Clive Crook in the Financial Times this morning is making a point I made in my June 21 Examiner column on the three rules of Obama: the President doesn’t care much about the details of public policy. Relevant excerpt:
“[H]e does not seem to care much about the details of policy. He subcontracted the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, and his health care program to Max Baucus. The result is incoherent public policy: Indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program priced by the Congressional Budget Office at a fiscally unfeasible $1,600,000,000,000.”
Crook analyzes the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House Friday and the health care proposals floating around the Senate and finds them both wanting—even if (or especially if) you share the policy goals of candidate Obama and President Obama. With charactertistic British elegance, Crook takes the analysis a step farther with a swipe that at first seems aimed at Obama’s top advisers but is really aimed at the president himself:
“A White House that is more interested in promotion than in product development has another great drawback: it squanders talent. Mr Obama has impeccable taste in advisers: he has scooped up many of the country’s pre-eminent experts in almost every area of public policy. One wonders why. On the main domestic issues, they are not designing policy; they are working the phones, drumming up support for bills they would be deploring if they were not in the administration. Apart from anything else, this seems cruel. Mr President, examine your conscience and set your experts free.”
Hope and change!
