Obama's Executive Philosophy

Yes, it's been about a year since I posted last. And, yes, we still live in Nevada, not North Carolina. And, yes, I realize nobody reads this blog unless they follow a link from a comment I leave on somebody else's blog. I am in the process of thinking up rather technical posts for a technical blog I'm considering starting.

It took me longer to realize this than it should have, but I believe I finally understand something of President Obama's philosophy. Almost as soon as he won the election, President Obama started taking advice on what he should really do. This puzzled me because he had published large numbers of proposals to deal with health care, climate change, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other issues. And, of course, his stump speeches referred to these proposals.

But if he already had proposals, why was he taking advice on the same subjects? People voted for him, presumably because they wanted to see him keep his campaign promises. Why ask "what should I do now that I've been elected?" after spending years promising what he would do if elected?

I believe the reason is that President Obama sees the role of the President very differently than I do. Or, rather, he sees the role of the legislature as more important than I do. The President appears to prefer legislation that originates in Congress. In the President's world, he has the ability to propose laws, regulations, policies and whatnot. And Congress not only enacts those changes, but drafts them in the first place. I'm honestly not trying to caricature the President's M.O. but simply trying to understand why the Press Secretary disclaimed Ted Kennedy's proposed health care bill and encouraged rival plans.

The President is willing to give speeches to cajole Congress into action, the President is willing to play hard ball with the opposition party, and the President is willing to campaign against Rush Limbaugh. But President Obama appears unwilling to actually author legislation. If I were to guess, this appears to be out of a belief that Congress creates a great marketplace of ideas and can generate better legislation (I suspect this comes from his past as a legislator).

Unfortunately, I think this approach sounds too much like "design by committee." I believe that in general groups (like Congress, boards of directors, and committees) do a good job of judging whether an idea is good, and individuals (like the President, CEOs, and individual committee members) do a good job of coming up with ideas.

However, last year Secretary Paulson came up with a three page bill that was a real stinker. And Congress caused it to balloon to a much worse law hundreds of pages long. Not only did the final law have irrelevant pork attached, it even created a health cost oversight board which clearly had no connection to the credit freeze TARP was supposed to address. It's hard to say this outcome is any better than what would have happened had President Bush left the initial drafting of the bill to Congress.