Government Executive - Authors - Ron Fournier

Flint and the Case for Open Government

Ron Fournier, The Atlantic — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 14:00:00 -0500

FLINT, Michigan—I can’t stop thinking about Lawrence White. In January, at a downtown coffee shop, I chatted with the 43-year-old state employee and owner of a small security firm about the poisoning of his city. Then I squeezed his thinking into one paragraph of a column on government dysfunction.

“I’m not just singling out Governor Snyder,” said the Democrat, an African American. “All the politicians including the EPA are playing tit-for-tat, playing games at our expense. It’s everybody. It’s Republicans. It’s Democrats. It’s a globalization of not caring for the people of Flint.”

His quote buttressed my theory of the case, so that’s all I shared with readers. What he said next remained in my notebook—and haunts me. White continued: “What matters to me as an American, what should matter to all Americans, is that we learn from this: How do we change the way government works? How do we fix these systems?” White paused to blow on his coffee and sip. “How do we avoid another Flint?”

I asked him if he had any ideas. White nodded.

“To start with, let me see my damn tests,” he said. “Why does the government sit on them?”

The knee-jerk answer to White’s question is that it’s the job of government to conduct public-health tests and double-check the results; to analyze the results and peer-review the analyses; to consult with internal partners and external agencies before recommending a course of action up the chain of command; to pressure-test those recommendations with political and public-relations professionals; and, finally, to inform the public: “Hey, we got a problem, and here’s what we’re going do about it.”

In the case of Flint, a tragic decision to forgo anti-corrosion treatment of the city’s aging water pipes exposed city residents to lead poisoning. State and federal tests soon revealed excessive levels of lead in the water, but the results were not shared with the public for months—and not without a push by whistleblowers atVirginia Tech University and a Flint hospital.

Flint is the worst of circumstances. But even in a best-case scenario, public-health tests take weeks, if not months, to become public.

“Let me see my damn tests.”

Maybe there’s a better way. What if governments immediately posted water test results on a website open to the public? What if citizens and citizen activists were encouraged to add their water test results to the public platform, creating a muscular database that anybody could use to spot trends and raise alarms? What if government offered prizes and other incentives to any bureaucrat, business person, citizen activist or parent who creates a solution to the present water crisis or develops a better approach, in general, to protecting Flint’s water?

The paternalistic approach to government has run its course, and not just in Flint. Averting such crises requires re-inventing government—not to be smaller or bigger, but to be more efficient and connected to a tech-empowered public, where mutual transparency and data sharing can leverage the wisdom of crowds.

Crowdsourcing government—looking to the public for innovation—is not a new idea. Napoleon offered a prize to the person who could feed his hungry army across a continent of conquered land, and the French chef who won the contest sparked the modern canning movement. But technology offers scale.

Under President Obama, more than 80 federal agencies have collaborated with more than 200,000 students, entrepreneurs, and others to tackle more than 440challenges—from developing autonomous vehicles for warfare to biomedical research serving the disabled. Napoleon’s chef won 12,000 francs. Obama’s innovators earned $150 million in prize money.

Another White House program—a start-up, actually, dubbed “18F”—leverages world-class developers, designers, and tech specialists to help agencies change how the build and buy technology services.

Governing on a social platform puts public servants under greater scrutiny. If a pothole isn’t filled or the lead levels creep up, everybody knows it. People are punished, problems solved. On the other hand, a job well done can be instantly acknowledged, rewarding bureaucrats and restoring trust in the system.

In Boston, “Citizen’s Connect” is a cell-phone application that allows users to take a photograph of a problem—say, a pothole—and send it to the city for repair. The citizen is notified when the work is done. In the Spanish town of Jun, residents use Twitter to lodge complaints with the mayor, who uses the same platform to issue orders to his staff addressing the complaints. Citizens can spot problems that governments, left to their own devices, might prefer not to acknowledge.

The role of political leaders would shift. Rather than being parental figures who withhold bad news until they can find their own solutions, 21st-century leaders would be providers of context, conveners of people and platforms, and enablers of citizens making the best possible decisions for themselves and their families.

After I laid out this theory in a series of tweets related to Flint, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said he agreed. “We need accountability,” he emailed me. “Not one person is accountable. Complexity has become the means for no one to accept responsibility.”

William Eggers, author of The Solutions Revolution and an expert in government innovation at Deloitte, told me Flint points to the need for a mutually transparent government. “It’s easier to cast blame on politicians and parties than it is to set up new systems that prevent these things from happening in the first place.”

This is no panacea. Open-source governance would not only give people more power, but also more responsibility—not to overreact to every grim data set, for example, and to support new systems and institutions that set data free.

Technology can’t make government perfect. But making government more transparent and accessible might make its failures less profound.

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Biden to Clinton and the Rest of DC: Stop the Madness

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 15:49:09 -0400

“I believe we’re out of time,” Joe Biden said Wednesday of his opportunity to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. Then the vice president warned Washington’s political class that its time was running out.

Stop fighting, he said. Stop the madness.

“I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart. And I think we can. It’s mean-spirited, it’s petty, and it’s gone on for much too long,” Biden said in the Rose Garden alongside his wife, Jill, and President Obama. “Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take.”

The bulk of his speech was an affirmation of Obama’s presidency and the increasingly liberal Democratic agenda: Reduce the income gap, increase social mobility, eliminate large and secret campaign donations, extend public education to 16 years, tax the wealthy, avoid open-ended military invasions, and launch a “moon shot” to cure cancer.

Brain cancer claimed the life of Biden’s beloved son Beau. “If I could be anything,” the vice president said, “I would have wanted to have been the president that ended cancer.”

He won’t be that guy. After 10 months of grieving and several weeks of reviewing his political window of opportunity, Biden said, “I’ve concluded it has closed.”

He said he doesn’t have time to mount an effective campaign. The fact is Biden stood little chance of eroding Hillary Clinton’s domination of the Democratic Party’s establishment wing. His entry likely would have divided that vote, aiding the populist candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Polls suggest Democratic voters are happy with their current choices. They’re eager to look past Clinton’s inappropriate use of a private email server as secretary of State, the potential exposure of U.S. secrets, and her less-than-honest explanations. The FBI is investigating the activity.

Biden projected confidence in his standing among Democrats. “While I will not be a candidate,” he said, “I will not be silent.”

Proving his point, he made a thinly veiled jab at Clinton.

I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naive to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They’re not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.

In the first Democratic debate, candidates were asked to name their “proudest enemies.” Treating the exchange as a moment of levity, Clinton responded, “Well, in addition to the NRA [National Rifle Association], the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the Iranians,” she chuckled, “probably the Republicans.”

Clinton is a divisive public figure in divisive times, for two decades the victim of GOP attacks—some of them fair, others outrageous. While partisan voters love political combat—encourage it, actually—a growing number of voters are wary. They’re identifying themselves as independents, even if they tend to routinely support one party over another. They’re disconnecting from the political process or hanging out at the fringes with the likes of Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson.

Clinton says she gets it, and she promises to work with Republicans if elected. It’s hard to imagine that happening.

The vice president certainly is a partisan, but Biden is also the product of a time—he was first elected to the Senate in 1972—when political leaders worked together, when party voters allowed their leaders to bargain, and when members of Congress lived in Washington and made friends on both sides of the political divide. It wasn’t perfect, but it was in many ways better than now.

Biden remembers when there was an incentive to solve problems.

“As the president has said many times,” he said, “compromise is not a dirty word. But look at it this way, folks: How does this country function without consensus? How can we move forward without being able to arrive at consensus?”

Good questions. We need answers. Time is running out.

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Republicans Imperil Obama Legacy With National Service Cuts

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 10:04:29 -0400

A national service program seeded by President George H.W. Bush, launched by President Clinton and expanded by President George W. Bush faces drastic cuts under President Obama, posing a new threat to his legacy.

Republicans in Congress are taking an ax to budgets of the AmeriCorps family of programs, and Obama seems unable or unwilling to protect them. More broadly, the culprit is a culture in Washington that abhors compromise—a Republican Party that won't raise taxes and a Democratic party that won't tame entitlement spending to jointly lower national debt while protecting vital public projects.

In short: The problem is short-sighted, cowardly leadership.

Caught in the middle is a bipartisan success called the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps and scores of other programs that pay national service workers small stipends. Those programs include Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, City Year, and Vista. (Disclosure: My elder daughter was a member of the City Year corps in Detroit, and I received an award from the service community in 2014 for writing about this topic.)

Each program competes for federal money, measures and reports results, and raises private-sector contributions to match government grants. In addition to receiving stipends that help pay tuition and make ends meet, the mostly young workforce learns the value of serving others for a greater good.

It's a bargain for taxpayers: For every federal dollar invested, national service members deliver as much as $3 in services. In the brutal new economy, non-profit organizations are struggling to meet people's needs, and the Corporation for National and Community Service fills the gaps, winning praise from Republican lawmakers, including those now poised to gut the program. GOP national security experts and retired military leaders consider the federal spending a small investment in furthering a national ethos of service.

Among the program's successes: improving academic performances in the nation's poorest schools and helping veterans with the transition from war to peacetime.

And yet, a GOP-led House Appropriations subcommittee is proposing to slash the service corporation's budget by one-third, from $1.05 billion to $687.8 million. That is 42 percent less than Obama requested, and would force the elimination of more than 40,000 of AmeriCorps' 75,000 positions.

That's draconian. During his first presidential race, Obama pledged to "expand and fund AmeriCorps" from 75,000 to 250,000 positions, putting service-minded millennials to work on the nation's toughest problems. Under Bush, the program had grown from 50,000 slots.

After just three months in office, Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act authorizing the expansion of the program to the goal of 250,000. He had kept his promise, Obama bragged, and he declared 2009 the dawn of a "new era of service."

But the dawn never broke. Congress never funded the quarter-million hires, not even when Democrats controlled both chambers in 2009-10. Enrollment never crept above 80,000.

Of all his broken promises, this might hit closest to home for Obama, a former community organizer with a special affinity for AmeriCorps. As I've written before, it also reflects a familiar pattern of his presidency: Raise hopes for big change; watch dogged rivals crush those hopes; and hear Democrats gripe about his strategy or resolve.

When I asked AnnMaura Connolly on Thursday morning what the White House was doing to counter the GOP cuts, the president of Voices for National Service said with more than a hint of frustration, "That would be a good question to ask them. I have been emailing the White House with abandon today with no luck so far."

I also emailed a White House spokesman. No reply yet.

Easier to reach was the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. (Disclosure: my youngest daughter interned for Cole last summer). He called the proposed cuts a matter of "priorities, not antipathy."

In the same bill, the GOP-controlled panel is proposing budget increases for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and education services for special-needs children. In many cases, Cole said, those programs—long favorites of the Democratic Party—would get more money than Obama put in his own budget.

Cole's counterparts in the Senate are also expected to slash AmeriCorps budgets, though not quite as much. Negotiations with the White House will likely lead to changes in the bills, Cole said, but he held out little hope for AmeriCorps supporters. "If I had more money," he said, "I'd put it into early childhood education," another progressive cause.

Some conservatives have been critical of AmeriCorps, associating it with Clinton and questioning the merits of even a modest stipend. Cole said those perceptions are "a factor, not a big factor" in the proposed cuts.

He said lawmakers are hamstrung by a tight budget, and blamed Obama for passing up a chance to strike a "grand bargain" on the budget after his re-election, when Republicans were bowing to demands to raise taxes on the wealthy. That may be, but the White House has good reason to point the finger back at Republicans, who seem unwilling to compromise on taxes beyond letting Bush-era tax cuts expire.

Truth is, they're both at fault. Due to a variety of political and social trends, there is little incentive for the two major parties to cooperate, little room to lead. Until the GOP raises revenue and Democrats trim spending, parts of the budget not "entitled" to programs like Medicare and Social Security will continue shrinking—squeezing out successful "discretionary" programs dear to both liberals and conservatives.

Programs like the Bush-Clinton-Bush national service mission, all rooted in the first Bush's "Points of Light" initiative.

You don't have to tell that to John Bridgeland, a founding member of the service coalition who ran the younger Bush's domestic policy team and national service initiative.

"Congress hasn't lived up to its part of the bargain in recognizing the power of national service to heal our broken citizenship," said Bridgeland, a Republican.

He ticked off the horrors. "Social trust in one another is half of what it was a generation ago, including among millennials. Our communities, places like Ferguson and Baltimore, are fraying. Many wonder whether we are living in two nations, one for children from well-off families and others for families that are not well-off. And we have a Congress that can't work together to get things done for the country."

"National service is an antidote for that," he added. "It brings people together from different political affiliations, races, ethnicities, income levels and geographies to work on common problems together."

And yet, this sick Congress may kill a cure.

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This Is What Functioning Government Looks Like

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:00:00 -0500

When the first person diagnosed with Ebola on U.S. soil died in October, I suggestedthere was something scarier than the prospect of an outbreak. More alarming than a Texas hospital's misdiagnosis of Thomas Duncan. More threatening than a bureaucratic snafu at the state health department that delayed sanitization of Duncan's apartment. More worrisome than the sluggish pace of U.S. aid to West Africa, ground zero for the virus.

Of all the reasons to get hysterical about Ebola, what concerned me most was the social precedent. The initial response reminded Americans of the limits of critical U.S. institutions—in this case, various state, local, and federal agencies and private-sector health systems that responded to Duncan's illness slowly, inefficiently, and with a lack of candor that Americans, unfortunately, have come to expect.

In short, the United States faces crises of leadership and trust. Which, to me, is the scariest thing about the Ebola outbreak. I'm far less worried about the disease striking me or my loved ones than I am about what this incident says about the nation's ability to survive a true cataclysm. Whether the next existential event is Ebola or ISIS or any of the countless 21st-century horrors, we are only as strong as our institutions—and our trust in them.

Since I wrote that column on Oct. 4, the institutions rallied. Our leaders got their acts together. President Obama and congressional Republicans, along with the public and private health sectors, deserve credit for positive steps taken since the Ebola crisis's unacceptable start.

Two health care workers infected by Duncan recovered. Seven other Americans were infected with Ebola—all overseas, and all but one recovered. Most famously, Dr. Craig Spencer fell ill after returning from working for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea. While infected, he used the New York subway and a car service, and went bowling—all without transmitting the disease. He is fully recovered.

"Our best experts thought that high-quality health care could treat Ebola, but didn't really know because Ebola had never been here before," said Ron Klain who was appointed in the fall to be Obama's so-called Ebola czar. Sitting in his office overlooking the West Wing, Klain ticked off the accomplishments of a coordinated public-private sector attack.

• The number of U.S. hospitals certified to treat Ebola increased from three to 44.

• The number of labs that can test for Ebola increased from 14 to 42.

• The first-ever Ebola vaccine completed first-stage trials in December, and 20,000 doses will be administered in Africa in just weeks.

• A voluntary self-monitoring system for travelers was replaced with an "active monitoring system" that routes anyone traveling from West Africa to one of five U.S. airports, where they are screened and given a preprogrammed cell phone with numbers to call if they get ill. Each person is tracked by a state public health department for 21 days. Travelers exposed to the virus get their temperature checked twice daily. Klain gets a daily update. On Monday, data were recorded on 98.9 percent of the people being tracked.

• Congress took just five weeks to pass a $5.4 billion package aimed at preventing further outbreaks. While the White House had asked for $6.2 billion, Obama signed the bill, and Klain said the GOP made "reasonable changes."

• In Liberia, Ebola treatment units were built by the United States on time, and the number of news cases has dropped from about 100 per day to five or 10 per day. For all of West Africa, the epidemic is still rampant, although Klain said the number of cases is below forecast

"The point here isn't that the response has been perfect," Klain said. He noted that a lab error at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta may have exposed a technician to Ebola. In West Africa, Sierra Leone, and Guinea steep challenges remain. "But I think it is the case that the Ebola response has been coordinated, effective, and shown real results."

Klain said Obama deserves credit for ignoring the clamor for a West African quarantine, a step that might have helped the White House politically but that scientists said would have made it harder to fight Ebola at its roots.

He also praised congressional Republicans, particularly outgoing Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who chaired the Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees health care funding. After losing is Senate bid, Kingston helped steer the aid bill through the House while a lame duck. "He busted his butt," Klain said.

Finally, Klain said the public and private health care systems deserve huge praise for treating and containing Ebola. "They took up the challenge very aggressively," he said.

Policy ahead of politics? Bipartisanship? Competent bureaucracies? Klain attributed the Ebola rebound to "the classic American attitude of people holding up their hands and saying, 'I'm willing to do it.' "

The institution faring worst in all of this may be mine: The media, which seems to flit from crisis to crisis like a moth against a well-lit window, converting fear into ratings and page-views.

Numerous polls show the media leading an unhealthy trend: Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every institution that is key to a functional society: banks, school, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big and small business, and, of course, politics and government.

While no single event will reverse or even nudge the trend, on Ebola – of late, anyhow – U.S. leaders seem worthy of our trust.

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The 2016 Presidential Conversations Taking Place Right Now

Ron Fournier and Matthew Dowd, National Journal — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 11:00:00 -0500

This story is co-authored by National Journal columnist Ron Fournier and ABC News special correspondent Matthew Dowd. Dowd has worked in Democratic and Republican campaigns for 30 years, including as chief campaign strategist for Bush-Cheney 2004.

In hotel suites across America, the nation's most talented and ambitious politicians are huddling with their entourages—nervous smiles and high-fives as Tuesday night's election results put them into position to make a most profound decision: whether to run for the presidency.

We don't fully know what's happening in those rooms, but three decades of campaign strategy and coverage give us a pretty good idea. First, most of these men and women desperately want to be part of a presidential race. The candidates are competition junkies who've always wondered what it would be like to wield the Constitution's greatest powers. Their advisers consider electing a president the ultimate professional achievement—the key to fame, wealth, and influence.

Second, there's a higher purpose for most of these people. Sure, some may lose sight of their calling once in office, but for just about everybody in these rooms, the fundamental ambition is to make the country better—and to make history doing so.

Third, most of these people are closer to saying "no" than you think. Despite conventional wisdom, which would have you believe that the dithering is false modesty, most potential presidential candidates are a buffet of conflict.

In these suites is where raw ambition meets reality—the dark secrets, inner doubts, and hidden roadblocks that might be coming into view. These are just a few that we know about:

A reluctant spouse: Bill and Hillary Clinton's mutual ambition is unique in American politics. In many political marriages, the candidate's spouse is a reluctant partner. The concerns are often benign, such as those shared by the two governors we know—one current, one former—whose wives don't want their kids' lives upended in 2016 and beyond. The concerns can be more malignant. Maybe a spouse or child is hiding an embarrassing secret—not only from the public, but maybe from the candidate as well.

Hidden agenda (Candidate): Not every politician publicly mulling the presidency seriously expects to win. Some get into the race to nurse more modest ambitions—higher speaking fees, TV contracts, book deals and, of course, ego stroking. Early in the 2000 campaign cycle, Fournier arranged to meet a GOP presidential candidate for coffee. He wanted to get to know the candidate a bit before covering him, so Fournier suggested they talk confidentially and about anything other than politics—their families, sports, and any shared interests. The candidate kept steering the conversation back to the presidential campaign, and after growing frustrated with Fournier's refusal to bite, the guy blurted: "You know I don't have a chance in hell to win. I know I don't have a chance in hell to win. But could you at least play along?"

Hidden agenda (Consultant): There's a reason why hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on television advertising each cycle—in amounts far exceeding TV's relative effectiveness in an era of digital targeting. It's this: Consultants get a big cut of TV ad buys. While that may be the most pernicious conflict that hampers candidate-and-consultant relationships, it's by no means the only one. Over the years, a handful of campaign advisers suggested that they were pulling their punches against a primary opponent, hoping to land a job "if my guy loses." A final example: The best sources of leaks are advisers who place a higher value on their own reputations than their candidates'. No campaign lacks a few such suckers.

Fighting advisers: In 2008, both John McCain and Barack Obama knew they were riding herd on talented, mercurial staffs that might be prone to fratricide. While Obama kept his team focused on McCain, the advisers on McCain's side turned on each other. It was as ugly as it was predictable. Wherever Hillary Clinton is debating her future Tuesday night, her loose coalition of advisers must wonder whether they're going to help elect the nation's first woman president, or be part of the second Clinton implosion—beaten a second time amid infighting.

Self-doubt: Bill Clinton is the most talented politician of his generation, a singularly ambitious and self-confident man. Yet he had his doubts. In 1991, he walked up to a group of Arkansas political reporters and nodded toward a clutch of East Coast journalists who were in Little Rock for some event. He asked, "Do you think I can do it?" It wasn't clear whether he was asking about his capacity to run, to win, or to serve—or all of the above. Among those thinking of running in 2016, we're personally aware of more than one likely GOP candidate who honestly fear they're not ready to serve.

Doubting parents: Jeb Bush's mother has expressed doubts about him running. "I think this is a … great country, and if we can't find more than two or three families to run for high office, that's silly, because there are great governors and great eligible people to run," Barbara Bush said in January. "And I think the Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes—there's just more families than that." While she may be the most famous parent with doubts, she can't be the only mother or dad whispering cautions.

Earnest young operatives/staffers: These suites harbor the dreams of devoted young operatives who really want to change America and have fallen in love with their candidates. Their hearts and heads are totally in it, and they're the hopeful optimists we need in politics. Soon, they will see a reality of politics that is not apparent to them this night. Some will grow stronger and wiser because of the realities of the campaign ahead and the hurts they will feel; others will get their hearts broken and become the cynical folks who no longer dream of a better way.

Candidate's secret: They all got 'em. That shouldn't be a surprise because we all harbor secrets that we wouldn't want exposed to a 24/7 media cycle. Clinton famously shied away from the 1988 presidential campaign because his chief of staff feared "bimbo eruptions." We can almost guarantee that in these hotel suites tonight, various donors, consultants, and other hangers-on are hoping to get the chance to pry.

Some might summon the nerve to repeat a conversation as old as politics. "Whatever you don't want people to know about, people will find out about," the presidential hopeful is warned. "Tell me now. Please, tell me now."

This article appears in the November 6, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.

(Image via Frederic Legrand / Shutterstock.com )

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Changing Who Runs the Senate Won't Fix Washington

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 13:33:16 -0500

Two months ago, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked President Obama why it mattered who controls the Senate. Obama stammered, "Well—I'll tell you what …"—and then struggled to answer.

"First of all, there's a sharp difference between the Democratic agenda and the Republican agenda. And the American people need to know that," Obama told Todd. "If you've got a Democratic Senate, that means bills are being introduced to raise the minimum wage. That's something Democrats support. We think America needs a raise."

But, of course, Democrats couldn't get a minimum-wage increase to Obama's desk when they controlled the Senate. So what difference does it make? Same problem for his other issues: Equal pay for women, family-leave benefits, affordable college tuition, and infrastructure spending. By the time Obama finished, he was grasping desperately at clichés: "Here's the issue. I think elections matter."

There's a reason why Todd's question was so hard for Obama to answer. It doesn't really matter who wins the Senate.

Of course, the midterms are not without consequences. Gaining control of the Senate calendar and committees through 2016 would give the GOP a stronger hand in the shaping of the federal judiciary (particularly if a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court), investigating the White House, and curbing Obama's agenda.

But don't buy the hype. Democrats and Republicans exaggerate the importance of their campaigns. How many times do we need to hear, "This is the most important election of our lifetime," before realizing that neither of the two major parties can produce an election of durable importance?

More to the point, neither party is capable of achieving what most Americans want—a bipartisan, transparent, pragmatic approach to governance that addresses big problems in an era of socioeconomic change.

Here are five reasons why changing control of the Senate on Tuesday won't fundamentally change things:

Obama can't or won't compromise. Hemmed in by his liberal base and a hostage to his own limitations as a leader, Obama has not moved beyond the lip service of his brand. In 2012, he predicted that his reelection would "break the fever" of Washington gridlock. How has that worked out? Now he says a better-than-expected showing for Democrats on Tuesday would be the antidote. "I think what it does is to send a message to Republicans that people want to get stuff done," Obama told Todd. We know how this movie ends.
Republicans can't or won't compromise. Hemmed in by his conservative base and a hostage to his limitations as a leader, the GOP's top man in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, let ideology and self-preservation intensify dysfunction in Washington. Why would it be any different with McConnell in charge? My colleague Molly Ball of The Atlantic points to an oxymoron in the GOP message: Republicans say that if they win Tuesday, they'll stop gridlock and stop Obama's agenda. That's a lie: They know they can't do both. "You can't 'get things done' in Washington without the president's signature, and no matter what happens in this year's elections, he's not going anywhere for another two years," she wrote.
There are no mandates on Election Day. The night Obama won reelection, I argued that a small-bore and brutish campaign guaranteed the president a shallow victory, one without a mandate. "Mandates are rarely won on election night," I wrote Nov. 6, 2012. "They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching." Ditto, now, for the GOP. Two years ago, I thought Obama was capable of building a mandate through good governing. I was wrong. My new prediction: Republicans will misread this election as badly as Obama did his reelection.
Any GOP gains will be short-lived. Even if you dismiss my pessimism about the GOP, there is the inconvenient fact that six first-term Republicans senators will face reelection in states Obama won in both 2008 and 2012. Politico reporter Burgess Everett called 2016 a "mirror image" of this year's Senate campaign. Furthermore, even a wave election in 2014 won't automatically fix the structural and image problems that many GOP strategists worry will block their road to the White House.
Politics will still be broken. History will consider the 2014 midterms a referendum against the status quo, against Washington, against the political establishment, and against incumbency. While nothing about the election suggests growing support for the GOP brand, multiple signs point toward a rise of populism that might transform—even radically disrupt—the institutions of politics and government.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, disapprove of the do-nothing Congress, and have lost faith in the presidency. Most Americans hold a negative view of the GOP. The approval ratings of Obama and his party are underwater, meaning more people disapprove than approve.

The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as independents is rising sharply, from 31 percent in 2004 to 44 percent in September. Independent candidates ran stronger than expected races in Kansas, South Dakota, and Alaska.

Two-thirds of registered voters say they would like to see "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of change in the direction Obama is leading the country. Ending gridlock in Washington ranked behind only job creation on the list of issues driving voting decisions.

Things are no better in the states. Nearly a dozen governors face various levels of danger due to sour electorates. Dysfunction has deep roots: In the busy state legislatures, nearly 35 percent of incumbents ran unopposed in either their primary or general-election bids, according to one estimate, up from 25.9 percent just two years ago.

Channeling their readers, newspaper editors across the country endorsed the lesser of two evils. In an endorsement titled "Disappointment vs. Danger," The Charlotte Observer editorial board reluctantly backed Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan. "She has done about the minimum you'd expect from a U.S. senator." The Nashua Telegraph backed GOP candidate Scott Brown while admonishing him. "Stop claiming you are from here," the editorial said. "It's disingenuous."

The Staten Island Advance endorsed Rep. Michael Grimm of New York, even as it demanded that he step down from office if convicted of the criminal charges against him. The editorial board lamented that the race isn't one where "both candidates are of high quality and high integrity."

"Amen!" replied America.

(Image via Dave Newman / Shutterstock.com)

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The Scariest Thing About Ebola: Americans' Lack of Trust in Institutions

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 11:07:06 -0400

Doctors at a Texas hospital unwittingly release an Ebola-infected man. The hospital blames a flaw in the electronic health records system and then backtracks: The doctors blew it.

The home shared by the Liberian man and four people is a nest of infectious materials, where cleanup was delayed by more than a week due to a bureaucratic snafu. State health department officials apologize.

In Liberia, the U.S. assistance President Obama promised several weeks ago has been slow to arrive, according to The New York Times, "and logistical glitches have prevented the United States military from being able to quickly set up the hospitals and treatment centers needed to halt the virus." The general in command says it will take "several weeks" before the U.S. military is fully responsive to the months-old crisis.

Once again, Americans are reminded of the limits of U.S. social institutions—in this case various state, local, and federal government agencies and private-sector health systems that responded to the Ebola crisis slowly, inefficiently, and with a lack of candor that Americans, unfortunately, have come to expect.

Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every American institution: banks, schools, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big businesses, small businesses and, of course, politics and government. A Pew Research Center survey in October 2013 found trust in government at a near-record low. While specific federal agencies received generally high marks (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Americans continued to lose faith in the presidency, Congress, and the two major parties.

In short, the United States faces crises of leadership and trust. Which, to me, is the scariest thing about the Ebola outbreak. I'm far less worried about the disease striking me or my loved ones than I am about what this incident says about the nation's ability to survive a true cataclysm. Whether the next existential event is Ebola or ISIS or any of the countless 21st-century horrors, we are only as strong as our institutions—and our trust in them.

Eighteen days ago, the president said, "I want the American people to know that our experts, here at the CDC and across our government, agree that the chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low." Once the disease crossed into the United States, a phalanx of administration officials sought to reassure the public.

"The system that's in place, with our health care infrastructure, would make it extraordinarily unlikely that we would have an outbreak," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Do you believe Fauci? Do you trust Obama? Stipulate, for a moment, that they are right—that Ebola is a far less dangerous disease in a nation like the United States that takes sanitation and health care so seriously. It's important that we be able to trust these and other officials enough to 1) heed their advice to limit the spread of the disease, and 2) not overreact, which leads to panic in the short term and deepens mistrust in the long term.

When the final outcome of events like these don't match the initial fear and hype (remember the so-called bird flu?), Americans grow a bit more numb, and more likely to let down their guard. It's the boy-crying-wolf syndrome that the Obama administration hopes to avoid.

Back to the stipulation: Is the Obama team right about Ebola? The fact is, nobody knows whether the disease will spread or mutate. Crises are, almost by definition, unpredictable—which is why we have institutions and leaders whom we must trust to adapt to what comes.

Trust. There's that word again. How much faith can the public summon toward an administration that used incompetence as a defense in scandals involving the IRS, Benghazi, and Obamacare; that lied about its surveillance of Americans; and that just recently acknowledged dangerous misjudgments regarding the Secret Service and ISIS?

And yet, it wasn't Obama who misled the public about Saddam Hussein or the Vietnam War or Watergate. The trust deficit runs deeper than one president—or even the presidency. While vast economic, social and technological changes buffet the lives of most Americans, those institutions that are supposed to shield people are failing to adapt.

Most of these public- and private-sector entities were created in the 19th century; they were expanded and contorted in the 20th century; and they're maddeningly ill-equipped for the 21st century. This indictment includes the media, an institution democratized by technology and thus desperate—prone to exploit any crisis in search of conflict, clicks, and cash. Thanks again to new technology, Americans today are both better informed and subjected to more hype.

Why does any of this matter? During the 2012 presidential campaign, I wrote a story called "In Nothing We Trust" that sought to capture the cause and effect of institutional decline. From Muncie, Ind., I wrote:

When people trust their institutions, they're better able to solve common problems. Research shows that school principals are much more likely to turn around struggling schools in places where people have a history of working together and getting involved in their children's education. Communities bonded by friendships formed at church are more likely to vote, volunteer, and perform everyday good deeds like helping someone find a job. And governments find it easier to persuade the public to make sacrifices for the common good when people trust that their political leaders have the community's best interests at heart. "Institutions—even dysfunctional ones—are why we don't run amok in the woods," [sociologist Laura] Hansen says.

Still, no metrics exist to measure life without institutions, because they've been around as long as humankind. The first institution was the first family. The tribe was the first community. The first tribe's leader was the first politician, and its elders were the first legislature. Its guards, the first police force. Its storyteller, a teacher. Humans are coded to create communities, and communities beget institutions.

What if, in the future, they don't? People could disconnect, refocus inward, and turn away from their social contract. Already, many are losing trust. If society can't promise benefits for joining it, its members may no longer feel bound to follow its rules.

Ebola is a serious threat, but it's not the disease that scares me. What scares me is that fact that we can't trust the institutions that are supposed to deal with such threats, and we can't trust the men or women who lead them. Which means they can't help us.

(Image via Andrea Izzotti / Shutterstock.com)

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The Secret Service's Problems May Be Older and Harder to Fix Than You Thought

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 14:56:48 -0400

I argued in this column Wednesday that the resignation of Director Julia Pierson wouldn't fix the Secret Service. I urged Congress and the Obama administration to undo a post-9/11 reform that folded the agency into the new and ginormous Homeland Security Department. I barely scratched the surface.

A few well-informed readers tell me that the problems are older and more deeply rooted than anyone wants to admit.

First came a link via Twitter from a reader reminding me about a horrifying U.S News & World Report cover story on the Secret Service in June 2002—almost a year before the DHS merger. It opens with tales of sexual dalliances, theft, and public rowdiness among agents whose conduct defiled the Secret Service's "image to the world of bravery, excellence, and patriotism."

[A] U.S. News investigation shows that, at a time when the stakes for the Secret Service are higher than ever, the agency is rife with problems and resistant to oversight and correction. The troubles range from alcohol abuse and misuse of government property to criminal offenses and allegations of extramarital relationships by Secret Service personnel with White House employees …

Such incidents, current and former Secret Service personnel say, are tarnishing the image of an agency long lionized as the elite of the elite. And they have led many agents to raise questions about their organization's ability to fulfill its unique mission: protecting America's leaders.

Written a dozen years ago, that story documented the occurrence of similar issues in the 1990s. My point:

Pierson was an ineffective leader who squandered the public's trust, so she had to go. But the problems didn't start with her.
The Homeland Security Department is a bureaucratic monstrosity that weakens the Secret Service's autonomy and leadership, cannibalizes its budget, and suffocates its sense of purpose. The Secret Service should regain its quasi-independent status. But the problems didn't start with a Bush-era reform.

If only it were so simple. Pushing back on my column, Christian Beckner of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University writes:

While the U.S. Secret Service's relationship with DHS headquarters has been far from perfect over the past decade, it would be a mistake to think that a new reorganization will be a fix for the issues that have arisen in recent weeks. Instead, the administration and Congress should focus their attention on addressing a number of smaller but harder issues, including adequacy of budgets, personnel authorities, perceived unfairness in promotion decisions among many employees, training issues, and technology challenges. And above all, they need to closely examine the cultural and organizational issues that contributed to the deception and public misinformation about the recent security incidents. That was unacceptable, and should not be tolerated in any government agency, and particularly in one with such an important role in our federal government.

What else needs to be done? I don't know exactly, but I know what the solutions can't be: small, safe, or incremental. "Radical" is the word that came to me while reading a post sent to me by Andy Priest, an antiterrorism-policy adviser in California who identified a "cycle of stagnation" at the Secret Service. He looks at the agency as you would any institution that was built to address problems of the 19th century: expanded and contorted to respond to challenges of the 20thcentury; and now, not surprisingly, struggling to adapt to the 21st century. In other words, the Secret Service is like so many other public trusts: Banks, schools, unions, newspapers, churches, and political parties—virtually every American institution, except perhaps the military, has suffered a loss of credibility and confidence in the eyes of Americans.

How do you revitalize a Lincoln-era institution? You should read Priest's specific recommendations on the Secret Service here. My twist on his language starts with what he calls "fresh perspective and disruption." Leading members of Congress and the White House must ask themselves, "If we were to start a government from scratch, how would we prevent terrorist attacks, and how would we protect the president?" Ruthless attention to that question would lead to a dramatically different approach to the president's security. It might not involve the DHS—or even the Secret Service.

Second, do less with more. Decades-old mission creep gives the Secret Service responsibility for both investigating financial crimes and protecting the president. The DHS's mission is even more far-flung. Congress and the White House should reimagine a new structure and properly fund it, rather than tweaking the current system and squeezing money from it.

Third, the Secret Service should consider unifying its force to promote cross-training, prevent fatigue, and create a more flexible security force. There is now a bright line between "uniformed" officers and the presidential detail.

Finally, the agency needs a new brand of leadership that is open to criticism, transparent about its mistakes, and dedicated to a clear mission. It needs leaders who are strong enough to lobby Congress for adequate resources, savvy enough to fend off bureaucratic encroachment, and strong enough to say "no" to a restless president playing fast and loose with security protocols, which happens far more often than the public knows.

Priest ends his post with what I consider to be an admonishment to second-guessing politicians and journalists. "Rather than continuing to cite examples of deficiencies, poor leadership, low morale, and a need for change," he writes, "perhaps it is time to take action and effect change." Yes—it's long past time.

(Image via David Stuart Productions / Shutterstock.com)

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No Joke, Here's How to Fix the Secret Service

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 12:40:36 -0400

The Secret Service is a joke. That's harsh, I know—and it's unfair to Secret Service agents who unflinchingly risk their lives for the president and for their country. But it's true, and it needs to be fixed. Here's how.

First, fire Director Julia Pierson. Her agency covered up a 2011 incident in which shots were fired at the White House, when one of President Obama's daughters could have been killed. Her agency allowed a mentally ill Iraq war veteran to rampage through the White House with a knife. Her agency permitted a security contractor with a gun and three assault convictions to ride an elevator with Obama -- then, reportedly, tried to cover it up.

In each case, her agency concealed details from the president and the public. Her agency lied. It distributed facts that were known to be false, such as the initial claim that the fence-jumper was unarmed. In short, there is overwhelming evidence that the Secret Service is rotting from atop.

Pierson made matters worse with vapid, bafflingly bureaucratic testimony to Congress on Tuesday. This is how Frank Bruni of The New York Times described it:

She pledged reviews, reports, inquiries, and assessments—a brimming thesaurus of self-examination—and tried to run out the clock.

She muttered sentences like this: "In downtown areas, there is sound attenuation." This was a reference to the Secret Service's confusion in 2011 over whether someone had been shooting at the White House or a motor vehicle in its vicinity had backfired.

Pierson three times uttered the Watergate-era dodge "mistakes were made." No, a mistake is locking your keys in the car. Trapping the president and his security detail in an elevator with an armed felon is professional malpractice.

When the The Washington Post and Washington Examiner posted news of that incident Tuesday, the reaction on Twitter seemed to hit in waves. Disbelief, shock, anger, and the awkwardly familiar coping mechanism of morbid humor.

Secret Service Agent Accidently Drops Off President At House That Is Painted White
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) September 30, 2014

SECRET SERVICE AGENT LEAVES POTUS IN HIS OTHER PANTS.
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) September 30, 2014

@samsteinhp @ron_fournier honestly, completely not funny.
— Catherine C. Smith (@TruBluCatherine) September 30, 2014

Tweets like hers reminded me that I've had the honor of knowing many Secret Service agents. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, I worked daily inside both the White House and the security "bubble" that accompanies presidents on trips outside Washington. Countless long days on the road ended in long conversations with proud agents, who parsimoniously shared details of their families, their jobs, and their willingness to end it all to save a president.

After 9/11, some of these same agents warned me that no good would come from plans to yank the quasi-independent agency out of the Treasury Department and fold it into the fledgling monstrosity that would come to be known as the Homeland Security Department. "We are who we are because we aren't a bureaucracy," a senior Secret Service official told me in February 2003, a month before DHS swallowed the service.

Which brings me to the second way to fix the Secret Service. Congress should reverse the Bush-era mistake and give the agency back its mojo.

At the Treasury Department, the Secret Service's leadership had autonomy, and its agents were encouraged to consider themselves elite. The Secret Service was not just the leading law-enforcement agency at Treasury, it was at the apex of the entire profession. Only the best cops became agents.

The Secret Service leadership could draw on the agency's reputation and relative independence to defend its budget, its professionalism, and its mission from political encroachment. Before 2003, the director of the Secret Service was a player—somebody even the president and members of Congress had to think twice about crossing.

By contrast, Pierson—and, I would argue, any Secret Service director inside the DHS labyrinth—is just another bureaucrat fighting for turf, money, and autonomy in one of the largest, least-efficient agencies in Washington. As we see at the Internal Revenue Service, the National Football League, and the many other acronymed entities, it's easy to lose sight of your calling from inside an ossified institution.

Secret Service personnel, particularly those in uniform, are often paid less today than law-enforcement officials in other agencies. More than the money, the agency's declining reputation in the law-enforcement community—a trend that goes back to 2003—has hurt morale and recruitment. Also diminished are efforts to develop the agency's "brand," the little-known marketing efforts that supported books and movies and other pop-culture references to the Secret Service, which in turn made the presidential detail an iconic, aspirational profession.

People used to worry that the Secret Service had too much independence, that its agents and leaders were bureaucratic cowboys who answered to almost nobody. There was something to those concerns, but at least presidential security wasn't a joke.

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How Soon We Forget the Veteran Who Attacked the White House

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 15:56:22 -0400

When a deranged man jumps a 9-foot fence and storms into the White House, the most obvious questions involve security—and so these were among Monday's headlines: "The Secret Service Considers Bigger White House Buffer" (The Washington Post) and "White House May Check Tourists Blocks Away" (The New York Times).

Beware of the most obvious. The most important angles often lurk below the surface. What struck me about Day 3 coverage of the White House breach was how the intruder had all but been erased from the stories.

His name is Omar J. Gonzalez. He is a decorated Iraq war veteran from Texas, a sniper who was badly wounded by a homemade bomb. He suffers posttraumatic-stress disorder, his family says. For two years, Gonzales has been homeless and living alone in the wild and in campgrounds. What happened to him? What happens to men and women like him when they return home from war?

Twelve paragraphs into Monday's story about the intrusion, The Post told readers that Gonzalez is 42. The last paragraph offered a bit more:

A member of Gonzalez's family told The Washington Post that he was suffering from posttraumatic-stress disorder and had been living out of his car for more than a year. A Secret Service agent said Gonzalez told him after being handcuffed that he was concerned that the "atmosphere was collapsing" and that he needed to get the word to the president, so he could tell the citizens. It was unclear what Gonzalez meant.

The Times story didn't mention Gonzales's name until the 11th paragraph, which made no mention of his war service or health issues. The paragraph did remind readers that Gonzalez wielded a knife and could face 10 years in prison.

If you want to know more about Gonzalez, you need to go back a couple of days to stories like this one in the Los Angeles Times:

The intruder who scaled a White House fence and made it through the front doors was an Army veteran diagnosed with combat trauma, but authorities said Saturday the case was still under investigation.

A family member in California said Omar J. Gonzalez, 42, of Copperas Cove, Texas, near Fort Hood, has been homeless and living alone in the wild and in campgrounds with his two pet dogs for the last two years.

"We talked to him on 9/11 and he said he planned to go to a Veterans Administration hospital to seek treatments," said the family member, who asked that he not be identified pending completion of the Secret Service investigation.

"He's been depressed for quite some time," the relative said. "He'd been taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. I suspect he stopped taking it, otherwise this wouldn't have happened."

The story goes on to say that Gonzalez joined the Army in the mid-1990s. He was diagnosed with posttraumatic-stress disorder after his first tour in Iraq, the relative said, but was sent back for a second tour.

During a second tour, about three years ago, Gonzalez was reportedly injured by a homemade explosive device. "His job was running patrols in Baghdad when his Humvee was hit," the family member said.

"A portion of his foot was amputated," he said, "and the evidence is the limp you see in the video of him running across the White House lawn."

You read that right. Watch the video—and remember that Gonzalez used to run into battle in Iraq.

I'm not excusing Gonzalez's actions. Protecting the president, his family, and the White House complex is a matter of national security. The legal system will determine whether Gonzalez is guilty and whether he serves time in jail. The Secret Service will tighten its procedures.

In the meantime, read The Washington Post's "A Legacy of Pain and Pride," a special report based on a poll that found more than half of the 2.6 million Americans deployed to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "struggle with physical or mental-health problems stemming from their service, feel disconnected from civilian life, and believe the government is failing to meet the needs of this generation's veterans."

The long conflicts, which have required many troops to deploy multiple times and operate under an almost constant threat of attack, have exacted a far more widespread emotional toll than previously recognized by most government studies and independent assessments: One in two say they know a fellow service member who has attempted or committed suicide, and more than 1 million suffer from relationship problems and experience outbursts of anger—two key indicators of posttraumatic stress.

Also read this VA report showing 10 percent to 18 percent of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer PTSD upon their return home. Those like Gonzalez who served in Iraq had higher rates of PTSD than Afghanistan veterans, the report said.

Our recent veterans are seeking care at VA more than ever before. VA data show that from 2002 to 2009, 1 million troops left active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan and became eligible for VA care. Of those troops, 46 percent came in for VA services. Of those veterans who used VA care, 48 percent were diagnosed with a mental-health problem.

However, many veterans with mental-health problems have not come in for services.

One of the reasons that veterans don't seek care, the VA admits, is that veterans don't trust the VA—they don't believe treatment is effective and they have problems with access, such as cost or location of treatment.

The next time a lawmaker condemns the Secret Service for allowing Gonzalez to breach the White House, nod your head—but don't stop there. Ask whether Washington will truly transform the VA, or stop at the tinkering done this summer. Demand to know why troubled veterans like Gonzalez continue to fall through the cracks. Insist that we do more as a country to treat them, house them, and employ them—and not erase them.

(Top image via Flickr user qnr)

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The Next President Could Find Unity Fleeting

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 16:27:11 -0400

Thirteen years ago this month, President George W. Bush was vacationing at his Texas ranch when his daily briefing included a memo titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." Al-Qaida struck a month later, and the nation was at war. No memos are needed today.

ISIS is communicating directly to President Obama via the Internet and social media. "The Islamic Caliphate has been established," the spokesman, Abu Mosa, said Friday, vowing to "raise the flag of Allah in the White House.

After dismissing ISIS as al-Qaida's "JV" team last fall, the president has awakened to the bloodcurdling threat. Last week, he ordered air strikes and air drops in northern Iraq to prevent genocide and to protect U.S. assets. The CIA is reportedly arming Kurds to fight the emerging Islamic state. The world is focused on whether the United States needs to do more, despite the reluctance of Obama and most Americans to recommit troops.

But I can't shake another, darker, question. What if we get hit again with a 9/11-sized attack? More to the point, hypothetically, would a crisis pull us together or drive us apart? It's a morbid question worth asking before the worst happens, because there's reason to worry about the durability of what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

What can we learn from the Bush era? Well, the nation immediately rallied behind the fledgling president (Bush had been in office only about seven months). Members of Congress famously locked arms on the East Front steps of the Capitol and sang "God Bless America." Bush's approval ratings soared to 90 percent, as he ordered U.S. troops into Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The kumbaya period didn't last long. Three months after the attacks, Democrats mildly questioned parts of the USA Patriot Act, and Attorney General John Ashcroft said such questions "erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." Time has proved the legislation to be excessive.

Two months later, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle stepped up criticism of Bush's antiterrorism policies. In response, Republican Rep. Tom Davis accused the Democrat of "giving aid and comfort to our enemies." It was the start of a years-long strategy of the Bush administration to stoke and exploit fears of a post-9/11 attack to enhance the president's standing and defang Democrats.

The false front of bipartisanship crumbled in May of 2002 when the bin Laden memoleaked. According to a helpful chronology compiled by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan, Democrats demanded to know what else Bush knew about the attacks beforehand. White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said second-guessing is "exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do."

The pattern was set for the rest of Bush's term. Democrats seized on (and often exaggerated) any morsel of evidence that undermined Bush's tough-on-terrorists image, and the White House seized on (and often exaggerated) any development that underscored its narrative. The Bush team created a new story line by invading Iraq based on evidence of weapons of mass destruction that was distorted, hyped, and, in some cases, contrived.

Bush's approval numbers declined after 9/11, slowly and steadily. His rating turned to pre-attack levels (about 50 percent) toward the end of 2003, and plummeted after his reelection, when the wheels fell off the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

What has occurred since 9/11 that might change the equation for the next president to face such a crisis? In a word, plenty. First, social media gives terrorists direct access to world leaders, the public, and potential converts. When bin Laden was taunting America with grainy videos, Facebook was still three years away from its launch (2004), and Twitter would not come along for two more (2006).

Second, it may be easier to divide America because, well, we're already more divided than in 2001. Awatershed study by the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who consistently express conservative or liberal views has doubled over the past two decades from 10 percent to 21 percent. The bulk of that sorting has occurred since the end of Bush's first term.

Third, the Obama White House has proved to be self-generous and ruthless in its defense. When critics said his refusal to aid Syrian rebels helped embolden ISIS, Obama tartly called the analysis a "fantasy." But it wasn't just Republicans who made the case against him. Obama's former secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, warmed up for a potential presidential bid by calling the Syria policy a failure.

Fourth, today's Republicans are looking for any excuse to take on the president. Their base wants Obama impeached. The House GOP has done everything in its power to block Obama's agenda. And now they're already testing postattack talking points.

"I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorists' ability to operate in Syria and Iraq," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. "This is just not about Baghdad. This is just not about Syria. This is about our homeland. And if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages."

After the 9/11 attacks, the nation united for several months while Bush gained his footing as a crisis manager and prepared to wage war. We may never get hit that hard again. But if we do, one wonders how long we would stand together. Months or weeks? Days, maybe? Hours?

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Is the White House Lying or Just Bad at Crisis Communications?

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 11:52:17 -0400

President Obama's decision to stick with his schedule of fundraisers and photo opportunities amid twin foreign policy crises elicited one of the strangest statements you'll ever see from a White House.

"It is rarely a good idea to return to the White House just for show, when the situation can be handled responsibly from the road," said Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director. "Abrupt changes to his schedule can have the unintended consequence of unduly alarming the American people or creating a false sense of crisis."

Where do I start?

First, the phrase "just for show" is indicative of the Obama White House conceit that their guy is above politics. The fact is, all presidents do things just for show, because the office is inherently political, and one of the levers of power can be found in the public theater. Think of Abraham Lincoln's split rails, William McKinley's front porch, Theodore Roosevelt's whistle-stops, Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats—oh, and Barack Obama's entire 2008 campaign, not to mention his "bear-on-the-loose" jaunts with ordinary Americans.

The hypocrisy is staggering. How is playing pool and drinking beer with the governor of Colorado not "just for show"? Obama and his team consistently respond to criticism by dismissing the media's focus on "optics," even as they craft and control the president's image more aggressively than perhaps any previous White House.

Second, while Palmieri is correct that gutting a presidential schedule is rarely a good idea, there are times when it is. You could make an argument that Thursday was one such time, when the Gaza Strip erupted with violence and Russian President Vladimir Putin's allies shot a passenger plane from the sky. A president can bring calm and clarity to a confusing situation, or he can add to public anxiety.

About the time a Russian news agency reported 23 Americans were aboard the downed liner—a report that was responsibly attributed and distributed by U.S. news agencies—Obama was ordering lunch with a single mother at the Charcoal Pit in Delaware.

Mr. President, you better get those burgers and shakes to go. https://t.co/S0lBSJjeOu #MH17 #Ukraine #PhotoOops
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 17, 2014

That tweet was based on my knowledge of how a White House works in crisis. It happens: Harrowing news pierces the security bubble, and a presidential aide tells the president, "I think we should go, sir." Let's figure out what's happening, and make sure we're not the part of an embarrassing split screen on cable TV.

The Russian report was wrong, which isn't a surprise, and which doesn't substantially alter the urgency of the moment: Let's go, sir. Later on Thursday, I confirmed with a White House official that there was a discussion among presidential aides in Delaware about the poor timing of the restaurant stop.

The third problem with Palmieri's quote is the most obvious—"unduly alarming the American people or creating a false sense of crisis."

Unduly alarming? False sense of crisis? A ground war in the Middle East and raining bodies over Ukraine are cause for alarm. These was no false crisis—no more than the string of second-term controversies that have undermined Obama's credibility are "false scandals."

This points to the fundamental problem with Obama's communications ethos: He and his advisers are so certain about their moral and political standing that they believe it's enough to make a declaration. If we say it, the public should believe it.

That's not how it works. A president must earn the public's trust. He must teach and persuade; speak clearly, and follow word with action; show empathy toward his rivals, and acknowledge the merits of a critique. A successful president pays careful attention to how his image is projected both to U.S. voters and to the people of the world. He knows that to be strong, a leader must look strong. Image matters, especially in an era so dominated by them.

In the story that quoted Palmieri, New York Times journalist Michael D. Shear reported that White House aides "gave no consideration to abandoning the president's long-planned schedule" on Thursday. No consideration, really? Is this White House so stubborn and out of touch that presidential advisers didn't even considertweaking his schedule? Unless the White House lied to Shear, the answer is yes.

Where WH reverses course to acknowledge that optics do matter. Just that #MH17 and Gaza Strip aren't real crises: http://t.co/8Ewu96Imlk
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 20, 2014

(Image via Dan Thornberg/Shutterstock.com)

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Did the IRS Really Lose Lois Lerner's Emails? Let a Special Prosecutor Find Them.

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:58:53 -0400

A sloppy mistake, the government calls it, but you couldn't blame a person for suspecting a cover-up—the loss of an untold number of emails to and from the central figure in the IRS tea-party controversy. And because the public's trust is a fragile gift that the White House has frittered away in a series of second-term missteps, President Obama needs to act.

If the IRS can't find the emails, maybe a special prosecutor can.

The announcement came late Friday, a too-cute-by-half cliche of a PR strategy to mitigate backlash. "The IRS told Congress it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year," the Associated Press reported.

Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea-party and other conservative groups.

At issue is whether the IRS probes were politically motivated and directed by the White House. Congressional investigators were hoping for answers in Lerner's emails.

The IRS also screened liberal groups, which Democrats claim as proof that there was no abuse of power. That's wishful thinking. The fact that liberal groups were screened is mitigating, not dispositive.

Republicans lawmakers are prone not to trust any explanation from the White House. Their most conservative voters assumed from the start that the White House was targeting right-leaning groups for intimidation.

"The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS's response to congressional inquiries," said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. "There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general."

Obama has adamantly rejected the suggestion that the IRS was used for political purposes. "That's not what happened," he told Fox News in February. Rather, he said, IRS officials were confused about how to implement the law governing those kinds of tax-exempt groups. "Not even a smidgen of corruption" occurred, he said. His allies dubbed it a "phony scandal."

Six weeks after the scandal broke, I chastised House Republicans for cherry-picking evidence and jumping to conclusions. In the same column, I urged the president to be transparent: pave way for investigators to question witnesses under oath and subpoena the White House and his own reelection campaign for related emails and other documents.

If forced to guess, I would say that the IRS and its White House masters are guilty of gross incompetence, but not corruption. I based that only on my personal knowledge of—and respect for—Obama and his team. But I shouldn't have to guess. More importantly, most Americans don't have a professional relationship with Obama and his team. Many don't respect or trust government. They deserve what Obama promised nearly six weeks ago—accountability. They need a thorough investigation conducted by somebody other than demagogic Republicans and White House allies.

Somebody like … a special prosecutor. Those words are hard for me to type two decades after an innocent land deal I covered in Arkansas turned into the runaway Whitewater investigation.

Nothing has changed. The White House is stonewalling the IRS investigation. The most benign explanation is that Obama's team is politically expedient and arrogant, which makes them desperate to change the subject and convinced of their institutional innocence. That's bad enough. But without a fiercely independent investigation, we shouldn't assume the explanation is benign.

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Geithner Book: When Obama Blew a Dog Whistle and a Budget Deal

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 12 May 2014 15:50:08 -0400

In his forthcoming memoir, former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner captures a moment at which President Obama faced a choice between forging ahead with a promise to seek GOP compromise on the nation's debt crisis or bow to pressure from his liberal base.

Obama chose surrender.

This from Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises, as excerpted by Politico's Playbook:

At a meeting early in 2011 in [Chief of Staff Bill] Daley's office to discuss fiscal strategy, we debated how to respond to the Republican push for cuts in domestic spending. David Plouffe, who had just replaced David Axelrod as the president's top political adviser, made the case that we couldn't ignore the public clamor for fiscal discipline, and, politics aside, the president believed in fiscal discipline. "We didn't run on a platform of permanently increasing the size of government," said Plouffe, who had managed the president's 2008 campaign.

The quote assigned to Plouffe reflects Obama's nuanced view of the U.S. budget during his 2008 campaign and the early days of his presidency—that fiscal sanity was not only an acceptable part of a progressive agenda, it was a necessary element of any strategy to invest in the 99 percent and build the public's trust in an activist government. As late as his reelection campaign, Obama argued publicly that "the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population" and said "those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms—otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out investments we need for our children, and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations."

But there were dissenting voices in 2011, according to Geithner:

Dan Pfeiffer,the president's communications director [now senior adviser] and another 2008 campaign veteran, often took the other side of the debate, saying we couldn't afford to alienate our base and split a weakened Democratic Party in pursuit of an imaginary compromise with Republicans who didn't want to compromise.

At another meeting in the Roosevelt Room, I told the president I thought there was a chance that he could break at least some Republicans away from their no-new-taxes mantra and forge a deal to stabilize our long-term debt. It wouldn't be a deal that his base would like, but if he wanted to get anything through the House, he couldn't be bound by the demands of Democrats. "You have a chance to split the Republicans," I said. "But only if you're willing to split the Democrats.…"

I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn't contribute to the deficit. It wasn't a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line was a "dog whistle" to the Left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.

Obama decided not to split the Democrats—or to seriously seek compromise. Yes, he did propose a modest adjustment of entitlement spending in exchange for tax cuts on a "grand bargain," but that now appears to have been a mere signal (or dog whistle) to debt-fretting independent voters. It was a game. Liberals played their part and objected to the reforms. Republicans played their part and said they would never raise taxes. Despite advice from Geithner, fellow Democrats, and top Republicans who recognized the GOP negotiating ploy, Obama seized on it as an excuse to surrender to his base.

As late as a year ago, just a few months after Obama shoved a reelection tax hike down their throats, the GOP leadership was still open to compromise. A budget deal would be hard, but not impossible, to strike. The situation required an able, nimble partner in the White House, a leader who could help the GOP leadership reach and sell a deal to their conservative base. In March 2013, I wrote of the GOP: "Don't mistake a negotiating position for reality. House Republicans tell me they are open to exchanging entitlement reform for new taxes—$250 billion to $300 billion, or approximately the amount that Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania proposed raising over 10 years under the guise of tax reform."

The numbers were specific because the possibility of a deal was real. But the White House, quite literally, laughed at it. The president had already bowed to his base, given up on compromise, and damaged his legacy.

Like a political memoir, Geithner's accounts need to be taken with a grain of salt because personal agendas can shape memories. For instance, he quotes Republican economic adviser Glenn Hubbard as saying, "Of course, we have to raise taxes" as part of a broader deal based on the the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, "we just can't say that now."

Hubbard, now the dean of Columbia Business School, told Politico that Geithner made up the story."'It's pretty simple. It's not true," Hubbard said.

I don't know whether Geithner is lying about his conversation with Hubbard. I do know a number of top Republicans who said they were open to cutting a tax-and-cut deal with Obama, and who said they privately told the White House, "We just can't say that now."

The Republicans may have been lying, but we'll never know. Because Obama wasn't listening.

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Obama, Congress Flunk National-Service Test

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:07:56 -0400

With the audacity to overreach, President Obama commemorated the fifth anniversary of the bipartisan Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act on Monday by calling it "the boldest expansion of opportunities to serve our communities and our country since the creation of AmeriCorps."

He's wrong. National-service advocates, including Democrats otherwise loyal to Obama, say the law has gotten little more than lip service from the White House—and far less than that from House Republicans.

In fact, both the Obama administration and Congress received failing grades Monday in a report by ServiceNation and Voices for National Service, two groups advocating for programs that support volunteerism and community service.

This must be what Obama considers to be bold and expanded:

From 2010 to 2013, the number of people serving the nation through AmeriCorps declined by nearly 18,000 because of a lack of funding from Washington, according to the report.
This year, despite soaring number of applicants for AmeriCorps positions, fewer than 80,000 national-service members are serving. That is 120,000 short of the law's goal for 2014.

The 2009 act authorized the growth of AmeriCorps from 75,000 positions in 2008 to 250,000 by 2017. That pledge appears unattainable, given the resistance of Republicans to support national service and Obama's inability to overcome the GOP.

"As we celebrate this anniversary," Obama wrote in a letter to national-service advocates Monday, "let us recommit to fulfilling its promise." One recipient, who asked not to be identified, emailed me a copy of the letter and scoffed, "You can't recommit to something that's never been committed to."

Zack Maurin, executive director of ServiceNation, put it more diplomatically. "Congress and the White House need to make good on their promise," he said. "The millennial generation is desperate for opportunities to work and gain experience, while communities across the country need help tutoring and mentoring struggling students, rebuilding after natural disasters, and helping people climb out of poverty."

The law, named in honor of Sen. Edward Kennedy, an advocate for national service who died in 2009, builds upon the legacies of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, George H.W. and George W. Bush, and Clinton, each of whom played a role in developing the modern-day national-service system. While Obama's immediate predecessor grew AmeriCorps by 50 percent, the program has flatlined under the current administration.

The report lays most of the blame on Republicans, noting that House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has called repeatedly for the elimination of national-service funding. But it also criticizes Obama for finessing the numbers in an attempt to disguise the lack of progress.

I've written previously about the many Democrats who believe the president has not fought Republicans hard enough on behalf of AmeriCorps. In their report released Monday, the two advocacy groups issued a report card grading Washington's leaders, with an "A" awarded in three areas: focusing national service toward the nation's greatest needs; developing interagency partnerships that take advantage of national-service programs; and steering service members toward national disaster relief.

In addition to the failure to expand the program, an "F" grade was issued against the goals of increasing service opportunities for older Americans and enhancing service-leading opportunities for the young.

"This report highlights a leadership opportunity for Congress and the administration to step up and make good on the promise made five years ago to expand and strengthen national service," said AnnMaura Connolly, president of Voices for National Service.

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Millennials Don't See Serving in Government as the Way to Change the World

Ron Fournier, The Atlantic — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 10:08:50 -0400

Forget what you’ve read about the “Me, Me, Me Generation.” Here are four things you probably don’t know about the 95 million Americans born between 1982 and 2003:

Millennials, in general, are fiercely committed to community service.
They don’t see politics or government as a way to improve their communities, their country, or the world.
So the best and brightest are rejecting public service as a career path. Just as Baby Boomers are retiring from government and politics, Washington faces a rising-generation “brain drain.”
The only way Milliennials might engage Washington is if they first radically change it.

For a least a decade, experts have struggled to understand why civic-minded Millennials are rejecting public service and politics. Beyond the why, I wanted to understand what it means: What happens to U.S. politics over the next two or three decades if the best and bright of the next generation abandon Washington? So I talked to them -- at elite public high schools in suburban Washington and Boston, at Harvard University’s Kennedy School for Government, and on Capitol Hill. In all, I conducted more than 80 interviews with Millennials as well as pollsters, demographers, and generational experts. They brought me to my fourth conclusion: What Millennials have in store for the political system is revolutionary. Maybe worse.

“They’ve been told all their lives to wait in line,” former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says. “But they’re of a mind to say, ‘OK, while I’m waiting in line I’ll blow your stuff up.”

You’ve heard the knocks against Millennials. They’re narcissistic, coddled, and lazy, not to mention spoiled. But there’s more to their story. The largest and most diverse generation in U.S. history is goal-orientated, respects authority and follows rules. Millennials are less ideological than their Baby Boom parents and far more tolerant. In addition to famously supporting gay rights, polls show they are less prone to cast negative moral judgments on interracial marriages, single women raising children, unmarried couples living together and mothers of young children working outside the home. While their parents and grandparents preferred to work alone, young Americans are team-oriented and seek collaboration. Wired to the world, they are more likely than past generations to see the globe’s problems as their own. Millennials are eager to serve the greater community through technologies, paradoxically, that empower the individual.

Speaking of technology, Millennials witnessed, embraced, and in some cases instigated massive disruptions of the music, television, movie, media, and retail industries. The most supervised and entitled generation in human history, they have no patience for inefficiency, stodgy institutions or the status quo. Consider what they could do to politics and government.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

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Analysis: How Obama and Congress Failed AmeriCorps ... and America

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 08:00:00 -0400

During his first presidential race, Barack Obama pledged to "expand and fund AmeriCorps from 75,000 slots today to 250,000" volunteers, putting service-minded millennials to work on the nation's toughest problems.

After just three months in office, he signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act authorizing the expansion of the Clinton-era program to the goal of 250,000. He had kept his promise, Obama boasted, and he declared 2009 the dawn of a "new era of service."

But the dawn never broke. Congress never funded the quarter-million hires, not even when Democrats controlled both chambers in 2009-10. AmeriCorps enrollment crept above the 80,000 mark in 2009 and limped along until this year, when the sequestration spending cuts cost the program at least 3,600 workers.

This broken promise must be a painful one for Obama, a former community organizer with a special affinity for AmeriCorps. It also reflects a familiar pattern of his presidency:

raise hopes for big change;
watch dogged rivals crush those hopes;
hear Democrats question White House strategy.

"Our country is a better and stronger force for good in the world because more and more we are a people that serve," Obama said while promoting the embattled program this month.

Founded in 1994 and operated by the Corporation for National and Community Service, AmeriCorps includes several service programs that pay volunteers stipends. Those programs include Teach for America, City Year and Vista. (Disclosure: My daughter was a City Year volunteer in Detroit.)

At a time of high unemployment and slow economic growth, non-profit organizations are having trouble meeting people's needs. A 2012 survey by the NonProfit Finance Fund showed that 85 percent of organizations serving the needy expect an increase in demand for their services. Yet only 40 percent can meet the needs, the survey showed, due to a lack of workers. For every federal dollar invested, national service members deliver as much as $3 of services.

By refusing to fund AmerCorps, Congress is missing a chance to engage Millennials who are volunteering in record numbers. AmeriCorps alone received more than 582,000 applications in 2011, a 62 percent increase over 2009. That means a half-million young Americans are being turned away.

Despite the need and value, AmeriCorps has long been on the GOP hit list. While President George W. Bush supported the program, Republican lawmakers objected to any program so closely associated with President Clinton, and they balked at paying volunteers.

Former Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, once called AmeriCorps "a welfare program for aspiring yuppies." In 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann voted to defund AmeriCorps, despite the fact that her son, Harrison, had joined Teach for America in 2009.

Supporters of the public service program praise Obama for fending off the GOP, but argue that the White House has not made AmeriCorps expansion a priority in budget fights.

"I wish I could remind them that they do have a veto pen and could use it," said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

A senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Berg said the White House never fails to propose an adequate budget. "But what do they insist upon in conference? What do they accept? That is a different story."

The White House declined comment for this story. In private conversations with AmeriCorps boosters, White House officials maintain that, tactically, the best they can do is defend the program against GOP cuts. Demanding more money for AmeriCorps would raise the program's profile, make it a target and expose it to cuts.

Such is the toxic political situation in Washington.

The questions about AmeriCorps could apply more broadly, Berg said – to any of Obama's failures to impose his agenda on Congress. "How much is his fault? How much is the fault of the political structure? And how much is the fault of the GOP?"

This month, Obama honored former President George H.W. Bush for making service a national issue via his "Points of Light" program. In doing so, Obama also announced a government task force led by the Corporation for National Service to study how service programs could meet the needs of federal agencies. It was a toothless gesture.

"In times of tight budgets and some very tough problems," Obama said, "we know that the greatest resource we have is the limitless energy and ingenuity of our citizens." True enough, but Congress is squandering that resource and Obama seems powerless to help.

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What Detroit's Demise Says About America

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 17:36:00 -0400

My ancestors helped build Detroit. The Fourniers were fur-trappers and farmers living hard by the Detroit River until the fledgling auto industry beckoned in the early 1900s with a better deal: $5 a day and a pension.

In the 1960s, my father opted out of the family business to be a police officer. He served Detroit for 25 years as part of the elite motorcycle unit that doubled as the riot squad. One of my earlier memories is of my parents, dressed in church clothes, leaving our house to attend the 1967 funeral of a riot cop.

Mom and dad raised four children at 15285 Coram in the city's northeast corner, the same block upon which they were raised. All this to say: I love my hometown. And I hate what Detroit's demise might bode for our country.

Wrenching economic change … income inequality ... political corruption … ineffective government … rigid institutions … chronic debt and racism -- these are the things that bankrupted Detroit, morally and fiscally, and they're an exaggerated reflection of the nation's challenges.

Economy: Detroit failed to adapt to the global economy and to diversify for the postindustrial era. "Sometimes the losers from economic change are individuals whose skills have become redundant; sometimes they're companies, serving a market niche that no longer exists; and sometimes they're whole cities that lose their place in the economic ecosystem," wrote economic columnist Paul Krugman in today's New York Times. Sometimes, the victims are whole countries, a fact that seems lost on Washington, where the leadership is polarized and smart ideas go to die.

Income inequality: The unemployment rate in Detroit is more than 18 percent. Per capita income is pathetically low, near $15,000. Life is much better for suburban residents. In Grosse Pointe, Mich., separated from Detroit by the aptly named Alter Road, the median family income is more than $100,000, and unemployment is not a problem.

Bad government: "The city's operations have become dysfunctional and wasteful after years of budgetary restrictions, mismanagement, crippling operational practices and, in some cases, indifferences or corruption," Detroit's emergency manager Kevyn Orr wrote in May. "Outdated policies, work practices, procedures, and systems must be improved consistent with best practices of 21st-century government." It would not be a stretch to apply Orr's words to the federal government.

Broken promises: The group most at risk in Detroit's bankruptcy may be the city's 20,000 retirees (including my father and many friends and family members). Of Detroit's overall debt, about half represents pension and health benefits promised to retirees, according to The Washington Post. This is because city leaders borrowed against pension funds and mortgaged the future—not unlike what Washington's leadership is doing to Social Security and Medicare.

Rigid institutions: Government agencies, businesses, schools, churches, the media, and virtually every other city institution failed to help residents weather the tumult of the last four decades of the 20th century. In particular, big labor never managed a second act after anchoring the rise of the American middle class in Detroit. Union membership and influence has declined in Detroit and elsewhere, considered by many to be more of an obstacle than a solution.

Racial tensions: Racism and racial polarization have a long and an ugly history in Detroit. The 1967 riots caused many whites to leave the city. White flight increased in the 1970s, when school busing and a ban on real-estate "red lining" threatened the nasty traditions of segregation. Craven real estate agents hired black women to push baby strollers through white neighborhoods, then knocked on doors urging residents to sell "before it's too late."

The fallout from George Zimmerman's trial struck a chord with this Detroit native, particularly President Obama's eloquent remarks about Trayvon Martin and black Americans. As a kid, I was told to lock my car doors in "black neighborhoods." The owner of Detroit store where I worked ordered me to follow young black men into the aisles "to keep an eye on them."

On race and other issues, Detroit should be a warning to the country. It was—and in many ways, still is—a great city, but poor leadership and an ambivalent citizenry allowed Detroit's problems to fester, grow, and eventually overwhelm it. A nation can make the same mistake.

Coincidentally, when Detroit declared bankruptcy, I was wrapping up a Michigan vacation. The highlight was my daughter's wedding. She lives and works in the city, and got married in a church not far from where the Fourniers once trapped beavers and farmed. Her family drove in from the suburbs to a city they had abandoned (and that had abandoned them). The wedding reception was at the Detroit Historical Museum, where the Fourniers danced to Motown music in the brick-and-cobblestone streets of "Old Detroit." We toasted the future.

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Analysis: Why the IRS Scandal Needs a Special Prosecutor

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 11:03:41 -0400

You're being spun, America. On the vital question of whether the Internal Revenue Service incompetently or corruptly targeted conservative groups, both the White House and GOP are rushing to judgment – and they want you to follow like lemmings.

Don't do it.

Nearly six weeks ago, President Obama responded to an inspector general's report detailing the targeting, which had been long denied by the IRS. "The misconduct that it uncovered is inexcusable. It's inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it," Obama said, vowing to "hold the responsible parties accountable."

The IG report was based on a cursory audit. It was not a full-fledged investigation. And yet Democrats disingenuously claimed that it exonerated the Obama administration and the president's re-election campaign from any involvement in IRS targeting.

To truly "hold the responsible parties accountable," Obama still needed a thorough and impartial inquiry led by investigators who would question witnesses under oath, and would subpoena the White House and his own re-election campaign for related emails and other documents.

He did not ask for that.

Smelling blood, the GOP-controlled House launched an investigation led by Rep. Darrell Issa of California. Never mistaken for an impartial investigator, Issa quickly declared that IRS targeting was "ordered from Washington" – a thinly veiled indictment of the White House. His evidence? A few cherry-picked interviews with IRS officials and an Orwellian subtext: "We're getting to proving it," Issa said. On June 3 I wrote of Issa: "Meet the best friend of a controversy-plagued Democratic White House: a demagogic Republican."

Meanwhile, Obama backed his strong words with middling action, transferring political ally Danny Werfel from the Office of Management and Budget to the IRS, where as acting commissioner Werfel would investigate his own administration.

Werfel may be a stand-up guy with a solid reputation in Washington. But the public doesn't know him. The public also doesn't trust the federal government. And the public doesn't like the IRS.

Why, after the agency's massive breach of trust, would Obama think a Werfel-led investigation will restore the public's faith?

Werfel announced Monday that instructions used by the IRS to look for applicants seeking tax-exempt status with "Tea Party" and "Patriots" in their title also included groups whose names included the word "Progressive" and "Occupy." Jonathon Weisman of The New York Times reported, "The documents appeared to back up contentions by IRS officials and some Democrats that the agency did not intend to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny."

The White House and its allies declared the scandal over. Said David Axelrod, one of Obama's longest-serving advisers, said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show: "I think the implication that this was some sort of scheme is falling apart."

Don't buy it. Like Issa and the GOP, Democrats are jumping to convenient conclusions based on incomplete evidence and no credible investigation.

There is a hard truth that partisans won't admit: Until more is known, we can't implicate or exonerate anybody.

If forced to guess, I would say that the IRS and its White House masters are guilty of gross incompetence, but not corruption. I based that only on my personal knowledge of – and respect for – Obama and his team. But I shouldn't have to guess. More importantly, most Americans don't have a professional relationship with Obama and his team. Many don't respect or trust government. They deserve what Obama promised nearly six weeks ago – accountability. They need a thorough investigation conducted by somebody other than demagogic Republicans and White House allies.

Somebody like …. a special prosecutor. Those words are hard for me to type two decades after an innocent land deal I covered in Arkansas turned into the runaway Whitewater investigation.

But Obama was right to be angry about the IG audit. He knows how important it is for Americans to trust the IRS, an agency that keeps our secrets, that collects taxes to run government, and that will soon implement Obama's own health care program.

What the IRS did, Obama said less than six weeks ago, was "inexcusable." That's a good word to describe what Republicans and Democrats in Washington are doing now -- cherry-picking evidence from partisan and cursory inquiries, treating Americans like lemmings and the truth like a leper.

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Analysis: Obama Gives Nod to Transparency ... in Private

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 15:51:49 -0400

This is an excerpt from The Edge, the National Journal's daily look at today in Washington -- and what's coming next. The email features analysis from NJ's top correspondents, the biggest stories of the day -- and always a few surprises. To subscribe, click here.

Stung by the uproar over secretive government surveillance, President Obama took steps Friday to assure Americans that he's not trampling on the Bill of Rights.

First, he nominated as FBI director a former George W. Bush official best known for a dramatic hospital standoff against warrantless wiretapping.

In 2004, then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey rushed to bedside of his ailing boss, John Ashcroft, to stop two senior White House officials from securing the attorney general's approval to reauthorize the controversial post-9/11 program.

In a Rose Garden ceremony, Obama praised Comey for standing against "something he felt was fundamentally wrong."

Also Friday, the president met for the first time with a privacy and civil liberties board that is supposed to provide oversight of anti-terror programs. Created in 2004, the board was dormant during Obama's first term, and only became functional in May.

Fittingly, the meeting was private.

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Analysis: How Obama Scandals Threaten to Kill 'Good Government'

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:04:44 -0400

I like government. I don't like what the fallout from these past few weeks might do to the public's faith in it.

First, you don't need to be a liberal Democrat to root for government efficiency, transparency and solvency. Even tea party conservatives expect certain things from Washington: a strong military; pensions and health care for the aged; student and small-business loans; safe food and drugs; secure borders; and, of course, federal police protection against terrorists, both foreign and domestic.

The core argument of President Obama's rise to power, and a uniting belief of his coalition of young, minority and well-educated voters, is that government can do good things -- and do them well.

Damn. Look at what cliches the past few weeks wrought.

Government is intrusive. The National Security Agency is collecting records of tens of millions of customers from the nation's largest telephone companies. The secret agency is also tapping into Internet providers like Google to sift through emails, videos, photos and other activities.

They are using the data to find patterns that might reveal terrorist plots. It is an electronic fishing expedition.

Government is Orwellian. Sixty four years ago this month, George Orwell published "1984," a chilling prophecy of a police state. The book inspired the term "doublespeak," government's attempt to disguise, distort and reverse the meaning of words. It abounds.

In defending the spying on U.S. citizens, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., declared Thursday that "there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint." But come on. How many complaints did he expect on a secret program?

James Clapper, the direction of national intelligence, said the program "cannot be used tointentionally target any citizen … ." That sentence is so 1984: vaguely assuring, impossible to refute, and beside the point. According to multiple reports, U.S. citizens are sacrificing their privacy to a government casting its wide and powerful net in search of foreign terrorists. Rather that initiating an honest conversation with the American public, Clapper hid behind the Orwellian turn of phrase: "intentionally target."

Government is incompetent. The best outcome for Obama and his Internal Revenue Service is a full and credible investigation by Congress that determines the targeting of conservatives was not orchestrated by the White House but was rather rooted in bureaucratic incompetence. That would begood news.

Government is corrupt. If investigators uncover even a single email or conversation between conservative-targeting IRS agents and either the White House or Obama's campaign, incompetence will be the least of the president's problems.

Team Obama has publicly denied any knowledge of (or involvement in) the targeting. Privately, top advisers admit that they don't know if the denials are true, because a thorough investigation has yet to be conducted. No emails have been subpoenaed. No Obama aides put under oath. A quick and absolute denial might be smart short-term politics. But doesn't anybody in Washington think long term?

Government is complicated. Before the scandal, only 10 percent of the public told NBC/Wall Street Journal pollsters they had "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence in the IRS. That number is likely to drop, just as Obama tries to implement his landmark health care insurance program through the IRS.

Polls also show that most voters don't understand the byzantine law, and relatively few support it.

Government is heartless. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesdayshe won't intervene in the widely publicized case of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who requires a lung transplant to live.

Sebelius' point is sound: Federal rules require children to be age 12 or older to get lung transplants from adults, and making an exception would endanger somebody who qualifies. But outside Washington, age 12 is an arbitrary number chosen by bureaucrats who now, effectively, are sentencing the girl to death.

Government is secretive. Look, it's a dangerous world. Obama and his team need to get their hands dirty to protect us. As terrorists grow more dangerous, we need to consider using the flexibility of the Constitution to adapt. But the mandate to keep Americans safe is no excuse to keep them in the dark. There must be a way for a savvy president like Obama to lead a credible and responsible national debate on the balance between liberty and security. He should have done it five years ago. It might not be too late.

Government can't be trusted. All these roads lead to a credibility crisis: The Pew Research Centerfound this year that fewer Americans than ever have faith in the decisions made by government.

Even the military, one of the only U.S. institutions Americans hold in high favor, experienced a recent decline in confidence. Two thirds of respondents told NBC/WSJ pollsters that they have "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence in the military, down from 76 percent in May 2012, and an 18-point drop since January 2002. The decline coincides with publicity over the Pentagon's inability an/or unwillingness to stem the epidemic of sexual assaults in the military.

In his soaring second inaugural address, Obama compared this era of immense change and challenge to other American pivot points.

"Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone," he declared. "Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character."

Those words will ring hollow -- and Obama's agenda will fail -- if Americans can't look past questions about the character and quality of their government.

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Analysis: The Bush-Obama White House Spies on Us

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:43:59 -0400

Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic, terrorism, and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.

It made little difference.

Despite his clear and popular promises to the contrary, President Obama has not shifted the balance between security and freedom to a more natural state -- one not blinded by worst fears and tarred by power grabs. If anything, things have gotten worse.

Killing civilians and U.S. citizens via drone.
Seizing telephone records at The Associated Press in violation of Department of Justice guidelines.
Accusing a respected Fox News reporter of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason for doing his job.
Detaining terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, despite promises to end the ill-considered Bush policy.

Even the IRS scandal, while not a matter of foreign policy, strikes at the heart of growing concerns among Americans that their privacy is government's playpen.

And now this: The Guardian newspaper reports that the National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of tens of millions of customers of one of the nation's largest phone companies, Verizon.

If the story is accurate, the action appears to be legal. The order was signed by a judge from a secret court that oversees domestic surveillance. It may also be necessary; U.S. intelligence needs every advantage it can get over the nation's enemies.

But for several reasons the news is chilling.

Verizon probably isn't the only company coughing up its documents. Odds are incredibly strong that the government is prying into your telephone records today.
Issued in April, the NSA order "could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued," according to the Washington Post. "It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carries under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."
This appears to be a "rubber stamp," order, reissued every few months since 2001. As is the case with all government programs, the systematic snooping into your telephone records is unlikely to ever expire without public outcry.
Congress is full of hypocrites. Liberals who criticized Bush are less incensed with Obama. Republicans who bowed to Bush are now blasting Obama. The next time your congressional representative criticizes Obama for curbing civil liberties, ask if he or she would vote to repeal the Patriot Act, the post-911 law that handed unfettered power to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Most won't.
The Bush-Obama White House hates transparency. President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were justifiably criticized by Democrats (none more successfully so than Obama himself) for their penchant for secrecy. Obama promised that he would run history's most transparent administration. By almost any measure, on domestic and well as foreign policies, Obama has broken that promise.

It is the lack of transparency that is most galling about the security versus civil liberties debate under Obama, because it shows his lack of faith in the public. Americans know a high level of secrecy and dirty work is needed to keep them safe. Most trust their president. Many approve of his job performance.

Still, they expect and deserve an open discussion about how to fight terrorism without undermining the Constitution.

Obama started that conversation with a recent address on the drone program, media leaks and the need to move American off a constant war footing. It was a compelling and well-considered argument for the balance he is claiming to strike.

But he made the speech under pressure, and reluctantly. It only came amid new revelations about the drone program and the disclosure of newsroom spying (the Guardian may well be in Obama's sights next). Under Bush, the warrantless wiretap program only stopped after it was publicly disclosed. In that way, the Guardian story is not a surprise, so why didn't Obama long ago acknowledge, explain and justify such an intrusion into privacy?

Obama has promised to adjust the drone and leaks investigation policies, essentially acknowledging that his administration had gone too far in the name of security. Do you believe him?

One thing we've learned about the Bush-Obama White House is that words don't matter. Watch what they do.

(Image via kropic1/Shutterstock.com)

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Analysis: Issa Stirs Echoes of McCarthy in IRS Probe

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:45:43 -0400

In one brief and repugnant interview, the GOP's chief congressional investigator into Internal Revenue Service abuses cherry-picked evidence, overstated his case, and violated the sacred American principle of presumed innocence.

If that was not enough, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., called White House press secretary Jay Carney a "paid liar," and couldn't explain why. "We're getting to proving it," he said.

Meet the best friend of a controversy-plagued Democratic White House: a demagogic Republican.

In a reminder of how the GOP overreached during the Clinton-era sex scandal, President Obama's chief congressional investigator doesn't seem capable of letting damning facts speak for themselves.

Interviewed by a smartly skeptical Candy Crowley on CNN's State of the Union, Issa found himself on the defensive from the start.

"Congressional investigators tell CNN the [congressional] report finds the IRS spent over $50 million on 225 employee conferences over a two-year period," Crowley said, adding that the Obama administration no longer allows spending on such training.

"So what's the hearing about?" she said. "Why are you having it?"

Issa shifted focus to the IRS's admission that its agents targeted conservative groups for review of their tax-exempt status. "Well, first of all, we're looking at the IRS for how big the problem is," he replied. "As you know as late as last week the administration is still trying to say there's a few rogue agents in Cincinnati when in fact the indication is they were directly being ordered from Washington."

Note what Issa is doing. He does it all the time--start an unsubstantiated allegation with an absolute declaration ("when in fact") and follow it with weasel words ("the indication is"). This smear-and-caveat technique allows him to ruin reputations without being called a liar.

Issa is a demagogue with plausible deniability.

Crowley turned next to excerpts of interviews with IRS agents that were selectively made public. She calls the practice "problematic" because "it's hard for us to kind of judge what's going on."

Cherry-picking evidence is deceptive and unethical. Here's how it works:

CROWLEY The investigator said, "So, is it your perspective that ultimately the responsible parties for the decisions that were reported by the [inspector general]"--that is, the decision to target tea-party and patriot applications--"are not in the Cincinnati office?" The employee says, "I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, from an agent standpoint, we didn't do anything wrong. We followed directions based on other people telling us what to do." Investigator: "And you ultimately followed directions from Washington, is that correct?" The employee: "If direction had come down from Washington, yes." The investigator: "But with respect to the particular scrutiny that was given to tea-party applications, those directions emanated from Washington, is that right?" The employee answers, "I believe so."

It's totally not definitive.

ISSA Well, that one isn't.

No "smoking gun." Not even a warm slingshot. And yet, Issa kept digging his hole.

ISSA But I will tell you, one of the agents asked for and got a transfer because that person was so uncomfortable that they wanted out of it.

CROWLEY Right.

ISSA And they've said categorically they thought it was inappropriate, and that's why that person requested a transfer.

CROWLEY You give those transcripts as well.

ISSA Right. And these transcripts will be made public.

If history is a guide, the full transcripts will not support Issa's exaggerated claims and dark accusations. Crowley pressed Issa to release the interviews immediately to avoid the perception that "you in particular sort of cherry-pick information that go to your foregone conclusion."

Like a cornered snake, Issa lashed out.

ISSA The whole transcript will be put out. We understand--these are in real time. And the administration is still--their paid liar, their spokesperson, picture behind [he points to a picture of White House press secretary Jay Carney], he's still making up things about what happens in calling this local rogue. There's no indication--the reason the Lois Lerner tried to take the Fifth is not because there is a rogue in Cincinnati; it's because this is a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters and we're getting to proving it. We have 18 more transcribed interviews to do.

See what he's doing? "We understand" and "in all likelihood" are weasel phrases couching accusations and assumptions that Issa can't support. But don't worry; he might prove them after 18 more interviews!

Do you hear history's echo? Sen. Joe McCarthy paved his way to infamy with 205 names. " I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party …," McCarthy said in 1950. (There is some dispute over the actual number of names McCarthy cited.)

Crowley pointed out the obvious--that Issa had "no direct link" between the wrongdoing of IRS agents and political leaders in Washington. Issa replied, "The president's spokesman is saying whatever is convenient at the time and the story changes."

That sentence is irony wrapped in raw partisanship and infused with hypocrisy. If Issa is going to call Carney a liar, he might want to step outside his glass house.

He might also want to realize that the president is swamped in self-inflicted controversies that raise questions of West Wing competence, if not corruption. We will soon know whether the IRS's targeting involved officials at the White House or Obama's reelection campaign. The flames don't need Issa's toxic fuel.

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Analysis: You Know What Really Risks National Security? Leak Investigations

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:27:02 -0400

A year ago, The Associated Press discovered a foiled al-Qaida plot. Worried about the safety of an informant in the case, the CIA asked the AP to delay publishing the story until their spy could be secured. The AP agreed.

Five days later, the CIA told the AP that their national security concerns were “no longer an issue.” As a seasoned AP team of reporters and editors made final edits to their scoop, the CIA backtracked and asked the AP to delay the story one more day. New national security concerns?

Nope. The only concern was about public relations. The Obama administration planned to promote the failed plot the next day. Hold the story, the CIA said, and “you can have it exclusively for five minutes” before the White House announces it.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder insist that the leak endangered American lives. But details of the AP-CIA discussions, as reported by The Washington Post, raise serious questions about the gravity of the leak and the administration’s credibility. They also reflect the tense and traditional relationship between journalists and national security officials, a fragile bond of trust that may now be bent or broken.

In that way, the leak investigation might actually jeopardize national security.

(Disclosure: I worked for the AP for more than 20 years, including a 2008-10 stint as Washington bureau chief.)

After considering the CIA’s outlandish request to postpone for public relations reasons, the AP published its story with no further delay. The White House trumpeted the foiled plot, injecting the national security victory into Obama’s reelection campaign.

Privately, the leak became an obsession to those inside the administration who believed a life-saving anti-terrorism operation had been jeopardized. U.S. officials tell the Los Angeles Times that the informant, reportedly a British subject of Saudi birth, had earned the trust of terrorists and had provided information used to disrupt al-Qaida’s Yemeni affiliate.

The group had trained and outfitted the informant with an underwear bomb designed to pass airport security. He turned it over to his handlers, the Times reported, and the CIA planned to make it appear that the underwear bomb had failed so his infiltration could continue.

When the AP distributed its story May 7, 2012, it disclosed details of the bombing plot, U.S. officials told theTimes, and the potential for using the informant again was lost.

Details of this case raise issues with Obama's leaks-kill-people narrative. First, the AP story did not mention an informant. Second, government officials tell me the CIA never asked the news agency to kill the story. Third, there is reason to doubt claims that the leak prevented the re-infiltration of the informant. Once his suicide mission “failed,” why would al-Qaida trust the informant again?

There is also the question of whether the administration is obligated to notify the American public about a plot to destroy an airliner with a newly developed security-busting bomb. Did the government really plan to keep this secret?

And if the AP story was grave enough to justify an unprecedented extension of police powers, why did the CIA tell the AP that security concerns were resolved?

Finally, why did the White House take a victory lap over the foiled plot?

All this leads me to four tentative conclusions.

The leak inquiry threatens national security. The AP acted responsibly by checking its story with the Obama administration. News organizations do this all the time – not to get permission but to make sure that their stories are accurate and don’t undermine U.S. security.

This practice requires mutual trust between adversaries. The government needs reporters to flag national security stories before harm is done. Journalists need government officials to protest only those stories that pose a legitimate risk to the nation, and not use the relationship to curb political fallout.

What might happen when journalists think they’re being gamed – when delays are sought for news conferences and when fishing expeditions are launched against sources? Journalists might trust government less, share less, and missions might be compromised.

You should be worried about your phone records. The DOJ seized AP records knowing that they would eventually notify the wire service and the intrusion would be widely reported. You don’t have the AP’s power. If the Obama administration would go to these lengths against the world’s oldest and largest news organization, how deep might they dig into your life? If they didn’t give the AP a heads up, why would they ever tell you about seizing of your records?

Obama is intimidating whistleblowers. As I wrote the other day, this story is not just about journalists and their feelings. It’s about good men and women who know about wronging doing in government – and now know that the Obama administration will go to unprecedented lengths to shut them up. It’s an indirect but certain threat to the First Amendment.

The White House has a credibility crisis. After the IRS lied about targeting of conservatives and the White House minimized the State Department’s role in disputed Benghazi talking points, the justification for snooping on the AP raises new questions about the administration’s credibility.

One of those questions is whether the CIA and White House are more concerned about plugging leaks or managing spin.

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Analysis: Benghazi, IRS Storms Threaten Obama's Credibility

Ron Fournier, National Journal — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:10:32 -0400

When two storms collide, the weather gets hairy. For President Obama, the IRS and Benghazi stories converged this weekend for a self-inflicted tempest that threatens his credibility.

His people can’t get their stories straight.

Internal Revenue Service officials denied for months the targeting of conservative political groups for reviews of their tax exempt status. With investigators poised to expose the chilling operation, a high-ranking IRS official acknowledged it late last week and apologized for it.

The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. That appears to be untrue. The Associated Press reported Saturday that senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report.

Politicizing the IRS threatens the integrity of an agency entrusted with Americans' secrets and the taxes that fund government. It also fuels the paranoia of conspiracy theorists.

"This is outrageous," said Democratic consultant Chris Kofinis. "The administration and the president need to condem this and act immediately. This is not a right-left issue."

Several other Democratic allies of the White House expressed similiar sentiments while refusing to be named out of fear of retribution. Kofinis, who specializes in political communications, said White House needs to explain itself. "Your first response can't be to say the IRS is an independent agency," a claim the White House has made, he said.

On Benghazi, the president’s U.N. ambassador said five days after the Libya attack that the incident grew out of a street protest rather than a terrorist attack. Caught fudging the facts in the middle of a presidential campaign, a race in which Obama’s anti-terrorism record was a major selling point, the White House blamed Ambassador Susan Rice’s statement on “talking points” concocted by the CIA in virtual isolation.

Obama’s team stuck with that story until the truth was exposed amid a GOP congressional investigation. Emails leaked to news organizations last week show that both the White House and State Department were directly involved in scrubbing the CIA talking points of any mention of past threats and al-Qaida involvement. That is the exact opposite of what the Obama White House had claimed.

Inexplicably, White House spokesman Jay Carney refused late Friday to acknowledge the contradiction.

Why does this matter? Because a president’s credibility matters. President Bush’s second term effectively ended when Americans grew tired of his administration’s spinning and dissembling over Iraq and Katrina. They stopped trusting him. They stopped listening to him. He no longer had the moral authority to lead.

It’s far too early in this perfect storm of controversy to condemn Obama to Bush’s fate, but he and his advisers face a credibility crisis. A news conference at the White House later today gives Obama a chance to convince Americans that he is still worthy of their trust.

To do so, he may need to do more than to promise to bolster embassy security and to shut down the IRS targeting operation. He may need to forcefully condemn the half-truths and distortions disseminated under his name.

He may need to fire people who can’t get his story straight.

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