Back in my college days, which were the late Reagan and Bush the Elder days, I decided to "read the other side." I wanted to see if my liberal prejudices were just that, or if they stood up to the ideas and rhetoric of the newly resurgent right. So I read them. I read "Right From the Beginning" by red meat xenophobe Pat Buchanan. I read "The Triumph of Politics" by David Stockman. I read "What I Saw at the Revolution" by Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. I read "Diplomacy" by Henry Kissinger.
My head did not explode. But let us just say the experience did NOT reverse my liberal leanings. It rather enhanced them.
Which brings us to this morning...
I admit. I usually skim the headlines by reading my personalized version of the Google News home page. I don't have the slightest idea why I clicked through to a WSJ Peggy Noonan editorial titled "He Was Supposed to be Competent." I really don't
Ever since reading "What I Saw at the Revolution," I knew what to expect from the lady. I honestly don't know why I clicked through. I also don't know why I read the whole thing. But I did.
We all have a framework of education, experience, assumptions, and, yes, prejudices on to which we map all new information. And although it staggers my mind the extent to which the right is able to draw connections between the BP Gulf disaster and Katrina where one was a foreseeable event that could have been planned for and mitigated by government action prior to and in the immediate aftermath of and the other was a completely unforeseeable event that is being tackled in every possible physical way and there is just not a damned thing that can be done, I must still acknowledge that the lady has one valid point.
(Phew, that was one hell of a sentence. I think I was channeling Dickens...)
Yes. I said Noonan has a point.
She's just completely wrong about what the point is. It is indeed true that it was a mistake for the Obama administration to hold the story at arm's length. Because the story is the most important policy and the most important political event of his administration so far.
It holds the key (in my admittedly uninformed opinion on politics) to election victory and to sound future policy. Policy that can solve global warming, terrorism, and energy problems.
Let me dispense with the political first, because I am weaker in this area and because I have an engineering background and the policy question is of greater interest to me.
Politically the opportunity to intercut the spewing oil, the RNC (I mean the convention, not the committee) chanting "Drill, baby! Drill!", dead and dying seabirds, the RNC chanting "Drill, baby! Drill", out of work and idled fishermen and shrimpers, the RNC chanting... I think you get the idea. This message should be hammered home on every media outlet constantly up to the midterm elections.
The folly of allowing the other party back into control cannot be better illustrated than that simple message.
And where Noonan is right? The administration should be using this to drive an aggressive policy agenda aimed at ending our dependence on oil as an energy source in our economy. I am not convinced modern industrial society will survive the oil age. I sit somewhere between the technocrats who believe that all our energy problems can be solved through innovation, the the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and the radical pessimists at dieoff.org whose outlook I think you can deduce from their web address.
But even if you think oil will last for centuries (it won't), you should still want to make this change. Why? Because our insatiable demand for energy drives our foreign policy, drives our headlong rush to a radically altered environment, and drives international hatred towards the United States.
In this catastrophe an opportunity to drive real and dramatic incentives for renewables, efficiency, conservation, research and development, and whole new sustainable kinds of economic growth really and truly exists. Believe me, I support this President. I will support my party. But just as I felt health care reform was needlessly compromised, so too I worry that this opportunity will be lost. So, Ms. Noonan, to the extent that I've been motivated to write my two (happily) DFL Senators and my one (sadly) Republican Congressman, I thank you for your passionate and utterly misguided and deluded world view.
As a final aside, the reading I mentioned at the top? Noonan's book is the only one that was an utter waste of time.
Buchanan's book is such an honest portrait of a truly aggressive, closed-minded bigot that I am glad to have read the book, and disturbed to know that many who read it must agree with it.
Stockman's book is actually, I think, loaded with insights into what is wrong with Washington and how power works. The fact that he was trying to accomplish things with which I totally disagree doesn't invalidate his insights into how people with ideas and goals are stymied by our political process. However it also made me realize that there is value in that. Those same forces are blocking things I support right now, such as single payer national health and the comprehensive energy policy reform I'd like to see come out of the SP Gulf disaster, but they blocked a lot of what Reagan and Bush the Elder wanted done too. It took 9/11 to give the executive runaway power, and how do we all like that?
And Kissinger's book? Kissinger may be a war criminal, but he is a smart and learned war criminal. And he represents one pole in American foreign policy thought. He is even humble enough (irony alert) to elucidate it himself in the book. The tension between a purely power/pragmatist approach to foreign policy that he identifies with Theodore Roosevelt, and a moral/idealist approach he identifies with Woodrow Wilson. I wonder what future scholars will make of the power/idealist combination that I think Bush the Younger represents? Future topic, perhaps.
Finally, this is my first diary in years. I'm out of practice. So forgive the rough edges and typos. Noonan just pissed me off enough to write something...