Only Jonah Goldberg (NRO) :Tea Obama and Care

"To me, the scandal is that there are 47 different organizations involved in building the site. I cannot imagine that any sane project executive would want it that way"

In the words of the highlander (and the experience of this now retired large project mgr) .. "THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE"

This arrived in email so I am copying it complete ..awesome:

The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg

October 18, 2013

Dear Reader (and those poor Hawaiians who bizarrely got this “news”letter as an error warning while trying to log on to Healthcare.gov),

Maybe it’s my sleep deprivation. Maybe it’s the fact I spent yesterday afternoon like Martin Sheen in his Saigon hotel room in Apocalypse Now doing tai chi amidst empty whisky bottles. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the fact that I can’t get the song “The Mighty Quinn” out of my head, but I feel pretty good about the state of things.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think things are messier than my aforementioned hotel room and I’m not jumping for joy the way I will when Quinn the Eskimo gets here. I also stand by all of the comments that have elicited more bile from my colleagues on the right than a bulimia party on the set of America’s Next Top Model after the Ben and Jerry’s product-placement episode.

One fellow on Twitter proclaimed that Jonah Goldberg is “Saul Alinskying the Tea Party and he doesn’t even know it. #MediaBubble" because I said on Fox yesterday that the Tea Party comes out of this more internally galvanized but externally more radioactive among Americans outside its sphere. This guy has an elephantine epidermis compared to the other thin-skinned responses I’ve gotten to my utterly banal observation. Some have skin thinner than the slightly congealed cream on the surface of an old cup of coffee. Others don’t even seem to have a skin at all, and are simply walking around like flayed souls flinching at even the sight of a bottle of lemon juice.

The complaint seems to be that it is wrong to suggest that the Tea Parties came out of this fight with their brand or reputation diminished among non-tea-partiers, even if it is objectively true (or if that’s too tendentious, even if it’s what I truly believe). It’s difficult for me to catalogue all the ways I think this is silly. For starters, there’s nothing ad hominem about the statement.

For instance, if I were to say that Barry Goldwater became more “radioactive” when he said, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” it would be a true observation. That wouldn’t mean, however, that I disagreed with what Goldwater said.

Moreover, radioactivity is the whole point! That’s what the Tea Party does. It reminds me of Charlie Cooke’s response to a C-SPAN caller’s asking, “Why can’t guns be safer?” He answered: “Because they’re guns.”

If the Tea Party isn’t pissing someone off, it’s doing it wrong.

Like the skinny guy everyone in prison is afraid of, much of the Tea Party’s political power is drawn from the perception that it’s just a little crazy. Boehner’s hand has been strengthened over the last few years by his ability to tell Obama, “Hey, look, I’d love to cut a deal with you but you see those guys over my right shoulder? — DON’T LOOK THEM IN THE EYE! They are crazy and if I walk back there with what you’re offering they will rip off my legs and beat me to death with them. And then they will get mean.”

So why did I get crosswise with them this time? Because I didn’t think their strategy would work. But going over all that again feels like airing dirty laundry during Thanksgiving dinner just so you can get grandma riled up about grandpa’s escapades during the war. “You weren’t fighting Communists! You were fighting syphilis! We’re going home!”

Still, like most of my colleagues, I didn’t think the strategy would work. And that was a risk for the Tea Parties themselves. Sometimes to use power means to lose power. Good hostage-takers are always careful to ask for a ransom the victim’s families can afford to pay, otherwise what’s the point?

Indiana Jones and the Tea Party of the Lost Ark

In a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon introduces his girlfriend, Amy, to the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which she’d never seen before. She liked the movie, she explains, despite the big “story problem.” Sheldon is aghast at the suggestion there could be any story problems with the “love child” of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. “What story problem?” he demands to know. She explains that Indiana Jones is absolutely irrelevant to the story. If he’d never gotten involved, the Nazis would have still found the ark of the covenant, they would have still brought it to that island, and they would have still had their faces melted.

I’d never thought of it that way before, but it’s actually a very close parallel complaint to the one I’ve written about many times. My dad — who loved the movie — always laughed at the idea that the Nazis would be able to use the ark for their dastardly purposes. The idea that God would be like, “Darn, it’s out of my hands. I guess I have no choice but to lend you my awesome powers for your evil deeds,” is pretty ridiculous. They even returned to this idea in the third movie, when the Nazis tried to get their hands on the Holy Grail — because, you know, Jesus would totally say, “Nazis!? Rats. There’s nothing I can do. It’s life everlasting for the SS!”

I’m no theologian, but I just have a hard time believing that’s how God rolls.

Anyway, I bring this up because I think you can say something similar about the last few weeks. There was a whole lot of action, but at the end of the day, things worked out the way they were going to all along. I’m sure there’s a really good extended metaphor in here somewhere. Default was the face-melting ark, but we looked away at the last minute. Or defunding Obamacare was the Holy Grail, or something like that. But I want to get back to why I feel pretty good about how things worked out.

Obamacare: The Horror

While I think the notion that we wouldn’t be talking about Obamacare were it not for Ted Cruz’s filibuster is simply untrue, the fact that he laid down that marker, and forced everyone in the party to do likewise, will almost certainly work to the Right’s advantage down the road. We can all argue about how unpopular the shutdown really was and how damaged the party brand is, but my guess is that the worst of it has to be behind us. The shutdown will fade from memory while the Obamanation of Obamacare will grow. If you read the Wall Street Journal story today alongside Yuval’s post in the Corner, it’s becoming ever more clear that this is kind of an M. C. Escher drawing of failure. The error pages literally have errors in them. Jonathan Cohn — a passionate Obamacare booster — has a relatively balanced piece about the rollout problems, but he goes back to boosterism when it comes to the issue of premiums. He simply asserts that competition is working and delivering lower premiums. I am at a loss as to how he can know that given thatall the reporting I’ve seen suggests that if you’re healthy and middle class, your premiums will likely go up. It even happened to a Daily Kos blogger whose tears are delicious!

Imagine going to Target the day after Thanksgiving for the “Black Friday” sale. You wait for hours or days for the doors to open. You rush in like O. J. Simpson in the old Hertz ads, leaping over pyramids of GI Joes with the Kung Fu Grip, sidestepping the giant Justin Bieber cardboard displays. It’s complete chaos. Some woman who wants the same George Foreman Grill you do punches you in the uvula. You kill a guy with a trident when he tries to get the last Bluetooth beer helmet. Finally, because you kept your head on a swivel, you get your cart to the check-out line and the cashier tells you everything in your cart isn’t on sale, but it’s actually twice as expensive as it would be on a normal day. Why? Because in order to buy the things you want, you have to buy a bunch of stuff you don’t want; a DVD of Bridges of Madison County, a cornucopia of indecipherable feminine products, a top-of-the-line salad spinner, and a twelve-pack of Ensure.

That’s Obamacare for you.

And the fact that the GOP caused a huge fuss that briefly annoyed some people to protest this mess is really not such a bad thing.

It’s Obamacare All the Way Down

Look, it’s always possible that eventually they’ll get all the kinks out and make this thing work well enough to avoid a total disaster. But every day it looks more and more like this thing is a Big Government onion. Liberals think the outer layer is bad but that if they just peel that away it’ll be great. But the thing about onions is they’re onions all the way down. You can peel all you want, you’ll never find a prize in the center, but you just might find yourself crying in the middle of a big mess.

Consider this from the Sunlight Foundation:

All but one of the 47 contractors who won contracts to carry out work on the Affordable Care Act worked for the government prior to its passage. Many — like the Rand Corporation and the MITRE Corporation — have done so for decades. And some, like Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, are among the biggest wielders of influence in Washington. Some 17 ACA contract winners reported spending more than $128 million on lobbying in 2011 and 2012, while 29 had employees or political action committees or both that contributed $32 million to federal candidates and parties in the same period. Of that amount, President Barack Obama collected $3.9 million.

Arnold Kling responds:

I don’t hold it against the contractors that they had prior government experience. I don’t hold it against them that they lobby or contribute to campaigns.

To me, the scandal is that there are 47 different organizations involved in building the site. I cannot imagine that any sane project executive would want it that way. I am just guessing, but it seems more likely to me that this many contractors were imposed on the project executive because there was a requirement to “spread the work out” to keep all these companies in the politicians’ pockets.

The Limits of the Moral Equivalent of War

Don’t worry, I’m not going to wear my sandwich board and ring my bell about William James again. But I do feel like making one point. Whenever I make the argument that government is very bad at doing things like Obamacare, the liberal response is invariably to offer counter-examples. “The military is awesome! Are you saying SEAL Team 6 is bad at what it does?” or “We sent a man to the moon!” Other counter-examples are pretty rare, but there are some. The NIH does some great things. The Coast Guard, the Peace Corps, etc.

What liberals never appreciate is that in all of these counter-examples there’s something else going on. The institutional cultures that won World War II or put a man on the moon or that discover some new protein are not strictly speaking government cultures. While none of them are immune from bureaucratic stupidity and inefficiency, ultimately higher motivations win out.

How the Marines’ esprit de corps differs from the post office’s esprit de corps should be pretty obvious. But even in the other examples, the cultural core of excellent government institutions is driven by something greater than a mere paycheck and significantly different from simple “public service.” The NASA that sent men to the moon was imbued with a culture not just of excellence and patriotism but the kind of awe and wonder that cannot be replicated by the Department of Health and Human Services. Moreover, for scientists passionate about space and the race to get there, there was simply no place else to be. That meant the very best people were attracted to NASA. Even if, for some strange reason, you’re passionate about writing billions of lines of code for a website and managing health-insurance data, there are still better things to do with your time than work on Obamacare.

I want to be fair to government workers. Many individuals who work for government are dedicated to doing excellent work for the public good. But I’m talking about culture here. President Obama talks as if, absent a war or other national crisis, the entire government can still be imbued with the spirit of sacrifice and excellence that won World War II or put a man on the moon. And that’s just crazy talk.

Obama, the permanent campaigner, believes that governing should be more like campaigning. Everyone unified towards a single — Obamacentric — purpose. Everyone loyal to his needs. Everyone in agreement with his agenda. In 2008, when asked what management experience he had, he said that running his campaign proved he was ready for the presidency. That should have been the moment when we all heard the record-scratch sound effect and said “What’s that now!?” Even if Obama deserved all of the credit for his campaign’s successes, campaigning and governing are fundamentally different things. Campaign culture allows for people to be fired. It also rewards excellence, which is why some very young people rise very quickly in the campaign world, while it’s far more rare in civil service. Campaigns have a deadline-driven, crisis-junky energy and sense of team loyalty that is at least somewhat analogous to a war or some other crisis. That’s why the Obama campaign website was great. It’s also why the Obamacare website’s error page has an error page.

Various & Sundry

Today’s column is about the bizarre crusade to break the stranglehold the Rockefeller Republicans have on the party, despite the fact that there is no such stranglehold. As you can imagine, reactions to it are … mixed.

I’m finishing this “news”letter from a restaurant in New Haven. I wrote most of it at the airport, on the plane, and in the car ride to the campus. I’m speaking at a conference hosted by the Buckley Program at Yale. This is pretty late notice, but come on by if you’re in the neighborhood.

As many of you know, every Friday afternoon, usually around 4:00 p.m. I announce on Twitter the “phrase that pays” that will get me to personally send you the G-File if for some reason the gremlins blocked delivery. One day I hope that we will fix this problem because, frankly, it’s a huge drag for me to send these things out. And for that reason, I’d like to clarify something. If you send me the phrase that pays in the subject header, I will send you the latest G-File sometime over the weekend. But only over the weekend. If you wait until Wednesday of the following week, I’m sorry, but you’re out of luck. It’s one thing to get into a groove and send it when there are a hundred requests in a row in my inbox. It’s another thing to drop everything each time an individual request comes in five days later.