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The Audacity of Help: Obama’s Economic Plan and the Remaking of America by John F. Wasik

Initially, I was reluctant to accept a review copy of The Audacity of Help because I blog primarily on military and national security issues and straight domestic politics posts tends to attract tiresome, angry, commenters who type in caps ( I do not want traffic, I want influential readers). Nor am I an expert on business or finance issues, Wasik’s forte as a journalist and an area best judged from a position of extensive personal experience, which I do not have. John Wasik though, after I checked him out, impressed me as an evenhanded and experienced reporter, so I accepted.

If you are a “political blogger”, Left or Right, order a copy of The Audacity of Help today, it’s an invaluable, factual “scorecard” on the domestic agenda of the administration of President Barack Obama, especially the outcome stimulus package and the positions of all the players, executive vs. legislative, promises vs. reality and Democrat vs. Republican.  The appendix and bibliographic resources alone will be fodder for many a blog post. Wasik offers a theme of “cui bono” from policy status quo or change that is refreshing and informative (and I say this as someone who would much rather write about Bernard Fall, the Haqqani Network or Herodotus than how Obamacare will impact senior citizens or the elections in 2010) accompanied by various textual, factoid, “asides” that extend each chapter.

Here are the chapters of The Audacity of Help, which runs 202 pages:

1. First Aid and Income Boosters

2. Rebuilding Infrastructure, Creating Jobs,

3. Bottom Up Economics: Small-Business Benefits

4. Job Creators and the Green Collar Bonus

5. Get Smarter

6. Borrowing Wisely

7. Restoring Home Ownership: Keeping the Dream Alive

8. Health Care Reform

9. Unifinished Business: Long Range Goals in Entitlement Reform

10. The Road Ahead

I don’t agree with everything Wasik has to say in terms of policy but Wasik is measured in his praise and criticism on all parties and is ultimately, a fiscal realist (“How will all this money be paid back?”). He gives a fair hearing before offering his own opinions and policy recommendations toward the conclusion of the chapters which allows me to give Wasik the ultimate compliment to a writer of non-fiction:

The Audacty of Help is useful.

Hat tip to Critt Jarvis, social entrepreneur, conversational catalyst.

Robert D. Novak, 1931 -2009

During the Reagan era, two conservatives shared the title “the Prince of Darkness” as an epithet from liberal Democrats and Washington insiders. The first was nominal Democrat turned Reagan administration assistant secretary of Defense Richard Perle, a neoconservative activist who was castigated for his ultra-hardline anti-Soviet views and skepticism about the value of arms control. The second was veteran Chicago Sun-Times reporter and columnist Robert “Bob” Novak, who passed away today at age 78.

While Novak shared many of Perle’s foreign policy views regarding the malevolence of the Soviet Union and Henry Kissinger and was (with Jude Wanniski) a firey media advocate for the emerging school of  Supply-Side economics, what made him and the Evans & Novak column a political force to be reckoned with was that Bob Novak was a dogged, old-fashioned, working reporter who regularly unearthed new information from his vast collection of sources. Most people under thirty only know of Bob Novak from the Valerie Plame affair, which began in Novak’s column,but Robert Novak had been creating havoc for politicians, and not just liberal ones, for decades:

The fact is that Novak, as he would disclose in his autobiography, actually admired very few politicians. He wrote that he found the first politicians he covered less impressive than the athletic coaches he had covered as a young reporter — “an impression of the political class that did not change appreciably in a half-century of sustained contact.”But then, many big-time politicians didn’t like Novak. Pat Buchanan relates a priceless story of being with Richard Nixon in the mid-’60s in a high-school gym in Indiana. Nixon peeked through the stage curtain, finding Novak in the first row of the press section. “Look at him,” Nixon commanded. “That’s Bob Novak. That’s the enemy.”

Not only did I read Novak growing up ( later I realized that Novak would shoehorn his pet theories on to the facts he uncovered regardless of whether it made any sense, the facts though, were always useful) but I watched him pioneer the Left vs. Right shoutfest template on CNN’s “Crossfire”, first sparring with Tom Braden then, more famously, with Michael Kinsley. When Novak did it, the concept was refreshing because the whole idea of a show that actually had political balance by including conservatives on equal terms with liberal talking heads was revolutionary at the time. Unfortunately, when Crossfire went from a clever niche on a feisty cable news station to a transmogrified, dumbed-down, infotainment as an industry standard, a lot of damage was done to public discourse and reportedly, Novak shared that view to an extent ( though he also cashed the checks – CNN helped make Robert Novak exceptionally wealthy).

Robert Novak represented the last of a generation of hard-nosed reporters who learned journalism as a craft rather than as a product of graduate school theories, who could come from any ( but usually modest) background rather than having a distinctly “bicoastal” cultural worldview and a ranking system based on what “good school” you attended. The news business, I note, has not prospered from becoming more insular.

The media could use more Robert Novaks.

ADDENDUM:

I see Lexington Green beat me to the punch with his obit post.

Out of sheer laziness and a nod to public service, I will re-post this notice from Lexington Green in its entirety:

Early Notice: Thomas E. Ricks at the Pritzker Military Library on September 10, 2009.

Thomas E. Ricks will be in Chicago at the Pritzker Military Library to discuss this most recent book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The event will be free and open to the public.

Ricks is the author of the widely-acclaimed book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, e.g. this review.

Ricks is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Ricks has a blog, The Best Defense.

I hope to read The Gamble before the date, and I plan to attend the event.

I hope the weather is better than the downpour on the night that David Kilcullen spoke at the PML.

Barring any unforseen, work-related, commitments, I will be attending this event and will blog about it. Perhaps some live twittering as well.

Blogfriend Matt Armstrong had an important post regarding The Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009. An excerpt:

The plan describes current efforts within the Department of Defense, the military services, the combatant commands and other agencies on SC. In total, these efforts could be linked together to form the foundation of an S&T thrust area for strategic communication. The report also includes a macro-analysis of capability gaps not being addressed by ongoing initiatives and lays out potential areas for future S&T investment.

While the request for the plan itself represents recognition from Congress that SC plays a critical role in the public and private response to current and emerging threats, it also highlights that there is much research and development already underway and many tools available to increase the government’s effectiveness in global engagement. The rub today is the need for strong leadership and coordination to ensure: 1) awareness of the long list of capabilities; 2) incorporating these capabilities into plans; and 3) participation by stakeholders across the US government, NGO’s, industry, and private citizens.

The S&T plan sorts current efforts into the following categories:

• Infrastructure: Enabling and facilitating access to information from news to markets to vocational
• Social Media: Knowledge Management, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds
• Discourse: Analysis of radical and counter-radical messages and ideas
• Modeling and Forecasting: Gaming and anticipating adversarial messages and ideas as well as our counters and pre-emptive measures
• Collaboration: Increasing collaboration and training across and beyond Government
• First Three Feet: Empowering, Equipping, Educating, and Encouraging media and others to exist and freely report on events for what they really are
• Understanding: Develop country, culture, and regional expertise, including polling
• Psychological Defense: Planning and capacity building for dealing with critical strains on society in peacetime and wartime

The interesting thing here for me is that “strong leadership” is lacking because the people spread across and outside government who have the shared awareness of technology, social media and national security at a level of sophistication where they could actually craft a strategic communication policy, are usually many levels removed from the appointee policy deciders for whom these variables are (usually) fuzzily understood.

To use an analogy, the chefs are valet parking cars outside while trying to get the manager of the restaurant to acknowledge their recipes. Or, maybe that there should be cooking going on in the kitchen if they want to have any customers. Or that the business is, in fact, a restaurant and not a nicely organized room full of tables.