on Pres. Obama’s “csars”

“The President-elect has appointed overseers for health care, economic policy, counter-terrorism, regulation, and for energy and the environment, with more similar appointments possible,” writes Alex Spillius in a telegraph.uk.co in a story titled Barack Obama risks infighting with his team of ‘csars’; Barack Obama risks infighting and personality clashes after appointing too many policy “csars” to his White House team, veterans of the Clinton and Nixon administrations have warned.

Spillius continues:

[...] Morris Reid, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “You’ve got these csars running around the White House. It’s going to be too many chiefs.

“You’ve got to remember that Barack is the only commander-in-chief. But he is setting up something like a think tank where you have a lot of super stars running around, ministers without portfolio that makes for a troubling situation when he’s trying to make a decision.”

Stanley Herschensohn, a deputy special assistant to Richard Nixon, said the “extra layer” of people being created by Mr Obama was “bound to create conflicts”.

“The cabinet officers will be answerable to the president’s csars and not to the president. This has not happened on this scale before and I predict there will be more friction in this administration than previous ones,” he added [...]

In an earlier transmission I riffed on proximity and power in comments on Lewis Shepherd’s analysis of the appointments of Panetta and Blair:

[...] in the courtly literatures—e.g. Gracian’s Art of Worldly Wisdom, Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier—power is always power in relation, and power as it derives from the center, which in the era meant royal or ecclesiastical power. Power is always power in opposition. The position or the portfolio that you held only had meaning in relation to everyone else’s position or portfolio [...]

Principle: You organize to communicate; you communicate to organize. How you organize is itself a powerful message. The constellation of power that forms about the person of President-Elect (until tomorrow) Obama strikes Reid andHerschensohn—both cited in Spillius’ account—as tending toward disunity.

Various responsa:

1. The organization of President-Elect President Obama’s administration is consistent with what we know about him. When big questions arise he stands aloof. He takes stock. He allows others to argue until a consensus view begins to emerge. He may or may not try to shape the emerging consensus. If he does it will be to issue general principles or evaluative standards. Later he will adopt the consensus view as his own. He will do this in stages. This happened in September when the stock market crashed. Senator McCain famously suspended his campaign and fled to Washington. Then-candidate Obama kept his counsel. Later—after furious deliberation on every side but his own—Obama would support the compromise bailout bill with reservations.
2. Think in the abstract for a moment. Think in terms of systems. Requisite variety contradicts the experience curve. As a team or organization matures in its practice and achieves success it hones, it optimizes, it improves and perfects—but every gain in efficiency raises the costs of innovation as scarce capital gets sunk into the existing order of things. Victory is a poor teacher. Hard-won insight passes into the rote and habit of the complacent. Think of the U.S. automobile industry. Requisite variety can impede efficiency—imagine everyone arguing every point—but it makes space for reflection, innovation, sometimes even wisdom. Moral: Plan for a complete systems failure when things are going really, really well. Think of the U.S. housing market. It is not enough to say that nothing lasts forever. Rather: things pass into their opposites.
3. Conclusion: Unanimity or simple unity can be a positive menace. Sometimes nothing is more frightening than a system at peak performance. Example: group think. Also: the law of requisite variety. Moral: Cherish and protect your heretics. Recruit one if you don’t have one. Create them or provoke them into existence if you must. Don’t just consult your dissidents and dissenters. Rather, dramatize dissent in open debate—this is how you cultivate requisite variety.
4. Back to Obama. Grant Reid and Herschensohn their point: Obama’s proposed organization itself may foment or support disunity. Yes, and disunity has its uses. It supports requisite variety, hence innovation and reflection. Further: Adversarial reasoning is the way we settle disputes in e.g. courtrooms, legislatures, corporate boardrooms. To allow the best argument to win implies a contest. Open dispute would be the contest as it plays out in publicly in interviews, press releases, news programming, blogs, editorials, letters to editors, conversations in lunchrooms and at bus stops.
5. There is another use for an open process with all its risks of disunity—ritual sacrifice, as essential to the operations of power now as it was when my proud Anglo forebears painted themselves blue and worshiped trees. The principle is simple. When everything goes to hell, someone, almost anyone, must pay. Blood must spill. A head must roll. This is the secular version of what R. Girard would call a sacrificial crisis. So you plan for your crisis. Like in any episode of the old Star Trek you write into the script an expendable crew member. You keep a pen of scapegoats on hot standby. Think of how Renaissance princes would post their bastard sons to insecure positions or assign them grim, hateful tasks. Because he was of illegitimate birth his claim to the principate was suspect. So in principle he would be less likely to develop his own power base to threaten the prince were he to succeed at e.g. silencing dissent, gathering revenue, confiscating property. If, on the other hand, the son became a liability—say, he provoked rebellion—the prince could execute him, perhaps publicly. The people would be mollified; the prince would remain secure, as dissociated from the costs of the policies of his son as his son’s head would be from his shoulders.
6. Obama’s “ministers without portfolio”—this additional layer of administrative abstraction—can screen Obama from the risks and political costs of unpopular policy. President Obama can tank whatever czar he pleases, to signal whatever base or constituency the moment requires, without disrupting the operations of a federal agency or agencies because these are free-floating, unattached, non-cabinet positions. This would be presidential power passing into a semblance of royal power. Courtiers rise and fall. The monarch remains in the center silent, serene, unmoved and umovable. Or in business language, you build a team and you act through the team. This insulates you from the costs of the team’s activities.
7. So, counter-intuitively, this new layer of hierarchy allows the new president to position himself as closer to the American people. Just as my hypothetical prince defends the interests of the people when he executes his bastard son.
8. It bothered me when an interviewer asked Obama to name one conservative friend and he could not. But consider e.g. Obama’s economic team. Obama has recruited from all across the ideological spectrum. Further, what appears to be forming in the new administration are multiple fora for the gathering and interrogating of ideas on adversarial grounds. This, I would say, is promising.

yours &c.
g.

P.S. About (5) and the notion of a sacrificial crisis. Think of the Bush-Bernanke bailout plan, TARP etc. What was missing from the forumula is a sacrificial victim. Someone needs to pay—to be punished—to satisfy public outrage. So far that has not happened. So far it appears that the federal government wants to rescue the very executives and top managers responsible for the collapse. Until someone gets marched to wall and shot public support for any bailout will continue to be low bordering on nil. Consider the proposed bailout of the automobile industry and the sudden burst of anger at union labour. The public wants someone to be punished—almost anyone. This is the logic of sacrifice according to Girard.