The best and the brightest

Mark Schmitt writes that the GW Bush administration left us with problems that elude political solutions, but he cautions that relying too much on "experts," and too little on political consensus will end badly.

On June 11, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at Yale. After some Harvard-Yale jocularity, he put forward the most memorable definition of that triumphal moment in what historians now call the era of liberal consensus: "What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies ... but the practical management of a modern economy." Economic problems of the 1960s, Kennedy said, are "subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided."

According to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the speech was the work of a supergroup of Camelot intellectuals that included himself, John Kenneth Galbraith, Theodore Sorenson, and McGeorge Bundy. Its calmly persuasive, sensible pragmatism would sound familiar coming from our current president, and Kennedy's argument that concern about federal budget deficits was based on "myths" (marking his turn toward Keynesianism) would be at home in this magazine today.

And yet, one can recount the history of the subsequent decades largely as a chronicle of the political error of that speech. It was short-sighted in dismissing a "grand warfare of ideologies" at the very moment the Goldwater movement was being born, which would set the stage for a battle not between Marxism and capitalism but between a new ideology of unrestricted capitalism and the managed economy that seemed so commonsensical in Kennedy's time.

By taking public questions out of the domain of "political answers," and leaving them to experts, as technical questions, Kennedy gave birth to two backlashes. From the left, in reaction to the failure of the great brains--notably Bundy's--in Vietnam, the New Left turned to the dream of participatory democracy, which in six years led to the unraveling of the liberal consensus on the streets of Chicago. On the right, a new conservatism found its voice in a kind of disingenuous anti-intellectualism and contempt for experts, exemplified by William F. Buckley's comment, "I'd rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty."

Schmitt concludes that Obama is right to rely on experts, even when it is confounding to have to rely on some of the very same people, i.e., bankers, who got us into the mess to begin with, but that Obama cannot then simply say, "trust us." That said, I don't think such a finely tuned politician as Obama would be so tone deaf as to say that. That's why he is ubiquitous; there at every turn to explain what his administration is doing and why (and it's why, I suspect, the hook came out early when Geithner was showing up on the stage earlier this year). I think Obama has drunk deeply from the lessons of the Kennedy administration.

On a related note, see McKiernan, David, for illustration of Obama recognizing that when you're neck deep in The Big Muddy, don't say "push on."