Week of April 20, 2009

In Cleopatra’s case, the sheer absence of truth has guaranteed the legend. Where facts are few, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Nudge-ocracy: Barack Obama's new theory of the state.... Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers.

The phrase comes from British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who quoted an ancient Greek poet:"The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Ronald Reagan was considered a hedgehog; he wanted smaller government and a tougher U.S. confrontation with the Soviet Union. (OK, two big things.) Obama, like Bill Clinton, wants to do many, many things. The long debate among political scholars and historians has been: Which approach is more effective? Does a fox, by trying so much, risk accomplishing little?

I realize that it's factually true that Newt Gingrich has a doctorate in history and that this peculiar fact illuminates, in a weird way, many of the deeply silly ideas dispensed from the gumball machine that people generally mistake for an actual human head. But we should always remember that Gingrich is an"historian" in the same sense that someone who last played golf in 1978 is a"golfer." Or, to rephrase slightly, Gingrich is an historian in the same sense that someone who lost his PGA tour card in 1978 is still a golfer. I usually read that Gingrich was denied tenure; the alternate version (which I think is technically correct) is that he never actually applied for it because he'd have been turned down anyway. Regardless, Gingrich's history credentials -- to the degree that anyone, anywhere takes them seriously -- provide a great case study in the inflation of cultural capital.

Watch out. Everywhere you look, the talking heads are going to be talking about Barack Obama's first hundred days. Did he end the war in Iraq? Not yet. Turn the economy around? I'd have to say not yet. The EPA has been making moves, and there's a new proposed rule on stem cell research, although the last time I went outside here in Los Angeles, the air was no cleaner, and no new diseases have been cured since January, at least as far as I've heard. Are we better off than we were three months ago? Why would we be?

There's an old rule of thumb that chief executives should only try to do three things at once. Three is an agenda. Six is a laundry list. The problem comes when you inherit the reins of a state or a company or a country with more than three major problems. What then? For a guy who couldn't get his credit card taken when he tried to rent a car at the 2000 Democratic Convention, a guy who in 2004 was a State senator in Illinois, it's not bad. If he could come this far this fast, think what he might do in a few more hundred days. Or a few years.