Metrics, Mistakes, and Opportunities for Growth

Overall, I am a big fan of metrics. I truly believe that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Presidents are often measured on a 100-day metric, “The First 100 Days” as a phrase often chirped by the media. Questions have persisted recently about how realistic a metric this is. With President Obama, many believe that this amount of time will not be sufficient to even begin to make a dent in the serious deficits (both moral and economic) that were left behind by the previous President. Some have proposed that the end of 2009 might be a better metric. With most economists speculating that the current deep recession will not turn around under a best-case scenario until late 2009, this seems a bit fairer.

However, after less than 20 days, for many on the far left and far right, Obama’s honeymoon has already ended. No one expected his honeymoon with those on the far right to last long. However, the fact that the far left have in many cases already turned on Obama is disconcerting.  For example, check out some of the comments on this thread from OpenLeft.

Yes, Obama has made some blunders, but I do not believe that these mishaps have been anywhere near fatal errors. Instead of knee-jerk reactions, let’s take a look at two areas where I believe Obama actually has made a mistake, and more importantly, how I believe he can use this mistake as a learning experience. As a human being, everyone makes mistakes, even presidents. The question is not whether a mistake was made during the beginning days of a presidency, but rather whether action was taken to learn from that mistake. In general, this includes a root-cause analysis with corrective action going forward. For example, President Kennedy took the Bay of Pigs failure and used it as the impetus to change the decision-making process in his inner circle. This fundamental change helped get rid of the previous group think and helped avert a disaster in the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred the next year. Yes, the Bay of Pigs was unfortunate. However, if the Bay of Pigs mistake had not happened, the same disaster, at a billion times the magnitude (i.e., nuclear holocaust) could have occurred the following year. Working with the subject of patient safety in health care, I am exposed to this type of analysis all the time. Most errors are not the fault of one person, but rather the result of a misaligned organizational structure that does not catch errors or raise the proper questions.

Let’s take a look at two examples of what I believe have been mistakes and how the Obama administration could possibly learn from them going forward:

1. Tom Daschle Appointment

As a health care policy wonk, I found the developments with Tom Daschle the most disappointing developments to date. As I wrote here, I believed Tom Daschle would have been a perfect fit to get real health care reform through Congress. Granted, I write this before it is clear who Obama’s replacement choice may be, and this choice may surprise us all. However, when it came to the pure Washington knowledge needed to get something through, Daschle was the man. However, this greatest strength also came to be Mr. Daschle’s greatest weakness.  To me, the tax issue was an aside. The biggest problem was that Daschle became emblematic of the Washington insider’s sense of entitlement or the lobbyist rotating door cycle of greed that Obama campaigned against. When taking office, Obama seems to have caved on some of this campaign rhetoric in favor of practicality, with the reality that you must work within the system in order to get anything done.  Overall, this is unfortunate, but largely correct. However, there is a line to be passed; there is a needed sense of accountability and most importantly transparency in government. Tom Daschle crossed this line, and more importantly, did not disclose these transgressions. The fact that no one in the Obama transition raised questions about Daschle’s past lobbying or tax issues is very troubling. The dilemma is that in order to get anything accomplished, you must work within the system (even if you are independently working to change it). However, at the same time, if the system is broken, you cannot try to make lasting change with those who have become one with the system. Finding a cabinet secretary who can meet this requirement is easier said than done.

The solution here is perhaps to create two positions, one for a “health care czar” to handle the political issues and another for Secretary of HHS to handle the technical aspects and realities of health care reform. Ideally, there would also be an independent board appointed outside of the political realm to handle tough decisions related to such issues as cost effectiveness and reimbursement. Such tough decisions must be brought outside of the direct influence of lobbyists. Outside of being a health care expert, President Obama must make sure that he finds individual(s) with the complex mix of insider knowledge and outsider credibility, and most importantly, that any such person is properly vetted.

2. Stimulus Bill Negotiations

Although successful in the end, President Obama severely underestimated his opponents in the negotiations over this package. In a gesture of bipartisanship, Obama offered a large percentage of the bill as tax cuts in his first proposal to Congress, thinking that this would lead to widespread Republican support and easy passage of the bill. This was naïve at best, possibly political malpractice if repeated in the future. One of the big lessons out of this is that outside of a few Republican Senators, the Republican party is not a moderate party. The last two election cycles have defeated most Republican moderates in swing districts and turned the once great party of Abraham Lincoln into nothing but a regional party controlled by the Deep South. There is no incentive for most of these members, outside of people like Arlen Specter who are up for reelection in blue states, to be for a stimulus package. If the stimulus is a success, it doesn’t matter how they voted because the Democrats will get the credit. If the stimulus package fails, there will be a real opportunity for Republicans who voted against it to claim they were in the right. Therefore, a simple logic tree would have shown Obama and his political team that there was no incentive for the Republicans to compromise on this bill.

Hopefully, Obama’s political team will learn from this mistake in the same way that Kennedy’s team learned from the Bay of Pigs disaster. From now on they must give nothing without getting something in return. Bipartisanship only works if someone is willing to meet you in the middle.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the far right needs to be ignored, the far left needs to chill out, and the Obama administration needs to methodologically look at and learn from their early mistakes. If the Obama administration is to be successful, odds are that these early mistakes will be looked back at not as blunders, but rather as invaluable learning opportunities for a young presidency.