A Good Boss and a Good Team

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[For a bit of (unrelated) hope in this dismal time, read this. For impressions of last night’s Democratic debate, click here].

Nothing lately has depressed me, as a Democrat and an American, so much as the one-two punch of Trump’s State-of-the-Union speech and his acquittal by the Senate. Now I can envision our own American version of Josef Stalin ruling us for another four dismal years. I can see us losing our Republic.

Maybe some day we’ll get it back. But if Trump wins again, I don’t think I’ll see that in my lifetime. Much as I want to, I can’t visualize any of the now-leading Democrats stopping Trump. With the slap of that one-two punch upside my head, I’ve just now come to see what’s missing.

Our president is the “big boss,” who must fill the world’s hardest executive job. Being a legislator, even a Senator, is not the same thing. Legislators think, analyze, argue, negotiate and vote. Bosses decide. Then they convince, goad or coerce others to follow. Our highest boss also runs a huge bureaucracy, one of the biggest in the world.

Legislating and executing are different work. They’re different in accountability as well as qualifications and day-to-day performance.

Trump’s acquittal illustrates the difference. I’ll go to my grave believing that maybe ten to twenty Republicans would have convicted and removed Trump if doing so had been entirely up to them individually. Mitt Romney was not the only one who despised Trump and wanted to see him gone.

But it wasn’t an executive decision; it was a group decision. Trump and McConnell, as leaders, were the ones who really decided. Then they convinced the other GOP Senators what would happen.

No one but Romney dared stick his neck out. All but one Republican voted to acquit, so no single Republican Senator would have to take the hit alone (although obviously those in purple states had more to lose than others). No single senator could affect the outcome, so all but one hid in the crowd, profiles in cowardice.

In a deeply divided legislature, that sort of thing is all too common. Something can get done only by virtue of rare bipartisan cooperation, or with a dominant legislative majority in which a few bosses (like Mitch) call the shots. Today’s Senate is no school for executives; it’s a school for chameleons, posturers, rationalizers, and excuse-makers. Susan Collins (R., Me.) is Exhibit A.

Unfortunately, the three Dems whose policies I like most are all Senators: Warren, Klobuchar, and Sanders. Klobuchar and Sanders have some executive experience at the local level, but that’s all. Their executive heft, such as it is, rests on their plans and programs and their experience, if any, at the city or county level: Warren, none; Klobuchar, eight years as Hennepin County Attorney; Sanders, ten years as mayor of Burlington, Vermont.

In contrast, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all had governed states, and Bush Senior had run the CIA and served as Vice President. One reason that Trump won last time is his lifetime of running a small family company, as compared to Hillary Clinton’s following Obama’s leadership at State. Many voters thought he would make a good executive.

Pete Buttigieg’s narrow win in Iowa (if recanvassing confirms it) likely derives from more than just his superb articulation, his self-evident decency and his razor-sharp mind, exceeded (if at all) only by Warren’s. He served as mayor of South Bend, Indiana for eight years, had tactical military experience as a naval intelligence officer (seven years, including seven months in combat); and served 2.5 years with a leading business-consulting firm advising executives how to save their businesses.

Joe Biden, of course, has the highest-level of political experience of any Democratic candidate, including executive experience of two years on a country council and eight years as Vice-President. But he would be 78 at inauguration, our oldest president ever. More important, he fails to excite Dems craving a true progressive agenda after eight years of scorched-earth resistance to Obama’s mild progressivism and three years of Trump’s full-speed retrogression. And if anything tells voters that leading Dems now are a bunch of amateurs, it’s got to be the Iowa caucus debacle.

So what have the Dems got to match Trump’s claim of vast executive experience, his stealing credit for the Obama Recovery (and everything else but the Sun shining), and his juggernaut of demagoguery? Potentially, they have one thing that Trump can never match, because he’s not a team player. They could have a team.

The Democratic Party is filled with outstanding public servants with potential to rise ever higher and serve the public better. Imagine, for example, how quickly our nation could recover from the ogre with a Cabinet like this:

Possible Democratic Cabinet, 2021
Vice President	Elizabeth Warren or Stacey Abrams
Attorney General	Eric Holder, again
Secretary of Commerce	Tom Steyer
Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers	Paul Krugman or Joe Stiglitz
Secretary of Defense	Pete Buttigieg
Head of EPA	John Hickenlooper
Presidential Adviser on the Future (a new post)	Andrew Yang
Secretary of HHS	Amy Klobuchar
Secretary of HUD	Stacey Abrams, if not VP
Secretary of Labor	Bernie Sanders
Secretary of State	Joe Biden
Secretary of the Treasury	Elizabeth Warren, if not VP

Just to dream this dream suggests how powerful a Democratic administration could be if the Dems worked together like Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Team of Rivals.” All that’s missing is the top name: the supreme leader’s.

Enter Michael Bloomberg.

I know, I know. He would be 79 on inauguration, older than anyone but Sanders. Yet the whole idea is that he would be the grey eminence: he would make the decisions based on options presented by all the mostly younger people listed in the table above. He would harness all the decency and power of the entire Democratic field, while Trump, being Trump, would govern alone. No one who’s watched Trump so far can conclude that he listens seriously or regularly to anyone else, let alone consults experts often on his own initiative.

Bloomberg has the most impressive executive experience of any Democratic candidate running, even Joe Biden. He served as mayor of the nation’s leading city for eleven years, and twenty-sx (nonconsecutive) years as CEO of Bloomberg L.P., a finance, software and global media company he created. After the New York Times appeared declining and Murdoch bought and corrupted the Wall Street Journal, and before Jeff Bezos bought and rescued the Washington Post, Bloomberg’s own on-line news service filled the gap in national coverage with, incisive, objective and mostly quantitative reporting.

Unlike Trump, Bloomberg is used to running very big organizations that succeed without extortion, fraud, lawsuits, bankruptcies and lies. He would cut Trump down to size on Trump’s own scale and reveal him as the small, crude and clueless man that he is. Bloomberg could crush Trump with attack ads without even denting his own enormous fortune, which, unlike Trump, he got through his own success, not inheritance.

As for progressiveness, don’t worry about that. Read his own published summary of his program. It fits in the space for an ordinary op-ed, but it tells you how he would govern. He would address most of the goals of Warren and Sanders, but without making waves or roiling the oligarchs (other than with bigger taxes, including estate taxes).

The guy doesn’t just talk like a can-do leader. He actually did it. And he can fund his entire campaign with his own money, making him immune from corruption or even influence by other oligarchs.

The only thing at all precarious about Bloomberg is his age. As long as he’s healthy now, he can last long enough to give his Vice some of his wisdom and executive savvy, turning a progressive savant like Elizabeth Warren or Stacey Abrams into an experienced national-level executive leader. (Both Warren and Abrams are quick studies, and Abrams already has substantial executive experience.)

If Bloomberg felt his grip slipping, he could resign, like the last Pope, after making sure he had adequately prepared his replacement. In that way his age could become an advantage, building a bridge to a new gender and/or generation of leadership.

But in order win the election, Bloomberg has to promise to create such a team. That’s the only way it works. No Democratic voter wants to replace one-man rule by an alleged billionaire with one-man rule by another, even if real. The same, of course, is true for any of the other leading Democrats who seek the presidency, as their high-level executive experience is so thin, especially as compared to Bloomberg’s.

Impressions of the Democrats’ New Hampshire Debate

I was able to watch only the last third of last night’s debate live. For the rest, I relied on highlights from CNN and live blogging from fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver’s media site. (Nate Silver is the reporter who literally wrote the book on the proper use of mathematics, statistics and probability in politics.) So I’m not going to comment on the horse race, but just give a few general impressions:

1. Practice makes perfect. Every one of the seven candidates on the stage vastly improved her or his debating style and approach last night. As a result, I would prefer every one to the monster in the White House now, including Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer (in that order). But all this healthy practice may be futile for the general election. Trump might well refuse to debate at all and rely instead on his financial support, media muscle, Fox propaganda, Tweets and in-person rallies. When you base both your campaigning and your governing on lies, why submit to a venue where you can be called out in real time? The Democrats should be prepared for a no-debate general-election campaign, just as we had a no-witness, no-documents impeachment “trial.”

2. Billionaires. Sanders’ and (to a lesser extent) Warren’s bashing of billionaires is getting old and stale. There are probably too many billionaires, but reducing their number, by any stretch of fair taxation—of income, wealth or estates—will take time. In the meantime, there are good and bad billionaires. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett each have pledged $30 billion to worldwide charities, supplementing US and UN funds to improve human life worldwide. Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer are devoting their billions to dis-electing the worst president in our history, and both are having an impact. Bloomberg, in particular, has pledged to support any Democratic nominee and to use his own money to bash Trump in the general election. Steyer used his presence in last night’s debate not to tout himself (probably a lost cause) but to redirect the conversation to crucial issues like race. The billionaires who need bashing are people like Sheldon Adelson and the surviving Koch brother, who use their billions to promote their personal interests, and those of their billionaire class, without regard to the public welfare or the nation’s or humanity’s future. There are good and bad billionaires, just as there are good and bad people of every race, ethnicity, religion and national or sexual minority. Bashing all indiscriminately will only alienate voters.

3. Campaign purity. I think it’s wonderful that Warren and Sanders don’t accept any money from PACs and rely on millions of individual contributions. But I don’t fault other candidates for taking contributions from rich people, or Bloomberg or Steyer for using their own billions to finance their campaigns and aid the Democrats’ cause. Unilateral disarmament doesn’t work any better in domestic politics than in geopolitics. We should all strive to overturn Citizens United, even by stacking the Supreme Court, if necessary. But in the meantime let’s all live in the real world.

4. Teamwork. I remain convinced that, to beat Trump, the Democrats must unite and provide a team, not a single candidate. Going after the presumed frontrunners (now Sanders and Buttigieg) is traditional and expected, but it’s counterproductive. Every Democrat paying attention now knows that Sanders’ and Warren’s “Medicare for All” would wipe out private insurance, that Bernie’s flirtation with “Democratic socialism” attracts some youth but Trump would demagogue it to death in the general election, and that Biden supported easy incarceration decades ago, as Bernie did gun rights and Bloomberg “stop and frisk.” Enough already. Now it’s time for Dems to turn their attention to Trump in unison, and for primary voters to judge how well each bashes him. Especially if Trump ducks debates, the time to start softening him up among the general electorate is now.

5. Gender and empathy. I remain convinced that Warren’s and Klobuchar’s gender will be an advantage, not a liability, in the general election. Females are an absolute majority of voters and an even bigger majority of likely voters. When women enter the privacy of the voting booth, I think Trump’s misogyny and cruelty will be important factors in their voting, and in some men’s as well. Democratic candidates can and should call them out often, and they should be the subject of massive attack ads. But there’s another way for Warren and Klobuchar to campaign against Trump: showing the stark contrast between an empathetic female and the human monster that he is. Warren did that well in the last debate, and Klobuchar did it superbly last night. Whether either wins or loses, the memory (and video clips) of that contrast will enhance Democrats’ prospects this fall, especially if the primary winner promises a team that includes Warren and/or Klobuchar.

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