{"id":13000,"date":"2013-11-23T10:04:10","date_gmt":"2013-11-23T15:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=13000"},"modified":"2013-11-23T10:26:06","modified_gmt":"2013-11-23T15:26:06","slug":"obamacare-and-common-core-when-technocrats-stumble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/11\/23\/obamacare-and-common-core-when-technocrats-stumble\/","title":{"rendered":"Obamacare and Common Core: when technocrats stumble"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Screen<\/a>

Screen shot of Healthcare.gov<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve watched with real interest the last couple of months as the launch of the Affordable Care Act nationally and Common Core education standards here in New York careened through potholes and slammed into fire hydrants.<\/p>\n

Schroon Lake school board president John Armstrong got it about right last week<\/a> — and sparked rueful laughter — when he noted that “it appears now that the Common Core roll-out and healthcare roll-out have similar looks and feels.”<\/p>\n

The painful muddle culminated in what amounted to “apology and we’ll get it right next time” tours by President Barack Obama and New York Education Commissioner John King.<\/p>\n

Both men have acknowledged systemic shortcomings and missteps and they’ve asked for our patience.<\/p>\n

There’s a painful irony here.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama, a guy who lectured Republicans for driving the national car into the ditch at the beginning of his presidency, finds himself in the position of admitting that he himself has, at the very least, dinged the country’s fender.<\/p>\n

John King, meanwhile, promised to continue revamping Common Core based on feedback from school districts and teachers, and he urged local leaders to use the flexibility built into the system to tailor new standards to their own community needs.<\/p>\n

What do these two high-profile blunders say about the current state of American politics and policy-making?\u00a0 Let’s dive in.<\/p>\n

It’s Hard To Be A Technocrat<\/strong><\/p>\n

For all the hype from the right about Barack Obama’s secret ideologies (Muslim, socialist, 60s radical, closeted gay, hater of white people, and so on) the guy appears to be, at heart, a tinkerer and not a revolutionary.<\/p>\n

He believes in government’s power to help people’s lives and he wants to make it work well.<\/p>\n

Which means creating things like a new insurance system that, in theory, will help more people gain access to health care without entirely tossing out the old, much-hated and dysfunctional system.<\/p>\n

Same, too, goes for a new nationally-calibrated education system.<\/p>\n

Critics have suggested that Common Core is everything from a secret effort to indoctrinate young people into the New World Order to a not-so-secret effort to produce mindless wage-slaves ready to enrich corporate America.<\/p>\n

But really, a modern, integrated country like ours is long overdue for a baseline (and a fairly high baseline) of shared knowledge and skills. \"<\/a><\/p>\n

For all its increasingly obvious flaws, Common Core represents another baby step toward trying to realize this modest and hardly radical goal.<\/p>\n

But in order to sell this kind of policy agenda, you have to get stuff right.\u00a0 Technocrats can’t rely on ideology or political rhetoric or bluster.<\/p>\n

Instead, they have to bring the best and brightest into the room and they have to come up with whiz-bang ideas, and they have to execute them well.<\/p>\n

If you’re an egghead, you have to show your math, and then you have to show results.<\/p>\n

By contrast, George W. Bush could muck up the Katrina response and bumble us into a quagmire in Iraq and it didn’t shake the foundation of his core ideas, or his political identity — which, I think it’s fair to say, weren’t founded on the idea of competence.<\/p>\n

But when technocrats fumble it’s not just a political crisis.\u00a0 It’s a shock to the core of their raison d’etre<\/em>, an erosion of the foundation of their brand.<\/p>\n

Mr. Obama, in particular, is living this erosion of trust right now. People voted for No Drama Obama.\u00a0 They didn’t vote for No Results Obama.<\/p>\n

Mr. King, too, appears to be on thin ice.\u00a0 There’s evidence that Governor Andrew Cuomo, once a passionate supporter of education reform, is backing away from Common Core<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Governing In The Age of No<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second take-away from the Affordable Care Act and Common Core debacles is that governing against the headwind of a deeply angry, distrustful populist culture is going to be brutal.<\/p>\n

It’s not just the tea party.\u00a0 You also have liberals and progressives on the left who view an initiative like Common Core as a cynical effort to transform cool, creative teachers and beautiful, natural children into mass-produced cogs in an industrial machine.<\/p>\n

There is always a pool of rage somewhere just ready to be tapped.\u00a0 And in the new age of ideological journalism and blogs and 24\/7 televised bitterness, there’s always someone ready to turn that tap into a fire-hose.<\/p>\n

A generation ago, you could get away with introducing muddled if well-intentioned social programs and expect to get the details right later.\u00a0 But in modern America, the knives are out and they’re always sharpened.<\/p>\n

We’ve known for years that Obamacare needed tweaking, refining, adjustments.\u00a0 But because the Republican Party demanded a full-scale dismantling, rather than reform, that proved impossible.<\/p>\n

In like fashion, it’s unclear whether more progressive New Yorkers will be patient with Common Core, accepting the kind of steady, small corrections that Commissioner King is promising.<\/p>\n

I’m not shifting the blame here.\u00a0 Team Obama and Team King have known for years that the roll-out of their signature accomplishments would have to be managed in the face of a full-court political press.<\/p>\n

That should have motivated them to work harder and do better.\u00a0 Instead, they’ve made unforced error after unforced error.<\/p>\n

The fact that Mr. King’s own children are in private school?\u00a0 The fact that his program’s teaching materials are flawed to the point of being laughable?\u00a0\u00a0 The fact that the White House couldn’t even make a website function?<\/p>\n

These freshman bungles have done real harm, not only to the mission of these programs — helping Americans be healthier and better educated — but to our sense of the value and capacity of government itself.<\/p>\n

Take a deep breath.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. John King in Schroon Lake (Photo: Ian lowe)<\/p><\/div>\n

My final conclusion watching this latest round of turmoil is that we Americans — the citizens, the voters, the “we the people” part of government — are a growing part of the problem.<\/p>\n

I know this is an unpopular idea.<\/p>\n

Anger and distrust toward government are supposed to be viewed by the media as an eternally valid and validating force.<\/p>\n

If people are shaking their fists, they must have a sound argument.<\/p>\n

I’m not so sure.\u00a0 It’s perfectly fine to be wary of government and to demand that technocrats get stuff right.\u00a0 (See everything I’ve written above.)<\/p>\n

But the level of impatience and the degree of vitriol strike me as arguably unwarranted and at times deeply problematic.<\/p>\n

The fact that Mr. Obama and Mr. King appear to have mucked this up is worthy of a political response, and possibly a shift in direction.<\/p>\n

But I would argue that it’s not worthy of hatred or scorn.<\/p>\n

Again, I’ve yet to see a credible argument that either leader is trying to accomplish anything other than what they promised:\u00a0 improving healthcare and education.<\/p>\n

That they’re doing so clumsily matters profoundly, but it’s not a war crime or an indication of anti-Americanness or evidence that either man is trying to Wal-Martize America.<\/p>\n

It’s also important that the people criticizing the Affordable Care Act and Common Core acknowledge the difficulties of the tasks at hand — and be required by the rest of us to come up with coherent plans and ideas of their own.<\/p>\n

As a journalist in America’s age of rage, I’ve grown skeptical of people who offer themselves up as critics and naysayers and obstructionists, without offering credible and thoughtful alternatives.<\/p>\n

The truth is that protests are easy.\u00a0 It’s harder and a lot less fun to do the slow, steady, and politically risky work of solving America’s problems.<\/p>\n

So yes, Mr. Obama and Mr. King have tried our collective patience — sorely, I would say — with their poor execution and sloppy detail-work.<\/p>\n

But perhaps this is a moment for sharpened pencils and hard work and perhaps even a cautious amount of patience, rather than pitchforks and effigies?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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