The governor is hungry.

Brown paper bag in hand, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley strides into a conference room on the fourth floor of an old government building in downtown Annapolis. “I brought lunch,” he whispers to no one in particular and, stooping slightly in the way that people do when they enter a meeting late, takes a seat. For a moment, he is quiet.

He’d spent the morning in discussion with various members of the state legislature, which is in session just a few steps away at the statehouse on the hill. Up there, laws are being shaped and votes cast, mostly in the governor’s favor, but it’s down here, in this windowless room, packed with staff from three of Maryland’s state agencies and his own executive team, that O’Malley’s political impact is deepest. In 2000, as a young mayor of Baltimore, he pioneered this type of meeting—biweekly, multi-agency, data-driven performance reviews—and thirteen years later they’re still the cornerstone of his legacy as a politician.

“So that’s the carrot at the end of the stick that you hope the community colleges are going to close in after?” O’Malley asks, breaking his short silence. He leans forward in his chair, his elbows on the table and the contents of his lunch—a dry deli sandwich, a bag of potato chips—lined up in front of him like a control panel.

“That’s right, sir,” a man in the back of the room says. They’re referring to an incentive to get students to use Maryland’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation’s online Workforce Dashboard. It was designed to help colleges, businesses, and job seekers get a snapshot of employment opportunities in the state, but also to allow the state to gather better data on who’s looking for jobs, where, and with what skills, to improve both monitoring and outreach efforts. As of now, not enough people are using the Dashboard to make it a valuable tool.

“I know everyone’s got budget constraints, but why don’t we all talk about how to market this more?” the governor asks, and as is typical in these meetings, the attention turns to an array of charts, maps, and digital reams of Excel spreadsheets, each illustrating the nuts and bolts of the program, the population it’s serving, and the various outputs and inputs and outcomes over the past few months. The idea is to use data like a scalpel to dissect how a government program works, to pinpoint where, exactly, it’s breaking down, and then to use these collaborative meetings to solve the problem at hand.

“We gotta get those numbers up,” O’Malley says, gesturing to one graph in particular and taking a bite of the sandwich. In addition to the Department of Labor, the Departments of Business and Economic Development (DBEV) and Veterans Affairs are also present. “What about DBEV? Can you guys help with this?” he asks, still chewing.

And with that, the governor launches a spirited question-and-answer session—he compares it to a cross-examination—that lasts for the better part of forty-five minutes, his voice sometimes muffled by mouthfuls of bread. As the meeting unspools, the topics shift, from the jobs Web site to foreclosure rates to reducing recidivism among recently released convicts.

Nearly an hour later, the governor stops for some air. He attends meetings like this only about once every couple months, usually delegating the day-to-day management to his executive staff, but it’s clear he enjoys the role. He leans back in his chair and wipes the smudges of his lunch off his iPad with his green-striped tie. “Sorry, Sam,” he says, chuckling and turning to one of his staffers, who usually heads up these meetings. “The witness is yours!”

O’Malley is not the kind of person who’s afraid to take over a meeting. “I’m an operations guy,” he tells me afterward, partly by way of explanation. “I’ve always liked digging into the numbers, figuring out what’s going on and doing the kind of analysis that the other guys won’t do.” In the hallway after the meeting, two staffers corroborate the point. He seems so much more relaxed in meetings like that, they say, when he’s not “doing all the politician stuff.”

In truth, O’Malley, who is fifty and handsome in a Kennedy sort of way, has made a career out of all the politician stuff, chomping his way up the political food chain like a man hungry for more than a deli sandwich. After serving as a Baltimore city councilman in the 1990s, he was elected mayor of Baltimore in 1999 and then governor of Maryland seven years later, where he’ll remain until 2015. Because of term limits, he can’t run again. Every pundit in America has predicted he’s going to run for president in 2016, and O’Malley has done everything he can to encourage that speculation, short of outright admitting it’s true.

As governor, he’s pushed a series of bills that are all but guaranteed to impress Democratic primary and caucus voters three years from now, on topics ranging from guns (against), gay marriage (for), the death penalty (against), medical marijuana (for), and implementing Dream Act-like policies at Maryland’s colleges and universities. Just as Bill Clinton did in the 1980s, when he too was a relative unknown, O’Malley has also sought positions in recent years that have allowed him to sidle into the national limelight. In both 2011 and 2012, he served as chair of the Democratic Governors Association, and he’s since stayed on as the finance chairman, which will allow him to continue to meet top donors. During the election last year, he was a regular fixture on the talk show circuit, often playing the role of President Barack Obama’s personal attack dog. In one interview with ABC’s This Week last summer, O’Malley managed to mention former Governor Mitt Romney’s “Swiss bank accounts” and “offshore” tax havens seventeen times in three minutes flat.

With that iron message discipline, plus his standing as one of the Democrats’ most successful governors (with thirty statehouses in GOP hands, the Dems’ roster is slim), O’Malley won a coveted primetime speaking slot for the second time (he spoke in 2004, too) at the Democratic National Convention last September. He whiffed it—again, just as Clinton did in 1988—but spent the remaining time juggling a packed schedule of schmooze, addressing swing state delegates by day and jamming with his Irish rock band, O’Malley’s March, by night. In recent years, the governor has also made public forays into Iowa and New Hampshire and launched a political action committee, the O’Say Can You See PAC, to raise money that he will be at liberty to distribute, one of his critics groused, “like favor-doing fairy dust,” to fellow Democrats before the midterm races in 2014.

Within Maryland, O’Malley’s reputation is middling and wrapped up in his rocket-propelled trajectory. He is known to be effective, but also brash and impatient. (He has a habit of feuding publicly with officials who he doesn’t believe are doing their jobs with enough zeal.) At this point, only 17 percent of Marylanders would “definitely vote” for him if he ran for president, according to a recent Washington Post poll, a dismal showing that his critics chalk up to what is often described as his ravenous ambition—a characteristic that has tended to rub people the wrong way.

Outside of Maryland, O’Malley’s reputation is limited for the most part to “Isn’t that the guy from The Wire?” The creator of that famous, and famously cynical, HBO series about crime and politics in Baltimore, David Simon, has said that O’Malley is just one of several inspirations for his fictional, stats-driven mayor, Tommy Carcetti, but it’s an association that has dogged the governor for more than a decade, much to his chagrin.

But for the vast majority of Americans, O’Malley simply has no reputation at all. Last fall, after giving a speech at Senator Tom Harkin’s Iowa steak fry fund-raiser, a local woman told the Washington Post that she thought the speech was fine, but she couldn’t remember who was doing the talking. “Deval Patrick?” she says, mistaking him for the governor of Massachusetts, who is black. “Oh damn … Mike McNally? An Irish name?”

The truth is, what makes O’Malley stand out is not his experience, his gravitas, nor his familiarity to voters (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden crush him in those regards). Nor is it exactly his policies or speeches (New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, both rumored presidential aspirants, have cultivated similar CVs). Nor is it that he plays in a band. Nor is it even the Atlantic’s breathless claim last year that he has “the best abs” in politics. (Beneath a photo of the fit governor participating in the Maryland Special Olympics’ annual Polar Bear Plunge, the author gushed, “What are they putting in the water in Maryland?”) Instead, what makes O’Malley unique as a politician is precisely the skill that was on display in that windowless conference room in downtown Annapolis: he is arguably the best manager working in government today.

That may not seem like a very flashy title—at first blush, “Best Manager” sounds more like a booby prize than a claim a politician might ride to the White House. But in an era where the very idea of government is under assault, a politician’s capacity to deliver on his or her promises, to actually make the bureaucracy work, is an underappreciated skill.

Of course, it was a conservative president who most recently demonstrated his woeful lack of such expertise (see George W. Bush, administration of), but it is the liberal and progressive bloc that stakes its identity on a belief in government, and therefore has a higher stake in getting government management right.

In 2012 Barack Obama cobbled together a motley majority, unified by a shared belief that the federal government can and should play a larger role in solving the country’s common problems. The best way to ensure that voting bloc’s enthusiasm for the Democrats lasts—and the best hope to reduce some of the antigovernment anger on the other side—is for government to deliver results. That means not only passing big legislation, but also making sure that the programs that result, and the rest of the government’s far-flung endeavors, actually work. It means eliminating waste. It means funneling increasingly scarce resources where they can make the most difference. It means making sure that health care access grows while costs stay reasonable; that when hurricanes hit, disaster relief arrives quickly; that big banks don’t implode; that oil rigs don’t explode; that the murder rate goes down and that student test scores go up. What we need in the next president, in other words, is not just creative policy-making and politicking, but a willingness to drive the bureaucracy to perform. He or she must have a passion for managing the government itself.

It’s a tough order to fill. Considering the growing complexity and size of both the federal government and the challenges it has been asked to address, many would characterize it as Sisyphean. But fortunately, over the last couple of decades, through trial and error, new systems of goal setting, data gathering, and accountability have been developed in the public sector that attempt to give elected officials some of the same tools corporate leaders use to demand bottom-line results from their organizations. These new accountability systems are hardly panaceas; in fact, they have disappointed more often than they have succeeded. But it just so happens that the politician who is most broadly recognized to have made them work the best is none other than Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley.

O’Malley comes by his faith in politics and government honestly. His parents, Barbara and Thomas O’Malley, raised their six children in the shadow of two formidable ideologies: the Catholic Church and the gospel of the Democratic Party.

Both archetypal members of the Greatest Generation, Barbara and Thomas met in the early ’50s at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in D.C. Barbara, the product of sturdy, German Democrats from Fort Wayne, Indiana, joined the Civil Air Patrol and got her pilot’s license at sixteen, then volunteered for a local congressman’s campaign. When he won, she followed him to D.C.—a natural fit for a young woman who’d grown up collecting campaign buttons at Democratic rallies. Thomas, to whom O’Malley owes his Irish complexion, joined the Army Air Corps during World War II, flew thirty-three missions over Japan in a bombardier, and returned home in time for the GI Bill to put him through college and Georgetown Law. He later became an assistant U.S. attorney at the Justice Department. He passed away in 2006.

Both Barbara and Thomas were driven by a deep belief in the power of government to do good. On the walls of the O’Malley family home in Rockville, Maryland, there were photos of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., and dinner table discussions were often about upcoming local and national campaigns. On Martin O’Malley’s second birthday, in 1965, his parents got him a cake that read “Martin for President 2004.” It was a joke, of course, but the message was genuine. “There was always a belief that politics is an honorable profession,” O’Malley said of his childhood.

O’Malley’s devoutly Catholic upbringing, as well as his educations at the Jesuit-run Gonzaga College High School and Catholic University, was also infused with an overarching sense of public, and particularly political, service. It’s impossible, after all, to walk to or from Gonzaga, where O’Malley was in the student council, without being physically aware of the great force of American government. Just step outside, and there it is, the Capitol Dome, looming like a movie set. If O’Malley were to become president of the United States one day, he’d be the first in history to have been born and raised in the D.C. area, with the exception of George Washington himself.

Student council aside, O’Malley’s first foray into politics was as an undergraduate, when he took a semester off from school to work for Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. He eventually worked his way up the organization, leading the effort in five states. “I felt like I’d gotten ten years older, but when I came back, I was still in college,” he says of the experience. A couple years later, as a law student at the University of Maryland, O’Malley threw himself into another race: then Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski’s 1986 bid for the U.S. Senate. It was over the course of that campaign that O’Malley met the woman who would later be his wife. Catherine (Katie) Curran, a fellow law student, was working on her father J. Joseph Curran Jr.’s successful bid for state attorney general. O’Malley and Curran were married in 1990 and now have two daughters, Grace and Tara, and two sons, Jack and William. For the last twelve years, Curran O’Malley has served as an associate judge on the District Court of Maryland.

After Mikulski joined the Senate in 1987, O’Malley went to work in her office as a legislative fellow, then finished up law school and passed the bar. Around the same time, Barbara O’Malley, who had spent the past thirty-three years at home raising kids, landed a job in Mikulski’s office too. Twenty-six years later, she’s still at it, answering phones for the senator.

O’Malley himself didn’t linger long in Mikulski’s office, however. After a stint with the state attorney for the city of Baltimore, O’Malley again threw himself into a race—this time, as the candidate. In 1990, he challenged incumbent Maryland State Senator John A. Pica for his seat, launching a dogged grassroots campaign and losing by a crushingly slim margin: just forty-four votes. A year later, at twenty-eight years old, he won a seat on the Baltimore City Council, a post he would hold for the next nine years.

It’s not for nothing that O’Malley’s political coming of age happened during one of the bloodier periods in Baltimore history. For most of the ’90s, “Bodymore, Murdaland” had a murder rate nine times the national average, clocking in at roughly one body every thirty-six hours for a decade straight. Baltimore was, perhaps unsurprisingly, also hemorrhaging its population at the same time, losing nearly 85,000 residents to the suburbs and neighboring states in the ’90s alone.

It was during this period that O’Malley, like a lot of elected officials and policy wonks around the country, desperate for a solution for the inner-city war zones, became fascinated with new crime-fighting techniques. At the top of the list was the New York Police Department’s innovative new experiment, CompStat. Led by NYPD Chief William Bratton and his deputy, Jack Maple, the idea was twofold. First, you’d collect data on all the crime that was happening in the city, map it, and then deploy police officers directly to those trouble spots. (In Maple’s shorthand, you’d “put cops on the dots.”) Second, and more fundamentally, you’d hold precinct commanders accountable by making them report the weekly crime data from their precincts, and then attend regular group meetings, where they’d be cross-examined on them: Why are these numbers going up? What can you do about it? Between 1993 and 1998, New York’s homicide rate dropped by 67 percent.

In the mid-’90s, O’Malley and a small team of city officials traveled up to New York with notepads and cameras to observe a CompStat meeting, and by the time O’Malley returned home, he was “a true believer,” to borrow his own words. He spent the last few years of his time on the city council trying to get then Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier to implement the program in Baltimore, too. (When Frazier resisted the young councilman’s entreaties, O’Malley accused him of shirking his duties, sparking a public feud that lasted for years.) O’Malley’s total belief in the CompStat model would define his political career.

In 1999, O’Malley stood at an intersection in Northwest Baltimore, a known drug-selling corner, and announced his intention to run for Baltimore city mayor. His platform? A single, resounding, and highly unlikely promise: to reduce the city’s crime rate by 50 percent. In a city riven by racial politics, the cards were stacked against the young, white councilman, but in August, in the nick of time, he got lucky. Former State General Assembly Delegate Howard P. Rawlings, who is black, endorsed him, and in September, O’Malley walked away with the Democratic primary—the equivalent, in Baltimore, of victory. (Twelve years later, O’Malley would return the favor, endorsing Rawlings’s daughter, the current mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.) O’Malley took the general election in a landslide.

Two days after election night, months before he’d even taken the oath of office, O’Malley recruited Jack Maple, the guru of CompStat, and his business partner, John Linder. Their task? Bring CompStat to Baltimore, stat. Almost immediately, the duo launched a comprehensive review of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), and in early 2000 they delivered eighty-seven suggestions of reform to both O’Malley and his brand-new police commissioner, Ronald L. Daniel. That’s when the trouble began.

In March, Daniel rejected half of Maple and Linder’s suggestions out of hand and, after a series of closed-door meetings, unexpectedly quit. The city was rocked. Daniel, who was a well-respected, longtime member of the BPD, and black, had seemed like a good bet, and here he was leaving after just
fifty-seven days on the job. What was this new mayor up to? To make matters worse, O’Malley replaced Daniel with a former NYPD official and old CompStat hand, Edward T. Norris, who is white. In the mostly black city, hackles went up. CompStat’s model of “zero tolerance” policing had by that point already been associated with civil rights abuses and higher police brutality rates. (During the election, one of O’Malley’s opponents had circulated postcards with an image of the Rodney King beating and the words “Are you ready for zero tolerance?” On the back was a photo of O’Malley.) Meanwhile, Maple and Linder—“O’Malley’s New York consultants,” as they were invariably described by the media—and their $2,000-a-day consulting fee, were staying on.

The Baltimore Sun, betting against the young mayor, launched a new feature. Every day, it would run a chalk outline of a dead person, the kind you see at a crime scene, next to two figures: the number of homicides that had occurred the previous year on this date and the number of homicides that had occurred so far this year. It seemed to be intended to throw down the gauntlet: So you say you’ll reduce crime by 50 percent? We’d like to see you try.

In March, O’Malley, having played all his cards with an ambitious campaign promise and a rocky start, redoubled his effort. He and Norris—a fast-talking, leather jacket-wearing, motorcycle-driving, ’70s-era police movie kind of guy—began to meet nearly every day and often several times a day. Officials who were around at the time remember their relationship as a marriage. “They saw more of each other than anyone else,” one former staffer told me. Norris, who had been in charge of coordinating the NYPD’s CompStat meetings, began to implement an almost identical program at the BPD, while O’Malley cleared the path politically, throwing the weight of his office behind the new program. They brought in computers to map where crime was happening; retrained precinct commanders to deploy the 3,100-member force accordingly; began collecting and analyzing crime data for the whole city on a biweekly basis; and held regular meetings where all the leaders in the police force would gather and discuss the trends.

Meanwhile, O’Malley helped to create a special task force of seventy-five police officers to eliminate a backlog of unserved arrest warrants—a job that had, under the previous administration, fallen to just four overwhelmed souls. The move was intended to zero in on what Norris called “a small core of criminals,” and in 2000 alone it helped police officers arrest, interrogate, and charge more than 250 suspects who had already been implicated in recent homicides and nonfatal shootings. Partly as a result, the rate of solved cases began to climb. In 1999, the police had solved 54 percent of homicides; by the end of 2000, they had solved 80 percent.

O’Malley and Norris’s efforts were also buttressed by an infusion of new recruits, courtesy of then President Bill Clinton’s COPS Program, which was launched in 1994 to help support local community policing efforts. Over the course of nearly a decade, Baltimore was awarded a total of $58 million and was able to hire nearly 900 police officers.

Despite incremental progress, it was slow going at first, and in the spring and early summer, the crime rate even appeared to be climbing. But by the fall, at last, it began to tick downward. By the following January—one year into O’Malley’s first term—the number of homicides per year had dropped below 300 for the first time in a decade. In 1999, there were 305 murders; by 2000, there were 262. Two years later, there were 253. While the homicide rate from there on out climbed slightly and then remained stubbornly high throughout the rest of O’Malley’s term as mayor, the broad downward trend in crime as a whole continued. By 2005, robberies and aggravated assaults were down by a third, and the overall crime rate in Baltimore had dropped by at least 24 percent.

Even before CompStat had gotten off the ground, back in early 2000, O’Malley was eager to expand the concept to other realms. The idea of closely monitoring data and tracking weekly and biweekly progress toward explicit goals appealed to him. It was a way to break down daunting problems into bite-sized pieces, to move, incrementally, in the right direction. It must have felt, in some ways, like a game. In June 2000, just six months after becoming mayor, O’Malley and his team launched a new city-wide program.

CitiStat, as it was called, would be just like CompStat, O’Malley announced, but instead of applying only to the police force, it would apply to every agency in the city. Just as the police commanders had been asked to gather data, set measurable goals, and convene at biweekly performance reviews, so would the agency heads. If CompStat was built on Maple’s premise that the police force should “put cops on the dots,” CitiStat was built on a similar, if less catchy idea—that agencies should deploy their limited resources to the areas that would pack the most punch.

Among those who work in the small world of government performance—a field that, for a variety of reasons, tends to move at glacial speed—CitiStat was seen as a potential game changer. While the CompStat model had been making waves in the criminal justice circuit since the early ’90s and a handful of non-police organizations, like New York City’s Parks Department, had begun to apply the concept on an agency-wide scale, no one had ever tried it with an entire city. If this worked, they thought, it could really change the way we do things, says Robert Behn, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who studies government performance. “All eyes were on Baltimore,” he says.

When CitiStat launched in June 2000, Baltimore City Hall was a mess. If a citizen requested a basic service, like having a downed tree removed or a pothole filled, it would often take multiple calls to reach an operator and then days, or sometimes weeks, to see a response. City officials often showed up late, or drunk, or not at all, and in many instances they seemed to lack the basic information necessary to do their job. One day, O’Malley asked an agency head how many cars and trucks the city had at its disposal. He was given an answer that turned out to be about 2,000 vehicles off the mark.

Where to begin? “The first thing we did was throw all the data we had about the city into charts and maps and graphs to see what was going on,” says Matt Gallagher, who was hired in 2000 to coordinate the brand-new CitiStat program, along with O’Malley’s deputy mayor and childhood friend, Michael Enright. (Gallagher is now the governor’s chief of staff.) Once they had the data in one place, the men “sat down with the numbers” and discovered that rates of absenteeism, overtime, and workers’ compensation claims were staggeringly high. Using off-the-shelf software—mostly Excel spreadsheets—they figured out which departments were filing the most overtime, which individuals were responsible for most of the absenteeism, and how long, on average, it was taking employees to get back to work after they had been injured. Then they began meeting with the agencies to figure out what was going on.

What they discovered was an extraordinary amount of waste, redundancy, and poor management. Some of it was easily fixable. Simply redrawing the Animal Control employees’ daily routes, for example, saved that team more than 10 percent in overtime. But other problems were harder to suss out. For example, at one of the early CitiStat meetings with the Department of Public Works, Gallagher and Enright asked the new head of the department why he wasn’t firing employees who were chronically absent without reason. After a while, he reluctantly admitted that it was because as soon as an employee was fired, the budget department would eliminate that position in the name of salary savings. For him, he said, it was better to have an unreliable employee than no employee at all. That discovery was, as such things go, a eureka moment. O’Malley’s team subsequently met with the budget office, changed their policies, and then went back to the agency heads, empowering them to make changes of their own.

Progress was, again, incremental—a percentage point increase this week, a half percent the next—but after a year, it began to add up. By mid-2001, absenteeism had dropped by nearly 50 percent in some agencies, and overtime costs had dropped by 40 percent city-wide, excluding the police department. By the end of the year, the city had saved $6 million in overtime pay alone and $13.2 million in personnel costs. By 2003, savings were up $40 million. By 2007, the mayor’s office announced that CitiStat had saved a total of $350 million, mostly by cutting waste, according to a 2003 report by the IBM Endowment for the Business of Government.

In the summer of 2000, O’Malley and his team had started with just one hunk of the government, the Bureau of Solid Waste Management, and by the end of O’Malley’s first term every department in the city had a CitiStat meeting. By 2003, they had also revamped Baltimore’s 311 call center so city officials could compile a list of citizens’ needs and complaints, track the time it took different departments to deliver services, and improve the response, agency by agency. In 2002, if a citizen complained about a missed trash pickup, he was likely to wait for days. By 2004, the trash would be whisked away within twenty-four hours 82 percent of the time. In 2002, it took more than a week to remove an abandoned vehicle; by 2004, it took five days. “It became this game of limbo,” Gallagher says. “Say it took two weeks to clean a dirty alley. Once we got to an 80 percent completion rate within two weeks, we would drop the bar and say we’re going to do it in ten days, and then seven. Productivity increased, but people also started seeing it as a challenge. How low can we go?”

When attempting to describe what CitiStat is, people often reference Moneyball, that 2003 book by Michael Lewis, which was later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt. In it, Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, uses a series of data points to drive his scouting decisions and, in doing so, successfully assembles a crack baseball team on a budget. The same general theory applies to O’Malley’s style of governance: you collect all the data you can, week after week, until eventually you start to see trends—which program has the most impact? Which doesn’t seem to be working at all? And that’s where those regularly scheduled, collaborative, data-driven meetings come in. Every other week or once a month, you get together with a department’s leadership, look at the data, see what the department is doing right or wrong, and then make a game plan for what should happen next.

The idea of CitiStat is not exactly revolutionary in concept, but in the world of government performance, it’s been ground-breaking. In 2004, Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovations praised CitiStat for making the city’s government more cost-effective and accountable. By 2007, Baltimore City Hall had become a Mecca of sorts for visiting delegations from all over the country, who’d come to observe the program in action. After a while, so many delegations were traipsing through the city hall, O’Malley joked that CitiStat had become his “tourism promotion tool.”

For the most part, however, other cities that tried to emulate CitiStat were not successful. So why did it work in Baltimore? Behn, who studies these programs across the country, credits, among other things, O’Malley’s leadership. For one, O’Malley stands out among most politicians because he has been willing to set measurable goals—something most politicians avoid because it can have the effect of “setting you up for failure,” Behn said. “If you don’t reach the number you put out there, you’ve given your opponents some talking points.” Behn also credits what he calls O’Malley’s “executive buy-in.” Implementing a program like CitiStat demands a significant cultural shift in a bureaucracy, “so the message from very top has to be, ‘You can’t just keep your head down and wait for us to stop asking questions. This isn’t going away. I’m here and I’m watching,’ ” he said.

It’s also helpful that O’Malley is, by all counts, a bit of a wonk by nature. When he starts talking about an agency’s statistics or getting “graphs moving in the right direction”—his favorite phrase—his eyelids peak into perfect pink triangles and his voice speeds up. While discussing different projects with me over the course of reporting this story, he would regularly cite numbers from progress reports and memos, clicking fluently through data sheets to get to the graph he was looking for, and rattling off statistics. (“If I say something wrong, raise the bullshit flag,” he told a few members of his staff who were gathered around. Once, someone corrected him by a couple percentage points, but for the most part he was spot on.) Part of it, clearly, is that he enjoys the numbers, but the other part is strategic. “If I see one of the secretaries at the elevator, I want to be able to say, ‘How’s that going? I notice those numbers were going down,’ ” O’Malley told me. “It’s important that they know I’m paying attention.”

While O’Malley’s CompStat and CitiStat are fairly widely regarded as successes—both are still being used today under Mayor Rawlings-Blake—they are not without their pitfalls and energetic critics. Baltimore city officials, for example, regularly complained that CitiStat simply demands that they collect and analyze more data with less money and staff, and then submit to grueling cross-examinations at biweekly meetings. (The Sun once described a department head at a CitiStat meeting “looking as if he needs a cigarette and a blindfold.”) Others, including criminologists, insist that the media has been too quick to credit CompStat for reductions in crime. In the past decade, crime rates have dropped across the country for reasons criminologists can’t pinpoint. Some attribute it to the fact that people stopped using leaded paint and gasoline; others correlate it with weather patterns and street lights. Tweezing causality from correlation is never an easy task.

In late 2005, when O’Malley announced his intention to run for governor of Maryland, the campaign became as much a referendum on O’Malley as it was on CompStat and CitiStat. When attacking O’Malley personally, his political opponents tended to paint him as derisive, citing, among other things, his public feud with Baltimore State’s Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy, who O’Malley believed was not being ambitious enough with her prosecutions. (Once, he unleashed a profanity-strewn tirade about the attorney in front of reporters.) “He has his own game plan in mind,” one former city employee told me recently. “You’re either with it, or you’re off the team.”

When attacking CompStat and CitiStat, however, O’Malley’s critics were often even more damning, objecting to what they saw as the twin dangers not only of those programs but of data-driven systems of performance in general. The first is that an administration can consciously manipulate the stats in order to make its performance look better than it is. The second is that the measures themselves can incentivize the bureaucracy to play games with the numbers in ways that management neither anticipates nor notices—to the detriment of citizens. For example, in surveys conducted by criminologists in 2010 and 2012, retired NYPD officers reported that their fellow officers would cite a lower value for stolen goods in order to reduce the charges from a felony to a misdemeanor.

As mayor, and since leaving the mayor’s office, O’Malley has stood accused of both—by political opponents, civil rights groups, labor advocates, and by another, more slippery force: Hollywood. In one episode of David Simon’s HBO series, The Wire, various agencies of a fictional Baltimore, scrambling to make it seem like their numbers had improved before a weekly “Comstat” meeting, resort to messing with the numbers. “Juking the stats,” one character says knowingly. “Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I’ve been here before.” In 2002, O’Malley had been there, too, but in real life. During an internal audit, the BPD found that officers had been under-counting the number of rapes that had occurred in the city. The official total was 178, when it should have been 211. While the problem was, in fairness, discovered by the O’Malley administration itself, the revelation became a useful political bludgeon for O’Malley’s opponents, who later would call loudly for more external audits, casting shadows of doubt on O’Malley’s progress.

Civil rights advocates, for their part, have been less concerned with allegations that O’Malley was juking the stats and more concerned that his data-driven programs were creating damaging incentives for police officers to make their numbers look good. In 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought a lawsuit against Maryland on the grounds that O’Malley’s policies as mayor had caused the number of illegal arrests and instances of police harassment of law-abiding citizens to skyrocket during his tenure. Indeed, according to city records, in 2005, police made 108,000 arrests—that’s one for every six people in the city at the time.

In 2010, the state settled the cases out of court. The BPD has since rejected “zero-tolerance” policies, established new protocols for minor infractions, and agreed to allow independent observers to keep an eye on police actions. (In 2012, police made fewer than 53,000 arrests.) O’Malley has said that he does not see the ACLU/NAACP lawsuit, or the state’s decision to settle it, as a rebuke of CompStat, which, he says, never encouraged officers to be more aggressive in their arrests.

Of course, the issue, and O’Malley’s response to it, reflects a larger debate playing out in headlines across the nation today. In April, yet another instance of teachers cheating in order to raise their schools’ test scores came to light, drawing fire from critics not only of policies like No Child Left Behind, but of data-driven systems in general, which, they say, often encourage appalling behavior. Proponents of such systems, and O’Malley himself, argue that while dangers like cheating and juking stats are real, they can be mitigated, and the value of using data-driven techniques outweighs those costs. (After all, when companies like WorldCom and Enron juked their internal accounting numbers, we didn’t respond by eliminating accounting standards; we tightened them up with Sarbanes-Oxley.) Harry Hatry, a fellow at the Urban Institute long involved in data-driven governance efforts, says the problem of misaligned incentives “is real—it’s a major problem, and we don’t do enough about it.” But he suggested the solution is to collect more data, in the form of surveys, for example—not to scrap the metrics altogether.

That ongoing debate has characterized much of O’Malley’s recent career. On the campaign trail in 2006, for example, O’Malley’s Democratic rival, Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan, as well as the incumbent governor, Bob Ehrlich, who is Republican, tussled with O’Malley again over what they called his “fuzzy math.” In his stump speeches, O’Malley claimed that violent crime had dropped by 37 percent during his time as mayor, giving Baltimore the second-fastest crime rate reduction in the country. His opponents, however, argued that crime had dropped by 24 percent, giving Baltimore only the sixth-fastest crime reduction rate in the country.

Both were right—depending on what baseline you looked at. In 1999, an audit by Linder & Associates found that the BPD had been mis-categorizing assaults, thereby artificially reducing the violent crime rate. If you re-categorized those assaults, the overall instances of violent crime would appear to spike dramatically. When O’Malley became mayor in 2000, he did just that. As a result, both the crime rate and the percentage by which he was able to cut crime appeared substantially higher. If you used the new baseline, his numbers were right; if you used the old baseline, his opponents’ numbers were. While the controversy cast a pallor on the election, it didn’t change its course. In June 2006, Duncan dropped out of the race, leaving O’Malley to win the Democratic primary and sweep into the governor’s mansion.

Less than a month after taking the oath of office in January 2007, O’Malley held a press conference. During the half-hour presentation, in which the new governor “alternately sounded like a policy wonk and deadpan comic,” the Washington Post reported, O’Malley laid out his plan to implement CitiStat at the state level. The predictably named StateStat would span all state agencies, he said, and, like CitiStat, include issue-specific programs to focus on cross-agency problems. Gallagher, who had helped launch CitiStat, would launch StateStat, too. With Maryland facing more than a billion-dollar projected budget shortfall the following year and state agencies unaccustomed to stringent oversight, O’Malley predicted at the press conference that there would be “growing pains,” he said. That was, it turned out, a major understatement.

Ten months later, Maryland was slammed, along with the rest of the country, by the recession (which O’Malley invariably and loyally refers to as “the Bush Recession”). With unemployment and foreclosures skyrocketing, and businesses shuttering their doors left and right, critics questioned whether that was the time to roll out a fancy new managerial tool at the state level. O’Malley and his team, however, were committed to it. By mapping government services with data, they argued, they could be more efficient with the increasingly strapped resources they had.

Early on, the primary challenges of applying CitiStat at the state level were of both scale and philosophy. CitiStat had been tailored to Baltimore’s $2.4 billion budget and 15,000 employees, while StateStat needed to stretch to Maryland’s $30 billion budget and 80,000 employees. Beyond the mere logistics, it quickly became clear that the role StateStat had to play would also have to be different. While a city is expected to provide tangible services, a state government’s role is more that of a liaison between federal agencies, counties, and municipalities. Simply accurately tracking an agency’s progress became trickier. If your goal is to clear downed trees quickly and efficiently, you’re dealing with a finite number of moving parts; if you’re trying to increase the number of woman- and minority-owned businesses across the state, you’re dealing with a much broader network of causes and incremental solutions, many of which tend to slip through the cracks of an Excel spreadsheet. “There can be a hundred reasons why the needle’s not moving,” said Catherine Motz, O’Malley’s deputy chief of staff, who helps run StateStat. “So you have to start thinking about the problems from a wider angle.” The solution, in many cases, was to use StateStat as a tool to help push agencies out of their hierarchical silos—the natural state of most
bureaucracies—and force them to work together to solve statewide problems.

The first StateStat program, known as BayStat, is an example of such collaboration. It hinges on the participation of six state agencies to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake Bay—a challenge that falls under the jurisdiction of no single agency. Under BayStat, the Department of Natural Resources has been working closely with the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which has organized battalions of inmates to plant bay grass and more than a million trees in strategic locations. That new growth helps prevent runoff and stop erosion, two of the major causes of pollution in the bay. Under the same program, inmates have also made more than 9,000 metal cages to seed baby oysters, which help to filter the bay water and buttress the local economy.

Another collaborative StateStat program is partially responsible for helping to launch the most far-reaching statewide health information exchange in the country. A couple of years ago, the Chesapeake Regional Information System for Our Patients (CRISP) was slow in getting off the ground because hospital CEOs were uncertain about signing on to a new program. Made aware of the problem through a State-Stat review, O’Malley convened a meeting with the state’s top hospital CEOs. Once they were all there, he “pointed at each one and said, ‘Are you going to participate? Are you going to participate?’ ” said Scott Afzal, a program director at CRISP, chuckling at the memory. “That kind of commitment doesn’t happen in other states.” CRISP is now working with Maryland hospitals to track and share information about patients (with the patients’ consent), so that, among other things, an emergency room doctor in, say, Anne Arundel County, knows if his patient was recently treated over in Montgomery County. CRISP, a nonprofit funded by state, federal, and private sources, is also beginning to partner with primary care doctors, so that doctors receive an email when one of their patients is admitted to a Maryland hospital.

Getting independent state agencies to work together is one of the toughest jobs a governor faces. In March, after sitting in on a StateStat performance review, O’Malley pointed me to precisely that challenge in his own government. At the meeting, I had listened to three assembled agencies—the Departments of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (DLLR), Business and Economic Development (DBEV), and Veterans Affairs (VA)—discuss how to solve the problem of veteran unemployment in the state. Each had passed the responsibility like a hot potato. “So the VA guys are like, ‘We don’t do job placement. That’s DBEV.’ But DBEV does high-level outreach, so they don’t do it. They say it’s DLLR,” O’Malley said, giving me a recap. “So now it’s DLLR’s job to hire veteran specialists to place veterans—and that’s not the VA’s thing? How much sense does that make?”

O’Malley, who is clearly fluent in the way that government functions behind the scenes (as well as in his agencies’ awkward abbreviations), pointed out the absurdity that can arise when agencies don’t work together, and executives are not aware of how services are being delivered. During the debate about the sequester earlier this year, for example, Congress was careful not to cut Veterans Affairs. But if Congress had just dug a little deeper, it would have seen that many of the programs that actually affect veterans are run by the Departments of Labor, Housing, and Education. “People don’t understand how the government works,” O’Malley said. “But that’s what StateStat can help with. You can use it to shine a light on what’s really going on.”

The complexity that O’Malley is grappling with is one of the central dilemmas at every level of government today. Because of long-standing fears of centralized control, the majority of government programs in America are structured in tiers. In some cases, federal, state, and local governments share administrative duties. In other cases, private entities, like nonprofits or corporate contractors, work with one or more levels of government to deliver services on a contractual basis. This results in often clumsy, slow services and high administrative costs. Citizens, flummoxed, can’t figure out who to hold accountable for what.

Johns Hopkins University political scientist Steven Teles predicts that the growing complexity of government, rather than its size, will be the issue that dominates American politics over the next thirty years. If so, politicians who have figured out how to “shine a light on” that complexity, like O’Malley, will be crucial to making government work.

Halfway through his second term as governor, O’Malley has a handful of big legislative victories to be proud of, as well as some managerial ones. While his state, along with the rest of the county, is still limping from the recession, he can brag about the fact that the Maryland school system has been ranked first in the nation for five years running, up from third place in 2008; that his administration was able to hold down the cost of tuition at state colleges and universities; and that crime rates, following trends across the country, are the lowest ever recorded in the state. He can also brag about incremental but important progress on issues like pollution in the Chesapeake and eliminating the DNA backlog from Maryland’s criminal justice sector.

Since 2007, StateStat, like CitiStat, has also become a model for analysts and researchers who study government performance, as well as practitioners of the confused art. In recent years, O’Malley’s team in Annapolis, like his team in Baltimore, has become an attraction for visitors, who come to see how StateStat works. Since 2007, O’Malley has hosted governors from more than a dozen other states and leaders from all over the world, from Peru to Pakistan, from China to Northern Ireland. In 2008, the Obama administration turned to O’Malley’s programs as inspiration for its model of how to manage the federal bureaucracy. And in 2009, Governing magazine put O’Malley on the cover of its issue highlighting the country’s best public servants. He was the only governor in the spread. In the last thirteen years, O’Malley’s general data-driven managerial style has even earned its own name among those who study such things: PerformanceStat. Behn, the Harvard lecturer, is writing a whole book about it.

While O’Malley may have considerable bragging rights from his time as mayor and governor, if he runs for president, he’ll still have some serious explaining to do. For one, his passage of laws banning the death penalty, regulating gun purchases, and approving an offshore wind farm will certainly endear him to Democratic primary voters, but there’s not a lot in his record so far that will warm the hearts of more conservative, but persuadable, voters in states like Ohio, Virginia, and Nevada, which he very well might need in a general election. Same goes for his recent move to increase the gas tax for the first time in two decades. While it’s no doubt a boon for Maryland’s infrastructure, it’s generally a wildly unpopular policy among average voters of any stripe. David Ferguson, the chairman of the Maryland Republicans, recently wrote in a media brief that O’Malley, “determined to become President of the United States,” is pursuing a “radical social agenda,” “ ‘checking the boxes’ for the most extreme and liberal Democratic Party primary voters.” O’Malley has not crossed any of his own liberal base groups, which might signal ideological independence the way, say, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has occasionally run afoul of conservatives. Nor has he exactly styled himself as a great unifier—for years he has stoked a trans-Potomac feud with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, who is Republican.

But perhaps O’Malley’s lefty, and loyally Democratic, credentials could also be an asset—particularly if he’s aiming for the penultimate spot on the ticket. His ironclad message discipline, combined with his roles as cheerful fund-raiser, proxy campaigner, and loyal attack dog during the election last year, could be seen by many as an impressive tryout for vice president. And should Hillary Clinton run, surely her people will not have forgotten that, during the heated 2008 primary, O’Malley was the Maryland state chair of Hillary’s campaign from 2007 to 2008.

More importantly, in recent White Houses, vice presidents have often taken on key managerial roles in the government. That proved disastrous in the case of Dick Cheney, but Al Gore, who was responsible for driving the largely successful Reinventing Government program in the ’90s, did a much better job. Joe Biden, who spearheaded the project tracking stimulus spending, which has been successful in minimizing fraud, also did well. O’Malley, given his history, would be a natural fit for that role—a fact he’s probably aware of. In April, chafing at accusations that he was too far left, he began referring to himself as a “performance-driven progressive,” and describing his management style in an interview with Bloomberg as a “fundamentally different way of governing.”

Should he get that far, O’Malley could take on the traditional VP role at a time when the federal government is uniquely primed for it. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the GPRA Modernization Act, which re-ups and codifies the Clinton-era performance management program and includes some new requirements, some of which were directly inspired by CitiStat and StateStat, including regularly scheduled performance reviews. (See “A Short History of Data-Driven Government.”)

Of course, skillfully managing the federal government is a job for neither the cynic nor the faint of heart. It’s an enormously complex task, to say the least, and no president or vice president in recent memory—none perhaps since Franklin Delano Roosevelt—has tackled it with any holistic success. But when I asked O’Malley if he thought it was even possible—is StateStat even scalable to the federal level? FedStat, anyone?—he considered it for a minute, admitted the enormous difficulties of the job, and said yes. Then, putting his feet up on the desk in front of him, he transitioned from O’Malley-the-wonky-manager to O’Malley-the-guy-who-actually-likes-all-that-politician-stuff.

“You know,” he said, “I think the truth is we need FedStat. At a time when people are so very cynical about what our public institutions are capable of delivering, the power of openness and transparency and the willingness of leaders to make themselves vulnerable by declaring goals could well restore that essential trust that we need in order to bring forth a new era of progress.” He stopped, nodding at the cadence of his own thoughts.

Then, like a hundred reporters before me, I broached the subject of 2016. If he were to go to Washington, D.C., I asked, would he be the one to implement “FedStat”? His face broke into a broad grin.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know any other way to govern.”

The post Should Martin O’Malley Be President? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Feb. 21, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by the parents of a Mexican teenager killed by the U.S. Border Patrol while the 15-year-old was on the Mexican side of the border. The justices are weighing whether the parents have the right to sue in United States courts. The lawyers for Sergio Hernández Guereca, the slain teenager, cited information first reported in this Washington Monthly feature about the frequency of such killings.

Until moments before U.S. Border Patrol agents shot him dead on the night of October 10, 2012, Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez had passed a pleasant evening in his hometown of Nogales, Mexico. He had visited his girlfriend, Luz, and watched television with her family; at around eleven o’clock, he asked Luz if she wanted to join him in his nightly routine of grabbing a hot dog at the convenience store where his brother worked. When she declined, he set out alone on the five-minute walk down International Avenue.

At about the same time, right across the border, a Nogales, Arizona, police officer named Quinardo Garcia responded to a call about “suspicious subjects” running south toward the fourteen-foot wall that divides the two towns. At 11:19 p.m., Border Patrol agents, including K-9 Officer John Zuniga, arrived as backup.

“I passed Officer Garcia’s patrol vehicle and I saw two male subjects climbing the international fence and were trying to get over to the country of Mexico,” Zuniga wrote in his report. “I gave them numerous commands to climb down.… I then decided to deploy my assigned canine, Tesko, and hold him on a leash and secure the area in case the male subjects climbed down. Moments later, additional Border Patrol Agents arrived on the scene.”

The two Mexican men were carrying large backpacks, according to the police report. Garcia and Zuniga stated that they presumed the packs contained illegal narcotics and that the two men were trying to evade capture. “I then heard several rocks start hitting the ground and I looked up and I could see the rocks flying through the air,” Zuniga’s account continues. “As I tried to get cover between a brick wall and small dirt hill, I heard an agent say, ‘Hey your canine’s been hit! Your canine’s been hit!’ ”

Border Patrol agents responded by opening fire across the border into the dark streets of Nogales, Mexico. No agents or officers claimed they’d been struck by rocks—the dog was the only one hit. By the time the agents were done firing, Jose Antonio had received two bullets to the back of the head; at least six more bullets entered the back of his body after he fell to the ground.

He landed facedown on the sidewalk, and died there, outside a small clinic whose sign read “Emergencias Medicas.” He was unarmed, according to the Nogales, Mexico, police report. Border Patrol officials, as of this writing, have declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation by the FBI, which has also declined to comment.

Fatal shootings by Border Patrol agents were once a rarity. Only a handful were recorded before 2009. Even more rare were incidents of Border Patrol agents shooting Mexicans on their own side of the border. A former Clinton administration official who worked on border security issues in the 1990s says he can’t recall a single cross-border shooting during his tenure. “Agents would go out of their way not to harm anyone and certainly not shoot across the border,” he says. But a joint investigation by the Washington Monthly and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute has found that over the past five years U.S. border agents have shot across the border at least ten times, killing a total of six Mexicans on Mexican soil.

There is no doubt that Border Patrol agents face a difficult job. Between 2007 and 2012, twenty agents have died in the line of duty; most of these deaths were the result of accidents, but four were due to border violence. For instance, in 2010 Agent Brian A. Terry was struck down near Rio Rico, Arizona, in the Border Patrol’s Nogales area of operation, by AK-47 fire after he and his team encountered five suspected drug runners. In 2012, Agent Nicholas J. Ivie was shot by friendly fire after being mistaken by other agents for an armed smuggler.

But following a rapid increase in the number of Border Patrol agents between 2006 and 2009, a disturbing pattern of excessive use of force has emerged. When I first began to notice this spate of cross-border shootings, I assumed that at least some victims were drug traffickers or human smugglers trying to elude capture. But background checks revealed that only one had a criminal record. As I began to dig more deeply, it turned out that most of the victims weren’t even migrants, but simply residents of Mexican border towns like Jose Antonio, who either did something that looked suspicious to an agent or were nearby when border agents fired at someone else.

In one case, agents killed a thirty-year-old father of four while he was collecting firewood along the banks of the Rio Grande. In another, a fifteen-year-old was shot while watching a Border Patrol agent apprehend a migrant. In yet another, agents shot a thirty-six-year-old man while he was having a picnic to celebrate his daughters’ birthdays.

As the debate over immigration reform heats up on Capitol Hill, increased border security will likely be the condition of any path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers now living in the United States. This makes scrutinizing the professionalism of the Border Patrol all the more urgent. The picture that emerges from this investigation is of an agency operating with thousands of poorly trained rookies and failing to provide the kind of transparency, accountability, and clear rules of engagement that Americans routinely expect of law enforcement agencies.

So far, the Border Patrol’s cross-border shootings have yet to attract much international attention. If they continue, however, it is easy to imagine the U.S. not only being assailed by human rights activists around the world, but also compromising its standing to pressure other countries, such as Israel, to refrain from firing on unarmed citizens across their borders.

In 2006, the Bush administration began rapidly increasing the size of the Border Patrol, ushering in a fanatic recruitment drive. Customs and Border Protection spent millions on slick television ads that ran during Dallas Cowboy football games and print ads that appeared in programs at the NBA All-Star Game and the NCAA playoffs. CBP even sponsored a NASCAR race car for the 2007 season.

In less than three years, the agency hired 8,000 new agents, making Customs and Border Protection one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States. Because qualified recruits were so hard to find, the Border Patrol had to lower its standards, deferring background checks and relaxing training regimens. Lie detector tests, which were previously common practice, were often omitted.

Richard Stana, head of Homeland Security and Justice at the Government Accountability Office, testified before Congress in 2007 that the “rapid addition of new agents” would “reduce the overall experience level of agents assigned to the southwest border”—and that Customs and Border Protection would be relying on “less seasoned agents” to supervise the new recruits. He spoke even more frankly in an interview on National Public Radio: “Any time we’ve had a ramp-up like this in the past, the propensity to get a bad apple or two goes way up. And if we don’t have supervisors to identify those bad apples, then they stay on board.”

At the same time, Customs and Border Protection has been secretive about the guidelines its agents are supposed to follow. While a quick Google search will take you to use-of-force protocols for police departments of such major cities as New York and Los Angeles, use-of-force guidelines and training manuals for the more than 21,000 CBP border agents are difficult to come by. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection, turned down Freedom of Information requests to see their guidelines.

At least this much is known for sure, however: an international agreement with Mexican law enforcement officials states that U.S. Border Patrol agents are barred from firing their weapons into Mexico from the United States under any circumstances. Instead they are supposed to call Mexican authorities whenever there is an incident on the Mexican side of the border.

Specifically, agents are supposed to notify the Center for Investigation and National Security in Mexico City as well as local Mexican police closest to the incident. The protocol specifically states that Mexicans throwing rocks or drawing weapons are “time sensitive” offenses and “requir[e] immediate response from the Mexican government.” Once Mexican officials have been notified, protocol directs U.S. agents to “vector responding agencies to the area of the incident.”

As the case of Jose Antonio and those of other victims of cross-border shootings illustrate, however, such niceties are often left on paper. The Nogales, Mexico, police report indicates that Customs and Border Protection did not notify Mexican authorities when they saw two men trying to climb the border fence back into Mexico, nor did they report that rocks were being thrown at U.S. agents.

On September 3, 2012, Arevalo Pedroza, a longtime construction worker, took his family and some friends out for a picnic to celebrate his daughters’ birthdays. Around four p.m., Pedroza pulled into an outdoor recreational area perched on the southern bank of the Rio Grande called the Patinadero. Families with children were everywhere. Some were swimming, some were eating, others were just relaxing in the hot afternoon sun. Pedroza got busy at the grill.

Meanwhile, 200 feet away, on the other side of the river, a Border Patrol pontoon boat was floating by, just keeping pace with the flow of the river. One agent was driving while the other appeared, according to Mexican eyewitnesses I interviewed, to be scanning the riverbank looking for something or someone. Then, on the American side, a Latino man jumped into the river, seemingly trying to evade the agents in the boat by swimming back toward Mexico. As soon as the agents noticed him, the driver floored the engine and sped over to block his path, circling him and creating large waves that made it difficult for him to swim.

“Help me, help me,” the man in the water shouted in Spanish toward the people in the park, who had begun to gather to watch the unfolding scene. “They are trying to drown me.” Waves washed over his head; on at least two occasions, witnesses say, the boat ran directly over him. The crowd began to shout at the agents in Spanish to leave the swimming man alone. Several witnesses told me they were sure the agents were going to drown him.

Suddenly, a quick series of eight to ten gunshots rang out. At first, few on the shore could tell where the shots were coming from, but three Mexican eyewitnesses told me they could see the agents in the pontoon boat aiming their rifles and opening fire directly at the crowd.

Pedroza’s ten-year-old daughter, Mariana, heard a bullet pass by her head. She described it to me as a sharp sound, like something ripping the air as it flew past. Without thinking she turned and ran away from the river as fast as she could. Others in the crowd also fled for their lives.

The whole incident lasted only seconds. Once the gunshots stopped, the confused crowd looked back across the river. The agents remained still for a long minute, still aiming their weapons at the picnickers. Then a woman began screaming at the agents in English, “That’s against the law! That’s against the law!” It was only then that Pedroza’s wife, Isabel, noticed that her husband was lying flat on the riverbank, faceup, blood pouring from his chest. She spun around desperately, looking for help. “They shot him!” she shouted. “They shot him!” She began to wail hysterically.

Other picnickers started shouting obscenities at the agents, who remained motionless in their boat. By now Isabel was screaming in disbelief, “They killed him! They killed him!” Others joined in the screaming and taunting directed at the agents. Finally the agents silenced their motor, as if trying to hear. As the shouts from the crowd grew louder, the agents hit the accelerator and fled upriver.

Pedroza remained motionless. His eyes were open, Isabel recalls, but he was staring blankly at the sky and did not appear to be conscious. His daughters knelt beside him, trying to comfort him, but he wasn’t responding.

An autopsy conducted by the Nuevo Laredo Police Department later showed that he’d been shot one time through his right lung. The Mexican government issued a statement condemning the incident, saying, “The use of excessive or deadly force by the U.S. Border Patrol in this matter is unacceptable.”

The Border Patrol also issued a statement, saying the shots were fired because the agents had been “subjected to rocks being thrown at them from the Mexican side.” The Border Patrol has said that an FBI investigation of the incident is under way, but none of the witnesses I spoke with, including Pedroza’s wife and his friend Josue Gonzalez, who was by his side when he died, say they have ever been contacted. “Even if rocks were thrown,” Gonzalez told me, “the Border Patrol agents were so far away on the other side of the river, they couldn’t even reach them.”

Of the ten incidents of cross-border shootings that we have uncovered, Border Patrol agents claimed in all but two cases that they had fired their weapons in response to rocks being thrown. Of the six that resulted in fatalities, all but one involved alleged rock throwing.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the United Nations, and even the U.S. State Department have all denounced lethal force against rock throwers in international areas of conflict. For decades, Western diplomats have likewise condemned the use of lethal force against civilian rock throwers.

Commenting in 2000 on the Israelis’ use of force against Palestinian rock throwers, Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, “The superior firepower [by Israel] has been used, I believe, excessively—particularly against youths throwing stones.” Since then, the Israeli Defense Forces adopted an official policy (not consistently implemented) of deploying nonlethal rubber bullets and other crowd-disbursement methods instead of using deadly force to deal with rock throwers.

More recently, when Egyptian soldiers confronted stone-throwing protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with lethal force during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon both condemned the “excessive” use of force. Clinton said she was “deeply concerned” about the violence and urged Mubarak’s security forces “to respect and protect the universal rights of all Egyptians.”

Already, the Border Patrol’s killing of Mexicans on their own soil has complicated and compromised U.S. diplomacy. In June 2011, Border Patrol agents shot another Mexican national, Alfredo Yañez, claiming that he had been throwing rocks and a nail-studded post from the Mexican side of the border. In response, then Mexican President Felipe Calderon condemned the killing publicly and, in a meeting with Secretary Clinton, demanded that U.S. authorities swiftly investigate the “use of firearms to repel an attack with stones.”

Sixty organizations, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Catholic Charities, responded in kind to the Yañez killing, signing a joint letter to Congress asking for an investigation and calling for an immediate end to the Border Patrol practice of shooting at rock throwers. “Deadly force should always be an action of last resort, and only used if an imminent risk of death is present and no other tools exist to ameliorate a dangerous situation,” reads the letter. “To shoot stone throwers is exceptionally disproportionate and inhumane.”

On July 7, 2012, Juan Pablo Santillan, a thirty-year-old father of four, and his twenty-eight-year-old brother Damian were walking along the southern bank of the Rio Grande collecting firewood for their mother to use in cooking tamales. Across the river they noticed some Border Patrol agents about seventy yards away, high on an embankment, and tried to ignore them. “Border Patrol agents would always use their bullhorn and shout obscenities at us across the river,” Damian recalls. “They would call us beaners and stupid Mexicans. I didn’t like being around them.” Damian’s mother told me she stopped bringing her grandchildren to the river to swim because Border Patrol agents constantly harassed them.

Damian had his back to the agents when he heard what he thought were several gunshots. He instinctively dove to the ground. Seconds later he looked up and saw his brother lying on the ground faceup. Blood was pouring from his chest, and he was not moving.

Damian recalls looking away from Juan Pablo’s bleeding body, across the river, and says he noticed several Border Patrol agents staring his way. One was holding what appeared to be a large rifle with a scope on it, pointed at him. He began to panic. He needed to take cover for his own sake, but his brother might be dying. He dashed to his brother’s side. If he got shot, well, he would die trying to save his brother’s life. But what to do? He was far from a hospital, even from a phone.

In desperation he yelled out at the agents across the river, one agent’s rifle still pointed at him. “My brother is dying!” he cried in Spanish. The agents, he says, did not respond, and instead started to move away from the scene. “Can you please help me!” That was when one agent stopped, according to Damian, and yelled back, also in Spanish, “Let the dog die.”

The official Border Patrol report claims that Juan Pablo Santillan had a gun and aimed it at the agents, and that they fired in self-defense. But Mexican officials, and the five neighbors and family members I spoke with, all told me unequivocally that Juan Pablo did not have a gun that day and had never even owned one. According to an investigation conducted by Mexican police, a gun was not found on his body or at the scene.

A year ago, the border advocacy group No More Deaths published an extensive report on migrants’ treatment by U.S. Border Patrol agents, called “A Culture of Cruelty,” based on 4,130 interviews with 12,895 individuals who had at one point been in Border Patrol custody. The group identified widespread patterns of abuse, including denial of water to migrants who were caught after wandering days in the desert, denial of food, failure to provide medical treatment, verbal abuse, and physical abuse. The report recounts instances of abuse including Border Patrol agents threatening detainees with death, enforcing stress positions and sleep deprivation, turning cell temperatures down to frigid levels, and kicking, beating, and sexually assaulting detainees.

Repeatedly, CBP officials have declined to answer my questions about any of these specific incidents. The agency has instead issued statements like this one, in response to my questions about Santillan’s death:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) respects the sovereignty of the country of Mexico and its territorial integrity. Without the express authorization of the Mexican government, CBP personnel are not authorized to physically cross the international boundary when conducting operations. Regarding the use of firearms on the border, CBP law enforcement personnel are trained, required to comply with and be thoroughly familiar with all aspects of the use of force and firearms guidelines.

One former CBP commissioner, W. Ralph Basham, who served from 2006 to 2009, briefly spoke with me some months ago, when I was reporting on a Border Patrol killing on the U.S. side of the border. “I’m certainly sympathetic to those individuals who lose their life as the result of some of these activities,” he said, but added, “These agents have to be able to protect themselves when they feel like their life is being threatened, or the life of other officers.” Still, a 2010 Associated Press investigation found that border agents are assaulted at a dramatically lower rate than police officers (3 percent compared with 11 percent)—and with far less serious weapons, such as rocks or knives rather than firearms.

According to a 2004 CBP use-of-force document I obtained through a source, “Verbal warning to submit to authority shall be given prior to use of deadly force if feasible, and if to do so would not increase the danger to the officer of others.” Yet in Juan Pablo Santillan’s case, and in the nine other cross-border shootings I have uncovered over the past five years, I have found no evidence that verbal warnings were given before agents opened fire into Mexico. In fact, none of the agents involved have even publicly claimed that they issued such warnings.

Details of agent shootings are also protected from public scrutiny by Customs and Border Protection. If an investigation is undertaken internally, it is not made public. If an agent is disciplined, that is not made public either. If CBP refers a case to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation, that, too, is kept from the public.

Convictions are on the public record, but they are exceedingly rare. The last one I could find was that of two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who were tried and convicted for shooting an unarmed, fleeing drug smuggler in the buttocks in 2005. The Bush administration ended up commuting their sentences in the face of public pressure, and both former agents are now free. Since then, no agents have even been disciplined for misuse of their firearms—at least so far as the public can know, since CBP refuses to disclose data on either the number of shootings by officers or the number of related disciplinary actions.

Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was a small-framed fifteen-year-old who loved soccer and wanted to be a police officer when he grew up. He lived in a humble three-room cinderblock house on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico, with his mother, brother, and two sisters.

On June 6, 2010, Hernandez went with his brother to pick up his paycheck at a furniture factory near a concrete canal that contains the Rio Grande as it passes along the border between Juarez and El Paso, Texas. Meanwhile, as captured on an eyewitness video, Border Patrol Agent Jesus Mesa Jr. was patrolling the U.S. side of the border on bicycle when he spotted a handful of Mexican men trying to cross into the United States.

Mesa quickly dumped his bike and ran for one of them, grabbing him by the hair. The others began throwing rocks at Mesa as they retreated back toward Mexico. Mesa drew his weapon and fired two rounds across the border into Mexico. He missed the fleeing men but hit Hernandez, who was watching the scene from under a concrete bridge about fifty yards away, in Juarez.

According to the Mexican forensic report, Hernandez was shot through the left eye, suffering “a direct laceration to the brain, which … caused cardiac and respiratory arrest.” The medical examiner found “no evidence of a fight or struggle and concluded that the victim was surprised by the assailant eliminating any possibility to defend himself or flee.”

Though Mesa never claimed that he was struck by a rock, he said in a Border Patrol press release that he fired his weapon in self-defense. He also claimed that Hernandez was among the group of men throwing rocks. However, Cristobal Galindo, an attorney retained by the Hernandez family, says that he has seen additional tapes—one from a second eyewitness and one from a CBP surveillance camera—and neither of them show Hernandez throwing rocks. In both videos, the rock throwers are simply running by him.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of the family charges that the Border Patrol agents denied assistance to the bleeding victim. “U.S. Border Patrol Agents arrived on the scene, the shooter picked up his bicycle and then they all left,” says the complaint. “No one took any action to render emergency medical aid to Sergio, leaving him dead or dying beneath the Paso del Norte Bridge in the territory of Mexico.”

The incident caused uproar in Mexico. Felipe Calderon, then Mexico’s president, called on Washington “to investigate fully what happened and punish those responsible.” Mexico’s secretary of state called the use of firearms to respond to a rock attack a “disproportionate use of force.” And Mexican prosecutors issued a warrant for Agent Mesa’s arrest for his involvement in the killing; if Mesa ever steps foot in Mexico, he will likely be arrested and tried for murder.

But the response on the U.S. side of the border was decidedly more subdued. Alan Bersin, then CBP commissioner, promised a transparent and fair investigation but otherwise declined to comment. Two years later, the Justice Department found no wrongdoing by Agent Mesa and said no charges would be brought against him.

“The team of prosecutors and agents concluded that there is insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution,” a Justice Department press release read. “This review took into account evidence indicating that the agent’s actions constituted a reasonable use of force or would constitute an act of self-defense in response to the threat created by a group of smugglers hurling rocks at the agent and his detainee.” (Incidentally, no evidence was ever made public that the men involved in the rock throwing were smugglers.)

When the Hernandez family filed a civil suit against the U.S. government for the wrongful and negligent death of their son, a district court judge threw out the case, arguing that the family had no standing to sue because Hernandez was in Mexico when the incident occurred. According to the decision, “the constitutional constraints on U.S. officers’ excessive use of force and wrongful taking of life did not apply to the border agent’s conduct because, although all of his conduct occurred solely in the United States, the victim was not a U.S. citizen and incurred the injury in Mexico.”

The ACLU filed an amicus brief in support of the appeal. Sean Riordan, the author of the brief, argues that “it would be a dark and dangerous precedent for the courts to hold that federal agents can kill people with impunity merely because they are just across the border and not U.S. citizens.” The case has been appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and is so unprecedented that it may be headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of the nineteen cases we have uncovered over the past two years in which people died at the hands of Border Patrol agents—six on Mexican soil—no agents have yet been prosecuted. If any of the agents involved have been relieved of their duties because of their role in the incidents, that information has not been made available to the public, and our queries to Customs and Border Protection on this issue have been denied.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

The post Over the Line appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Democratic Party’s equivalent period of soul searching played out quite differently. As early as the late 1970s, a major rethinking of traditional liberal ideas and policies about crime, welfare, entitlement programs, and much more was under way at magazines like the Washington Monthly and the New Republic—this at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. In 1984, only four years after Ronald Reagan’s first presidential win, reformist Democrats had their own popular primary candidate, Gary Hart. In 1985, the centrist-reform Democratic Leadership Council was founded. By 1988, two charter members of the DLC, Al Gore and Richard Gephardt, were running for president. By 1992, a former DLC chairman, Bill Clinton, won the office.

Compare this to Republicans. It’s two decades after Bill Clinton’s first presidential victory, and there is still no Republican equivalent of the DLC. During last year’s GOP primary, the only candidate who ran as a moderate reformer, Jon Huntsman, garnered almost no party support, quit in disgust, and started advocating for a third party.

The one commonality between the two reform periods is that, as with Democrats in the 1970s, the rethinking on the right today, such as it is, is being led by a loose network of reformist writers and policy intellectuals—though the task on the conservative side is more treacherous than it generally was for liberals. In 2005, former Reagan Treasury official and Jack Kemp acolyte Bruce Bartlett questioned the fiscal rectitude of the Republicans for, among other things, adding an expensive new entitlement, Medicare Part D, without budget cuts or tax increases to offset the massive new costs. For his temerity, his employer, the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free market think tank, fired him. Five years later, conservative journalist and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum criticized Republicans for failing to negotiate with Democrats on Obamacare; he too lost his job, at the American Enterprise Institute.

Most of the conservative journalists and writers who make up the reformist camp today—people like Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam of the National Review, Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner, and Yuval Levin of National Affairs—have been more tentative and selective in their critiques of Republican policy than Bartlett and Frum. The average conservative reformist output consists of about three articles bashing liberal statism for every one questioning Republican dogma. To retain an audience among Republicans, one must be “considerate of the contours of conservative opinion,” Ponnuru told me.

By being careful in what they say, a number of these writers have built audiences among party elites, and increasingly so since November, according to interviews with Republican House and Senate staffers. “They’re addressing ideas in policy spaces where there may be gaps,” says Neil Bradley, an aide to Eric Cantor. “Ramesh is widely regarded as a smart and insightful thinker,” agrees a Senate Republican aide. The reformists are read in Marco Rubio’s office; Paul Ryan’s office is a fan of Levin.

It is easy, however, to exaggerate their influence. “There is a cultural gulf,” says John Feehery, a former staffer for Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert, between the reformist writer-intellectuals, with their New York/Washington sensibilities, and Republican officeholders, with their base of voters in Texas, Kansas, and Georgia. The reformists “are speaking the language of policy,” notes Feehery, while the base “is speaking the language of hating Obama.”

Frankly, the Republican reformists face an extremely steep climb. In the ’80s, the Democratic reform project was helped enormously by the fact that their ideas were eagerly embraced by Democratic politicians of the day from red states and swing districts who were looking for fresh ideas that would appeal to the moderate voters they needed to win. Today’s Republicans, by contrast, are mainly concerned with avoiding a primary challenge from the right in 2014 and often seem barely interested in ideas at all, fresh or otherwise. Compared to ages past, “there is a lot less entrepreneurship in the House GOP,” says Ponnuru. Too many congressional Republicans “just wait for instructions.” But if in 2016 a Republican presidential contender can break free from the death grip of conservative Know-Nothingism and still succeed electorally, the reformers whose profiles follow may well become very influential indeed.

JOSH BARRO

Bio: Now the lead writer for the Bloomberg View’s Ticker Blog, Barro started his journalism career as an analyst for the Manhattan Institute. He is the son of noted conservative economist Robert Barro.

Age: 28

Issues: Barro writes primarily about economics, finance, and politics. After leaving the Manhattan Institute, he has become a progressively more trenchant critic of the conservative movement, coming to favor Obamacare and increasing Social Security benefits. However, that makes him one of only a handful of conservatives who do serious work on health care. In addition, he is one of a few thinkers pushing for expanding free market, conservative principles into new areas; for example, he favors reducing zoning restrictions for America’s big liberal cities, to reduce rents and enable greater density, and weakening intellectual property protections, especially software patents, in order to spur innovation.

Notable fact: Barro was one of the leading voices in favor of the platinum coin stratagem to get around Republicans taking the debt limit hostage.

Quote: “Conservatives’ first preference is to get government out of the way; their second preference seems to be government cutting checks indiscriminately.”

Reformist score: 9

Influence inside GOP: 2

BRUCE BARTLETT

Bio: A former policy adviser for Reagan and Bush I, and the author of several books, Bartlett is now a writer for the New York Times Economix blog, the Financial Times, and elsewhere.

Age: 61

Issues: Probably the first member of this generation of reformists, Bartlett was happily ensconced in the right-wing think tank world until the passage of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit. This led to more and more fierce criticism of President Bush, culminating in Bartlett’s 2005 book Imposter, for which he was fired from his position at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) and ostracized from conservative circles.

Bartlett retains much of his Reagan-era conservatism on things like tax reform and trimming social insurance. He has moved left on economics, embracing Keynesian policy and monetary stimulus under depression conditions, but his biggest break with Republicans is in the strident and sometimes bitter language he uses to attack their perceived failings.

Notable fact: After being fired from the NCPA, times were so hard for Bartlett that he didn’t make enough money to pay federal income tax for several years.

Quote: “Unless the Republican Party can move beyond its base, it faces political euthanasia down the road.”

Reformist score: 9

Influence inside GOP: 2

DAVID BROOKS

Bio: Probably the most prominent reformist, Brooks is the more senior New York Times house conservative and currently teaches a class at Yale about the lost virtue of humility. Previously, he wrote for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.

Age: 51

Issues: Brooks is fond of intellectual sophistication for its own sake, and was one of the primary exponents of what he called “national greatness conservatism,” involving national service, manned missions to Mars, and other “great projects designed to physically and spiritually unify the nation,” which has since fallen out of favor with the rise of the Tea Party. Though his substantive positions are often difficult to tease out, he doesn’t share the fixation on slashing government of, say, Paul Ryan. He often joins Ross Douthat in anxiety over the changing social norms, though not so strongly.

Brooks uses his column to promote the work of reformers like Ponnuru and Levin, and, like them, tries to keep at least one foot firmly planted in the GOP camp even as he explores the borders of respectable dissent. After lambasting the right for whatever nonsense is consuming them at the moment, sometimes in quite cutting terms, he can be relied upon to use his next column to blame it all on President Obama.

Notable position: Brooks endorsed same-sex marriage in 2003.

Quote: “It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.”

Reformist score: 5

Influence inside GOP: 5

TIM CARNEY

Bio: Carney is a senior columnist and blogger for the Washington Examiner.

Age: 34

Issues: A self-described “conservative populist,” Carney fumes at preferential government treatment of any kind. This leads him not only to lambaste the green energy subsidies in the Obama stimulus, but also to propose busting up the largest banks, taking the wood ax to corporate welfare, and slashing farm subsidies. He also leans anti-intervention in foreign policy, though not to the same degree as Daniel Larison.

He is strongly anti-nanny state; he savaged Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban as well as rules proposed by the local D.C. government to ban food trucks from most of downtown.

Notable position: Carney has a suspicion of the money politics of the political system one rarely sees on the right. “Both parties are beholden to their donors,” he says.

Quote: “I’ve been writing on the same themes for seven years, and since the 2012 election Republicans have been more receptive than ever before.”

Reformist score: 6

Influence inside GOP: 3

ROSS DOUTHAT

Bio: One of two New York Times house conservatives, Douthat was previously a blogger and senior editor for the Atlantic. A Catholic convert and Harvard graduate, he lives in Washington, D.C.

Age: 33

Issues: A genteel, paternalistic social conservative, Douthat alternates between lengthy theological noodling, handwringing over the evolution of societal norms, and increasingly aggressive criticism of the Republican Party, especially its economic agenda. He has moderated his social conservatism, correctly perceiving that the gay-bashers of the 2004 election are going to be remembered as Bull Connors in the very near future. But he remains anti-abortion, anti-porn, and skeptical of gay marriage, if resigned to its inevitability.

His reformist bona fides were cemented with the 2008 publication of Grand New Party, coauthored with Reihan Salam. Douthat argues that the party is largely captive to its wealthy donor class, and that its recent socially liberal turn (toward immigration reform and softening opposition to same-sex marriage) is as likely as not to backfire by alienating social conservatives without winning anyone else over.

Quote: “A party elite can rebel against its own base successfully, but only if there’s a bigger base waiting to be built.”

Reformist score: 5

Influence inside GOP: 5

DAVID FRUM

Bio: Another former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Frum is now a columnist and blogger for the Daily Beast.

Age: 52

Issues: Frum has always been somewhat critical of the conservative movement; his 1994 book Dead Right attacked much of extant Republicanism while trying to defend a pure conservatism. In a 2010 article, he chastised Republicans for refusing to negotiate with Democrats over Obamacare, forcing the Dems to pass it on a party line and thereby foregoing any chance at influencing the final policy. He was subsequently fired from his position at the American Enterprise Institute. This turned him into a full-fledged reformist; he embraced gay marriage, pushes for some gun control, and worries about income inequality.

He still identifies himself as a conservative Republican and remains a hardline hawk on foreign affairs, especially with respect to Israel. But with his dramatic shift to the left on domestic policy and his relentless criticism of the GOP, his main audience now is among liberals, and few conservatives pay him heed.

Notable quality: Frum is a distant cousin of Paul Krugman.

Quote: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

Reformist score: 7

Influence inside GOP: 2

MICHAEL GERSON/PETER WEHNER

Bios: A former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, Gerson has since become a Washington Post columnistWehner, who also wrote speeches for Bush, is a former Weekly Standard columnist who now writes for Commentary and the Post.

Ages: 48/52

Issues: Though in the past these two sometimes criticized the right, neither one really qualified as a reformist until after the 2012 election, cemented by the March publication of a cowritten Commentary article
entitled “How to Save the Republican Party.” In the piece they proposed economic policies more fo

cused on middle- working-class families. They also advocated ending corporate welfare and breaking up the biggest banks, immigration reform, pivoting away from Randian hyper-individualism, softening their message on gay marriage, and accepting the conclusions of science. This report was widely read enough to be quoted in the official RNC “autopsy,” the analysis of why the party lost the 2012 election.

Quote: “First, and most important, is focusing on the economic concerns of working- and middle-class Americans, many of whom now regard the Republican Party as beholden to ‘millionaires and billionaires’ and as wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans.”

Reformist score: 5

Influence inside GOP: 6

DANIEL LARISON

Bio: Based in Texas and sporting a PhD in Byzantine history, Larison writes primarily about foreign affairs for the American Conservative, a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan.

Age: 34

Issues: An acerbic critic of American interventionism in both parties, Larison has few fans among the GOP’s neoconservative wing. However, his brand of paleoconservatism is on the upswing among the more libertarian-minded Republicans, most recently on display during Rand Paul’s famous filibuster.

He is a bit skeptical of the reformist camp, which he says is “heavily focused on domestic issues” and has not fully reckoned with the disastrous failure of the Iraq War. But he has a loyal, if small, readership among the Republican rank-and-file, and with President Obama’s relative hawkishness, his views on foreign policy have some chance of percolating to the top in 2016.

Notable fact: Larison was once a member of the League of the South.

Quote: “Prolonged, costly wars always become unpopular, but this has not seemed to diminish popular enthusiasm for entering into new ones.”

Reformist score: 7

Influence inside GOP: 2

YUVAL LEVIN

Bio: An Israeli-born former policy staffer for George W. Bush, he is the founding editor of National Affairs, the successor to Irving Kristol’s Public Interest.

Age: 35

Issues: Levin is a sort of ideological gunnery sergeant for the Republican Party. His specialty is urbane, elegantly written articles decrying liberal statism and putting an intellectual sheen on, say, cutting social insurance. This sometimes takes him in interesting directions; his manifesto “Beyond the Welfare State” started with a clarion call against liberal intellectual exhaustion and ended with a proposal to, in essence, replace Medicare with Obamacare.

His magazine occasionally runs heterodox pieces on subjects like patent reform and reducing income inequality, but for the most part Levin hews to the conservative Republican agenda and his role is to provide the party with shells that will fire. He will be a person to watch; should the party consensus change, he will be the first to demonstrate it.

Quote: “Again and again in our history, passionate waves of resistance to authority have rattled our politics, while periods of trust in the state have been rare.”

Reformist score: 3

Influence inside GOP: 10

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS

Bio: Pethokoukis is a blogger for the American Enterprise Institute and occasional National Review columnist. Previously he was a columnist for Reuters and U.S. News & World Report.

Age: 44

Issues: A list of reformists made in 2011 would probably not have included Pethokoukis. But within the last eighteen months or so, he has undergone a rather startling evolution on most of his economic positions, morphing from a budget-slashing inflation paranoiac in the mold of Paul Ryan and Herbert Hoover to a more heterodox right-of-center economic pundit.

This means that he supports a nominal growth target for the Federal Reserve and favors increased high-skill immigration; he opposes a balanced budget amendment, tight money, and a flat tax.

Quote: “Free enterprise, free markets, competition, and choice: All are timeless economic principles, but their application can and should evolve with changing economic circumstances.”

Reformist score: 6

Influence inside GOP: 4

RAMESH PONNURU

Bio: A longtime senior editor of National Review and Bloomberg View columnist, Ponnuru also works at the American Enterprise Institute.

Age: 38

Issues: Ponnuru was once a hardline social conservative. His 2006 book, Party of Death, was an anti-Democrat polemic. But as Republicans’ electoral fortunes ebbed and ebbed, he has become a more confident, innovative voice. He favors turning away from Republicans’ beloved marginal tax cuts toward more family- and middle-class-friendly policy, such as cutting the payroll tax and increasing the child tax credit, though he remains quite socially conservative at heart.

He has probably the greatest influence out of all the serious reformists. After the 2012 Republican shellacking, he was invited to their retreat in Williamsburg to deliver a speech based on his bracing explanation of GOP defeat, “The Party’s Problem.” With the exception of Yuval Levin, no one else can match that level of respectful attention.

Notable position: Ponnuru is one of the few monetary policy doves on the right, pushing for more Federal Reserve action against the goldbuggery and hard money fetishism of the Tea Party wing.

Quote: “Romney was not a drag on the Republican party. The Republican party was a drag on him.”

Reformist score: 8

Influence inside GOP: 9

JAMES POULOS

Bio: By far the strangest member of the reformist caucus, Poulos is a producer at HuffPost Live, and writes for Vice and Forbes.

Age: 33

Issues: Poulos is stylistically wild, both in prose and in person; he has moderated himself somewhat now, but he has previously indulged a tendency for elaborate metaphysical exegesis, colossal sideburns, and brightly colored suits. He favors an eclectic bunch of reformist causes—things like restraining the surveillance state, “beating back” the prison-industrial complex, and breaking up the largest banks.

But where he stands out most among the reformist crowd is his cultural criticism, which sometimes leans Jonathan Franzen-esque in its suspicion of capitalism’s side effects. (A recent column was titled “Clubbed by Growth.”) His best work of late is analysis of the increasing domination of political journalism by data-obsessed wonks: “In the wonkocracy, your human being is little more than a wisp of poetry, something that might be nice to whisper about tipsily over a plate of sea urchin foam, but something no professional would try to make room for in their work on policy.”

Notable distinction: Possibly uniquely among right-leaning pundits, Poulos is frontman and guitarist for a rock band, Black Hi-Lighter.

Quote: “Being a political pundit is actually like fronting a band. You suck at both for pretty much identical reasons.”

Reformist score: 8

Influence inside GOP: 1

AVIK ROY

Bio: A former health care policy adviser for the Romney campaign, Roy writes for Forbes and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Age: 40

Issues: Roy writes almost entirely about health care, which makes him a rare breed indeed in conservative circles. “There was not a single session about health care at CPAC,” he sighs. Despite years of work, he and his fellow conservative health care wonks have yet to come up with a feasible alternative to Obamacare that would solve the problem of the uninsured sick, largely because most of their best ideas are contained within the law already.

However, he is unfailingly respectful and polite, and eschews the bitter resentment of the Republican base, which has made him a popular guest on left-leaning TV. “Politics is not the forum to change the culture,” he says.

Notable history: Roy got his start along with Josh Barro guest-blogging for Reihan Salam.

Quote: “The thoroughness of the Republican defeat in 2012 opened a lot of people’s eyes.”

Reformist score: 5

Influence inside GOP: 5

REIHAN SALAM

Bio: The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, Salam has probably the most eclectic intellect among the reformists. He currently writes for Reuters and National Review; previously he’s worked for the New America Foundation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Atlantic.

Age: 33

Issues: Like Douthat (his coauthor for Grand New Party) and Ponnuru, Salam favors a more explicitly pro-middle-class agenda than what is currently in vogue among Republicans. This includes tax reform, increased immigration, and some sort of workable replacement for Obamacare, as well as more esoteric proposals like ending the favorable treatment of debt in the tax code.

Notable quality: In person, Salam is almost impossible to keep pace with. Presented with a question, he tends to tackle it from six different directions simultaneously, developing arguments and picking holes in all of them in real time.

Quote: “Glenn Beck … is good for the country because he gives the small fraction of cable-watching American adults who are seriously alarmed by the threat of communism taking hold in the United States the sense that they are being listened to, and my instinct is that this will keep them from embracing more extreme views.”

Reformist score: 7

Influence inside GOP: 5

The post Reformish Conservatives appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Turnaround: Third World
Lessons for First World Growth
by Peter Blair Henry
Basic Books, 240 pp.

Turnaround is a book heavily focused on macroeconomic policy issues covering fiscal and monetary austerity along with the “Washington Consensus”—an oft-derided ten-point set of policy prescriptions for economies in crisis, so described by economist John Williamson because the criteria were recommended by D.C.-based organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the Treasury Department, and the World Bank. As such, Turnaround is a welcome addition to a global development literature that has recently spent much of its time either discussing microeconomic issues at the one end—like the multi-award-winning Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty—and millennia-spanning work on the historical determinants of wealth like Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty at the other. Besides providing a happy middle ground, Henry has produced one of a dwindling number of papers in the American Economic Review and can also be understood by readers who haven’t passed advanced classes in statistics and algebra.

Henry takes on institutional determinists’ view that economic policymaking and performance is largely preordained by a country’s past. He reprises his argument in the American Economic Review, noting that while Barbados and Jamaica shared very similar colonial histories, between 1960 and 2000 Barbados had per capita GDP growth of 2.2 percent compared to Jamaica’s 0.8 percent. Populist Jamaican politicians drove their economy into the ground while disciplined Bajan leaders kept their country on the straight and narrow through careful spending and controlled monetary and wage policies—a matter of choice rather than historical destiny.

There are other good reasons to think that Henry’s skepticism is justified. After all, North and South Korea and East and West Germany shared similar histories before they were torn apart—and have had dramatically different economic trajectories since. In the best-selling Why Nations Fail, authors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson describe
China as an economy where growth will eventually hit a limit. Maybe so, but the quality of life enjoyed by the average Chinese citizen is much higher now than it was three decades ago, thanks in part to historically unprecedented economic growth over that time.

Nonetheless, while there’s bathwater to be thrown out, there’s still a baby in the institutional tub. Turnaround suggests that applying market interest rates, free exchange, openness to trade and finance, privatization, and liberalization in Latin America has lifted the region’s growth rates. Critics, Henry notes, will argue that the region still didn’t achieve growth rates anywhere near Asian miracle performance, but that “the germane comparison is not of Latin America to Asia, but of post-reform Latin America to itself before the onset of reform.” One is tempted to ask why. Might it be (pace Henry) that deep historical factors do at least somewhat constrain long-term growth rates in the region?

When it comes to policy choices, Henry is no market purist or purveyor of universal shock therapy. “Governments that adopt and maintain market-friendly reforms can deliver ongoing improvements to the material well-being of their people,” he notes, but in his view “market friendly” doesn’t necessarily mean the wholesale destruction of regulations. Nor does it require significant currency devaluation or budget cuts, except when they are forced by the depth of a country’s economic crisis. Henry suggests, for example, that the current eurozone penchant for fiscal compacts that demand huge budget cuts and tax increases is over the top. The IMF World Economic Outlook suggested late last year that if governments weren’t spending during this time of immense slack in the economy, they were just destroying growth. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, urged flexibility and restraint when it came to budget cutting last year, which Henry calls “eminently sensible.”

Turning to market-friendly policies, Henry dislikes the effort to create domestic industrialization using tariff barriers and subsidies. He suggests—rightly—that this tactic was a dismal failure across much of Latin America and Africa, and he fingers it as a cause of the 1980s debt crisis in those regions.

At the same time, in keeping with the moderate tone of his book, Henry notes that South Korea industrialized on the back of only partial liberalization. Economists including Dani Rodrik from Harvard and Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University go further, arguing that expanding the manufacturing base of a country, as South Korea did, is key to development despite the fact that it goes against free-trade norms. Once again, the truth probably lies somewhere in the messy middle, and “disciplined” industrial policy might be quite hard to identify in advance.

Indeed, given that some of the most successful countries in the world in terms of economic growth involve active government intervention in favor of cartels (e.g., South Korea) or where the government owned majority shares in large chunks of the economy from housing stock to airlines (Singapore) or where the country is still officially communist (China, Vietnam), it would be hard to argue that free markets are necessary—or even particularly effective—for development.

Still, in the end, it is often hard to argue too strongly with Henry’s thoughtful stances. Not least, there is surely a lot of truth in his contention that countries that engaged with the global economy rather than turning their back on it did better. Again, he concludes, “in debating the best method of promoting prosperity, we should not ask if the Washington Consensus worked or failed, but which elements from the menu of potential policies have worked in which contexts.” Policies surely do matter: maintaining broad openness to trade and finance while limiting government borrowing from banks and bond markets is a recipe for better performance, certainly on the margins.

Which is not to say that every stance Henry takes is similarly reasonable. The evidence he provides linking stronger stock market performance to future economic performance is, at the very least, weakly presented. While Turnaround does show that stock markets respond well to moderate reform programs, we don’t have to look too far from home to doubt the prognosticatory power of the exchange. After all, the S&P was at all-time highs in 2000 and approaching them again by 2007. Neither run-up presaged fair economic sailing ahead.

But on one final point, Henry’s conclusion is spot on. The strength of developing economies that used to be mired in debt and poor policies is increasingly important to rich countries that are now drowning in red ink and struggling with policy reform themselves. “The future prosperity of countries like the United States, Germany and Japan depends crucially on the continued high performance of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and beyond.” If there’s one clear example of a turnaround in global economics, this is it. And however it was that the rest of the world got richer, that they did so is one of the best things to happen to the West in a long time.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience: Buy from Amazon.com.

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Higher Education in the Digital Age, a slim and highly readable volume, is built around Bowen’s Tanner Lectures at Stanford University and includes reactions from four astute observers, Stanford President John Hennessy, Harvard education professor Howard Gardner, Columbia humanities scholar Andrew Delbanco, and Daphne Koller, president of the for-profit online education company Coursera. The collection of voices provides a thoughtful and provocative discussion of the emergence of online education, which Hennessy says is hitting colleges and universities with the force of a “tsunami.”

Higher Education
in the Digital Age
by William G. Bowen
Princeton University Press, 200 pp.

Supporters of online learning argue that it has the potential to pull off a higher education hat trick: reduce costs, raise learning outcomes, and reduce inequalities. Bowen, an early skeptic, now declares himself a “convert,” though one who adopts a measured tone. “I regard the prospects as promising, but also challenging,” he suggests.

Early in his career, Bowen helped identify the “cost disease” facing labor-intensive industries such as higher education and the performing arts, which have found it difficult to raise productivity. Bowen invokes Cornell economist Robert Frank’s observation: “While productivity gains have made it possible to assemble cars with only a tiny fraction of the labor that was once required, it still takes four musicians nine minutes to perform Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, just as it did in the 19th century.” To make matters worse, the wage premium for highly educated workers, like professors, has grown.

These increased costs are then passed on to students. And to add insult to injury, states have simultaneously been cutting back on the funding of public higher education, shifting the burden to students. In 1980, state appropriations accounted for 32 percent of revenue at public colleges and universities, but by 2009 the share had fallen to 18 percent. Taken together, the College Board reports, in the last thirty years in-state tuition and fees at public four-year institutions have increased a whopping 257 percent, after adjusting for inflation.

No wonder, then, that colleges and universities are looking to online education for a technological fix to the cost disease. If a professor can tape a series of lectures once and doesn’t need to physically show up twice a week to give essentially the same performances over and over again, she can teach additional subjects. And if thousands of students can watch lectures in their dorm room or at Starbucks, the need for new auditoriums and classrooms is reduced. Given the potential cost savings, it’s not surprising that universities are shifting to digital course offerings. The number of students taking at least one online class has increased from one in ten in 2002 to one in three today.

But will learning outcomes suffer as universities move to a greater reliance on online learning? Bowen argues that if online learning options are executed in the right way, outcomes won’t suffer, and, indeed, should improve. Particularly promising, he suggests, is the “hybrid” approach, which mixes online lectures with face-to-face “active learning” sessions. This method, called “flipping the classroom,” was found by one poll to receive 69 percent support from professors.

According to Bowen, the most rigorous study to date of online learning involves a randomized trial experiment of a “hybrid” statistics class designed by Carnegie Mellon University, taught mostly online with a once-a-week face-to-face question-and-answer session. The experiment involved 600 students, some of whom took the more expensive class in a traditional setting while others took less costly hybrid classes. The differences in completion rates and on tests were not statistically significant—and low-income students succeeded at comparable levels in the two sets of classes.

Moreover, Bowen suggests that once professors become accustomed to a new way of educating students, outcomes could actually improve. For one thing, online approaches allow for customized learning, in which students who provide the wrong answer to a question can receive immediate feedback and automated guidance on how to find the correct answer. Likewise, educators can receive feedback to improve their craft. As Coursera’s Koller notes, “We can now collect every click from tens of thousands of students and start analyzing what in our classes is working and what is not; what our students are confused about, and when they figure it out, what they did to reach that understanding.”

Finally, Bowen and other supporters suggest that digital learning can promote greater equality of opportunity in higher education. Any effort to reduce costs without reducing quality should be an enormous boon to low-income and working-class students, who have suffered under what Bowen calls the twin scissor blades of rising college prices and stagnant wages. And in theory, online learning could democratize access to star professors, who until recently were available only to students at elite institutions.

Online learning could also deal with the capacity problems at underfunded two-year institutions, providing access, for example, to the nearly 500,000 California community college students recently placed on course waiting lists. Students who work full-time can take advantage of the flexible scheduling that many online courses offer. Online classes can also open up colleges to students from across the world, supporters argue, noting that two-thirds of students in online classes are not in the U.S.

But skeptics—including Delbanco and Gardner—wonder if the hype is too good to be true. In education, there is often a trade-off between quality and cost. Just as an expensive ten-person seminar usually provides more meaningful learning opportunities than a 300-person lecture class, learning may also suffer in cheaper online classes designed for thousands. A 2011 Columbia University study of 51,000 Washington State Community College students, for example, found that completion rates were 8 percentage points lower for students in online classes than for those in traditional classes. Delbanco notes that while the six-year graduation rate at public four-year colleges is an unimpressive 58 percent, the completion rate for students in what are called massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is a dismal 10 percent.

The low rate of completion for MOOCs surely reflects the fact that students lack skin in the game (MOOCs are usually free and not for credit), and Bowen is careful to advocate the hybrid approach. But the greater the proportion of professor time required, the greater the cost. As Bowen notes, the flipped classroom model may not save resources “and can even lead to higher costs.”

Moreover, online learning may lend itself more readily to certain subjects, particularly those in which there is only one right answer. As Bowen cautions, the study of the Carnegie Mellon class found positive outcomes in the instruction of statistics; an online course in Herman Melville might not produce comparable results. Colleges are not simply in the business of imparting skills; they also want to provoke students into contemplating deeper questions about what constitutes a fulfilling life. A smartphone has the answers to all the questions, Gardner says, “except the most important ones.”

Finally, the equity implications of online learning are less clear than proponents would suggest. Indeed, there may be parallels between today’s embrace of online learning and the nation’s earlier foray into community college education. In the twentieth century, there was enormous enthusiasm for the community college model, which was envisioned as a cheaper way of providing education to larger numbers of students. There is no doubt that community colleges greatly expanded access, providing low-income and working-class students with new opportunities for convenient classes at more affordable prices than distant four-year residential colleges. But there were trade-offs as well, as Bowen himself has vividly documented. Not living on campus, where “lateral learning” can take place between students, and being taught by less expensive adjunct professors, has reduced learning outcomes. Bowen’s ground-breaking work on “under-matching” finds that controlling for incoming preparation levels, completion rates are much lower for students who attend less selective colleges with fewer resources. He also finds evidence to suggest that honors college settings “that encourage close contact among students and between students and faculty members” lead to improved completion rates.

Over time, community colleges have become increasingly the province of the poor. Whereas wealthy students outnumber low-income students by fourteen to one at selective four-year colleges, low-income students outnumber wealthy students by two to one at community colleges. In our stratified system, students who have on average the least preparation are the most vulnerable and need the greatest attention—and they receive the fewest resources.

Online learning is coming to higher education one way or the other, and, like community colleges, has the exciting potential to expand opportunities. Bowen provides some important cautions: online learning needs to be coupled with face-to-face encounters, and certain disciplines may never fully lend themselves to the digital revolution. But with all the hype, there is a danger that his caveats will be forgotten and that online learning will become a tempting way to educate low-income students on the cheap. In the coming years, one worries whether cyberspace will become the new place where the students who need the most once again get the least.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience: Buy from Amazon.com.

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College (Un)bound:
The Future of Higher Education
and What It Means for Students
by Jeffrey J. Selingo
New Harvest, 256 pp.

Nearly 80 percent of American college students attend state colleges and universities, but per student state support for state colleges and universities has plummeted. In 1987 tuition accounted for about a quarter of college revenue. Today’s students pay just over half of all operating funds for state colleges and universities through tuition. Annual state funding per enrolled student dropped from $10,195 in 2002 to $5,900 in 2012.

It was not always thus: From the 1950s through the ’70s, states generously funded public higher education. During the ’80s and ’90s, states were anxious to avoid tax hikes but were forced to devote more and more public money to fund state programs, particularly employee pensions and Medicaid. Colleges also cost more to run. Every year, despite changes in public funding, American institutions of higher learning spent more on science labs, administrative staff and student services, and employee and student health care. One of the solutions to these fiscal problems was to raise tuition at public colleges.

And then the spending problem got worse. Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor at large for the Chronicle for Higher Education, calls the early 2000s the “lost decade” of college financing in his new book College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students. At least part of the reason college got more expensive is that Americans were willing to pay more in tuition; parents rich from equity on their overvalued houses demanded more and more amenities at their children’s universities. As a result, Selingo writes, “college leaders spent the last decade chasing high achieving students, showering them with scholarships to snatch them from competitors, and going deep into debt to build lavish residence halls, [and] recreational facilities.” Colleges were getting less money from public sources but spending more, convinced that the gravy train would continue forever. Within months of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, however, college endowments lost billions. This was the beginning of the financial crisis that became the Great Recession—and the end of the university of endless excess.

Selingo argues that financial problems leave universities ripe for disruption, with Americans going elsewhere for their college education and college becoming “unbound” as students need no longer be, as he says, “tethered to one campus.” More than six million students are currently enrolled in online courses. There are now massive open online courses (MOOCs), in which universities and technology companies partner to design courses for thousands of students. Selingo also discusses how two colleges, the traditional Southern New Hampshire University and the newly developed Western Governors University (see John Gravois, “The College For-profits Should Fear,” Washington Monthly, September/October 2011), are experimenting with competency-based online associate’s degree programs, in which students are credited as soon as they show mastery of a subject rather than having to spend a set number of hours in class. Selingo agrees with Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen’s assertion that “higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation” (online colleges, hybrid online/in person courses, vocational skills offered directly by professional organizations, YouTube videos in specific academic subjects, and so on) and use technology to “find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions.”

For a book about complicated policy and economic trends, this one is very well told (and the subject should be familiar to readers of this magazine). Selingo moves seamlessly from legal and regulatory decisions to the real experiences of students. Each chapter begins with an anecdote to illustrate the trend he addresses. His section on student debt begins with the story of a woman who attended a private college and paid for it largely with loans; she now works three part-time jobs to make payments on $120,000 in debt. A chapter on alternative models for higher education begins with the story of a fifty-seven-year-old security guard earning a degree in political science using a program called StraighterLine, which provides college credits for only $99 a month (see Kevin Carey, “College for $99 a Month,” Washington Monthly, September/October 2009).

Selingo doesn’t believe that MOOCs and StraighterLine will themselves necessarily be the colleges of the future; rather, the proliferation of such initiatives, coupled with the withdrawal of public support for traditional colleges, suggests that alternative delivery methods will simply direct higher education in the foreseeable future. Employers might like this sort of thing, Selingo speculates, because unbound course credit could be earned like a kind of badge, indicating that a potential employee has mastered a certain skill or is qualified to perform a specific task. Selingo writes that technology will give “students more options to take classes outside of their home institution, accelerating the pace to completing a degree, or serving as a supplement to a face-to-face course.”

Well, that’s one way to look at it. But if we’re expanding access to college through alternative, technology-based systems, is this really expanding access to college or providing a different experience entirely? Perhaps the biggest flaw of this book is that while Selingo offers a very good take on what declining state funding and innovative technology could mean for both colleges and students, he fails to consider what this “revolution” in higher education might mean for American society as a whole.

“The college of the future will certainly be different than the one of today,” he explains, “but robots will not replace professors in the classroom anytime soon. Harvard will remain Harvard.” He estimates that 500 or so of America’s 4,000 colleges have large enough endowments to remain unchanged by this revolution. But isn’t that a problem? If Princeton and Williams will be unaffected by these trends, what’s really going on here?

It seems that the future won’t unbind higher education for everyone—just for the working and middle classes. That’s because rich people will always be able to afford traditional colleges. America’s affluent parents recognize that the actual point of college is only partially about earning four credits in microeconomics and more about drinking with your roommate and talking about philosophy until four a.m., working together with classmates on problem sets in the library, negotiating a new social scene, and falling in love. College students make friends, cultivate interests, and develop connections through which they eventually get jobs. Those experiences cannot be replicated through badges.

But these experiences may just be upper-class luxuries. A dichotomy already exists between America’s well-funded and prestigious colleges and the rest of them. The experience the average student has at Morrisville State College, for instance, is vastly different from the experience of a student at Columbia or Swarthmore. This is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Prior to World War II, learning beyond high school was unbound too. Education and training for most people didn’t take place on a traditional college campus: for most of the nineteenth century, a university education was essentially restricted to the American rich; the rest of the country received post-secondary training in the form of trade schools and apprenticeships. Under the new system it appears we would be returning to this two-tiered system: traditional college for the moneyed, and alternative training for everyone else.

This shift may be inevitable given the relentless cost pressures facing traditional colleges and universities, but whether it proves to be a healthy change for American society remains to be seen. Under the rosy scenario described by education futurists like Selingo, entrepreneurs will develop high-quality technology that engages and challenges students and allows more of them to obtain work-ready degrees and credentials quickly and cheaply. But there is a darker scenario in which the less prestigious schools that make up half to three-quarters of four-year colleges either disappear altogether or are transformed into something very different. The students who would have gone to these schools and lack the income, preparedness, or smarts to get into the remaining higher-prestige institutions will be forced to take the equivalent of their freshman and sophomore years online. They may well find the format lonely and difficult, and then conclude that college isn’t really for them—never having experienced the real thing.

Given the current 90 percent dropout rate in most MOOCs, an 8-point gap in completion rates between traditional and online courses offered by community colleges, the 6.5 percent graduation rate even at the respected Western Governors University, and the ambiguity of many other higher education reform ideas, there’s good reason to think that an unbound future might not be so great.

The best American innovations in education were the Land-Grant College Act of 1862, which helped create a system of public universities, and the GI Bill of 1944, which ensured that an entire generation had the money to attend college. This widespread access to the college experience enabled people from working-class backgrounds to advance en masse into professional jobs that required reasoning and logic and extensive knowledge of the world. The question is whether or not we will continue this trend or simply give up and say that a few online classes and specialized training are good enough for the majority of Americans.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience: Buy from Amazon.com.

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The Unwinding:
An Inner History of
the New America
by George Packer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 448 pp.

The people who believe this superstitious nonsense are usually the ones cutting school funding and refusing to fix the roads. As the United States slips down the global competitiveness and education indexes and as income inequality rises, they insist that the country is great while refusing to pay for the things that make it so. Ironically, this very faith in American infallibility enables some of our most destructive public acts. Since America is exceptional, Republicans reason, why not use the threat to default on its financial obligations as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations? Defaulting would probably trigger a global financial disaster, but the far right seems to believe this would not happen, or that if it did, it would wash away our profligate sins. Yet in the heat of the debt ceiling farce of 2011, Standard & Poor’s, by downgrading the U.S. credit rating, served notice that moist sentiments like destiny do not trump cause and effect. A recent survey on American competitiveness in the Economist archly noted, “This is the America that China’s leaders laugh at.”

On the other hand, acknowledging that the United States is not immune to decline is not the same as saying it is in decline. Americans are living longer than they have ever done. Their universities (if not their primary and secondary schools) are the envy of the world, dominating the annual global rankings. Despite the dysfunction in Washington, America’s political infrastructure is broadly sound, featuring an independent judiciary, a free press, and reliably peaceful transitions of power every four years. The U.S. enjoys unrivaled military power and influence in global institutions. Its economy is the largest in the world and continues to grow, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching its highest-ever point in March.

The economic collapse of 2008 and the accompanying Great Recession have colored many conversations about a creeping American decline. But as Robert Kagan argued in an influential essay in the New Republic last year, each generation since the Second World War has worried about receding American influence. “Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s,” he writes, “with Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, and the energy crisis, cannot really believe that our present difficulties are unrivaled.” And this is to say nothing of the generations that endured the Great Depression, the financial panic of 1873, and the Civil War. Kagan contends that the only thing as reliable as the perennial diagnosis of American decline is American resurgence.

Tell that to a man who has lost his job, or his home, or his idealism, says George Packer. In The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Packer puts aside economic indicators and strategic assessments to approach the topic of American decline from the most intimate of angles: the personal profile. The book follows three representative Americans: an African American assembly-line worker from Youngstown, Ohio; a truck stop owner and biofuels visionary from North Carolina; and a disillusioned Washington insider. Each section of the book begins with a collection of headlines and sound bites to give a flavor of the times.

The kaleidoscopic presentation, inspired by John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. novels, draws on Packer’s years of reporting at the New Yorker, and it takes some getting used to. Yet by the book’s end, Packer seems to have found a new way to tell a familiar story, which he describes as the slow unraveling during his lifetime of institutions like midwestern factories and California universities. The Unwinding also echoes the symphonic rage of the celebrated television series The Wire, which fictionalized the demise of the American city. Packer offers a profoundly dispiriting picture of the United States: all three of his main characters are crushed, in their own way. Yet each narrative ends on a hopeful note.

Rather than getting on a soapbox, Packer takes out his notepad. The Unwinding is, among other things, a tremendous work of reporting that pushes past abstractions and recycled debates to look despair straight in the face. Throughout, Packer offers almost no editorial comment, an approach that has its downsides. Instead he tells stories, and readers must make of them what they will. Packer is not an “America is crumbling like Rome” pessimist; he acknowledges the cyclical nature of boom and bust in this country’s history. The book’s optimistic ending suggests that he believes the United States will rise again. But the preceding chapters show that it is now at one of its periodic low points.

One of The Unwinding’s strengths is Packer’s refusal to romanticize earlier periods of American prosperity. He does not simplistically pine for a return to the 1950s and ’60s, when a factory job could support a family and companies took care of their workers. While describing the death of Youngstown, a moribund steel city, he notes that in brighter years its industry was characterized by “rapacious growth, brutal conditions, segregation of mill jobs by ethnicity and race, unalterable hostility to unions, [and] constant strife.” Tammy Thomas, the featured factory worker from Youngstown, assembled electrical components at a Packard plant for nineteen years before accepting a buyout in 2006. “The work didn’t destroy your body like in the steel mills,” she says, “but over time it beat you down.” Packer suggests that the era of American manufacturing is over, but he doesn’t argue whether this is a boon or a tragedy: it is simply a fact that has altered the trajectories of millions of lives.

The story’s biofuels entrepreneur, Dean Price, owned several truck stops and fast-food franchises before founding an alternative energy start-up. (Its prospects were still uncertain as The Unwinding went to press.) Price’s story is a case study in the way big-box competitors like Walmart and Target undercut small businesses with cheap labor and cheap wares, all while killing town centers and encouraging sprawl. Packer also follows a struggling Tampa man who scraped by on $8.50 an hour unloading inventory at a Walmart store, only to lose his job after casual grousing led to a confrontation with a manager.

Packer’s most striking character is Jeff Connaughton, a Washington power player broken by a system that slowly destroyed his idealism. Connaughton was a self-designated “Joe Biden guy”: inspired as a student by a speech Biden gave at the University of Alabama in 1979, Connaughton eventually worked on his 1988 presidential campaign and as a Senate staffer. What follows is one of the most damning portraits of the current vice president you will ever read, a master class in disillusionment from public service. Packer’s Biden is an ungrateful phony, shilling sentiment like a huckster sells miracle cures. Behind the scenes,

he ignored you, intimidated you, sometimes humiliated you, took no interest in your advancement, and never learned your name. “Hey, Chief,” he’d say, or “How’s it going, Cap’n,” unless he was ticked off at you, in which case he’d employ one of his favorite terms for male underlings: “dumb fuck.” “Dumb fuck over here didn’t get me the briefing materials I needed.” It was both noun and adjective: “Is the event leader a Democrat or a Republican? Or are you too dumb fuck to know?”

Connaughton’s first assignment on Biden’s 1988 campaign was to bring in twenty new donors. Thus he quickly learned the ubiquity of money in politics, Washington’s capture by business lobbyists, and the nature of a transactional relationship: all back scratching and IOUs, rarely or never friendship or concern. His low point was working to keep monied interests from diluting the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in 2010. At the story’s end, Connaughton begins to write a book, which has since been published. It is called The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins.

If Washington is corroded by dollars and hacks, Packer shows that it is also beset by the rise of the total-war conservative. The breed’s avatar is Newt Gingrich, who decades ago field-tested many of the tactics that have dragged today’s Republican Party to the edge of the cliffs of insanity. Gingrich realized that voters “got their politics on TV, and they were not persuaded by policy descriptions or rational arguments, but responded to symbols and emotions. Donors were more likely to send money if they could be frightened or angered, if the issues were framed as simple choices between good and evil.” Thanks to these toxic methods, today we have right-wing senators insinuating on no evidence that their opponents are in the pocket of North Korea, and the moderate Democratic president is pilloried as a socialist radical with a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.

Packer’s narrative is literary rather than prescriptive: he does not offer policy proposals or routes back to greatness. Like a great political novel, The Unwinding reveals a problem with unprecedented clarity but leaves readers to find a solution. Whatever one’s views on American decline generally, it is difficult to put the book down without a distinct feeling of unease and a conviction that we can do better. And yet if it is a story of despair, it is also a story of resilience. Packer’s subjects make good and bad decisions, enjoy lucky breaks and misfortune, eke it out, give in, and try harder. The lives they lead are worth describing in detail, not only because they are instructive but also because they are beautiful.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience: Buy from Amazon.com.

The post The Great Unraveling appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Strange Rebels:
1979 and the Birth of the
21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Basic Books, 432 pp.

The genesis of this marvelous book was in January 2002, when Caryl happened upon the Behzad Book Store in Kabul. After the collapse of the Taliban regime, the Afghan capital was efflorescing. But for Caryl it was the past that caught his eye. Old cars. Eight-track tape players. Intact vinyl records in the basement of the old U.S. embassy. But the best time capsule of all was a local bookstore, where Caryl was transfixed by a wall of postcards showing an Afghanistan in happier times. One image in particular haunted our foreign correspondent. It was of a glamorous woman sitting on the grass: “Her loose, flowing dress was all folkloric swirls, purple and black, a fusion of 1970s psychedelia and ethnic chic. Her head was uncovered, and a cigarette was dangling from one casual hand.” What happened to her? he wondered. Why did the Westernizing, secular, sometimes even hedonistic Afghanistan and Iran vanish? What occurred in 1979 that led to such profound changes? Who were the counterrevolutionaries of 1979 who upended their societies and decisively shifted historical events?

Caryl identifies four key figures who were rebels with a cause. Each displayed a missionary zeal to promote either a restoration of religion (Catholicism and Islamism) or capitalism. Caryl singles out Pope John Paul II, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping as the authors of what amounted to a series of counterrevolutions against modern social engineering, either in the form of socialism, communism, or a ruthless authoritarian social order like Iran under the shah. In Poland, Europe’s most Catholic country, communism had always been a poor fit—in Stalin’s colorful phrase, it was rather like trying to put a saddle on a cow. The elevation of the Polish-born John Paul to the papacy and his subsequent visit to Poland in 1979 triggered a moral revolt against communist autocracy. In Iran, the ascetic Ayatollah Khomeini, too, drew on religion to topple the shah’s efforts to construct a modern Persian society in the heart of the Islamic Middle East. In what had become a decidedly unmerry England, Margaret Thatcher, who came from a Methodist household, tried to lead a capitalist insurgency against the social welfare state that was based on morality and the virtues of individual initiative, thrift, and self-reliance. Finally, in the wake of Mao’s death, the Chinese became, under Deng Xiaoping’s rule, what Mao had once scorned: capitalist roaders.

Caryl’s account offers very detailed and probing insights into each of these societies. He is hardly the first observer to note that the Iranian revolution had a cataclysmic effect upon the Middle East and Islam, but he explains with remarkable clarity why what might seem (to Westerners) an obscurantist ideology carries, or at least carried, great attractiveness. He notes that a number of young Iranians had turned to Marxism as a form of protest against the shah’s modernizing but repressive monarchy only to conclude that “adopting leftist ideologies merely meant exchanging one brand of imported Western intellectual tyranny for a different one.” In short order they began to look at religious thinkers who espoused anti-colonialism and national self-awareness.

The Iranian religious establishment had historically served as a source of opposition to the state. Khomeini’s innovation, however, was to move from opposition to argue that religious figures should actually oversee the state. In exile he formed a Combatant Clergy Association that inculcated young clerics with his precepts. They returned to Iran, where they disseminated his teachings on cassette recordings—a small but potent sign of how modern technology could effectively be deployed to spread medieval (and mostly mendacious) ideas about the true nature of Islam. As Caryl emphasizes, Khomeini’s imposition of an Islamic theocracy did not happen overnight. Instead, he proved to be a wily leader who capitalized on events such as the student seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979 to outmaneuver his nominal secular allies and more moderate religious figures to consolidate power—he had already announced the theory of clerical rule known as “guardianship of the jurisprudence” in Najaf in 1970—for his own camarilla. The consequences have been frightful both for Iran and its neighbors.

Khomeini was not the only religious leader preaching a return to traditional values. Caryl brilliantly chronicles the threat Pope John Paul posed to the communist bloc, emphasizing that he spoke not just for Poland but for the Eastern European nations in general. Caryl examines writings such as the papal encyclical Redemptor Hominis. It demonstrated the extent to which John Paul’s thinking was shaped by the horror of both Nazi concentration camps and the Stalinist dictatorship, prompting Caryl to conclude that it “displays a profound anxiety about the rising threat posed to individual human rights by various collectivist systems, including totalitarianism, imperialism, and colonialism.” The Soviet Union suffered an intellectual and moral defeat in Poland from the church no less than it experienced a military one in Afghanistan at the hands of militant Islam.

If John Paul and Khomeini were antipodes, then so too were Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. Caryl provides an insightful précis of Deng’s career, which involved several rises and falls from political grace before he finally ascended to lead China toward capitalism. Deng never shrank from viciousness, not in 1957 when he ran the Anti-Rightist Campaign that sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese to jails, concentration camps, or into exile, nor in 1989 when he presided over the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. But Caryl suggests that he always had a pragmatic streak—as he told a party assembly in 1961, “I don’t care if it’s a black cat or white cat. It’s a good cat if it catches mice.” Mao had identified Deng early on as a canny future leader of China. But that didn’t stop Mao—who, like Stalin, constantly feared that subordinates were plotting against him—from demoting Deng and subjecting him and his family to physical torments during the Cultural Revolution when the young Red Guard ran amok during the 1960s. After he backed the adoption of a hybrid capitalist system—a free market with the party remaining in control of the commanding political heights—Deng ushered in what Caryl says is justifiably termed the largest poverty-reduction program in history, and did “more than any other individual” to bring about the demise of Marxism as an idea.

What about the late Margaret Thatcher, depicted by Caryl as a kind of revolutionary in defense of tradition? Caryl displays a remarkable inside knowledge of British politics, down to Tory MP Norman Tebbit’s line on the hustings in 1979 that the Iron Lady was a talented leader in Westminster—“She’s the best man among them.” Caryl is very good at teasing out the intellectual background to Thatcher’s rise, noting that, unlike Ronald Reagan, she loved to wade into intellectual disputes about figures such as libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek and diligently read many classic economic texts. Caryl highlights the importance of a wealthy businessman named Anthony Fisher who figured out how to popularize the ideas of Hayek and Milton Friedman in England. He formed what was the equivalent of the American Enterprise Institute in London—the Institute for Economic Affairs. It was supposed to be the counterpart to the Fabian Society, which had, more or less, dominated intellectual thinking about the British economy for decades. “Socialism was spread in this way and it is time we reversed the process,” Fisher declared. According to Caryl, the choice that Britain faced in 1979 was between a “freer state that ensured personal liberties and economic initiative—or the one envisioned by Labour, where the state played an ever-increasing role. This was not the voice of Britain’s postwar consensus. This was something verifiably new.”

Whether Thatcher ever lived up to the hopes reposed in her by her early admirers is another matter. In painting Thatcher as a revolutionary, Caryl is probably at his weakest. To be sure, Caryl is quick to observe that Thatcher never attempted to topple the welfare state—she was too pragmatic for that. She did slash public outlays and curb the power of the unions and divest the state of ownership of many enterprises. Much of this was to the good, as even her detractors have begun to acknowledge. Writing in his memoirs, for example, the late Christopher Hitchens confessed that the “worst of ‘Thatcherism,’ as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.” What she did was to alter the fundamental direction of British politics, setting the stage for the man Caryl correctly deems, as have many others, her true disciple—Tony Blair. But whether that served Britain well over the decades is another matter. How well does Thatcherism serve Great Britain today? Is slashing the budget really the right answer during a recession or has it, in fact, compounded the United Kingdom’s difficulties? The country appears to be headed toward a third recession. Free market economics, at least the sort promulgated by Thatcher, have once more come into bad odor as the reckless side of capitalist speculation has become glaringly apparent.

Nevertheless, this is not the province of Caryl’s temerarious study. While 1989 will always loom as the more sensational year—when communist regimes, despite conservative predictions that they would always remain repressive dictatorships, toppled one after another—Caryl has made a very strong case indeed that 1979 was a pivotal year, one whose significance has perhaps not been adequately appreciated. His closing remarks alone about the lessons of 1979, which focus on the illusion that social and material advancement are inevitable, are worth the price of admission. In his book, then, Caryl has staged his own rebellion against humdrum writing and conventional analysis. It is a profound accomplishment.

If you are interested in purchasing this book, we have included a link for your convenience: Buy from Amazon.com.

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Out of Many, One:
Obama and the Third
American Political Tradition
by Ruth O’Brien
University of Chicago Press, 432 pp.

But there’s something about Barack Obama that makes people want to interpret him not just as a product of his time and political circumstances but also as a powerful theorist creating a politics of his own. This is common on the right, of course, where Newt Gingrich once asked, “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich was reflecting the work of Dinesh D’Souza, whose book (Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream) and movie (2016) depict Obama as an acolyte of quasi-Marxist postcolonial theory. Numerous books have looked at Obama’s theory of race, and in Reading Obama, the intellectual historian James T. Kloppenberg contributed an elegant account of the ideas that were in the air in Obama’s schooling and in Chicago, and of their debt to American pragmatism.

Ruth O’Brien, a political scientist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, makes a more expansive claim: Obama marks a third American political tradition, one that falls outside both the “Lockean” tradition of unfettered liberties that Louis Hartz celebrated in The Liberal Tradition in America in 1954 and also the civic-republican thread that more recent thinkers, among them E. J. Dionne and Michael Lind, have seen in the line running from Alexander Hamilton through the Progressives and FDR. (Essentially, this the tradition of an active government with a strong role in the economy.) Obama’s third way, according to O’Brien, is not the hyper-cautious centrism associated with the Washington lobbying group that bears the same name, but rather a commitment to democracy as process, to deliberation, to a kind of unity in diversity in which people are bound not by their identities but by participation in a continuous discourse.

O’Brien refers to this tradition as “Spinozan,” or, worse, “Deleuzo-Spinozan,” referring to the recent French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze revived academic interest in the seventeenth-century political thought of Baruch Spinoza, which bears rudimentary hints of the idea of democracy as a kind of never-ending deliberation—long before anything like modern democracy could be observed anywhere in Europe. On these shores, her Deleuzo-Spinozan line is represented by John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and the community organizer Saul Alinsky.

You’ll learn from Out of Many, One that O’Brien is brilliant and erudite, but you won’t learn much about Spinoza, Deleuze, or Arendt. O’Brien strings these and more obscure names together, as if names alone had meaning enough, in a style reminiscent of the philosopher Richard Rorty—a kind of writing that should bear a “Don’t try this at home” warning. In a typical sentence—“Drawing on Deleuzian and Spinozan ethics, Arendt’s Vita Activa, DuBois’s deconstruction of racial mechanization, and Dewey’s insistence on a plurality of perspectives, Obama asks American citizens to go beyond bipartisan discussion”—the names are just decoration for a banal observation. Dozens of sentences begin with phrases like “Obama believes” or “Obama knows” but are followed not by any evidence about Obama but rather a paraphrase of Deleuze, Arendt, or some other author of whom the president may or may not have ever heard. While more congenial than D’Souza’s interpretation, and probably closer to the truth, O’Brien’s Obama is no less a fictional character.

O’Brien is also a poor guide to the substance of Obama’s presidency. She praises Obama for supporting Elizabeth Warren’s ambition to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by appointing Warren’s deputy, Richard Cordray; a few pages later she lauds his diverse appointments to the federal bench. I’m as forgiving of the Obama administration as anyone who was never on its payroll, but even I can’t pretend that Obama supported Warren when he didn’t, or that his appointments to the federal judiciary are any kind of success—he hasn’t made enough of them, and he hasn’t fought to get his nominees confirmed. There are plenty of excuses, and no president executes well on everything, but by no definition can these be considered successes.

The deeper flaw here is the single-minded focus on Obama himself to the exclusion of the context, institutions, and other forces that shape the presidency. It’s a blind spot shared by the Obama haters like D’Souza (and the Republicans who were confident of a Mitt Romney presidency because everyone they know hates Obama), by the long-standing liberal skeptics such as Paul Krugman, and by liberals who cycled from enthusiasm to (predictable) disappointment.

O’Brien is right that Obama represents an American political tradition, though there’s no need to go back to seventeenth-century Rotterdam to find it. The focus on democratic process, reform, and an ideal of deliberative democracy has been shared by many of the less successful Democratic candidates (and a few Republicans, like Representative John Anderson in 1980) since the 1950s. It’s the tradition of what historian Sean Wilentz called the “beautiful losers,” beginning with Adlai Stevenson, and journalist Ron Brownstein called “wine track” candidates (people who talk about “new politics”) as opposed to the more electable “beer track” candidates like Bill Clinton (who focus more on basic economics than on the nature of politics). Obama’s passion has always seemed to be more for a richer and more collaborative form of politics than for any particular vision of economic justice.

Obama’s presidency has been the first real test of a politics focused on reform and democratic participation rather than traditional bipartisan bargaining—and it has failed. Over the last four years, American politics split sharply into the two primary traditions: the first a sort of hyper-Lockeanism represented not just by the Tea Party but even by Mitt Romney’s division of the country into “makers and takers,” the second a demand—driven by circumstances and crisis—for a much more active, expansive government role in the economy. Economic issues, once a natural zone of compromise, began to seem more like social issues, matters of irreconcilable absolutes. There wasn’t much room in the middle, and for a period, Obama’s discursive strategy seemed wholly irrelevant. Obama was pulled between trying to cut a “grand bargain” with an intransigent right and taking a fierce stance in favor of economic stimulus, job creation, and a publicly backed guarantee of health insurance. He did neither one well, although he somehow still survived to reelection.

Perhaps the whole approach was a mistake from the start, and Obama should have adopted an aggressive, ambitious posture to counter his opponents—or Hillary Clinton should have been president. Alternatively, one could argue that Obama didn’t invest enough energy in reform, process, and deliberative democracy. Imagine, for example, if instead of letting Congress figure out health reform, and instead of driving the policy from the White House (as many liberals contend he should have done), the administration had organized hundreds of mass community discussions, using the technology perfected in deliberations on topics such as the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, to involve tens of thousands of citizens in the questions of how (and even whether) to ensure universal access to health care and lower societal costs. It might not have worked, but it might have provided an alternative outlet to the raw anger of the Tea Party and the violent town hall congressional meetings of the summer of 2009. Nor did the administration live up to the promise to fundamentally change the power relationship among campaign donors, lobbyists, and government—but should we really be surprised that the most successful fund-raiser in modern political history would not ultimately be willing to shake things up?

Another possibility is that a crisis is simply the wrong moment for new politics. In a way, it’s miraculous that Obama was able to build the foundations for some very different approaches to governance, such as the Race to the Top education program, within the panicked, hateful environment of the economic crisis. Reading, for example, the recent report from the Republican National Committee on its party’s woes, one can see the effort to find a way out of the apocalyptic, all-or-nothing politics of 2009-2012, a politics that is unsustainable and out of equilibrium. As the political system slowly returns to balance, this might be the moment for a fresh politics, a new relationship between citizens and government, and a chance for Obama’s mode of politics—which, after all, reflects a deep American tradition—to show its strengths.

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When Kathleen felt a lump in her right breast she began a journey that millions have experienced—or, sadly, will experience. After a painful biopsy and other tests confirmed it was cancer, my wife was thrown into a cauldron of tears, doubt, and fear for herself and her loved ones. Our two daughters were then just eight and twelve.

Like many cancer patients, Kathleen also experienced a stranglehold of guilt. Was it something she did or didn’t do that fed the tumor? Was it the meat in our diet? Our water? The air? Her genes? I assured her that we couldn’t be at fault. We had banned soda pop and anything with high-fructose corn syrup from our house more than a decade before. We tried to eat organic food, we were transitioning to more vegetarian fare, and she did yoga and took regular walks. We didn’t even have cable.

After a test showed that Kathleen didn’t have the BRCA breast cancer gene, her surgeon, Dr. Sonya Sharpless, suggested that environmental factors might be implicated. But what could they be? Kathleen had already thrown out a bevy of household cleaning products and plastic containers.

Then she discovered the work of the Breast Cancer Fund, a San Francisco-based advocacy group that for the last ten years has been focusing on cancer-causing agents in personal care products. Through a coalition of health and environmental groups called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (of which the Breast Cancer Fund is the principal sponsor), the organization has been drawing attention to the fact that known carcinogens—substances like formaldehyde—are used as preservatives in everything from suntan oil to makeup. Kathleen frantically threw out her all her expensive Clinique and Shiseido cosmetics.

Did a lifetime of using cosmetics cause or contribute to Kathleen’s breast cancer? We don’t know. But here are some facts that every American woman and her loved ones should absorb. The European Union bans nearly 1,400 chemicals from personal care products because they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. But in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration entrusts safety regulation of cosmetics to a private entity that is housed and funded by the industry’s trade association. To date, this entity has found only eleven chemicals to be “unsafe for use in cosmetics.” The FDA has no oversight of cosmetics products before they come on the market and, unlike the EU, leaves it to the cosmetics industry to determine which ingredients should be banned.

Because the American cosmetics industry is largely self-regulated, American women have to worry that they may be exposed to all sorts of cosmetics ingredients that may be dangerous to their health. Without greater powers for the FDA to regulate cosmetics, there is just no way that people like Kathleen who have cancer, or those who fear getting it, can know for sure. Indeed, even while in the hospital cancer patients are exposed to cosmetic products that the FDA has never evaluated and that activist groups like the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics say contain known or suspected carcinogens.

This happened to Kathleen. During her first round of chemo in 2009, some volunteers at the hospital came calling with a little red bag that contained products from Clinique, Estée Lauder, and Del Laboratories. Everything from eyeliner pencils to blush was in the bag, accompanied by a brochure that provided helpful advice on skin care and wig purchases.

Her well-meaning visitors were part of the Look Good Feel Better program (LGFB), which involves 16,000 volunteers who hand out $10 million worth of personal care products every year to women being treated for cancer. Behind this effort is a Who’s Who of the personal care industry: Alberto Culver, Avon, Chanel, Coty, Aveda, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena, L’Oreal, LVMH, Mary Kay, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, among others. The sponsors, as Kathleen learned from the brochure, are the American Cancer Society and the Personal Care Products Council (PCPC), the leading national trade association representing the global cosmetic and personal care products industry, which, through its tax-exempt foundation, kicked in $8.6 million to LGFB in 2011.

No doubt many women who are feeling awful about the loss of their hair, breasts, and dignity are grateful for these gifts from the cosmetics industry. But Kathleen, even though the chemotherapy by this point had caused her hair to fall out and turned her skin ghostly white, was not one of them. Upon reviewing the contents of her LGFB bag, she realized that several of the products in it contained parabens—chemicals that mimic estrogen and that according to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics are linked to cancer. You can image how that made her feel.

For a while, fighting the cancer was all we could do. After her mastectomy, Kathleen’s chemo treatments proved so debilitating that she ended up in the emergency room and in isolation wards twice in December of 2009. The drugs in her body were robbing her of hemoglobin and she became dangerously anemic, a common side effects of blasting the entire bloodstream with
toxic chemicals.

Kathleen could barely walk. Her immune system was also in shambles and needed frontline antibiotics. We had to get rid of our houseplants for fear of infection. Meanwhile, I was trying to hold body and soul together even as I lost my main source of income as a contract columnist for Bloomberg News.

Once Kathleen began to recover from the trauma of the chemo I decided, however, to throw myself into answering a basic question: How is it, I wanted to know, that the FDA, which was created by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, leaves the regulation of cosmetics largely up to the cosmetics industry?

Start with a fact that is hardly a secret yet still little known by the public: the FDA does not have the authority to test cosmetics ingredients before they go on the market. This is explained right on its Web site: “FDA’s legal authority over cosmetics is different from other products regulated by the agency, such as drugs, biologics, and medical devices. Cosmetic products and ingredients are not subject to FDA premarket approval authority, with the exception of color additives.”

Instead, as the FDA’s site goes on to explain, “Cosmetic firms are responsible for substantiating the safety of their products and ingredients before marketing.” In other words, the industry is largely responsible for regulating itself. How good a job do they do?

There exists an obscure entity called the Cosmetic Ingredient Review. According to the industry, the CIR is responsible for ensuring the safety of cosmetic products. On its board sit nine voting members. The voting members are all academics, and, according to the CIR, they must meet the same conflict-of-interest requirements as individuals serving on FDA advisory committees. However, there is no independent way to verify what conflicts of interest might actually exist. As a private organization, the CIR is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, as I found out when I tried to make a FOIA request. Nor will the CIR publicly disclose its budget.

“Since we are not a part of FDA, there is no obligation to provide information under FOIA,” Dr. F. Alan Andersen, the CIR’s director, explained in an email, adding, “The annual budget is not a matter of public record, so that information is not available.” According to a search of the Internal Revenue System’s database of tax-exempt organizations, the CIR has not filed a Form 990, which would contain at least its budget. It is accordingly not known whether the cosmetics industry pays the “experts” on the CIR, much less how much.

The CIR does admit that its overall funding comes from the industry’s main trade association, the Personal Care Products Council. The PCPC has filed Form 990, and it shows that in 2011, the organization paid Dr. Andersen, the CIR executive director, a total of $372,151 in wages and other compensation, including a performance bonus of $55,675. And the form shows that PCPC paid a total of $292,257 in employee compensation and contracting fees to a Mr. John Bailey, “a key employee who retired from the Council during 2011 because of his former employment with the FDA.” (John Bailey’s wife also received $49,930 for her part-time work with the council.) There is no breakdown, however, of what the PCPC may have paid the CIR’s expert panel.

The two organizations both list their mailing address as 1101 17th Street in Northwest Washington, D.C., though one is in Suite 300 and the other in Suite 412. In Suite 412, the CIR goes about its business, which does not include conducting any clinical studies or trials. “The panel does not conduct its own research,” spokesperson Lisa Powers explained in an email, “but carefully examines all of the currently available scientific data.”

The CIR discusses its findings at four meetings a year that are open to the public, and publishes the proceedings on its Web site. It also publishes reports in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Toxicology.

Does that mean you should rest assured that your blush won’t give you cancer or damage your unborn children? At least on one occasion, the CIR has pronounced cosmetics ingredients to be safe despite protests that there was no scientific basis for doing so. For example, in 2002, the CIR pronounced that it was safe for the industry to continue adding possible endocrine and reproductive disruptors known as phthalates to cosmetics marketed to women of childbearing age. This decision was based on what the Environmental Working Group characterized as the “ad hoc calculations” by one of the trade association’s scientists during the course of its proceedings.

But the more salient reality is that, regardless of the quality of its research, the CIR has no power over the industry that finances it. How often has the industry taken action to reformulate products that contain harmful chemicals? According to the PCPC, the trade organization does not “keep a record of products that have been reformulated or removed from the market as a result of a CIR review.” Of the 12,500 ingredients used in personal care products, only a handful are not used in the U.S.

By law, cosmetics companies are supposed to do some kind of research into the safety of their products before putting them on the market. “If the safety of an ingredient as used in a cosmetic product has not been established by CIR,” a PCPC spokesman stated, “a company must possess other information to substantiate the safety of the ingredient for its intended use and make that information available for inspection by FDA upon request.” But the FDA’s review of industry-sponsored research, if it happens at all, won’t occur until the product is already on the market.

For example, in recent years, a substantial controversy has arisen over the use of lead in lipstick. Lead can be a pretty serious substance. The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the use of lead in house paint in 1977, due to the brain damage it has been proven to cause in children. Because of its neurotoxicity, leaded gasoline has been entirely banned in the U.S. since 1995. The FDA also bans the presence of lead in candy bars in concentrations greater than 0.1 part per million.

Yet the FDA never got around to even testing lead in lipstick until 2010. When it did, it found concentrations as high as 3.06 parts per million—or more than thirty times the maximum allowed in candy bars. Whether this is an unsafe level for lipstick users I’ll leave to others to dispute, but the point is, under the current regulatory regime, lipstick users were exposed to these concentrations of lead for decades without their knowing it and without the FDA ever conducting so much as one test. For now, at least, the FDA says the lead in lipstick is safe, though if I were a woman, I wouldn’t be licking my lips.

And what if the FDA does determine that a cosmetic product being sold on the market is unsafe? “FDA does not have the legal authority to order a recall of a cosmetic,” a spokesman explained. “However, FDA works with firms to ensure that voluntary recalls are effective.” One exception provided by the FDA’s statutory authority is for cosmetics products with ingredients that are “adulterated and misbranded.”

The FDA’s lack of regulatory authority over perfumes and other fragrances is also troubling. In 2010, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the Environmental Working Group tested popular colognes and body sprays and found fourteen “secret chemicals not listed on the label.” These substances are linked to hormone disruption, skin irritation, and allergic reactions, according to several studies. The FDA did not test, much less ban, the products, which included American Eagle Seventy Seven, Chanel Coco Mademoiselle, and Britney Spears Curious.

It’s the same story with hair products. In August 2011, under pressure from consumer groups such as the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the FDA tested hair straighteners produced by a California company called Brazilian Blowout. The agency found high levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, but did not request the manufacturer to pull the product off the market. The state of California is suing the company while the product remains on the market. The company has agreed to disclose the presence of formaldehyde in Brazilian Blowout, which was previously labeled “formaldehyde free.” In the case of hair products used in beauty salons across the country, which often contain formaldehyde and other toxins, the FDA has even more limited authority to regulate.

The only exception to this pattern of lax regulation is telling: the FDA does vigorously regulate imported cosmetics. Just between January 2000 and December 2011, the FDA stopped more than 14,000 shipments from various countries abroad. That information led me back to the FDA. I wanted to know if they at least had any evidence of personal care products harming people in the U.S.

As it turns out, the FDA does collect reports of adverse reactions to personal care products through its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Adverse Event Reporting System (CAERS). (Should you care to drop them an email, the address is CAERS@cfsan.fda.gov.)

The FDA was kind enough to let me read through 543 pages of complaints from users of different cosmetics products. People reported about products that burned their skin or caused their eyes to water, and that in some cases sent them to the emergency room. The names of the people involved were all redacted. I wondered how or if the agency was following up on these reports. Despite my queries, the FDA didn’t respond directly, instead referring me to their Web site, which doesn’t have the answers either.

Kathleen’s greatest fear when she was diagnosed with cancer was that our daughters, who were just then getting to the age where they would start to use cosmetics, would be at risk. Again, we can’t know for sure. But there is no doubt that the lax regulation of cosmetics exposes American girls and women—and men and boys as well—to an unknown health risk they do not need to be taking, even if definitive, unbiased science is not always available to evaluate each particular ingredient.

We know, for example, that the skin, our largest organ, easily absorbs cosmetic ingredients, safe or toxic. Repeated low-level exposures may accumulate through a person’s lifetime (such as lead in hair dyes and mercury in skin whiteners). Girls often start using cosmetics at a very young age, thereby increasing lifetime exposure. Puberty is a critical development time for both girls and boys, and exposure to reproductive and/or hormonal toxins often starts before.

So why doesn’t the American public demand that we at least take a precautionary approach, and not use ingredients in cosmetics until they are proven safe, instead of waiting to see how many people they harm?

One explanation is the pervasive corporate influence over how most Americans even think about cancer. Have you noticed all the feel-good advertising that hundreds of companies have adopted to make it appear that they are “working for the cure”? Often they do this by releasing merchandise in pink, the color that has been chosen to show support for breast cancer victims and research. Companies have jumped on the bandwagon to promote everything from pink guns to pink vodka to pink fried chicken. Even NFL players wear pink shoes during the breast cancer awareness period. Some critics call this phenomenon “pinkwashing.”

The first such campaign originated with the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, which gave $1.5 million worth of pink ribbons away in 1992 to show support for breast cancer patients and research. Cosmetics manufacturers have been in the forefront of pinkwashing ever since. Avon, for example, sponsors the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. And, of course, with those Look Good Feel Better bags, the whole industry associates itself with being behind a cure or palliative for a devastating disease—albeit one it may be exacerbating. Don’t worry about what’s in your rouge; the money you spend on it goes to “cancer research,” and meanwhile, using more cosmetics will make you “Feel Better.”

When I challenged the industry’s trade group to disclose what chemicals might be in those bags, the PCPC responded, “In an abundance of caution, certain types of products and ingredients, which may be used safely in products for the general public, may not accepted for use in the LGFB kits … each product accepted into the LGFB program is subject to FDA oversight and has undergone multiple levels of review including safety, quality and regulatory reviews by the manufacturer, and is re-evaluated by Council staff before being accepted for use in the kits.”

Yet as we’ve seen, FDA “oversight” is, to put it mildly, weak. To make sure it stays that way, the PCPC alone spent $809,000 in direct lobbying in 2011, according to its disclosures to the IRS, plus $933,955 in conferences, conventions, and meetings, and $785,000 in travel. Meanwhile the staff of its putative research arm, the CIR, serves at the pleasure of the industry.

As public awareness has grown of the links between environmental chemicals and cancer, at least some politicians have responded. One is Illinois Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, who in 2012 cosponsored the Safe Cosmetics Act. It would have banned the use of ingredients linked to cancer and reproductive disorders while also requiring companies to include complete ingredient labels on fragrances and salon products. Sponsored as well by Wisconsin Democratic Representative Tammy Baldwin, who was recently elected U.S. senator of Wisconsin, the bill received strong support from the Breast Cancer Fund, along with other consumer groups. Nonetheless, it received just one hearing in the Republican-controlled House, and never left committee. Schakowsky has reintroduced her bill again this year.

Meanwhile, the PCPC and other industry groups, after a $3.5 million lobbying campaign, seeded the introduction of a weak, pro-industry bill called the Cosmetic Safety Amendments Act of 2012. Introduced by New Jersey Republican Senator Leonard Lance last year, the legislation called for registering product manufacturing facilities, disclosing product ingredients, and reporting adverse events from product use (which, as noted above, is already done through the FDA’s adverse report-
ing system).

The bill favored the industry, because it didn’t give the FDA any meaningful power to take harmful products off the market, and rubber-stamped research from the industry-funded CIR. The Lance bill (which has since died) would also have preempted tough state laws such as those found in California, while the Schakowsky bill would not.

In voicing the industry’s support for the Lance bill, the PCPC issued a statement in April 2012. It asserted, without apparent irony, that “FDA regulation of cosmetics has protected the public for decades, and this landmark legislation will enhance protections for millions of American consumers.”

When I requested further comment from the PCPC, spokesperson Lisa Powers replied, “We support increased regulation and authority by FDA over cosmetics. This increased regulation should allow and require FDA to set safety levels on ingredients found in cosmetic and personal care products. We look forward this year to working with Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle on discussion of these issues.”

Schakowsky is optimistic she can reach a compromise with Republicans. “We’re hearing that there’s some possibility that something on cosmetics might move,” she told me in a telephone interview in mid-January. As of this writing, the legislation has not been allowed to come to a vote.

Research for this piece was generously supported with grants from the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, the Chicago Headline Club, and the National Press Foundation.

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