Marbury

is it time to go grey again?

Harold Macmillan famously cared little for the Arctic Monkeys.

In an interview with John Humphries on the Today programme yesterday, the Prime Minister found it necessary to defend himself from the suggestion that he was spending too much time with his family. 

It prompted Max Atkinson to ask an excellent question: are parents of young children fit to run the country?

It's a simple fact that being the parent of young children - if it's done right - requires a great deal of time and effort. The sleep deprivation alone is famously punishing. Then there's, well, everything else. It seems common sense to conclude that the people having to deal with such demanding and stroppy bosses at home can't be doing their day jobs as well as they would otherwise.

In most cases, this temporary productivity decline is, from the point of view of society, a small price to pay. We accept that people who may be less effective in their jobs for a few years should nonetheless keep them, because we want a society as full of stable, happy families as possible. And those people may go on to be even better at their jobs when they come out the other side.

But Prime Ministers are a special case. They are only in the job for a few years (around ten at most). It's not just any job either - it's the job upon which, to some extent, all of our futures depend. It is also an unusually intense and demanding role (again - if it's done right). Would it not be sensible to appoint people to this position who had every chance of working at full capacity?

As Max suggests, this is one part of a larger issue, which is whether we made a sensible turn when we decided that we didn't want fuddy-duddy old grey hairs like Harold Macmillan in the top job, but young, dynamic and thrusting types - people who listened to the Arctic Monkeys (in Gordon Brown's day) and brought young families into Downing Street. Family aside, it's pretty clear that Cameron, like Blair before him in his first term, is suffering from his relative inexperience.

Maybe it's time to go grey again. As the UK population ages, it will be interesting to see if the age of our leaders moves in tandem. My vote is for Alistair Darling.

here's bill

I love this photo. I just came across it although, as you can tell by the presence of Robert Gibbs in the background, it's over a year old (I can't find the source - can anyone else?). UPDATE: it was from December 2010, but still can't source the photo.

I love Bill's demonic grin, and the way that Obama looks like a schoolteacher exasperated by the antics of a brilliant but unruly pupil.

It made me think about their relationship, and to reflect on Obama's seeming inability or unwillingness to really 'get' Clinton.

Obama's political identity was formed in part through opposition to Clinton, as a president and a personality. Where President Clinton was a trimmer and a compromiser, Obama would be a bold Reagan-style reformer (hmm). Where Clinton was a natural politician, who loved and lived for the game of politics, Obama would disdain Washington and its ways. Where Clinton was undisciplined and messy in his professional and personal lives, Obama would be self-controlled, precise, punctual.

(You could, by the way, say pretty much the same about Bush and his relationship with Clinton. Both the presidents that succeeded Clinton were extremely keen on not being Clinton. Which is surprising when you consider that Clinton was a relatively popular and successful president.)

What strikes me as odd is that Obama doesn't really value Clinton's advice, and seems very wary of him. Although he occasionally meets with Clinton or plays golf with him, you get the sense that he is doing so for the sake of the pictures, and the reassurance that it brings a large part of the Democratic base. I say it's odd, because Clinton is so clearly worth listening to. First, just as an ex-president. Second, as a genius-level analyst of politics, not just in the grand strategist sense - how to win the positioning battle versus the Republicans - but as someone who has an unparalleled ability to understand voters and articulate their fears and aspirations.

It's almost as if Obama fears being overwhelmed by Clinton's personality, or infected by him somehow - as if he might come back from that round of golf demanding all-night pizza sessions with his aides and eyeing up the intern.

More broadly, I think this is symptomatic of a blind spot in Obama's personality: he has a suspicion of disorder, even when it is creative. He likes everything to be just so; organised, thought-through, and planned, down to the last detail. The problem for him is, that's impossible when you're talking about an organisation the size of the US government, a war on the scale of Afghanistan, or a vast ecosystem like the one that constitutes US healthcare. As a consequence, Obama is - as David Brooks has argued - over-keen on centralised decision-making, too confident in the ability of a few clever people to make plans for everyone else. He is also often slow to react when his carefully made plans go astray.

Clinton, of course, was at the opposite extreme, never happier than when reacting to unforeseen events, performing reverses and digging out of holes.

In theory, the two men's skills and dispositions are perfectly complementary. It's a pity that at least one of them fails to grasp how much they could do together. 

the moment muhammad ali met his wife

This photograph was taken in Louisville, Kentucky, 1963, just as the young Cassius Clay's career was taking off. The girl that Clay/Ali is talking to is now married to him (a more recent picture of them together is here).

Kind of sweet and also slightly creepy.

The picture was taken by photographer Steve Shapiro, who, nearly fifty years later, received an email from Mrs Ali, letting him know what he'd captured that day.

presidents are people too

One of Jonathan Haidt's starting points is that there are surely good ideas - and good people - on both sides of the left-right divide, which brings me to this find from Quora (a kind of high-quality Q&A forum).

A user had posted the following question: What is President Obama like in person? On most forums this would lead to a stream of abuse and bad jokes but on Quora some interesting insights emerge, including and especially the following. It's from Peter Marquez, who served under George Bush and then, more briefly, Obama, as White House Director of Space Policy. He is a Republican, though his primary identification is Geek: he's a policy guy in the most complex of fields.

Marquez is keen to qualify his comments by saying that he didn't spend a lot of time with the president and only had a few meetings with him, and his observations aren't revelatory or striking. But he's clearly an astute and thoughtful observer. Here he is on Obama's personal manner:

The first feeling I got was of a casual familiarity.  President Obama comes across somebody who could be your next door neighbor. He's down to earth.  But at the same time a bit guarded- it's hard to explain.  Maybe another way to put is that there are people who want to be your friend and then there are people who want you to be their friend-- Obama being the latter.  I don't know if this makes sense but it's the best way I can think to describe it.

He also describes the time his wife met Obama (at Marquez's departure party) and recalls Obama offering his wife, then pregnant with a second girl, some rather touching advice on having two daughters. Then, as a decision-maker;

From a policy standpoint the President struck me as someone who was also politically astute.  He liked to analyze all the possible options and all of the potential outcomes for those options.  I know it drove some of my colleagues crazy having to answer every hypothetical situation but we also understood it as man trying to make sure he got things right.

This wasn't the first time Marquez had responded to a question about presidents. Earlier, someone had asked the same question about Bush, and Marquez responded. As you might expect, perhaps, given that he was Bush's guy, he is very positive. But given Marquez apparent fair-mindedness and keenness to stick to the question - about presidents as people rather than as politicians - his answer on Bush is even more interesting, because it runs so counter to popular image:

The man is smart and has an incredible memory.  He'll remember things that you said months ago or he'd remember some minute detail of some obscure policy issue.  He studied the issues and took it as a challenge to know as much about a topic as his experts knew. For example, President Bush asked all of the directors in the NSC to put together a transition book for the incoming Obama team.  Each director was responsible for creating a book that covered all the details of their specific repsonsibility.  I was responsible for space.  I put together a 3-inch binder of all the things that we had done and encountered during President Bush's administration.  I gave the book to the President and two days later the book shows back up on my desk.  In the margins the President had hand written comments and questions and even remembered a few details on things that I, the "expert", had failed to include.  Anybody who says the man is dumb has never met him...

On matters of policy the President could quickly home in on the critical points and he would politely hammer away at the issues until he felt he had the right answers or that he knew what the right questions were that needed to be answered.  You always made sure you brought your "A" game when talking to the President because he would ask questions about your research or recommendations and you'd better have the answers (or know how to get the answers).

Marquez's wife, he reveals in this answer, is on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Much against her better instincts, she found herself charmed by Bush.

The full answers are worth reading: here's Obama, and here's Bush. Also - check out Marquez's answer to "What's it like to fly on Air Force One?"

the righteous ones

Last night I went to see Jonathan Haidt talk about his new book, The Righteous Mind, at a Demos event held at the British Academy.

Haidt is one of the most thoughtful and important psychologists at work in the US today. His core interest is moral psychology: our sense of right and wrong. Over the years he has drawn on different disciplines - anthropology, evolutionary biology, philosophy - to put together a very rich and multi-layered picture of our moral sensibilities. His new book applies this learning to politics. It's quite a blockbuster, makes a big argument, and is already provoking a huge amount of discussion, over there and over here.

You can read about the book here, or here for a British perspective. In short, Haidt asks why it is that the left and liberal thinking has been in retreat for the last thirty or forty years, and concludes that the right now appeals to a much broader range of human instincts than the left does. His conclusions are all the more interesting in that they come from a liberal perspective - Haidt, like most academics, is on the left of the political spectrum.

Haidt turns out to be a charming, modest and compelling speaker, adept at using well-turned metaphors and imagery to express complex ideas. The event itself wasn't so impressive. It had two chairman plus an introducer. It had four guest panellists (one would have been sufficient - if you are going to invite people of the calibre of David Aaronovitch or Brian Eno it seems pointless to allow them only ten minutes to speak). One of the panellists - Rowenna Davis - didn't appear to have read the book at all and gave a speech about herself. Questions from the audience - of which too many were taken - were tedious speeches in disguise (a man called Philip Blond, by far the worst offender in this regard, seemed impervious to the audience's loudly expressed derision for his endless, incomprehensible and self-inflating spiel).

Haidt handled all this politely and stylishly. But the event as a whole embodied much about the contemporary left: solipsistic, shambolic, pessimistic - and yet somehow, oddly pleased with itself.

civics class

William Langewiesche is one of the best non-fiction writers in the world. Every piece he writes is deeply reported, exquisitely crafted and incredibly compelling, this one being no exception (the opening alone should win a prize). His latest piece for Vanity Fair is about the Camorra, the mafia of Naples. You should really put aside some time and read the whole thing; here I'll just focus on one aspect of it.

The piece centres around the extraordinary figure of Paolo Di Lauro, whose mugshot is above. Di Lauro, now in a maximum security prison, was one of the greatest Camorristi of all time, ruthless and amoral but also intelligent and self-disciplined. When he ruled the roost, Naples was relatively peaceful and well-ordered. Now that he has been put away, the town - or at least those parts of it where the Camorra holds sway - has become more blighted by murders and petty crimes than ever before. The police force has never succeeded in asserting a "monopoly of violence" in Naples, and in the absence of a strong Camorra, order has suffered. Langewiesche hints at a provocative conclusion:

It’s hardly the system you would dream up in a civics class. Nonetheless the Camorra serves society best when it is strong. The judges I spoke to all recognized this truth, and yet these were the same people who had taken Di Lauro down. I asked them if they believed in the superiority of the Italian state, and all but one replied no. That one said, to paraphrase, “We have no choice. The Camorra has created an anti-state whose very existence threatens the legitimacy of the Italian state. If the courts did not act, they would not be real. If the courts are not real, Italy will not endure. Our role is not to prevail over the Camorra but to go through the motions of trying.” I mentioned this to a Camorra defense lawyer. She knew the judge in question. She said, “The anti-state is the state itself. It is the state, not the Camorra, that is strangling Italy.”

This is interesting enough in itself, and I don't want to imply a false equivalence between real violence and economic disorder, but when I read this paragraph I couldn't help being reminded of the debates we're currently having over how to tax the super-rich.

careless youth

Hillary and Bill, Arkansas, 1975. Via Time, appropriately enough (and the Clinton Presidential Library).

watching you watching me

Photo: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty

I came across this story (which I hadn't heard until now) in a short piece about the nature of freedom, by the brilliant Sarah Bakewell, author of one of my favourite books of the past couple of years:

Over the last week I found myself thinking of De Maistre in relation to two recent cases. Both are of artists trying to outwit their governments; both do it with Xavieresque wit and grace.

One is Ai Weiwei, who responded to surveillance of his Beijing home and studio by announcing he would himself install four webcams, to transmit his every move while he works, sleeps and lives. His supporters could see that he was OK, while for the government it was a "gift". If they watched his webcams, though, they would be doing it alongside his fans and at his own generous invitation. By opening the scene of his confinement to the world, he was making it an artwork and a means of flight. His "beast" is pinned down, but his soul runs off laughing. It is a measure of how subversive the project was that he was ordered to switch the cameras off.

Read the whole thing: it's certainly a cut above the usual op-ed fodder.

don't mess with this woman

No time to post today so...here's another photo of Hillary Clinton. I like the caption from the person who posted it on Twitter: Cannot even deal with this picture of Hillary Clinton. GIRL IS PIMP.

She certainly is. I mean, in a good way.

UPDATE: Of course, this is what the internet is for.

mr fixit: reflections

I'd like to add a couple of points, inspired by commenters on the post below.

- How many Americans have trees in their backyard? If we listen to Tagg (like his father, a venture capitalist) we must assume this is normal, as is having a backyard large enough to drive a tractor through - or having a tractor. ("The thing is with dad, one minute he's commenting on the fungi on your trees, the next he's landing on your helipad with an axe").

- Semi-seriously, Tagg's characterisation of his father may tell us something about Romney's likely governing style. In his desperation to win the nomination, Romney has tried to present himself as a Reaganite enemy of government, wherever it rears its interfering head. But of course, we know from his record in Massachusetts - and Romneycare in particular - that this is not true to his instincts. He may sincerely be for a smaller government, but I suspect - and Tagg's sketch of his personality provides further evidence for this - that Romney would be anything but a hands-off president. You can hardly imagine him rising late and doing a couple of hours of meetings before bumbling off to the golf course. A Romney White House would be intensely activist. It would, as Michael Heseltine once promised, "intervene before breakfast, lunch and tea".

"Hey there, I see you have a crumbling infrastructure. Shall we fix that? I brought some tractors."

mr fixit

Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP. From the slideshow Pictures of Mitt Romney Confusing Children.

Here's how Mitt Romney's eldest son describes his father, presumably in an attempt to make him sound, um, likeable:

In his spare time, he wants to solve problems,’ Tagg Romney said in an interview. ‘He wants to figure out, when he comes over to your house, he wants to figure out, “Well, your boiler’s not working. How are we going to fix the boiler?” and “Have you noticed that some of your trees are dying out there? Why are your trees dying? What’s causing that? Can we figure that out, and can we go down to the hardware store and see if they’ve got something to fix that?” And all of a sudden you see him driving a tractor in your backyard, and he’s pulling stuff up. He’s like, “Oh, these rocks were doing that.” I mean, that’s just who he is.”’

I don't know about you but if I knew someone like this I would do anything in my power to stop him from ever coming round to my house.

I imagine that he tries to fix people too:

'Hey I see you got some pretty bad acne there. What causes that? Is there a cream for it? C'mon, let's go to the drugstore.'

'You seem to be putting on a lot of weight recently. How can we stop that happening?'

'Hey there, excuse me for calling round so early. Remember we talked about your bad breath? I brought some pills. They should fix that. Don't mention it.'

the best april fool of 2012?

I think it was this: Philadelphia's office of transportation faux-announced that it was to introduce a pilot programme for electronic sidewalk lanes, or E-lanes, for pedestrians too busy to look up from their devices.

The press release came with explanatory video.

It actually sounds like a good idea. Certainly, the problem is a real one.

sheik sandwich

Apologies for the hiatus. This has been due to a combination of other projects getting in the way, a trip to Venice (delightful), and the tedium of the Republican nomination race, which is now just a matter of waiting for Mitt Romney to drag himself across the finishing line. Anyway, I'll be posting more this week. In the meantime, here's a picture of the magnificent Hillary Clinton, who was in Saudi Arabia while I was in Venice: