2013 – Page 107

Attacking Obamacare’s Foundation

Yuval Levin believes that the ACA is fundamentally flawed:

The key to Obamacare is something it doesn’t have in common with conservative approaches to health care: It seeks to impose a very specific model of insurance and compel people to buy into it. It has the government strictly define the insurance product, requires insurers to sell it, requires consumers to buy it, and calls that a market.

The result is not just a gross constriction of the economic liberty of all involved, though that is no small problem. And the result is not just high prices, either, though those clearly contribute to the difficulties Obamacare is already confronting. The key consequence of this kind of approach is an inability to find that balance between quality and price that could allow for the greater access and security we want: It is a failure to achieve a more efficient system, which is more or less the whole point of reforming American health-care financing.

Applying expert knowledge from the center is just not a recipe for efficiency in a system as enormous and complex as America’s health-care system. And the idea that we already know what the answers are to the quandaries of health-care financing in our country — whether because other countries have found those answers or because the latest effectiveness research makes it clear — just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. More important, an evolving system as intricate as American health care isn’t going to be made radically more cost-effective by any one model of efficiency over the long-term anyhow. The appeal of a competitive insurance market in which sellers have a constant, huge incentive to give buyers what they want is that such a system is constantly searching for a better answer to our problem, and so is able to evolve as health care and health financing evolve. It doesn’t get stuck with today’s answer forever, let alone with a wrong answer.

Last week, Levin and Ponnuru suggested an alternative to Obamacare that would use “a flat and universal tax benefit for coverage” and cap the employer health insurance tax break. More details:

People who have pre-existing conditions when the new rules take effect would be able to buy coverage through subsidized, high-risk pools. By making at least catastrophic coverage available to all, and by giving people such incentives to obtain it, this approach could cover more people than ObamaCare was ever projected to reach, and at a significantly lower cost.

The new alternative would not require the mandates, taxes and heavy-handed regulations of ObamaCare. It would turn more people into shoppers for health care instead of passive recipients of it—and encourage the kind of insurance design, consumer behavior and intense competition that could help keep health costs down. Redesigned and directed this way, the flow of federal dollars and tax subsidies would do much less to distort health markets than it has for the last several decades, while getting far more people insured.

In response, Adrianna McIntyre points out problems with high-risk pools:

[T]he pools would need to be incredibly well-funded—conservative health policy scholar James Capretta estimated that adequate funding would be on the scale of $15-20 billion a year to cover 4 million individuals. Remember that back in the real world, the GOP quashed a bill for $4 billion in one-time high risk pool stopgap funding earlier this year.

In the context of Ponnuru and Levin’s plan, high risk pool funding is in addition to their proposed tax credits, which would be sufficient for individuals without employer-sponsored coverage to purchase catastrophic plans. Ponnuru and Levin argue that their plan is cheaper and would offer more coverage than the ACA, but the column is fuzzy on details, like the Capretta “repeal and replace” proposal it seems to be patterned on. It would be helpful if they had actually defined what a “catastrophic” plan might entail, for example, so it’s difficult to assess how the costs of this proposal would stack up against the ACA.

Did Mao Modernize China?

Reviewing a set of books on China’s path to power in the 21st century, Ian Johnson takes issue with the popular idea that Mao’s reign, much like Stalin’s, proved necessary to modernize a vast, backward country:

[It] supposes that prior to Mao, China was on a dead-end path—that essentially it needed a Mao or it wouldn’t have modernized. This used to be a fairly conventional view, but many historians now believe that the pre–World War II Nationalists were well on their way to modernizing China and likely would have stayed in power if Japan had not invaded. [Authors Orville] Schell and [John] Delury are aware of this argument, and mention a “golden decade” of development in their chapter on Chiang Kai-shek; but they don’t follow through on its implications. If Chiang and the Nationalists were succeeding, then why was Mao’s destruction necessary?

Rather, it seems to me that the authors could more easily have portrayed the Mao years as motivated by fuqiang [wealth and power]—and thus not at odds with their overall narrative—but as a period that, nevertheless, led China down a dead-end street. One could even go further and say that the Mao years helped prepare for economic takeoff by creating a literate and healthy workforce—two real accomplishments—while they also laid the Communist Party so low that Deng was forced to experiment with capitalist-style reforms. Instead, there is almost a teleological argument that Mao was necessary, perhaps to give meaning to the series of catastrophes that defined his years in power, such as widespread death by famine during the Great Leap Forward and the millions more who perished in political campaigns like the Cultural Revolution.

(Image of a toy-soldier mosaic of Mao courtesy of artist Joe Black)

A Minimum Income For All?

Switzerland may become the first country to guarantee one by providing all adults about $2,800 each month. Danny Vinik thinks it’s an idea worth importing:

The clear [benefit] is that no American would live below the poverty line. The U.S. has been waging the War on Poverty for a generation now and still nearly 50 million Americans are below the line. This would end that war with a decisive victory. There are knock-on effects as well. Americans would have greater leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions from their employers thanks to the increased income security. Families could allow one parent to take time off to raise their kids. Eliminating the numerous different government welfare programs would also lead to efficiency gains as adults would simply receive their check in the mail and not have to waste time filling out paperwork at numerous different offices. …

Economists have long shuddered at the thought of a basic income, because it strongly disincentives work. However, a basic income is just that: basic. Most adults would continue to work to earn extra money. The employment effects would not be non-existent and there may be an increase in part-time work. As Lowrey points out, different studies have found the disincentive effects on work are not as strong as economists feared.

McArdle is rightly skeptical:

Consider the cost of real estate, one of the sore points in Switzerland, where there isn’t a whole lot of flat land to build on. In that, Switzerland is a bit like my own home city of Washington: it’s a small area attracting a lot of new, more-affluent residents (wonks and lobbyists, in Washington’s case; international finance types for Switzerland). Many of the poorer residents don’t make enough to compete in the new bidding wars, and they don’t like it one bit.

But suppose we gave everyone in Washington a check for $2500 a month. Would that make it easier for the old residents to get nicer apartments? Not really, because everyone would be getting that check. Poorer residents would have another $2500 to commit to the housing bidding war, but so would the wealthier residents. Unless the $2,500 actually created a larger supply of housing — and that’s as much a matter of planning regulations and building codes as of demand.

She also worries what effect it would have on immigration:

[A] substantial basic income is simply and obviously incompatible with making it relatively easy for people from poor countries to become citizens. A path to citizenship for legal immigrants is one of the foundational values of American society; we are Americans because we are born here or we choose to come here, not because of some ethnic heritage. We couldn’t get rid of it even if we wanted to; the idea that anyone born on American soil is an American is enshrined in our constitution. And of course, if you had to choose between a basic income, and relatively easy immigration, the choice is obvious — at least if you’re interested in improving human welfare.

Alec Liu argues that “the problem, as with many issues economic, is that there is no historical precedent for such a plan, especially at this scale.” However, he concedes a few “isolated instances” of governments providing a minimum income:

Similar plans have been proposed in the past. In 1968, American economist Milton Friedman discussed the idea of a negative income tax, where those earning below a certain predetermined threshold would receive supplementary income instead of paying taxes. Friedman suggested his plan could eliminate the 72 percent of the welfare budget spent on administration. But nothing ever came to fruition.

It’s what makes the potential experiment in Switzerland so compelling. Developed countries around the world are struggling to address the issues of depressed wages for low-skilled workers under the dual weight of automation and globalization.

Beard Of The Week

This time … in a Miami Dolphins speedo getting thrown out of the stadium for excessive abtitude. Extra social media photos here.

Losing Lessing

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing died last Sunday at the age of 94. Her life, like her work, was varied:

A generous, open minded character, she was, at various stages of her life, a communist, socialist, feminist, atheist, Laingian and finally a Sufi. To each of these beliefs, she brought a tireless enthusiasm that sometimes obscured judgment. She fell for ideas, digested then, outgrew them and then moved on. While she still believed, she wrote novels out of the experience. Her interests were varied but her ability to make fascinating fiction out of life was constant.

If she had written nothing else, The Golden Notebook (1962) would have secured Doris Lessing a place in the hall of fame. With it, she wrote about “new women” in a new kind of novel, one that stretched the boundaries of realist fiction.

Kim Murphy elaborates on The Golden Notebook:

In her work, Lessing raised but didn’t necessarily answer the existential questions of women’s lives in the 1960s and beyond: Is it better to be married or single? How do you raise children and have a professional life? Is a woman denying her intellect if she longs for a man to love her? Why do older women still feel passion, and what is acceptable for them to do about it? If my life is so perfect, why do I feel as though I’m losing my mind? …

“The Golden Notebook” suggested that humanity, male and female, is driven by a common yearning: “Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who would really understand me, who’d be kind to me,” one of the characters said. “That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

The above video from 2007 captures Lessing’s reaction to the news that she won the Nobel Prize. Her first words? “Oh, Christ!” When she was offered the title of “Dame” in 1992, she was similarly dismissive, rejecting the honor by writing, “There is something ruritannical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire.” David Ulin praises her as someone who believed “that literature should recognize no boundaries, that the best work moves us by challenging our preconceptions, whether they have to do with content or with form”:

This, in some ways, could be read as Lessing’s legacy: Don’t stand on ceremony, question your beliefs and prejudices and always, always be prepared to change your mind.

Justin Cartwright remembers a woman “truly unique in her views and in her take on life.” Sophia Barnes argues that “[t]he diversity of Lessing’s oeuvre goes hand in hand with the impossibility – and I would argue the futility – of trying to categorise her”:

A recent collection of scholarly essays on her work was titled Border Crossings, in reference to her seemingly endless capacity for moving between spaces, genres, forms and modes of thinking. What is important to emphasise is that in crossing borders Lessing did not leave what she had experienced or thought behind; rather, she constantly moved back and forth across borders, displaying an adaptive historical consciousness which was vital to the whole body of her fiction.. … She was a postmodernist before postmodernism, a post-communist before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and perhaps both more and less of a feminist than she has often been seen to be. She was without doubt a radical, in the truest sense: intellectually uncompromising, absolutely individual, always striving with the boundaries of her form and the intellectual climate of her age.

From her 2007 Nobel lecture:

We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be. We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

The New Yorker has assembled a collection of her pieces here. The New Statesman has republished her first piece for the magazine, from 1956, on being refused entry into South Africa. Her 1988 interview with the Paris Review is here.

Israel’s Warmongering

Drezner considers it unwise, to say the least:

Israeli jaw-jawing about a military strike puts it into a corner with no good exit option. Netanyahu’s definition of a bad nuclear deal seems to include… any nuclear deal. So say that one is negotiated. What can Israel do then? Netanyahu could follow through on his rhetoric and launch a unilateral strike. Maybe that would set Iran back a few years. It would also rupture any deal, accelerate Iran’s nuclear ambitions, invite unconventional retaliation from Iran and its proxies, and isolate Israel even further. If Netanyahu doesn’t follow through on his rhetoric, then every disparaging Israeli quote about Obama’s volte-face on Syria will be thrown back at the Israeli security establishment. Times a hundred.

Larison piles on:

Attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would make the Iranian government more interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon, so an Israeli strike couldn’t ever truly “prevent” that outcome in any case. Once a deal is negotiated, I suspect that Netanyahu will accept it as a fait accompli, because there is nothing else he plausibly could do that wouldn’t risk a huge breach between the U.S. and Israel.

Robert Merry chimes in:

Netanyahu believes, based on past experience, that he can set in motion pressures and forces within the American polity that will ensure the demise of Obama’s delicate reach-out to Iran. And he is willing to risk a rupture with this administration in order to do so because he doesn’t think the risk is very great.

In response to Merry, Larison bets that “the administration will press ahead with negotiations despite Israeli and Congressional complaints”:

I suspect that Obama correctly assumes that his handling of Iran has broader international and domestic support than the critics of the negotiations realize. Netanyahu may think that most Americans will sympathize with his position, but if so he is very likely misreading the public mood and potentially inviting a backlash against himself.

Drum joins the conversation:

Netanyahu obviously has good reason to think that Republicans will support him in this unreservedly, but he better be careful. Even Obama-hating tea party types can start to get a little antsy when a foreign leader is so obviously contemptuous of American interests and the American president.

The Press’s Obamacare Pile On

Kalev Leetaru maps it:

[W]hat we are able to see in the crisp mathematical precision of the computerized graphs and maps above is just how vast and intense the negative coverage really is. As a result, we can move beyond anecdotes like “It’s getting a lot of coverage” to precise statements like “More than 80 percent of all television news shows are talking about it.”

We can also gaze through the eyes of the news media and literally map the deep pessimism towards the law as it spreads across the nation. This by itself is a key finding: just how much the media has been covering Obamacare and, in particular, how key the GOP’s tying of Obamacare to the government shutdown was in bringing it to the forefront.

Chait tries to calm the media down:

Lost in the Keep Your Plan imbroglio, it appears that healthcare.gov has already reached a point of functionality. It can currently handle 20–25,000 simultaneous users. That may or may not qualify as a full Hanukkah Miracle fixed website by the end of the month, but it’s probably enough, at the very least, to let the law muddle through.

All sorts of things will happen to Obamacare in the next few months. At least some of those things will be bad, because any large enough enterprise, public or private, has bad things happen. One thing that can be predicted is that more and more people will start signing up for Obamacare between now and the end of March, which means the constituency for the law will steadily grow. There will still be a constituency against the law, and possibly future failures will enlarge it, too.

But at some point, having state exchanges where people buy private insurance, with rules preventing abusive practices, will simply be part of the backdrop of health insurance.

Waldman adds:

I realize that there’s an impulse as a reporter or a pundit to cast everything in the most dramatic terms possible. “Things are neither perfect nor disastrous” is a much less interesting assertion to make than “Everything has changed! Earth-shattering developments are afoot!” But that happens to be the truth.

Earlier Dish on media coverage of Obamacare here.

The Democrats’ Shutdown Bump Fades

Nate Cohn parses recent polling:

Several new surveys show that the Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot—the one that emerged during the shutdown—has faded or even evaporated. The three live interview surveys conducted more than two weeks after the shutdown show a dead heat, with the Republicans gaining an average of a net-5 points over the previous survey. Fox News, the newest poll, even shows the Republicans ahead by three points among registered voters.

A “dead heat” among registered voters all but ends Democratic hopes of retaking the House, notwithstanding another political earthquake. They might not even gain seats, since Democrats hold more vulnerable districts than Republicans.

He cautions against reading too much into these numbers:

[I]t would be foolish to assume that the environment will remain this bad for Democrats, just as it was wrong to assume that the GOP was doomed by the shutdown. Frustration will probably subside if and when Obamacare gets up and running. Frustration could even turn into a bit of renewed support if the president benefits from lowered expectations. In the end, the public has a short memory. So, apparently, do most commentators, who have forgotten that they were frothing about the end of the Republican Party as recently as three weeks ago.

Waldman made related points late last week:

Over the next year, the rest of the law will be implemented. There may be problems here and there, but overall it will probably go reasonably well. There will be plenty of things Democrats can point to in order to convince people that it was a good idea, like the fact that now nobody can be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, or the fact that millions of people who couldn’t afford coverage or were denied before now have it. There will also be things Republicans will say to try to convince people it was a terrible idea, like the fact that premiums didn’t plummet, and health care is still expensive, and Obamacare didn’t give every little girl a pony.

And what else will happen in the next year? Other things. The economy may get worse, or it may get better. There may be a foreign crisis. Controversies we can’t yet anticipate will emerge, explode, then disappear. A young singer may move her posterior about in a suggestive manner, causing a nation to drop everything and talk about nothing else for a week. We might start talking about immigration reform again. There’s going to be another budget battle. In other words, all sorts of things could affect the next election, and the election after that.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #180

A reader writes:

You’re killing me … lots of clues, but I’m still clueless. Left-hand driving, which is mostly in tropical countries, except for UK and Japan, and this doesn’t look like either to me. I can’t read the signs, but they seem to be in a different script. Maybe Thai, but vegetation doesn’t look Thai. I thought about New Zealand, but the train in the background doesn’t look like any of the images I found for “New Zealand Trains.” There’s a KFC, but where isn’t there a KFC? I tried to figure out who made the air conditioners on the roof. Looked like an “O” logo. There is a company called O General that sells AC units in India, but couldn’t find any units that looked like those. White is the most popular car color worldwide, so that’s no help. But cars look relatively new, which says prosperous country.

I’m going with Japan. Let’s say Matsumoto, because I like the way it sounds.

Another:

Charleston, West Virginia? I don’t even know why I’m bothering. It just looks like Charleston, but I have no idea what building the picture was taken from. But, then again, those look not unlike windmills on the mountain. Massachusetts, maybe? No, that’s definitely Charleston. The building in the foreground looks like the kind of federal office building that Robert C. Byrd so fought for.

Another:

I think it’s somewhere in Tasmania. The cars drive on the left, so it’s a former British place, and it looks like it’s just rained in an otherwise dryish region, and the light looks like it’s in the Southern Hemisphere.

Another:

Ok, the photo indicates that this was taken 2013-11-04 at 10-13-38 PM. I would think that only the Northern European countries are in play – Sweden, Finland, Norway as they would have sunlight at 10pm at night in November or so I think. I also think the tip off is the fir trees. I searched Google images for bridges in all three and the closest I came was the Vousaari Bridge in Vousaari, a suburb of Helsinki. So I searched, and boy does Helsinki have a lot of bridges and waterways, but I can’t locate the spot of the photo. I’m just fishing for closeness points.

I’m also think that this could be Canada as well. There’s an American style pickup in traffic heading towards the water, but given a lapse in any other clues, I’m sticking with Helsinki.

Actually, “2013-11-04 at 10-13-38 PM” is just the timestamp of the screenshot of the original image, something we do to bypass the meta data that would reveal the exact geographical coordinates. Another reader:

You people are ruining my weekends.

I get a few right and think, OK, I’ve got this figured out now. Last week’s was bad enough, but this week is awful. There are so many clues I thought I would find it in five minutes flat. Instead we can’t even agree on what country it’s in and I am probably off by several thousand miles again.

We argued over hemisphere. I say the tree in the middle is starting to bloom and the white car in the alley in the foreground is parked on the left, so it must be the Southern Hemisphere – Australia or South Africa. The housemate says no; it’s a tree starting to shed its leaves and the two people you can see are fairly well bundled up, so it’s fall somewhere in the northern half of the world. The visible cars are sold pretty much everywhere in the developed countries. I said, well, there’s a KFC and an elevated railway, so how hard can it be? I booted up Google Earth – if you go into the “more” section on the menu and click Transportation, you see a zillion highway numbers and bus stops, but railroads are nice black lines. That’s a big help when there is a railroad track or three visible. I found if you do a search for “KFC near [name of any city, country], Google Earth will put pink dots on the map of the entire world, each of which represents a KFC store. For the city you name, it gives you selections A-J on a page, with as many pages as necessary to name them all.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia says that “As of 2012, there were over 18,000 KFC outlets in 120 countries and territories around the world. There are 4,600 outlets in the United States, 4,400 in China, and 9,000 across the rest of the world.” That is a lot of pink dots to check. It turns out that lots and lots of them are near railways and hills. It’s an older sign they don’t use any more in the US and some countries, and you use four-year-old photos, so the store may have closed.

We looked for other clues – that weird white scalloped wall, the hills, possibly wind farm on top of one hill, the tower you can see past the top of another, elevated railways, weird traffic signals. We tried to figure out what those installations wall of the brick building in front are – they look like pipes for some kind of heating system? I have decided there is not nearly enough information on the web about rooftop air conditioners; I think those are made by LG, but they sell them all over the place. There are no satellite dishes visible, so I looked for places they might be banned. Nothing paid off.

I thought it was Australia, because they seem to use the bucket on a short pole the most, and those strange short traffic signals show up in a few towns. So my guess is Brisbane, because I fell in love with it looking at photos of the bays and beaches and rivers and birds.

My first job was at KFC in 1972 – I negotiated a salary of $1.60 an hour, way more than the other fast food place in town, Jack in the Box, would give me (only $1.35). We spent a lot of time seeing how far we could slide on the greased kitchen floor after closing, and I sliced off the end of my finger cleaning a machine. Good times. I wouldn’t eat chicken for several years after that, and now I hate them again. Your fault.

Another gets the right country:

While I can’t identify the exact location in the city, I’m sure it’s South Africa and have a pretty good idea it’s in Pietermaritzburg or somewhere else in KwaZulu-Natal. Firstly, the diagonal lines at the intersection on the left side of the picture and the left-hand drive on the car on the street in the bottom middle. Also, the deciduous trees on the hill mean it has to be somewhere that gets cold enough for them to lose their leaves. But you also see air conditioner condensers, therefore it’s a place that gets cold in the winter and warm in the summer. It’s also somewhere where you have security concerns (note the walls and gates on the edges of all the buildings. Based on the terrain I’m going to guess Pietermaritzburg.

Another gets the right city:

Boy, these things are hard. It looked a lot like the highveld on a winter afternoon, and then I spotted the Voortrekker Monument in the distance, making it Pretoria, South Africa or its surrounds. I think, based on the relative location of the sun, this must be near Unisa, close to an on-ramp to the highway, but my Google Street View skills aren’t hot enough to pinpoint it exactly.

Pretoria it is. An aerial view:

Another gets the right building:

Having lived in South Africa, I immediately recognized the purple jacaranda tree in the background, which Johannesburg and Pretoria are famous for. The “robots” (traffic signals) also had a distinct South African appearance. When I zoomed in, I also saw the modern-looking passenger train in the background – which I assumed must be the Gautrain. These clues made zeroing in on the location fairly easy. The picture was taken from the Manhattan Hotel in Pretoria, South Africa (or Tshwane, the official name for the municipality). The hotel is located at the corner of Scheiding Street and Thabo Sehume Streets in the Pretoria CBD. The picture was taken from a window on the backside (southside) of the hotel. I would guess it was from the 5th floor (6th floor in US numbering).

Another visual entry:

Another reader:

The poles (or “reeds”) of Freedom Park helped orient me. Freedom Park, by the way, honors people who died during South African various conflicts, going back centuries, including people who died in the struggle against apartheid. It’s the Rainbow Nation’s answer to the nearby apartheid-era Voortrekker Monument, which used to monopolize the view (and still kind of does).

Another adds, “I’m a historian, and I found a crazy archive of sorts in the Voortrekker museum’s vaults.” Another looks to the nearby rail station:

The elevated platform on the left side of the photo, which appears too slim to be a highway, immediately indicated to me that this is a view of the Gautrain track (a mass rapid transit system that was completed in 2012 and connects Jo’burg and Pretoria). I searched Gautrain stations on Google, and the one in Pretoria, with that unique wave-style roof, immediately stood out and told me that I was on the right path. A little playing around on Google Earth helped me to find the specific building, which is the Manhattan Hotel located on Scheiding Street.

Another zooms in on the hotel:

I have a suspicion that the scalloped roof of the railway station will be immediately recognizable to residents and visitors of the city, but I did do this the old-fashioned way and hopefully that will count for something! I started out noticing the left-hand traffic, limiting this to a few likely candidate countries. Too spread out to be the UK, and the brick made it seem unlikely to be India. Australia? South Africa? Japan? Realizing the two people walking at the bottom of the picture were black, my attention immediately turned to South Africa. Googling “South Africa traffic lights” revealed the same shape seen on the road on the left as confirmation. The rail station with its unique-looking roof seemed to be the best clue, so looking up images of different rail stations in South Africa led to a perfect match with Pretoria. A bit of orienting from there and we have the Karos Manhattan Hotel, 247 Scheiding Street, Pretoria, South Africa. I would guess the 6th floor, from the window highlighted in the attached picture:

The correct floor is actually the 7th, which about a half-dozen readers guessed. Of them, two readers have previously gotten a difficult window view (“difficult” defined by having 10 or less correct guesses) without yet winning. To break that razor-thin tie, we counted the total contests each of the two readers have participated in. The following reader has 8 contests under his belt. Money quote from his highly-detailed entry this week:

I should note that I have tried, hard, in MANY of these contests. I occasionally get the right country and I once got the right city (mostly by luck). But this time I KNEW I was close, really close. At this point, I literally heard angelic music and noticed a bright glow in my bedroom. I found this distracting, so I turned down the volume and brightness on my laptop and carried on.

But the following reader ekes out a win this week with a total of 10 contests. Money quote from his extensive entry:

Worthy of note is the presence of 40 to 70 thousand jacaranda trees, which had led me to consider the southern hemisphere for my search. Pretoria in South Africa is popularly known as The Jacaranda City due to the thousands of jacaranda trees. Interestingly, the jacaranda are considered an invasive species, as they were imported from South America, and are no longer allowed to be planted.

I have previous correct submissions of Depoe Bay, Waterton, Sierra Vista, Finca Magdalena, Hiangyin, North Ballachulish, Fayetteville, and Lima, Peru.

And now Pretoria. For the record, here are the exact details from the photo’s submitter:

Monday, 4 Nov, 2013, at 6 p.m. Room 707 (facing south), Manhattan Hotel, 247 Scheiding St., Pretoria, South Africa. The jacaranda trees are blooming in town, but I don’t think you can see any in this pic. The global “access programs” groups of the Clinton Health Access Initiative are here for an annualish meeting. An inspiring bunch of people, and generally a lot of fun. We’ve been to Jo’burg and Dar es Salaam before (as well as Goa, India and stateside in Boston, NYC, Chicago).

I know Andrew doesn’t have much love for the Clintons, but I hope he realizes what a huge impact the Clinton Health Access Initiative has had on getting anti-retrovirals to the people of Africa and SE Asia. As we move on from ARVs, we discussed some exciting new initiatives in our meetings in Pretoria.

(Archive)

Obama Agonistes

The major clusterfuck of the website, the breaking of an unequivocal promise, and a media eager to prove it’s not a lapdog to the president have all combined to bring the president down. The latest polling is grim. Here’s the poll of polls on Obama’s approval, since January:

Here’s the favorability chart for the same period:

The question is: what does this mean and what does it portend? I don’t know, but I can express how this has changed my view of the president. On the core question of whether I believe the president deliberately lied to us, I’m inclined to believe he didn’t. His explanation of his broken promise last week was depressing but convincing to me. And I’m not alone: “By 52 percent to 44 percent, Americans say they think he told people what he thought was correct at the time.”

As for the website debacle: Canada and the UK had similar disasters when they attempted something on this scale. And the refusal of many states to set up their own exchanges made the burden on the federal website far greater than might have been imagined. The relative success of many of the states’ own sites is more proof that federalism works, and more proof of the sabotage of the law of the land that Republicans have engaged in.

But what I cannot get past is the management failure. Walter Russell Mead made a strong case on this yesterday:

Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.

I’d cavil about the ACA being the single most important initiative of his presidency (pulling the world out of an incipient second depression and carefully unwinding the Bush-Cheney catastrophe in foreign policy beat it, in my view). But it sure is a key element in his domestic agenda for his second term. It was going to require a real focus to get the federal government to work on this core matter. And yet the president was somehow blindsided by this fiasco. One wonders: what on earth was he doing this past year? He clearly understood the importance of the website’s functionality, and yet he didn’t get into the innards of the government to avoid a debacle.

Substantively, I think the ACA may well have the last laugh. We are certainly primed by the press for comeback stories. But I can’t predict the future, except that the core issues that the ACA deals with are not going away and even the nihilist GOP will have to offer something at some point to address them. What I do know is that the president was inexcusably AWOL on this for the past nine months. And that matters.

Protected by too-loyal staffers, let down by contractors, sabotaged and distracted by the Republican war on him, he lost his grip on his own agenda. That is now embedded in my consciousness, and that of many others. For a candidate who insisted that a president should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, there’s no escaping the failure.

But, to revisit a theme, what matters in a president is not that he is flawless. It is how he responds to the flaws, once exposed. Obama always said he would not be a perfect president, and, unlike others, I found his presser last week to be consistent with much of what he has said and done in the past. He’s also president for the next three years. What we should observe is how he now reacts; how he shuffles staff; how he re-applies himself to the nuts and bolts of the federal government in the months ahead. Unlike Bush, we know he’s capable of this. We’ve just seen him coasting incompetently on healthcare in his second term thus far. To suddenly extrapolate from that a failed presidency is absurdly overblown, especially given the huge achievements already under is belt, the remaining potential for the ACA to work, and the enormous prize of ending the Cold War with Iran that is now within his reach.

He has been humbled and chastened. That’s a good thing. But reveling in that, rather than acutely watching how he adjusts in response, is a function of obsession with the man rather than concern for the country. He’s under probation now. His potential success will matter just as much as his obvious and glaring current failure. And unlike some, I want him to succeed in this. Because I want this country to succeed as well, and its current healthcare system is so profoundly inefficient and ineffective for so many that the status quo is simply not an option.