PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.

That has long been a Cold Spring Shops theme.  I claim no special insight in labelling former president Jimmy Carter as an indecisive Silent Generation type twenty years ago.  I'm pleased to see people with bigger platforms seeing the pattern repeating.  "On policy issues, Mr. Biden, 78, takes days or weeks to make up his mind as he examines and second-guesses himself and others. It is a method of governing that can feel at odds with the urgency of a country still reeling from a pandemic and an economy struggling to recover."  Yes, we saw that coming as well.

Not to mention that at the height of The America That Worked^(TM), these people came of age thinking that process mattered and that big institutions, such as the United Nations and Congress could work.  Thus the Watergate hearings.

But process-worship has since degenerated into booth review, endless committee meetings of the referees at the same time that the players can function without a huddle, and "completed the process of the catch" means nobody knows anymore what a catch is.

Just like the coot, who apparently can never be burdened with too much detail. Doing the opposite of his predecessor, who came up in a world of executive summaries and no more than three bullet points in a recommendation, has value, but only up to a point. "Embedded in Biden’s mindset is the micromanaging social engineer."

It might be, as Power Line's Steven Hayward is hinting at, that the Times released that criticism as battlespace preparation, with a handoff to Mrs Emhoff coming sooner rather than later.  "The timing of the Times story is interesting, as Biden’s 'honeymoon' period looks to be over, his ambitious legislative and spending agenda is in trouble on Capitol Hill, and multiple self-induced crises are piling up in ways that bring back memories of the ineptitude of Jimmy Carter."  The Carter comparisons keep coming.  "It’s stunning how much success Biden has managed to reverse in not even four months. With long lines at the pump, slowing growth and rising inflation, it’s looking like the Jimmy Carter era — except that it took Carter years to produce the disasters that this president has fostered in scant months."

It might not be the empathetic mind-set that's causing the troubles.  Rather, it might be the process worship and the misplaced enthusiasm for some sort of consensus.  "We have two major parties beholden to electoral bases with very different interests. That reality is itself a result of a compromise (Republican support for the so-called voting rights act enabled state legislatures to craft majority-minority districts safe for Democrats in such a way as to create other districts safe for Republicans). That makes splitting the difference in a conference committee more difficult."  It can't help the coot to have small legislative majorities that comprise a divided caucus, and that his ability to knock heads together isn't that of Lyndon Johnson.  Perhaps people will grow tired of the talk of consensus, anyway, because the pursuit of consensus fails at anything more significant than a bike shed.  Not to mention that between the wrangling and the implementation all sorts of things can go wrong.  "If the President’s progressive agenda proceeds, then history teaches that Americans will endure more years of failed policy initiatives, enhanced coercion, further social frustration, and yet more social and political incivility."

Fortunately, two forces are at work that will limit the coercion.  First, the very intrusion of conflicting goals, even in something as simple as issuing vaccines, makes the technocrats look bad.

[New York Times editorialist David] Leonhardt hints at a stronger explanation: government finds it increasingly difficult to do anything because it is increasingly rare for government to do any one thing. Vaccinating everyone as quickly as possible isn’t a sufficient goal for government even in the worst epidemic in a hundred years. Additional, complicated imperatives must be folded into the pursuit of this public health objective, ones that take time to formulate because they require input from many constituencies and experts. After that, the implementation of the multi-faceted plan inevitably becomes complex, contested, and protracted in ways that a program to realize a single objective would not.

In William Voegeli's view, it's the process worship, and he'd like to unbundle "progressive" as the contemporary euphemism for "communist" from "progressive" as shorthand for "Governance By Wise Experts:" "[P]rogressivism is more process-oriented than goal-oriented."  Ideas may persevere, but their advocates change over time.  So, too, with Team Biden's gerontocracy.  "The country in which a young Joe Biden came into his own politically was one in which there was a sizable industrial base, in which vast swathes of the economy were yet to be subsumed into high finance, in which uncreative Fordist assumptions that now seem unthinkable dominated many corporate boardrooms."  Life expectancies increase, which makes current retirement options untenable for the long term; on the other hand, intellectual agility probably deteriorates with age, and the current crop of process-worshippers are still in charge. "This is what happens when you let geriatrics run your country. The average age of the three most powerful politicians in the country is over 76. President Biden is 78, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 81 and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the spring chicken at 70. Fauci is 80." None of them are the second coming of Winston Churchill. We give them grief and we wait them out.