Monica Lewinski and the failure of Journalism

The word "hook" is a term of art.  It is something that is included in order to attract attention.  "Monica Lewinski" in the title is the hook for this piece.  I will talk about her but this piece is primarily about other things.  She is able to serve as my hook because she has been in the news recently.  Andy Warhol coined the phrase "15 minutes of fame" to describe people who come under intense scrutiny for a short period of time.  As I write this it appears that interest in Ms. Lewinski is already waning.  It lasted more than 15 minutes.  But an older phrase, "three day wonder", appears to be a reasonably accurate description for her recent time in the spotlight.  The action that occasions her current round of attention is piece she wrote for Vanity Fair.  It's in the June issue, the one with Jon Hamm (Vanity Fair's hook) on the cover.

I will get back to Ms. Lewinski and what she had to say at the end of this piece.  And she does tie in to my main thesis.  And that thesis is encapsulated in the boring (or at least less hook-ish) part of my title.  And before continuing let me confess to a bit of hyperbole.  I am not going to talk about all of journalism.  I am going to focus on what passes for journalism inside the "beltway", the circular highway that surrounds our nation's capital, Washington DC.  I believe my thesis applies to a broad swath of journalism but I am not going to attempt to prove that.  I am not even going to talk about it.  I will leave the question of how broadly my thesis applies across all areas of journalism in the hands of you, dear reader.

If I am going to talk about journalism failure I need to start by talking about journalism success.  And to do that it is important to understand what journalism is about.  Libraries are divided into two broad sections, fiction and non-fiction.  Journalism resides in the broad category of non-fiction.  Journalism is about what is true not what is false.  It is about what is not what might be or how we wish things to be.  Journalism is also bound up in the news, or more broadly, current events.  Good journalism tells us what is going on in the world.  It also tells us what is NOT going on in the world.  There is an old saw to the effect that "people watch the news on TV to find out what disasters did not happen today".

Bound up in the news is the concept of "breaking news".  Journalists value speed.  They treasure the "scoop", getting a story out before anyone else does.  And speed is sometimes the enemy of accuracy.  The quick version of some event may be incomplete or inaccurate.  I am going to deal with that problem by ignoring it.  I am going to examine how three big stories were covered, not by any specific journalist but broadly.  And each of these stories unfolded over a period of years.  So with respect to the stories I am going to discuss there was plenty of time to fill in any gaps or correct any inaccuracies that were the result of the need for speed.  And, depressingly, the time period over which these stories occurred is many decades.  Given the amount of time involved the problem is systemic.  It is not limited to a particular story or journalist or news organization.  The dominant news medium was print for the first story and TV for the last.  So maybe the Internet will finally fix the problem.  Only time will tell.

The first story I am going to talk about is frequently referred to at the "McCarthy Era" or "McCarthyism".  Senator Joe McCarthy was a Republican back bencher from Wisconsin who was first elected in 1946.  He became famous starting with a speech he made in 1950 and remained famous until his death in 1957.  To explain what the fuss was about will require a little background. 

The US got dragged into World War II on the side of the British and in opposition to the Nazis.  On the theory that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" the US ended up allied with what was then called the U.S.S.R. but which I will refer to as Russia for convenience.  This was a good thing because the longest campaigns and the largest battles were fought between the Germans and the Russians.  But the Russians were never very popular either before or during the war.  And after the war the Russians took political and economic control of a group of countries generally referred to as "Eastern Europe".  This made the Russians very unpopular by the late '40s.  So there was an opportunity to make political hay.  The Democrats had been in control before the war and during it.  So blaming the Democrats for various bad behavior (e.g. cozying up to the commies) was a fun and profitable game for the Republicans.

Added to this was a long history of aggressive spying by the Russians.  The Russians maintained an active program of spying and undercover political shenanigans in the '30s and during and after WWII.  Their activities seemed unimportant to the US in the '30s.  We turned a blind eye during the war in order to keep the Russians in the fight.  The single biggest coup for Russian intelligence was stealing the US design for the Atomic Bomb.  So by the late '40s the Russians were "dirty commies" who were spies and saboteurs.  In the middle of this was the US State Department.  During the war their job was to keep the Russians in the fight no matter what.  This meant that various State Department officials spent a lot of time with Russians and said nice things about them on a regular basis.  This left many State Department officials wide open to unscrupulous attacks.  At the same time a number of Russian spies were identified by authorities.  Enter Joe McCarthy.

McCarthy was happy to launch unscrupulous attacks.  He was especially happy to launch them against the State Department.  He was famous for waving a piece of paper around where it could be photographed but not read.  According to McCarthy it contained a specific number of names (51 or 87 or some other specific number) of spies or traitors in the State Department or in some other part of the government.  We now know that none of these papers contained any names at all.  There were various investigations and committee hearings.  And some spies were exposed.  But the information to expose them was developed by the FBI or other government agency.  J. Edgar Hoover (then head of the FBI) found McCarthy useful so he occasionally fed McCarthy tips.  So did a few other government officials.  We now know that McCarthy and his operatives developed no "actionable intelligence" on their own during this period.

In other words, McCarthy was a fraud (and a well known drunk).  And it quickly became apparent he was a fraud to those in the know including many journalists.  But he was useful.  He advanced an agenda that benefitted people like J Edgar Hoover.  Eisenhower, an honest and able man found him useful as he was damaging Democrats and Eisenhower was running for President as a Republican in '52.  His theory was he could rein him in after the election.  "Journalists" found him useful because he was good copy.  So a circle of powerful people, many of them journalists, ran interference for him.  The result was that McCarthy was able to ruin the lives of many good and patriotic people.

There is a journalist who is famous for openly opposing McCarthy.  His name is Edward R. Murrow.  Many books have been written about this subject.  But a quick introduction to the Murrow/McCarthy battle can be found in a very good movie called "Good Night and Good Luck" starring George Clooney.  But Murrow was an outlier.  Almost no other "journalists" openly opposed McCarthy.  Most of them jumped on the gravy train that McCarthy represented and enjoyed the ride.

McCarthy was eventually brought down and his era slowly ground to a halt.  Was it great (or even adequate) journalism that did it?  Sadly, no.  It was TV.  ABC was the new network on the block at the time and did not have a full schedule of daytime TV programs.  McCarthy launched a Senate investigation that came to be known as the "Army/McCarthy hearings" because they were ostensibly about treason in the army.  ABC decided to televise them.  They went on for weeks and McCarthy was front and center as master of ceremonies.  Average Americans got to see McCarthy as he actually was not as the news media portrayed him.  And they did not like what they saw.  The hearings effectively ended when the attorney representing the army said to McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you no sense of decency?"  The audience in the room and at home were nearly unanimous in their opinion that the answer was "no".

The next story I am going to cover is the granddaddy of all "gate"s, Watergate.  Richard Nixon, who had come to prominence as part of the crew that hung on to Joe McCarthy's coat tails, was elected narrowly to the Presidency in 1968.  So when 1972 rolled around he was of a mind to take no chances.  But for a number of reasons he was way ahead.  This was a situation he had no experience with.  Not quite believing his good fortune and sitting on a large well funded organization (called CRP by the Nixon people and CREEP, technically the "Committee to Re-Elect the President", by everyone else) he decided to leave no stone unturned.  A secret group called the "plumbers" (we find and fix leaks) was formed.  They decided to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.  The DNC happened to be then housed in a building complex near the Lincoln Memorial called the "Watergate Complex".  The name of the building eventually became the nickname for the scandal.

On their second burglary job the plumbers were caught.  Events surrounding Watergate spawned the aphorism "it's not the crime that gets you, it's the cover up" because that is how Watergate went.  If the Nixon people had owned up early on they probably would have received a slap on the wrist and Nixon would have still been re-elected.  Instead the burglars were initially characterized as a "rogue operation" that no senior officials knew anything about.  But then payoffs were arranged and various cover up contingency plans were hatched and implemented.  And things kept spiraling out in more and more baroque ways.  Eventually the whole thing broke wide open and Nixon was forced to resign.

There is a Murrow-like character in Watergate.  Except it is two people operating as a team that came to be known by the nickname Woodstein.  The two members were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  They were junior reporters for the Washington Post.  As with McCarthyism before, most of the news media (including most of the senior reporters at the Washington Post) either provided cover for the Nixon people or stood on the sideline.  Another hero in uncovering the scandal was a Federal Judge named John Sirica.  He was the judge that officiated at the original burglary case.  He refused to accept a plea deal the Nixon Justice Department had put together as part of the cover up effort.  As a result of his probing facts came out that pointed to a larger conspiracy.  This was one of several key points where the Nixon people came very close to successfully hushing things up.  There is a book by Woodstein and a movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford called "All the President's Men" that covers some of the Watergate events.  But the whole story has enough twists and turns (and players) to fill an entire season of "Game of Thrones".

From start to finish Watergate took about 3 years.  The burglars were caught in June of 1972.  The US Senate convened a "Watergate Hearing" committee in May of 1973.  The critical time was during this first 18 months.  The election took place in November of 1972 (Nixon won big).  The Sirica hearings that led to additional information coming out also happened during this period.  Woodstein were most active during this period.  The revelation before the Senate committee (and the public) in August of 1973 of the existence of the Nixon Tapes put an end to any serious possibility of the cover up succeeding.

And, unlike the Army/McCarthy hearing, the Watergate Hearing was well conducted.  It was covered on TV but this time the public gave the participating Senators high marks for how they comported themselves.  It would be nice to report that DC journalists as a group also comported themselves well during the critical early period.  But they didn't.  They divided themselves for the most part into the "Nixon apologists" group and the "there's no story here" group.  Once the existence of the Nixon Tapes was revealed it quickly became apparent that there was a big story here.  At that point the DC news media came piling in.  There were lots more twists and turns.  But Nixon resigned in August of 1974 and was pardoned about a month later by President Ford.

I was too young for the McCarthy era.  I heard stories about it and the last embers of McCarthyism were just dying down when I started getting interested in the world around me.  But I was front and center for Watergate.  And Watergate whetted my appetite to learn more about the McCarthy era.  But by then (and still to some extent all the way to the present) the McCarthy period is not much spoken of.  Very few people covered themselves in glory during this period.  And there are a lot of people who engaged in shameful behavior during that period.  They are happy to let sleeping dogs lie.

In any case, after Watergate wound up I spent some time trying to figure out what lessons could be learned.  (I did the same thing at about the same time with respect to Vietnam.  See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html for more on what I learned from Vietnam).  My basic question with the Watergate affair was how to evaluate whether the media was doing a good job with respect to a potential scandal.  I came up with two questions:  (1) Is the media doing a thorough investigation?  (2) Is the media afraid of the powers that be (the people being investigated)?  The two questions are related.  If the media is afraid of (or beholden to) the powers that be they are more likely to do a poor (or nonexistent) investigation.  And the people who need to talk in order for the story to come out are less likely to spill the beans if they are afraid.  With Watergate a large segment of the media had effectively been bought off by the Nixon Administration.  This is not done using bags of cash.  It is done by "access" (giving selected members of the press access - either off the record or on - to key administration figures) and "leaks" (dribbling out "not for attribution" juicy ("newsworthy") tidbits).

The Nixon Administration had a segment of the media in their pocket using some combination of access and leaks.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Everybody does it.  But good journalists weigh the costs against the benefits.  Are they being given correct information?  Are they being required to slant their coverage in order to stay in the good graces of the administration?  Good journalists should never tolerate being given bad information.  And a certain amount of "slant" is probably unavoidable.  But the slant should be kept to saying nice things about the administration (how much and for how long is a judgment call) but it should never extend to suppressing facts or shutting out the other side's ability to get their story out.  So in the early stages of Watergate the Nixon Administration did not lack for cheerleaders.

Then there was the "thorough investigation" issue.  Most of the media coverage between June and November of '72 was election coverage.  With respect to Watergate it was definitely "there's no story there".  How much of this was laziness or narrow mindedness versus being bought off by access and leaks versus fear of the Nixon Administration is hard to tell.  The Nixon people kept a formal "enemies" list. People on this list were to be sabotaged at every opportunity.  Given the number of "journalists" working in DC, the list was remarkably short.  And with that let me move on to the third story, the one that involved Ms. Lewinski.

Actually this story is multiple stories.  The first one goes by the name of "Whitewater".  It broke during the 1992 campaign when Bill Clinton was running for President.  At heart it was an influence peddling scandal.  Someone does a favor for Bill and Bill does a favor for this person in return.  Whitewater was a real estate development.  The Clintons (before Bill was running for President) were given an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a deal that was supposed to be highly profitable.  The problem with this scheme is that the Clintons ended up losing a bundle of money on the deal.  After that the Clintons were unlikely to come through with the "pro quo" to go with the "quid".  So even if the plan was to peddle influence, it didn't happen in this case.

Clinton won the election.  In spite of this the "investigation" of Whitewater continued.  But no one has ever shown that the Clintons made money on the deal.  Various investigations have come up with various figures for their loss.  But the figure was in the tens of thousands of dollars.  (For contrast, Bill was earning $26,500 a year at the time of the deal.)  Mostly what these investigations turned up was that the other party to the deal, a banker named Jim MacDougal, was a real sleezeball.  But Whitewater turned out to be only the first of the Clinton "scandals".  And, in an homage to Watergate, a "gate" nickname was usually attached to each.

The next one was "travel-gate".  The Clintons kicked the current occupants of the White House travel office out and installed their own people.  I never could understand what the big deal was.  (And George W Bush did the same thing 10 years later and no one let out a peep.)  Travel-gate somehow managed to garner vast quantities of publicity anyhow.

Shortly thereafter, we were treated to "Vince Foster-gate".  Vince Foster was a Whitehouse aid who committed suicide.  Somehow, in spite of the fact that the death was thoroughly investigated there was supposed to be some deep mysterious conspiracy behind the death.  "It wasn't a suicide.  It was a hit job ordered by Bill Clinton."  It never made any sense.  But the media obsessed about it for month after month anyhow.

There were others.  It is now hard to keep them all straight.  But before moving on to the one that involved Ms. Lewinski let me cover one more.  Hillary was employed for many years by the Rose law firm.  It was one of those political law firms that are ubiquitous in DC but Rose was in Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas.  While she was there she decided to invest in cattle futures.  There is no evidence she ever had any interest in or knowledge of cattle futures except in the case of this one transaction.  And the transaction turned a nice profit.  Now, if you know how to game the system, it's pretty easy to make sure that a single transaction for a single individual makes money.  There is no firm evidence that this happened in this case.  But a single very profitable transaction is suggestive.  So here we have a classic influence peddling scenario.  But this whole thing never got any real traction.  We heard ad infinitum about Whitewater, at best a failed effort at influence peddling, and we heard almost nothing about cattle futures, a classic influence peddling scenario.  To this day I can make no sense of this.

Before he was elected there were a lot of rumors that Bill Clinton was a skirt chaser.  No one was able to come up with definitive proof but there was a lot of speculation.  Four years before Clinton ran another Democrat named Gary Hart ran for President.  And he too was surrounded by similar rumors.  One day he dared the media to come up with definitive proof.  Shortly thereafter proof appeared that Hart had dallied with a lady named Donna Rice on a boat called "Monkey Business".  Whether he was informed by the Hart experience or he was just a more careful politician, Clinton never made that mistake.  In fact, in a famous "60 Minutes" interview early in the campaign he owned up to being a sinner and to having committed unspecified sins.  He also did not take a "holier than thou" attitude and chastise others who had been caught out.  So the implied pact was that his past dalliances would be let pass but that he would mend his ways while in the White House.

Various "bimbo alerts" surfaced after he entered the White House having to do with events that had occurred before he became President.  But no hard proof was found.  That is until Paula Jones emerged.  She alleged an affair with Clinton.  But hard proof was scarce.  Eventually a lawsuit ensued and depositions were taken, including one by Bill Clinton.  Meanwhile it turned out that Clinton had become involved with a White House intern named Monica Lewinski.  The most salacious aspect of this involvement can best be characterized as mutual jerk off sessions.  No actual sex (in the biblical sense) was involved.  But that turned out to be enough.  Lewinski had been confiding in a friend named Linda Tripp.  Tripp in turn had consulted Lucianne Goldberg.  Goldberg was very active in Republican circles.  She advised Tripp to secretly tape her conversations with Lewinski.  When it came out that Lewinski had a dress with semen stains on it (the "blue dress") Goldberg counseled Tripp to counsel Lewinski to keep the dress as insurance. .  Tripp did what Goldberg counseled and Lewinski did what Tripp recommended.

The Republicans had engineered an "independent council" investigation of the various Clinton "scandals".  They then engineered the replacement of original head with a hard charging conservative named Ken Starr.  Starr was made aware of the existence of the tapes and the dress.  He went to town.  The investigation was supposed to be handled in secret but the Starr operation leaked like a sieve.  And, in spite of running down every whisper, Starr concluded there was no serious wrongdoing involved.  But after pressure was applied he dumped the whole thing in the lap of the US House of Representatives.  The body was controlled by Republicans at the time so they promptly moved bills of impeachment.  This results in a trial with the Senate in the role of the jury.  The Senate (controlled by Democrats) did not vote to convict.  The public generally concurred with the opinion of the Senate and Republicans did badly in the next election.  With his feet cut out from under him, Clinton eventually settled with Paula Jones for $850,000 and no admission of guilt.

As a side note, the Tripp tapes were illegally recorded.  The reason I mention this is a couple of years later another tape surfaced.  This one featured Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, and documented him engaging in flagrantly unethical behavior.  Not a peep about illegality was heard from Republicans when the Tripp tapes surfaced.  But a huge uproar went up about the "illegality" of the tape in the Gingrich case.  The tape was leaked to the New York Times by Democratic Representative Jim McDermott.  Republicans (including now Speaker John Boehner, who was heard on the tape) sued McDermott.  The case dragged out for years and McDermott eventually lost.  The result was millions of dollars of penalties, court costs, and legal fees.  I will say in defense of the media that they did actively support the McDermott side of the case.

I applied my two Watergate tests to the various Clinton "scandals".  In the Watergate case the answers were "no" (the media did not thoroughly investigate, at least in the critical early period when it mattered) and "yes" (many media figures were afraid of the Nixon Administration.  Many low level employees also frankly admitted to Woodstein that they were afraid to talk.)  In the Whitewater case, I quickly concluded the opposite.  The answers were "yes" (a whole crop of journalists who had grown up on Watergate were eager to crack their own "gate") and "no" (no one in Little Rock seemed to be the least bit afraid of the Clintons nor reluctant to talk).  If there was any substance to Whitewater I expected it to emerge quickly.  It didn't.  (The basic facts of Whitewater were all in the original story.)  It became quickly apparent that the same was true of "travel-gate", "Vince Foster-gate" and other Clinton "scandals".  The exceptions were "cattle futures", which the media quickly lost interest in, and the Lewinski affair.

Given this pattern at some point the story should have changed from "allegations by anonymous sources have surfaced suggesting Clinton involvement in fill-in-the-blank-gate" to "the GOP scandal machine has surfaced a new and likely false charge against the Clintons in a crass effort to damage them politically" but it never did.  Instead the media ignores their earlier bad behavior and relies heavily on the Lewinski affair when the subject is raised because they can argue with at least marginal credibility that they behaved appropriately in that case.  And the beltway media has yet to own up to their sins in any of these stories.  I note without comment that in all the stories I have recounted the beltway media acted to promote Republican causes and damage Democratic ones.  I am perfectly willing to believe that examples going the opposite way exist.  Conservatives have suggested a number of possibilities.  But so far I have found their analysis unconvincing.

Finally, let me recommend Ms. Lewinski's piece.  It is well written and she has some interesting things to say.  She does herself justice in that she gives us a much more well rounded picture of herself than the media has at any time, then or now.  She titles her piece in part "The Culture of Humiliation".  She styles herself an expert on that particular subject and I am convinced by her logic.  Her involvement in a "gate" has effectively forestalled many carrier options.  She has suggested that she can provide assistance to others who have also been the target of public humiliation.  Again I am convinced.  I wish her all the luck and much success in her endeavor.

Regulations

The Republicans have been on a rant about regulations for some time now.  The media in good lapdog fashion dutifully reports their blather on this subject (and every other subject) in their usual uncritical manner.  The short and sweet version is "all regulations are evil".  This is followed by the usual nonsense, "it is bad for the economy", "it is some kind of plot to take away our liberty", etc., etc., etc.  Since all issues have two sides it goes without saying that Democrats (the un-Republicans) have never met a regulation they didn't like so all regulations are some kind of malevolent plot on the part of the Democrats to destroy the economy, take away our liberty, etc., etc., etc.

This "controversy" of course is all nonsense.  And, since Democrats don't at all believe what the Republicans say they believe, but the idiot media lets the Republicans frame the discussion, only a complete idiot would show up for the "debate" so what we usually see is the equivalent of a Republican debating an empty chair while the media pretends that news is happening.

The Republicans keep trotting this nonsense out for the reasons outlined above but it bears absolutely no resemblance to reality.  The truth is that Republicans love regulations, if you pick the right regulations, and Democrats hate regulations, if you pick the right regulations.  The devil is in the details.  There are good regulations.  There are bad regulations.  There are parts of society that are over-regulated.  There are parts of society that are under-regulated.  This leads to an obvious path forward.  Get rid of the bad regulations.  Keep good regulations.  Reduce regulations where things are over-regulated.  Increase regulations where things are under-regulated.

Of course, there is a sensible debate to be had about which are the "good" and which are the "bad" regulations.  There is another sensible debate about where society is under-regulated and where it is over-regulated.  But all I have to do is use the word "sensible" and you know that such a discussion is not going to happen in D.C.  The current popular colloquial description for an activity like this is "going out into the weeds".  Doing so is bad for ratings so everyone agrees (i.e. both the politicians and the news media) that it is a good idea to just not go there.   So they don't.  Instead we have the idiot "discussion" I have outlined above.

There is a life cycle for regulations.  We start out with a situation where there is a problem.  Over time this problem becomes apparent enough so that something resembling a consensus develops that something needs to be done.  If the government is involved (see below for a discussion on private sector regulation) then laws are passed.  This enables government departments to write regulations so they do.  Then conditions change.  But now there is a problem.  The regulations have become part of the landscape and groups have come to depend on their existence and their general form.  Any significant change is seen as detrimental to one or more of these groups.  Depending as they do on the status quo, these groups organize to resist changes (e.g. updated regulations).  On the other hand those who might benefit from the regulatory change see the benefit as strictly hypothetical so they make little or no investment in opposing the forces of stasis.  The regulations become more and more detrimental as conditions continue to evolve away from the initial situation for which the regulations were designed.  And we end up with a situation where the consensus now is that the regulations in a certain area are bad.  And we all sit around wondering why they don't get fixed.

Let me give you a specific example of the life cycle of a specific set of regulations from what is now ancient history.  Commercial airlines date back to roughly the '30s.  Flying in the early days was dangerous and expensive.  This made founding and operating an airline a very risky business.  So the federal government stepped in.  They provided various subsidies (i.e. airmail, R&D subsidies to airplane manufacturers, easy financing for airports, etc.).  This was because there was a general consensus that having airlines was a good idea.  Another thing they did was to put in regulations that made it hard to start an airline.  They also put in a lot of restrictions about where a particular airline could fly and how much they could charge for a ticket.  These regulations were designed to reduce the financial risk by reducing competition and making it easy for airlines to fly routes profitably (i.e. by setting ticket prices high).  It worked.  By the '50s we had a robust and very profitable airline industry.  It was now possible to fly quickly (compared to alternate modes of transportation) between pretty much any major city in the country.  These kinds of regulations extended to international flights so you could also fly to most major cities around the world.  In short, the subsidies (still present but at much lower levels) and the regulations resuled in the achievement of the initial goal.

But things had changed.  The regulations resulted in a monopolistic market where prices were unnaturally high.  And subsidies were no longer necessary to guarantee that planes would be designed and built and airports would be built or upgraded.  The market was now big enough and stable enough to do this without government help.  So the benefits of the regulations were pretty much a thing of the past.  But the established airlines liked things as they were.  They could make a nice profit without having to work very hard.  And the manufactures liked their subsidies even though they no longer needed them.  The people who built and upgraded airports liked the free money too.  So they all organized to keep things just the same.

They succeeded right up to the late '70s.  Government control of pricing was finally ended.  Regulations that made it hard to start a new airline were scaled way back.  (The various subsidies were also scaled back considerably over a long period of time but they are still around to some extent.)  The result is just what you would expect.  Fares plunged.  New "low cost" airlines entered the industry and old airlines jumped into the markets where they thought their competitor's prices were too high.  This has been very good for passengers in terms of price.  Service has plunged but the market has decided that cheap is what matters.  The old line airlines have had a lot of trouble.  Several of them have gone out of business completely.  The others have merged and restructured to the point that they are unrecognizable.  And, most importantly, the job of being the CEO of an airline has gone from being a cushy, prestigious, fun, and pretty easy job to a permanent throbbing nightmare.  From their perspective they were right to resist deregulation with every fiber of their being.

We have seen this same scenario play out over and over in all segments of the economy.  Businesses come to depend on a certain kind of "regulatory framework".  And it doesn't matter if the proposed change looks like a good one or a bad one.  Any change looks risky.  And, if the truth be told, regulations are the friend of big businesses.  And the more complicated the better.  The established business has figured out how to be successful in the current regulatory framework.  New competitors are at a disadvantage while they figure out how to do business.  A change to the regulatory framework can represent an opportunity for a newcomer to get a jump (competitive advantage) on the old guys.  This is what happened in the airline business.  Southwest pioneered a new business model.  It resulted in a lot of early success for Southwest.  It also required the old line airlines to change how they did business so they could catch up.  It took them a long time to make the transition.  Today, all airlines are clones of Southwest to a great extent.  If you were part of an old line airline all this change was not fun.

Then there is the captive regulator.  If businesses can work it properly they can get the regulator to work for them rather than the other way around.  This is what has happened in banking and finance.  A change to the law permitted financial institutions to literally shop around between three agencies and chose which one they would be regulated by.  If a regulator loses too many "customers" this is bad for whoever is running the agency.  So the agencies were forced to chase customers (the financial institutions they were supposed to be regulating).  This resulted in a race to the bottom.  What these institutions wanted was loose regulation.  "I'm the loosest regulator.  No I am."  After a few years of this none of the regulatory agencies were doing their job properly.  The regulatory agencies each knew that if they did their job properly then all the institutions would flee to one of the other regulatory agencies.  We all know how that turned out.  The situation has improved somewhat since.  But none of the regulatory agencies is back to where they need to be.

You may be willing to grant the specific examples I have cited but you may still be skeptical of the general proposition that businesses actually like regulation.  So let me move on to private regulation.  And this goes back a long time.  Back in colonial times a new way to heat buildings was developed.  The traditional way was to use a lot of fire places.  These were later replaced by (eventually) very sophisticated stoves.  The "Franklin" stove was quite the modern marvel when it was introduced by Ben Franklin.  (Yes, that Ben Franklin.)  The next wave of cutting edge technology was to use a boiler to heat water.  This hot water was circulated around the building to "radiators".  It was a giant improvement.  But occasionally the boiler would blow up and burn the building down.  So people started buying fire insurance.  And the fire insurance companies decided that it was in their interest to reduce the incidence of fires and explosions.  So they set up regulations for the construction and maintenance of these boiler systems.  If you didn't have a conforming system you couldn't buy fire insurance.  All of a sudden nonconforming boilers were as scarce as hens teeth.

I picked that example because it was the first example (at least in the U.S.) of private regulation.  But I am talking about a niche market.  How about something more general?  Well, in 1894 an organization called Underwriter's Laboratories was formed.  Pretty much every type of electrical gadget found in the home used to have a green "UL" sticker on it.  The idea was the same.  If something bad happened and whatever was involved did not have a UL sticker on it then someone was likely to have to cough up a lot of dough in court.  If the device had a UL sticker the device maker could at least argue that "It's not my fault.  My device was tested by UL and conformed to all appropriate safety standards".  The argument might not work all the time but it worked enough of the time to make the sticker quite valuable to device manufacturers.  And, since stores became reluctant to sell non "UL approved" devices, it kept a lot of shoddy devices off the market.  UL is still around.  It's just not as prominent as it used to be.  There are other standards laboratories and other government and non-governmental standards organizations out there that give it a run for its money.

Before wrapping things up here, let me make one purely political observation.  The airline industry was deregulated under a Democratic President, Jimmy Carter.  Carter also deregulated the trucking industry.  Moving vans and long haul truckers used to have their rates set by a department of the federal government.  The same department also had barriers to entry set up to protect the old line moving companies and trucking companies.  That's all gone.  President Clinton put together a task force chaired by Vice President Gore to review and eliminate obsolete government regulations.  They got rid of thousands of pages of them.  The Republican presidents that followed Carter (Reagan then "H W" Bush) did nothing on the regulatory front.  Nor did the Republican president that followed Clinton ("W" Bush).  There were periods under these Republicans when their party controlled both houses of congress in addition to the White House.  Yet we saw no activity on the deregulation front from either the White House or the Congress.  And the "deregulate everything" Republicans that are now so vocal were conspicuous by their silence in those days.

President Obama represents a special case.  It is obvious that he inherited horrific problems that demanded a regulatory response.  And he has stepped up to the plate in these areas.  But he has also been amenable to working to reduce unnecessary regulation in other areas.

Congratulations!  You have now arrived at the wrap up.  Regulatory reform is a thankless task.  For the reasons I have outlined above you have to fight entrenched interests to make any progress and you get no credit from those who benefit if you do your job well.  But it is nevertheless the job of our elected officials.  And it is obvious that they don't do it.  Part of the problem is certainly the fact that it is one of those "long on grief and short on glory" jobs.  But I want to note another factor.  There are two major political parties.  And the media does a thorough job of keeping us informed of who is in which party.  But I want to  categorize politicians differently.  I want to put them in one of two categories but the categories won't be their political affiliation or even where the fit on the "liberal" / "conservative" political spectrum.

The categories I am interested in are "show horse" and "work horse".  I try to pay a lot of attention to this sort of thing.  But, even so, I am not very good at it.  I used to be a fan of Anthony Weiner.  I liked what I saw of him.  I thought the first Weinergate scandal reflected poorly on his judgment and so I thought it was appropriate that he resigned.  But my opinion of him, while much diminished, was still positive.  Then Weinergate II happened.  Here things went from "poorly" to totally idiotic.  But what's relevent for this discussion is a minor side effect of Weinergate II.  It came out that Weiner was all show horse and no work horse.  He was an attention hog who worked hard at avoiding anything that resembled actual work.  Why didn't I notice this?  Because I am not on the inside of the U.S. House of Representatives.

I have some idea of what is going on with my own delegation.  But the only way I can form an opinion of anyone else in congress is by following the media.  The media is happy to cover "show horse" activities.  So I know who the show horses are.  But that doesn't tell you much about anything else.  Senator Ted Kennedy got his share and more of media attention.  But he also was known as a hard worker.  He spent prodigious amounts of time crafting legislation and working to get it passed.  So he is a classic example of someone who is both a show horse and a work horse.  Another example is Senator John McCain.  He spends too much time on show horse activities (e.g. Sunday talk shows).  But he also has a distinguished work horse record.  People who are work horses but don's spend much time being show horses are effectively invisible.  As are people who are neither show horses nor work horses.

It would be nice if there was ready access to accurate information on who the actual work horses are.  But that sort of thing doesn't attract eyeballs.  And attracting eyeballs is the real job of most of the beltway press.  That, and being seen as a power player.  Sigh!