Information Sharing Is Caring-Why Obama and Congress need to talk it out on Syria

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/information-sharing-caring

Information Sharing Is Caring
Jonathan Bernstein
September 5, 2013

Why Obama and Congress need to talk it out on Syria.


snip//


The partisan nature of the legislative branch's reaction to a president’s policy proposal is also helpful. When Congress takes sides, the president is able to see how strong his own party’s support for the policy might be, and how strong the out-party’s opposition is. That’s going to help the president make far better informed guesses about some crucial questions that the Pentagon and State Department can’t help him with. How long will the political system tolerate troop deployments? How many casualties will it take to turn people—and then their elected representatives—against (or further against) military action?

Public questioning of executive-branch officials (oddly enough, something that can’t really happen within the executive branch) can also generate answers that illuminate flaws in their reasoning, or even specifics about a situation which they were not eager to volunteer. A classic example was General Eric Shinseki’s public testimony about the need for a large occupying force in post-invasion Iraq—a clear signal to George W. Bush about what the military was really thinking, albeit one that Bush apparently totally ignored.

All of this information gathering is contingent on a president seeking it, as opposed to simply attempting to impose his personal policy preferences and trusting his own sense that they will succeed. And this more informed decision making comes with a risk: that at the end of the day, the political process will defeat the president's original preference or modify it significantly.

snip//

Presidents put themselves at risk when they listen only to experts, because it’s difficult for presidents to know when those experts are wrong. Even when the experts are credentialed. Even when the experts are seemingly “neutral” and work only for the government. Even when they are the very experts the president himself chose in the first place.

Even experts have self-interest, and even experts can be subject to groupthink or to other biases. Indeed, a government of bureaucrats has no shortage of expertise, but it’s a particular form of expertise, subject to its own set of biases.

The particular strength of democracies in forming public policy is that they take input from a wide variety of people who see the effects of the policy up close; the particular strength of the United States’s flavor of Madisonian democracy for policy formation is that, at its best, it is particularly good at bringing an especially diverse set of groups into that discussion, with all the different experiences and information sources that those groups can offer. Policy debates that are restricted to just the president and the executive branch fail to take advantage of those strengths, especially when much of the debate is conducted in secret. Getting these debates out of the White House and into Congress is exactly what a smart politician in the White House will do.

[sendero]

1. Obama plans a speech.

Who here really thinks the point of the speech is to "spread information"?

No, the point of the speech will be to persuade. Obama is not interested in what Americans think about this, if he was he would have foregone the possibility of using the military already because the numbers are completely one-sided to NO and HELL NO.

We're going to be subjected to the same emotional appeals that have been put forth by Kerry in a frankly insulting display of hand-wringing. I can live without it, I've weighed the pros (very few) and cons (huge) and this is a no brainer.

No.

[bigtree]

2. good advice

. . . for the public and the president alike.