New blood

By Deauwand Myers

"Strong government … should mean effective, fair administration ― in other words, 'good governance.'" ― Raghuram Rajan

I wrote before that sometimes, experienced, older politicians like Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and current U.S. President Joseph Biden are more effective at running the federal government, setting political agendas, and passing meaningful legislation.

This fact is still true, but with some major caveats. First, former President Barack Obama was better than I expected at being a president. Many of his errors were more political due to his personality than anything else. He famously thought he could be like Reagan and get a bipartisan deal on healthcare, an idea upon hindsight that looks like naivete and male ego.

The Republicans would oppose any healthcare plan Obama put forward, and he should have just passed the Affordable Care Act expeditiously, a sage suggestion Speaker Pelosi offered Obama on several occasions. He did not listen to her wise advice, and that delay strengthened the opposition, politically weakened the Obama administration, helped to give rise to the Tea Party (a precursor to the scourge of MAGA and Trump), and decimated Democratic politicians on the federal and state levels during the 2010 election cycle. That decimation, by the way, is still being felt today.

But President Obama was actually more successful at foreign policy and military strategy than President Biden has been thus far. Biden's disastrous pull-out of American troops and citizens in Afghanistan and the clumsy, needlessly insulting nuclear submarine deal the Biden administration made with Australia and Great Britain are two examples.

So offended was France that they recalled their ambassador to America and in the strongest possible way expressed their sense of betrayal and disrespect. The Biden Administration could have easily consulted France long before this new security pack was struck. Obama was never so brash or inconsiderate while conducting geopolitical affairs.

Which brings me to another caveat. Sometimes you have so much experience as a politician, your points of view are calcified, rigid, and won't comport to new data. Remember, President Biden has been in the federal government, first as a U.S. senator from Delaware, then as the U.S. vice president in the Obama administration, for over 50 years. He has never lost a general election.

President Biden always wanted to get out of Afghanistan, but in his eight years as vice president to Obama, the generals and national security apparatus writ large rebuffed his opinions, and President Obama usually listened to the flag officers instead.

But now, as president, Biden can do all the rejecting. He wanted out of Afghanistan, and not in a more orderly and gradual way as his national security team advised, but abruptly, with chaotic scenes of Afghan citizens hanging off military planes as they were taking off, babies being handed over wire fences, and a deadly terrorist attack killing over a dozen American marines and dozens of Afghan citizens. Worse, the U.S. military botched a strike at what they thought was a van full of terrorists, killing over ten innocent Afghan citizens.

President Moon suffers from some of this same ideological calcification. The liberal policies of rapprochement with North Korea and controlling the hot real estate market or spurring job growth have thus far been unsuccessful.

President Moon and President Biden also suffer from over-experienced staff. It may sound counterintuitive, but the constant recycling of high-level cabinet officials and presidential staff over and over again across different administrations is not the best way to get fresh ideas and better perspectives. Obama recycled some of Clinton's staff, and now Biden is recycling some of Obama's.

President Moon, not unlike Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, relies too heavily on party insiders who have held different high-level posts from past administrations of his political party.

This is why, particularly in Prime Kishida's case, the Japanese government has not made the meaningful economic and social reforms needed to rejuvenate its economy and spur more economic participation by its female population. Japan has one of the lowest levels of women's participation in the workplace and one of the highest levels of the lack of payment parity between women and men than any other wealthy democracy on earth. (And Korea is only doing moderately better in this regard).

The Korean government seems to do a much better job attending to needs of foreigners living and working here, via more ubiquitous foreign language services and making the most government services available online.

There's nothing wrong with age or experience. But when your top people are all of the same level of wealth, point of view, and they have similar life experiences (and they are also mostly men, especially in Prime Minister Kishida's case) there will inevitably be blind spots and poor decision making, more often than not. Balanced, thriving, dynamic democracies need a mix of new blood in leadership, as well as old hands.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.