Multi-tasking in American history
Dealing "with more than one thing at once"
Multi-tasking in American history
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Barack Obama, while assessing John McCain's attempt to cut and run from the Friday night presidential debate, contended yesterday that both candidates have ample time to shuttle between the Washington crisis and the Mississippi showdown. Indeed, he said, "It is going to be part of the (next) president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."
Perhaps this is the kind of multi-tasking that Obama was talking about:
While Abraham Lincoln was prosecuting the Civil War during his first winter in office, he was also trying to create a federal department of agriculture; to win diplomatic recognition for the black republics of Haiti and Liberia; to negotiate with Congress on proposals for a land-grand college system, a Pacific railroad charter, a tariff increase, and a tax on consumers. Over a period of two months that winter, he was also trying to avoid plunging the Union into a war with Great Britain (a two-month crisis precipitated by a Union captain's decision to board a British ship and remove two Confederate envoys), and success didn't come until the eleventh hour.
Eighty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt was into all kinds of multi-tasking, even before Pearl Harbor; as one Washington magazine reported in April 1941, "A more discouraging agenda could not have been imagined." FDR had to deal that month with (among other things) urgent British appeals for more aid; the fallout of Allied setbacks in the Middle East; the delicate issue of Axis ships berthing in American ports;, the sluggish buildup of the newly-conscripted military; and a rash of labor strikes, fought over workloads, working conditions and wages, that ultimately affected one of every 12 American workers, and seriously slowed production of the war materials earmarked for Britain.
Twenty years after that, John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1961 had to juggle nearly simultaenous crises in Cuba, Laos, Vietnam - and the American South, where the racist attacks on the Freedom Riders brought the civil-rights crisis to the fore. In the autumn of 1962, even during the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy broke away for politics, flying to Chicago where he delivered speeches and pep talks to the Cook County Democrats in advance of the impending congressional elections.
But McCain himself knows a little about juggling simultaneous duties. Back in October 1999, for instance, he and his Senate Republican colleagues - led by his '08 campaign sidekick, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm - were busy putting the finishing touches on a landmark piece of deregulation legislation that would unshackle the financial industry from federal oversight. The work was completed in the wee hours - but wait, McCain wasn't there. He was multi-tasking up in New Hampshire...at a Republican presidential primary debate.
His debate message: Our "almost unprecedented prosperity" requires, among other things, "a lack of regulation."
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Bob Beaney, if the bill didn't get the votes; the bill would have failed. McCain, and others, were working to make sure it passed. Obama sat on the bench and didn't do his job as senator. Last time I checked, that was still his job.— thelastRepublicaninPhilly- What would Backtrack do in Washington,vote "present" ? I love the idea McCain would duck Obama in a debate.Have you people seen this clown without a teleprompter ? Painful,simply painful.— Yankee Air Pirate 12
Comment removed.- There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding on this board (or else I am not reading properly comments posted here). And I'm not picking on you, tom, but I will use a quote from your recent post here as an example. You stated, "Barney Frank wanted them (Fannie & Freddie) to continue to offer loans to low income people. " Now maybe people here understand the role of Fannie and Freddie. But a comment like that makes question whether it is understood that those two organizations are secondary market participants. Fannie and Freddie did not make a single mortgage. They provided liquidity to banks and other lending institutions by either purchasing the mortgages or purchasing CMO's. The difference is the fact that Fannie and Freddie did not apply credit scoring standards to the mortgages when the loans originated. Instead, in purchasing mortgages they relied on the financial institutions to have properly done their documentation. And while I have not been able to verify a statement that I heard on the radio by an economist, I did hear that economist state that by charter that Fannie and Freddie were not allowed to purchase sub prime mortgages. Maybe I'm stating the obvious and everyone already realizes these facts (and it's just a matter of wording by the posters), but some of the statements I've seen here make me wonder sometimes. The point is that laying the fault at Fannie and Freddie is an easy out and that there a lot more organizations (that have supported both D's and R's) that are to blame.— fetchez la vache
- If there has been one constant in Mr. McCain's legislative record through decades in the House and Senate, it has been his unequivocal support for deregulation. He championed it during his years as chairman of the Senate commerce committee. He campaigned actively and successfully for the very act that scrapped the regulations whose absence created this cascade of bank and insurance-company failures. "I have a long voting record in support of deregulation," he said back in 2003. It was no idle boast. Mr. McCain's election platform proposes allowing taxpayers to divert part of their social security payments into private investment accounts. It would deregulate the health sector, so that people could shop around for the best available health plan, rather than relying on their employer to provide it. "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation," he wrote in a magazine article published last week. Presumably, the piece was submitted before Lehman Brothers went belly up. In a nutshell, John McCain is rushing back to Washington to vote for the first time in months to try to help clean up a mess he had a huge hand in creating. Can anyone demonstrate that McCain has done anything meaningful to try to prevent this fiasco, or has acknowledged that his earlier enthustiastic campaigning for deregulation was misguided, to put it very politely. The notion that this man is putting country first is obscene. Where was he while the financial system was falling apart, and what was he doing to try to stop the bleeding? CAMPAIGNING. Now that the patient is on the operating table, suddenly he decides to suspend campaigning? Too little, too late. It stinks to high heaven.— mousikos
- Can I inquire which polls you all are looking at that say that McCain is sliding? To me if you look at an electoral map Obama is in jeopardy in several states he should be winning far and away.— jwad56
- Alcee Hastings is an idiot. And no sane Democrat posting in this board supports that nut. But both parties have more than their fair share of idiots. Stop the finger pointing. Remember you got three more pointing back at you.— fetchez la vache
- fetchez la vache, you're right. I've been blaming everybody; and i really think it is everyone's fault that got mixed up in this. Now we've got to clean up this mess. Let's just pray that this will fix it and the economy will get back on it's feet; which is what we all want.— thelastRepublicaninPhilly
- John needs a nap; otherwise he gets cranky.— Djoko Pritza
- Xi Jah, do you have anything beside FoxNews talking points? McCain's political maneuver looks pretty useless now. And all that he was doing was trying to change the topic on a flailing campaign.— donde
- The debate does take a backseat in one regard. You just got something more than a debate. You just saw their behavior in a crisis. You had one guy make a paniced, impulsive and irrational decision and the other guy take a page right out of Leadership 101. He was patient, persistent in his communication, informed and understanding of the status of the negotiation, aware of his role in the process and most of all, gave the people who needed to reach an agreement, the support, the space and the opportunity to reach one. And they did reach one. McCain is repeatedly showing poor decision making technique and using poor judgement. He's impulsive and that is not a good trait in a president.— gee1971
- fetchez la vache, I would love to believe that Hastings is the exception rather then the norm; but the more I hear from this and other blogs, talk to people on the street, see it on the news and read it in the papers, the less I believe that. Yeah I've been pushing McCain; but you can't imagine the number of people that have a visceral reaction to me just handing out flyers.— thelastRepublicaninPhilly
- Xi Jah, I love when you come off as pathetic in your fawning sycophancy.— Djoko Pritza
- gee1971, we needed the senators to hammer this deal out. It's just that simple; they had to figure it out. The current president really couldn't do much but wait for a bill to sign. McCain went to work, with both democrats and republicans, while Obama did nothing and said nothing. America wants a doer, not a talker.— thelastRepublicaninPhilly
- I just read on the CNN site that there is no accountability process built into this compromise bill. Can anyone confirm that? I will be furious if that is the case.— NigeltheMastiff
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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