Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
December 18, 2008
With Chu, Browner and
Jackson, the Battle Lines Over Energy Are Drawn
It
has been said, and repeated in articles and books, that Ben Bradlee, the
legendary executive editor of The Washington Post, managed his
newsroom through dynamic tension. The idea here is that two people are
left to fight it out for the same job.
I
never saw that anything was gained by this in my time at The Post.
But what I did see was Ben's habit of hiring the smartest, most
ambitious people he could find. It wasn't tension between two, but among
many.
The problem was that there weren't enough great jobs to accommodate the
best and the brightest coming across the threshold. People would be
hired who thought they were going to rise to the top in weeks and report
their way to great glory.
But the people who had the great jobs, like David Broder, the chief
political reporter, and diplomatic correspondent Carroll Kilpatrick were
not about to surrender their turf to the latest aspirant.
In
the end, Bradlee's innocent desire to hire the best had a toxic effect.
Rather than creating a newspaper of happy savants, it made for one with
the worst internal politics of any paper outside of The New York
Times, where, for different reasons, the same degree of infighting
was part of the culture.
On
the face of it, newspaper management may not have much in common with
political administration. But I aver that it does, or at least it will
for Barack Obama.
In
two of the areas where much is expected of the president-elect, foreign
policy and energy, I detect Bradlee's management style. In foreign
policy, Obama has set up an incipient tension on a grand scale. There is
the imperious Hillary Clinton, who has many virtues, one of which is not
diplomacy. Those who know her say that if she is crossed or undercut,
the secretary of state-designate will strike with the stealth, speed and
ferocity of a crocodile taking a wildebeest.
Besides Clinton, three others on Team Obama will want to make their mark
on foreign policy: Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser
James Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
Similarly energy policy, and the implementation of the president's
policy, has all the ingredients for covert warfare.
Obama has chosen to make Carol Browner the energy czarina, complete with
an appointment at the office of the president and all the authority that
implies. Ostensibly, her role is to coordinate the energy activities of
the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior and the
Environmental Protection Agency.
But ideology, rather than coordination, may be the order of the day.
The energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning
nuclear physicist who quoted William Faulkner in his acceptance speech.
Browner and Lisa Jackson, who has been tapped to head the Environmental
Protection Administration, are not energy experts. Instead, they are the
products of the environmental movement and service in the Clinton-Gore
Administration with its suspicion of big energy; its pathological
hesitation about nuclear; and its belief that somewhere out there is the
soft path which, if taken, leads on to reduced oil imports, cleaner
skies and millions of jobs.
Chu will have his hands full just keeping the Department of
Energy functioning. It is poorly constructed, designed around fuels
without an integrating purpose. Also in 2000, Congress established the
National Nuclear Security Administration as a separately organized
agency within the DOE. Consuming $20 billion of the department's $25
billion budget, it is a managerial problem. For the money, the NNSA
refreshes the nation's weapons stockpile; designs and computer-tests new
weapons; manages the legacy nuclear wastes from earlier weapons work;
conducts monitoring and surveillance of weapons programs, both legal and
illegal, around the world. Prima facie, this is more than Browner, a
former EPA administrator, may be ready for.
Finally, the new team has implicitly been charged with creating millions
of new jobs. Alas, that may take more than the first Obama
Administration to implement. Notoriously, energy has always been
capital-intensive and labor-light. It is not a big employer. Only in the
extraction of coal was it once a big employer, but mechanization has
reduced the need for men with picks and shovels.
It
is a good guess that Browner will tell Chu what is expected, and he will
tell her what is possible. And there's the rub.
© 2008 North Star
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