As for Mrs. Clinton, she's supposed to be made of sterner stuff. But her cynical surge opposition, despite counsel from such Petraeus intimates as former General Jack Keane, should be a mark against her as a potential President. Mr. Obama lacked any convictions on war, but Mrs. Clinton lacked the courage of hers.
The Gates book may be most troubling for what it says about the three long years left in Mr. Obama's second term—which also makes us wonder why he didn't go public sooner, at the time he left office. He describes a President who knows he must invoke the traditional rhetorical markers of U.S. foreign policy—a strong defense, credibility with allies, democracy and human rights—yet whose every impulse is to leave the world to its own devices. That's especially dangerous when the American public is in an inward-looking mood. The U.S. needs a President willing to make the case for continued American engagement and leadership.
Mr. Gates's account also helps to explain why America's friends are worried (Israel) or increasingly going their own way (the Saudis), while our enemies (Iran, al Qaeda) are confident that now is a time to advance. They didn't need a memoir to draw those conclusions, but they too have taken the measure of Mr. Obama and the lack of will behind his words.
With such a President, it is going to be up to some of Congress's few grown-ups to steer the country away from the dangers ahead and avoid lasting damage to U.S. security and world order. Any candidates?


1a)Obama the Management Failure

A seasoned executive would have bird-dogged ObamaCare at every stage, from its creation to its rollout.

By

President Obama is back in Washington, presumably refreshed after a two-week Hawaiian vacation. Perhaps he'll start 2014 on a vigorous new note that will erase the memory of his lugubrious end-of-the-year news conference and other moments when Mr. Obama looked less like a leader with lousy poll numbers than like a beleaguered manager whose enterprise was failing.
One of the oddities of America's cherished political system is that the job of chief executive of the most powerful operation in the history of the world requires no executive experience. Men who have done little more than publish a small-town newspaper or manage the staff of a U.S. Senate office find themselves in charge of a vast bureaucracy and all-powerful military. As often as not, they don't have a clue about how to run this monster.
It's often argued that the virtue of America's endless and gigantic modern presidential campaigns is to test not only the candidates' brains, character and stamina, but also their managerial talent. The winner, it's said, proves by winning that he (and soon enough, she) has the right stuff to be chief executive.
That's really not the case. In a presidential race, the candidate is the "talent" out on the campaign making speeches and debating; the show is actually run by the "suits"—the campaign managers, fundraisers and press secretaries. If their candidate prevails, they become the heroes of postelection books like "Double Down," Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's account of the 2012 presidential race. The talent spends most of the time in the traveling bubble taking direction from his handlers back at headquarters.


Leadership and management are often confused, but the difference is more than semantic. A leader's job is to create and enunciate a vision and to inspire his followers to pursue it—"the vision thing," asGeorge H.W. Bush so famously put it. The manager's job is to make the vision tangible. Some leaders may coincidentally be good managers, but a sterling manager doesn't necessarily have the charismatic leadership gene.
Some people may be born managers, but most only master the skill by painful experience. Humiliating mistakes are inevitable and necessary. A manager learns that having the right idea or strategy isn't the goal, but the obligatory first step in the process. Getting the plan or deal or product or service executed properly is the job. That means putting the right people in the right roles, anticipating what might go wrong and having a fallback to deal with disasters, and closely monitoring the unfolding process. Responsibilities have to be delegated, but the savvy manager knows that anything at any time can jump up and bite you in the behind.
Even the most brilliant staffers have weaknesses, and the successful manager has to sense or identify them and make sure people are put in roles where they can succeed despite their shortcomings. Some people are flawless in routine situations, shaky under pressure. Some people can be sloppy or careless, but brilliant in a crisis. Some people are cowards in the crunch. You need to get burned a couple of times to develop a sharp nose for danger.
Until the Depression, having an experienced manager in the White House wasn't often a concern. The federal government was a poky enterprise and the U.S. military was small and insular. The men who succeeded to the White House in the 19th century were most often military heroes (among them, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and Ulysses Grant ) or U.S. senators (including the notorious "Dough Face" temporizers in the run-up to the Civil War, the drunken Franklin Pierce and dandyish James Buchanan ). It took Abraham Lincoln years to get a handle on managing the Civil War, and he didn't succeed until he put the Union forces in the sometimes tremorous hands of Grant, a onetime business failure who later turned out to be a disaster as president.
With the 20th century, governors who had experience administering their states increasingly took over, generally for the better ( William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge ).
The man with the most business and executive experience to reach the presidency was Herbert Hoover, the mining engineer who oversaw famine relief in Europe after World War I and then was overwhelmed in the White House by the Depression. George W. Bush, who ran a major-league baseball team and scored an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, is the only other president with management credentials. His administration of post-invasion Iraq was a shambles only partly redeemed by the 2007 "surge" that turned the tide of war.
The only American president who ever managed a mammoth enterprise before entering the White House wasn't a business executive at all: Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ran the Allied effort in Europe in World War II and masterminded D-Day, the largest and most complicated military operation in history. Derided in his Oval Office days as a smiling do-little, Ike is increasingly recognized today as a slyly adroit president.
Jimmy Carter, the nuclear submarine engineer, fancied himself so expert a manager that he personally handled the booking for the White House tennis court. His presidency was not a success. Lyndon Johnson, the acclaimed "Master of the Senate," tried to micromanage the Vietnam War with predictably disastrous consequences. He also loosed a torrent of Great Society social programs, many of which turned out to be expensive boondoggles. On the other hand, John F. Kennedy, who didn't even write his own Pulitzer Prize-winning book, came up with his "Excom" strategy team that brilliantly managed the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Barack Obama swept into office in 2008 with the thinnest résumé since JFK, a half-century earlier. When Mr. Obama was in his 20s, he headed a staff of 13 as a community organizer in Chicago and later directed a staff of 10 in a six-month get-out-the-vote campaign that also had 700 volunteers. At Harvard Law School, he ran the law review. Otherwise, Mr. Obama had been a writer, instructor at the University of Chicago Law School, an Illinois state legislator for eight years and a U.S. senator for four with a staff of three dozen or so.
However brilliant a politician he may be, this sort of background offers scant preparation for the managerial challenge of wrangling the executive branch with its stupendous bureaucracy and the high-tech military, not to mention the most fractious Congress in memory. Mr. Obama's response has essentially been not to try to manage much except foreign policy, where success could charitably be described as elusive.
The prime example of the president's management gap has been ObamaCare. By handing off the framing of the legislation to Congress, Mr. Obama repeated the rookie mistake he made with the stimulus bill, which became a bloated porkfest. The health-care program that emerged from Capitol Hill with no Republican support is a Rube Goldberg monstrosity, an administrative nightmare.
Given ObamaCare's complexity, a seasoned executive would have bird-dogged every stage of its creation and rollout, with obsessive attention to the testing of the sign-up computer programs, the public's first encounter with his signature initiative. There would be go/no-go inflection points and backup timetables, cold-eyed performance reviews and abrupt dismissals. And, in the worst case, a plan to put everything on hold for a year to sort out all the problems.
The Obama administration's backstage handling of the program has been so cloaked that it's impossible to know whether any of these routine management approaches were built in or ad-libbed when big trouble arose. But clearly, the chief executive's downcast proclamation that "I take full responsibility" is the lame refuge of the failed manager.
Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York magazine, Esquire and the New York Daily News.
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2) Another Anti-Israel Vote Comes to Academia

One scholar says being denied access to the West Bank violates her 'rights as an American citizen.' Huh?

By Cary Nelson

Save for some college students refusing to buy Israeli hummus, the "boycott, divestment and sanctions" movement against the Jewish state has had very few successes over the past decade. That changed last month when the American Studies Association voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Now the Modern Language Association (MLA), a far more prominent group, is poised to condemn Israel at its annual meeting in Chicago. Anyone interested in academic freedom should pay attention.
Scholars at academic conferences are expected to offer original research and analysis in their presentations. That certainly can't be said of one MLA session this Thursday, called "Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine."
All the scheduled panelists are outspoken supporters of the boycott Israel movement: University of California, Riverside Prof. David Lloyd, Wesleyan Prof. Richard Ohmann, University of Texas Prof. Barbara Harlow, and Omar Barghouti, who has compared Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. Even the moderator, University of Texas Prof. Samer Ali, is a boycott supporter. In essays and public statements I have read, their message was clear: Israel, the worst human-rights violator on the planet, deserves to be made a pariah among nations.
On Saturday MLA members will also get to vote on a resolution by Wesleyan's Mr. Ohmann and Columbia University Prof. Bruce Robbins that "urges the U.S. Department of State to contest Israel's arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities."
One scholar, Rima Merriman, who is quoted in the supporting document for the resolution, declared in 2009 that it was a violation of her "rights as an American citizen" to be denied access to the West Bank. Whether anyone explained to her that the U.S. does not control another nation's visa rules I cannot say. Apparently some MLA members consider themselves qualified to judge whether a visitor presents a security risk.
There's a lot at stake for the MLA here. The humanities—increasingly politicized and unserious—are in danger, as seen by plummeting enrollments in majors like English and history. To remain relevant, the MLA needs to be a big tent in which scholars can pursue research without being subjected to political litmus tests. Instead, by only featuring anti-Israel professors, the group seems to be taking a stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Meanwhile, the MLA denied press credentials to two reporters from conservative-leaning outlets, the Daily Caller and the Jewish News Service, who wanted to cover the conference. This shows that the organization, which claims a principled devotion to academic freedom, needs a lesson in press freedom.
Academic freedom certainly isn't the priority for supporters of the boycott Israel movement. If it were, they would not be so keen on breaking relations with the very Israeli institutions—its universities—that provide a home to many of the sharpest internal critics of Israeli government policy. Despite the claims of boycott advocates that they are all about promoting freedom, an academic boycott will inevitably inhibit interaction between American and Israeli professors. As more than 100 university presidents have argued in rejecting the American Studies Association boycott resolution, academic freedom can only survive if international exchanges are promoted, not curtailed.
Struggling to justify an agenda with no imaginable benefit to the Palestinian people, boycott advocates claim they can move Israeli universities to protest their government's practices. A less likely outcome could hardly be imagined. If Israel and the Palestinians ever negotiate an agreement, it will not be because American faculty members have indulged their hatred of the Israeli state. By castigating Israel, the boycott movement instead will produce bitterly polarized constituencies here and abroad.
A truer indication of the real goal is the boycott movement's success at increasing intolerance on American campuses. Junior faculty members sympathetic to Israel fear for their jobs if they make their views known. Established faculty who grasp the complexity of Middle East politics hold their tongues for fear of harassment by those who are more interested in offering lessons in contemporary demonology than in sound history. The politically correct stance in many academic departments is that Palestinians are victims and Israelis are oppressors. Period.
The fundamental goal of the boycott movement is not the peaceful coexistence of two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian, but rather the elimination of Israel. One nation called Palestine would rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Those Jews not exiled or killed in the transition to an Arab-dominated nation would live as second-class citizens without fundamental rights.
There is no political route toward a one-state solution. But some American professors are too blinded by hatred of Israel—or too naive—to see that they are inadvertently advocating for armed conflict.
Mr. Nelson is an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was president of the American Association of University Professors from 2006-12.
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3)  Surprise! Walmart health plan is cheaper, offers more coverage than Obamacare

By RICHARD POLLOCK | 


New Obamacare health insurance enrollees may feel a pang of envy when they eye the coverage plans offered by Walmart to its employees.

For many years, the giant discount retailer has been the target of unions and liberal activists who have harshly criticized the company's health care plans, calling them “notorious for failing to provide health benefits” and "substandard.”

But a Washington Examiner comparison of the two health insurance programs found that Walmart's plan is more affordable and provides significantly better access to high-quality medical care than Obamacare.
Independent insurance agents affiliated with the National Association of Health Underwriters and health policy experts compared the two at the request of the Examiner.

Walmart furnished employee benefit information to the Examiner. Neither Obamacare advocate Families USA nor the United Food and Commercial Workers, which backs anti-Walmart campaigns, responded to Examiner requests for comment.

Walmart offers its employees two standard plans, a Health Reimbursement Account and an alternative it calls "HRA High" that costs more out of employees' pockets but has lower deductibles. Blue Cross Blue Shield manages both plans nationally.

Also offered is a Health Savings Account plan that includes high deductibles but allows tax-free dollars to be used for coverage.

For a monthly premium as low as roughly $40, an individual who is a Walmart 

HRA plan enrollee can obtain full-service coverage through a Blue Cross Blue Shield preferred provider organization. A family can get coverage for about $160 per month.

Unlike Obamacare, there are no income eligibility requirements. Age and gender do not alter premium rates. The company plan is the same for all of Walmart's 1.1 million enrolled employees and their dependents, from its cashiers to its CEO.

A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis from September showed that unsubsidized Obamacare enrollees will face monthly premiums that are five to nine times higher than Walmart premiums.
JAMA found the unsubsidized premium for a nonsmoking gouple age 60 can cost $1,365 per month versus the Walmart cost of about $134 for the same couple.

The medical journal reported a 30-year-old smoker would pay up to $428 per month, in contrast to roughly $70 each month for a Walmart employee.

A family of four could pay a $962 premium, but the same Walmart family member would pay about $160.
Low premiums are not the only distinguishing feature of the Walmart plan. The retailer's employees can use eight of the country's most prestigious medical facilities, including the Mayo Clinic, Pennsylvania's Geisinger Medical Center and the Cleveland Clinic.

At these institutions, which Walmart calls "Centers of Excellence," Walmart employees and their dependents can get free heart or spinal surgery. They can also get free knee and hip replacements at four hospitals nationwide.

Many top-rated Walmart hospitals — such as the Mayo and Cleveland clinics — are left out of most Obamacare exchange plans.

But the real difference between Obamacare and Walmart can be seen in the levels of day-to-day access to doctors and hospitals.

Robert Slayton, a practicing Chicago independent insurance agent for 11 years and the former president of the Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters, described to the Examiner the differences between Walmart and Obamacare provider networks.

Slayton said the BlueChoice exchange network for President Obama's hometown has very limited hospital participation. “In downtown Chicago, the key is the number of hospitals: 28,” he said.

“Now we’re going to the national network — this is what the Walmart network would most likely be — and you have 54 hospitals. That’s a big difference,” he said.

Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, a Republican who is now a health care advocate, said Obamacare's lack of first-class hospitals is a big problem.

“It’s not just the number, but who they are. You’ll find under the Obamacare exchanges that the academic hospitals have declined to participate, along with the specialists who practice at those hospitals. The same is true of cancer hospitals,” she said.

“People who are seriously ill need to stay away from these exchange plans,” McCaughey said.
Slayton said the gap between doctor availability in Chicago under the Obamacare and Walmart plans is dramatic.

“You will notice there are 9,837 doctors [under Obamacare]. But the larger network is 24,904 doctors. Huge, huge difference,” he said.

Walmart also offers a free preventive health plan that mirrors the Obamacare plan. Its employees can take advantage of a wide range of free exams and counseling, including screenings for colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, chlamydia, diabetes, depression and special counseling for diet and obesity.

Their children can get more than 20 free preventive services, ranging including screenings for genetic disorders, autism and developmental problems to obesity, lead poisoning exposure and tuberculosis. There are also 12 free vaccinations, and free hearing and vision testing.

Walmart employees pay as little as $4 for a 30-day supply of generic drugs and only $10 for eye exams through a separate vision plan.

“It’s a lot better program than people, I think, might assume without looking, just because Walmart has gotten such a bad reputation by some of the labor groups and other groups for its general activities,” said Gail Wilensky after reviewing the retailer's plan.

Wilensky was head under President George H.W. Bush of the federal Health Care Financing Administration, the predecessor to the the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS is the agency in charge of implementing a large part of the Affordable Care Act, and it oversaw the rollout of the troubled healthcare.gov website.

David Todd, an independent insurance agent based in Little Rock, Ark., also compared the health plans for the Examiner. Walmart’s corporate headquarters is in Bentonville, Ark., and the company has 58,000 workers in the state.

Todd pointed to stark differences between the government plan and Walmart: “If I buy a family plan on the exchange, it’s still $1,000 a month. And I can buy this for ... [$160] on Walmart.”

Walmart also gives cash to its employees for any health care expense. The annual payments run from $250 to $1,000 and are given at the beginning of the enrollment year in an account that can only be used for health care expenses.

Walmart individuals face a $2,750 deductible and families need to pay $5,500 under the HRA plan. Individuals pay $1,750 and families pay $3,500 deductibles under the HRA High plan.

The deductibles are high, but Obamacare deductibles are higher, going up to $6,300, according to Todd.
Todd looked at a 30-year-old woman who could qualify for the government subsidy. “The nonsubsidized premium is $205 a month for this 30-year-old. If they get a subsidy, then the premium is zero. But that person has to come up with $6,300 if something catastrophic happened,” he said.

The Walmart monthly premium for the same 30-year-old woman would be about $40. Her deductible would be $2,750, minus $250 in cash advance, for a total net deductible of $2,500.

Todd said some Obamacare exchange family plan deductibles can go as high as $12,000 before benefits kick in.
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