Obama's Flawed Consensus Model

President Obama's procedural approach to most issues so far seems to be a modified form of consensus decision making. This may be a holdover from his days working as a community organizer, and the idea, in theory, has a certain appeal. Unfortunately, several of the prerequisites for a consensus model to work are missing in the way Obama is using it, leading to narrow and dangerously flawed policy decisions.

Having served several years ago as the Clerk of my local Friends Meeting, I'm familiar with the Quakers' use of consensus and the reasoning behind it. When decisions are made by majority vote, those holding minority opinions can feel that their views are not reflected in the group's official position, and are therefore less likely to feel any investment in carrying out that position. The goal of consensus is to involve everyone in formulating a group position, so that each participant feels involved in the eventual outcome. Rather than settling a matter by taking a vote, discussion continues until everyone feels they can support what has emerged to be the sense of the group. The final decision may not meet all of the goals of any one of the individuals, but it should reflect the shared goals of the group.

For such a consensus model to work, however, two key elements are necessary. First, all of the community's views must be represented in the process. If the Friends Meeting decided to discuss a key budget issue, but didn't invite certain members with strong views on that topic, the result would not truly reflect a group consensus, and may fail to really solve the problem. Second, all of the participants must share a commitment to this consensus process. If a subgroup decides to wage a war of attrition by continuing to argue for their views until everyone else tires of the process and drops their opposition, they may prevail in getting their view approved, but they've missed the point of the consensus approach.

On too many issues, the administration is not inviting a broad enough spectrum of views to participate in the process, and they're allowing some voices to drown out others.

Let's look at the health care debate. The Obama administration as well as the congressional committees brought together "policy experts" from the health insurance industry (both individual corporations as well as their lobbying group AHIP), hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies (again, individual corporations as well as PhRMA) to forge a consensus. Locked out of these discussions was anyone advocating a single-payer system, such as Physicians for a National Health Program, California Nurses Association, or House sponsors of the single-payer H.R. 676 such as John Conyers (D-MI) or Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). Also absent from these discussions were any representatives from other industrialized countries with decades of experience in administering various types of national-level healthcare systems, such as Canada, England, or France; think of the valuable lessons learned they could have shared, so that we could have constructed a system that took the best aspects from all these different real-world models. Instead, Obama established ground rules saying that this country's existing practice of employment-based healthcare coverage, using private health insurance companies, would remain unchanged. Imagine if the country's chicken farmers insisted that the foxes be a part of any new improved plan for guarding the henhouse, and refused to look at what farmers in other countries had done about the problem, because we need to find a uniquely American solution. That probably wouldn't work out too well for the chickens.

Another example is our regulation (or lack thereof) of the financial industry. Two of Obama's key economic advisers are Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council, and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury. Yet both of them were high-ranking officials in the Clinton Treasury department, where they worked with the Republican majority in Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. That law, which repealed key provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, is being held largely responsible for creating the financial collapse that led to a near-repeat of the Great Depression - precisely what Glass-Steagall was intended to prevent. Inviting Summers and Geithner to help create a consensus on financial regulation is a bit like reacting to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska by asking the builders of that single-hull ship to design the next generation of oil tankers.

To be fair, the primary sponsor of the 1999 financial deregulation, former Republican Senator (and current employee of Swiss bank UBS) Phil Gramm, was the top economic adviser to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign - another reason these policies seem like a "consensus".

Finally, there's Obama's military surge in Afghanistan, announced last December after soliciting expert views. But how wide did he cast his net in looking for those views? As CENTCOM Commander Petraeus explained his plan to "clear, hold, build" Afghan territory, did anyone point out that this is essentially a rebranding of our "strategic hamlet" program in Vietnam, and ask why we expect it to work any better this time? Was there anyone in the room comparing our plans to identify and assassinate Taliban leaders with the notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam? Did Obama ask Norodom Sihanouk for his advice on whether our CIA-led "secret war" along the Af-Pak border might destabilize neighboring Pakistan - precisely the same type of actions which destabilized Sihanouk's Cambodia and led to the rise of Pol Pot? Even if Obama wanted to limit the debate to the specific case of Afghanistan, without looking for parallels with Southeast Asia, he would have done well to have consulted historians of the British Empire and the Soviet Union, to ask them why Afghanistan is referred to as the "graveyard of empires". Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, offered some unique insights based on his country's 1979-1989 military occupation of Afghanistan during an interview last fall with The Nation magazine; it's not at all clear that Obama read that issue.

In 1964, writer Abraham Kaplan formulated his "law of the instrument": "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." Obama's approach seems to demonstrate what I'll call the Consensus Corollary to Kaplan's law: if you try to find consensus on an issue by only inviting hammers to the meeting, your solution will be to increase the amount of pounding.

What we seem to keep getting, in every policy debate, is a roomful of hammers. And it's the people who wind up getting pounded.