How Not to Muck Everything Up

Both of those landmark legislative achievements of Obama’s first two years in office left many of the most important decisions to regulators rather than inscribing them in law. The Wall Street bill, for instance, has more than 30 studies in it, and does not proscribe things like the precise level of capital a bank has to hold, or the precise way the Volcker rule is implemented, or what is to be done with the ratings agencies. It leaves those questions to regulators. Both bills require the construction of new institutions, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the state health-insurance exchanges. And both bills ask existing agencies, like the Federal Reserve and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to take on much larger roles.

All this tends to play poorly politically, with naysayers worrying about unelected bureaucrats making important decisions behind closed doors. But in some ways, the greater danger is that the doors will not be closed enough. As Eric Patashnik argues in his book Reforms at Risk, recent reforms to open the regulatory process have mainly benefited lobbyists and special interests, as the people who show up and know what to do during the third phase of public comment for a regulatory act that most people will never know happened are the people who are paid to show up and trained to know what to do.

Thus, the implementation period brings a dangerous asymmetry: The public quiets down, as they think action has been taken, but the lobbyists mount up. As Binyamin Appelbaum reported in The New York Times, some industry groups made the decision to focus their energies on this phase even before the bills had passed. “When the Consumer Bankers Association convened its annual meeting in early June,” he wrote, “there was still plenty of time to lobby Congress. But the group’s president, Richard Hunt, told his board that the group should shift its focus to the rule-making process. The board voted to increase the group’s budget and staff.”

What Would Reagan Really Do?

Grown men don’t tend to worship other grown men—unless, of course, they happen to be professional Republicans, in which case no bow is too deep, and no praise too fawning, for the 40th president of the United States: Saint Ronald Reagan.

His name is invoked by candidates for offices high and low, from aspiring state assemblyman Anthony Riley of Hesperia, Calif., who constantly referred to himself as a “Reagan Republican” before losing in the 59th district last month, to Danny Tarkanian of Nevada, who framed his failed 2010 primary run for the U.S. Senate as Reagan’s “last campaign” and frequently repeated what has to be one of the most tired lines in politics: “We’re going to win this one for the Gipper.”

For conservatives, Reagan is more than a president. He is a god of sorts: wise, just, omniscient, infallible. Being Republican has long meant being like Reagan—or at least saying you’re like Reagan. The writer Dinesh D’Souza neatly captured the conservative CW when he suggested that the right “simply need[s] to ask in every situation that arises: what would Reagan have done?” Period. Problem solved.

Even Female Law Partners Suffer Wage Disparities

Even female attorneys within the highest-ranks of elite law firms are paid, on average, roughly $66,000 less than their male counterparts, according to a new study done by the Project for Attorney Retention and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association.

“Frankly, the numbers are so stark that it really does call into question whether there is a systemic problem,” says employment attorney William Martucci.

The study, called “New Millennium, Same Glass Ceiling?,” found that the oft-cited explanation for the gap—that family responsibilities mean women are less ambitious, more distracted, and less productive than men—is ultimately an inadequate excuse. The biggest contributing factors, according to the study’s authors, are not nearly as benign: they include stereotyping, gender bias, and even bullying and intimidation.
f some 700 female lawyers surveyed, more than half of equity partners and two-thirds of income and minority partners say they are dissatisfied with the way compensation was determined at their firms—compared to nearly three-quarters of men who reported high levels of satisfaction with those systems, according to an earlier study. Complaints include a lack of diversity within compensation committees, a lack of wage transparency, and too much weight given to factors such as billable hours and too little to institutional investments like developing a firm's human capital and nurturing young associates. Female lawyers also reported being stymied by the "double bind," saying that for women it’s virtually impossible to be simultaneously respected and well-liked. “You must engage in self-promotion but you’re penalized for doing so if you’re a woman,” says Joan Williams, a professor at UC’s Hastings College of the Law and an author of the report. But Williams says that she was perhaps most surprised by the fact that the survey respondents were so incensed by their experiences at work, which was made clear through comments they submitted online. “The anger comes from the fact that they see these patterns of gender bias, double standards, and double binds in their everyday lives.

Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful

Before I defend plainness as a career strategy, let me concede that we should all strive to be leggy, doe-eyed, and beautiful. It certainly beats the alternative—or does it? For all their professional advantages, members of the eye-candy crowd may not sit as prettily as they appear. Few studies have examined the perils of beauty, or the upside of ordinary stock. But those that do offer some interesting reminders—above all, that beauty, like wealth, is both a blessing and a curse.

Consider a new paper in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology that found that when attractive people—as determined by what an independent panel thought of their pictures—are evaluated by members of their own sex, the “beauty premium” disappears. The paper’s authors speculate that biology may be the culprit. Male guppies gravitate toward the least sexually successful fish in their school (the better to emphasize their own fine scales), so perhaps humans use similar logic in performance situations, viewing attractive members of the same sex as rivals who need to be avoide

Kabul Conference Sets Lofty Goals

Big international conferences on Afghanistan have become an annual, and more recently a biannual, ritual. They mostly follow the same script. Afghanistan’s international backers, led by the United States, pledge more money and steadfast backing for the beleaguered government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. (It has received some $29 billion in aid over the past nine years.) In return, the president vows to fight the Taliban harder, spend international aid money more wisely, end corruption, and promote good governance in order to win the embattled population over to his side.

This week’s conference, the ninth since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001, was envisioned to be different. Indeed there was an element of desperation about it. The Taliban seemingly has the momentum, steadily expanding the insurgency from the south and east to the west and north. U.S. and NATO casualties have been rising (June was the deadliest month with 60 American and another 40 NATO soldiers killed). And support for the war is dwindling in the U.S. and at rock bottom in Europe. So both Karzai and the international community knew they had to make this conference a watershed moment. They had to create a new narrative telling a more positive story, showing that there is momentum on the coalition’s side, that all is not bleak, that there is, in Vietnam War terminology, a light at the end of the tunnel.

Arianna’s Answer

The Huffington Post may have figured out the future of journalism. But it’s going to be a very difficult future.

If you had to declare a winner among Internet media companies today, the victor easily would be Arianna Huffington. Her site, The Huffington Post, attracted 24.3 million unique visitors last month, five times as much traffic as many new-media rivals, more than The Washington Post and USA Today, and nearly as many as The New York Times. HuffPo’s revenue this year will be about $30 -million—peanuts compared with the old-media dinosaurs, but way better than most digital competitors. And HuffPo has finally started to eke out a profit.

Those numbers, however, don’t fully convey the site’s place in this new-media world. What began five years ago as a spot for Huffington and her lefty celebrity friends to vent about the Bush administration has become one of the most important news sites on the Web, covering politics, sports, entertainment, business—along with plenty of tabloidy stuff to drive clicks, like photos of “Jennifer Aniston’s topless perfume ad.” HuffPo’s mission, Huffington says, is “to provide a platform for a really important national conversation.”

 

Left Pushes Hard for Elizabeth Warren

There’s a 2.0 version of health care’s public-option debate, and her name is Elizabeth Warren. She’s the Harvard law professor who’s been overseeing the Troubled Assets Relief Program and giving Treasury Department insiders heartburn over their excessive generosity to Wall Street bigwigs. Liberals are lobbying hard for Warren to head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, warning the White House that failure to do so would rival the left’s disappointment over President Obama’s refusal to fight for a public option. Warren’s backers consider her the Joan of Arc of the financial consumer movement.

Warren is the only woman under consideration, and the job should be hers if it weren’t for some intramural friction that has taken on a gender cast. Her credentials are impeccable, underscored by her prescience in originating the idea for a consumer financial agency three years ago, well before the storm that would take down the markets and cost taxpayers trillions in wealth. Writing in a 2007 article in the journal Democracy, Warren challenged the rah-rah boom times, arguing that consumers are “effectively unprotected in a world in which a number of merchants of financial products have shown themselves very willing to take as much as they can by any means they can.”

In her clear-eyed and earnest way, Warren has broken through in testimony on Capitol Hill and on television as a voice for the people, ticking off powerful business interests and irritating the boys’ club that Obama has entrusted to steer the economy. If Obama chooses her to head the new consumer agency, she would have to be confirmed by the Senate and would likely provoke a partisan battle on the scale of a Supreme Court nomination. On Friday morning, three Republican senators warned the White House not to use a recess appointment to fill the new position. For Obama, it’s a classic political choice: how much of a fight does he want or need going into the fall elections?

His base is telling him that Warren is what the left needs to believe in him again. Obama loves the woman; there have been articles written about how he sought her out, and how admiring he is of her. As the financial-reform legislation made its way through Congress, she was consistently named as the likely head of the first consumer-protection bureau. If Obama backs down now, he looks like he’s afraid of a fight, which is not a good perception for a president who needs to burnish his leadership cred going into the November election. Warren is the voice of Main Street, and if the Republicans want to block her, Obama’s attitude should be “Bring it on.”

Warren has dared to challenge the captains of international finance, and she has rattled the protectors of Wall Street, many of them Republican and male, just the kind of opposition that Obama could use to drive women’s turnout in November. Warren embodies his efforts to revive the economy and create jobs in a way that everything else he’s done hasn’t conveyed. Her persona as a champion for the people is so ingrained that Obama wins simply by having the fight. “The only question is whether Elizabeth Warren is Moses whose candidacy expires overlooking the Promised Land, or Joshua who gets to lead the troops,” says Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Clinton domestic policy adviser.