Federal Appeal Court Judge and über-liberal Abner Mikva was an early patron of President-elect Obama, according to Tom Hundley. He “was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name.”
"I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him," explains Mikva. "It means a Jewish soul. It’s an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from."
That’s cool, because there’s a national problem right in the cross-hairs of the national radar that needs just that sort of sensitive, sympathetic personality. It’s the Big Three auto mess. Michael Barone rather neatly describes how the mess came to be.
It all started with Taylorism, after the book on “the one best way” by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s brilliant idea was to measure worker productivity with time and motion studies and implement the one best way as a mandatory procedure for all workers.
Only one problem, of course. It treats workers like machines rather than people. So it provoked its nemesis, the Wagner Act of 1935, that legislated an adversarial relationship between business and labor. It worked great, for a while, as auto workers and steel workers won themselves fabulous wages and benefits.
Everyone thought that the new unionism was a wonderful idea, in particular liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith who made a fortune peddling conventional wisdom to a generation of liberals by telling them that he and they were intelligent iconoclasts that soared above mere “conventional wisdom.”
Well, it wasn’t such a great idea. It wiped out the steel companies a generation ago, and now it’s brought the auto companies to the edge of ruin, and brought the current generation of autoworkers to the edge of humiliation.
If President-elect is the genius that his patrons believe then he will use his yiddishe neshuma to lead the autoworkers and their union and their jobs back from the precipice.
But my guess is that he won’t. My guess is that he’ll choke on the chance to get the auto companies to reorganize and write Finis on the era of Wagner Act unionism.
The sensible thing for liberals to do would be to start a strategic retreat on their welfare state and its privileges, to preserve as long as possible the unsustainable privileges and subsidies they have awarded themselves and their servitors. But I don’t think they will.
My guess is that in the next few years the liberals are going to get themeselves suckered into the political equivalent of the Battle of Kursk. That battle, you will recall, was the last big offensive of the German Army on the eastern front in World War II. It seemed like a good idea to the German generals in early 1943 but by the time that Germans actually started the offensive the Russians were ready for them. So the greatest tank battle ever fought ended in failure. The Russians began a counter-offensive that didn’t stop until it reached Berlin two years later.
After all, Barack Obama didn’t run for president to sort out the labor union problem. He ran to lower the oceans and cure the sick. Much more fun.
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