Well, not in the sense that they'd suggest a Republican President should appoint him. But if a Democrat's going to have someone run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, then Sunstein's the guy they'd like to have:
On January 8, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein would be nominated to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It was a surprising choice for a job, created in 1980, that monitors and manages the federal government's regulatory apparatus. And it was welcomed as an olive branch from an incoming Democratic president to conservatives and libertarians.
"[Sunstein's] writings on regulation and the herd mentality deserve a voice in the incoming Administration," the newspaper's editorial board wrote, in one of vanishingly few positive assessments it has given Barack Obama's White House. "Mr. Sunstein brings important qualifications to [the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs], and Mr. Obama has made a savvy choice in putting him there." The editorial's headline emphasized just what a happy surprise the appointment had been: "A Regulator With Promise - Really."
So, the WSJ editorial board loved him. But GOP senators, not so much (three of them placed holds on his nomination), not to mention Glenn Beck.
Weigel's piecehas lots of bits and pieces about things that set different folks off. But the fact that Beck asked his audience to send him anything they had on Sunstein made me think of the following, from Cathy G in late August of last year:
Remember when President Bush tried to put more arsenic in our drinking water? Lots of people got outraged -- it seemed like a classic example of a deregulator-in-chief helping his corporate friends at our expense. Not Cass Sunstein, a prominent (and nominally-liberal) law professor.
Sunstein, working for and with right-wing deregulatory think tanks, published a piece called "The Arithmetic of Arsenic", arguing that everyone needs to stop being so emotional about these things. We can't decide whether arsenic should be in our water based on fuzzy-wuzzy arguments about not killing people. No, we need to be hard-headed realists and decide exactly how much a human life is worth and whether filtering arsenic is worth the cost. In short, we have to do cost-benefit analysis.
As fellow law prof Tom McGarity pointed out, Sunstein continued to hold this view despite the fact that Sunstein's own research into the subject showed that there was so much uncertainty around the issue that just using different previously-published estimates could result in whatever conclusion you like. And there was no obvious way to decide which estimate to trust.
All of this would be just another story in the annals of out-of-touch intellectuals -- a law professor who gets off on killing people to save money, actual facts be damned -- except for one frightening fact: Barack Obama just put this law professor in charge of cost-benefit analysis for the whole government.
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was set up by Ronald Reagan to allow him veto power over any federal regulation. If the EPA wanted to stop companies from poisoning fish, if the DOJ wanted to stop businesses from discriminating, if OSHA wanted to protect miners' lungs, OIRA could intervene and double-check their cost-benefit analysis. They could rejigger the numbers to make it so that the regulation got killed or if they failed at that they could just demand more and more research from the agency, delaying the regulation it was finally abandoned.
OIRA was one of Reagan's most powerful tools for keeping the Federal Government from doing its job. And now someone who's a strong fan of its mission has been put in charge. It's a scary thought, especially as you're going to get a glass of drinking water.
I don't have time to do an ordinary 'opening the day', so please put what you're reading in the comments. I'm not reading convention coverage, it's all meetings and panels and convention watching and parties, so if you throw your thoughts on how the convention is being covered in the comments I'll read and absorb and learn and use that to inform how I write back from the scene on the ground. Meanwhile, here's a picture of Cass Sunstein, Sam Powers, and me. I keep running into these two. Powers dotes on Sunstein, who is selling his book Nudge.
On Tuesday, top Obama legal advisor Cass Sunstein appeared on Democracy Now! While it's not yet certain precisely what position he might occupy in an Obama Administration, he did clear up any doubts about his position in the afterlife, as those familiar with Dante's Inferno--Canto III, to be precise-- immediately realized. That is where Dante encountered "the melancholy souls of those/Who lived without infamy or praise," along with the angels who stood neutral between God and Satan. These are the moral triangulators between Good and Evil, and as Dante found them, they "Were naked, and were stung exceedingly / By gadflies and by hornets that were there."
Although they are not even within Hell, proper, Virgil tells Dante:
These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.
Sunstein is hardly alone, of course. But, first at Netroots Nation, then in his Democracy Now! debate with Glenn Greenwald, Sunstein has clearly staked out his leadership position in arguing against any sort of moral compass.
In his Democracy Now! appearance, Sunstein revealed three facets of the moral vacuum that lies disturbingly close to the heart of the Obama campaign. In the segment with Glenn Greenwald, he both defended Obama's FISA betrayal, and attacked the notion of any accountability for Bush Administration lawlessness. In a short followup segment on his book, Nudge (discussed by Matt in his diary yesterday here), Sunstein argued for an extreme minimalist approach in dealing with catastrophic market failures such as global warming.
What all three facets share in common is the basic acceptance of the rightwing hegemonic order established under Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Gingrich and Bush II. Under the rubric of listening to all sides, what is actually happening is that thoroughly discredited rightwing ideas are being accepted as defining the common sense framework inside of which Obama is proposing to make modest gestures in a progressive direction on one or another various issues. In short, Obama is trying to end the culture wars by surrenduring on the most basic of issues of defining political reality.
I'm reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which is a book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein about applying behavioral economics to public policy and personal questions. As we move from the Reagan era into something different, free market fundamentalism is being supplanted by behavioral economics as the dominant economic mindset. Behavioral economics looks at people not as rational actors with perfect information looking to maximize income, but as human beings who make emotional decisions that cannot be divorced from their social context.
At a time when our constitution is in such crisis, the symptoms of which can be seen in every aspect of our politics and our government, there is one quote that sticks out to me above all others:
"I don't know if we have had a president that knows as much about the founding document as he does." - Professor Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago
