Tuesday night Georgetown students gathered for “The Real State of the Union,” a panel discussion with several writers for the Atlantic Monthly. Panelists offered substantive analysis in contrast to the inevitable drivel of next week’s actual address. The Atlantic Monthly staff are a unique bunch, unafraid of absorbing and applying ideas across the ideological spectrum. Thus Jim Fallows, who has written some very strong articles on planning for the war in Iraq, conceptualizes the dearth of strong commentary in the magazine and think tank industry as a “market failure,” not a term you usually hear applied to financially failing magazines and policy institutions that rely almost entirely on grant money.
The evening also included Jacob Weisberg from Slate magazine, who described the event as a gathering of nerds. As editor of an Internet magazine, he considers himself to be “bridging the divide between nerds and geeks. This being Georgetown, we probably also have some jocks in the audience.”
Yes, Weisberg, we have jocks, but the proper term isn’t nerd; it’s “policy wonk,” and the evening was first and foremost a lesson in professional-level wonking. Wonking is a step up from punditry, a sin that these people are trying to root out in all of its manifestations (which is basically impossible). Georgetown students are mere minor-leaguers next to these wonks, who tended to step to the podium and get in the zone. Afterwards they generously hung around by the coffee, like pro athletes signing autographs. The excitement was palpable, especially around wonks who have gotten such a sweet deal: they are freed from the constraints of actually governing, as well as from the interest-group oriented funding of many think tanks. They have detailed policy discussions, but they write for a national magazine audience.
The wonks came in a variety of flavors. Ted Halstead and Michael Lind both took a historian’s approach, trying to frame their analysis in long-term demographic shifts and political realignments. It’s a tough goal, trying to discern greater trends from the erratic flow of modern political discourse. Halstead had common but well-expressed ideas about the two parties; the Democrats, in his analysis, have no idea what they think, and their political base is a hodgepodge of completely unrelated interest groups, as divergent as Al Sharpton and Howard Dean. The Republicans, meanwhile, have a “strong but flawed and incoherent ideology” which they adhere to at all costs.
“I could go on,” he assured the crowd as his allotted time expired. I believe you. So could everyone I know.
Lind discussed the shifting base of the middle class, and seemed to be telling the crowd that technology would soon make us all janitors. According to him, once we janitors realized we were in the majority, we would decide that janitorial work was the new mark of the middle class.
Maya MacGuineas and Shannon Brownlee, two other New America Foundation analysts, took a more short-term approach, engaging in exactly what their colleagues were calling for: an extremely technical and focused discussion of the ins and outs of two areas of policy (tax reform and health care, respectively). Brownlee in particular was an engaging speaker, railing against doctors and the healthcare system they run with a vehemence usually reserved for addressing polluting industrialists.
The odd man out was Paul Starobin, a writer for the National Journal, who gave a rambling talk on “The Angry American” in a voice so calm and complacent that it bordered on creepy. The exact point was lost on me, other than that political anger has a long and storied tradition in America, and is probably a good thing. Whether Starobin himself had reached peace with politics or was simply enjoying the calm before the storm was unclear.
What will the president’s State of the Union address deal with? Tuesday’s speakers decided to focus on domestic issues because they felt that the domestic sphere was “especially stale” and in need of rejuvenation. President Bush will focus on foreign policy questions with a smattering of bold promises for space exploration, but will probably avoid discussing the very real prospects of a decade-long political limbo in Iraq, or of American troops in Baghdad for the rest of our lives. Better to just go to the basketball game to see us give the Red Storm a deserved ass kicking, or stay at home and hone your wonking skills. With the television off.
