I totally agree that this appointment was not a very good one. While this pales in comparison to the outright corporate lobbyist takeover of government policy we experienced under the Bush Administration, even I easily can name a dozen qualified advocates for food safety that should have been recruited for the job above a lifetime Monsanto rep like Michael Taylor. They should have looked much, much harder.

That being said, I think it’s important to uncouple this criticism from all of the debate about “czars.” It just seems so incredible. That got started when Obama poked fun at the tendency of the media to term policy analysts and regulatory directors as “czars” and somehow, in the same echo chamber he was mocking, it got turned into an absurd portrait of Obama’s Administration as one drifting toward (I guess?) a 19th century Russian aristocracy. The whole diatribe has to be among the most ridiculous sets of arguments I’ve ever seen in American politics, and that’s really saying something.

Too your credit, your post is not focused on this issue really, but about really worthwhile concerns. But as a somewhat tangential statement, I wanted to clear the air on this “czar” nonsense. No one in the Obama Administration is proposing a pre-Trotskyite Russian state to replace the Federal Republic. And I think even the most firebrand water carriers of the “Czar revolt,” such as Glenn Beck, know that full well. If the objection is that the Federal government is making policy well beyond its Constitutional authority, I would say that objection is legitimate. But let’s focus on that, with arguments such as thus: “Domestic safety issues, such as food safety and agricultural regulation, are properly the role of the states and not the Federal government, whose policies of agricultural subsidies have overwhelmingly performed in favor of agribusiness oligopolies like Monsanto and Cargill rather than sustainable local agriculture.”

Anyway, my kudos for keeping a discussion focused in a reasonable place, and I hope others in the so-called “czar debate” would actually do the same.

The use of the word “czar” to describe an official who can make policy beyond his constitutional authority is quite legitimate. “Csar” is a metaphor.  It is prose shorthand to describe the questionable power in the position the official holds with respect to policy making.  In poetry, a metaphor is used to beautifully describe a commonplace notion.  As such the metaphor “czar"is quite handy, for it saves time while it projects the intended criticism on the official’s position.

The point is that it is an error to interpret a metaphor literally, for to do so distorts the meaning of what the speaker intends.  Unfortunately, it is such a commonplace error today that it is almost unrecognizable, and its use in major media to denigrate a speaker is rampant.

Matt,

Thanks for your thoughts and I agree.  I only used the czar term in this instance to bring a little controversy, with a hint of sarcasm.  Any president needs policy people, call them czars or whatever, and most of them are not approved by Congress, which again is fine.  I have not heard any reasonable argument that Obama is doing anything different from any other president in terms of staffing levels or protocols to filling those positions. 

I do think there is a valid debate on who fills the positions and whether they are the right person for the job (and what sort of message does it send), which is why I brought up the FDA food safey position.  The position is needed, but needed to be filled by someone else beside Michael Taylor.  Hiring Michael Taylor sent the wrong message and smacks of hypocrisy by the current administration.

every ostrich a czar!

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