Rahm Emanuel on moments of crisis
December 2, 2008 | by Alex Evans | More on Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America | 2 comments
As regular readers will know (since I post this quote about once a month), I’m a fan of Milton Friedman’s sage advice to his fellow monetarists when they were still voices in the wilderness: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
So it’s deeply gratifying to see that Barack Obama’s pick for White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is clearly no slouch either when it comes to seeing the opportunities in big crises. Here he is doing an interview for the Wall Street Journal - excerpt:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. I think America as a whole in 1973 and 1974 … missed the opportunity to deal with the energy crisis that was before us. For a long time our entire energy policy came down to cheap oil. This is an opportunity - what used to be long term problems, be they in the healthcare area, energy area, education area, fiscal area, tax area, regulatory reform area, things we had postponed or too long that were long term are now immediate and must be dealt with. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us … to do things that we could not do before. The good news is … the problems are big enough that they lend themselves to ideas from both parties for the solution.
Related posts
- A crisis of trust
- Elite capture and financial crisis: is America the new Russia?
- Great moments in Chinese public diplomacy (part 2194)
- Great moments in public diplomacy
- Man with plan
Max McKeown channels Friedman more effectively than Emanuel at http://www.management-issues.com/2008/11/12/opinion/a-crisis-is-a-terrible-thing-to-waste.asp. Or possibly just rips him off, it’s hard to tell sometimes.
Rahm Emanuel is the wrong man, with the wrong connections, for the vital position of US White House Chief of Staff: a serious error that will bring further damage to the incoming administration unless he is replaced now. I can only trust that President-elect Obama will not make other errors of judgement as potentially damaging as this one.