No partisan solution

A lot of people are furious over this week's Congressional vote to continue funding the Iraq war. Much of this fury is directed toward Democrats who voted "yes", acting against a clear mandate. They deserve the criticism, for sure. But the most important thing we can do now is to be persistent, to keep our eyes on the ball.

Let's not forget that the authorization to use military force after 9/11 was bipartisan: even some of the current Democratic presidential candidates succombed to the politics of fear and voted to misplace their trust in Mr. Bush. It was their mistake, and they admit it; but they still own their share of it. We know Democrats who are afraid to cut off funding for the war are stupid, because they are buying into the false Republican notion that cutting off war funding is somehow harmful to the troops. The truth is that there's plenty of money left to bring the troops home safely. All it means is Democrats aren't perfect, that stupidity is bipartisan. It means the solution to this war is going to have to be bipartisan, too.

This week, Rep. Mark Udall and Sen. Ken Salazar began rounding up support for a bipartisan initiative to end the war.

Four more senators on Thursday joined a bipartisan group urging a diplomatic effort to stabilize Iraq by making the Iraq Study Group's recommendations official U.S. policy.

Sens. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, Bob Casey, D-Pa., Mark Pryor, D-Ark., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., joined Ken Salazar, D-Colo., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., arguing the plan is the way to end debate over the costly and unpopular war.

The senators plan to introduce a bill next month that would set a series of benchmarks the Iraqis must meet in exchange for continued U.S. support.

Many Republicans are getting impatient with the war, and have warned Mr. Bush that he will lose their support for escalation if no progress is evident by fall. Udall and Salazar are giving these GOP legislators a politically safe fall-back position by pushing the Iraq Study Group recommendations to the forefront, with Republican support.

It's true that Democrats who voted to continue funding for the war, are swallowing a Republican lie. But let's not react by swallowing another of their lies. Republicans made all their policy decisions along partisan lines, and tried to convince us that the only good policies are the ones that satisfy 50%+1 of the voting population and harm the rest. We don't have to govern this way.

We can see that politics isn't like the movies. Nancy Pelosi doesn't have some secret strategy that is going to resolve all conflicts and make things right in the end, just before the final commercial. Ending the Iraq war is going to take some pain-staking chipping away: at fearful politicians, of both parties; and at Bush administration lies. We need to keep at it until we finally dislodge enough votes to bring the war to an end.

Ugly baby syndrome

Wednesday's Rocky Mountain News featured a fascinating look at the latest in a string of information technology failures in Colorado state government: "Doesn't compute: 'It's like you were having a baby, and it turned out ugly'." The article describes a failed effort to develop a new motor vehicle licensing system, CSTARS, for the Colorado Department of Revenue (DOR). The project is a perfect example of how too much of a good thing can end up wasting massive amounts of the taxpayer's money, how privatization is useless if it doesn't yield meaningful competition.

Like many ambitious projects, CSTARS began in 2001 with optimistic planning, and a contractor that was willing to promise everything the agency asked for. A beautiful baby was expected by all. Two years later, the project became bogged down in problems as the contractor discovered how difficult the job really was. Sensing high risk and impending trouble, and unwilling to admit to the customer that it was in over its head, the contractor began cutting corners and shedding functionality. It took another four years of management denial before a new administration came along, saw that the project had become a slow-motion trainwreck, and began to pull the plug. How did this happen?

DOR had assembled a wish list of 700 requirements, and put them out to bid. Of the seven firms that responded, six had developed similar systems before and felt that not all of the 700 requirements could be satisfied at the same time for the available budget. The seventh firm, Avanade, had not developed a similar system but promised it could satisfy all 700 requirements. The state accepted the bid even though Avanade clearly had not provided sufficient evidence that it understood the job. DOR had not forced the contractor to prove its ability to manage the work. In fact, as it turns out, DOR was also incapable of managing the work.

Bill Owens' former Revenue Director was quoted in the article as claiming CSTARS isn't the same kind of computer project failure that Colorado government had experienced four other times under Owens with four different contractors, most famously the $223 million Colorado Benefits Management System. He's wrong. It is exactly the same kind of failure. It's also the same kind of failure that caused an improperly-secured bridge girder to fall onto I-70, killing a family in a minivan almost exactly three years ago. You might think these are unrelated technology problems, but they aren't: in every case the technology involved was relatively simple and straight-forward.

What went wrong in all of these projects is the political mistake of confusing privatization with competition. It's a common mistake that causes a lot of bad policy decisions. Economists have long understood the value of competition as a source of actionable information. When a project is put out to bid, the prices that come back tell an agency what the best available price might be, and who is offering it. This can then lead to the action of writing a contract favorable to both the agency and the contractor, based on the winning bid. Usually the private sector supplies most or all of the bidders; hence the term privatization.

But the bid preparation process is not only a source of essential information, it also consumes and transforms information given to it. Like any computer program, it's garbage in/garbage out. A list of 700 features is not enough information to give a reliable cost estimate on a large information system. Without a preliminary functional design analysis, DOR did not supply enough information to expect meaningful bids to come back. Effectively, it asked the bidders to "figure it out," which is not much different from asking them to take a wild guess. Having been on the bidder's side of that equation many times over 27 years, I recognize the setup. Without a preliminary attempt to design the system, DOR didn't know that it might be impossible to implement as conceived. Without its own systems analysis and internal cost estimate, it didn't have a framework for evaluating the competence of the bids.

The reason DOR didn't do its homework, is clear in the article. It failed because it didn't have the necessary manpower and expertise on its own staff, to make sure it was getting usable information in the bidding process. Further compounding the error once the job was awarded, DOR didn't have the expertise to understand the software project workflow, nor the importance of the functional design process. It didn't exercise control over changes in requirements, so it lost control of the project. It gave too much responsibility and power to the contractor, and didn't protect the public interest. An understaffed agency is easily fooled.

This then is exactly the same problem that occurred on I-70 with the failed bridge girder. The Colorado Department of Transportation had given most construction supervision responsibility to the contractor, and was not staffed to supervise the work adequately. A family died as a result.

Privatization is a competition not only among bidders, but between the agency and the winning contractor. The agency and contractor don't have the same goals in mind. The DOR wants to get a computer system that meets the needs of its staff and the county clerks, so they can best serve the public in the issuance of license plates. The contractor wants to make a profit, win more projects with other clients so it can grow, keep its staff busy, and stop the client from complaining about being behind schedule. Those are competing goals. If the agency is too weak to compete, too understaffed to gather the information it needs, it won't know enough about contractor capabilities, project status, or achievement of project milestones and objectives. It won't be able to enforce the contract. A contract that isn't enforced, isn't worth the paper it's written upon. If the DOR doesn't have the staffing to effectively represent the public interest, it will end up wasting the taxpayer's money.

Privatization can be a good thing, if it provides real competition. Competition is a good thing, if it provides useful information and the agency acts on it, to its advantage. But stupidly cutting back on staff and throwing money at the private sector, just because of blind faith that "the private sector does everything better," is a huge mistake. While private firms can do a great many things better than public agencies, one thing they will never do better is to look out for the public interest.

Centrism is dead; so are left and right

The world is made up of two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

The format of presidential debates and campaigns, and the punditry surrounding them, would make us all think that the world of politics is made up of a "left" and a "right", and that a politician is either left, right, or if sitting on the fence, centrist. Newspaper columnists such as Curt Dale position themselves somewhere on the scale and see the whole world as left or right of them (or in Curt's case, everyone is left of him). It's a simplistic one-dimensional world that not only is vastly wrong, but is harmful to the nation.

The temptation to find a candidate's place on this one-dimensional scale comes from being expected to have a solution to every problem. Debate questioners don't ask how the person intends to go about solving a problem, but instead asks for a solution and a guarantee. Instead of choosing a leader, we buy a box of detergent. A real leader invites us all to be a part of the solution, to work together on it. A box of detergent invites you to pour in a cupful and forget about it. If your problem is ring-around-the-collar, the detergent might be the right answer; but not if the problem is a deeply divided nation with complex problems.

In this year's legislative session, Governor Bill Ritter and House Speaker Andrew Romanoff showed us that a successful leader doesn't have to be left, right, or centrist. Those aren't the only choices.

As so many politicians today become tightly bound to ideologies, their method of solving problems becomes very predictable: consult your ideology and do what it says. So if you're a libertarian, the solution to any problem is to drown government in a bathtub; if you're theocratic, the solution is to preach. If you're a hammer, every problem is a nail. This cookbook approach is very simple and easy to understand, perfect if you believe society is made up of people who don't have the willingness or mental ability to engage in problem solving.

Ritter and Romanoff are leading us to take a better approach. They address a problem by identifying stakeholders and interests, and devise approaches of collaboration and competition to reach a solution. They throw away the cookbook and ask people to work it out themselves. In this sense the people at the table don't have to be left or right, nor does the leader. They are all independent, looking out for their own interests and not for partisan interests. The leader creates incentives for the parties to come together and reach agreement, then sees to the implementation of that agreement. It's not a government for cynics, because you really do need to find the smartest people to run such a government, much like you need the smartest person you can find to be the CEO of a company.

With this approach, Romanoff and Ritter are creating an irresistible magnet to attract business-oriented voters over to the Democratic side of elections.

Corporations no longer own the Republican Party. On the 2006 ballot, we saw Republican ideological groups (especially libertarians, nativists, and theocrats) propose a variety of ballot questions that were actively antagonistic to business. Within that party, businesses are a source of money but have relatively sporadic ability to influence policy. They find ideologies to be inflexible and constraining.

Politicians like House Minority Leader Mike May expect business to fight it out with ideological groups within the GOP, and then to implement policy by overpowering the Democrats. The fatal flaw in this plan is that, unless the GOP controls every branch of government, this becomes a partisan fight where no one wins except a few politicians.

Lacking the ability to participate through legitimate channels, a few businesses resort to corruption, thus harming the ones who want to stay clean. Government based on sweetheart deals, is not going to keep us ahead in the competition with India and China.

Policy decisions made within a partisan framework are always going to please 50%+1 of the population and displease the rest; a government for all the people isn't possible when decisions are made within a single party.

The business community is pragmatic and will work in any framework that helps them promote their interests. The blue-ribbon panels and collaborative organizations Ritter and Romanoff have assembled this year, give businesses a chance to be players, without betraying traditional Democratic constituencies, who are also players in this open system. Most importantly, this framework doesn't rely on politicians or ideologues to have the best solution to every problem; instead it encourages the stakeholders themselves to find even better solutions. We don't need a know-it-all government for this to work.

Mike May is unhappy because Democrats are stealing his supporters by listening to them and helping them solve their problems. He wants them to get out the cookbook — his cookbook — and stop listening to anyone else. He wants a partisan fight with clear losers, but Ritter and Romanoff won't give him one.

Adult satisfaction

Jon Caldara is not a happy camper today as legislators head home after a highly successful session. The guru of the all-government-is-evil set had been riding high on the hog earlier in the decade as his disciples, led by John Andrews, went to work sowing vitriol in the state capitol, and reaping the stench of a decaying state government. By helping dysfunctional people win legislative seats, Caldara had gone a long way toward making his dreams come true, creating an evil government in his image.

Sure, state government had been like a rusty old Chevy that needed more and more money to keep it going. Voters toyed with the idea of crashing their old Chevy into a bridge pier to put it out of its misery. But they realized just in time that this isn't such a great idea if you're still sitting in the driver's seat.

With the help of simple-minded media, we'd been led to believe that every election was a choice between wastefulness or destruction. We'd been electing people whose only talent was elementary school mud-slinging, and building the expectation that the legislature is a playpen for the most immature people we can find, people lacking the brainpower to earn more than $30,000 per year.

Fortunately, this was not our only choice. Contrary to what Jon Caldara had been telling us, and in spite of his best efforts, we discovered better options. There are people in this world willing to work in jobs where they are vastly underpaid relative to their skills. People whose worldview includes taking responsibility for problems and solving them, not simply blaming others for them. People smart enough, and motivated enough, to see our complex world as it is, and find clever and elegant ways of making it better. People motivated by a feeling of mutual responsibility.

Andrew Romanoff is one of those people, the new breed of adults who are now in power in the State House. He has set a new tone for the institution, taking people's concerns seriously, even those of the opposing party, and looking for common ground and practical solutions. At a time when party warfare so often involves each side looking for a bigger bazooka to blast the other, Romanoff adopted a much more clever approach: listen to the other side and solve their problems, disarm the partisan militants by taking away their reason for bickering.

Romanoff's willingness to listen to Republicans and take them seriously, makes him perhaps more conservative than other Democrats, more respectful of tradition and more cautious, more willing to balance competing interests, and less willing to spend money. Sometimes it's frustrating for the Democratic base. But it's infuriating for outside troublemakers like Caldara, who make their living on conflict. It's challenging for local newspapers, who find it much easier to invent conflicts than to sit down and carefully explain a complex issue.

Words can't describe how much fun it is to watch people like Mike May and Ted Harvey try to come up with partisan zingers to blast the Democratic leadership. How do you criticize this year's highly successful legislation on energy efficiency, cutting health care costs, strengthening of schools, and consumer protection; when so much of it was supported by both parties and especially by the business community? How can you complain that the legislature did all of this within the bounds of Tabor, and further saved the taxpayers' money by finishing early? Mike May tries to work up a head of partisan steam, but then has to let it out and criticize the color of Romanoff's tie.

It will be especially interesting to hear from Dick Wadhams, the new Republican State Chair who was described by fellow Republican Senator Nancy Spence as the "The meanest, roughest, toughest, take-no-prisoners SOB we can hire." He'll soon be on TV whining about how those awful Democrats take all the fun out of politics by actually solving problems with bipartisan support. Spence's comments will come back to haunt her when she realizes Wadhams' mean and nasty approach is no longer wanted here.

Yes, the adults are back in charge, much to the voters' satisfaction. We now have sustained proof that government can work for the good of the people.