Blog

The protagonist in C.P. Snow’s novel Corridors of Power, a politician who is having an affair, quotes an old Anglican Church maxim, “You can get away with unorthodox behavior. Or you can get away with unorthodox doctrine. But you can’t get away with both of them at the same time.” That, in a nutshell, explains Eliot Spitzer’s political demise. Call it double hubris.

We all know about the unorthodox behavior. In his recent documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, film-maker Alex Gibney elaborates on the unorthodox doctrine: aggressively prosecuting the financial sector while he was New York’s Attorney General, and aggressively trying to push reform on a Republican-controlled state senate and a corrupt legislature. Gibney suggests that the enemies Spitzer made in business helped spread the news about his use of prostitutes and, when the word was out, his political enemies pushed for his resignation.

I’m a big fan of Gibney’s documentary style. Lots of face-forward interviews of key players in the story, all of whom, including Spitzer and his favorite dates, were eager to talk. A sharp-edged, bright lights, big city aesthetic for depicting life among the New York elite. Quick transitions from scene to scene, accompanied by an ironic musical score.

But the documentary leaves unanswered one key question. Given the political risks he was already taking for his unorthodox doctrine, why did Spitzer indulge in the unorthodox behavior? Maybe he knows, and the answer would have been too personal or too wounding to share with the world. Or maybe he himself doesn’t know. So I will speculate.

For a rock star, sex comes with the territory. Groupies offer it, and no one condemns rock stars who accept it. Men in power – whether it is economic, political, or intellectual power – are, at least to a certain extent, like rock stars, and they get offers. Many, at one time or another, take advantage of them.

One of the best portrayals of this is the classic Robert Redford movie The Candidate. As the campaign of the senatorial candidate portrayed by Redford builds momentum, we see one excited young supporter ask him to sign her bra and another flash her panties with his button pinned to them. He has a solid and loving marriage, and easily dismisses these clumsy advances, but we see another, much more sophisticated woman hovering around his campaign, flashing him glances that indicate they are having an affair.

For a long time male politicians got away with recreational sex and even the occasional affair. Jack Kennedy took this to unparalleled heights. Technology that easily keeps records (like the saved text messages sent by Tiger Woods), coupled with reduced public acceptance of promiscuity have made this unorthodox behavior much riskier. Governor Clinton emulated President Kennedy and got away with it; President Clinton didn’t.

We can assume that Eliot Spitzer knew that free sex was not on, so instead he went for what his consorts referred to as “the girlfriend experience.” But the movie indicates he knew this, too, was very risky, so he took great efforts to cover his tracks, for example paying in cash.

What was the thrill Spitzer was looking for? The act of sex with someone other than his wife? Or the illicitness of the act? Or both? What led him to do it? Boredom with a smart and attractive wife? Frustration at work? Rebellion against aging? Powerful feelings of entitlement? Rage at the demanding love of ambitious parents? Again, Spitzer didn’t tell the world, and there’s no reason he should. But if he wants to come to terms with himself, he will have to share it with his analyst/therapist and his wife.

What does this all mean for the practice of politics? As long as public attitudes in the US, unlike those in at least some European countries, condemn rather than condone promiscuity in their politicians, then the set of job requirements for politicians becomes more exacting. If you’re married, have a sexually fulfilling marriage, or act as if you do.

I admire Jeffrey Skoll and Participant Media, the company he founded. They have a clear vision: hire name directors to make aesthetically compelling political films that show heroic individuals fighting corporate or government bureaucracies and conclude with an actionable message to the audience. Sometimes this formula works well, on other occasions not so well, and here are two of each.

George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck employed an early Fifties black and white palette to recount broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s battle against Senator McCarthy. Charlie Wilson’s War used Aaron Sorkin’s hyper-articulate walk-and-talk style to tell the story of the Congressman’s struggle to build support for arming the Afghan mujahideen in their ultimately successful war against the Soviets. Both movies made clear that the victory was ambiguous. Morrow helped drive McCarthy from the Senate but lost his prime time show. The Afghan mujahideen became the Taliban. While both movies supported a cause, neither told the viewer how to sign up after leaving the theater.

Niki Caro’s North Country oversimplified a long legal fight against sexual harassment (Jensen vs. Eveleth Taconite), turning it into one courtroom scene where a Perry Masonesque lawyer by breaking down a hostile witness redeems the protagonist, proving that she was not a teenage slut but rather a victim of rape. Conversely, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for Superman spun too complicated a tale about charter schools and educational reformers. Both movies encouraged the viewer to visit a web site and join the cause: opposition to harassment in one, educational reform in the other.

So is the latest Participant Media offering, director Doug Liman’s Fair Game a hit or a miss? The terrain the movie covers is the relationship between politicians and professional public servants. Two episodes are at the heart of the movie.

Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was employed as a consultant to the CIA to determine whether Saddam Hussain’s regime was importing uranium fuel from Africa to produce weapons of mass destruction. When his finding that no such importing had happened was ignored by the Bush Administration, he spoke his truth publicly in an op ed in the New York Times.

The Bush Administration exacted revenge on Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, an undercover CIA agent, by leaking information that blew her cover and effectively terminated her career. The CIA reacted, appropriately, with damage control to salvage or cancel Plame’s operations. However, it failed to confront the White House on the destruction of its organizational capital. A contrast that comes to mind is Dominion Statistician Munir Sheikh’s resignation in protest against the Harper Government’s scrapping the long form census, a similar instance of destroying organizational capital.

As a student of public management, I wanted to know what constraints there were on Wilson going public (for instance, the terms of his consulting contract) and what was done with his report between the time he submitted it and the Administration ignored it. Fair Game didn’t adequately answer either question.

More broadly, Fair Game gave a considerable amount of attention to Valerie Plame’s dramatic career as a CIA agent before her cover was blown, but too little time and attention to the story of how she and her husband both used the media and the legal system to fight back. A contrast is All the President’s Men, which gave a full accounting of the journalistic craft Woodward and Bernstein used to trace the Watergate conspiracy back to the Oval Office.

That the White House attempted only to destroy the Wilsons’ careers is at least testimony to the robustness of American democracy. In other countries, for example Russia, a similar incident would have led to the whistleblowers paying with their lives. Plame would have died first, in the line of duty of course, and then Wilson, while on the run. In actual fact, the career most damaged by this episode was that of White House adviser Scooter Libby, who did prison time.

My final criticism is that I found Liman’s cinematic vision very unappealing. He filmed most of the movie through heavy filters (gauze and Vaseline?), giving it a muddy grey appearance, and shot stiflingly close to the actors.

On the other side of the ledger, what Fair Game did well was allow Sean Penn and Naomi Watts to portray a marriage of professional opposites – he, expansive and extroverted, she guarded and secretive – that was almost destroyed under pressure.

Finally, I must praise Sam Shepherd’s cameo as Plame’s father. On Plame’s visit to her parents to seek their support when the situation looked bleakest, in just a few sentences he communicated two key messages: good marriages survive storms and she had been a fighter, not a quitter, all her life. Perhaps that scene was an example of truthiness, not truthfulness, but it still worked, and the messages resonate beyond the movie.

Moving from the depiction of the events to the events, ultimately the Wilsons should derive three sources of satisfaction from this tumultuous episode in their lives. First, their marriage survived, and, by going public, they turned the attempt to destroy their careers into new careers as writers and advocates. Second, they cast doubt on the rationale for the war in Iraq and thereby contributed to undermining it. Third, they helped, literally, to take down George Bush’s reputation. American presidents remain moral guides, either to emulate or avoid, long after their terms of office are over, so their ranking in the annals of the presidency matters.

Recently I attended my first Live in HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s das Rheingold. I’m not exactly a Ringhead, but I’ve always enjoyed the Ring Cycle, in particular because of its attention to the theme of how power corrupts people. This is, of course, one of the main themes of political narrative. Das Rheingold, to be sure, focuses almost exclusively on it.

The performance blew me away. I was impressed by the powerful sound, by the sustained close-ups of the soloists, and by Robert Lepage’s imaginative production. Because das Rheingold uses very little chorus close-ups of soloists work well. And the set was very effective at presenting events occurring at different spatial levels, as well as serving as a backdrop for projected images.

I came away from it thinking about the difference between witnessing a live production and witnessing a Live in HD broadcast. Tickets for live in HD are a lot less expensive and, at least for this production of this opera, it gives you a much closer view than any seat at a live performance. I don’t expect that Live in HD would cut into the Met’s sales, and indeed there are Live in HD presentations in New York City. (This differs from the standard practice in many sporting events of blacking out broadcasts within the immediate vicinity).

I wondered, however, if the Live in HD performances of the Met wouldn’t cut into the market for regional opera companies. I posed this question to my co-authors of Digital State at the Leading Edge, and received a detailed and thoughtful reply from Perri 6 that made 3 points. First, people go to live performances to interact with other members of the audience and for the interaction between performers and audience, the latter especially if the audience is small and the performance space intimate. Second, close-up may not be the best way of enjoying a performance. Third, while the sound in Live in HD is powerful, it is mixed and blended by the production team, and is likely different from the sound in different places in the hall. Someone may buy a particular seat in the hall because they prefer the sound as heard in that location. The general consensus of my colleagues was that the experiences are sufficiently different that the Met’s Live in HD will not kill regional opera.

The next Met Live in HD performance I’m going to is John Adams’s Nixon in China on February 12. It turns out that the Canadian Opera Company is doing 8 performances of Nixon in China between February 5 and 26 and the Met an encore performance on March 12. This serendipitous quirk of scheduling has provided what economists would call a natural experiment.

Contrast the two Nixons. For Live in HD you get close-up camera work and powerful, perhaps overpowering, sound. Let’s also give the edge in quality to the Met for the same reason the Yankees usually do better in the AL East than the Blue Jays. Tickets cost $25 and you see it in borderline-grubby Cineplex cinemas usually in shopping malls.

For the Canadian Opera Company you get the in-person experience that Perri raves about. You also get a chance to dress up and see and be seen, something that has always been part of opera-going. (My compliments to the ad agency that does Cialis commercials for one that cleverly refers to the performance before the performance.) Single tickets cost between $70 and $317, though I imagine there are less expensive package deals and youth discounts.

If we were considering the impact of Live in HD broadcasts on the COC’s live performances, there are a number of things we’d like to find out. How many tickets did each sell and how many seats were empty? The Live in HD broadcasts are presented in multiple screens in the greater Toronto area, so its two performances could still amount to quite a few seats.

I could imagine a questionnaire posed to the patrons of each. Were you aware that the other way of watching the opera was available? If you were aware, why did you choose this one? Are you seeing both the COC live and the Met’s Live in HD (to pick up the real hard-core John Adams fans)? In general, do you go to both COC live and the Met’s Live in HD? If you’ve ever been to both, what do you like about each and dislike about each?

Without proprietary information about the audience (held by the COC and Cineplex) a telephone survey wouldn’t be possible. I suppose the most feasible way to implement such a survey would be to distribute it at the door. That of course, would require some funding and some research assistants – dressed down at the cinema and dressed to the nines at the opera – to hand out the questionnaires.

With less than three months, it would likely be difficult to find funding. And that’s unfortunate, because I think these are fascinating and important questions about the relationship between traditional live performance and a new technologically-enabled alternative.

As part of the last chapter in my book about public management narratives, I developed a list of my top ten. They are not ranked, but rather listed in the order they appear in the book. My main criterion in evaluating these narratives is the extent of my engagement, in terms of enjoying the movie or novel the first time I encountered it as well as the intellectual stimulation that comes from ongoing reflection about it. Some are considered classics but others are, in my view, unfairly neglected.

1.Stand and Deliver

Jaime Escalante was an ordinary person whose charisma came from his extraordinary enthusiasm for what he was teaching and his commitment to his students. His teaching did not reward or encourage self-revelation, but it demanded mastery of abstract concepts and meeting externally-imposed standards. Stand and Deliver remains as the original transformational teacher narrative.

2.Cheaters

It succeeds both because of the cleverness with which it parodies the transformational teacher fable and because it poses the thought-provoking question of whether as competitive a society as the US subtly encourages those with high aspirations to cheat. It thus serves as a fitting introduction to a different genre, namely the many narratives about corruption in the corporate world.

3.The Class

The Class (Entre les Murs) challenges the transformational teacher fable by transposing it to a different culture and portraying a teacher who is well-meaning and energetic but who makes mistakes in classroom management that leave him on the verge of losing control. Could he have handled the situation more effectively? Producing the film through improvisation by an ensemble that includes the students provides a variety of perspectives about what happened in the class.

4.Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister

The rigor and cleverness of its application of public choice principles to a wide variety of public policy and management questions is unparalleled. It also encourages us to reflect on the ways language can be used in government to obscure or mislead. The two episodes of Yes Prime Minister discussed in chapter 3, “The Ministerial Broadcast” and “The Smokescreen” are a good starting

5.Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day

While the film adaptation is excellent, going back to the original novel is even better. Ishiguro’s creation of the butler Stevens’s unique voice and the slow revelation of an unsettled and anxiety-provoking story are masterful. The novel leads one to ask if there was not some way Stevens could have overcome the constraints of Darlington Hall to have made a more honest and more rewarding life for himself and, more broadly, to ask about how an agent should respond to a principal with whom he profoundly disagrees.

6.Advise and Consent

By downplaying the heavy-handed anti-communist perspective of Allen Drury, the author of the original novel, Otto Preminger’s film adaptation poses important questions of the legitimacy of the means to achieve political ends. Are character assassination, blackmail, and lying under oath ever justified? Preminger pushed the censorship envelope of the early Sixties by depicting a gay lifestyle (even though the story stigmatized homosexuality).

7.The Candidate

Jeremy Larner’s screenplay subtly portrays the process by which a politician, responding to the pressure of his handlers, the expectations of the voters, and opportunity created by his own gifts appears to lose his soul. Or does he? Also, by running what was in effect a political campaign, the film-makers crowd-sourced the movie decades before the concept of crowd-sourcing had been invented.

8.The Fog of War

Errol Morris’s sympathetic but probing questions lead Robert McNamara to overturn the received wisdom regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and to relive the trauma of Vietnam. We come to understand the extraordinary arc of McNamara’s life story but the moral questions of wartime leadership remain unresolved. These questions emerge to the backdrop of a mesmerizing visual presentation and musical score.

9.The West Wing

It portrays a president who has a vision for the nation, who is a thoughtful and careful decision-maker, and who has established a culture in which his West Wing staff are not afraid to speak what they see as the truth to power. In addition, the series replicates the frenetic pace of the West Wing, with a continuing stream of crises and issues to be managed. Of its 154 episodes over seven seasons I recommend: Season 1, episode 9 (“The Short List”) about the choice of a nominee for the Supreme Court; Season 1, episode 14 (“Take this Sabbath Day”) about capital punishment; Season 1, episode 19 (“Let Bartlet be Bartlet”) about difficulty advancing the president’s agenda; Season 3, episode 8 (“The Women of Qumar”) about issues management and compromising one’s ideals; and Season 7, episode 7 (“The Debate”) which presents an intelligent and thoughtful debate between the Democratic and Republican nominees to succeed President Bartlet.

10.Twelve Angry Men

Rightly considered a classic play and movie, Twelve Angry Men builds its tension through heated deliberation in a claustrophobic jury room. While Juror Number 8 (the architect portrayed by Henry Fonda) heroically leads the jury to its verdict, the crime is not solved, inviting viewers to deliberate on their own about the guilt or innocence of the accused.

What do you think? Are there errors either of omission or commission?

Documentary film-maker Charles Ferguson is a bona fide scholar with a 1989 Ph D in Political Science from MIT and several books about the IT industry with respectable Google Scholar counts on his cv. He also cofounded a high-tech startup, Vermeer Technologies, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996 for $133 million.

He has in effect endowed the Charles Ferguson chair in public policy research at Charles Ferguson University and communicates his findings in film rather than print. (I’m reminded of an introduction political scientist Harvey Mansfield gave to Camille Paglia: noting that she is a faculty member at the unheralded University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he observed that “Camille Paglia teaches at the university Camille Paglia teaches at” and asked how many other people that could be said about.)

Inside Job is a well-crafted and thought-provoking documentary about the causes, major milestones, and consequences of the financial meltdown of 2008. At times it looks like a Powerpoint deck with slides depicting financial flows and leveraging of credit default swaps.

In making the documentary, Ferguson attempted to interview a large cross-section of financial sector players, academic experts, and public officials. Ferguson’s style of presenting his interviews is similar to Errol Morris’s, but without the Interratron technology. We hear Ferguson’s voice, but we never see him in conversation with his interviewees. The camera focuses directly on the face of the interviewee and, for some, this turned out to be an unnerving if not excruciating confrontation.

Ferguson had the most expansive co-operation from the analysts, for example Nouriel Roubini, who saw the meltdown coming and were most critical of the financial deregulation that caused it. He also had access to senior overseas officials such as French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

But he was virtually shut out when he attempted to talk to senior officials from the Bush or Obama administrations or to anyone in the finance sector. It appears that the word quickly got out that Ferguson was asking uncomfortable questions on camera, and players, likely advised by counsel, refused to speak to him.

But before the door slammed shut, he managed to interview a handful of leading economics and finance academics who served as both policy-makers at the Fed and Council of Economic Advisers, as well as directors and consultants to the financial sector firms. The most notable were Martin Feldstein and John Campbell of the Harvard Economics Department and Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard and Finance Professor Frederic Mishkin.

Ferguson zeroed in on two questionable practices, writing consulting reports arriving at conclusions the financial sector wanted to hear (“deregulation is good and we need more of it”) and serving as directors of financial sector firms. Ferguson unearthed a study lauding Icelandic financial deregulation for which Mishkin was paid $125,000. Feldstein was a long-time director of the insurer AIG until its collapse in 2008. When asked about the Iceland study, Mishkin squirmed, and when asked about AIG, Feldstein smilingly refused to say anything.

Campbell began his interview cheerfully enough, but when Ferguson suggested that consulting reports like Mishkin’s are comparable to medical research supported by the drug companies, he was at a loss for words. And Hubbard finally told Ferguson the interview was not a deposition, regretted speaking to him, and – on camera – gave him three minutes before booting him out.

(Hubbard’s previous claim to fame was as one of those short-listed for the chairmanship of the Fed in 2006. A group of Columbia Business School students made a satirical YouTube video with a viewcount now approaching 1.7 million – titled Glenn Hubbard every breath you take – depicting his assumed envy towards Ben Bernanke.)

In my view, when academics do consulting, they should be attempting to speak truth to power, that is, giving their best professional judgment, as opposed to telling clients what they want to hear. This should mean seeking out views that the client likely doesn’t want to hear, and seriously discussing them. When academics serve as directors, they should be adding value to the deliberations by bringing an outside and skeptical perspective to corporate decision-making.

The big challenge to acting with integrity is corporate money. $125K is a very rich consulting contract. Ferguson tells us that corporate directorships like AIG and the major US banks pay $250 – $300K, which is the equivalent of a handsome salary in academe. That kind of money seduces otherwise smart and skeptical people into saying what the client wants to hear. In addition, there is always the fear that if you don’t say what the client wants you to say, someone else can readily be found who will.

Ferguson’s film is an attempt to hold bankers, financial regulators, and finance academics accountable. It’s one thing to be held accountable in the court of public opinion, another in the court of law, and Ferguson is skeptical that the latter will ever happen. Whether or not the US ever develops a better way of regulating the financial sector is another matter. The issues are complicated and the government is now divided. Still, Ferguson deserves acclaim for his efforts to incite the moral outrage in civil society that might lead to better governance of the financial sector. I consider his film a must-see.