Why decision is good policy

Barack Obama is a “dithering” president whose controlling tendencies and extreme risk-averse attitude to foreign policy has damaged American interests in the Middle East, according to a new book by a senior former State Department adviser. The insider account of the damaging divisions between the White House and the State Department comes as diplomats wait to see if John Kerry, the new US secretary of state, can persuade Mr Obama to show greater engagement on Syria, Egypt and the wider Middle East.

That's the title of a famous paper by Stephen Ansolabehere, John de Figueireido, and James Snyder.  The abstract of the non-gated version (other versions here) reads as follows:

Congress has done such a beautiful job handling the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling that president Obama felt it mandatory to issue an Executive Order Giving Biden, Congress Pay Raises President Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden.

Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade America’s credit rating Friday is momentous, but not, I suspect, for the reasons most people will cite. Many worried that interest rates would skyrocket and the markets sell off. This seems unlikely. The news won’t be a surprise and S&P was kind enough to damp any impact by waiting until after the markets closed.

I’m largely in agreement with what Joel Klein writes about K-12 education policy in the new Atlantic, but there’s a passage that I think reveals an important blind spot in this conversation:

You can have these on a plane.