by Sanford Levinson

Generally, I am not taken by comparisons of government with business. That most leaders have never met payrolls usually is of no importance to me. That being said, I do find myself increasingly interested in the responses of businesses, in a variety of realms, when confronted with what is perceived (sometimes inaccurately, of course) as the failure of executives to take the company forward. So a thought experiment: Would any self-respecting business corporation or, for that matter, professional (or even big-time college) sports team feel it necessary to keep in office a demonstrably failing chief executive? There have been many stories in the news recently about excessive severance packages given fired executives, and I certainly have no desire to defend what seems like a looting of the shareholders' money. But isn't it just as relevant that major companies are in fact willing to pay such packages rather than spend another day (or year or four years) with demonstrably failed leadership? Think of Home Depot in this context, though many other companies surely come to mind. Larry Brown might be a Hall-of-Fame coach, but not with the Knicks, and out he went, even though he had, I believe, a five-year contract that needed paying off. The firing of football coaches is, of course, an annual phenomenon; sometimes, one can believe they're being scapegoated for the failures of others, but often it is easy to understand management's frustration. (One inane decision by Boston Red Sox manager Grady Little to leave Pedro Martinez in for the eighth inning against the Yankees was enough to earn him a deserved sacking by Red Sox management, for example.) Sometimes this requires not only junking top leadership, but even reflection on the continuing validity of the basic structures of decision-making bequeathed companies by their founders. That Alfred P. Sloan or Henry Ford was an organizational genius does not mean that everything they did at GM or Ford makes perfectly good sense in the 21st century. This, of course, is an extraordinarily banal observation, at least if one is thinking about American corporations. And I have long thought that everyone, whether or not one is a sports fan, should read Michael Lewis's marvelous book Moneyball, about Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane. It is a remarkable study of different notions of organizational rationality. Compare this sort of unsentimental judgment with our approach to a failed chief executive/command-in-chief. As readers will know, I believe that it is a severe defect of the U.S. Constitution that it allows us to hire a commander-in-chief to fire ostensibly defective generals, but provides no way, short of a quadrennial election, to fire a defective command-in-chief. Responses usually take the form, as can be easily verified in responses to earlier postings along this line--yes, I know that I can be somewhat tiresome in my returning, over and over again, to the defects of our Constitution, but, after all, I do believe that nothing less than the future of our country is involved--that our sacred Founders made the decision for us and that it is basically unpatriotic to suggest that their handiwork, however much sense it might have made in 1787 (when, after all, everyone knew that the first commander-in-chief would be George Washington), is extraordinarily costly in 2007. That literally thousands of lives are being wasted because of the mistaken decisions of the commander-in-chief and that we may be on the way to a disastrous war with Iran seem almost irrelevant, save for passage of "nonbinding" resolutions begging the commander-in-chief, who is basically being treated like a dictator, to make better decisions. Indeed, President Bush seemed more than happy to cast Donald Rumsfeld over the cliff, but, of course, one can doubt that that was sufficient to bring about a genuinely new and productive policy in Iraq or Iran. (What, exactly, that would constitute, I am genuinely perplexed about, but I know for a certainty that I don't trust George W. Bush to have the insight and judgment to come up with it.) Perhaps one answer is to adopt a provision of the German constitution that places command of the armed forces in the portfolio of the defense minister, and not the chancellor. I don't know enough about the German system to know how well this actually works, and Germany, of course, has not found itself in a "genuine" war since 1945, though they are providing valuable forces in Afghanistan. At the very least, I would be shocked if the Germans would feel constrained to keep in office a defense minister who made a series of disastrous (or even questionable) decisions, even if they were unwilling to get rid of the chancellor (a very complicated process in Germany because of the principle of the "constructive vote of no-confidence," which requires agreement by the voting majority as to who should replace the chancellor. Israel has a similar system with regard to the prime minister, I believe.). If we were discussing a company in which readers had invested much of their retirement savings accounts (and could not withdraw the investment for, say, almost two more years) or if we were simply discussing a favorite sports team that had disappointed its fans through inept decisions--and never forget that George W. Bush, as managing partner of the Texas Rangers, traded Sammy Sosa!--then I take it there would be a great deal of openness to at least discussing the possibility that it's time to change management and perhaps even basic structures of decision-making, NOW. Only with regard to government do we complacently believe that we live in the best of all possible constitutional worlds. We don't, as a look at other constitutions around the world--or, for that matter, simply at one or another of the 50 state constitutions within the U.S.--might reveal. In my book, Our Undemocratic Constitution, I describe myself as Paul Revere, trying to alert my fellow citizens about easily recognizable threats to our public weal. Increasingly, I confess, I find the better analogy to be Cassandra, for I think that Americans are more than willing, like members of the Light Brigade, to march forward into catastrophe before actually taking a sober look at the adequacy in 2007 of our basic structures of government. In any event, we are, each day, paying a very high cost for unreflectively sticking with decisions made 220 years ago by men who themselves were willing to scrap the Articles of Confederation (not to mention their willingness to take up arms against the British) because the "lessons of experience" were that it wasn't working and that America, if it was to survive, deserved better. Would that we were more willing to emulate their bracing empiricism.