If there’s one thing that baffles me about the present discourse on Ebola, it’s the effort to paint it as a partisan issue. Democrats are complaining that Republicans are turning Ebola into a partisan political issue even as they mendaciously claim that were it not for Republicans we’d be in a much better position for dealing with it.

In that light I’d appreciate an explanation of President Obama’s appointment of Democratic Party apparatchik Ron Klain as matrix manager for Ebola. I think that the complaints of some, including the editors of the Wall Street Journal, that he doesn’t have medical expertise is completely nonsensical. However, I think complaints that he’s neither a general nor even a manager are legitimate.

To the best of my ability to determine Mr. Klain is a lawyer and Democratic party apparatchik full stop. Should we interpret that as the president’s believing that the problems posed by Ebola are purely political?

Update

Ron Fournier’s take bolsters mine:

The choice makes sense if Obama’s main concern is a) the incompetence of his team, or; b) midterm politics. My strong hunch is it’s “b”. The Obama White House is not self-aware. It is nakedly political. The uneven response to Ebola threatens to be a toxic issue for Democrats, and the president is under pressure from his party’s desperate candidates to do something.

The problem with the White House strategy in my view is that the situation is not purely political, especially now that we’re talking about having 4,000 soldiers in the Ebola “hot zone”.

Matrix management is an organizational structure in which many of the workers have more than one direct manager. For example, if all engineers report to a director of engineering but also report to a project manager who does not report to the director of engineering, it’s an example of matrix management. If all accountants within an organization report to a director of finance but also report to, for example, a line manager it’s another example of matrix management.

It’s an idea that appears to have begun in the Pentagon during World War II but reached its full bloom at NASA in the 1960s and became a sort of fad among large corporations in the 60s and 70s. It’s largely fallen out of fashion now except in government.

The general problem with matrix management is managers. They can’t wrap their heads around the concept. Good management is scarce and precious. I have never seen an example of effective matrix management. Has anyone ever experienced effective matrix management? Give an example, outside of NASA or the Pentagon, of effective matrix management?

By the way how practical does the president’s plan for Ebola sweeneys (Cockney rhyming slang: “flying squad” = “Sweeney Todd”, shortened to sweeney) to deal with the cases that will occur here in the United States sound to you? To me it sounds as though he’s been advised of the time and expense of training doctors and nurses all over the country (which will run well into the billions) and tried to come up with a better, cheaper plan that could be put in place quickly. How much better would these sweeneys be?

How many of them would there be? How long would it take to train a team? If there aren’t many of these teams, what do you do when a member of one of the teams contracts Ebola? It seems to me that the plan can only work if the number of cases of Ebola in the U. S. is kept very small which in turn implies that you’re taking steps to limit the number of cases.

I agree with just about every word of Eugene Robinson’s column about the need for candor from medical officials, especially the conclusion:

The thing is, Americans are anxious about Ebola but not panicked. This will change, however, unless experts speak more honestly about the nature of the threat.

That should include being frank about the limits of what they know. To my eye the greatest signs of panic are those coming from those medical officials who are so frantic to show that it’s not their fault. Or maybe it’s guilt—as though they’ve been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

In stock market parlance a “correction” is a decrease in the price of a stock or group of stocks of 10% or more. This week the Dow has been flirting with a correction so I think it might be a good time to consider Steve Forbes’s “five basic reasons stocks are falling”. They are

• The U.S. Senate
• Misbehavior by the Fed
• The profit picture is getting blurry
• World economies are a mess
• The world security situation is worsening

I think an even more basic basic reason is that by what used to be the historic standards the relationship between stock prices and earning is incredibly out of whack. For 120 years the P/E ratio was around 15. Now it’s half again that.

Why? You can come up with any number of explanations but the implication of the (by historical standards) detachment of stock prices from the performance of the companies means that prices are unquestionably being buoyed by something else. If it’s “animal spirits”, I’d find an explanation of why the spirits of the stock market and those of entrepeneurs are so very far apart extremely interesting.

By the way, over the years I have been sneezed on, slobbered on, thrown up on, sweated on, and even bled on by fellow passengers on commercial airline flights. I have never personally had sexual relations with anyone on a commercial airline flight but I know people who have. Explain to me again how safe commercial airline flights are from a communicable disease standpoint.

I still don’t think there’s reason to panic but I do think we should recognize that public announcements are still getting far out in front of the known facts. To the best of my knowledge there aren’t any particularly good studies of disease transmission among the passengers of commercial airlines. One of the complications is that diseases have incubation periods and if you get sick three weeks after flying you might not attribute it to that guy who sneezed on your tray.

This story at the Daily Mail is surreal. Read it and weep.

It certainly makes you wonder how seriously the isolation protocols are being taken.

In an editorial broadly attacking public health institutions, the editors of the Wall Street Journal declaim:

An Ebola outbreak on the Eastern seaboard or some other densely populated region could well cost billions of dollars to contain and perhaps throw the economy into recession, akin to the 2009 SARS pandemic in China. The possibility is very remote, and Washington is marginally more accountable than Beijing. Then again, the CDC said domestic cases were improbable too.

They’re underestimating, probably by a factor of ten. As I pointed out yesterday spending billions to fight Ebola is already “baked in” to present policy. If that’s enough to push us into recession, recession here we come!

The editors of the Washington Post urge “U. S. leadership” to boost world economic growth:

The list of measures that could boost growth in the short term is longer than you might think. Corporate tax reform, for example, has already been thoroughly discussed in the House and Senate, with relatively little daylight between the two parties. Several Democrats as well as the overwhelming majority of Republicans support the Keystone XL pipeline. Bipartisan coalitions in the Senate have drafted bills to reform housing finance and reauthorize federal highway programs. Postal reform, too, is teed up. All of these would be consistent with the IMF’s call for structural reform and greater infrastructure investment.

U.S. leadership internationally is also necessary to promote growth. Lest global trade stagnate, and economic reform in Japan stall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement must be brought to a successful conclusion, aided by congressional approval of fast-track negotiating authority for the president. The Obama administration should keep urging Germany to reduce its trade surplus, which is a major factor inhibiting the growth potential of Europe’s debtor countries. And U.S. engagement can help resolve the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East, which the IMF identifies as aggravating factors in the global slowdown.

The ratio of wishful thinking to practical proposals in that list is very high. If you’re a resident of Illinois, you can hardly escape the reality that the Democrats’ present rhetoric relies almost exclusively on class warfare. It’s understandable. Their incumbents can’t run on records of solid accomplishment or reform. The implication is that Democrats can’t vote for anything that would smack of favoring corporations over the poor working stiff without injuring their own reelection bids.

And notice how conspicuously absent the word “China” is from their list. Although the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” is largely an anti-China measure.

The sad reality is that China, Germany, Japan, and South Korea just to name the largest economies in a very long list all need to consume more and export less if our economy or the world’s is to grow. Is U. S. leadership sufficient to accomplish that?