Dem Disease claims another victim

[n2doc]

BY DAVID ROBERTS
19 MAY 2011 5:10 PM

Joseph Aldy worked for a while as a top energy aide in Obama's White House. Apparently, while he was there he caught Dem Disease.

Dem Disease is an affliction that causes sufferers to prioritize being viewed as reasonable over securing reasonable policy. The primary symptom is a Tourette's-like inability to keep from revealing how much one is willing to concede in negotiations ... before negotiations begin. (Obama is, of course, a chronic sufferer -- though he goes beyond revealing what he's willing to concede to actually conceding it before negotiations begin, a sure sign the disease has reached its advanced stages.)

Aldy, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, also works these days as an analyst at Brookings, and he's got a new paper out proposing a technology-neutral Clean Energy Standard to help green the power sector. You can read the paper itself or a decent summary on the NYT green blog. I won't get into the details; suffice to say, it's modest, not particularly ambitious, but a decent start, at least for the power sector. Better than nothing. It doesn't have a chance in hell of passing, so honestly the details aren't that important.

That would be that. But it's not enough for Aldy to have a sensible policy proposal. As a sufferer of Dem Disease, he needs to signal to the rest of the elite that he's reasonable.

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http://www.grist.org/politics/2011-05-19-dem-disease-claims-another-victim-joseph-aldy