What Happens When Two Self-Confident, Willful Men Find a Problem They Don’t Understand? Wait, Make It Three. No, Four.

This is what happens. With the two, that is, with Cuomo looking a little more sensible, if ruthless (leaving Christie holding the bag.

Reminds me of Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s behavior during the Fukushima disaster, actually. No hard feelings, and it’s unlikely that the onsite outcome would have been any better, but if he’d immediately made a 9.11 George Bush bullhorn speech, let CCS Yukio Edano assemble a crack team of bureaucrats to run the government side of the operation, and appeared on stage periodically to assure the public that the government was on top of things, I believe that the DPJ administration would have been well-positioned to blame the whole affair on what it could have plausibly portrayed as 40 years of LDP and MITI/METI kowtowing to the power industry. To put it another way, what if Yoshihiko Noda had been the first DPJ prime minister?

Would that have kept the DPJ in power? Who knows? But the media narrative would have been very different, the economy recovered quite quickly, and hey, do you think Metropolitan Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara would have provoked the hawkish Noda, the son of an SDF soldier to boot? (That’s Four.) Note also that Noda would not have wasted all that time and political capital in a futile search for a non-Henoko alternative to the Futenma question.  The three arguably most damaging issues would have turned out very differently, at least in political terms.

Think about that