OPINION:
Among the life-altering books I have read in my lifetime is Dr. Meyer Friedman and Dr. Ray H. Rosenman’s “Type A Behavior and Your Heart.”
The 1974 work by two cardiologists described the tendency of certain types of people to characteristically be in a self-imposed rush, battle against time, and metaphorically suffer a “hurry sickness,” marked by consistent impatience.
The point of the landmark work was to warn people who were hurried Type As that they were in significantly greater danger of cardiovascular illness, per the damage that such behavior did to arterial health, often at an early age. Nevertheless, throughout the work and subsequent analyses, they warned of the fact that such an approach to life also compromised the quality of decision-making — “a continuous frenzied pace almost ensures later disaster in every field of human activity.”
In fact, Type A political decision-making and analysis generally ensures such mistakes, errors and/or calamities, specifically in public policy.
Examples are legion, but let us look at two disparate issues: Fatherlessness and North Korean denuclearization. Regarding the former, in January of this year Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh wrote an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun, titled “Baltimore mayor: I am impatient.” She explained that the violence in Baltimore and its root causes meant that the city “must achieve progress faster” and that she needed to replace the previously little criticized commissioner with a new one.
The only problems were that in her rush, she forgot to take the time to vet sufficiently the new acting commissioner, who had failed to pay his income taxes for three years. Meanwhile, Baltimore remains USA Today’s “nation’s most dangerous city.”
Some (including this writer) have written and argued for decades that the key cause of violence and murders in American’s cities is fatherlessness, and that single-mother families must be financially disincentivized and stigmatized. Having spoken to politicians and principals in the media, one discovers the reaction is invariably either to ignore the issue or to say that any solution will take a decade or more and is therefore not worth doing, due to the lengthy wait for a change.
Why do they make a long-term solution not worth doing? Well, the answer is never stated, but it is clearly due to politicians being concerned only about elections coming up, their personal political prospects and the often-articulated false dilemma of needing “to do something now!”
The Type A leadership that dominates our national foreign policy and its coverage is equally manifest.
President Donald Trump goes to Singapore and negotiates a pledge from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula and made some concessions, including the United States’ freezing U.S.-South Korea military drills.
The anti-Trump and pro-Trump forces were respectively appalled at Mr. Trump’s caving or certain that Mr. Trump had been vindicated. The former crowed that Mr. Trump was being fooled just as former administrations that he had castigated had been fooled, coming away with “nothing but a photo-op.”
Partly due to the new constant news cycle, itself a manifestation of the Type A journalistic approach to foreign and domestic policy, the Trump critics seem virtually uninterested in seeing what transpires from what the president’s supporters call the “beginning of a process.”
Not to be out-Type-A’d, the president, two days after the summit, proclaimed that his “very, very comprehensive” agreement meant that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea,” a manifestly false depiction of the current geo-political situation days after the first round of negotiations, a premature confidence born of — you guessed it — Type-A hurried policy outcome assessment.
Type A overeagerness when exacerbated by political polarization can be devastating to wise domestic and foreign policy.
How soon can political principals overcome their destructive Type A behavior? As with individuals worried about coronary thrombosis, only if they really want to, according to Dr. Friedman and Dr. Rosenman.
• Richard E. Vatz, professor of political rhetoric at Towson University, is the author of “The Only Authentic Book of Persuasion: The Agenda-Spin Model” (McGraw-Hill, 2017).
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