New York's 9/11 Site Needed Not a Moses but a Logue

Thanks to the diminished dollar, many are Europeans who bring whole families to see the ripped walls. This probably nets out as positive, if unmeasurable, global support for knowing what Islam's terrorists wish to do and why resistance matters.

To resist, though, one needs a functioning political system, and it's an open question whether we have one, or are losing the one we've got.

Yes, we have a healthy politics, but after the immense fun of watching the campaigns and the speeches ends, what remains is the work of running the system.

This week the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a stunning document to explain why Ground Zero has remained nothing but a hole for some seven years.

AP

Ground Zero

It is arguably the greatest political and bureaucratic fiasco in the history of the world. Remember the line about how if we don't rebuild the towers "the terrorists will win"? The terrorists will be dead of old age before this project is finished.

Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward, who did the remarkably frank report at the request of a frustrated Gov. David Paterson of New York, wrote that original estimates of time and cost (now at $15 billion) "did not reflect the unprecedented challenges associated with a project . . . involving so many different public and private stakeholders." (Arguably the system began its decline when the vocabulary changed deadly "factions" into benevolent "stakeholders.")

Ground Zero is a perfect storm of contemporary American politics. The report cites "19 different governmental entities from every level of government each laying claim to some component of the overall project." And, "Each entity makes daily decisions about their individual projects, but no streamlined process or authority is in place to . . . ensure that each decision is in the best interest of the overall project." This sounds eerily like the 9/11 Commission's assessment of our dis-coordinated national security agencies.

Besides the public players, the report notes "dozens" of family groups representing the victims, plus various community groups. Bowing to another toxic value, the agency promises to still be "inclusive," then complains no one has the authority to decide anything.

That is because productive decision making has fallen as a public value below "being heard." Even being heard is no longer enough. The "stakeholders" have to prevail, somehow assuming that the process – or a complex project like this – will endure endless blows. Meanwhile, construction of the wholly private, 52-story 7 World Trade Center building was done in 2006.

New York City, a chipping temple to the public sector (the roadbeds would embarrass a third-world country), will sink or swim beneath this dead weight. But as a case study of system malfunction, the Port Authority report on unbuilt Ground Zero is a warning shot to our acrimonious national politics. A can-do tradition is losing ground to can't-possibly-do. Barack Obama's appeal rests heavily on the belief that he'll bring back can-do. He's one man. The answer lies deeper, with a people who have to choose between politics that moves its system forward or a politics that just wants to have fun.