From the Archives: Bush lays trap for self, falls right in it (April 17, 2007)
This story originally appeared in The Daily Tar Heel.
Bush lays trap for self, falls right in it
By David Donovan
April 17, 2007
On New Year's Day I saw a cartoon where 2007 was a baby and 2006 was an old man. If the analogy holds, 2007 is now a young adult about our age brimming with the optimism that middle age will surely crush.
Though 2007 is still young, it's already wrought a bad year's worth of bad news for the Bush administration: Scooter Libby's conviction, the Walter Reed scandal, the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons and then lies to cover it up, and investigation of the provisional council that oversaw an Iraq war that still fares poorly.
The common thread in each scandal is that each implicates not so much Bush himself as the network of incompetent underlings he embedded in the ranks of every agency from FEMA to the Department of Justice.
These are movement conservatives whose prime directive is the words of Ronald Reagan: "Government is not the solution; government is the problem." And then these people are placed in charge of - government. It's like picking a president of Domino's who hates pizza. Worse, actually. In no other business would this fly.
Obviously there's room for debate that the government should do less. I would prefer less warrantless searching, less regulation of people's private lives, less corporate welfare and less nation building in the Middle East.
But if we elect leaders who believe government can do nothing right, we, not surprisingly, get a government that will do nothing right. The spate of scandal is not the president's bad luck; it is the residue of his design.
He used appointments as opportunities to reward friends. Companies such as Halliburton that gave lavishly to Bush's campaign received no-bid contracts for his campaign in Iraq and then did slipshod work. Bush tapped a college roommate to run FEMA, which was woefully unprepared when tragedy struck in New Orleans and outsourced cleanup responsibility to some of the same companies that mishandled Iraq.
Somehow, we elected a man so passionately committed to his radically different vision of what a president's job is that he has no investment in doing the jobs that aren't part of that vision - even if the Constitution requires it, or the people depend on it.
I can see why, if you thought a job was unimportant, you'd feel free to use it as a spoil for friends and allies. You weren't expecting much anyway. Thus Bush hired anti-environmentalists to regulate pollution and diplomats who see little value in diplomacy while career civil servants who actually do their jobs well saw their informed opinions totally subjugated to political appointees.
But he's even botched jobs he wants. The Pentagon asked job applicants for the Iraq Provisional Authority about their political affiliation and views on abortion. Thus we sent cadres of loyal young Bushies to a country where they knew nothing of the language or culture. Now we're surprised little in Iraq has gone well.
The prophecy that you can't be trusted with your own responsibilities is both self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. When Reagan ran for president, he used Watergate as one reason why you couldn't trust elected officials. Trust me, in 10 years someone will point to our shameful failure to rebuild New Orleans as proof that the public sector can't handle such tasks. Rather, New Orleans is proof that the public sector shouldn't be run by people who don't like it much because they'll find themselves in the same scandals Bush has.
We'll always have healthy debate about what a government should or shouldn't try to do. But if there's a job to fill, a president has an obligation to pick the best people, not the most loyal. This president has fallen into a trap he himself laid, and we with him.
Bush lays trap for self, falls right in it
By David Donovan
April 17, 2007
On New Year's Day I saw a cartoon where 2007 was a baby and 2006 was an old man. If the analogy holds, 2007 is now a young adult about our age brimming with the optimism that middle age will surely crush.
Though 2007 is still young, it's already wrought a bad year's worth of bad news for the Bush administration: Scooter Libby's conviction, the Walter Reed scandal, the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons and then lies to cover it up, and investigation of the provisional council that oversaw an Iraq war that still fares poorly.
The common thread in each scandal is that each implicates not so much Bush himself as the network of incompetent underlings he embedded in the ranks of every agency from FEMA to the Department of Justice.
These are movement conservatives whose prime directive is the words of Ronald Reagan: "Government is not the solution; government is the problem." And then these people are placed in charge of - government. It's like picking a president of Domino's who hates pizza. Worse, actually. In no other business would this fly.
Obviously there's room for debate that the government should do less. I would prefer less warrantless searching, less regulation of people's private lives, less corporate welfare and less nation building in the Middle East.
But if we elect leaders who believe government can do nothing right, we, not surprisingly, get a government that will do nothing right. The spate of scandal is not the president's bad luck; it is the residue of his design.
He used appointments as opportunities to reward friends. Companies such as Halliburton that gave lavishly to Bush's campaign received no-bid contracts for his campaign in Iraq and then did slipshod work. Bush tapped a college roommate to run FEMA, which was woefully unprepared when tragedy struck in New Orleans and outsourced cleanup responsibility to some of the same companies that mishandled Iraq.
Somehow, we elected a man so passionately committed to his radically different vision of what a president's job is that he has no investment in doing the jobs that aren't part of that vision - even if the Constitution requires it, or the people depend on it.
I can see why, if you thought a job was unimportant, you'd feel free to use it as a spoil for friends and allies. You weren't expecting much anyway. Thus Bush hired anti-environmentalists to regulate pollution and diplomats who see little value in diplomacy while career civil servants who actually do their jobs well saw their informed opinions totally subjugated to political appointees.
But he's even botched jobs he wants. The Pentagon asked job applicants for the Iraq Provisional Authority about their political affiliation and views on abortion. Thus we sent cadres of loyal young Bushies to a country where they knew nothing of the language or culture. Now we're surprised little in Iraq has gone well.
The prophecy that you can't be trusted with your own responsibilities is both self-fulfilling and self-sustaining. When Reagan ran for president, he used Watergate as one reason why you couldn't trust elected officials. Trust me, in 10 years someone will point to our shameful failure to rebuild New Orleans as proof that the public sector can't handle such tasks. Rather, New Orleans is proof that the public sector shouldn't be run by people who don't like it much because they'll find themselves in the same scandals Bush has.
We'll always have healthy debate about what a government should or shouldn't try to do. But if there's a job to fill, a president has an obligation to pick the best people, not the most loyal. This president has fallen into a trap he himself laid, and we with him.
posted by Ithakid | 2:22 PM
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