I’m a little disappointed that multiple instances of plagiarism led to the resignation of a top White House aide yesterday. It’s not that Tim Goeglein had a good excuse (he didn’t), and it’s not that he deserved to keep his job (he didn’t), it’s just that I’d much prefer to see White House officials resign for some of the Bushies’ more serious crimes. This feels like busting Capone for tax evasion.
An aide to President Bush responsible for outreach to conservative and Christian groups resigned Friday after acknowledging that he had plagiarized material for a column he wrote for his hometown paper in Fort Wayne, Ind.
Special assistant Tim Goeglein admitted lifting material from an essay about college education by former Dartmouth professor Jeffrey L. Hart and presenting it as his own in a guest column Thursday for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. Other allegations of plagiarism quickly surfaced after Goeglein informed White House officials of the situation Friday morning, and by day’s end he said he would step down.
On its Web site Friday, the newspaper said 20 of 38 Goeglein columns between 2000 and 2008 contained “portions copied from other sources without attribution.” […]
“There are no excuses. I am entirely at fault, and you have my sincerest apology. I pray you will forgive me,” Goeglein, 44, said in the e-mail to Hart. Neither e-mail alluded to other cases of plagiarism or offered an explanation for the use of the plagiarized material.
Once Goeglein was busted on his first instance, it was probably safe to assume there’d be more. And sure enough, once the examples started piling up, his career was over.
But looking back at this White House’s record of wrongdoing — the lies, the cover-ups, the extra-constitutional envelope-pushing — it’s unfulfilling to see Bushies resign in disgrace for relatively minor transgressions. Plenty of top White House officials have been forced from their posts, but for what? Plagiarism? Shoplifting? Given this gang’s conduct for the last seven years, it seems like they’re skating on the serious stuff, and getting busted for relatively minor mistakes.
That said, there is some irony in seeing Goeglein go down for stealing others’ work and claiming it as his own. He was, after, all, largely responsible for maintaining the relationship between the White House and the religious right, and promoting the president’s “faith-based” initative.
Here’s an excerpt from an NYT profile on Goeglein from 2004. As it happens, his favorite phrase is, “I really do mean this.”
Karl Rove, the president’s top political strategist, is famous in well-connected Washington for his tireless round of telephone calls and personal contacts with influential conservatives around the country. But even Mr. Rove has his limits — calls he cannot make, hands he cannot shake and meetings he cannot attend. For those, he has Timothy Goeglein.
When opponents of abortion were holding a rally on Mr. Bush’s first day in office, for example, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, called Mr. Goeglein from below the speakers’ platform to press the White House for a statement of support. Within an hour, Mr. Brownback received a call with a vow that Mr. Bush would cancel federal support for international groups that provide or advise abortion, a break from the president’s delicate approach to the issue during his campaign.
Mr. Goeglein, a slender, pink-cheeked 40-year-old Midwesterner who looks about half his age, is the official White House liaison to conservatives and to Christian groups. He is Mr. Rove’s legman on the right. “He is a constant set of eyes and ears,” said Edwin J. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Feulner said he saw Mr. Goeglein two or three times a week at meals, meetings or social events. “If I have a message I want to get to Rove or the administration, I will scribble out a note to Tim, and within 24 hours I will get a response back. For lots of things, he is sort of one-stop shopping for a point of access to the administration.”
Christian conservatives, in particular, say that Mr. Goeglein (pronounced GAIG-line) has been an important conduit to the White House for their demands that Mr. Bush stop financing family planning groups that support abortion, heavily publicize a signing of anti-abortion legislation, block stem-cell research and oppose same-sex marriage – all calls that the president has heeded….
In an interview in a briefing room near his office in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, Mr. Goeglein – an earnest speaker who punctuates his conversation with the phrase “and I really do mean this” – insisted that his job was to convey information to and from the whole administration, not just his boss, Mr. Rove. “The wonderful thing for me is that I recognize each and every day that I work for the president of the United States, the president of all the people, not some.”
But conservatives outside the White House say they view Mr. Goeglein mainly as an extension of Mr. Rove. And stalwarts of the right say that, even as some conservatives have grown sharply critical of the administration’s spending or of the war in Iraq, his function as a hot line to the White House helps keep the Bush administration more closely allied with their movement than any previous administration has been.
Mr. Goeglein majored in journalism and English at Indiana University. But after interning for Senator Dan Quayle, he fell into politics, first working as a spokesman for Senator Daniel R. Coats of Indiana, a champion of conservative Christian causes. In 2000, Mr. Goeglein was the spokesman for Gary L. Bauer in his Christian conservative campaign against Mr. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination.
What a shame.