Last week, the National Review’s Rich Lowry addressed an issue that it took him several years to notice: the Bush administration’s breathtaking incompetence.
“[Bush] has made a few key bad decisions about policy and personnel, compounded them by not reacting quickly enough when things go wrong, and failed to create a sense of accountability in his government,” Lowry wrote. He added, “The upshot is that even Republican primary voters will be looking in 2008 for someone who doesn’t run the government like George W. Bush…. Once inside the charmed Bush circle, people tend to stay there and rise to the level of their incompetence.”
Apparently, this “I-word” is finally making the rounds. Bob Novak noted it in his column today:
The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is “incompetent.” … The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI’s misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. “We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,” one House leader told me. “How can we claim that anymore?”
The reconstruction of the Bush administration after the president’s reelection in 2004, though a year late, clearly improved his team. Yet the addition of extraordinary public servants Josh Bolten, Tony Snow and Rob Portman has not changed the image of incompetence.
A few Republicans blame incessant attacks from the new Democratic majority in Congress for that image. Many more say today’s problems in the administration derive from the continuing impact of yesterday’s mistakes. The answer that is not entertained by the president’s most severe GOP critics, even when not speaking for quotation, is that this is just the governing style of George W. Bush and will not change while he is in the Oval Office.
Of course not. Bush cherishes his incompetence. He revels in it. Incompetence is perhaps the only meaningful constant of the last seven years — presented with a challenge, this is a team that will reject intelligence, ignore common sense, and pick the most unwise course possible.
Indeed, with all due respect to Lowry and Novak, I think it’s fair to ask them what on earth took them so long.
The Bush administration, blinded by ideology and unmoved by facts, has a problem with incompetence? You don’t say. What gave it away?
One of Novak’s GOP sources asks how they can possibly still claim to be “the party of better management.” News flash: they can’t — but they couldn’t before, either. Iraq, Katrina, pre-9/11 intelligence, North Korea, a resurgent Taliban, tax policy, budget policy, diplomatic policy, No Child Left Behind … we’re watching the gang that can’t shoot straight. It’s like watching the Three Stooges run the federal government, only the audiences is more likely to cry than laugh.
Lowry and Novak, both of whom wrote perfectly good pieces, seem to believe they’ve stumbled upon something new here by highlighting the administration’s incompetence. Welcome to the party, guys, we’ve been here for nearly seven years wondering when you’d show up.
Kevin Drum pointed to John DiIulio’s perspective, which continues to be one of the more poignant insider takes available.
In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis…. On social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking — discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.
The nation has had presidential administrations that have confronted challenges and gotten them wrong, but the Bush gang is unique — they prefer being unaware and ill-informed, and equate ignorance with strength. It’s why the president publicly tries to humiliate those with post-graduate degrees in public settings. What could he possibly learn from an egg-head with a PhD?
Drum concluded, “George Bush and his team practically ooze contempt for the naive conceit that policy analysis is a serious business.” And we’ll be paying the price for years to come.