COMMAND AND CONTROL
I couldn't find a good way to excerpt this article and as I kept reading it I found both more interesting and more important. This post by billmon in Whiskey Bar offers some insight into the overall philosophy or strategy underlying the Bush/Cheney/Rove government. One basic principle of Rovian politics is to focus discussion on wedge issues while the real agenda is being pursued behind the scenes. This is a peek at the big picture.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Not surprisingly, the post-Katrina autopsy is focusing fresh attention on the Cheney administration's bold "disinventing government" initiative -- although in this case I probably should call it the Rove administration's initiative, since it's been more Karl's pet project than the veep's.
If Cheney had his way, there wouldn't be any government left to disinvent -- just a service desk for the pipeline companies to call when they need to get the power back on. And Halliburton could easily handle that.
Rove, on the other hand, recognizes that government agencies has their uses, especially now that "to the victor go the spoils," has been firmly reestablished as the operative principle of the federal personnel management system. Let dweebs like Al Gore worry about making government work, the Rovians understand that the important thing is to make it work for them.
Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias both have a go at describing Rove's achievements -- with Yglesias reviewing the political resumes of various cabinet secretaries, past and present, and Krugman looking at the effect the modern spoils system is having further down the totem poll, among the senior career executives who generally keep the lights on and the water running at most agencies, or try to.
But the most interesting take comes from Mark Schmitt, a fellow at the newish Democrat New America Foundation who also blogs as The Decembrist. In a post over at TPM Cafe (I know the attribution is getting thick, but bear with me here) Schmitt argues that the real problem isn't the quality of the political appointees, but the fact that the Rovians apparently believe that controlling even the most minute bureaucratic functions directly from the White House is an adequate substitute for competent management at the agency level. He points to this line from Mike Allen's piece in Time (previously discussed here):
"Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House," said a lobbyist who is tight with the Administration. "You can't have a Mike Brown at FEMA unless you can guarantee that there isn't going to be a catastrophe." (emphasis added)
This is, of course, a crazy way to run a $2.5 trillion enterprise -- unless your idea of administrative excellence is the old Soviet central planning monster, Gosplan. But it's a very good way to take political control of decisions that are supposed to be made through the regulatory process, whether that's approving the "morning after pill" at the FDA, updating fuel economy standards at NHTSA, or issuing ergonomic safety rules at OSHA. In a sense, what the Rovians have created is a parallel government, in which the real channels of power run through the party apparatus, not the organizational charts of the various departments and agencies. This, says Schmitt, is the real story -- not the creative resume writing skills of guys like Mike Brown:
That's why it's so important to . . . focus some attention on the system that made it all possible -- a radical, unprecedented system of centralized, politicized control that is guaranteed to fail.
Radical, yes. Unprecedented, no. While the Rovians have taken centralization and party control to new extremes, I saw some of the same trends at work during the Reagan administration, which I covered as a cub reporter for a small trade paper that specialized in issues affecting the federal civil service -- or "the govvies," as we used to semi-affectionately call them.
It was Reagan, after all, who created the infamous Office of Regulatory Review, which allowed the White House to step in and review the economic impact of any proposed regulation. This became known as the "black box" of OMB (because it worked in total secrecy) and "the roach hotel" (regulations checked in, but never checked out.) The Reaganauts also tried, albeit with little success, to give OMB greater control over both agency budgets and budget-related policy decisions.
But the Reagan administration also wasn't the first GOP team to try to bring the federal beast to heel. While I was on the "govvie" beat, I came across a book called The Plot that Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency, which recounted Tricky Dick's efforts to neuter his cabinet and gain direct control over the bureaucracy. This struggle took various forms -- including the creation of OMB, upstaging cabinet secretaries (like Kissinger's end runs around the State of State Bill Rodgers), inserting Nixon loyalists in key subcabinet postitions, and impounding appropriated funds (to show the agencies they couldn't cut their own deals with Congress.)
As the title of the book suggests, the campaign ultimately foundered on the rocks of Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon's own paranoia, which led him to do completely wacky things like sending his personal hatchet man to count the number of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Nixon suspected was cooking the unemployment stats to make him look bad.
It's easy to see a common thread here. Ever since the New Deal, successive GOP administrations have regarded the federal government as hostile territory to be occupied and, if possible, pacified. Under Nixon and, to a lesser degree, Reagan, cabinet secretaries were seen as unreliable, and prone to "go native" -- especially since many of them were ideological moderates, who were appointed to mollify powerful interest groups with a vested interest in the status quo.
For conservatives, this made the White House the political equivalent of the Green Zone -- a fortified command and control center beyond the reach of the insurgent bureaucrats. And out in the agencies, hard-edged conservative subcabinet appointees began to take on something of the role of political commissars in the Soviet military, monitoring both their nominal superiors and their career subordinates for signs of disloyalty.
Like I said, the Rovians may have taken these trends to new extremes, but they didn't invent them. What is radical and unprecedented about the Rovian machine -- what makes it stand out from previous GOP efforts at bureaucratic control -- is that it stands completely outside the normal structure of government.
Nixon and Reagan tried to centralize administrative control within the Executive Office, and OMB in particular. Rove has made it an explicitly political function -- a kind of branch operation of the Republican National Committee. Not since FDR's famous order to "clear it with Sydney" (Sydney Hillman, the CIO's political director) has so much bureaucratic power been vested in a presidential fixer.
Which means that in the Cheney administration, policy, particularly domestic policy, is simply a basket of hot button issues -- stem cells, climate change, grazing fees, wetlands regulation -- that have to be managed on behalf of the various interest groups that make up the Republican coalition. Even the big domestic initiatives, like Social Security "reform," are treated more like election campaigns than serious policymaking exercises. (The one exception, energy policy, was controlled by Cheney, and was treated like a Soviet state secret.)
Outside of these political hot spots, the federal bureaucracy has been floating in a vaccum -- ignored not just by the Rovians and their pet president, but by the media, the public and, it seems, by many of the dispirited, apathetic career executives laboring under the hard-eyed scrutiny of the political commissars. Until the hurricane hit.
In a sense, we were warned that something like this might happen, way back when John DiIulio -- Bush's first faith-based initiatives czar -- coined the phrase "Mayberry Machiavellis" to describe the kind of people he encountered in Rove's world.
DiIulio's letter to Ron Suskind, which became the basis for a revealing piece in Esquire magazine, is worth rereading now:
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, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, non-stop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, 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.
. . . This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis -- staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.
One passage in particular has a sharp resonance now. It's DiIulio's description of the political manuevering that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security:
Contrast that, however, with the remarkably slap-dash character of the Office of Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department was needed, with the sudden, politically-timed reversal in June, and with the fact that not even that issue, the most significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense, has received more than talking-points caliber deliberation. This was, in a sense, the administration problem in miniature: Ridge was the decent fellow at the top, but nobody spent the time to understand that an EOP entity without budgetary or statutory authority can't "coordinate" over 100 separate federal units, no matter how personally close to the president its leader is, no matter how morally right they feel the mission is, and no matter how inconvenient the politics of telling certain House Republican leaders we need a big new federal bureaucracy might be. (emphasis added)
The point is not that the Rovians were wrong to oppose the creation of the DHS. In hindsight, they may have been right. It might have been wiser to leave bad enough alone. But if DiIulio is correct, the initial decision, and the subsequent flip flop, had little or nothing to do homeland security, and everything to do with preserving Bush's political capital.
It's weirdly appropriate that DiIulio, in the best tradition of the Stalinist show trials (or like John Cleese, hung by his heels out a window in A Fish Named Wanda) later denounced himself for his slanderous comments. Because what the Rovians have constructed is a kind of comic opera caricature of a totally politicized one-party state: Joe Stalin meets Huey Long meets the Wizard of Oz -- or at least, the little man behind the curtain. Previous GOP administrations only tried to control the federal bureaucracy; the Cheney administration has turned it into a running joke, like the Vogans in the Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Which would be pretty funny, if it weren't for all the casualties.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Not surprisingly, the post-Katrina autopsy is focusing fresh attention on the Cheney administration's bold "disinventing government" initiative -- although in this case I probably should call it the Rove administration's initiative, since it's been more Karl's pet project than the veep's.
If Cheney had his way, there wouldn't be any government left to disinvent -- just a service desk for the pipeline companies to call when they need to get the power back on. And Halliburton could easily handle that.
Rove, on the other hand, recognizes that government agencies has their uses, especially now that "to the victor go the spoils," has been firmly reestablished as the operative principle of the federal personnel management system. Let dweebs like Al Gore worry about making government work, the Rovians understand that the important thing is to make it work for them.
Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias both have a go at describing Rove's achievements -- with Yglesias reviewing the political resumes of various cabinet secretaries, past and present, and Krugman looking at the effect the modern spoils system is having further down the totem poll, among the senior career executives who generally keep the lights on and the water running at most agencies, or try to.
But the most interesting take comes from Mark Schmitt, a fellow at the newish Democrat New America Foundation who also blogs as The Decembrist. In a post over at TPM Cafe (I know the attribution is getting thick, but bear with me here) Schmitt argues that the real problem isn't the quality of the political appointees, but the fact that the Rovians apparently believe that controlling even the most minute bureaucratic functions directly from the White House is an adequate substitute for competent management at the agency level. He points to this line from Mike Allen's piece in Time (previously discussed here):
"Katrina has shown the incredible weakness of the notion that you can have weak players in key spots because the only people who matter are in the White House," said a lobbyist who is tight with the Administration. "You can't have a Mike Brown at FEMA unless you can guarantee that there isn't going to be a catastrophe." (emphasis added)
This is, of course, a crazy way to run a $2.5 trillion enterprise -- unless your idea of administrative excellence is the old Soviet central planning monster, Gosplan. But it's a very good way to take political control of decisions that are supposed to be made through the regulatory process, whether that's approving the "morning after pill" at the FDA, updating fuel economy standards at NHTSA, or issuing ergonomic safety rules at OSHA. In a sense, what the Rovians have created is a parallel government, in which the real channels of power run through the party apparatus, not the organizational charts of the various departments and agencies. This, says Schmitt, is the real story -- not the creative resume writing skills of guys like Mike Brown:
That's why it's so important to . . . focus some attention on the system that made it all possible -- a radical, unprecedented system of centralized, politicized control that is guaranteed to fail.
Radical, yes. Unprecedented, no. While the Rovians have taken centralization and party control to new extremes, I saw some of the same trends at work during the Reagan administration, which I covered as a cub reporter for a small trade paper that specialized in issues affecting the federal civil service -- or "the govvies," as we used to semi-affectionately call them.
It was Reagan, after all, who created the infamous Office of Regulatory Review, which allowed the White House to step in and review the economic impact of any proposed regulation. This became known as the "black box" of OMB (because it worked in total secrecy) and "the roach hotel" (regulations checked in, but never checked out.) The Reaganauts also tried, albeit with little success, to give OMB greater control over both agency budgets and budget-related policy decisions.
But the Reagan administration also wasn't the first GOP team to try to bring the federal beast to heel. While I was on the "govvie" beat, I came across a book called The Plot that Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency, which recounted Tricky Dick's efforts to neuter his cabinet and gain direct control over the bureaucracy. This struggle took various forms -- including the creation of OMB, upstaging cabinet secretaries (like Kissinger's end runs around the State of State Bill Rodgers), inserting Nixon loyalists in key subcabinet postitions, and impounding appropriated funds (to show the agencies they couldn't cut their own deals with Congress.)
As the title of the book suggests, the campaign ultimately foundered on the rocks of Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon's own paranoia, which led him to do completely wacky things like sending his personal hatchet man to count the number of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Nixon suspected was cooking the unemployment stats to make him look bad.
It's easy to see a common thread here. Ever since the New Deal, successive GOP administrations have regarded the federal government as hostile territory to be occupied and, if possible, pacified. Under Nixon and, to a lesser degree, Reagan, cabinet secretaries were seen as unreliable, and prone to "go native" -- especially since many of them were ideological moderates, who were appointed to mollify powerful interest groups with a vested interest in the status quo.
For conservatives, this made the White House the political equivalent of the Green Zone -- a fortified command and control center beyond the reach of the insurgent bureaucrats. And out in the agencies, hard-edged conservative subcabinet appointees began to take on something of the role of political commissars in the Soviet military, monitoring both their nominal superiors and their career subordinates for signs of disloyalty.
Like I said, the Rovians may have taken these trends to new extremes, but they didn't invent them. What is radical and unprecedented about the Rovian machine -- what makes it stand out from previous GOP efforts at bureaucratic control -- is that it stands completely outside the normal structure of government.
Nixon and Reagan tried to centralize administrative control within the Executive Office, and OMB in particular. Rove has made it an explicitly political function -- a kind of branch operation of the Republican National Committee. Not since FDR's famous order to "clear it with Sydney" (Sydney Hillman, the CIO's political director) has so much bureaucratic power been vested in a presidential fixer.
Which means that in the Cheney administration, policy, particularly domestic policy, is simply a basket of hot button issues -- stem cells, climate change, grazing fees, wetlands regulation -- that have to be managed on behalf of the various interest groups that make up the Republican coalition. Even the big domestic initiatives, like Social Security "reform," are treated more like election campaigns than serious policymaking exercises. (The one exception, energy policy, was controlled by Cheney, and was treated like a Soviet state secret.)
Outside of these political hot spots, the federal bureaucracy has been floating in a vaccum -- ignored not just by the Rovians and their pet president, but by the media, the public and, it seems, by many of the dispirited, apathetic career executives laboring under the hard-eyed scrutiny of the political commissars. Until the hurricane hit.
In a sense, we were warned that something like this might happen, way back when John DiIulio -- Bush's first faith-based initiatives czar -- coined the phrase "Mayberry Machiavellis" to describe the kind of people he encountered in Rove's world.
DiIulio's letter to Ron Suskind, which became the basis for a revealing piece in Esquire magazine, is worth rereading now:
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, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, non-stop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, 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.
. . . This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis -- staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but, in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.
One passage in particular has a sharp resonance now. It's DiIulio's description of the political manuevering that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security:
Contrast that, however, with the remarkably slap-dash character of the Office of Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department was needed, with the sudden, politically-timed reversal in June, and with the fact that not even that issue, the most significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense, has received more than talking-points caliber deliberation. This was, in a sense, the administration problem in miniature: Ridge was the decent fellow at the top, but nobody spent the time to understand that an EOP entity without budgetary or statutory authority can't "coordinate" over 100 separate federal units, no matter how personally close to the president its leader is, no matter how morally right they feel the mission is, and no matter how inconvenient the politics of telling certain House Republican leaders we need a big new federal bureaucracy might be. (emphasis added)
The point is not that the Rovians were wrong to oppose the creation of the DHS. In hindsight, they may have been right. It might have been wiser to leave bad enough alone. But if DiIulio is correct, the initial decision, and the subsequent flip flop, had little or nothing to do homeland security, and everything to do with preserving Bush's political capital.
It's weirdly appropriate that DiIulio, in the best tradition of the Stalinist show trials (or like John Cleese, hung by his heels out a window in A Fish Named Wanda) later denounced himself for his slanderous comments. Because what the Rovians have constructed is a kind of comic opera caricature of a totally politicized one-party state: Joe Stalin meets Huey Long meets the Wizard of Oz -- or at least, the little man behind the curtain. Previous GOP administrations only tried to control the federal bureaucracy; the Cheney administration has turned it into a running joke, like the Vogans in the Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Which would be pretty funny, if it weren't for all the casualties.
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