Leadership and Judgment

12 September 2005 |permalink | email article

W., despite getting just 51 percent of the popular vote in winning re-election, boasted he’d earned a lot of political capital and intended to spend it. In fact, he had very little capital to spend then - and much less today.

It was an illusion, based on his command presence in the wake of 9/11 -  and strong initial support for a preemptive attack on Iraq as the linchpin for a “global war on terror” - that an ideology spawned by Osama bin Laden could be easily eliminated.

That illusion, increasingly in doubt, has been shattered by the post-Hurricane Katrina fiasco which has unmasked W’s presidency. This national disaster has created a strong perception in America today of a dysfunctional government unable to handle a major domestic crisis - Homeland Security to shame.

The fallout raises new questions about W.‘s leadership, impacts the fate of American troops in harm’s way in Iraq, cripples his legislative agenda and makes Republican control of Congress less certain after 2006.

A new CBS News Poll is compelling. After 9/11, 83 percent said W. was a strong leader; campaigning for re-election, 64 percent agreed. But in the wake of Katrina, only 48 percent of Americans concur.

Once confidence in W.‘s ability to handle a crisis after 9/11, 66 percent agreed. With the nation angry about the slow response, just 32 percent have a lot of confidence.

His tardy return to Washington after cutting short a record-breaking vacation was telling, just as was his leadership failure to go to the heart of New Orleans five days after Katrina made landfall and the levees breached to meet with mostly black victims after disaster struck.

Another major concern about W. in Katrina’s wake is his lack of judgment in selecting competent personnel - not cronies or top political campaign aides - for critical positions in the government.

The example of FEMA director Michael D. Brown is compelling. When a clueless W. traveled to the Gulf Coast, Brown stood with him before cameras as the president said, “Brownie, you’re doing a great job.”

Yet, Brown admitted that he did not know for 24 hours after the first reports that there were 25,000 people desperate for food and water at the New Orleans convention center. And W. was getting his information from homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff who was receiving much of it from, you guessed it - Brownie.

Removed from his Gulf Coast duties last Friday, Brown is still in charge of FEMA despite a story in Time magazine that he inflated his resume that made it appear that he had more emergency management than actually did - like equivalent to an intern. But W. is loath to fire loyalists.

Far more disturbing for the body politic is that five of eight top FEMA officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters. The three top FEMA leaders, including Brown, arrived with ties to W.‘s 2000 campaign or the White House advance operation. It verges on cronyism.

Makes one wonder about the diversion of hundreds of millions from FEMA, now part of Homeland Security, to fight the war on terrorism when Congress has now been forced to authorize over 50 billion plus to deal with Katrina.

Loyalty, not competence, is what matters in this administration. It also makes it easier to understand why W. is so determined to nominate often combative nominees to high government posts when many are problematic.

The flawed John Bolton , whom the Senate refused to confirm, forcing the president to give him a recess appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, is Exhibit A.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that W. intends to nominate Michael Wynne to be secretary of the Air Force, despite the Senate’s refusal to confirm him as the Pentagon’s weapons-procurement chief. Wynne acting chief at a time when the Air Force was embroiled in a string of weapons-buying scandals.

The White House also intends to name as secretary of the Navy Donald Winter, a Northrop Grumman Corp executive. The Senate is likely to question his impartiality during his confirmation hearing because Northrup is one of only two U.S. shipbuilders at a time when the Navy is trying to keep existing shipyards open while struggling to cut costs.

The novelist E. L. Doctorow, a leading critic of Bush and the Iraq war, in an essay in the East Hampton Star last September wrote, in part:

“The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.”

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