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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (15823)	11/11/2003 12:58:10 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793739

OP-ED COLUMNIST Cynics Without a Cause By DAVID BROOKS Over the past few months, the Democratic presidential candidates have been peddling a story. The story is that the Bush administration is circumventing the competitive bidding process to funnel sweetheart Iraq reconstruction contracts to major campaign contributors, especially Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton. The riff was laid down by Dennis Kucinich, but now all the candidates are playing along. Howard Dean says the Halliburton contracts show that the Bush administration "has sold this country down the river." John Kerry says the administration has broken faith with the American people with its no-bid contracts with Halliburton. In the parade of Democratic bogeymen, the word "Halliburton" elicits almost as many hisses as the chart-topping "Ashcroft." The problem with the story is that it's almost entirely untrue. As Daniel Drezner recently established in Slate, there is no statistically significant correlation between the companies that made big campaign contributions and the companies that have won reconstruction contracts. The most persuasive rebuttals have come from people who actually know something about the government procurement process. For example, Steven Kelman was an administrator in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy under Bill Clinton and now is a professor of public management at Harvard...............There are a number of legitimate questions Democratic candidates could be asking about our procurement system. Are we so overreliant on private contractors that the line between combat personnel and support personnel is getting blurred? Should we beef up the Pentagon procurement staff, to give us the ability to manage contracts from a wider cast of companies? What do we do if the private contractors decide to pack up and leave Iraq? But answering these questions would mean coming up with a positive vision of how to better proceed with our reconstruction efforts. Instead the Democratic presidential candidates are content simply to repeat demagogic and misleading applause lines. The lesson of this Halliburton business is that some parts of our government really do make their decisions on the merits. And just because a story makes you popular doesn't make it true. nytimes.com