Wonks on the Run
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By Paul Waldman
gadflyer.com
3.16.04
As Bruce Reed, Bill Clinton's domestic policy chief, pointed out in the latest Washington Monthly, in every administration there is a conflct between the policy types - the wonks - and the political types - the hacks. Bill Clinton was both the ultimate wonk and the ultimate hack, while George W. Bush is all hack. The problem is, so is his administration. The wonks have been banished.
We see it yet again with the controversy over the Medicare bill. Apparently, then-Medicare chief Thomas Scully (who was working to pass the Medicare bill while simultaneously negotiating to become a health care lobbyist - now that's public service) told chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster that if Foster told the truth about the bill's cost to members of Congress, Scully would fire him. The issue was that the line the administration was peddling to Congress was that the bill would cost $400 billion, the limit many conservative Republicans said they would accept. What Foster and others knew, however, was that the true cost is going to be over $550 billion.
Was Scully's threat outrageous? Absolutely. But it was nothing new. Recall that when John DiIulio, Bush's first head of the Office of Faith-Based Intitiatives, left the administration, he told Ron Suskind, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
DiIulio's comments bear repeating in light of Richard Foster's recent revelations (you can read the article from which these quotes are drawn on Ron Suskind's web site:
"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions," [DiIulio] writes. "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 nonstop, twenty-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."
The day after Suskind's article was released, administration spokesman Ari Fleischer said DiIulio's charges were "baseless and groundless." A few hours later, DiIulio himself obediently apologized to the White House and recanted, saying his previous comments were "groundless and baseless." We may presume that at that point his children were set free.
Later, Suskind got a similar story from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: the political people were in charge, and the policy people were barely relevant. On one occasion early on, the political people wanted the President to claim that $1.2 trillion of the surplus could not be paid down even if the government wanted to, because it was in the form of bonds that would not mature for over ten years (meaning the money would be free to use for a tax cut). O'Neill and others in the Treasury Department realized the number was wrong - the true number was only $500 billion, not $1.2 trillion. But the White House included the false number anyway, as Suskind reported in The Price of Loyalty:
O'Neill was incensed. How could the White House political staff "decide to do things like this and not even consult with people in the government who know what's true or not? Who the hell is in charge here?" he ranted. "This is complete bullshit!"
That night, Bush stood before the nation, described the state of the Union in the most important speech a president gives, in any given year, and said something that knowledgeable people in the U.S. government knew to be false.
As we move into the 2004 campaign, it becomes increasingly apparent that particularly on the domestic side, policy has become the emperor's clothes of this administration. They keep telling us how wonderful it is and how great it's working, but look closely and there isn't anything there. For instance, on what may be the most important question of the 2004 campaign - the state of the economy and jobs - the administration seems to have no policy at all. They have photo-ops, and arguments, and spin, but can anyone say exactly what they plan to do to improve the economy?
Who knows - and what does it matter? It's all about winning. |
