What’s Changed in Washington?

Often, relatively small events serve as a template upon which larger issues are debated and become better understood. Scott McClellan’s book is the latest example.

The larger issue pushed by the left is an opportunity to rehash shopworn claims about Iraq or Valerie Plame that repeated examinations have disproved. The other larger issue is the caliber of staffing of this or any White House and administration.

Here the lines are not as clearly defined by right and left. McClellan is believed to have acted with less integrity and more basely than should be expected of a trusted aide. Terry McAuliffe, as Commentary’s Contentions puts it, "sounds like Rich Lowry (or Bob Dole).” The influence (also here) on McClellan’s expressed recriminations by a longtime leftist operative, funded by George Soros, adds icing to that lopsided cake.

David Frum delves deeper into the source of this seeming character weakness by McClellan, laying the buck-stops-here responsibility at George Bush’s desk. Frum says “George Bush got the team he deserved.”

In these deficiencies, McClellan was not alone. George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office, and if he never belonged to the innermost circle of power, he nonetheless gained closer proximity than would be available to almost anyone who did not first serve in Texas.

That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team….

Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example….

The lesson of this story is emphatically not that presidents should seek staffers even more fanatically loyal than Bush’s. The lesson is that weak personalities break under pressure. And since a White House is the world’s highest-pressure environment, a wise president will seek to staff it with strong personalities.

To recruit and hold strong personalities, a president must demand something more than personal loyalty. He must offer a compelling vision and ideal — a cause that people can serve without feeling servile. Otherwise a president will only get … what Bush has now got.

All of Frum’s points may be given some credence. But, ultimately, Frum’s points are both contradicted by other and larger truths.

First, in telling example, the Bush administration’s most important foreign policy posts, State and Defense, had initial appointees of national stature and experience, with decidedly strong views – often at odds with each other – expressed freely and potently within policy councils during the run-up to and execution of Iraq policy. Neither has indulged in public recriminations, getting-evens, or publishing profiteering. Their every decision or ultimate competence may be debated, and won’t be better known until more time, events and actions pass, but they are certainly not of the boondocks or lackey mold that Frum paints.

Second, Frum misses the more central point that leads to a McClellan or to the treatment of his book: that is Washington (and New York) today. The left’s adherents in office and in other positions of influence have developed both an enormous infrastructure and a virulent mode of speech and operation that works assiduously to undermine anything to its right, or center. (One may, with some justification, say much the same of the right, but there’s less cohesion or focus, and the extreme right is not in a comparably powerful influence as the extreme left within its political home Party.)

This organized extremism in Washington, coupled with the growth in size and power of a D.C. political class that is centered on its own enrichment and perpetuation, creates – as in other policy and appropriations areas – a tendency toward careerist incompetence not to shake one’s own nest and its supporters. At the same time, especially as traditional mores of personal integrity have been loosened by a culture of self-aggrandizement, there’s developed a greater need by politicians – including the president – to place higher emphasis on personally developed loyalties, hence the sometimes weaker in other respects minions that Frum lists.

I and others with long experience in corridors of government and private power have experienced men and women of the highest competence and integrity. At the same time, many second-raters and self-servers are known. The first type are the majority, but the second is often unavoidable. What has increased the tendency toward the latter type is their opportunity for the former type for a better regard and reward outside of government or large organizations, freer of the increased intrusion of those hostile to achievement or freedom to innovate due to their pushes for minute regulation and criticism, especially when serving partisan or ideological ends.

There is not a regulatory cure. There is a traditional one. In my words, it’s toward a resurgence of emphasis on individual freedoms. In Ed Morrissey’s words, it’s toward a more limited government. These are two-sides of the same coin: emptying or lowering the level of nuture in D.C.'s petri dish of germs.

Personal recriminations do not further this cure, but add to the mutually defensive – and self-servingly protective – cause.