Too tired to think: team Bush loses its way

By Andrew Sullivan (THE TIMES, 19/03/06):

There is no shortage of theories to explain the seemingly growing dysfunction in the Bush administration. I don’t mean by this the flawed structural decisions — to invade and occupy Iraq with half the troops needed, to add trillions to the national debt with no way on earth to pay them back, to expend a vast amount of energy on social security reform while Iraq went to hell (and get no social security reform anyway). I mean the daily, tactical decisions that can so easily derail any government.

Here are a few. President George W Bush was given clear warning that Hurricane Katrina could become a national disaster, yet wasted days before he took any real action to jolt his chaotic administration into a meaningful response. He nominated an unqualified indentured servant, Harriet Miers, for the Supreme Court — and infuriated his base before picking someone else.

He launched a huge and expensive entitlement for prescription drugs as a way to win votes, and then so botched the execution that the elderly are just itching to go to the polls in November to vote Democrat. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, shot a man in the face and then waited a day to get someone else to tell the local press about it.

The White House approved the sale of the management of several US ports to a company based in a country many conservatives related to 9/11 and no one foresaw a public outcry. When such an outcry followed, the president immediately threatened a veto of any legislative attempt to reverse it (and then the deal was killed). Cheney threatened Iran with potential military force, just before the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was authorised to negotiate with Tehran over Iraq’s future.

Although it hurts me to differ with the Pet Shop Boys, Bush is not stupid. But his administration is reeling from one mishap to another. So let me proffer another explanation for the sometimes comically inept gang that cannot shoot straight, unless it’s at an elderly lawyer mistaken for a duck.

They’re tired. Not just tired, actually, but exhausted. They can barely keep their eyes open. They’re sleepwalking through their second term. And you cannot really blame them.

Take an important figure: Bush’s chief of staff, Andy Card. Card has been in his job since Bush’s inauguration well over five years ago. Before that he ran the transition team for the new administration. He’s the man designated to keep all the president’s counsellors and meetings in line, to be the look-out for trouble, to manage the executive branch, to liaise with all the various people who want a piece of the man in the Oval Office.

To give you a sense of his longevity, the previous two two-term presidents, Reagan and Clinton, had eight chiefs of staff between them. Not since Eisenhower in the sleepy 1950s has a chief of staff lasted this long. And just think what Card has been through: a harrowing election recount; staffing the transition; 9/11; the war in Afghanistan; the Iraq invasion; the Iraq insurgency; a second election.

The Washington Post says Card gets up every day at 4.20am, gets to his office at 5.30am, has his first staff meeting at 7.30am and works flat out until he gets home at 9pm. He takes calls at home until 11pm. He has kept this schedule for more than five years.

Now consider Donald Rumsfeld, the most incompetent defence secretary since Robert McNamara. He, too, has been there since the beginning, and despite very loud rumours a couple of months ago is still in his job. He has presided over an unprecedented attack on American soil, a torture scandal, and two wars, both of which are continuing. He is 73 years old.

His hours would make a man in his twenties feel drained. And, in fact, every single critical figure in this White House has been there from the start: political guru Karl Rove, secretary of state Condi Rice, former speechwriter, now policy czar, Michael Gerson, budget director Josh Bolten, and national security adviser Stephen Hadley. Hadley, according to the Post, schedules a full battery of meetings on Saturdays as well.

Or take Miers, the doomed nominee for the Supreme Court, who had been Bush’s secretary for the first term. She’s still there, toiling for the president. Her first job after withdrawing from the court process was selecting the next nominee! No rest for the loyal.

Most presidents, especially two-termers, reshuffle a little or a lot, bring in fresh talent, reach out to the opposing party in some appointments, rear some younger talent to give them fresh advice. Not Bush. He has a comfort zone; and he rarely strays from it. Some of the people who staff his administration were his staffers when he was Texas governor. He knows whom he trusts and likes; and he is extremely resistant to new faces, let alone new ideas.

He is famously loyal; and expects the same. And so he has created a bubble of people who love him, who rarely challenge him, who defend him, and who represent a circle of ideology out of which the president makes sure he rarely treads.

There are two problems with this. The first is that people who make mistakes often find it hard to admit them; and so errors are not corrected. It’s hard to put Abu Ghraib behind you when its chief architects — Cheney, Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general — are still defending their own complicity in sanctioning torture.

In fact, the only significant figures who have left this administration are those who got things right. Paul O’Neill, the Treasury secretary, worried about deficits in the first term. Colin Powell, the secretary of state, worried about the Iraq war and opposed the decision to legalise torture. Both are gone.

The rest are always right, and tell the president he has never made a mistake. And they are exhausted beyond belief. At some point, one surmises, the president will have to make a change, won’t he? He’ll have to reach out at some point. He’ll be forced to bring in people who aren’t half-dead with exhaustion to run the country, won’t he?

And then you remember you’ve been saying the same thing to yourself for three years. And you wake up and smell the coffee the administration now needs just to keep itself from slipping into a coma.