Ross Douthat quotes Ezra Klein’s good post from this morning on how stellar Bush’s cabinet and staffing appointments were, but the former seems to have missed the latter’s point. Ross thinks Ezra is throwing “some much-needed cold water on all the excitement about how smart and experienced and hyper-competent the Obama Administration is shaping up to be.” And then he mentions two David Brooks columns, one lauding the Bush cabinet and one lauding the Obama cabinet and comments, “The two pieces don’t repeat themselves, exactly, but they rhyme – because the Bushies looked pretty good on paper, too.”
But Klein was not, in fact, throwing cold water on the excitement over Obama’s staffing and cabinet picks. Douthat failed to quote an important paragraph:
Administration culture matters. And in the Bush administration, internal dissent was silenced. Colin Powell’s vaunted experience became an excuse for his rapid marginalization. O’Neill was driven from the administration. Cheney and Rumsfeld rapidly saw their reputations fall apart. It’s not that the Bush administration lacked plausibly competent appointees, it’s that it was actively hostile to competence, and utterly obsessed with loyalty. In that case, the president, not his personnel, turned out to be destiny.
IOW, the problem wasn’t that Bush cabinet picks that “looked pretty good on paper” turned out to be disastrous. It was that Bush marginalized and drove out his competent appointments. Loyalty and doctrinal purity were prized above all else.
Klein doesn’t offer any speculation about what Obama’s “administration culture” will be like, but I think most people suspect it will be far better than Dubya’s. Everything I’ve heard and read suggests Obama values opposing points of view presented intelligently, and that he prizes competence over doctrinal purity.
By way of illustration, Yglesias has some commentary on a Brian Beutler post linking us to a Jamie Kirchick takedown of Karl Zinsmeister. Zinsmeister is apparently an incompetent hack with no qualifications currently serving as Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser. In contrast, Obama has chosen Melody Barnes for this role, someone who by all accounts has impeccable bona fides for the position.
So… Bush started out strong and then ran everything into the ground. Obama appears to be starting out even stronger but the ultimate question is how will he finish?
I’ve got a pretty good feeling about this.
