May 13
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, Ron Suskind (2004)

I neglected to make a note of when I actually finished this book, so the date in the top line is just a guess. I know it was when I was in California.

The Price of Loyalty is yet another of the many books hailed by the anti-Bush movement, the first by a White House "insider". It's the one based on the notes and recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, which Ron Suskind compiled and put into narrative form. Suskind interviewed other sources to give it more breadth, but the storyline always follows O'Neill.

For me the important message of the book is not any of the specific revelations -- that the Bush administration was already set on attacking Iraq even before 9/11, or Cheney's claim that "deficits don't matter" -- but rather what it reveals about the management style in the Bush White House.

The picture that O'Neill and Suskind paints, vividly and in detail, is a disinterest in the process of setting outcome-related goals, collecting information, and devising policy which is believed most likely to achieve the goals. Under Bush, the policy is the goal. As a result, there is no need to solicit alternative ideas nor examine facts. If one's goal is to help the economy, then one might want to consider a wide spread of views and information about which policy levers can be expected to do what. Even if one has a narrow goal of helping only the economy of an elite subpopulation, it still makes sense to shop around for how best to serve that one special interest. But if one's goal is merely to implement policy x, for no intended purpose beyond its own sake, then there's no need to consider or reconsider whether the policy "works". What counts as success is whether the tax is cut, not what effect the tax cut has on the economy.

And so too on other policy goals, domestic and foreign. O'Neill shows over and over again how Bush's process of governing differs from that of his predecessors' (including his father's), and how that flawed process has led to so much bad policy.

This argument works for me. In spite of my usual leaning to the left, I'm not very driven by ideology. Even my tendency toward liberalism is based on generalities, not specifics: I believe it's the legitimate purpose of government to try to make life better for all citizens ("promote the general welfare"); I believe it's a worthwhile goal to keep equality of wealth and privilege from getting too far out of balance. Those are liberal ideals, but if anyone can show me that some other strategy -- outsourcing jobs to India, abolishing corporate tax, whatever -- really will result in a better economy for everyone, then I'm happy to sign up, regardless of what part of the ideological spectrum it comes from. Even on foreign policy, where I'm radically isolationist, if someone can demonstrate to me that invading and occupying some distant country really can be done on the cheap, secure enough American economic interests to be profitable in the long run, and make others around the world respect America more rather than less, then I'd rethink my position on that, too.

In my view, pretty much all of the failures of the Bush administration come down to process, not ideology. In 2000, I was one of those lackadaisical liberals who figured that Bush was just a humdrum moderate Republican, and thus it didn't matter much if he won the election. Maybe I just wasn't paying sufficient attention, but I thought that "compassionate conservative" and "uniter not a divider", slogans though they obviously were, at least gave some indication of a desire by Bush to govern from the center, as he did in Texas. Even now, I still don't think Bush is a right-wing ideologue -- nor even an ideologue for whatever one might call this strange new direction he's taking the country in, which in many ways isn't conservative at all. The large deficit, for example, I don't think was ever a Bush goal. I think it was an unintended consequence. But since the Bush management style doesn't allow for stopping and taking a look at what are the consequences of one's actions, when the ship of state goes astray there is no course correction. Because there is no course at all.

So yes, I'm questioning Bush's competence. For me, that's really the reason to vote against him. Of the partisan issues, the one that animates me the most (which, come to think of it, is a liberal issue only recently) is the deficit, but I think that Bush's failing on this count is more a matter of process failure than economic ideology. On foreign policy, my own view is a pretty severe anti-imperialism which is so distant from that of either party that it renders the difference between the two negligible in comparison. My liberal friends rail that Bush waged war for economic interests and lied about the reasons, but it's hard to identify a president who hasn't. That pretty much describes Kosovo, but you have to venture far into the fringes of the left before you find any liberal complaining about that invasion or even its false pretense. Lying about the reason to go to war is a time-honored tradition, from Spain in 1898 to Grenada in 1983.

The only difference with Bush's Iraq is that he has waged war on a larger scale, made a much bigger fiasco of the aftermath, and managed to piss off most of our allies and most of our own military along the way. In other words, he bungled it. His intent was no more objectionable to me than the intent of a Clinton or a Reagan. What is objectionable is the clumsy implementation, and that is attributable to bad process.

Setting aside the assignment of blame for what has already happened, and looking only at where we go from here, I'm not at all convinced that Kerry is devoted to getting us out of Iraq any more quickly than Bush is. In fact, it looks rather the opposite to me. For all Bush's talk of staying the course and "these colors don't run", the reality looks very much like, for better or for worse, he is preparing to withdraw from Iraq sooner rather than later. More generally, Bush's modus operandi is to speak loudly and carry a small stick, so for someone like me who dislikes American imperialism it becomes a question of what I find more objectionable, the belligerent chauvinist talk, or the actual projection of force. Truth is, I don't like either. Ultimately, on Iraq, for me the reason to prefer Kerry to Bush is not that I think either one of them has a better plan, but rather that based on the evidence I think that whatever the plan is, Bush is more likely to screw it up.

The failure of Bush's style of government is not just about competence. There's also the matter of secrecy and of responsibility. Secrecy I'll discuss if I ever finish the Moynihan book on that topic (prominently cited near the beginning of Suskind's book but without much follow-up).

On responsibility, an enlightening passage comes by way of a discussion not about government but about corporations. This is the point in the story where the Bush administration is dealing with the crisis over Enron's bankruptcy and the SEC investigation that followed, which raised the question of what the standard of corporate responsibility ought to be. The books quotes a memo from Alan Greenspan to O'Neill:

Even though the rules for Enron were already set in law, O'Neill -- who was an advocate of greater corporate responsibility and openness during the days when he himself was a CEO -- saw this as an opportunity to change the rules for similar situations in the future.

The book then goes on to tell the story of O'Neill's efforts to have the standard of corporate responsibility changed from recklessness to simple negligence. To make a long story short, O'Neill lost. The response was the typical bureaucratic "I agree, that's a great idea, but we have to be practical, so let's do it this way...", and O'Neill's initiative was gradually whittled down to nothing at all.

One of the suggested compromises along the way was a standard of conscious avoidance:

Neither Suskind nor O'Neill follow in this direction, but I can't help thinking that this last sentence (with its emphasis in the original) encapsulates what's wrong with the entire Bush administration. From top to bottom, they behave as though the standard they should be held to is recklessness. When confronted about any failure, the response is always that they didn't know, without consideration of whether they should have known.

We see it over and over. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is asked about torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, his response is to insist that the Pentagon never ordered such a thing and thus he is not responsible for what happened. When National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is asked about the presidential briefing "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States", she says the briefing did not constitute actionable intelligence and thus she is not responsible for what happened. And so it is up and down the administration. Everyone says, "I didn't do anything wrong". Fair enough, but one wishes that someone would say "maybe we didn't cause that problem, but I sure as hell wish we had been able to do something to prevent it". Anyone who does say something like that (eg, Richard Clarke) is ostracized.

Strictly speaking, Rumsfeld and Rice and the others are not incorrect. Short of reckless misbehavior, a cabinet member is not legally responsible for what goes wrong on his or her watch. But wouldn't it be nice to have cabinet members who hold themselves to a higher standard than that?

In another book (Bill Sammon's Misunderestimated, which I have no immediate plans to read), Rice is quoted comparing Bush to Truman: "I think that anybody who misunderestimates this president is going to have egg on their face in a few years. People ought to go back and look at Harry Truman, because that's another president who was misunderestimated." What Truman is perhaps most famous for is his mantra, "the buck stops here". He's the president, so he's responsible, no matter what. Bush's mantra is just the opposite. With him, it's always someone else's fault -- his subordinates, the Democrats, the media, a small group of soldiers acting independently. The buck is passed to many places, but it never stops with the President.

I want cabinet leaders who take responsibility for what happens in their departments, and I want a president who takes responsibility for what his cabinet does. I'm tired of hearing, "Yeah, but that was Clinton's fault, not ours." You're the president now, and since 2002 your party has been in charge of both houses of Congress. If you won't take responsibility for running the government, get out of the way for someone who will.

I see I have a few scribbled notes here. Many are about vocabulary, but not all. For the others, if I had a larger argument to make, it has faded from my memory, but I'll report them in brief.

• This is a nice line: "Fiscal prudence, once the province of Republicans, had been thoroughly colonized in the 1990s by Clinton Democrats." I noted that although O'Neill praises Clinton for bringing the fiscal prudence which created the healthy economy of the 1990s, he also gives a lot of credit to the first President Bush. According to O'Neill, it was really Bush Sr who started the government along that path, doing the preparatory work on wrestling down spending and bringing revenues in line. (As this entailed breaking his "no new taxes" pledge, it cost him the election.) Most importantly, O'Neill argues, if Bush hadn't already cleared the path politically, Clinton would never have been able to do what he did.

• Of the specific policy goals that never came to be, probably the most important to O'Neill was Social Security reform. I don't remember hearing about that at all in the media buzz about the book, which focused more on deficits and Iraq. O'Neill had dithered about whether to take the job as Treasury Secretary at all, and in the story it's clear that a major motivation for him to say yes was the prospect of creating a fix for the impending disaster of Social Security insolvency, which both he and Greenspan see as the greatest problem our economy faces. In brief, their idea was that the budget surplus left over from the Clinton years was a rare opportunity; it was imperative that they grab the money now and apply it to the looming Social Security debt. The challenge was to find a process which would somehow lock in the money so that politicians from either party wouldn't be able to fritter it away on spending or tax cutting. Alas, O'Neill's efforts came to naught. Right now, that's not much of a story, since the collapse of Social Security is still many years in the future, but I wonder if ultimately that lost opportunity won't be the biggest tragedy of the Bush administration.

• O'Neill's wife was born and raised in my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska. O'Neill himself was a military brat who landed there near the end of his high school years, not too unlike my mother. At one point I worked out the math to see how close they came to crossing paths with my mother or my uncle. I can't find the numbers now, but I recall concluding that they missed by only a year or two.

Back by popular demand, some words that sent me to the dictionary or otherwise caught my attention:

Quotidian again! It's turning up everywhere. Last time I discussed this word (reviewing Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors), someone complained that I never actually defined it. What, you can't find your own dictionary? OK, it's an adjective meaning "everyday".

Empyrean I think I saw on some cards from Magic: The Gathering. The one I remember was Empyreal Armor -- a cheap white enchantment that pumped up a creature based on the number of cards in your hand, which was great for decks designed around the theme of a big hand -- but I'm pretty sure there were others. Looking in the dictionary, I can't discern any difference between empyreal and empyrean except that the former can only be an adjective whereas the latter can be an adjective or a noun. Both are a fancy way of referring to heaven. I see that it is etymologically unrelated to empire. The -pyr- is the Greek root meaning fire, which gives empyrean its special connotation of bright fiery light (as opposed to those rooms in heaven which set a mellower mood).

Another magic-like word is doppelgänger, which I've seen in several games as well as in a German art song. One's doppelgänger -- literal translation of the German is "double goer" -- is a magically manifested alter ego, or whatever that might represent metaphorically. We see lots of doppelgängers on TV shows like Star Trek or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Suskind uses the word (with umlaut) while describing O'Neill's trip to South Africa: "the slums of Soweto, the country's seething doppelgänger to sleek Johannesburg". Beautiful.

According to the scribbles on my bookmark (this time it's a business reply card from an issue of the Economist), somewhere in the book Suskind used rapier as an adjective to describe something other than wit. Unfortunately, I neglected to write down the page number, so I can't quote him.

I know what accoutrements are, but for some reason when I saw the word this time I was inspired to explore it origins. I see that Merriam-Webster shows accoutre (or accouter, for those like me who prefer American spellings) as a transitive verb meaning to dress something up for a special occasion. ("Sorry, I have to hang up now. My kids are due at a birthday party at 6:00, and it'll take me at least a half hour to accouter them.") As the spelling suggests, this word has its roots in French, where accoutrer is a more common verb (related to haute couture, etc). Petit Robert, defining it simply "habiller", adds the label "PEJ MOD" which I believe means that in modern French usage it has a pejorative connotation.

(If talk radio is any indication, here in America the very notion of dressing like a Frenchman is itself pejorative. Yesterday I read that Republican activists who will protest Kerry's campaign appearance are being encouraged, in addition to bringing flip-flops and waffles, to "dress up as a Frenchman". I'm not even sure what that means. Maybe a beret.)

Roil is a staple in Boggle -- not so much in Scrabble, because it contains no two-letter word that might get it started -- but I can't recall ever seeing it in writing. Suskind writes, "The economy then was roiled by steep inflation and high unemployment." OK. Generically, it's just a synonym for disturb. For those who like nuance, Merriam-Webster offers, "to make turbid by stirring up the sediment or dregs of", which makes me think of roiling the populace.

I don't know what to make of strategery. Suskind writes, "It made for a dilemma for the White House strategery team, meaning Karl Rove and the political operatives." Italics is in the original, but there's no explanation. Is this a new buzzword that I don't know about? Or just a normal word that has sprouted a redundant syllable, like preventative? (Or Homer Simpson's "saxomophone"?)

The gerund form of cue was spelled cueing, which looks affected to me. ("He sat down, cueing the rest of them to sit.") I would have said "cuing". Elsewhere, I've noticed a steady increase in use of ageing intead of aging. What's next? stageing? pageing? rageing? I think this is a bad trend.

I didn't think twice about this passage until Karen pointed it out after I was done with the book. Several cabinet members and their spouses have been invited to Camp David for a summit meeting. Suskind describes the scene as the day comes to an end.

It's probably nothing, but that's a strange juxtaposition in the middle paragraph. It almost sounds as if "bowling" is a code word for something else that George and Condi might do together, but he wouldn't dare try it with his wife sleeping in the other room.

Instead, Rice ends up singing with John Ashcroft while he plays the piano. I knew that Rice was a pianist but not Ashcroft. I guess that's one thing I can like about the guy.

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