Civil Disservice: Conservatives' contempt for bureaucracy shows that they are not fit to govern.

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


Civil Disservice
Submitted by Greg Anrig on October 22, 2007 - 5:32pm.

Greg Anrig is the author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing.

While liveblogging the Republicans' presidential debate in Orlando on Sunday night, Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox wrote, "Pop quiz: Who's gotten more zings tonight: Hillary Clinton, the Kennedys (Ted, Bay of Pigs), or 'bureaucrats'?" Along those lines, Mitt Romney repeated one of his favorite crowd pleasers: "I don't want to have the guys who did the cleanup at Katrina taking responsibility for health care in this country!"

But electing as a President any one of the candidates on the stage, precisely because of their fidelity to conservatism, would guarantee that people like the guys who did the "cleanup" after Katrina would continue to be responsible for our failing health care system. And for the disastrous war in Iraq. And for the ongoing evisceration of public health, safety, anti-discrimination, and environmental protections.

The countless failures of the Bush administration are an outgrowth of a conservative belief system that is deeply hostile to government, including knee-jerk denigration of the civil servants who have committed their careers to the public sector. By jockeying for position over who qualifies as most conservative, the candidates affirmed that none of them is qualified to govern.

The roots of many of the Bush administration's failures demonstrably can be traced in one way or another to the conservative compulsion to contain, bypass, or otherwise marginalize civil servants — the individuals who actually have the experience and knowledge capable of doing things like responding effectively to emergencies.

When James Lee Witt transformed FEMA under President Clinton from a "turkey farm" to a model agency, as described by Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress in the 1990s, one of his main strategies was to give more power and discretion to experienced civil servants while substantially reducing the number of political appointees at the top. Joseph Allbaugh, the campaign manager Bush appointed to succeed Witt, quickly reverted FEMA to its prior state by following the conservative public-management game plan. He packed the top echelons of the agency with unqualified political appointees, who then proceeded to privatize, devolve and cut its widely acknowledged successful programs. Many of the qualified civil servants left the agency in droves — producing the post-Katrina results Romney rightly deplored, for exactly the wrong reason. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/civil_disservice?tx=3

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[Old and In the Way]

2. Eventually, all Americans will learn this simple observation.

The question is, can we survive the luxury of conservative governance?