Water Is A Thief

It’s been another horrible week for the Republicans and the Bush administration. If this keeps up they are going to make me feel sorry for them. Not. One funny thing is that for a couple of years, I was on a friends of Bush mailing list. I even received a wonderful 8x10 glossy of George and Laura wishing me a happy holiday season. Laura looked great in a lime green suit if you like that sort of thing. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person even if she can’t dress. There are worse sins. And people routinely fall in love for the dumbest of reasons. As I looked at that picture, I thought of writing back to Laura, “Thanks for the photo. You look great, but you need to ditch that dope you’re standing next to.” But I didn’t.

I think I was on that mailing list because Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan administration economist, liked a piece I wrote on grade inflation. But Bruce Bartlett then turned colors. He wrote a book about Bush called Imposter. That’s not a very loyal thing to do. He’s definitely off Bush’s Christmas list. And so, apparently, am I.

All week long Alberto Gonzales, Bush uber-loyalist, was twisting in the wind for abusing his position as Attorney General. It’s like Rumsfeld all over again. Except this time it’s not about an arrogant, smart s.o.b, who is so cocksure he is right that he happily ignores the data that tell him he’s wrong. No this time it’s about a dim-witted political hack who just did as he was told.

First it was Harriet Mier’s fault that the Attorney General did what he did. How convenient. We’ll use someone who’s not in the White House anymore as the fall girl. But then it wasn’t her fault. Whose was it then? No one knows. Memories are hazy it seems. Maybe they should ask Scooter Libby to recollect how it all happened. Then again, he says he has memory problems too.

When will all the bad news end? Who knows? All I know is that the Bush administration is a classic lesson in how not to run a presidency. And there is one unlikely lesson that anyone who is seeking to be president needs to learn. Running a tight ship is at face value good. But running it too tight and being too anal ultimately will kill you.

For years, the press was in awe of the Bush administration’s ability to keep everyone on message. His team was loyal, disciplined and always had a smile on its face when it went before the press and the public. All that nasty stuff, the backbiting and infighting that take place in every organization, was hidden from view. All the lies and all the deceit that are part of the animal called politics never leaked out. The Bush administration was the political equivalent of Las Vegas. What happened in the White House, stayed in the White House.

But too much of anything is hardly ever good. Putting a happy face on your politics 24/7 is actually a lousy idea. It just allows all the bad news to build and build. When nothing leaks, all the bad information builds up. Eventually when it does get out it tends to explode. Explosions are never a good thing.

It would seem counterintuitive, but it’s probably true that leaks are good for a presidential administration. When the leaks are steady, the public just might get used to them. They start to get hardened to the minor misdeeds that happen in any organization. When you run a too tight ship, the absence of juicy gossip makes the press and the public hunger. And when the bad news eventually leaks out, as it did during the second term of the Bush administration, the press and public go into a feeding frenzy.

There is an obscure saying in Yiddish, water is like a thief. It means that no matter what you do, water will find a way eventually to leak through your roof. Information is like a thief as well. Eventually it finds a way to the public. The goal is to make sure that it does so in a manner that has the least negative impact. What happens in the White House shouldn’t be visible for all to see. But some of it needs to leak out, even the bad news. The alternative is what we’re seeing now with the Bush administration, a total collapse of a house of cards.