wotiwrote

The Financial Times is on a bit of a roll. In today's online edition a piece by Brad Delong, professor of economics at the University of Califirnia, Berkeley, has another pop at the incompetencies of Bush and his surrounding shrubbery.

Needless to say, the article is hidden in the subscription required pages of FT.com, which serves only to prevent these well-argued opinions reaching a wider audience. What's the point of that? It's exactly this sort of information that a reputable media source should be delivering to all and sundry. That's another argument. Back to Professor Delong.

The bulk of his piece is a long list of questions that highlight the absurdity, confusion, and downright malice of the US government's response to Katrina. Then he leads to his conclusion with this:

Let us ask another question: should we be surprised at this? After all, this is the administration that staffed our reconstruction effort in Iraq with young conservative activists with résumés on file at rightwing think-tanks, that refused to recognise that what we faced in Iraq was an insurgency rather than "dead-enders"; that found it extraordinarily difficult to get personal and vehicle armour to US soldiers in Iraq, that advanced a Medicare drugs bill that seems destined to generate huge profits for pharmaceutical companies - for Medicare is forbidden to bargain on price - for mediocre improvements in drug coverage, that turned America’s hard-won fiscal surpluses into deficits that threaten the health of the economy. We could go on.

He then, quite accurately, points out that FEMA is a bureaucracy and so should be able to function, even when leaderless, following well-developed plans. Alas:

But here the plans were not pulled out of the filing cabinets, the standard operating procedures were not followed, and the "what will we wish we had done?" meetings were apparently not held. In any other form of government besides that of the US - where the president has the formal legal powers of the 18th-century British monarch, and where each party’s presidential candidate emerges from an undignified struggle among party activists - Mr Bush would have been eased out by now. The barons of his party would have told him that he had to step aside.

His closing coda is worthy of the final couplet from a poem by Donne or any of the 'Metaphysicals'.

It would be better for the country and for the Republican party, if America found a way to ensure its future presidential candidates have some skill in public administration.