The Guardian: Four more years of decline

[maddezmom]

George Bush's new administration will be filled with mediocrities

Peter Preston
Monday December 13, 2004
The Guardian

The curse of the nanny is almost routine these days. No White House team can dodge it as the vengeful virus spreads. Exit one director of homeland security designate in the time it takes to change a diaper - or fast track a visa through the Home Office. (If Osama were really as bright as people say, he'd be training squads of suicide nannies even now.) But do not, perhaps, follow the spin here too swiftly. Pause over the disaster of Bernie Kerik before hurrying on.
Kerik, unlike most other nannygate victims, isn't some busy lady lawyer juggling private practice and a family in distracted desperation. Long ago, he was Rudy Giuliani's driver, the chauffeur who became chief of Rudy's NYPD, the capo di tutti copos in charge for 9/11, the mate the ex-mayor recommended when he turned down the homeland job himself. Law enforcement and detection are his professional business, illegal immigration and proper payment of taxes his natural concerns.

But he wasn't a natural choice - in experience or diplomacy - to run a great umbrella department of state. There were other confirmation issues for him, too: a $6.2m stock option killing on stun guns, for instance, or the jokes about Caligula's police horse. The Senate hearings were always going to be tough, even before he "discovered" a hole in nanny's paperwork. And there's the crucial, overarching point.

Kerik was a flawed candidate from the beginning, selected sloppily from a lacklustre field. As he departs, the Oval Office sucks its collective thumb. Though Tom Ridge, the incumbent director, announced long before the election that he'd be quitting (he wasn't making enough money to keep his family in the manner accustomed), the search for a successor has been a continuing botch. Which, in turn, sends an early, dissonant message about Bush's second term.

Only six weeks after his victory, the vibrations continue euphoric going on triumphalist. Depressed Democrats wonder if they could ever win again. Pundits ponder theses about eternal Republican hegemony. Talk is of more Bush power, more neoconservative solutions, more variations on a narrow and occasionally alarming agenda. But is that quite what unfolding events tell us?


~snip~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1372469,00.html