The American Mind

One thing we can learn from the Alberto Gonzales mess and the attempted lynching of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz is President Bush can pick some people with mediocre management skills to run large, complex institutions. My concern with Gonzales isn’t that eight U.S. Attorneys were fired–no laws have even been suggested to have been broken–but that his ineptitude turned the story into the mess that it is. B.T. at Ankle Biting Pundits puts it well:

The Al Gonzales testimony: is it too late to get the administration’s officials into a public relations and communications course yet? One thing that has doggedly plagued this administration has been its inability and/or unwillingness to argue its cases in public effectively. This is a non-story and the law governing the hiring and firing of US attorneys makes it so. Janet Reno can burn down a whole compound of people and kidnap a little boy to ship him back to an oppressive communist country, and she kept her job for eight years. Al Gonzales gets a handful of attorneys fired, and because he can’t make a coherent arguement to save his life the press and democrats successfully blow this up into the 180th coming of Watergate. He deserves to get canned just for that alone.

Ignoring competence and wanting only to have “their side” win has damaged the credibility of folks like Rush Limbaugh. I don’t like the Democrats scoring political points, but Gonzales makes it so easy. How can they not?

With Paul Wolfowitz (who seemed more of an egghead than an administrator) we have a man who had plenty of reasons to defend himself to charges that his orchestrated a sweetheart deal for his, well, sweetheart. The World Bank ethics committee told Wolfowitz to deal with the situation. He did and the committee approved it. Yet he’s apologized for any wrongdoing when documents show he didn’t do anything wrong. It’s another case of blundering the story and turning it into something bigger than what it really is.

Former World Bank economist Bill Easterly gets past Wolfowitz’s current problem and thinks he’s bitten off more than he can chew with his attempts at reforming the World Bank and single-handedly changing the economic development business.

President Bush has been touted as the first MBA President. Some of his personel decisions can’t be making Harvard Business School proud.