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Thursday, March 09, 2006

The competence gap

Jules Witcover, who has a long memory, reminds us that the "competence" issue was a major theme of Demcratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988: The Question of Competence Tribune Media Services 03/08/06. Old Man Bush managed to turn the contest into an ideological battle about black rapists and the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.
Witcover reminds us that if the Democrats can't be reasonably effective in sticking it to the Republicans in 2006 under current conditions, the party may have more problems than some of us think:

It was in this context of incompetence that the release of the teleconference showing Bush in the dark about the conditions in New Orleans, and declaring the government to be "fully prepared," was so devastating to his image of national leadership in crisis.

The question now is whether the Democrats can be as effective in using this record of incompetence against the party of George W. Bush in this fall's congressional elections as the Republicans were in sinking Michael Dukakis, on much less substantial grounds, in 1988. If not, their own political competence will itself come into question.

Witcover, who has been a strong critic all along of the disaster known as the Iraq War, also reminds us of the more consequential manifestation of the administration's competence problem.

He writes:

In the first months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, he particularly conveyed that impression in vowing to wage and win what he quickly labeled "the war on terrorism." But his later misguided invasion of Iraq and its deeply flawed aftermath soon raised the question of his competence as a manager of the nation's foreign policy.

The invasion itself was carried out with dispatch by demonstrably competent military officers. But what happened thereafter, as a result of false assumptions about the presence of U.S. troops in a foreign country wracked by an unanticipated insurgency, unmasked incredible incompetence by the president and those around him.

The whole exercise in Iraq demonstrated incompetence in diplomacy as well. More than half a century of effective collective action and solidarity among the major Western powers was shattered by Bush's essential bypassing of the United Nations, to go virtually alone into Iraq.

posted at 6:17:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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