[Mb-civic] George the Unready By PAUL KRUGMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
George the Unready
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three
things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each
case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case ‹ well,
let's look at what happened.

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence
agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq
had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But
senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of
dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked
for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President
Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station
chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before
Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush
was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the
breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack
of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the
storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and
wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days
nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with
disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few
days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were
doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got
off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the
country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies
without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug
benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who
warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the
nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the
drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the
Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O.
seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded
that the report say that the administration had "established effective
contingency plans" ‹ which it hadn't ‹ and that it drop the assertion that
some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is
exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have
faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they
were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will
turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the
messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush
administration ‹ there seems to be a new one every week ‹ as if it were just
a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is
what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders,
who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and
intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

Correction

On Jan. 30 I cited an article in The American Prospect that reported that
Indian tribes who hired Jack Abramoff had reduced their contributions to
Democrats by 9 percent. Dwight Morris, who prepared the study on which the
article was based, says on The American Prospect's blog that "there is no
statistically valid way to calculate this number given the way the data were
compiled." The American Prospect was sloppy, and so was I for not checking
its methodology.

However, Mr. Morris goes on to say this is a minor point because other
calculations show "an undeniably Republican shift in giving."

Pre-Abramoff, the tribes gave slightly more money to Democrats than to
Republicans; post-Abramoff, they gave 70 percent to Republicans, versus only
30 percent to Democrats. In other words, there's nothing bipartisan about
the Abramoff scandal.

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