Sidney Blumenthal, Salon, April 12, 2007
On Jan. 26, J. Scott Jennings, the White House deputy political director working for Karl Rove, delivered a PowerPoint presentation to least 40 political appointees, many participating through teleconferencing, at the General Services Administration, which oversees a $60 billion budget to manage federal properties and procure office equipment. Jennings’ lecture featured maps of Republican “targets” for the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2008 election. His talk was one of perhaps dozens given since 2001 to political appointees in departments and agencies throughout the federal government by him, Rove and Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director and Republican National Committee chairman. Rove and Co. drilled polling data into the government employees and lashed them on the necessity of using federal resources for Republican victory. “Such intense regular communication from the political office had never occurred before,” Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten wrote in their book, “One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century.”
At the GSA presentation, the agency’s chief, Lurita Alexis Doan, according to a witness, demanded of her employees, “How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?” But when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on March 28, Doan’s short-term memory loss grew progressively worse as she spoke. “There were cookies on the table,” she said. “I remember coming in late — honestly, I don’t even remember that.” At a break, she ordered an assistant to remove her water glass, unaware that the microphone in front of her was still on. “I don’t want them to have my fingerprints,” she said. “They’ve got me totally paranoid!”
The Oversight Committee is investigating multiple charges against Doan — her attempt to grant a no-bid contract to a friend; her effort to thwart contract audits and to cut funds of the GSA Office of the Inspector General, which she called “terrorists” after it began a probe into her conduct; and her potential violation of the Hatch Act, which forbids the use of government offices for partisan activity. A major Republican contributor who made a fortune as a military and homeland security contractor, Doan had held no previous government posts before being appointed last year to head the GSA. Like the fabled (“heck of a job, Brownie”) Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Doan is another stellar example of the culture of cronyism that has permeated the federal government under George W. Bush.
But Doan’s instant incompetence and wackiness under pressure disclose more than the price of patronage. “To the victor belong the spoils” has been the rule since Andrew Jackson. And every administration has displayed cases of abuse. But the Bush administration’s practices are more than the common and predictable problems with patronage. Bush has not simply filled jobs with favorites, oblivious to their underhanded dealings, as though he were a blithering latter-day version of Warren Harding. Bush has been determined to turn the entire federal government, every department and agency, into an instrument of a one-party state. From the GSA scandal to the purging of U.S. attorneys, Bush has engaged in a conscious, planned and systematic assault on the professional standards of career staff, either subordinating them or replacing them with ideologues.