Conservatives and Cronyism

[wyldwolf]

Ed Kilgore of NewDonkey.com writes: Noam Scheiber's latest TRB column in The New Republic... presents a general theory of the difference between "normal" cronyism and the sort of extended, exponential cronyism that's often found in conservative administrations, where you don't just hire your friends, but your friends are allowed to hire their friends, ad infinitum.

Like Tom Vilsack, Noam Scheiber thinks conservative hostility to government's legitimate purposes has consequences for how competently government is run.

Will no one defend George W. Bush? Amid revelations that fema has been overrun by incompetents, commentators have rushed to blame Bush administration cronyism. This is not only the unsurprising conclusion of New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman. It's also the conclusion of many principled conservatives. As Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, "o place a complete hack in charge of response to a national emergency is criminal negligence."

The implication from Dowd and Sullivan is that, while cronyism is a constant feature of presidential politics--both cite Bill Clinton specifically--Bush has practiced a particularly egregious version. Krugman blames the pervasiveness of cronyism in the Bush administration on its lack of intellectual seriousness. But all of this may be a little too hard on Bush, if such a thing is possible. The problem may have less to do with the current president than with conservatism itself.

Let's first distinguish between two very different types of cronyism. The first kind is what you might call "inner-circle cronyism": Pretty much every president has dragged a small collection of cronies with him into the West Wing. Whereas Bush brought Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and Karen Hughes, Clinton had Bruce Lindsey and Mack McLarty. The reason for this phenomenon, as John F. Kennedy once explained, is that the White House is a lousy place to start making friends. Presidents need advisers they can trust unconditionally, and longtime friends and associates are often the only ones who fit the bill. If Bush is exceptional in this case, it's only because he so values loyalty that he refuses to fire these people even after they've proved themselves incompetent.

It's the second kind of cronyism--call it "outer-circle cronyism"--that's truly destructive. The focus here isn't so much on handing out jobs to dubiously qualified friends and associates--that is, to one's own cronies. It's on handing out jobs to cronies of cronies, which increases the scale of the cronyism exponentially. The Clinton administration was relatively free of this pestilence.

As it happens, this strain of cronyism was also a prominent feature of Ronald Reagan's administration--the last bona fide conservative one to occupy the White House. Reagan had his share of inner-circle cronies--Ed Meese, William French Smith. But, as with Bush, what distinguishes the Reagan administration is that it was teeming with outer-circle cronies. The Reagan White House was constantly putting out fires caused by hacks in bureaucracies like the U.S. Information Agency (run by the husband of Nancy Reagan's best friend, who secretly taped conversations with top officials in hopes of cashing in on a memoir) and the Environmental Protection Agency (a former toxic-waste cleanup official was convicted of lying to Congress about favoring her ex-employer). According to The Washington Post, Reagan's personnel office, which was charged with staffing the federal bureaucracy, was "a study in cronyism," run by a crony of Reagan crony Meese. In 1987, Democratic Senator John Glenn released a report documenting the Reagan administration's efforts to gut the Senior Executive Service, a move that anticipated Bush's. Even conservative commentators like Bill Safire made cronyism a constant theme of their Reagan-era coverage.

(More - fascinating read: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=4rllluN1T%2B9vubFf%2F9rJz2%3D%3 )

[Southsideirish]

1. "Conservatives" are non-progressive, back wards thinking type people =

not very bright.

In the competitive job market of the last 10 or 15 years people who "aren't too bright" had a hard time finding work in the private sector where they prefer to be. Thus, they had to come crawling to their buddies in the public sector for good paying jobs with benefits which we all know, are increasingly in short supply.

Over time it has become second nature to them now to nurse at the public trough and they became ever more greedy to climb aboard and roost and collect their fat cat salaries. No talent or ability means a very sh*tty employee.

[Toots]

2. Ohhh..they just some "good ol' boys"

:shrug: Do you think any of them "cronies" will be canned?