inamerrata

PoliPundit raves about Dubya’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in 2000. An interesting line from Cheney’s remarks:

You will never see him pointing the finger of blame for failure…you will only see him sharing the credit for success.

Ignoring the over-reaching generalisation, that comment is interesting in regard to how Bush has handled a number of pretty controversial appointments. George Tenet is the main one that comes to mind: if you’re thinking in terms of “ministerial responsibility” for departmental failures, you’d probably expect the CIA director to have been booted over the massive intelligence failure that was Sept 11. White Glenn certainly did. But if Bush is firmly against “pointing the finger of blame”, demanding resignations like that isn’t going to happen; and indeed it didn’t: Tenet remained as CIA director for almost two more years, ’til resigning in June. While there’s speculation that “personal reasons” is just a face saving cover for being pushed, ttbomk it’s still nothing more than speculation.

Presumably it would be pretty easy to have fired Tenet, made him a scape goat for Sept 11, and brought in some new blood to try to fix the CIA’s problems. That would certainly have had some benefits; who knows, it could have shaken things up enough that someone would’ve gotten an accurate idea of what was going in Iraq. Putting the blame for S11 on Tenet, appointed during Clinton’s term, might’ve been a politically astute way of making it look like the Democrats’ fault, too. On the other hand, it’d probably have made Tenet’s life pretty unpleasant, might’ve gulled the country into thinking that the intelligence failures would be amenable to a quick fix, and might’ve been disruptive enough to the CIA so as to make it even less effective. There’s also the issue of whether putting too much focus on blame encourages more CYA activity than is desirable.

It’s probably reasonable to relate this to Bush’s handling of Colin Powell and the State Department.

It’s an interesting question whether avoiding casting blame even when it’s warranted is actually a good idea or not.

(For reference, a better generalisation than the one Cheney presents is probably “You will never see him pointing the finger of blame for failure at people he works with”. The converse implication is worth considering: just because you don’t see him pointing the finger of blame at a colleague, doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t think that guy isn’t a complete screwup and isn’t doing something about it.)