inamerrata

So it appears Michael Brown’s been moved aside from managing the Katrina response, and will probably be leaving FEMA entirely soon. No big surprise there; what’s interesting (to me) is this quote:

Asked ahead of the announcement if he was being made a scapegoat, Brown told The Associated Press after a long pause: “By the press, yes. By the president, no.”

“I’m anxious to get back to D.C. to correct all the inaccuracies and lies that are being said,” Brown said.

Asked if the move was a demotion, Brown said: “No. No. I’m still the director of FEMA.”

That squares pretty well with my post from just over a year ago about Bush’s policy on moving people on, summarised (by Dick Cheney in 2000) as:

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

I’m still not sure whether I find it more surprising that that policy could work for the leader of the free world, or that random praise from your sidekick in an acceptance speech could actually be useful information.

UPDATE 2005/09/28:

Shortly after I posted the above, Mike Brown resigned, saying

“As I told the president, it is important that I leave now to avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission of FEMA,” Brown said in a news release.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this president and to work shoulder to shoulder with the hard working men and women of FEMA. […]”

Pretty hard to tell from that whether or not he really did just decide that on his own, or whether he was pushed; after all if he was pushed, he’d be saying much the same thing, but on the other hand, would he still be emphasising the privilege of serving under “this” president, rather than the presidency in general?

Lending weight to the “wasn’t pushed” line, is the following from the ABC/Agence France-Presse/Reuters:

His resignation as FEMA chief embarrassed under-fire President George W Bush, who had stood up for Mr Brown in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, telling him: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

If he was pushed, you wouldn’t expect his resignation to be an embarassment. That’s still not terribly convincing, though — if you assume that they were going to add some slur against Bush no matter what, claiming they’re embarrassed by the resignation is probably more effective than the only real alternative of claiming they’re turning him into a scapegoat, since making the latter into a bad thing would require making Brown a sympathetic character, when the article’s focussing on how “his defense failed to impress”.