Knight-Ridder adds some nice color to the Michael Brown debacle …
Brown’s ticket to FEMA was Joe Allbaugh, President Bush’s 2000 campaign manager and an old friend of Brown’s in Oklahoma. When Bush ran for president in 2000, Brown was ending a rocky tenure at the horse association.
Brown told several association officials that if Bush were elected, he’d be in line for a good job. When Allbaugh, who managed Bush’s campaign, took over FEMA in 2001, he took Brown with him as general counsel.
“He’s known Joe Allbaugh for quite some time,” said Andrew Lester, an Oklahoma lawyer who’s been a friend of Brown’s for more than 20 years. “I think they know each other from school days. I think they did some debate type of things against each other, and worked on some Republican politics together.”
And some morsels about the horse years …
From 1991 until 2000, Brown earned about $100,000 a year as the chief rules enforcer of the Arabian horse association.
He was known as “The Czar” for the breadth of his power and the enthusiasm with which he wielded it, said Mary Anne Grimmell, a former association president.
…
Brown’s old friend Lester said the progression from horse shows to hurricanes was natural.
“A lot of what he had to do was stand in the breach in difficult, controversial situations,” Lester said. “Which I think would well prepare him for his work at FEMA.”
The article also says Brown made an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1988.
So let me see if I understand this. <$NoAd$>Brown’s a Republican from the southwest. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress when he was thirty-three. Then he bounced from job to job, finally getting into the sports business in mid-life, before getting canned. And then he used connections to land himself a high-powered position in the federal government for which he had no apparent experience at all.
How could such a fellow possibly be in the Bush administration?
