There are a host of wire stories out this morning with quaking Bushies pleading how little warning they had of Jim Jeffords’ imminent departure from the Republican party.
In fact, both Karen Hughes and Andy Card say they didn’t know anything was really up until they got a call from Maine Senator Olympia Snowe on Monday night and/or Tuesday morning.
Card looks especially vulnerable in all this. After all he’s a New Englander, a Washington hand, a moderate. You’d think he’d have known better, maybe would have had antennae for this.
Card added rather feebly that no one tried to muscle Jeffords or treat him badly. And that it’s not true that moderates have no place in the GOP today. (Of course, in a sense this is true: if you’re willing to squelch your already wishy-washy political views in the interests of absolute fealty to the Bush clan you can even become White House Chief of Staff!!!)
Anyway, enough about Andy Card. I take Card and Hughes at their word: that they really had no advance warning that this was going to happen. And frankly, that’s astonishing. Because this possibility was being pretty widely discussed almost a week before they say they found out about it. Olympia Snowe apparently needed to sidestep the machinery of legislative liaisons and the Senate leadership and get on the horn and tell Hughes, Card, et.al. just what hell was going on.
A little while back Jake Weisberg wrote a piece in Slate in which he canvassed several different possible explanations for the very conservative tack of Bush’s governance in the early days of his administration. One possibility was the effect of the White House echo chamber, the cocoon. For all the many streams of information which pour into the White House, it’s very easy (as Bill Clinton showed in 1993-94) to lose touch with what’s actually going on, how the political winds are blowing, and so on.
Presidents and their major advisors are surrounded, frankly, by lots of yes-men. And perhaps more important, they’re almost inevitably clothed in a triumphalist reading of their own recent political triumph. (This may be especially so with the Bushies since, as I’ve noted before, the Rove crowd has a history of getting hoodwinked by its own spin.)
In any case, this development points strongly toward this White House echo chamber conclusion.
