I must say this surprises even me …
A few months ago, [Condi Rice] decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer’s war. No one would publish it.
Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department’s director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.
As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. “I kept hearing the same thing: ‘There’s no news in this.’ ” Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership. “It read like a campaign document.”
Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept “telling me to shut up,” he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. “They just wanted us to be Bush automatons.”
I was actually remembering, only last night, how President Bush ran his 2000 campaign on a platform which charged the Clinton administration of making ‘everything about politics’. And how this crew was going to clean things up.
Politics is inevitably a very big part of governance. And to some degree that’s as it should be. But there’s truly never been an administration that has so relentlessly and cravenly politicized every nook and cranny of the governmental structure as this one. I’m not even sure there was anything like it in the 19th century, though the vast differences in the nature of the state itself make comparisons extremely difficult.
