Somehow the White House found a staffer not under indictment, not under investigation and not under a cloud of suspicion to teach ethics to all its other staffers who are under indictment, or are about to be indicted, or are under a cloud of suspicion. The classes began Tuesday and before they’re over, reports the Washington Post, “A total of 3,000 administration officials … will attend the hour-long briefings.”
I’m sure we’re all quite impressed.
The ethically fuzzy three thousand attending the course – presumably titled “Welcome Back Codifier” – are filing alphabetically into a classroom over a two-week period, though it’s reported that war-marketeer Andy Card and presidential-pal Harriet Miers, who is merely incompetent, attended the opening class.
Unethical – in the polite, understated sense that Carlo Gambino was “unethical” – and incompetent. Those glaring Bush-administration qualities pretty much explain why Democrats walked away with all the goodies in Tuesday’s elections. Those are the qualities against which the electorate protested at the ballot box.
The administration knows it, and its operatives are cracking from the strain. They’ve dominated the p.r.-propaganda game and intimidated the press for so long, this spell of adversity has been more than their nerves can handle.
The usually collected Scott McClellan, for example, suffered a mental meltdown the other day upon implying to reporters that Middle America broadly condones the brutal torture of terrorist suspects. He then sputtered in frustration that the press corps’ relentless insistence on learning more details about the illegal practice only shows that prissy, pinstriped journalists just don’t understand Middle-American values.
McCarthyism isn’t exactly the image the White House wants to project right now, but there McClellan was, projecting it nevertheless.
And, also this week, just after Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid deplored Veep Cheney’s nasty habit of submersing himself in intelligence manipulation, Mr. McClellan bizarrely characterized Reid’s comments as a “rant,” one “unbecoming of a leader.” In short, a pol who condemns malfeasance is vulgar, while one who promotes the slaughter of innocents is tasteful. Got it?
But, as mentioned, there was slaughtering of a good sort on Tuesday. It makes no difference what you might think of Senator Jon Corzine, or if, by any wild chance, you have any thoughts whatsoever about Lt. Gov., now Gov.-Elect, Tim Kaine. The important thing is that voters took both of their Republican opponents to the cleaners. And on another local yet transcendently national level, St. Paul’s Democratic mayor, Randy Kelly, went down to major defeat by a fellow Democrat for the singular reason that Kelly had endorsed George W. Bush for reelection.
Before, during and after Election Day the media were full of dissociative political commentators warning that whatever the results, one simply cannot find cause and effect between presidential popularity and regional-election outcomes. The closest suggestion of such a relationship that I happened to read was this, from the Post: “Some said [the election results] may vindicate the concerns of some Republicans that the GOP base – beset with internal rifts and with some conservatives demoralized by Bush’s recent poor approval ratings – was simply not as energized as its Democratic counterpart heading into Election Day.”
That may be. It may be that Democrats were, indeed, uncustomarily energized. Or, it may be that Democrats didn’t so much turn out en masse, as Republicans stayed home. Or, it may be, after all, that little or no presidential cause and effect existed. But I doubt it.
It’s undeniable that something big – really big – is in the electoral air, something that exit pollsters cannot statistically capture on paper. Not yet, anyway. But looking back on this week in November, 2006, political strategists may rethink its history as the week of Black Tuesday – as the week that everything changed, in apparent fact, as well as mood.