[Assam] George the Unready -from NY Times

[Chan Mahanta]

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 3, 2006


Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have 
three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy 
disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. 
And in each case - well, let's look at what happened.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman.

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T
Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, 
intelligence agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the 
insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and 
could lead to civil war." But senior administration officials 
insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign 
terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were 
attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World 
Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the 
C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind 
of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received 
before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation 
that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that 
nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the 
lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in 
responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of 
misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as 
Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. 
Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things 
were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush 
was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug 
program got off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare 
beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some 
were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, 
in the first week of Medicare's new drug benefit," The New York Times 
reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: 
experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the 
nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems 
with the drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark 
McClellan, the Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the 
concerns of the G.A.O. seriously, he tried to bully it into changing 
its conclusions. He demanded that the report say that the 
administration had "established effective contingency plans" - which 
it hadn't - and that it drop the assertion that some people would 
encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is exactly 
what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must 
have faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent 
G.A.O., they were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to 
be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things 
will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, 
they shoot the messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the 
Bush administration - there seems to be a new one every week - as if 
it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad 
luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And 
our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful 
thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

Correction

On Jan. 30 I cited an article in The American Prospect that reported 
that Indian tribes who hired Jack Abramoff had reduced their 
contributions to Democrats by 9 percent. Dwight Morris, who prepared 
the study on which the article was based, says on The American 
Prospect's blog that "there is no statistically valid way to 
calculate this number given the way the data were compiled." The 
American Prospect was sloppy, and so was I for not checking its 
methodology.

However, Mr. Morris goes on to say this is a minor point because 
other calculations show "an undeniably Republican shift in giving."

Pre-Abramoff, the tribes gave slightly more money to Democrats than 
to Republicans; post-Abramoff, they gave 70 percent to Republicans, 
versus only 30 percent to Democrats. In other words, there's nothing 
bipartisan about the Abramoff scandal.