Author: Frank Rich
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 27, 2001
Welcome back to Sept. 10. The "America
Strikes Back" optimism that surged after Sept. 11 has now been stricken
by the multitude of ways we're losing the war at home. The F.B.I. has proved
more effective in waging turf battles against Rudy Giuliani than waging
war on terrorism. Of the more than 900 suspects arrested, exactly zero
have been criminally charged in the World Trade Center attack (though one
has died of natural causes, we're told, in a New Jersey jail cell). The
Bush team didn't fully recognize that a second attack on America had begun
until more than a week after the first casualty. The most highly trumpeted
breakthrough in the hunt for anthrax terrorists - Tom Ridge's announcement
that "the site where the letters were mailed" had been found in New Jersey
- proved a dead end. And now the president is posing with elementary-school
children again.
Given that this is the administration
that was touted as being run with C.E.O. clockwork, perhaps it should be
added to the growing list of Things That Have Changed Forever since Sept.
11. But let's not be so hasty. Not everything changes that fast - least
of all Washington. The White House's home-front failures are not sudden,
unpredictable products of wartime confusion but direct products of an ethos
that has been in place since Jan. 20.
This is an administration that will
let its special interests - particularly its high-rolling campaign contributors
and its noisiest theocrats of the right - have veto power over public safety,
public health and economic prudence in war, it turns out, no less than
in peacetime. When anthrax struck, the administration's first impulse was
not to secure as much Cipro as speedily as possible to protect Americans,
but to protect the right of pharmaceutical companies to profiteer. The
White House's faith in tax cuts as a panacea for all national ills has
led to such absurdities as this week's House "stimulus" package showering
$254 million on Enron, the reeling Houston energy company (now under S.E.C.
investigation) that has served as a Bush campaign cash machine.
Airport security, which has been
enhanced by at best cosmetic tweaks since Sept. 11, is also held hostage
by campaign cash: As Salon has reported, ServiceMaster, a supplier of the
low-wage employees who ineptly man the gates, is another G.O.P. donor.
Not that Republicans stand alone in putting fat cats first. In a display
of bipartisanship, Democrats - lobbied by Linda Hall Daschle, the Senate
majority leader's wife - joined the administration in handing the airlines
a $15 billion bailout that enforces no reduction in the salaries of the
industry's C.E.O.'s even as they lay off tens of thousands of their employees.
To see how the religious right has
exerted its own distortions on homeland security, you also have to consider
an administration pattern that goes back to its creation - and one that
explains the recent trials of poor Tom Ridge.
Mr. Ridge is by all accounts a capable
leader - a successful governor of a large state (Pennsylvania) who won
the Bronze Star for heroism in Vietnam. A close friend of George W. Bush,
he should have been in the administration from the get-go, and was widely
rumored to be a candidate for various jobs, including the vice presidency.
But after being pilloried by the right because he supports abortion rights,
he got zilch. Instead of Mr. Ridge, the administration signed on the pro-life
John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson - who have brought us where we are today.
The farcical failures of these two
cabinet secretaries are not merely those of public relations - though Mr.
Thompson often comes across as a Chamber of Commerce glad- hander who doesn't
know his pants are on fire, and Mr. Ashcroft often shakes as if he's not
just seen great Caesar's ghost but perhaps John Mitchell's as well. Both
have a history of letting politics override public policy that dates to
the start of the administration. They've seen no reason to reverse their
partisan priorities even at a time when the patriotic duty of effectively
fighting terror should be their No. 1 concern.
Pre-Sept. 11, Mr. Thompson, in defiance
of science, heartily lent his credibility to the Bush administration's
stem cell "compromise" by going along with its overstatement of the viability
and diversity of the stem cell lines it would deliver to researchers. Post-Sept.
11, he destroyed his credibility by understating the severity of the anthrax
threat, also in defiance of science. Now he maintains that the $1.5 billion
the administration is requesting to plug the many holes in our public health
system - almost all of it earmarked for stockpiling pharmaceuticals, not
shoring up local hospitals - is adequate for fighting bioterrorism. This,
too, is in defiance of all expert estimates, including that of the one
physician in the Senate, the Republican Bill Frist.
It should also be on Mr. Thompson's
conscience that for the first two weeks of the anthrax crisis he kept the
federal government's house physician - David Satcher, the surgeon general
and a much-needed honest broker of public health - locked away, presumably
because Dr. Satcher, a Clinton appointee, became persona non grata in the
Bush administration for issuing a June report on teenage sexuality that
angered the religious right. Only after Mr. Ridge arrived on the scene
was the surgeon general liberated from the gulag.
As for Mr. Ashcroft, he has gone
so far as to turn away firsthand information about domestic terrorism for
political reasons. Planned Parenthood, which has been on the front lines
of anthrax scares for years and has by grim necessity marshaled the medical
and security expertise to combat them, has sought a meeting with the attorney
general since he took office but has never been granted one. This was true
not only before Sept. 11 but, says Ann Glazier, Planned Parenthood's director
of security, remains true - even though her organization, long targeted
by such home-grown Talibans as the Army of God, has a decade's worth of
leads on "the convergence of international and domestic terrorism."
Ms. Glazier found the sight of Mr.
Ashcroft and other federal Keystone Kops offering a $1 million reward for
anthrax terrorists a laughable indication of how little grasp they have
of the enemy. "Religious extremists don't respond to money," she points
out. Such is the state of the F.B.I., she adds, that one agent told a clinic
to hold onto a suspect letter for a couple of days "because we have so
many here we're afraid we're going to lose it" (perhaps among the Timothy
McVeigh documents).
If either the attorney general or
the secretary of health and human services inspired anything like the confidence
that, say, Mayor Giuliani does, there wouldn't have been a need to draft
Mr. Ridge. Even so, he's mainly a P.R. gimmick - a man who should have
been in the administration in the first place reduced to serving as a fig
leaf for lightweights. As director of homeland security, he's allegedly
charged with supervising nearly 50 government agencies - so far with roughly
a dozen staff members. When asked to define Mr. Ridge's responsibilities,
Ari Fleischer said on Wednesday that it was "a very busy coordination job,"
but so far Mr. Ridge is mainly sowing still more confusion.
The one specific duty that he has
claimed - in an interview with Tom Brokaw - was that he'd be the one "making
the phone call" to the president to shoot down any commercial airliner
turned into a flying bomb by hijackers. That presumably comes as news to
Donald Rumsfeld, who made no provision for any homeland security czar in
the Air Force chain of command he publicly codified days after Mr. Ridge's
appointment.
Since the administration tightly
metes out the news from Afghanistan, we can only hope that the war there
is being executed more effectively than the war here - even as Mr. Rumsfeld
and his generals now tell us that the Taliban, once expected to implode
in days, are proving Viet- Cong-like in their intractability. The Wall
Street Journal also reported this week that "instead of a thankful Afghan
population, popular support for the Taliban appears to be solidifying and
anger with the U.S. growing."
Maybe we're losing that battle for
Afghan hearts and minds in part because the Bush State Department appointee
in charge of the propaganda effort is a C.E.O. (from Madison Avenue) chosen
not for her expertise in policy or politics but for her salesmanship on
behalf of domestic products like Head & Shoulders shampoo. If we can't
effectively fight anthrax, I guess it's reassuring to know we can always
win the war on dandruff.
