More comes to light: Bush hiring done by inexperienced kids with connections -- and 'tude

NYT op-ed: Generation No
By THOMAS A. SCHWEICH
Published: December 11, 2008

St. Louis

“You know you have arrived when you get interviewed by the 29-year-old instead of the 22-year-old,” the 57-year-old foreign service officer said to me with a laugh. It was late 2005, and this three-time ambassador had just been interviewed for a top post at the Department of State. Her interviewer was part of a large corps of 20-somethings — some were in their early 30s — who ran the Office of Presidential Personnel. Many of them were sons or daughters of supporters of President George W. Bush. Others had connections through congressmen. With few exceptions, they had one thing in common: very little experience and a very big attitude.

Another top foreign service officer called me after his interview to be ambassador to a volatile African country. “The problem was,” he told me, “the kid interviewing me could not pronounce the name of the country I was being interviewed for. It made for an awkward interview until he just started saying ‘the country we are considering you for.’”...

My own experience is typical. I had three jobs in the Bush administration: ambassador for counternarcotics and justice reform in Afghanistan, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement affairs and chief of staff of the United States mission to the United Nations. For two of these jobs, my appointment was preceded by an effort by a 20-something in personnel to place an unqualified friend in the job....

In the worst cases, the “kids” — as many of us called them — would search for a candidate and eventually conclude, like Dick Cheney when he was the head of George W. Bush’s vice presidential search team, that they were the best candidates for the jobs.

The problems that resulted occasionally made the news. There was small bit of outrage in 2005 when a 30-something personnel employee picked herself to head the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security. (Her tenure included the publication of a photograph online of her standing next to an employee, who was costumed in blackface and a prisoner’s uniform, during a Halloween party that she hosted.) Similarly, the inexperience of Monica Goodling, the former liaison to the White House at the Justice Department, contributed to the politics-based hiring of career lawyers and helped create a demoralizing scandal from which the department still has not fully recovered.

But there were many other such stories that stayed below the radar screen....

(Thomas A. Schweich teaches law at Washington University in St. Louis.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/opinion/12schweich.html

...to learn that there were 20 year old kids running the country for the last eight years. But that would certainly explain the current state of affairs.

You know what? Screw you!

We 20-somethings aren't all a bunch of incompetant, dangerously stupid, totally unqualified assholes...That's just the Republican ones!

:)

Fuck you back. That's why I specified the ones "running the country for the last eight years." Those would be REPUBLICANS.

You know what else? Even the brightest twenty-somethings aren't qualified (don't have the job/life experience) to run the country, politics notwithstanding.

:hi:

have been destroyed in the blowback from the maladministration... not to mention, they're all going to put "worked for the * administration" on their resumes. Yeah, that should work out well for them. Republic business owners in the private sector are all about the entitlements and will, no doubt, be handing out $150K+ jobs to former Bushies like candy on Halloween.

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!

Our alum rag did a story a few years back about how he was high up in the DHS. *shudder* Sure, he's bright, no doubt, but the idea of him being that high up and controlling DHS made me feel a bit squicked out.

I guess there will always be a "base", but this story is beyond the pale.

After the Kymer Rouge took over and put children in charge of reeducation camps. Very similar.

Another one of those end-of-term news dumps from the Times, when it's too late to do anything about it. Everybody's trying to buttress their "credibility" by kicking Bush as he goes out the door.

No mention of how the Iraq CPA was stuffed with zero-experience ideologue pups, holding the power of disbursement over billions of dollars in a war-flattened country. And remember the punk given charge of NASA's web servers, who got shuffled to another job after he decreed all references to evolution be deleted from their websites? This shit has been SOP for Bushco since day one.

And of course, these revelations are just prologue for the real thrust of the story -- giving Obama notice that he'd better not think he can away with doing the same:

In fairness to the Bush administration, for which I retain a great deal of admiration, putting young campaign workers and connected college graduates into White House personnel positions is nothing new. And some of them, like Stuart Holliday and Dina Powell, who ran President Bush’s personnel office for a while, were true professionals.

But if our new president wants to make an important change to how government works, he should fill the personnel office — and the liaison offices to the White House at the various executive branch departments — with a combination of veteran government employees and human resources experts. That’s the way to ensure that the best people get the jobs that will shape our country for the next four years.