Just When You Thought They’re Gone
by "Rab Tremain"
[Going under the pen name of Rab Tremain, a friend of mine who worked 30+ years with the federal government in Washington, D.C., penned this last month. While it's mostly uncommitted voters who need the message, I thought Kossacks would enjoy it and so, with his permission, I'm posting it here. Hope you like it too. -- Clio2]
This city [Washington, D.C.] is loaded with party professionals. They make a career out of holding down the plum federal agency jobs. When their political party gets in, they get the jobs. They are "our people" in Hollywood East. They pitch the know-how and know-who to work the government while doing the bidding of their political masters.
During over 30 years in the federal trenches, I had an ongoing working acquaintance with these guys, always up for the Party.
The professional Republicans have hacked the way for George W. Bush for eight years. They have nailed the cushy jobs with "suck" that stoke Potomac Fever. Their ranks are filled with the usual suspects from the stockpile: campaign buckaroos, money manipulators, industry suits, lobbyists and lawyers, spinmeisters, wingnut wonks, evangelico Caesar wannabees, rambos-for-hire and good ol’ buds & spawn.
If the next president is a Republican [cuing John McCain] the professional Republicans will reshuffle in the agency line-ups. However McCain may appear to cut-and-run from Bush, it’s so much smoke and mirrors when it comes to the pros. McCain, who dwells in DC among many other forgotten residences, needs all the Republicans he can get. The professional Republicans collect chits and IOUs, the ties that bind. Sooner or later our intrepid GOP pros, survivors-at-the-ready, will burrow back in like pork worms.
Their drill goes something like this: "I’m winding down now at the MisState Department. But under #41 [Papa Bush] I worked at the Department of Hoods with My Guy who is now positioning to be Assistant Secretary of Stealth, Miscalculation and Warfare under McCain. I can come back at SMW."
The GOP welcome wagon door is well-oiled and swinging open. McCain chief aide Mark Salter has warmly embraced the Bushies. McCain’s senior foreign policy and national security advisors are We-Can’t-Get-Into-Iraq-Fast-Enough recyclees from Team W. While McCain the Born Again Regulator preaches against greed, his economics bench recruits from the no-billionaire-left-behind Bush League.
Professional Republicans can offer political continuity whatever that’s worth. Could they temper a President who goes off half-cocked in the thrill of risk-taking? Well maybe if they weren’t half-cocked themselves and had the stuff to do it. Don’t count on it.
They have dutifully punched-in as part of the Republican Regime that the Republican Party is now busy writing off like one big liar loan. The Party is running against its own President claiming, without a laugh track, that it is the agent of change from itself. In the hushed moments of the Great Unspoken, GOP pros seem to see that the Emperor has no clothes.
It all has something to do with the elephant in the living room: slacking off while the economic meltdown was set up, mishandling Iraq for many lethal years, hanging New Orleans out to dry after Katrina. On the environment and healthcare -- AWOL. Incompetence has shot the Republican can-do reputation. When the first term follies were piling up one pro put it this way about Bush, "He’s a fool."
Yet professional Republicans stuck with W no matter what. He is their fool after all and their juice was at stake. The few, proud and brave of their ranks that stood up for such quaint notions as the rule of law and Constitutional checks-and-balances were bulldozed. In the end, the true believers march in lockstep and most of the rest get with the Party.
If McCain lands in the White House, the professional Republicans will suffer the elation of the pardoned. Like all good bureaucrat time-servers they will calculate four more years until retirement. And that’s a useful cushion toward making the down payment on the getaway villa.