SharedThought

Check out Bureaucrat by Day for an interesting post on the announcement by Darrell Issa that he will not be running for Governor of California. His financial contribution of nearly $2 million is credited with getting the stalled recall movement going. I posted a lengthy comment on Bureaucrat by Day, but wanted to post it here as a separate item, in slightly revised form.

The recall vote in California is emblematic of a growing movement to hijack democracy through seemingly democratic means. California’s recall election is only the latest and most visible example. California also had problems in the November 2000 general election with referenda that were put on the ballot by monied interests as an end run around the legislative process.

The recall of Davis is amazing in the simplicity with which it was pulled off. The number of signatures needed for a recall in California is set at just 12 % of the votes for Governor in the last election. That seems absurdly low (especially when that works out to only 6 % of registered voters). Why allow a democratic choice of a statewide electorate be subject to revision by a small minority individuals who can afford to finance a petition drive?

The New York Times is running a story about how Vice President Cheney’s pals at Halliburton are capitalizing on their original (secretly awarded) contract to assist in the reconstruction of Iraq. Halliburton, based on the information it gathered in its initial contract and their dealings with the Army Corps of Engineers, now appears to have the inside track in securing followup contracts that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Bechtel Group, one of the world’s biggest engineering and construction companies, has dropped out of the running for a contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry, as other competitors have begun to conclude that the bidding process favors the one company already working in Iraq, Halliburton.

You’ve accomplished something if you can get the best of Bechtel.

And then there’s this odd story from the Los Angeles Times (registration required) about U.S. Plans to Supply AK-47s to the newly formed Iraqi Army. Evidently the civilian transition team has initiated a process to buy 34,000 new AK-47s, notwithstanding the fact that our military has found or seized more than enough of them to supply the need. Here’s what an Army spokesman said when told of the move:

‘That’s surprising,’ said Army Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a task force spokesman in Baghdad. ‘It would seem to me odd that we’re out there looking to buy more weapons for a place where we’ve already captured and set aside so many of them. It would raise a red flag for me, that’s for sure.’

In the inimitable words from Cool Hand Luke: what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate!

The Cultural Elite has a link to a Daily Howler story about Condoleeza Rice, the current frontrunner to replace Colin Powell. Ain’t she grand!

Potential roadblock to nomination: secret ties to the Clintons! It turns out she was Provost at Stanford when Chelsea Clinton visited campus with Hillary. She gave them a personal tour! It’s all there in the book.

I’m back. Tanned (sorta), rested (sorta) and ready (you bet). Today’s papers are abuzz with news that Colin Powell will be resigning at the end of President Bush’s first term. The departure is not as much of a surprise to me as is the time Powell chose to step down.

Last spring President Bush asked all of his cabinet officials and senior staff to step down this summer or pledge to remain with the administration through the election. Here’s an excerpt from a story that ran on CNN.com when Christine Whitman resigned as Director of EPA in May:

Cabinet officials and other senior staffers have been encouraged to leave by this summer if they do not wish to stay on through the 2004 campaign year so that Bush does not have to deal with high-level staff and agency appointments in the heat of an election season.

The officials cast Whitman’s decision in this light and noted she had always said she did not envision staying in Washington for too long.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer cited the coming campaign in his decision to resign effective this summer.

The President is right about this. Can you imagine how hot things would have gotten if Colin Powell resigned next summer? You’d have had a couple of of news cycles discussing what he did, and why he was resigning. Then you’d have had a couple more on how the search for a replacement was going. After that you’d have had a feeding frenzy over the named replacement, and then a whole bunch more news cycles on the confirmation process that the Democrats would surely try to bottle up in the Senate.

The bottom line is that the electorate would have been distracted from the President’s campaign message, and the Democrats would have had a chance to make an election issue out of a cabinet replacement. But, since Powell is waiting until after the election to leave his job, none of this will happen, right?

Wrong! I think that is is exactly why Powell is announcing now that he is resigning at the start of the next administration. While he appears to be playing the part of the good soldier and sticking it out for the rest of the first Bush administation, he is effectively quitting now and forcing the President into an awkward, extended search for a replacement.

Powell has been so marginalized by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice (who probably both want his job) that the only way he can exact a slight measure of revenge is to slowly quit. The Democrats will now have fifteen months to run against the President’s foreign policy record. And Powell can sit back and watch it all with a smile on his face.