"Moving from embattled to dysfunctional"

I added this piece by Lewis L. Gould from the Post to the list of Readings at right, but I think it's good enough that it's worth featuring over here.

The point is simple, but the implications extend into just about everything happening in DC--or because of it--right now: Campaigning isn't governing. The Bushies, under Rove's leadership, are great at campaigning--for five years they've been nearly unstoppable. But the tedious business of actually using power to administer the government is a whole lot less sexy to them than the process of getting power.

They're lousy at governing, largely because they're uninterested in it.

Once the president was no longer a candidate for office, he turned to the issue of a mandate for change with his seemingly abundant political capital. Remaking the Social Security system loomed as the big domestic goal of the second term. Hammering out an actual proposal ("Negotiating with ourselves" in the president's parlance) was not to the taste of inveterate campaigners. Campaign first, program last seemed the slogan to be followed. So the president made numerous speeches before captive audiences touting the virtues of change in Social Security as a platonic ideal, but refused to provide a specific plan. Since popular enthusiasm for an alteration in retirement policy failed to materialize, the president was left with a campaign in search of a governing objective.

Hurricane Katrina, and the political and atmospheric storms that followed, underscored the deficiencies of continuous campaigning as a response to real-life crises. Getting assistance to storm victims is a matter of logistics, competent administrators and coordinated planning. A presidential visit to express sympathy for those who have lost homes, jobs and loved ones is a one-day nostrum that leaves the basic situation unchanged, no matter how many times the chief executive jets in with concern. When the government does not work, it does not matter how many officials are told they have done "a heck of a job." Citizens see for themselves that their government is absent and help is not on the way.

Read the whole thing. The essay is that exactly-right vantage point from which everything lines up: How did we wind up with a president who's so proud of being removed from the details of governing? Why smear Joe Wilson and out his wife over an Op-Ed piece in the Times? Why was the administration so unprepared for Hurricane Katrina (or any other domestic disaster, it seems)? And why was its response, when it did come, driven by little more than photo-ops? Why has mainstream news coverage of the Bush administration been so insubstantial?

Don't look for answers in Gould's essay; that's not what he's aiming at. In fact, he notes in passing that when you're right in the middle of a presidential administration's implosion it's probably a bad time to be looking for ways to fix American democracy anyway. But give him credit for framing the problem in a way that hits all the right targets.