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How I Got Interrogated by the Bushies
As part of The Daily Beast's Farewell Chronicles, the author recounts experiencing the Bushies' partisan silliness up close right after 9/11.
At his final press conference, President Bush seemed mystified by one aspect of his legacy in particular—his failure to change the tone in Washington. The man who campaigned on his bipartisan record as governor of Texas, and was confident that he could impose freedom and democracy on the Middle East, feels like a victim of DC's culture of poisonous partisanship, even as Obama seems to transcend it.
Bush failed in large part because there were too many conservative apparatchiks in his administration who did not share that goal—they saw government as a warfare of interests, where service to ideology was idealism. They hijacked his administration in ways both big and small. I saw it with my own eyes. It's a story I haven't told until now.
It was a few months after the attacks of September 11. The country was briefly united around the Bush administration. The divisions left by the 2000 election had faded away in the face of our common grief and resolve. We remembered that we were all Americans first—not Democrats or Republicans. (If that sounds naïve to you now, you're part of the problem.)
"Who did you vote for?" the woman asked when I interviewed at the State Department.
I'd been working as chief speechwriter to Rudy Giuliani, who had left office respecting the two-term limit imposed by New York's voters. I was tired—writing eulogies for three months will do that to you. But the memory of the towers' collapse was still fresh. I wanted to serve my country and see the work to completion. I was asked to come down to the State Department, to interview for a position vaguely described as writing for the war on terror.
I met with a woman who shall remain nameless—no point in dragging her through the mud now. She was a southern political operative who'd worked on the first President Bush's campaigns. She pointed proudly to a blown-up photo of 41 and 43 on the wall as she asked me to sit down. She felt a familial loyalty to the clan—she was part of the restoration after the stain of the Clinton years.
My first sign of the trouble to come was during the pre-game small talk. She'd asked me to describe what I'd been doing the past few months, and I gave the story of my recent life, capped by something to the effect of how I took this all (meaning 9/11 and its still-unfolding aftermath) personally. She stiffened in her chair and said, "Nobody takes this more personally than the president."
I quickly tried to clarify that I hadn't been trying to one-up the president, just that the attacks had affected a lot of people personally in different ways. But the snowball of suspicion had begun to build in her mind—where did my loyalties lie? Soon came the question:
"Who did you vote for?" she asked.
"I don't think I have to answer that question," I replied.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Amateur Hour at the White House
Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Going Rogue: The Index
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
Wingnuts of the Week
John P. Avlon writes a column for The Daily Beast and is author of the forthcoming Attack of the Wingnuts, to be published in January by Beast Books. He is also the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.
The Next Wingnut Attack
John P. Avlon writes a column for The Daily Beast and is author of the forthcoming Attack of the Wingnuts, to be published in January by Beast Books. He is also the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.
Glenn Beck's Mob Rule
John P. Avlon writes a column for The Daily Beast and is author of the forthcoming Attack of the Wingnuts, to be published in January by Beast Books. He is also the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics. Previously, he served as chief speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and was a columnist and associate editor for The New York Sun.
I'm sure this will NEVER happen to anyone once the Messiah comes to office and all his Chicago cronies are in place.
Talk about consistency. You bristle at September 11th being more about the President than you, but some lame job interview - why that's all about the President and largely explains the so-called failures of his presidency.
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Spine-chilling, but not at all surprising. Under W 43, partisanship was elevated to the highest of priorities for all hirings, depriving the nation of objective leadership at a time when it was urgently needed.
The damage done to our nation by the "Only conservative Republicans will be employed here!" philosophy of the Bush/Rove clowns will be felt for as long as unqualified political hacks chosen only for their ideological purity & partisan fervor continue to exercise any power in the US govt.
I hope & pray that Obama can purge as many of these incompetents from the govt. asc soosn as possible.
Is there any standard to the material printed on DailyBeast or any other online source? This guy's rant is pointless and contains numerous factual inconsistencies. Who edits this stuff?
You don't say whether this is a political job or a career civil service job you are applying for. This distinction makes all the difference between rightful outrage and mere sour grapes.
With all due respect, MarineLtCol, you CAN register as an independent. I was registered as an independent for several years until there was one primary I felt I must not miss, and then registered partisan.
As for Mr. Avlon, while the apparatchiks of Bush 43 displayed truly smarmy behavior, that behavior is not isolated to that administration nor to Washington/partisan politics. That behavior is deeply rooted in corporate America too. Every time a new chief executive takes over a business, they clean house, replacing perfectly functioning, efficient executives with their own loyalists, and then hire new loyalists, which perpetuates the phenomenon of incoming chief executives cleaning house. Unfortunate, but true, and not limited to Washington.
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ju = just
Did I just get censored?
Nope. Disregard.
And, not to flood the comment board here, but if he was interviewing the type of job he indicates in the piece, and if he was interviewing with the person he describes (who I probably am familiar with), he was interviewing for a POLITICAL appointment, not a full-time government-service grade. Therefore, the interview would and should, naturally, focus on his efforts to support the President who is appointing him in addition to his political viewpoints etc. Of course, it wouldn't serve his purpose to point this out in the course of his article, now would it?
Interesting in your face personal account. It's a pity this illustrative annecdote (and others like it) didn't make it to the mainstream media prior to Nov 2003. Of course the problem is Bush's. He surrounded himself with reactionaries that had a loyalty to idealogy and their friends and not to America and he didn't clean house. D. Rumsfeld's firing is an example. Had GB fired DR prior to the election in 2006 I'm sure that many of the Republican seats in the Senate and House wouldn't have been turned lost. But, no, GB stuck to loyalty instead of harking to the American will and basically lost control of congress and the Senate. At least on paper.
It was at this point in time (2006) that I finally figured out that Bush and his administration weren't Republicans. They were reactionary idealogues that had coopted the party and vigorously pushed their own agenda with the result that the Republican party may be mortally wounded.
It is unfortunate. Our political system works better with two parties vying for the votes of the majority of Americans. The divide and counquer tactics used by the Republican leadership over the last few decades has just about killed off the only competition for the Democratic party. This is not good.
Also we must be watchful that the same thing doesn't happen to the Democratic party - having it coopted by a gaggle of revolutionaries (or reactionaries) who really have no common cause with the majority of Americans. When hiring for government requires that you reveal how you voted in the latest election the rot begins to stink and needs to be cut out.
As bad as the past 8 years have been, a lot of us can rest assured that the Republicans have made their bed and won't be in power for again for a long, long time. The only way they can be taken seriously as a party again is to drop the crazy fundies. The neo-cons need a makeover because the people have shown them that partisanship like this is completely tiresome and as will only make America fall backwards.
Marine Lt Col - You can register as an independent and then choose to vote in either, but not both, partisan primaries. Someone as ignorant as you in State? I doubt that, but it is you, sir, who is full of shit.
Well, that was a complete waste of time reading this article. It is obviously filled with holes on the actual flow of the interview and fiction scattered throughout. And MLtCol is correct in that you cannot register independent in VA or DC.
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Yup, the No.1, and No.3, most liberal Senators are now President and VP, which means the era of big partisanship is over. (Good grief)
I was registered as an indepenent in New Jersey for 30 years, then moved to Pennsylvania and registered as an independent. It just means I can't vote in the primaries. I think jweldons' closing comment is apt.
Off2delmar might note that the author was registered in New York, where you can, indeed register as an independent.
I'm waiting to see if we'll find the Democratic equivalent of Gooding. If I were starting a pool. I'd take April, '09.
I worked in the State Department and it does indeed have long echoing hallways (though not literally made of marble,I'm sure). Nowhere does the author say that he was in the Secretary's suite, and why would he be, to interview with that particular woman, whose office was probably not on that floor?
If you're going to write speeches, clearly you've got to represent the views of the administration. I give you that. But I think he was shell-shocked by the realization that the interviewer didn't see the world in the same post-partisan way that he did just after 9/11.
And though we ALL felt it and will never forget the impact of that day, people I know who were in New York City (I was not) experienced it on a visceral level different than that of someone watching it on the news from afar.
The author clearly states that they made a "perfunctory walk down the marble hallways". I'm in the building right now. There are no, and have never been, marble hallways. Face it, the author was busted trying to dramatize a partisan argument by fudging facts. Of course, his "indendent" and objective viewpoint was established early, in the title, when he used the term "Bushies", which is a common derogatory term used by those who simply hate all things related to Bush. I'm surprised he didn't include "neo-con" and "Halliburton" somewhere in the text. It was also obvious early on when he presented his Rudy Giuliani bonafides in a not-so-veiled attempt to establish himself as at least pseudo-conservative. Of course, any conservative would know that Giuliani would barely qualify as such.
MarineLtCol - you can't register as an Independent? Maybe you *wish* you couldn't, but I've been registered as one most of my voting life and I'm 61 years old.
You, sir, are a fraud and a liar.
connie47 - AGAIN, in VA you cannot "register" any party affiliation. I repeat, IN VA YOU CANNOT REGISTER ANY PARTY AFFILIATION. You just vote. It's irrelevant anyways, the author's story is an exageration of one interview then applied to an entire Federal govt. administration. It's called "generalizing" or "stereotyping".
Just a note of slivered sanity: When someone says he walked down marble hallways, he isn't necessarily talking about the floor. I've never been in the building. It may have marble or stone walls in some areas. If you are going to slam someone for something you claim is a stupid falsehood, please read carefully to make certain the conclusion to which you jump is accurate.
I have no suspicion that this ancedote occurred other than as Mr. Avalon relates and many others I have read. My question is this: Where the hell were they eight and four years ago? If they are as patriotic as they claim, and I'm not here to question that, but why weren't most of them speaking out back then? Concerning patriotism, speaking out would have saved this country much grief perhaps, at least egged somebody in an all too passive press in general to have started asking some questions of this Bush outfit before it was too late to remedy them. Thank you.
Thank you.
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