The Gonzales Debacle: Public Relations v. Public Service

It's hard to write about how badly conservative governance has degraded us as a nation because, well, it has so degraded us as a nation: They have managed to make us forget once-sturdy pillars of our national morality. To help heal this degradation, you have to explain very basic things—things taken for granted before the conservatives took over. You sound like a fourth-grade teacher. Or like a patronizing ass.

Please forgive me. I'm about to go there.

The notion of a disinterested civil service, of government officials chosen for their ability to do the job rather than their loyalty to political bosses, is one of the great accomplishments of the modern world. The nation's corps of 93 United States attorneys are not civil servants in the strictest sense—they're not part of a system in which merit is measured by formal examinations, nor are they protected against firing without cause. But by sound tradition, written and unwritten—the kind of sound tradition conservatives once felt themselves duty-bound by definition to respect—they have always been considered something close: political appointees serving a non-political, even anti-political, function.

"While U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, they must not only serve to please the president," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during yesterday's hearings on whether Gonzales improperly fired nine of these U.S. attorneys for political reasons. In response, Gonzales agreed.

Or claimed to agree.

Republican Lindsay Graham brought up the firing of U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins, and the attempt to replace him with J. Timothy Griffin, a janissary of White House political boss Karl Rove. "We wanted to put Mr. Griffin in, on an interim basis," Gonzales said. "I didn't know Mr. Griffin that well. And I wanted to see how he did." (Evidence is strong that Griffin was to be put in as an "interim" appointee to avoid a Senate confirmation hearing.)

Graham gingerly followed up: "The reason Mr. Griffin was going to be put is because the White House had a desire to have his service." Responded Gonzales, like a stammering FDA official [1] befogging the fact that they weren't checking for poisoned dog food ingredients at the border: "There was a well-qualified individual, yes, and the White House had a desire to have him serve."

This perjury-dodging admission was also an admission that the White House had actively obliterated the civil-service pillar of modern civilization. The media coverage of yesterday's hearings claimed that even the most conservative and loyal Republican senators had abandoned the White House on the issue of the U.S. attorney firings and the survival of the attorney general. What gets left out of that reporting is this: All these Republican senators proved perfectly happy to assent to the White House's general principle—that civil servants didn't deserve political independence.

Take Oklahoma's Tom Coburn. He made headlines as the Republican senator who called for Gonzales to resign.

Let's look closer. Gonzales told Senator Coburn of Bud Cummins' firing, "One of the reasons he was asked to resign is because there was a desire to place another well-qualified person." (He was referring to Griffin, Karl Rove's protégé.)

"Absolutely," Coburn affirmed. "I have no qualms with that."

No, Coburn's only qualm was whether the political hit couldn't have been carried out with more managerial skill. He asked Gonzales how he might have done it better. Gonzales replied: "Well, one of the things I would have done, of course, is been more respectful in communicating the decision. I think that a face-to-face meeting, if at all possible...or certainly a phone call..."

If only Gonzales had been more polite, perhaps this conservative wouldn't be calling for his resignation. He all but said so: "I disavow, aggressively, any implication that there was a political nature in this." Nope—as Coburn put it in his prepared public relations statement [2] for the press this morning, "This situation was handled incompetently.... The standards used to dismiss the U.S. Attorneys should be applied to the Attorney General."

But Senator Coburn is wrong. The standards used to dismiss the U.S. attorneys are already being applied to the attorney general. For their refusal to serve as George Bush's political pawns, U.S. attorneys were fired. For his willingness to serve as George Bush's political pawn, the attorney general is being retained. For some reason Coburn's been praised as a conservative profile in courage. He's really today's prime exhibit of conservative rot: that they have made it impossible to remember an America in which government employees could answer to a higher calling than the venal political needs of their bosses—before public relations replaced public service.