by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
John Emerson's comments on Brad DeLong's taxonomy of "honest conservatives" brings up a difficult conundrum the next Democratic President will face:
For example, Bush's politicization of the career staff in Justice andelsewhere was a very bad thing, no? And certainly this kind of thinghas to stop, no? So we will forbid the new Democratic President tointerfere with career personnel, with the result that all of thepolitical hacks Bush put in civil service positions will be untouchable.
Quite right. Even if Democrats take the White House in '08 and are able to install their own political heads, they'll have a staff full of Republican lawyers that have burrowed into the bureaucracy, eager to leak damaging gossip to Congress, slag their new boss, and derail the President. And this is just in one department; we have to assume that similar initiatives have taken place elsewhere in the executive branch. One has to hope that in, say, the Defense Department, political heads will be able to get the career pros to wage war against Bush's former tourists. Otherwise, the PR nightmare may start on day one and never end.
