By Kenneth Kowald
Loyalty to the boss is expected, but should not overrule the capacity of the staff to deal bluntly and effectively with problems. The anointed one in the White House is much given, we are told, to loyalty of staff even when it means incompetence is honored. Remember what was said to the man who headed the monumentally incompetent FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005? “You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!” Few seem to be as much of a longstanding loyalist as Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings – and she demonstrates that loyalty even to the detriment of the taxpayers who pay her salary and whom she should be serving. Spellings has known the incumbent for many years. In fact, at the announcement of her appointment, he joked that he asked her for a date many years ago in Texas (when both were single) and she turned him down. So, they go back a long way. Spellings holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Houston. She was an education lobbyist in Texas and then served as a paid campaign director when the White House incumbent ran for governor in 1994. She then served six years as the governor's advisor on education. Before becoming secretary of education in January 2005, Ms. Spellings was assistant to the president for domestic policy, so she must be held responsible for any actions which have resulted in the diminished federal domestic programs. If she ever tried to protect or expand them, to deal with growing populations and growing problems, such as poverty, health care, energy, the environment, national forests and parks, there is no record of that. The budget wouldn't permit it, right? Gotta get those tax reductions for the very rich, right? Who cares what happened to the huge budget surplus we had at the beginning of 2001. But it is the education law that bears her stamp and it is clear from the chorus of bipartisan concerns around the country that this is a piece of legislation that has been grossly underfunded, overly bureaucratic and bound to lead to failures. U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Forest Hills) has estimated that New York City has been “shortchanged by billions of dollars over the past three years.” As a loyal acolyte of the anointed one, she joined his call for a discussion in schools of evolution and creationism, calling both “points of view.” To demonstrate her loyalty even further, last summer Ms. Spellings dismissed an Education Department report (which she said she had not read) that challenged the push for school voucher programs by demonstrating that students in public schools generally did as well as students in private (including religious) schools. Ms. Spellings said the reports sample – 700,000 fourth and eighth graders in public schools and 25,000 in private schools – was too small and its results “basically inconclusive.” In both instances, it's known as keeping your credentials with the extreme religious right, the incumbent's “core constituency.” Like her boss, Ms. Spellings does not allow facts to interfere with ideology. And, they are performing their incompetent rites with your money and mine. I am reminded by this incompetence of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “…they smashed things up and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Can't you hear the compliment from her boss for this incompetency? “You're doing a heck of a job, Maggie!”
