On message, under fire

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has been both admired and mocked for its “message discipline” -- the almost unprecedented ability of its top officials to speak in unison in public. The president’s top advisors, scornful of the Clinton administration’s internal feuding and all-night policy hash-sessions that ended inconclusively, vowed to make decisions promptly and execute the president’s policies crisply. Their seeming success in requiring loyalty and enforcing discipline has been the envy of many a rueful Washington Democrat.

But as President Bush’s woes mount, so do the ranks of defectors from his administration. With the passion of the formerly censored, these dissenters are belatedly spewing forth their stories.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s chief of staff, compares the administration’s decision-making process to that of a “dictatorship” (see his article on the opposite page). Robin Raphel, the State Department’s outgoing coordinator for Iraq assistance, was quoted in this newspaper over the weekend as saying the Iraq invasion was ordered prematurely, its timing dictated from on high based on “clear political pressure.” Soon after, Raphel said, it became clear that U.S. officials “could not run a country we did not understand.... It was very much amateur hour.”

Equally disturbing are the reports of how the Bush administration’s political appointees -- including many handpicked Dick Cheney loyalists -- acted as political commissars inside federal agencies, including the State and Defense departments and the Food and Drug Administration.

Every administration, Democrat and Republican, puts loyal political appointees in key positions to ensure the president’s policies are being carried out. But according to numerous dissenter accounts, the Bush commissars strove not only to stifle competing policy proposals but also nettlesome facts and analysis that did not support the administration’s ideological proclivities. Those whose loyalty was deemed suspect were reportedly isolated or pushed out.

In such a Soviet-style atmosphere of political correctness, is it any wonder that the bureaucracies under Bush began to tailor their reports to what they knew their masters wanted to hear?

The administration’s refusal to tolerate dissent is not limited to foreign policy. Remember Richard S. Foster, the top Medicare financial analyst whose boss threatened to fire him if he told lawmakers debating the Medicare prescription drug legislation that the measure was likely to cost far more than the $400-billion ceiling Bush had promised them? Or Lawrence B. Lindsey, the top Bush economic advisor fired in 2002 after estimating that the Iraq war would cost $200 billion? (If only it were so.)

It’s true that good governance requires some measure of consensus among those doing the governing. It’s unseemly and sometimes unsettling to see senior government officials bickering in public. But it’s dangerous to dismiss all dissent by government professionals (even when privately expressed) as motivated by political hostility to the president’s agenda. The Bush administration -- as well as the Democrats who hope to succeed it -- should bear in mind the cost of ignoring the tellers of unpleasant truths.