Why is the Bush administration so incompetent?

Kevin Drum offers an answer that seems to fit.

The lesson of Katrina, after all, is not that the White House is bad at handling hurricanes. The lesson is that the Bush White House doesn't care much about whether things actually work. This is why they screwed up Iraq: they had an idea of what they wanted to accomplish, but figured that good results would take care of themselves as long as they applied energy and conservative principles. It's why the Medicare prescription bill turned out to be such a Frankenstein's monster: they knew they wanted to give seniors their pills, but they didn't really care much about actually implementing a sound policy. And it's why Republicans are conducting a war on science these days: to them, science is just something that gets in the way of what they want to do. The fact that eventually you're going to run aground if science is against you doesn't seem to register with them.

That fits with what I have been writing about the Bush triumvirate 'leadership' style. (See How does Bush think.) People claim that Bush is a delegator. Take it from me, no MBA teaches the kind of hands-off 'delegator' style he applies. Businesses with CEOs who function this way tend to fail.

The way it works, Bush sets an agenda and says he wants something done. Then he gives orders to do it, perhaps assigning a particular person he trusts. But he provides no detailed guidance, does not get periodic detailed progress reports, and essentially accepts whatever he gets back if it can be passed off publicly as a 'success.' Note that he has never vetoed a bill and never fired someone for failure.

This is the 'lack of policy mechanisms' of which I have been writing. Rather than policy, Bush operates on trust, ideology, and what he calls his intuition. The weakness of this process is demonstrated by the appointment of Michael Brown as head of FEMA. He has a resume somewhere between weak and bogus but because he knew someone Bush trusted he got the job. As long as someone Bush trusts to have the right ideology is on the job, details are unimportant. Unfortunately, those 'unimportant' details this time included a lot of people trapped in New Orleans and left to die.

Kevin also suggests reading two older articles.

Along these lines, I'd recommend that people reread two articles written a while back. The first is "Confidence Men," from the September 2002 issue of the Monthly. In it, Josh Marshall asks "why the myth of Republican competence persists, despite all the evidence to the contrary." It's a good question, and one that people might be more willing to pay attention to now that Katrina has rubbed their noses in it.

The second is "Fact Finders," published earlier this year in The New Republic. In it, Jon Chait points out that although both liberals and conservatives have dogmas and ideologies of their own, liberal policies tend to be focused on particular outcomes. If liberals can be convinced that their policies no longer work, they'll change them. Maybe slowly, and maybe only under pressure, but eventually they'll change them. Empirical results matter, after all.

This is really no way to run a government.