Why Paulose has suddenly moved to Washington

The Washington Post weighs in on the Rachel Paulose case this morning. They report that Ms. Paulose is going to a job where she "will be one of several counsels in Justice's office for legal policy." The new Attorney General was involved in the decision:

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, who was narrowly confirmed by the Senate and sworn in 10 days ago, was aware of the decision, the source said. Paulose "has come to realize, and the new attorney general and others, that management was a challenge for her there," the source said. "She felt it was best for her office for her to . . . get out of this management position and into a place where she could excel."

This is an acknowledgement that her management skills are, to put it charitably, somewhat inadequate.

An obvious question considering the suddenness of Ms. Paulose' move is "Why now?" The answer is that her interview with the National Review Online and the efforts to defend her tenure brought about a major reaction in her office in Minneapolis.

In an interview with a blogger last week, posted on National Review Online, the usually press-shy Paulose denied saying anything racist to the staff member and added that "the department is defending me against this outrageous and defamatory lie."

She also decried "the McCarthyite hysteria" that surrounded her.

The brief interview provoked some of Paulose's staff, according to her predecessor as Minnesota U.S. attorney, Thomas W. Heffelfinger. He said in an interview last night that "at least one and as many as three of her current staff managers either had resigned or were threatening to resign today."

Such defections would have been the second in Paulose's office in less than a year. This spring, her top assistant and two other senior prosecutors stepped down from their management responsibilities, saying they no longer could work with her.

[See yesterday's post The defense of Paulose steps up the rhetoric on this interview and the NRO defense of Paulose.]

It appears that the ham-handed and perhaps desperate defense of Ms. Paulose' position as U.S. Attorney caused a counter-reaction that forced her out as U.S. Attorney. So why does she still have any job in the Department of Justice at all? At a guess, I suspect that her conservative ideology, membership in the Federalist Society, and her political status as an ardent Christian Fundamentalist are what caused Mulkasey to give her an alternative job at DoJ instead of just firing her. In this administration those are strongly desired characteristics, and to simply fire her would anger all those political groups. That tells us a lot about the Bush administration as a whole.

Ms. Paulose is representative of why the Bush administration is so incompetent in running government. People are appointed to office not because they are competent to do that job, but because of strong conservative ideology and strong Christian Fundamentalist beliefs. Ms. Paulose was not appointed as U.S. Attorney because of her skills running an office of federal prosecutors. She was appointed because of her conservative and religious beliefs. She is a poster child for strong conservatives and for devout Fundamentalist Christians, while at the same time being a poster child for technically incompetent Republican political appointees. She represents the ideal Republican Movement Conservative.

Ms. Paulose has proven that she is worse than incompetent as a U.S. Attorney. In fact, she has been destructive to the office she was appointed to manage. So she was removed. But she is the ideal movement conservative, so she is still being protected, being given a safe position out of the limelight back in Washington after her total and very public failure as U.S. Attorney.

That makes Rachel Paulose an excellent metaphor for the disaster inflicted on the Department of Justice when Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. she is ideologically pure, but highly incompetent and quite unable to work with those who do not fall in line with her ideology.