“If Bush is so smart how come he’s falling for this? “
Bush is following typical good-management practice. Hire a competent person and trust them to do their job. Dont micromanage.
In a typical job, that’s fine, but here it can have drawbacks, if the hired hand walks away from the core principles of those who voted for you.
Hank Paulson is a competent person in charge of this arena. But Paulson is not really a conservative or Republican, he’s a Wall St guy.
The problem is, as noted, Bush is trusting a non-conservative with a wall-st-centric view to manage this crisis. What we got was a wall-st bailout that give Paulson all the authority.
Bush admin got burned over the Juctice Dept firings, and since then
The formerly ‘conservative Bush’ administration is not really conservative at this point. He’s been lame ducked into being an establishment figurehead of a govt whose non-conservative permanent bureaucracies have “won”, thanks to the Democrat Congress that would go after conservative ‘interference’ with the work of the liberal Democrats who staff these agencies. viz. the Justice department wasting many man-years to investigate the lawful and proper firing of US attorneys.
Its a neat trick, but the irony is that Obama’s ‘change’ will be less ‘change’ than McCain’s ‘reform’.
and then there was scott mcclellan...
It is why you can’t run the govt like a business. To run the country you need to have strong principles and make the case for them over the heads of the politicians, bureaucrats, special interests and the media and go straight to the people.
That’s what Reagan and Newt did and that’s why they were so successful even though reagan had to deal with Tipo and Newt had clinton to deal with.
W Bush is now not that much different from HW Bush or Ford.