Powelled! Right in the kisser.

It’s been noted in a couple of places on the internets today that the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell, has lost some of the gleam off his previously sterling reputation as a “straight-shooter.” Both links go into the how’s and why’s of that, so I won’t rehash that here. What interests me is 2 things: the pattern, as noted by TPM in the second link, of the Bush administration’s ability to get highly regarded civil or military professionals (or former ones) to sacrifice their reputations; and what seems to me an obvious misunderstanding over the use and meaning of “straight-shooter.”

Getting Powelled

It’s remarkable to me how successful the Bush administration has been at getting people respected in Washington for having maintained their integrity and professionalism, many of them military officers, to sacrifice their hard-won reputations. The most famous and perhaps tragic example is, of course, Colin Powell. I believe polls in the late 90s indicated Powell was, by a wide margin, the most respected and trusted man in American public life. Beltway insiders viewed him with something approaching reverence. He was considered perhaps the only contemporary example of that rare commodity, the statesman. When he accepted the Secretary of State post in the new Bush administration, he was that new administration’s stamp of credibility and trustworthiness.

We all know what happened next. After 9/11 and Afghanistan, there was the run-up to the Iraq War, during which Powell saluted and went along with a policy he knew to be counter to the national interest and knew to be driven by forces other than those publicly acknowledged, eventually agreeing to go to the UN and make the speech that effectively ended both his career and his reputation. In that speech, he presented evidence against Iraq that he didn’t believe to be accurate. He had spent the previous couple of weeks trying to weed out the things he knew to be bogus, but in the end, he ran out of time and political capital, and, to paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld, went to the UN with the speech he had, not the speech he wanted. Nonetheless, he went. He went and he sacrificed his hard-won reputation as an honest broker, in service to the Bush administration.

Others followed. How many highly respected generals went before Congress both before and during the war, and staked their reputations on numbers and strategies they didn’t believe in? There were exceptions, of course. Gen. Shinseki, the Army officer specifically tasked with knowing such things, said it would take a few hundred thousand troops to do the job in Iraq. He gave his honest, professional opinion, and Secretary Rumsfeld sacked him for it. He lost his job, but maintained his integrity and reputation. Jack Goldsmith was brought in to head the Office of Legal Counsel because he was known as a legal scholar who believed in a strong executive; when he discovered how far his predecessor had gone down that road, he pulled back the reins. He didn’t last long in the job, but he left with his integrity intact. There are some indications that Ambassador John Negroponte, another man with a long reputation for professionalism, resigned as Director of National Intelligence and took a lesser position in the State Department because he couldn’t do that job the way he was being asked to do it, and maintain his professional integrity.

Admiral Mike McConnell took over from him, and, like Colin Powell and so many others, seems to have made the opposite choice. He was warmly confirmed by the Senate, even by Democrats, because he had a sterling reputation in the intelligence community for his professionalism and commitment to being an honest broker. As detailed in the posts linked to above, he has sacrificed that.

How does the Bush administration do it? I’m not dewy-eyed enough not to know that every administration — of both parties — likes to sign up people of stellar reputation and then strongarm them into doing their bidding. The Bush administration is nothing new under the sun, in that regard. What’s remarkable about it is its success rate. How have they Powelled so many, and for so long?

Shooting Straight

The term “straight-shooter” is getting a lot of play these days, mostly because of the presidential candidacy of John McCain. McCain enjoys a great reputation among the Washington press corps for being a “straight-shooter.” He labels his speeches and answers to questions as “straight talk”; he calls his campaign the “Straight Talk Express.”

Many on the left point to contradictory statements McCain has made over the years, or to places where his policy and his rhetoric don’t match, and ask: how the heck is this guy a “straight-shooter?”

The answer is that the press corps doesn’t call McCain a “straight-shooter” because his rhetoric aligns perfectly with his actions, or because his rhetoric is always consistent. They call him that because he has a tendency to say whatever he happens to be thinking at the moment he opens his mouth. He is, in that sense, the opposite of someone like Hillary Clinton, who considers and reconsiders and re-reconsiders every syllable before it takes shape in her mouth.

Whether McCain’s kind of “straight shooting” is a useful quality in a president or a dangerous one, I guess the voters will decide. But it almost always makes for good copy, and that’s why the press corps loves him.