What We Really Need to Know The basic Bush attitude toward accountability seems to be: stuff it. This distaste for what he considers “Monday-morning quarterbacking” predates September 11. Allow historians continued access to old unclassified presidential documents? Nope. Release the names of those corporations that had private audiences with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force? Not gonna happen without a court order. Come clean at long last on the contacts between the White House and Enron? In your dreams.
The Democrats will try to exploit that impulse this fall. One of their big campaign themes is summed up by James Carville and other strategists as “lack of accountability”—on everything from Enron to the environment to national security. I’m not sure it will work, but I do know that the only way to secure our safety—at the FBI or the chemical plant down the road—is holding people accountable for performance. Bush understands that in the field of education. It’s about time he starts raising standards for homeland defense too.