Peggy Noonan:
The Veterans Affairs scandal involves charges of manipulation and falsification of medical waiting lists and systemwide rigging to hide delayed or inadequate treatment, which may have caused the deaths of some of those waiting for care. There are whistle-blowers, allegations of local coverups, and the possibility of criminal charges. Also becoming clearer are two motives for those involved in what appears to have been a racket: their compensation and their career trajectories.
This scandal won’t go away as others have, because all America is united in this thought: We care about our military veterans. We’ve asked a great deal of them, and they have a right to expect a great deal from us. Also, everyone in America knows what it’s like to go to a bureaucracy when you’re in need and get jerked around and ignored.
The scandal also prompts this thought: Barack Obama is killing the reputation of government. He is killing the thing he loves through insufficient oversight. He doesn’t do the plodding, unshowy, unromantic work of making government work. In the old political formulation, he’s a show horse, not a workhorse.
The president’s inattention to management—his laxity, his failure to understand that government isn’t magic, that it must be forced into working, clubbed each day into achieving adequacy, and watched like a hawk—is undercutting what he stands for, the progressive project that says the federal government is the primary answer to the nation’s ills.
He is allowing the federal government to become what any large institution will become unless you stop it: a slobocracy.
The president and his staff don’t seem to know that by the time things start bubbling up from the agencies and reach the Oval Office the scandal has already happened, even if it’s not in the press yet, and the answer isn’t to prepare proactive spin but to clean up the mess, end the scandal, fire people—a lot of people—establish accountability, change bad practices, and make the agency work again.
The administration’s sharpest attention goes to public relations, not reality. This time even their spin has failed. They didn’t fully apprehend the moment or the media landscape. Media people, cable and mainstream, are very, very interested in showing their respect for and engagement with veterans. They made a mistake with the veterans of Vietnam; they’ll never make it again. They like being helpful to heroes, and it does them good to be associated with regular men and women who’ve served. Vets, their friends and families comprise a significant share of the audience. The VA scandal not only allows journalists to stand up for vets, it allows them to demonstrate, at just the right moment—in the waning years of the administration, with the president’s numbers low and his standing wobbly—a certain detachment from Mr. Obama’s fortunes. They’re independent.
There is another management and accountability question here. It appears that part of the VA story is that local managers and administrators were given bonuses and the prospect of promotions for reducing wait times—so they falsified the records. What was meant to be an incentive to productivity became an incentive to lie.
I like Peggy’s ”slobocracy,” term.
It fits most gov’t unionized workers I have encountered.
The unions really are the main reason that gov’t is so slow and inefficient.
Did you know that after all these years since ”Sandy,” there are STILL neighborhoods with no safe drinking water?
Yup.
What’s the delay?
Paper is SO hard to push.
YES ,SANDY was not well taken care off, yes sir,
some came with skills to help and where turn down because they where not in the union,
but they wanted to work no charge to any one, ELECTRICIANS FOR FREE COMPASSIONATE
TO WANT TO GIVE FASTER HEATING AND LIGHT TO A PEOPLE DESPERATED,
NO YOU CANT THE UNIONS DO NOT WANT YOU TO DO IT FOR FREE,