Saturday, January 17, 2004

This week in The Wall Street Journal, John Fund said that Paul O'Neill should have known he didn't belong in a Bush administration. But as Julian Borger in The Guardian notes, O'Neill did know that, and said so -- something Fund would have known if he'd actually read Ron Suskind's book:

Fund:

...it wouldn't have taken much for Mr. O'Neill to figure out that on issues his new boss would more resemble Ronald Reagan than Nixon, Ford or the first George Bush. All he had to do was pay attention to Mr. Bush's record in Texas and his 2000 campaign.

Borger:

By his own account, Mr O'Neill actually warned the president-elect and his deputy not to hire him. When he was flown in for a secret meeting in a Washington hotel, he took a list of his past pronouncements that could prove embarrassing to a conservative administration.

He had called for a petrol tax, and worse still, he believed global warming to be a real threat.


So, why didn't the message get through? Apparently President-Elect Bush had more important things on his mind:

But in the Washington hotel room, the book suggests, Mr Bush was not listening. Mr O'Neill was telling a long anecdote about an encounter with an environmental pressure group when Mr Bush held up his hand and asked: "Where's lunch?". The president then upbraided his chief of staff for failing to produce a cheeseburger on time.

(Thanks to Skimble for the Guardian link.)

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