There is a lot of stuff floating around about former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s comments that the President is a difficult, opaque person to work with:
Former Official Describes Bush as Disengaged
Mr. O’Neill was also quoted in the book as saying that the administration’s decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on “little more than hunches about what the president might think.”
Mr. O’Neill said in the CBS interview that the atmosphere was similar during his one-on-one meetings with Mr. Bush.
Speaking of his first meeting with the president, Mr. O’Neill said, “I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage him on.”
He added, “I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue.”
Time and time again, we hear that we should have successful business people in political office, that the traits and habits that drive success in the market are just what’s needed in government.
Well, here we have the former CEO of Alcoa, a person of undeniable executive caliber saying what works in a successful business doesn’t work within the current administration. The White House is spinning this as a difference in management style but I think there’s more to it than that.
O’Neill also has previous government experience to draw on, and has public service experience dating back 40 years. I doubt very much, given his experience in the Nixon and Ford administrations and his private sector history, that this was a simple difference in working styles