Vision Circle

Paul O'Neill speaks

This quote, taken out of Paul O'Neill's Time Interview says it all:

When the corporate scandals rocked Wall Street, O'Neill and Greenspan devised a plan to make CEOs accountable. Bush went with a more modest plan because "the corporate crowd," as O'Neill calls it in the book, complained loudly and Bush could not buck that constituency. "The biggest difference between then and now," O'Neill tells Suskind about his two previous tours in Washington, "is that our group was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl (Rove), Dick (Cheney), Karen (Hughes) and the gang seemed to be mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction."

Others have said as much. I'm not sure people really understand what this means. I've never been one to shout the praises of The Enlightenment from the rooftops, largely because it was always hard for me to see the light through all that smeared West African blood. And it isn't like other cultures were clueless as to what reason was.

But embracing social science it's hard to go against hardcore EVIDENCE. The thing that scares me most about Bush is the idea that evidence simply doesn't matter. I detested Clinton, for a number of reasons (none of them including what he did with Monica). But I knew that at the end he was smart, a hard worker, and believed in evidence.