It's All About The Scandals, Baby

Kevin Drum asks the right questions:

here's a broader subject to consider: why was Shaha Riza required to leave the World Bank in the first place? Answer: because World Bank rules don't allow couples to work at the Bank if one reports to the other even indirectly through a chain of supervision. Since everyone reports to the president, that meant she had to leave.

But is this an obsolete rule? The fear, obviously, is that Wolfowitz would display favoritism toward Riza, and just as obviously that's a legitimate fear. But why is this an issue only for couples? After all, when Wolfowitz took the job he brought along with him two buddies from the Bush administration, Kevin Kellems and Robin Cleveland, both of whom were offered high-paying jobs despite their lack of any particular relevant experience. This raised eyebrows at the time, but that was all. Their employment contracts were duly approved despite the fact that they were close to Wolfowitz and were plainly people to whom he'd be likely to show considerable favoritism in the future...The "couples" rule probably affects women disproportionately by a factor of ten at least, and I wonder if it's finally time to think about whether it's obsolete. Favoritism ought to be scrutinized, but why should Riza have been scrutinized any more than Kellems and Cleveland?

Folks in Washington spend a lot more time clamping down on the appearance of scandal than the actual forces that lead to poor performance and wide corruption. This, of course, is because the press reports on the appearance of scandal, rather than poor performance and wide corruption. Here you have Wolfowitz, a primary architect of the catastrophic Iraq War who was elevated to the World Bank, came flanked by cronies, and proved himself imperious and disconnected from the bank's operations. You heard, of course, about none of this; not until a whiff of easily-explained patronage drifted past the press corps.

And it's not just Wolfowitz: Edwards is a hypocrite because he has an expansive poverty platform and a big house. If you wanted to search for actions at cross-purposes with his rhetoric, scrutinizing his Senate record, or examining his post-election decision to work for a hedge fund, might actually turn up some real questions, rather than superficial examples of poor political judgment. But no; Big house, haircut. Hillary, meanwhile, employs a top strategist who heads a company with a unionbusting division, but the knock against her remains that she's cold and calculating, rather than stupidly loyal to a small inner circle of committed advisors and surrounded by individuals who seem deeply out of step with her party and professed ideals.

In the end, if the press actually reported on poor performance and enlarged incompetence into a scandal, then institutions would protect against incompetence. In fact, performance is not a metric the press is particularly interested in, and so not a vulnerability for image-conscious leaders or organizations. What they need to watch for are soap opera scandals and easily digested misjudgments.