Davis vs. Styles: Grudge Match

To my mind, the best part of the Washington Post's epic smackdown of House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., today is the inside scoop contained both in the main story and a sidebar on Davis' feud with Angela Styles, the Bush administration's first procurement policy chief.

"The businesses in Mr. Davis district are primarily government contractors and he wants to make sure the $$ are free flowing without much regard to the fiscal consequences," Styles wrote in a May 2002 e-mail. Davis fires back in the Post piece, telling the paper's reporters, "Our clashes with Angela Styles were very clear from Day One. We sat down with her two or three times, and she just was not getting any adult supervision at OMB. I don't think they had any idea of what was going on."

But Styles' former boss, ex-OMB chief and current Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, gets the last word: "She was getting plenty of supervision," he said. "If Tom had a problem with Angela, I suppose it was because she understood the issues too well."