Heckuva Job

John Edwards scored some points this week in New Orleans by proposing "Brownie's Law," requiring that political appointees be qualified for the positions for which they are nominated. (Actually it sounds more like a policy than an actual piece of legislation, since, of course, there's currently no law preventing a President Edwards from restricting his pool of nominees to fully qualified, experienced people. He'd just be the first president to actually do so.)

The proposal, of course, is sardonically named for former FEMA Director Michael Brown, who is forever linked to his role in the response to Hurricane Katrina and his previous work at the International Arabian Horse Association.

But as I've written before, and as Brown himself points out in an interview in the Washington Post today, Brown did have experience in emergency management when he was named to head FEMA. That experience was gained at FEMA itself. He started at the agency as general counsel and worked his way up over the course of a couple of years to the nomination for the top slot.

Now that may not have been the best experience, but if Edwards and other senators thought Brown lacked the qualifications to head FEMA, they had an easy remedy at their disposal: reject his nomination. They didn't.

None of this is to suggest that Brown did a stellar job, or was the best guy to run the agency. It is to suggest two other things:

• That sound bites and simple proposals about requiring appointee qualifications aren't going to improve the caliber of nominees.
• That continuing, even two years after the fact, to make Brown the designated scapegoat for Katrina merely serves to deflect attention away from the multiple systemic problems within the federal government in both preparing for a disaster like Katrina and responding to it.