Wolfowitz isolated, remote, stupid at World Bank

[n2doc]

Bank workers see Wolfowitz as a world apart
Longtime employees say his cadre of GOP aides have helped limit their access to the organization's already remote president.
By Nicole Gaouette, Times Staff Writer
May 11, 2007

WASHINGTON — In the tense days after World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz admitted his mistake in arranging a generous payment package for his girlfriend, angry employees launched an impromptu campaign. Blue ribbons started cropping up on lapels, taped to doors and as an image in e-mails — a symbol of support for the bank's ideals of good governance and transparency.

The curls of fabric were seen by many of the more than 7,000 staffers in Washington as a silent but clear call for their leader to resign.

Then Wolfowitz himself was seen wearing one.

For employees chafing against his leadership, that blunder became a vivid example of Wolfowitz's isolation from the bank's employees — a remoteness that has left him with few allies inside the international poverty-fighting institution as he battles to keep his job.

A political scientist and former Pentagon official known for his analytical skills and predilection for sweeping, visionary ideas, Wolfowitz also has a reputation for remaining aloof from day-to-day management decisions. At the World Bank, he brought in a tightknit cadre of aides — all onetime GOP political operatives with no experience in development projects — who limited the access of bank veterans to the new president.

These aides, according to more than a dozen World Bank employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared for their jobs, showed little patience for bank practices, excluded veteran staff experts from negotiations over development plans for countries and went around managers to quiz staff about their work.

"When he arrived at the World Bank, he began by listening very carefully," said Sebastian Mallaby, author of a book on the World Bank. "But it emerged after six months or so that all of this would go in one ear and out the other. When it really came time to do something, he appeared to fall back on the advice of three people he had brought with him from the outside. The internal experts were feeling more and more out of the loop. That set Wolfowitz up."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-wolfowitz11may11,0,7807080.story

Comment- He is just following the behavior of W to a "T"....

[shain from kane]

1. "...known for his analytical skills and predilection for sweeping, visionary ideas..." I thought he

was known for licking his comb.

[n2doc]

3. they forgot to include "wrong, criminal" in that description as well

The rest of the piece has a bunch of fluff and crap about how great he was supposed to be. Typical LA times stuff. But I thought the observation about the ribbon was worth posting...

[A-Schwarzenegger]

4. Spit happens.

[JHB]

5. Once again, I think the laurels Wolfie rests on should be re-evaluated

For quite a while now I've been thinking Wolfowitz's (and other neocons) heady reputations in Washington for brilliance is more akin to the "powers" of John Edwards (the guy who supposedly talks to dead people, not the pol) than to reality.

Wolfie and others fed an audience predisposed to paranoia about the Soviets just the sort of things that would keep that paranoia stoked on the edge, but was never easily verifiable and so couldn't be readily debunked. By the time they actually were proven wrong, they already had their reputations and were too high on the totem pole to suffer the consequences.

I think there's History Master's or Doctor's thesis re-evaluating the neocons just waiting to be written.

[Virginia Dare]

2. That's actually an apt description of the whole damn lot of them..n/t