David Broder writes a seemingly fair article on His Expediency in the WaPo, trying to suss out what experience Mitt brings from the state he can’t leave soon enough. As these things go, it’s not bad, until this paragraph, which has become, uh, “non-operative”:
Romney’s campaign travels as head of the Republican Governors Association kept him on the road much of the past year. But he was on the job, and deeply immersed in the details, when the collapse of a concrete ceiling in a “Big Dig” tunnel in Boston killed a motorist this summer. He forced the legislature to give him control of the independent Turnpike Authority — power it had previously denied him — and he fired the administrator and moved in his own people.
“Deeply immersed.” Yeah, he was neck-deep in something:
Gov. Mitt Romney is blaming transportation secretary John Coglianos haste to reopen Big Dig tunnels after Julys fatal collapse for the move to allow contractor Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff a role in inspecting tunnel repairs.
… Romney called the move a mistake, one he would not have made himself.
“John wanted to get those tunnels open as fast as he could, and he got as many engineers as he could in there to help out, and he got in six from Bechtel,” Romney said. “I wouldnt have done that. I think it was a mistake. And he acknowledges that that was a mistake and has asked the Bechtel people not to be involved in it.”
Sure Mr. Broder, that’s just as hands-on as could be. The buck stops here, yes sirree.
Nope. Any Salt Lake City Olympic magic Romney was able to conjure up over the summer is long since gone. And GOP primary voters will be hearing more about that in due course.
the assumption is that it was a bad decision, but was it? I guess that depends on the circumstances. As I’ve written before, people are on a witch hunt, and as far as I can see, B/P-B keep getting the blame without a clear reason why. Maybe they deserve it, but I suspect it’s become the easy political scapegoat football.
Regardless of whether B/P-B is ultimately absolved of responsibility for whatever went wrong in the Big Dig, it’s NEVER a good idea to have a company investigate its own work to determine whether it did a crappy job — if for no other reason (and there are others) that no one will believe the result of the investigation. It’s got to be credible, so it’s got to be independent.