15 September 2004

Tis the Season

The Hill was swarming yesterday with activity. Everyone is back and there is the frenzy of the second session of the 108 th Congress with a war on and an election looming.

'˜Tis the season, and all that. There are cops everywhere. The Authorities are busy digging it up, closing off streets, and trying to harden it as a target. It is quite extraordinary. There are Jersey barriers on the streets between the office buildings and orange vests and earnest young people and guys in suits like me, who are old enough to know better but have mortgages and responsibilities. Most of them were gesturing in the air. If you did not know that they were talking on cell phones you would assume they were deranged. I didn't pay much attention.

I was on the phone. A colleague had forgotten the address. It was pandemonium, a sea of staffers and members and tourists and the dark-suited sharks who consider them their prey.

I was standing on the corner of Constitution and First. The morning session I was attending was in the conference room of the fifth floor of the Reserve Officers Association. The ROA is a lobby for the National Guard, and the building was fairly quiet since their national convention was in progress in Las Vegas and the President was there to say how proud he was to be one of nineteen presidents who served in the Guard.

ROA has a primo location on some private land located between the Capitol and the Senate office building named for Richard Russell, the legendary lawmaker from Georgia . They stay in business by renting out their facility for events of the public interest.

The Russell Building butts right into the Dirksen Building, which in turn has the marble Hart Building with its fantastic six-story atrium pasted on. That is where Porter Goss was settling in for his confirmation hearings.

I took a cab to get there, since I was running late. The closest Metro stop to the Senate Side is under Union Station, that magnificent marble pile of a train station. When I first came to Washington in 1971 it was boarded up and water ran down the inside walls from the leaky roof. They herded passengers to the platforms through the dimness of the main waiting room in corridors constructed of white-washed plywood so they wouldn't get hurt by parts of the ceiling falling down.

I didn't have time. I was supposed to attend a panel of distinguished government people and academics who were going to explain why the cops and the firemen can't communicate with each other, and why the cops were evacuating the Trade Towers while the Firemen were going up.

They said it was a classic interoperability problem, but it had nothing to do with radios. They were face-to-face on the stairwells. But the Firemen were relying on communications that were supposed to be broadcast from the top of the tower. In the opinion of the panelists, the problem is that the 50,000 separate police and fire units across the country, the majority of which have less than 25 people in them, and don't want to communicate. They are the kings where they live and they like it that way.

I talked to a Deputy Fire Chief from a medium-sized town in Virginia who was also trying to get at the Congressman. He said the cops usually got to be the biggest kings in the towns across America because they had guns.

He was making a joke, I was pretty sure. I sighed. I did not have a speaking part in this and was sitting taking notes for a follow-up memo. The organizers had succeeded in getting a Congressman to come and give the key-note address, and a free breakfast to ensure the media was there. I sampled the eggs and the sweet rolls they put out on the tables. It was an impressive spread.

The Congressman was an amiable enough fellow, but he does not have a lot of charisma. He is stiff and tall and his qualification to be a Congressman was based mostly on his twelve years in a State Patrol Police car. His law enforcement background propelled him into the Homeland Security arena after the attacks, and he has some legislation that will auction off parts of the electromagnetic ether that belong to you to fund new radios so the cops won't be going down while someone else is going up.

The tab is around a billion and a half bucks, small change, and I don't know if you will ever hear anything about it. Most laws they pass are like that. But the smell of money is intoxicating, even if it is only a few thousand millions, and that is why we were all here to listen. That and the public interest, of course.

I jostled with a couple of lobbyists to shake his hand and see if I could get my card in his hand. They were trim guys in sport coats with no ties who do not seem to know the dress code here. The Congressman knew the difference, instantly, and when I introduced myself as a former constituent he took in the sober gray suit, white shirt, placid tie and lapel pin and knew I was from here, and thus not a donor but a potential threat. His political antenna bristled like his cropped gray hair.

I wound up standing with the lobbyists, who like me, have a fabulous idea that, if funded with a couple million of the taxpayer's dollars, will end world hunger. They were in business for themselves, though, and hungry. My company is much larger, and I just helped myself to a sausage from the breakfast buffet. The Congressman represents a district where I used to live, and after he excused himself to have some free eggs, he read from his dry remarks.

I thought he could use some juice and helped myself to some from a jug on the table. I wondered what it would be like to debate him on the issues. I had consumed enough complementary coffee that I thought it might be fun. Maybe I was starting to hallucinate.

He was just sweeping out of the room with legislative assistant, an earnest young woman dressed in brown. The public part of the day was starting on the Hill after all the free breakfasts. Across the street, Porter Goss was taking his place in the big public hearing room between the Dirksen and the Hart Buildings . It was an open session, which meant that the press could be there and everyone refrained from asking classified questions.

He appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee. They will badger him for a while and then send a recommendation to the Senate as a whole, thumbs up or thumbs down. It is with the "Advice and Consent" of the Senate that the President's senior staff are confirmed, and like it or not, before the Senate you must appear if you want one of those jobs.

A lot of folks don't want to be confirmed by the Senate. They were fairly gentle with Mr. Goss, though he had to answer questions for over four hours. I know people who have turned down the opportunity to serve in these posts, or at least made avoiding the confirmation process a condition of employment.

It can be as humiliating as a deposition by a hostile attorney. By the time we got out of the Reserve Officer's Building he had done his four hours of questions and was free. If it was not exactly a love-fest, he was introduced by the senior Democrat on the committee, and the questions were mostly supportive. Mr. Goss dropped a minor bomblette on the conference table, saying that it would take five years to rebuild the nation's human intelligence capability.

It is important to have a major challenge when you take on a job, something against which you can measure success. He said that if confirmed as director, he would practice "tough love" in leading the fifteen agencies of the intelligence community. He ranked them as standing at 3 on a scale of 10 in terms of capabilities.

That is disconcerting, but it is comforting that we have room to grow.

S enator Mike DeWine of the battleground State of Ohio seemed non-plussed. He called the statement frightening. Mr. Goss, the only Congressman who had been a real Spook that we know of, replied "Candor is important, sir." But since it was an open session, he later said he "didn't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy by telling you how bad I think the problem is."

I agree with the former, and oppose the latter. I took a cab back uptown to write my report and make some phone calls. Some of the Democrats are still unhappy with Mr. Goss, and they may use the candor against him. But still, The Conventional Wisdom in town suggests that he is certain to win Senate confirmation, probably next Tuesday.

'Tis the season, after all.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra