Bush is running perhaps the most partisan and ideological White House in the modern era. His party's longstanding fondness for tax cuts has evolved into a pathological need to reduce every remaining burden on the wealthy. But the longer I watch this White House, the more convinced I become that ideology is just a convenient rationalization for why the president's agenda isn't working. The real reason is darker and more disturbing: The Bush White House is so obsessed with the politics of its agenda that it never even asks whether it will work.

He boils down the problem to the ultimate Washington dichotomoy -- political hacks and policy wonks -- and the fact that the hacks of the Bush administration have declared war on wonks, making decisions almost entirely based on political reasoning, without regard to whether they make sense from a policy standpoint.

(This very fact, confirmed by Paul O'Neill and John DiIulio in their descriptions of the inner workings of the Bush administration, is why Bush is vulnerable to the incompetency gambit. Old-line Democrats are wary of the argument because it was used by the Dukakis campaign and clearly that didn't work out so well, but the glory of the incompetence charge is that it can make sense out of a vast confusion.

Take Iraq, for instance: Reasonably intelligent and persuasive arguments can be made for why an invasion might have been a good idea as well as for it being a totally bad idea, and people on both sides of the political spectrum can conceivably adopt either argument -- in somewhat different forms, to be sure. But there's no doubt about the question of whether the totality of the Iraq operation has been handled well or not by the administration, and every day that passes in Iraq simply brings more and more evidence that, regardless of whether going in was a good idea or not, the thing has not been done well.

The bottom line is, they've fucked up, and it's to our advantage to keep pointing it out. That's what the incompetency argument is all about.)

Reed thinks that there's hope, and I agree:

The American people are a lot smarter than either the hacks or the wonks give them credit for. For all the talk in both parties about the urgent need to win one constituency or another, most Americans apply the same political yardstick: They vote for what works. There aren't enough hacks, even in Washington, to sell a policy that doesn't. [Emphasis added -- Ed]

Postscript: Go and take a look at the article if only for Reed's description of the differences between hacks and wonks, which is pretty funny.

Incidentally, Kevin Drum is now blogging for Washington Monthly, under the title Political Animal.