Remembering Elmer Staats
As I was reading about the disgraceful political debacle that led to the downgrade of the nation's credit rating in the New York Times, I saw on a back page that Elmer Staats died last week. He was 97.
Elmer Staats. What a perfect name for the Comptroller General, the official who once headed the GAO-the Government Accountability Office as its now called---the independent agency that collects all the stats and analyzes how the government spends tax dollars.
Staats ran it for what seemed like forever-from Lyndon Johnson's time through the Nixon, Ford and Carter.
His name was as familiar as a Washington landmark-like one of those places you hear on the radio traffic reports, as in "traffic is backed up all the way to the Occoquan." It was years before I knew the Occoquan was a river. All I knew was it was somewhere traffic backed up. Same with Elmer Staats. His name was on so many reports that people who didn't know what he did, knew his name. And those who did know, knew you could take what his agency reported to the bank-its facts were seldom disputed, its neutrality never challenged, his political affiliation never known.
The Times noted that visitors to his office sofa could rest on a pillow that had a donkey on one side, an elephant on the other.
Staats came from a different Washington in another and better time. Somehow, I'm glad he didn't know about the partisan bungling that brought the embarrassing downgrade of our credit rating. He might have found that hard to take.
