Paul Wolfowitz, Jennifer Lopez, and me

If you've been following the Paul Wolfowitz meltdown, you might appreciate this. Long before he took over the World Bank, long before he was in trouble for getting his girlfriend a raise while he campaigned against corruption, and before he left the Pentagon where his advocacy and management of the War in Iraq has turned out to be, oh, just a tad questionable, I ran into Wolfowitz on Election Night 2004. It was a somewhat surreal deal for me and Washington. As you probably remember, the network exit polls were wrong and for most of the day Washington thought President John Kerry was about to be elected. As the evening wore on, of course, things turned in Bush's favor. Since all politics is local, I'd spent much of the evening thinking my legal troubles in the CIA leak case would end with the election of President Kerry who, I guessed, would be unlikely to continue the investigation in a moment of national healing. Bush, of course, couldn't stymie it. So after thinking my legal troubles were over, I thought they were back upon me.

I was at Bush election headquarters, the massive Ronald Reagan building in Washington D.C. Jennifer Lopez's "Let's Get Loud" was blaring through the corridors, and like everyone I wandered around trying to garner what news bits I could. At one point I ran into Wolfowitz in shirt sleeves, looking very very happy. I'd never met him before but I asked him what he thought, as a former math major and son of a prominent mathematician, what he thought of the exit polls apparently being so wrong. "They must have been done by the IAEA," he quipped to me. It was a funny line and a reference to the International Atomic Energy Administration which dealt with Iraq, sent in weapons inspectors, etc. The dis of the IAEA seemed witty at the time, although even in my slightly addled state trying to cover the evening, I thought: "Hey wait a minute. The IAEA's been more right than wrong. And where are those weapons of mass destruction anyway?" Wolfowitz's stunningly bad judgement is legendary, famously telling Congress in 2003 "The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. Now, there are a lot of claims on that money, but... We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." but my admittedly very small anecdote suggests that his judgement can be bad at all hours under many circumstances.