Saying they “delayed our action plan,” Rick Snyder lays the blame for the Flint water disaster at the feet of “career civil servants” who cared more about process than people

You have to give him credit for having chutzpah. It took him a few days, but our Governor, with he help of multiple consultants and a few top flight PR firms, is attempting not just to deflect blame for what happened in Flint, but actually turn the deadly public health crisis into an anti-government parable that serves both his purposes, and those of his wealthy donors.

Snyder’s first so-called apology to the people of Flint came during the holidays, between Christmas and New Years. It came by way of press release. “I want the Flint community to know how very sorry I am that this has happened,” he said in the release. “And I want all Michigan citizens to know that we will learn from this experience, because Flint is not the only city that has an aging infrastructure.”

As far as apologies go, it wasn’t very satisfying.

“Hey,” he might as well have said, “It sucks that your kids have brain damage, but we’re going to learn from it… Happy New Year.”

He clearly didn’t know at the time just how big this story was going to get.

Within a very short time, though, the Flint water crisis became international news. Before Snyder knew what was happening, Cher was calling for his public execution and his poor handling of the public health crisis had become a subject of discussion on the presidential campaign trail. People not just in Michigan, but around the entire country, began to refer to this as the defining moment of his administration, likening his less than speedy response to the disaster in Flint to the Bush administration’s handling of hurricane Katrina… Clearly Snyder had to say something more than, “We’re going to learn from this,” but what?

I should add here, for those of you who have never had dealings with folks who work in public relations, that there’s a sub-specialty within the field known as “crisis communications.” People engaged in this line of work study disasters and how both people and companies either survive them, or get torn apart by them. They study things like the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, and they convey the lessons learned from such events to their clients. While I, of course, have no way of knowing what Governor Snyder was told, I think it’s highly likely that someone in this profession made it very clear to him that, if he didn’t show some emotion and take full responsibility, that he would not survive this. [They likely also told him that, in time, he could begin to shift the blame away from himself, but we’ll get to that in a minute.] And that’s exactly what he did.

Telling the people of Flint that they “deserve better,” a teary-eyed Snyder took the occasion last week, during his State of the State address, to say “I’m sorry most of all that I let you down. You deserve better.” And, for the most part, my sense is that it worked. People liked that he took ownership of the problem, and pledged to do whatever it took to “fix it.”

Of course, at just around the same time that he was telling the people of Flint, “(This is) a crisis you did not create, and could not have prevented,” he was also laying the groundwork for phase two of the communications plan.

On the same day that he gave his State of the State speech, Snyder also talked with Ron Fournier of the National Journal, telling him that, while he does take full responsibility, it should be noted that this problem really happened because of long-serving government employees whom he had never even met. “This was a case where we had people who had been in these jobs for years, (who) hadn’t gotten the change memo yet saying there’s got to be a better way of doing things,” Snyder said in the interview. “So they kept doing things the way they have.”

So this terrible thing that we’re still watching unfold in Flint didn’t happen because Snyder fundamentally changed the way state government was run, removing checks and balances at every level, and giving unelected Emergency Managers free rein over cities to do things like slash costs by giving people untreated river water to drink, but in spite of it. This happened, according to Snyder, because, try as you might, you just can’t fix everything “when you come in from the outside.” [God knows how bad things could have gotten in Flint, had Snyder not been out Governor. There would probably be bodies in the streets right now.]

So the problem wasn’t that he, by employing his brilliant business mind, and taking advantage of every loophole at his disposal, had created the least transparent and accountable state government in the entire country, but that not everyone in government got “the memo” that they were supposed to do more with less, and be more accountable, despite the culture of unaccountability all around them… Makes sense, right?

Before we go any farther, I should mention that, as of right now, few seem to buy Snyder’s revisionist take on where responsibility lies for the disaster in Flint. The following clip comes from yesterday’s Washington Post, where opinion writer Dana Milbank made it very clear who was at fault.

(T)he Flint disaster, three years in the making, is not a failure of government generally. It’s the failure of a specific governing philosophy: Snyder’s belief that government works better if run more like a business…

Snyder undertook an arrogant public-policy experiment, underpinned by the ideological assumption that the “experience set” of corporate-style managers was superior to the checks and balances of democracy. This is why Flint happened…

Unwilling to accept that narrative, Snyder has begun to double down on this notion that the problem in Flint was caused by government employees engaged in “business as usual.” [By the way, I don’t know why people on television are letting Snyder get away with saying that this was a result of people in Flint engaged in doing “business as usual,” when, to my knowledge, no one in Flint civil service had ever poisoned the entire city before.] And, toward that end, he’s beginning to pepper his speeches with a few phrases that must have tested well with focus groups. My favorite is “career civil servants.”

Here’s footage of Snyder on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, telling us how this was the work of “career civil servants” who were too caught up in regulations and technical reports to just do the right thing. [Mentions of “career civil servants” happen at 3:40 and 6:02.]

So not only is Snyder blaming “big government,” but, in the process, he’s also suggesting that regulations actually caused this. According to Snyder, if you can believe it, he actually wanted to move faster in response to what was happening in Flint, but he was told to wait for reports.

And I’m not making this up.

Civil servants, Synder told Fox News today, “delayed our action plan.”

Yup, if only the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule hadn’t slowed them down, they might have actually been able to save some of those kids in Flint from permanent brain damage…

It’s like something out of an Orwellian Koch brother wet dream.

And some on the right, as you might expect, have already joined Snyder in his attempt to reframe the narrative of what happened in Flint and push this version of events. See, for example, this recent tweet from the folks at ALEC, who would like nothing better than to see Snyder-like “reforms” spread across the nation.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time, and which of these two warring narratives comes out on top. It probably goes without saying, but my hope is that, when all is said and done, our experiences in Flint aren’t used to justify a coordinated push for even smaller government and less environmental regulation. Given the state of the world, however, and what we’ve seen over the past few decades, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if people tried. They are, if nothing else, relentless.

[The photo at the top of the page, taken in downtown Ann Arbor, near the Governor’s Main Street condo, comes courtesy of Ann Arbor City Council’s Kirk Westphal.]