Politics & Power Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

Inside this bureaucratic sentence is a quiet indictment of how Washington learns to take threats seriously only after they’ve become undeniable. Sidney Blumenthal isn’t admiring Dick Clarke’s persistence so much as spotlighting the institutional drag that made such persistence necessary. The phrase "pushed constantly" does the heavy lifting: it implies a system where the default setting is delay, where attention is a scarce resource rationed by rank, routine, and political appetite.

Naming the Principals Committee matters because it’s the room where issues stop being "staff concerns" and start becoming presidential reality. Blumenthal’s subtext is about gatekeeping: terrorism wasn’t absent from the government’s radar, it was stuck below the threshold of prestige. Clarke’s job title - "head of counter-terrorism" - reads like it should confer urgency. Instead, it functions as irony. If the person tasked with terrorism has to lobby just to get terrorism discussed, the problem isn’t information; it’s prioritization.

Contextually, this line sits in the long shadow of the pre-9/11 years, when counterterrorism advocates argued they were warning, briefing, escalating - and still hitting institutional inertia. Blumenthal, a journalist steeped in the power politics of the Clinton and Bush eras, frames the story as process: who gets heard, how agendas are set, how catastrophe can be less a failure of imagination than a failure of meetings. The sentence is procedural on purpose; it suggests disaster can be manufactured by protocol.