Inspiration Apparently Came from Condi Rice as She Danced
It was only as the Bush 43 presidency wound down to its lingering months that the world learned about the strange test the White House personnel office used to make hiring decisions for key governmental appointments.
Put simply, the test consisted of throwing a quarter at the naked buttocks of an applicant to gauge the tautness of the flesh. If the quarter bounced off the flesh with a certain snap, the applicant won the White House appointment, all other things being equal.
But if the flesh sagged, which is to say it possessed a certain sponginess, and if the thrown quarter, instead of bouncing, struggled a bit and then fell limply to the floor… Well then, never mind about resume, political connections, born again credentials or Richard B. Cheney’s blessing. The applicant was sent packing.
Officially, the test was known as the “firm buttocks evaluation for policy suitability.” But among White House insiders it quickly came to be known as the “tight ass test” or, less often, the “hard ass test.” And when a senior government official, a cabinet secretary, for example, wanted to tout a proposed White House hire, he or she would say, “This one’s a real hard ass,” meaning, of course, that the quarter would bounce right back when flung against the naked buttocks.
The White House’s bizarre hiring test might have never been uncovered by the news media but for a newspaper reporter’s book about Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice.
The book described a scene from a late-night party with some friends after Rice became a Bush 43 fixture. As Rice danced to rock and roll music, a friend speculated about whether a quarter thrown against her clothed buttocks would bounce back when thrown against them. Yes! The quarter bounced back with impressive snap.
Her friends proclaimed that she had tight buttocks and teased her about it. According to the reporter’s account, she was pleased and proud about her tight buttocks.
How a quarter bouncing off Rice’s buttocks came to be a White House personnel office litmus test remains obscure, something for historians to dig out at some point. But there is little doubt among scholars who have studied the testing procedure that it was conducted with typical Bush 43 conservative thoroughness.
A machine that would fling quarters with an exact amount of kinetic energy was devised, as was a photometric analysis system that would track the quarter’s bounce off the job candidate’s naked rear end and analyze every aspect of the quarter’s path from flesh to floor.
Algorithms were devised that parsed the job candidate’s resume and other credentials and then weighed them against the tight buttocks test results. The entire test was carried out under the supervision of White House doctors with complete privacy in their medical examination rooms.
It also remains for historians to discover some day which Bush 43 appointees were subjected to the taut buttocks test and which managed to avoid it. But those in the media who follow such Bush 43 arcana are eager to learn whether denizens such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or FEMA Director Micheal Brown (“Brownie you’re doing a heckuva job”) were subjected to the test.
Of equal interest, and surely worthy a Ph.D. dissertation or two in years to come, is the question of whether senior Bush 43 counselors, such as Vice President Cheney and political strategy guru Karl Rove, would have been able to pass the flung quarter hiring examination had they been subjected to it.