Dirty work left undone

It has been 40 years since my father taught me how to wash a kitchen floor. He left the mop in the back hall closet and instead handed me a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush . To do a job right, he said, you have to be willing to get dirty.

Even then I knew the lesson was not about housekeeping; the message was that any job worth doing was worth doing well. I have wondered all week what he would have made of the well-pressed suits parading before the microphones to wash their manicured hands of responsibility for the porous walls and collapsible ceilings of the most disastrous highway project in American history.

My dad lived long enough to see his North Cambridge neighbor, US House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., secure initial federal funding for tunnel and bridge construction that, 20 years ago, was supposed to cost $2 billion . Don't bet on it, my dad scoffed, skeptical of the projected price tag on the Democratic speaker's crowning achievement that would be a welcome local-jobs program.

The bill, as we all know, is now at $14.6 billion and climbing. No one has had the stomach yet to calculate the likely cost of repairs in the wake of the roof collapse that killed Melina Del Valle or the lost revenue from the resulting road closures that have turned Boston into the traffic nightmare the Big Dig was designed to forever foreclose.

We have spent a lot of the past week talking about the incestuous relationship between contractors and politicians, between project managers and those charged with oversight of the Big Dig. So like Boston, we have said. But much of what went wrong is as attributable to a broader cultural shift as it is to a parochial political climate. We wash our kitchen floors with mops these days.

The culture is less about communal responsibility than individual and corporate self-interest; more about getting what's mine than about doing what's right; less about crossing T's than cutting corners.

By week's end, officials of both political parties who ignored a decade of warnings about shoddy design and construction had launched half a dozen of their own investigations that will conclude that the collapse was caused by shoddy design and construction.

As empty gestures go, these finger-pointing exercises are topped only by the speed with which a do-nothing Democratic Legislature handed off the mess to a do-nothing Republican governor, happy to grandstand before the cameras as he pursues his delusional 2008 presidential ambitions.

Governor Mitt Romney even invoked his role in the Winter Olympics turnaround in Salt Lake City in 2002 to underscore his credentials as a crisis manager. The problem with that analogy is that Romney is not just currently learning about problems with the Big Dig. There has been a Republican in office through every phase of design and construction.

Romney has done little about mismanagement at the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority in four years other than issue press releases. If he could wrest power from Matt Amorello so easily last week, he could have made a stronger effort to do so in 2004 when water began pouring into the Central Artery tunnel through what turned out to be hundreds of leaks. He could have redoubled those efforts in 2005 when falling debris damaged five vehicles, narrowly avoiding the tragedy the Del Valle family has suffered.

Someone should not have to die to prompt a chief executive to demonstrate leadership. Romney did not look decisive last week; he looked exploitative.

On Friday, he was still at it. He refused to attend a meeting that included Amorello, lest cameras catch him in the company of the scapegoat he is trying to fire, but he invited photographers to snap him signing legislation authorizing him to oversee inspection of the tunnels. The pictures in his office told the story of this whole sorry episode: There was not a speck of dirt under the crisis manager's fingernails.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.