During the presidential election campaign, even Barack Obama’s most severe detractors conceded that he was smart, politically savvy, and had put together a team of brilliant advisors and managers.
Everyone expected that President Obama would carry the cool professionalism and political acumen of his campaign into his administration.
What the hell happened?
Since the election, the Obama team has become The Gang That Couldn’t Appoint Straight.
Today, both his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (Tom Daschle) and his nominee for Chief Performance Officer (Nancy Killefer) were forced to withdraw their nominations because of tax problems (or worse). Last week, Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary (Timony Geithner) was approved by the Senate only after offering a mea culpa for his own tax issues. And Obama’s first nominee for Commerce Secretary (Bill Richardson) was forced to withdraw his nomination when it became known that he is under federal grand jury investigation into improper pay-to-play business dealings (or worse).
Who is to blame for this mess?
As the executive director of Obama’s transition team, Obama’s Harvard Law classmate Chris Lu bears much of the responsibility, as does transition team co-director John D. Podesta and personal director Jim Messina (now Deputy White House Chief of Staff), as well as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Senior Advisor (and formerly chief campaign strategist) David Alexrod, and Staff Secretary Lisa Brown.
Along with the White House's expressions of "regret" and "disappointment," someone (probably from the group named above) should step forward and admit that they had the responsibility to vet these nominees and that they've (repeatedly) blown it.
Much of Obama’s post-election popularity – and his political capital – rests on the belief that we finally have a president who is smart enough, engaged enough, and politically savvy enough to navigate the ship of state through the very dark and troubled waters ahead.
With a series of highly publicised botched appointments to several of the most crucial cabinet positions, Obama risks undermining that belief and squandering his political capital before it is even spent.
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John Jacob Di Gasbarro
So Polite
Tim4change
Rolling
Dorian de Wind
Lairderg
Salon.com
Comments
Great post - rated
Also, some strange omissions. Whatever happened to Robert Reich, one of his early supporters? Or Susan Estrich? Both should be considered for the HHS post.
WOOF
At least he's stopping them before they get confirmed.
That's more than I can say for the last crew...Alberto Gonzalez
I have been amused (and angered) by Repugnicans born-again fiscal responsibility and ethics. They never applied this to bush. How our standards go up when we are not in power...
Yes, would like to see some personal responsiblity on the part of staff.
Bullshit! Set the bar high enough and we will have practically perfect people only in office who don't have a single clue how the other 99% of us get along. I DON"T want a god to serve me.
We didn't hear about the problems because we weren't supposed to hear about them. Agency after agency, Bush and his minions appointed people up to their necks in regulated industry ties or that had a partisan agenda 80 miles wide.
Part of the reason for us not hearing about these disastrous appointments was because the 'democrats' were on their backs getting their stomachs rubbed by the republicans... No wonder they are called 'blue dogs', with yellow streaks on their backs a foot wide...
The danger is that the public will reverse its perception of Obama as having his (and our) act together. That would be very bad for Obama, for Democrats, and for the country.
Thanks for all who read, commented, and rated. And thanks to the editors for the pick.
we can hope that he keeps the nation from total collapse, but we can't hope for any fundamental change in the way things are done. that means the long term projection is disaster.
politicians can't fix the problem, they are the rash of the political syphilis afflicting america.
Thanks for reading and commenting, but of course you know I disagree with you.
From your comments, I believe that you're an advocate of direct democracy. How do you think that direct democracy has worked in California -- in particular, the proposition process, which has brought us both Prop 13 and Prop 8?
So you marry CREDENTIALS to TASKS.
When we get all invasive over SCOTUS nominees, we wind up with faceless candidates with scant track record of delivering opinions. We 86 a Bork, who had a brilliant legal mind, and we wind up with a littany of humble men with much to be humble about such as Souter, Kennedy, and Thomas.
1099 filings on staff and the like are noise issues. Many folks will have one or two of those in their background if they have ever had any help performed for them on the fly.
My wife, who is an attorney with a business/tax law firm, agrees with you about 1099s. I suspect, however, that these minor tax probelms were not the reason that Daschle and Killefer withdrew, but that there were more troubling tax issues as well.
I also think that the comparison to Supreme Court nominees is apples and oranges. For cabinet appointments, it seems to me that the Senate should be primarily concerned with potential conflicts of interest and leave questions of ideology and competence to the president. For the Supreme Court, with lifetime appointments that typically last far longer than a partuclar administration, the Senate ought to be concerned almost solely with ideology, since just about anyone with a law degree is competent to be a Justice. The very idea of a "brilliant legal mind" seems questionable to me -- and certainly isn't required (or perhaps even helpful) on the Supreme Court.
Both organizations are playing for life-altering stakes, will "take no prisoners" (either destroy reputations, throw allies under the bus, or if necessary, arrange the occasional "accident"), are ruthless in their execution while simultaneously stunning in their tunnel vision and frequent incompetence, venal in their cynicism and expert at disguising that cynicism with sophisticated, elliptical bullshit, and at their core, concerned with one thing: the acquisition and maintenance of power and it's privileges, while feigning self-sacrifice for the "public interest", the "American People" or the "common good".
Obama can inspire, and he's as different from Bush as Cary Grant was from Charles Laughton. So What? It's the system that's rotten, the system of pay-to-play, incessant lobbying, stifling bureaucracy, and lethal political correctness, that's been growing like Ebola in a secure lab at Fort Detrick. The old Mafia bromide, "The fish stinks from the head" may or may not be true, but the whole damn fish stinks...that is a soul-deadening reality, and the single greatest obstacle to real "change" regardless of the man at the top. With this system as it is, they could take Superman down.
If Obama doesn't want to be tagged with "more of the same" before he even gets off the starting line, or much, much worse ("See what happens when you put a ****** in there?")--and make no mistake, that is what the vast army of haters and morons will imply, or sneer openly, with greater fervor if these kind of screw-ups continue--he better halt his Titanic Captain Smith impersonation, stop admitting every 5 minutes that he "screwed up" (to quote the Duke in "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon", a leader "shouldn't apologize...it's a sign of weakness"), read his staff the riot act, and get things back on track.
This isn't social work he's doing, or nursing, or community organizing. This is hardball in a category 5 hurricane. Capice?