President Obama desperately needs a sweeping staff shakeup to save his presidency. Leslie H. Gelb on why he must reassign Rahm, dump Larry Summers, and get rid of National Security adviser Jim Jones.
The negative, even dismissive, talk about the Obama White House has reached a critical point. The president must change key personnel now. Unless he speedily sets up a new team, he will be reduced to a speechmaker. It’s mostly a matter of relocating the Chicago and campaign crowd who surround the Oval Office and inserting people with proven records of getting things done in Washington and the world.
To be fair, it’s not clear whether the bad judgments on priorities, practicalities, and steadiness come from Mr. Obama or his White House team. Maybe he overpowers them in discussions, or maybe he gives them a role in policymaking far beyond their experience in that realm. Unless you’re there, you don’t know. But Mr. Obama is the president, and except for the right-wing crazies, most Americans still recognize his great talents and promise. It is he who’s got to be helped. So it is they who’ve got to go.
It is he who’s got to be helped. So it is they who’ve got to go.
One may quarrel with my sense of urgency here. But it’s hard to have a conversation with opinion leaders anywhere—and especially in Washington—that doesn’t descend into ripping Obama’s White House team. The refrain of complaints is always the same:
• Obama is forever taking strong stances only to backfill and trim. Most recently, he said he did not “begrudge” Wall Streeters their big earnings because that was part of the market system. This, in the face of his saying only a couple of weeks ago that such big bonuses were “shameful.”
• Obama doesn’t know what’s really going on. Regarding the Middle East, he recently said that “I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.” He had to be totally out of it not to realize that the Palestinians and Israelis were nowhere close to sitting down with each other and dealing.
• Obama wants to get along with everyone so badly he doesn’t recognize real opposition when he sees it—let alone know how to deal with it. He emerges from a meeting with congressional Republican leaders on health-care reform and says he is “an eternal optimist”—when those very same Republican leaders just told the press that they don’t see any common ground and believe the administration has to “scrap the bill and start over.”
• It’s even hard to follow his latest Afghan policy. He calls Afghanistan a “war of necessity” and orders more than 30,000 new troops there, coupled with an announcement that he’ll begin withdrawing some of them in a year plus, only to see some of his advisers say he will start withdrawals and some say he won’t.
(More here.)
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