Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a mostly good analysis of Obama’s recent mistakes staffing the administration. But then he loses me with this:
Early in his administration, the president announced that he was putting forward the toughest ethics laws in White House history, including the restriction that anyone who had lobbied for a company could not work in an administration post related to that previous lobbying work. Then we started to learn about the loopholes. William J. Lynn III, his choice for the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, recently lobbied for military contractor Raytheon. Mark Patterson, the treasury secretary’s chief of staff, was a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs.
The White House defended the exceptions on the grounds that these people were exceptionally qualified. This is such a reasonable argument that the White House easily could have made it on the front end.
It strikes me that part of the problem the Obama administration has is that this argument isn’t reasonable at all. Whatever politically expedient reason you gin up, there’s no good time to to tell Americans outside the beltway that you couldn’t find anyone without tax evasion problems to run the IRS. And it’s particularly difficult to argue someone’s “exceptionally qualified” when you use the same argument to justify overlooking problems with lesser appointees such as Lynn and Patterson. Or as one reader emailed me earlier today:
What really gets me about the mulligans of the administration vis-a-vis appointments is not that these elites feel they don’t have to pay taxes. No, the height of their arrogance is that someone is said to be “uniquely qualified” or is indispensible, and therefore, ala Geithner, must be confirmed hell or high water.
No job in government is so difficult or demanding that only one specific person is able to fill it. To believe that there is but a single adult in this whole country who can ably sit atop a bloated beauracracy for a short period of time (as measured by an average adult’s career span) is ludicrous….and insulting. Elvis is irreplaceable. Hank Paulson is not.