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Confirmations of Barack Obama’s Cabinet

Campaigner in Chief

by Bill O'Connell on September 28, 2009

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When in doubt stick with what you know.  Barack Obama knows how to campaign.  As a result he has been campaigning non-stop since he was elected.  Instead of spending his time in the Oval Office making executive decisions and leading, he is the perpetual pitch man for everyone else.  The problem is the American people didn’t elect Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as their president, nor did they elect a politburo of 30+ czars.  They elected the most inexperienced and inept chief executive since the Harding administration.

Biden’s Brushfires

Remember it was almost one year ago that Joe Biden said, “Mark my words…”  that within six months of taking office a President Obama would be faced with an international crisis.  Maybe it took a little longer than six months and maybe it is not yet a full blown crisis, but are there brushfires?  Let me count the ways:

  • Ahmadinejad thumbs his nose at the world while buying time to finish building nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to Israel.  Obama had the opportunity to put the same kind of pressure on the mullahs that the mullahs put on the Shah of Iran in 1979, by speaking out strongly against the fraudulent election in Iran. Instead he issued a tepid response and the mullahs cracked down hard.  Now Obama is negotiating from a position of extreme weakness.
  • The Poles and the Czechs are thrown under the bus, while the Russian bear licks its lips as the missile defense bases are cancelled by Obama
  • Obama has spoken to his commander in Afghanistan but once in the 70 days that the commander has been on the ground.  The general says he need more troops.  Obama is calculating his response.
  • Hugo Chavez is getting chummy with Ahmadinejad and would love to have nukes in Venezuela so he can take over as leftist strongman in South America as Castro fades away.
  • And if the nukes can’t get to Venezuela fast enough, Chavez wants to put puppets throughout the region.  He is currently trying to re-install Zalaya in Honduras, after Zalaya was removed for trying to illegally alter the Honduran constitution.  Hillary and Obama are not helping the democratic government of Honduras, but Chavez and Zalaya.
  • North Korea continues to play cat and mouse with Obama, while they also expand their nuclear and missile capabilities and see who they can sell the technology to for hard currency.

Amid all of this, one might expect President Obama to be burning the midnight oil in the Oval Office.  Well, not when there is another campaign that needs his special talents.  So he will travel to Copenhagen, to campaign for his hometown of Chicago, as they bid to be the host of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

It almost makes you pine for Jimmy Carter.

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Inexperience IV

by Bill O'Connell on July 29, 2009

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Just what is a czar anyway?  And I am not talking about the Russian royal family.  A czar is essentially a presidential advisor.  Take a moment to think about that.  Why does President Obama need to appoint 32, give or take, czars in his administration?  Could it be that he really, really needs a lot of advising?

In the campaign, the main stream media, somehow diverted the attention away from Obama’s glaring lack of experience as the Presidential candidate and put all their focus on Sarah Palin’s “lack of experience.”  Sarah Palin had more executive experience as a sitting governor and I emphasize executive experience, than Obama, Biden, and McCain combined.

But the media tut-tutted, and said “it’s only Alaska,” as for her mayoral experience, “it was a very small town.”  When Obama slipped his teleprompter and tried to claim he was running a very large organization, his campaign, it was laughable.  But don’t worry, he had Joe Biden to lean on.  I feel better.

Presidents and The Experience They Brought With Them

Let’s take a look back at past elected presidents and the executive experience they brought to office:

  • George W. Bush — Governor of  Texas
  • Bill Clinton — Governor of Arkansas
  • George H. W. Bush — Vice President of the United States, Head of the CIA
  • Ronald Reagan — Governor of California
  • Jimmy Carter — Governor of Georgia
  • Richard Nixon — Vice President of the United States
  • Lyndon Johnson — Vice President of the United States
  • John F. Kennedy — None.  He was a legislator and his inexperience nearly got us annihilated with the Cuban Missile Crisis, following the Bay of Pigs, and an embarrassing showdown with Khrushchev
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower — Five star general in command of all Allied Forces in Europe in World War II
  • Harry Truman — Vice President of the United States
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt — Governor of New York , Secretary of the Navy
  • Herbert Hoover — Secretary of Commerce
  • Calvin Coolidge — Vice President of the United States, Governor of Massachusetts
  • Warren G. Harding — Lieutenant Governor of Ohio
  • Woodrow Wilson — Governor of New Jersey, President of Princeton University
  • William Howard Taft –  Secretary of War
  • Theodore Roosevelt — Vice President of the United States, Governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy

Legislators Versus Executives

So, from the beginning of the 20th Century until the election of Barack Obama, only once has a  president with only legislative experience been elected, John F. Kennedy.  Nikita Khrushchev took advantage of Kennedy’s inexperience in their first summit in Vienna, and then there was the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the attempted overthrow of Castro.  On top of those two building blocks we got the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought us closer than we have ever been to thermonuclear obliteration.

The Eternal Campaign

President Obama is no different.  He has the least experience of any president since 1900.  He effectively was only a United States Senator for two years, as he was busy campaigning for the next two years and resigned his last two years after being elected president.  So what does he do?  He does what he is comfortable doing and what he is good at, campaigning.  He has held more press conferences in six months than his predecessor did in eight years.  Who is running the show while Obama is running around?  Is it Nancy Pelosi?  Rahm Emmanual?  His programs are falling apart.  The stimulus isn’t working and more Americans say that it has hurt the economy rather than helped it (31%-25%) and that the rest of it should be canceled.  His cap and trade plan is opposed by most Americans (56%) who don’t want to pay more in taxes to fight global warming.  His government takeover of our health care is opposed by most Americans (53%-44%) and yet he presses on, figuring that with enough campaigning the American people will be won over.

This may be a long slog, waiting for 2012 and hoping our country does not get destroyed by all the power grabbing characters in Congress, who don’t care a whit about us, only about increasing the powerful control they have over our lives.  We have the fight of our lives on our hands preventing the taking of our liberties.

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Obama Watch — Week 4

by Bill O'Connell on December 1, 2008

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Here’s where we are four weeks after the election:

  1. Appointments — With the Thanksgiving shortened week, it was mostly packaging of the previously announced appointments.  Monday was going to be the big day, with the formal announcement of Hillary and Holder.  They had to get Bill Clinton’s ducks in a row, and have him measured for a leash.
  2. Dow Jones Industrial Average — Up 675 points. Team Obama finally got a win.  One of the reasons is that Obama has stopped talking about eliminating the Bush tax cuts early, but letting them expire in 2010.  Also, he seems to be assembling an experienced economic team, well known to Wall Street, which doesn’t hurt.
  3. The New Leader – Obama has answered critics who say the team he is assembling looks a lot like the old Clinton White House, by saying that they are “Experienced, Yet Fresh.”  He is facing grumblings on his left, which brings into question how is he going to keep this team of wild horses under control?

The Challenge for Obama

Where is Obama’s base of support?  Where can he fall back on for strength?  He may well be pulling together a team of experienced hands for the various departments, but not all of them are cut from the same mold and there will be some tugging and pulling.  How does he keep them in check and how does he get them back in line?  In other words, where are his reinforcements?

In another post, I mention how past presidents, most of whom had executive experience as governors, brought some of their loyal people with them.  These were people who believed in their candidate and had been with him for a number of years.  That loyalty can be called in, like chits, when you need to win a battle.

It took Johnson a while, about two years, to get his people in the administration since he had inherited the Kennedy team when he ascended to the presidency, but he did have eleven years in the House and twelve years in the Senate, including six years as Senate Majority Leader.  So he had a lot of markers to call in if he needed them.

Kennedy was probably closest to Obama in lack of experience including no executive experience outside of the Navy, but he did have eight years in the Senate.  In addition, he had Papa Joe Kennedy, who had many strings of his own including being a former Ambassador to England; he had his own blood brother as Attorney General; and another brother Ted would be elected to the Senate two years later.  So while Jack Kennedy may not personally have had a lot of pull, his family had plenty.

Nixon was a former two term Vice President.  Ford had been House Minority Leader.  Carter had been governor and was able to bring some of his former team with him, as was  Reagan who had served two terms as governor of California, and Bill Clinton who was both Attorney General and Governor of Arkansas.  George Bush Senior was Vice President, and George W. was governor of Texas.  They all had many connections and a lot of political IOUs.

But what does Barack Obama do, after the glow of history is replaced by the hard work of governing?  It is more likely that Barack Obama wrote a lot of political IOUs rather than him holding them.  Many of his confidents uncovered during the campaign, turned out to be less than appealing to the nation as a whole.  When the going gets tough, who’s going to have Barack Obama’s back?  Who can he turn to and say, I need this one and because of thus and so, without having to say it, you owe me?  He has very little history with his team.  So when he needs a favor, he will have to deal almost from the get go.  Whose career has he made, such that he can ask for payback?

Experience Counts

Experience counts not just in knowing how to do a job, but it also counts in terms of who you know.  Rarely in our history has there been someone who has so little experience inside or outside the beltway.  This may well result in a very weak president.  For all of our sakes, I hope I am wrong.

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Hope and Change, Well, Never Mind

by Bill O'Connell on November 28, 2008

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As Barack Obama builds his Administration team you can sense the frustration starting to build on the left and among those who are still paying attention.  In an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Obama Describes Team as Experienced Yet Fresh, you can anticipate the eloquent gymnastics you are about to read as you would watching the young Chinese girls at the Beijing Olympics.

The Perception of Change

As the agent of hope and change, some people are beginning to wonder that if this is so, why is he populating his administration with so many people from the Clinton administration, causing one pundit to ask if we wanted a return to the Clinton Administration we would have voted for Hillary.  The master politician responded to this line of thinking thusly, “Americans would be ‘rightly troubled’ if he overlooked experience to create the perception of change.’”   Let me see if I have this right.  If you actually change, it is a perception of change, but if you don’t change, it is real change?  I got it.

He went on to elaborate, “What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking.  But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost:  It comes from me.”  Okay, let me take a hack at that one.  Barack Obama is bringing together all these people with long resumes in government, with years of experience, and confident in knowing what to do and how to do it, but they are all going to follow Barack Obama’s direction and apply fresh thinking to their settled ways.  Or might they say, yeah kid, go back to the Oval Office and we’ll call you when we need you.

The Voice of Experience

Painting the picture further Obama says, “I suspect that you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council at one of the most critical economic times in our history who had no experience in government whatsoever.”  But an inexperienced president?  No problem.  Even JFK, who was elected the youngest president in our history, had served one full term in the Senate, was reelected, and was two years into his second term before becoming president.  And he had a pretty rocky time between the Bay of Pigs, his Vienna meeting with Khrushchev, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Viet Nam, in less than three years.  Barack Obama was four years into his first term and half of that time he spent running for president.  Should we not be concerned at the lack of experience at the top?

The Definition of Freshness

To prove his point about the freshness of hope and change, he spoke of Paul Volker.  Now, I think very highly of Paul Volker.  I believe it was he who got inflation under control after the disasterous Carter Administration economic policies.  Obama appointed Volker to lead his economic advisory board.  At 81 years old, he is the epitome of freshness.  How is that you wonder?  Obama masterfully spins it this way, “Paul Volker hasn’t been in Washington for quite some time and that’s part of the reason he can provide a fresh perspective.”  So where does that leave Obama?  Is he stale because he has been in Washington or his he fresh because he has been out campaigning for the last two years?

To cap it off in a question and answer period Obama said, according to the Times, “his [Obama's] call for new ways of thinking on the economy should not be interpreted as a reflection of frustration and disappointment with the Bush administration’s recent economic-recovery efforts.  He signaled his support for the latest $800 billion government bailout plan, which is intended to provide new lending for consumers as well as push down home mortgage rates.”

Anyone Out There Feeling Buyer’s Remorse?

So the purveyor of hope and change wants us all to believe that bringing back the Clinton administration is change; that 81 year old Paul Volker is fresh, but 72 year old John McCain is ancient; that Bush is the cause of all that is wrong with America, but fresh thinking should not be interpreted as frustration with Bush.

My sense has been that Barack Obama was painting himself into a corner.  All the while he believed that with his adroit political and verbal skills he would be able to slip out of the corner unnoticed.

The Democrats have only held the White House for eight of the last twenty-eight years.  So realistically, where else would Obama go for experienced executives?  With no executive experience himself, it’s not like he can bring colleagues in from his past executive positions, like Carter from Georgia, Reagan from California, Clinton from Arkansas, and Bush from Texas.  With only four years in Washington, two of them spent on the road campaigning for president, it’s not like he built a network of experienced executive branch contacts there either.

He is also in the precarious position of having built up expectations so high, there is really no where for his job approval ratings to go, once he takes office, but down.  In addition to all this, he has to watch his left flank.  There are a lot of grumbling noises coming from that direction from a bunch of people with balled up IOUs in their fists, thinking we got you here, where’s the payback?

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