I don’t think is exactly what Rush Limbaugh had in mind, but the administration seems to be failing at administering themselves.
First — no, that just won’t do. This isn’t the first in a line of screw-ups and botches, it’s the first in the past few days. Okay, so, first we have the deputy secretary of the Treasury nominee, along with a few other nominees and appointees at Treasury, drop out of consideration. This continues the trend started by Bill Richardson over at Commerce. Can anyone point to this many failed nominations for administration posts before?
To make matters worse for Geithner and company, the Washington Post reported that the “understaffed” Treasury Secretary is basically in way over his head.
The problem, critics say, is that many of these initiatives would have gone more smoothly if Geithner had a full complement of senior staffers to work with.
Among the harshest critics of Treasury’s leadership vacuum is Paul Volcker, an Obama economic adviser and former Federal Reserve chairman who last week called the situation “shameful.”
“The secretary of the treasury is sitting there without a deputy, without any undersecretaries, without any, as far as I know, assistant secretaries responsible in substantive areas at a time of very severe crisis,” Volcker said. “He shouldn’t be sitting there alone.”
Then Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical wunderkind, announced he was withdrawing from consideration for surgeon general. Dr. Gupta says it has to do with his family, but perhaps he didn’t want to join the team that would be rolling out Obama’s brand of health care reform. It doesn’t really matter; to the public, it simply looks like no one wants to be a part of this administration.
Then, there is of course Joe Biden, the fount of humor (if it weren’t so doggone scary) for this administration. My friend Kathleen McKinley at Right Wing Sparkle hilariously likens Biden to Dark Helmet (if Dick Cheney was Darth Vader, that is). It seems that “nobody messes with Joe” because the administration is just trying to keep this guy out of the spotlight as much as possible.
Finally, though we can guess this won’t be the final thing to be worried about from Obama, the co-founder of Twitter was at the White House as part of a group of “young business leaders” to talk about the economy. No offense to Evan Williams or Twitter (follow me and us), but seriously? The Business Insider enjoys pointing out that Twitter makes no money in the US (just Japan with some advertising).
When will the grown-ups be back in charge?
UDPATE: Ed Morrissey points to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (I wonder if my girlfriend reads…she’s in Sydney right now) that basically says Geithner is incompetent to handle this crisis since he so poorly mismanaged the Asian crisis ten years ago at the IMF. Can we start a “Geithner’s gotta go” movement?
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