WhatFinger

As always, Obama thinks political expedience trumps competence

Top Obama ally: President can't fire VA chief because it would be politically difficult

By Robert Laurie ——--May 30, 2014

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Yesterday, former White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton appeared on CNN. He's no longer part of the White House team, but he's still a top level Obama ally who works as a strategist for the radical kooks over at Priorities USA. He was asked why the President seems to have such a hard time firing the extraordinary number of incompetents who populate in his administration. Burton's answer was telling.
"I think that the President looks at the problem first, and just sees that there's some noise around it."
Already, Burton's on shaky ground. Obama's "problem" is that veterans were allowed to languish and die. The "noise" is legitimate outrage from both sides of the aisle. This isn't some baseless, politically motivated, one-party witch hunt. As Burton says, Obama has been claiming that this is an ongoing, systemic, problem since he was first running for Senate.
"I think that the President is dedicated to fixing what he thinks is a serious problem. He's been talking about this since the days that he was a candidate for the United States Senate - not just since he was running for President and since he became President. He thinks that the problems are serious. Now that we've uncovered these new ones, he wants to have the right folks in place in order to fix it."
Isn't that super? Why then - if this is such a long-known concern - is it so difficult for Obama to jettison Eric Shinseki, the VA chief who obviously failed to implement a fix and arguably made things even worse?
"If the President were to just fire Shinseki, it's not like Senate Republicans are going to let you put some new head of the VA in, um, to deal with the problem. They're going to extract their pound of flesh and they're going to make it as difficult as possible for him."
In other words, if you admit Eric Shinseki failed and you fire him, a bunch of nasty Republicans will grill the next guy during his Senate confirmation hearings to make sure he's not another failure in the making. That's a political headache and, apparently, Obama doesn't feel like dealing with it. It's much easier to keep the guy who was - at best - asleep at the wheel while the VA let people die. According to Burton, Obama is literally choosing to hang on to deadly incompetence rather than fight through what could be a politically damaging hearing. Leadership!

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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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