Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Daily Beast says...

Well, actualy Leslie H Gelb says "President Obama desperately needs a sweeping staff shakeup to save his presidency",  Mr Gelb's thoughts include that "he must reassign Rahm [Emanuel], 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.
Much as I am always rooting for the outsides against the insiders, the fact is that one needs some of the insiders to make things work in Washington.

The President should not roll over to the insiders, but a few grey-beards are needed.

While I think health care needs to be recast and "cap and trade" is a mess, we can't afford to have our President reduced to speechifying.  The Congress will right itself in November, but the President is with us until 2013 and a lot could happen between now and then and I want him to be a strong factor in both domestic and world affairs.  Rush Limbaugh got it wrong.  We don't want the President to fail.  On the other hand, we would like to see him jettison overboard a couple of his current approaches to certain policy promises, because we believe they are not the solutions that meet the needs of the American People.

Regards  —  Cliff

  Mr Leslie H Gelb is a long time observer of the Washington scene and deserves to be listened to.  In 1980 his book The Irony of Vietnam:  The System Worked was published.  It talked about how Washington dealt with the issues of Viet-nam, as they came up.  He understands the Federal Government, from inside and outside.

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