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Politico published a lengthy article on the worst job in DC, which they say is being in the cabinet. It is long enough to fill us up today.
Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a brilliant innovator whose research fills several all-but-incomprehensible paragraphs of a Wikipedia entry that spans his achievements in single-molecule physics, the slowing of atoms through the use of lasers and the invention of something called an optical tweezer.” President Barack Obama even credits Chu with solving the 2010 Gulf oil spill, claiming that Chu strolled into BP’s office and “essentially designed the cap that ultimately worked.” With rare exception, Chu is the smartest guy in the room, and that includes the Cabinet Room, which he occupied uneasily as secretary of energy from 2009 to the spring of 2013.
But the president’s aides didn’t quite see Chu that way. He might have been the only Obama administration official with a Nobel other than the president himself, but inside the West Wing of the White House Chu was considered a smart guy who said lots of stupid things, a genius with an appallingly low political IQ—“clueless,” as deputy chief of staff Jim Messina would tell colleagues at the time.
In April 2009, Chu joined Obama’s entourage for one of the administration’s first overseas trips, to Trinidad and Tobago for a Summit of the Americas focused on economic development. Chu was not scheduled to address the media, but reporters kept bugging Josh Earnest, a young staffer, who sheepishly approached his boss, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, with the ask. “No way,” Gibbs told him.
“Come on,” Earnest said. “The guy came all the way down here. Why don’t we just have him talk about all the stuff he’s doing?”
Gibbs reluctantly assented. Then Chu took the podium to tell the tiny island nation that it might soon, sorry to say, be underwater—which not only insulted the good people of Trinidad and Tobago but also raised the climate issue at a time when the White House wanted the economy, and the economy only, on the front burner. …
… never has the job of Cabinet secretary seemed smaller. The staffers who rule Obama’s West Wing often treat his Cabinet as a nuisance: At the top of the pecking order are the celebrity power players, like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to be warily managed; at the bottom, what they see as a bunch of well-intentioned political naifs only a lip-slip away from derailing the president’s agenda. Chu might have been the first Obama Cabinet secretary to earn the disdain of White House aides, but he was hardly the last.
“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. …
… Obama’s political guys had been skeptical of Holder’s appointment from the beginning, quietly backing Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano over the easygoing career prosecutor, whom they considered unimpressive in vetting interviews. But they were blocked by the president-elect and his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ Chicago friend and mentor who didn’t seriously consider any candidate besides Holder. Jarrett has had an all-access pass to the first family, a back channel to Obama unlike any other adviser, and she soon earned the sobriquet “Eric’s appeals court.” …
… The West Wing’s obsessive control of messaging drove Gates (SecDef) crazy, and he felt crowded by young amateurs in the White House who had much less experience and much better access to Obama—guys like McDonough and speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who would weigh in after the secretary’s SUV had departed for the Pentagon. Over the previous four decades, Gates had served in a variety of posts, from deputy director of the CIA to the upper rungs of the NSC, and had seen a gradual increase in White House influence over internal Pentagon affairs. But that trend hit warp speed under Obama. There were far more deputies’ meetings attended by too many lower-ranking aides, and Gates believed an alarming number of White House staffers were being read in on specific war plans.
Most importantly, Gates had significant policy disagreements with Obama. By the time of his exit in July 2011, the lifelong Republican was dissenting more and more on major decisions being pushed by liberal interventionists including Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and NSC adviser Samantha Power. He has called the NATO intervention in Libya “a mistake,” and took a dim view of Obama’s statements of solidarity with the Arab Spring protesters, who, Gates said, represented an unpredictable and destabilizing force.
Since retiring, Gates has become increasingly disillusioned with Obama’s foreign policy; one friend says Gates winced when the president drew his “red line” more than a year ago on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. White House aides are nervously awaiting the publication of Gates’s memoir in January. The manuscript, according to people with whom he’s shared details, questions Obama’s policy choices on the Arab Spring in particular, and even compares the president unfavorably with Bush, sure to be a headline-grabbing assertion. …
… For the Obama team, having a 2016 candidate-in-waiting created all kinds of unintended consequences, especially at the end of Clinton’s tenure, when she was mapping out her exit strategy. Early on, she was willing to hit the Sunday shows for Obama, but she considered it an enervating gotcha circus, so by the time the Benghazi firestorm hit on Sept. 11, 2012, she was a firm “no.” When network producers asked if Clinton would appear to discuss the killings of Ambassador Chris Stevens and other U.S. personnel, State Department officials told them the secretary was too exhausted from her recent travels. That wasn’t entirely true, three officials told me: Clinton had a “standing refusal” to do Sunday shows. “She hates them. She would rather die than do them,” one aide said at the time. “The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”
In a classic Washington irony, Susan Rice turned out to be collateral damage. Rice, who started her career in the Bill Clinton White House and then infuriated both Clintons by backing Obama in the 2008 campaign, was at the time the only person Obama was seriously considering to replace Hillary Clinton at State.
And so Rice was tapped by the White House to appear on television that weekend instead of Clinton. ..
… As for the Cabinet, none of the three big replacements he’s made—John Kerry at State, Jack Lew at Treasury, Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon—seems destined to outshine those they replaced. And the lesser-known Obama picks—Gina McCarthy at the EPA; Ernest Moniz, Chu’s replacement at Energy; Tom Perez at Labor—are highly regarded technocrats who function more like West Wing staffers than traditional secretaries.
McDonough’s own role in the chaotic recent internal deliberations over the civil war in Syria suggests that all the coffees in the world won’t change Obama’s basic reliance on a small coterie of staff. On Aug. 30, Kerry had just delivered an impassioned argument in the State Department Treaty Room for launching an immediate missile strike on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, when Obama invited McDonough—his most trusted national security aide before taking up the chief of staff portfolio—for a long stroll around the White House grounds. (The incident is regarded as significant enough to have its own name inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.: “The Walk.”) Obama returned to tell a stunned group of aides gathered in the Oval Office that he had decided to seek congressional approval first, despite dim prospects of passage.
A few weeks later, sitting on the sunny patio outside McDonough’s West Wing office, I asked him if it was true that Kerry and Hagel weren’t around to hear Obama’s big decision. “They were not in the Oval, that is correct,” McDonough told me, though he said the notion of going to Congress had at least been broached during several contentious meetings earlier that week, at which both men had been present. “I’m trying to figure out if I’m about to commit news here, but the president talked to both of those Cabinet members [later that evening by phone] … then they had another meeting the next morning.”
There was nothing out of the ordinary about the process, McDonough insists. But Kerry was taken aback, according to several people in his orbit—as stung by the West Wing’s planting of the “Walk” narrative in the media as by the snub itself. Outside the administration, it reinforced the idea that Obama was home alone now that the first-term principals were out the door. “To me, that sent a statement,” says David Gergen, who has served as a White House adviser to presidents in both parties. “Would he have done this if Hillary or Gates were still around?” …
… The most serious maelstrom to engulf the Cabinet in years came in October, when it became clear that neither Kathleen Sebelius nor her counterparts in the West Wing had adequately prepared for the staggering technical challenges of launching Obamacare. The health and human services secretary was well-liked—she was especially friendly with Jarrett—but many of Obama’s aides still pined for Tom Daschle, the wily former Senate Democrat whom Obama had originally tapped for the HHS job. Daschle, who withdrew from consideration in 2009 over a tax issue, was canny enough to know the way power flowed in Obama’s circle: As a condition for taking the job, he requested a West Wing office so he could keep close tabs on the executive staff. For years, Daschle privately expressed his concerns that Sebelius, who didn’t have the stature to make the same demands, simply wouldn’t have the power to implement the health care program.
Yet, in the end, it may not have been her lack of power that caused all the headaches, but a breakdown in communication and coordination between the White House and Sebelius’s staff. It started with a slow-walk of critical Obamacare rulemaking, a key part of Plouffe’s do-no-harm election-year strategy of minimizing controversial regulatory action. “The number-one culprit was [that] they deferred rulemaking until after the election,” says Mike Leavitt, the Bush-era HHS chief whose face Bob Gates couldn’t quite place. “When they did that, it threw the entire process off. … They were issuing rules in September for implementation in October.” The secretary herself admitted that Obama had been blindsided by the near-meltdown of the program’s web portal, and several administration officials involved in its creation told me they had been alarmed by pre-launch signs of trouble, even offering to tap outside computer experts to help the agency. Sebelius, they say, demurred. That Obama’s staff didn’t press the issue on the president’s signature policy initiative illustrates a paradox central to understanding his governing style: The president who forcefully pushed through the largest expansion of the federal government in generations has been significantly less zealous in overseeing its operation. …