Friday, February 13, 2009

Assigning Responsibility

The finger pointing over who is more at fault for the whole Judd Gregg fiasco will go on for several days. Democrats are blaming Gregg for jilting them; Republicans are claiming Gregg’s withdrawal is a response to the Obama Administration’s hyper-partisan actions. The real issue is much simpler.

The question that begs to be asked is, who thought it was a good idea to nominate a senator who voted to eliminate the Commerce Department and has been a harsh critic of the census as Commerce Secretary in the first place? Gregg may have been a little naïve by accepting the appointment, but he shouldn’t be vilified now for seeing the light and doing the right thing. As for the Republicans’ accusations of Democratic hyper-partisanship, the November bloodbath was in large part a referendum on Republican policies, leadership, and practices. Obama has spent more time consulting with the other party in the past three weeks than the Bush Administration did in the four previous years.

The real issue here is that Gregg was improperly vetted, as were Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, and Tim Geithner. The Obama Administration has done a lot of things well in its early days, and has made some excellent appointments, but its overall personnel record is disturbingly uneven, at best.

1 comment:

CB said...

And, then there might be this to consider:

Judd Gregg & his Abramoff Problem

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/2/13/32013/1373/707/696949

quote from story:

The trouble with including Republicans in the Obama Cabinet is that there are very few of them who are not involved in scandal. As Jack (Abramoff) said:

"Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn’t know me is almost certainly lying," he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. "This is not an age when you can run away from facts," he declares. "I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs."

We dodged a bullet on this one.

Judd Gregg and the Republican Party did not. They have cause for concern. The scandals of the Gingrich/DeLay/Bush era are not going away. More details will leak out.