The new Ebola czar was supposed to lessen President Obama’s political pain. Instead, the intense scrutiny of Ron Klain, the man tapped to manage the Obama administration’s response to the deadly virus, has compounded the president’s problems.
Klain, the former chief of staff to Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Al Gore, officially starts his job on Wednesday but already has plenty to prove. Just two weeks before the midterms, Obama can ill afford for competency questions to linger.
“The White House is doing a terrible job on the public confidence front,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “It sounds today like the Obama administration thinks Ebola is a fad that will just go away. I don’t think they’re really grappling with the actual concerns out there.”
Republicans have stoked criticisms about Klain’s lack of medical experience, his absence from Ebola meetings with the president and the White House’s refusal to make him available for a congressional hearing. Others wonder whether Klain is simply angling for a more senior position at the White House, such as chief of staff, during the president’s final two years in office.
Even Democrats are grumbling that the White House mishandled Klain’s rollout.
“They’ve let Republicans define [Klain] before he’s even started the job,” a veteran Democratic operative told the Washington Examiner. “He should have been out front immediately. If he’s the czar, the public needs to see exactly what he’s doing or it just looks like another empty appointment motivated by politics.”
So far, the White House has devoted more time detailing the limits of Klain’s role than explaining how he would jumpstart a federal Ebola campaign seen by many as too slow and disorganized.
The White House is framing Klain as a managerial savant, insisting the federal government has no shortage of medical acumen and that a leader who knows how to operate the tricky bureaucratic maze can solve the Ebola puzzle.
One senior administration official held up Jeffrey Zients, brought in to fix the federal Obamacare website last year, as proof that management chops sometimes outweigh technical proficiency.
Publicly, the White House is urging voters not to read too much into Klain’s avoidance of the limelight.
“The profile that he will have is primarily a behind-the-scenes one,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “He’s got a responsibility for making sure that all of the government agencies that are responsible for responding to this effort are coordinated and integrated in a way that meets the high standards that the president set for his team. Mr. Klain is somebody that has very strong management credentials both inside of government and in the private sector, and it’s why we believe and the president believes he’s the right person for the job.”
But Klain will skip a House Ebola hearing on Friday. White House officials argue that it would make little sense for Klain to answer lawmakers’ questions on just his third day on the job.
Yet, some allies wonder if his absence will overshadow the proceedings.
“If I’m a Republican lawmaker, the first thing I ask is, ‘Where is your Ebola czar?” said the Democratic operative. “It won’t be that difficult for Republicans to make it look like the response is lacking, no matter how much work Klain is doing behind the scenes.”
The focus on Klain comes as the Obama administration takes additional steps to limit the Ebola threat on U.S. soil. The administration announced Tuesday that all travelers from West Africa must go through one of five American airports, falling short of the travel ban demanded by conservatives, but still implementing the types of restrictions Obama once said were unnecessary.
With Klain’s appointment prompting more questions than answers, however, some analysts wonder whether Obama should have avoided the choice altogether.
“I think Obama has gotten himself caught between not speaking out quickly enough and when he did, it wasn’t really what needed to be said,” said Martin Medhurst, a Baylor University expert on presidential communication. “Now we have a czar, for what, two cases? What we needed was more clear presidential leadership and putting things in a proper context.”
