Although he readily uses and talks about his “pen and phone” power as chief executive,White House observers say President Obama just as readily shrugs off the most important duty of a CEO: taking responsibility for what happens under his leadership.
The president, who has issued a series of controversial unilateral actions over the last two years, has spent much of that same time blaming cabinet secretaries for problems with the Obamacare website, IRS targeting of conservative groups, and now the failure to enforce the Federal Records Act with regard to Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account throughout her four years as secretary of State.
Now presidential scholars and transparency advocates are taking Obama to task over the White House’s deferral of responsibility.
“When the going gets rough, it’s always somebody else’s problem,” said Richard Benedetto, a former White House correspondent for USA Today who covered four presidents and now teaches journalism at American University.
Obama’s approach to accountability is getting new scrutiny in the wake of the New York Times’ revelation that Clinton used a private email account for official business when she led Obama’s State Department from 2009 to 2013.
The White House this week declined to say that Clinton had done anything wrong by setting up the private email account right before taking the job and exclusively using it for official State Department business during her entire tenure in the top spot at Foggy Bottom.
“It’s the responsibility of the State Department to maintain these e-mail systems,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Tuesday. “It’s important for people to understand that it’s not as if there’s one e-mail system that applies across the federal government. Each agency is responsible for maintaining their own system.”
While Earnest admitted that some White House officials knew Clinton was using a private email account for official business, he argued that they did not know she had never set up a government account at all, creating a potential violation of federal record-keeping and transparency laws. For an administration that promised to be the most transparent in history, the explanation doesn’t pass the laugh test, critics say.
Benedetto also recalls how Obama delegated responsibility to Attorney General Eric Holder for deciding on where to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
“Eric Holder doesn’t make decisions that big — but Obama said he was deferring to him,” Benedetto points out.
Obama took a similar position when pressed to determine the fate of Keystone XL oil pipeline — putting offfor more than two yearsa decision on whether he supports it — while the State Department concludes a probe of its impact on the environment and makes its recommendations.
When it comes to ensuring that Hillary Clinton wasn’t using a private email exclusively for official business, it’s unclear exactly how much the White House knew about the steps she took to avoid using publicly available means of communication.
James Pffifner, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said the email controversy sounds much more like a “house-keeping matter” that a busy White House might not prioritize in its hectic schedule.
“Other secretaries of state have used private email accounts — partially at least — so White House staff may have not have noticed or kept track of how many they were receiving from Clinton’s personal account,” he said.
But John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for open and transparent government, isn’t buying that argument.
Wonderlich questioned the White House’s statements this week that it has no culpability for ensuring cabinet-level secretaries are following federal record-keeping laws.
“It’s an odd explanation and pretty surprising for them to say that the State Department has sole responsibility because cabinet secretaries serve at the pleasure of the president,” he said.
Every email that Clinton sent to any White House official, including the White House chief of staff and senior National Security Council officials, would serve as a “mini-announcement that she was using a personal email system.”
“It’s not credible to me that it wasn’t something broadly known in an elite circle” — including top White House staff, he said.
Obama is hardly the first president to defer and delay in the middle of a growing scandal.
During the Iran-Contra controversy, White House aides spent a considerable amount of time trying to keep the focus off President Ronald Reagan’s role and the focus on the responsibility of a much more minor cast of characters. Ultimately, Oliver North, a lieutenant colonel in the Marines who served in Reagan’s National Security Council, took the fall for running the clandestine sale of weapons to Iran.
During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Clinton administration did its best to keep the focus away from President Clinton for as long as possible.
White House aides kept Clinton and the White House press corps busy covering speeches and events in order to preserve a business-as-usual air, Benedetto said.
Obama has taken a similar approach during periods of crises. This week, for instance, he will be traveling to South Carolina and Alabama to participate in a 50-year remembrance of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. He will be in Georgia on Tuesday.
“There might be a crisis going on, but the president doesn’t look like he’s in the middle of a crisis because the American people are seeing the president on television making speeches and acting like he’s on the job,” Benedetto said.
But trying to conduct business as usual and making speeches while deferring other chief executive responsibilities has a price.
Last month the Brookings Institution released a survey of American Political Science Association scholars showing that a majority, by a 3-1 margin, consider Obama one of the worst American presidents, compared to those who consider him one of the best.
Obama’s tendency to delegate some responsibilities and deflect crises onto his cabinet, critics say, is particularly jarring while he’s simultaneously claiming the power as chief executive to bypass Congress and issue sweeping executive actions.
“The president runs a huge, huge bureaucracy and he is the CEO of that bureaucracy and CEOs are forced to take responsibility rather than deflecting,” Benedetto argued.
