Former official: ‘Strong people’ lacking in Obama’s White House

“He has centralized power and operational activities of the government in the White House to a degree that I think is unparalleled — [a National Security Council] staff of 450 people at this point,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And yet, I think one of the great weaknesses of the White House is implementation of strategy, is difficulty in developing strategy and then implementing that strategy. And I don’t see the kind of strong people around the president who will push back on him.”

Gates’ comments reflect a widespread view that Obama’s team has diminished the importance of the various executive departments as policymakers, perhaps most notably the Defense Department team. And although Gates allowed that Obama accepted criticism from him, he suggested that the president doesn’t respect his own team.

“The president is quoted as having said at one point to his staff, ‘I can do every one of your jobs better than you can,'” Gates said.

Gates’ comments were consistent with the description of the National Security Council team that Chuck Hagel recently provided. Hagel faulted faulted National Security Advisor Susan Rice in particular for calling last-minute meetings that were unproductive and time consuming.

“We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room,” Hagel told Foreign Policy in December. “I eventually got to the point where I told Susan Rice that I wasn’t going to spend more than two hours in these meetings. Some of them would go four hours.”

Gates suggested that other members of Obama’s senior team aren’t much better. While evaluating past and potential presidents, in the course of promoting his book A Passion for Leadership, Gates told the Morning Joe team that he wouldn’t want Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry to run for president.