After Tim Geithner’s tax and nanny troubles came to light, the Democratic consensus was that his nomination was too big to fail.
And the consensus is probably right. But the dust up over the would-be treasury secretary, like the awkward moments caused by Bill Richardson, Rahm Emanuel, and Hillary Clinton, shows the need for President-elect Barack Obama to do a better job of managing expectations.
If Obama continues to over promise and under deliver on his pitch of having “the most transparent administration in history,” his honeymoon may end abruptly.
Geithner, who has spent most of his professional life inside the federal bureaucracy, ought to have known better than to whiff on his tax withholding or have domestic help with an uncertain immigration status.
But these are not signs of extraordinary personal defects. These are the mistakes that human beings ¬ especially human beings who are very busy and believe themselves to be very important,¬ tend to make.
They are, indeed, the same kinds of mistakes that forced George W. Bush’s first pick for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, to withdraw her name from consideration in 2001.
Geithner, though, will probably be confirmed, after suitable bowing and scraping before indignant senators. A few repetitions of our new Washington explain-it-all – “The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” will handle that.
The real problem for Obama is his own struggle to learn that every chief executive has to spend much of his time dealing with his subordinates’ failures. You can try to govern with a committee of czars, but taking the blame is still a one-man job.
And especially when you’re the president, you often don¹t find out about your flock’s transgressions in time. When you do find out, you’re past delivering transparency and on to explaining away a seeming impropriety.
That seems almost certainly seems to be the case with Bill Richardson, Obama’s erstwhile appointee for secretary of commerce.
Richardson, eager to be lifted back out of Albuquerque obscurity, no doubt played down his exposure in the pay-to-play scandal tickling political circles in his home state when he talked to the vetters from the Obama transition.
But when the inquest got too close, Richardson went down in flames and singed Obama slightly in the process. This did not look like transparency, but rather an unsuccessful effort to sneak something through.
Still looming on the horizon is the question just how chummy Emanuel had been with the man whose place he took in Congress, Rod Blagojevich. We¹ve seen the Obama transition team’s internal report (as sheer as a negligee) on the Emanuel-Blago contacts that promised that everyone behaved themselves.
But, if Emanuel did not disclose every potentially embarrassing moment he ever shared with Blago, it will be back to the podium for Obama. Another explanation of how all that transparency got clouded.
Similarly, the sparse light that has been shed on the affairs of the former first lady and her husband in the run-up to her appointment as secretary of state has yet to produce a clear image.
While the beneficiaries of Senator Clinton¹s legislative largesse may have been spontaneously moved to show their gratitude with contributions to her husband¹s charitable foundation, it creates an awkward appearance.
If U.S. diplomatic intervention overseas is followed by a big donation to the Clinton Global Initiative by the House of Saud or the Kazakh warlord of the day, would Obama feel compelled to explain?
All this explaining in the name of transparency leaves the electorate feeling they¹ve been snookered.
Obama must scour the records, statements, and backgrounds of all his underlings. Not necessarily to purge them for their mistakes, but to know better what he’ll be held responsible for down the line.
It might seem obvious with the Clintons, Emanuel, and Bill Richardson, but the rule should apply to everyone, even Obamas’s closest friends. As the 40th president said, trust, but verify.
Second, stop explaining. If Obama gets good enough intel on his people, there won’t be many surprises. And those that will invariably occur can be met with one of two responses ¬ “No big deal,” or “We fired him this morning.”
The presidency is not a transparent kind of job. It can, however, be a straightforward one.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
