So much for the Greatest Transition in World History
A New York Times headline yesterday read: “Obama’s Team Is Lacking Most of Its Top Players.”
Yes, so much for the Greatest Transition in World History (a point expounded on in the introduction to Culture of Corruption, where I note that for all the hype about Obama’s brilliant, efficient, amazingly genius transition team, Obama failed to beat the pace of the Reagan White House, which had 73 officials confirmed by Day 100 compared to Obama’s 65 — and which avoided the bungles and baggage that Obama’s botched nominees brought with them.)
The bottom line so far, the NYT now reports:
As President Obama tries to turn around a summer of setbacks, he finds himself still without most of his own team. Seven months into his presidency, fewer than half of his top appointees are in place advancing his agenda.
Of more than 500 senior policymaking positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 43 percent have been filled — a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious after several nominations blew up last spring, a Senate that is intensively investigating nominees and a legislative agenda that has consumed both…
…Measuring the progress in appointments depends on what positions are counted and who is doing the counting. The White House Transition Project counts 543 policymaking jobs requiring Senate confirmation in four top executive ranks. As of last week, Mr. Obama had announced his selections for 319 of those positions, and the Senate had confirmed 236, or 43 percent of the top echelon of government. Other scholars have slightly different but similar tallies.
The White House prefers to include ambassadors, United States attorneys, marshals and judges, who are also subject to Senate votes but are not counted by the scholars. By that count, Mr. Obama has won confirmation of 304 nominees, compared with 301 for Mr. Bush, 253 for Bill Clinton and 212 for the first President George Bush at this point in their administrations.
If lower-ranking senior executive service officials and political appointees who do not require Senate approval are counted, the White House said it had installed 1,830 people, at least 50 percent more than any of the last three presidents had at this stage.
No matter how the counting is done, though, hundreds of senior positions remain empty with 15 percent of Mr. Obama’s term over.
Blame is tossed around by partisan Democrats who assail the “intrusive” vetting process and obstructionist Republicans.
But even liberal bloggers are rejecting the lame spin. From commenter Bart DePalma at left-wing Balkinization:
Sandy, this is completely a failure of the Obama Administration and no one else.
Nearly ten months after his election, Obama has failed to even nominate 224 out of 543 or 41% of all positions. (Although he has found time to appoint over two dozen unaccountable “czars.”)
Of the 319 folks Obama find time to nominate, less than a handful have holds. The Senate has not confirmed them all because many have only just been nominated half a year after Obama took office.
The whine that Team Obama is having a hard time finding folks who have not committed felony tax evasion like many of is original nominations is, shall we say, less than sympathy inducing.
This is what you get when you elect an utterly inexperienced President with less executive experience than a certain ex-Alaska governor backed by a Chicago based team that has never run anything apart from a campaign.
And from commenter Brett:
It’s a fair point Bart is making: The remnant of Republicans in the Senate might be able to, thanks to Senate rules, block a few nominations from coming to a vote. But they can’t be blamed for nominations never made.
Well, yes they can. Team Obama always find a way to redistribute away the blame.
See what others have said
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- White House Imbalance: Team Obama’s Czars (Too Many) vs. Vetted Team Top Players (Too Few) « Frugal Café Blog Zone
- A Blog For All
- Obama’s Cyber Czar Hathaway Resigns… How Many Czars Do We Have Now in Obama’s Shadow Government? Still More Than Russia… « Frugal Café Blog Zone
- The Substratum
- Michelle Malkin » Obama’s CIA in turmoil; Panetta on the ledge
- Overexposed & Overhyped: Too Much Obama in Prime-Time « Frugal Café Blog Zone
- » Obama’s CIA in turmoil; Panetta on the ledge; awaiting document dump The Liberty Tree Lantern
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I think most positions are not filled because the Empty Suit fully expected his Death Care and Knee Cap and Trade to sail through negating the need. If these fully pass, he has his own Czars to take the reins.
He doesn’t need all those people . . . he’s changing our government from three independent branches to multiple czars and a king. Thank you enlightened voters, you really stuck it to us this time.
Is there a listing of the openings and qualifications?
Maybe he could find some people if the jobs included guaranteed private health care insurance.
We’ve suffered through and will suffer from his “agenda” for generations to come. I shudder to think what would have been “accomplished” had Obama been playing with his full deck of cronies.
It’s a good time to go on vacation.
This lack of appointees is a good thing when you factor in his radical leftist appointments so far.
Let’s be thankful most of his people are not in place. now if we could get rid of the Czars….
The greatest transition in history would be a resignation of the entire upper administration and Congress to a large number of honorable, honest and mature leaders akin to our founding fathers. One can dream….
Hardly surprising from a man who compares Project Apollo with digging a levee. Unreal.
James Greenidge
Queens New York
This line can and should be used in everything the Prez does. Our new mantra…
He has already vetted everyone he can think of and they all failed the stink test. That is why he has all those csars…they don’t have to go through the vetting. Most of the positions don’t have to be filled because he already has it covered by his csars. And meanwhile, the doofuses who voted for this guy continue to zone out on reality TV and think everything is just ducky. They won’t realize they have been screwed until they find out they aren’t getting their free plasma TV like obama promised.
That depends on how you look at it. If he meant his transitioning our great republic into a socialistic nation I think he is on track to proving his point (unless we keep the pressure on and stop him).
Nice segue into this article over at Hot Air. A taste:
What Happy said. If create a csar position you can avoid the pesky comformation mess. Everyone into zee showah, schnell!
Sigh…is that all. It’s gonna be a long 31/2 yrs.
Whoever suggested this administration has the ‘Greatest Transition in World History’ should re-examine their sourcing.
Even when a Veep succeeds a Pres, via election, time is required to install new appointees. Whatever the standards and benchmarks were used in saying the ‘Greatest’, I’d like to know what they are.
‘Greatest’ is an exagerration for effect and approaches a calculated mischarateriztion and misrepresentatrion of the truth.
He shouldn’t be taking a vacation until he has his entire cabinet in place. Has he earned a vacation? I say NO. I see that he is paying for his family’s expenses. But it costs $50,000 (I think) a week for each unit required for his secret service and staff. This is one expensive vacation!! But then, this president has VERY expensive tastes, as we have found out.
Wow, #16. The trolls are showing up earlier and earlier these days.
Hard to find Honest people to get on board the Hopey Changey BS agenda.
Hope and Change = Crock of Bologna
It’s by design … That way the unelected, unconfirmed czars can do all the real work, with no oversight.
You can have any crook, communist or thug as a czar, no worries about finding out who they are, nor what they are doing.
Z- You seemed to have missed the entire election campaign.
zero needed a vacation after working a couple of hours this month flying around at taxpayer expense trying to sell his health care scam. as for not yet filling all the positions still open it should be very easy to do since all you need to qualify with this administration is to be unethical, a tax cheat, a fraud, and utterly corrupt.
Z-Troll apparently thinks MM was making up the hype about the wonderfulness of President Dum-Dum’s transition. Nay, not so:
Obama winning praise for transition strategy – 12/20/2008
“83% Approval Rating for Obama Transition!” – January 16, 2008
“High Praise for Obama During Transition Period” – 12/10/2008
“Obama Transition Boost Wall Street; High Praise for National Security Team” – 12/01/2008
“Praise Pours In For Obama Economic Team” – 11/20/2008
“Obama Gets High Marks for Transition” – 1/16/2009
You see, Z-Troll, the reason Al Gore invented the internet was so that we could fact-check your a$$.
Z-Troll apparently thinks MM was making up the hype about the wonderfulness of President Dum-Dum’s transition. Nay, not so:
Obama winning praise for transition strategy – 12/20/2008
“83% Approval Rating for Obama Transition!” – January 16, 2008
“High Praise for Obama During Transition Period” – 12/10/2008
“Obama Transition Boost Wall Street; High Praise for National Security Team” – 12/01/2008
“Praise Pours In For Obama Economic Team” – 11/20/2008
“Obama Gets High Marks for Transition” – 1/16/2009
You see, Z-Troll, the reason Al Gore invented the internet was so that we could fact-check your bass.
Z-Troll apparently thinks MM was making up the hype about the wonderfulness of President Dum-Dum’s transition. Nay, not so:
Obama winning praise for transition strategy – 12/20/2008
“83% Approval Rating for Obama Transition!” – January 16, 2008
The Obama bunch is “all show and no go.”
They are so far over there heads, it would take a submarine to find them.
And more (because the comment filter chokes on multiple embedded links.
“High Praise for Obama During Transition Period” – 12/10/2008
“Obama Transition Boost Wall Street; High Praise for National Security Team” – 12/01/2008
And a few more …
“Praise Pours In For Obama Economic Team” – 11/20/2008
“Obama Gets High Marks for Transition” – 1/16/2009
You see, Z-Troll, the reason Al Gore invented the internet was so that we could fact-check your mass.
Most of the cockroaches he’s acquainted with avoid the light whenever possible.
Obama doesn’t need any other government offices filled. Axelrod and Emanuel are running the show. Obama can keep running his interminable permanent campaign while the puppet-masters pull the strings.
His most important problem, then, is how can he blame that on George Bush? He’s tried to blame him for everything else.
Google is your friend, as they say.
rplatt has hit on something here, and I wish more Republicans and conservatives would pay attention to it.
By appointing “czars,” Osama Obama is sidestepping the Constitution, as he has longed to do for years, and has done in many ways since Jan. 20.
His appointees are responsible to no one save Lord Obama. With a Congress full of blind, unprincipled followers, Obama has arrogated to himself power that no one person in a free society should have.
Suddenly, it’s 1917 in Moscow all over again.
Perhaps The One’s time was taken with finding an official White House dog? Priorities, people!
/sarc off
Google is evil.
Try Bing. A new picture every day.
you can fool some of the people all of the time (dems) and all of the people some of the times (rinos and moderates), but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, mr. pres. and you can’t fool people who can and do read your life’s work and your history any of the time.
That was a a Huff Po headline from Dec 2008. One has to assume the numbers are reasonably close to reality. Though as safe bet is that budget has been increased.
But the point is that how can a team of 450 with an 8 figure budget not get this job done, or at least mostly done, in 10 months? Are there THAT many felons in the pool of nominees? Is the team THAT inept?
EPIC FAIL
also.. from the Huff Po article
Looks like it didn’t quite meet his expectations.
First time hearing about this search engine. Will check it out.
It’s more intuitive than google and has less blatant advertising.
Mt Vesuvius today.
Doesn’t seem so bad. Certainly is better than Yahoo!. Thanks.
Zerobama’s transition team:
Zeeero. And dropping precipitiously.
I like to use Scroogle. It uses Google’s algorithm, but blocks the tracking cookies.
Or this:
http://www.scroogle.org/
It has the same results as Google.It ’scrapes’ Google’s results but Google doesn’t get credit for the hits or hits on the Ad links.
Good to know.
If I am reading Glenn Beck correctly, it is not Axelrod and Emanuel who are running the show. It goes higher and deeper than that. I have been wondering how Obama can swagger around with a big silly grin on his face, and have time to run around in campaign mode, plus take his wife on romantic getaways, plus have parties in the WH, plus go on vacation for a week. Now I know. He is just a puppet. And Soros, et al are pulling the strings. He delivers the message they tell him to deliver. Why doesn’t anyone in congress need to read any of the bills? Because they were written by outsiders who are orchestrating the destruction of capitalism and democracy right before our eyes. This is not child’s play, folks. It is real and it is happening. I believe the war in this country is escalating very quickly.
You may have inadvertantly stumbled across one of what Limbaugh would call the “undeniable truths of life”. No bureaucrat ever gets fired. They can’t finish the transition, because then they wouldn’t need a transition team.
I have said this before…Obama put his hand on the Bible and took the solomn oath for the highest office in the world…to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. NOW can we question his patriotism??? He is a traitor. He belongs in prison. I pray I live long enough to see it.
I like it! Thanks.
No, Google is *your* friend. Bing is my friend. I’m also an acquaintance of AltaVista and a drinking buddy of Dogpile.
Everyone watch Glenn Beck this week!! And pass it on.
No point in joining a sinking ship.
So savvy on the interwebs. I wanna be like you when I grow up.
No. You are wrong. Try asking me what I think. Heck, even try comprehending what I wrote.
Calling Pres Obama’s Administration transition the “Greatest Transition in World History” is just absolutetly false. It isn’t the greatest, or even near great. Do you believe it is? And, whoever does believe it, ought to have their head examined.
Moreover, in every link you provided, none of them used the phrase “Greatest Transition in World History”. Yep, a number of them gushed over Obama’s transition.
You are welcome to respond to the above question and should you do so, since you like linking so much, provide a link where someone is actually quoted saying that this is “Greatest Transition in World History”.
Nope.
Besides the topic is Pres Obama’s transition, which isn’t the “the Greatest Transition in World History”. If you wish to believe so, so be it.
Incompetence…thy name is Obama!
re The comment of Bart DePalma at bakinization:
During the campaign,I wonder if anyone else here experienced the same thing I did.That is,none of the Democraps or left-leaning Republicans that I spoke with concerning Obama’s experience versus Sarah’s understand what kind of experience is required of the Chief Executive.
The people I’m referring to could not understand how being the Mayor of a small town constitutes more executive experience than being a community activist or Senator.
I bring this up because it surprises me how many people don’t know what an executive does(or is supposed to do).
Apparently Obama is one of the people I am referring to.This could be one of the reasons he has had to appoint czars,instead of filling cabinet posts.
I’m sure there are some real executives who read this blog and I’d be interested in their take on this issue.
The difference between campaigning and governing is becoming painful clear.
Campaigning you lie at will, as long as the state run media lets you — governing, you lie at will and the people will laugh at you and call you a Joker.
Here’s a tip.
The next time you make a comment – have a point!
On August 24th, 2009 at 3:02 pm, blues said:
I’m sorry to say that I know too many people (many are highly educated) that don’t understand the difference between an executive and a representative.