Team Obama’s ‘Real Time’ Bureaucracy

June 2, 2010 04:15


Just for confirmation, let’s check the Curriculum Vitae of some of the honchos running field ops for Team Obama.

by Brian Sussman at American Thinker

Yesterday, the White House director of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, assured “Fox and Friends” host Gretchen Carlson that the Obama administration was “making decisions in real time” regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil leak. Browner further appeased Carlson by insisting that Team Obama had been on the leak “since day one” and that any complaints of government beadledom were unfounded. “There is no bureaucracy here,” said Browner.

The Energy Czarina went on to highlight two names from the “best minds in America” club that we keep hearing about in reference to stopping the British Petroleum (BP) gusher: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Contrary to Browner’s insistence, the government players involved in the Gulf oil crisis have no track record of making real-time decisions, have been thoroughly taken to task for not being on the case since day one, and have been mired in mind-numbing bureaucracy. This is because the White House and its West Wing are packed to the rafters with lawyers, politicians, and academics. These are the type of people associated with paper-shuffling, assembling blue-ribbon committees, holding hearings, and filing lawsuits — not getting things done in “real time.”

Just for confirmation, let’s check the Curriculum Vitae of some of the honchos running field ops for Team Obama.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar worked as a private attorney for a few years before going to work for Colorado Governor Roy Romer in 1986. Salazar has been in government work ever since, first as Colorado’s Attorney General, then as a U.S. congressman, and now as head of Interior. Not the kind of resume that would imply the ability to commandeer the stoppage of a 5,000-barrel-a-day oil leak in real time.

Next we have Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Without question, Dr. Chu is a brilliant academic, and a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. However, academicians like Chu aren’t beholden by real time, either. They crave mental environments laden with deep theory and void of the stresses involved in bringing products to market. Even though Secretary Chu has had some personal interaction with British Petroleum via a grant proposal he once submitted to the oil giant (while at the University of California-Berkeley, he received the winning bid for a $500-million grant funded by BP), folks in the know tell me grant-writing works on a Gregorian calendar — not in “real time.”

FULL STORY



Help Make A Difference By Sharing These Articles On Facebook, Twitter And Elsewhere: