The Obammissariat

Interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal this week by Karl Rove. Pres. Barak Obama's staff at the White House's West Wing will number about 160, almost a three-fold increase from the number of staffers that punched in every day for George W. Bush. But what's more amazing is how the President is concentrating power at his fingertips. A number of positions, for the first time will be based in the White House. The decisions about who gets to be down the hall from the real Executive Washroom is an interesting one.
Among those to score offices in the West Wing are:

• The President's director of political affairs. Putting his political guru in the White House says a lot about the importance of looking good politically to the first post-partisan president.


• Incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle. He'll be the first cabinet secretary in our nation's history to be assigned to the White House. Daschle is an avowed proponent of what is called in Orwellian speak a "unitary payer" health system, but which everyone else knows as socialized medicine.


• The "environmental czar (czarina?) Carol Browner. Now instead of a phone call, Mr. Obama just has to walk down the hall for a few of Ms. Browner's left-of-center environmental bromides.

All of this is troubling for two reasons:

• It ignores 233 years of American tradition which says that the President's advisors of record are his Cabinet secretaries. Mr. Obama says the cabinet concept is outdated. Funny, Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union using it. Teddy Roosevelt oversaw sweeping changes to business and enshrined the environment in the national conscience using it. FDR won the great war using it. Mr. Obama's apparent disdain for it says a lot about arrogance and the esteem in which he holds the traditions and structure of our government.


• It creates a dangerous precedent where Mr. Obama has concentrated the real authority of his administration in the hands of a few people who even trump the cabinet secretaries. This is not unlike the old Soviet system of Commissars, isolated in the Kremlin, who held the real power and owned their allegiance not to the country but to the premier.

Pres. Obama said all the right things (and a couple of wrong ones) during his inaugural adress. But as time passes we're apparently seeing the real Pres. Obama: the guy who goes on Arabic television to make an unwarranted apology on the part of you and me to the Arab world for some perceived slights. The guy who thinks that bipartisanship is buying the votes of Republican congressmen with some drinks at the White House. And an isolated premier who is building his own Commissariat in the West Wing, getting ready to force feed legislation that most Americans will find repugnant.

Be worried. Be real worried.

Just thought you might like to know.