Hey, that’ll work:
President Obama has asked Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff to both Vice President Biden and former vice president Al Gore, as his Ebola response coordinator, according to a White House official.”He will report directly to the president’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, and the president’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, as he ensures that efforts to protect the American people by detecting, isolating and treating Ebola patients in this country are properly integrated but don’t distract from the aggressive commitment to stopping Ebola at the source in West Africa,” a White House official wrote in an e-mail.Klain, a longtime Democratic operative, served as Biden’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2011 and as Gore’s from 1995 to 1999. He helped oversee the Democratic side in the 2000 presidential election recount as its lead lawyer, a role that Kevin Spacey portrayed in the HBO film “Recount.”
Klain has virtually no experience except for the political and the legal. He’s another Harvard Law graduate, and briefly clerked for SCOTUS Justice Byron White, but after that there’s mostly a long string of Democratic political positions, including a stint as debate prepper.
The following [emphasis mine] is really a masterpiece in gracefully laconic understatement by the WaPo. My hat is off to the article’s authors:
Klain is not known for his health-care expertise, though he would get briefings on those policies in his capacity as a campaign strategist for Gore and the Democrats’ 2004 presidential candidate, John Kerry.
On the other hand, the doctors who’ve been dealing with this so far, such as Frieden, have been so bad at it that perhaps a complete naif would be better. If a person were organized, smart, independent, and objective it could work. But Klain’s status as party operative makes the “independent and objective” part rather unlikely, to say the least.
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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