The honeymoon for President Obama may not be over but it sure looks like it is fraying at the edges after only 18 days in office. Strangely enough, it seems to be happening more with the people and the press than with the opposition. It was reported this week that you could barely make a phone call to the seat of government these past two weeks because so many angry voters were flooding the congressional offices with complaints.
A good deal of this frustration appears to be over a slew of very questionable if not down right stupid appointments. Does the best and the brightest the president mentioned have to include people who can't be bothered to pay their taxes? Timothy Geithner was the first mistake and what a beauty it was. What was the president thinking when he knew that his appointment to head the Treasury and the IRS was a tax cheat?
Apparently undaunted by the criticism of the Geithner appointment' the president quickly followed up with former Senator Tom Daschle who not only had tax issues but was also cleaning up in the unregistered lobbyist business since his defeat for re-election. Didn't the President promise something about that whole lobbyist issue? Despite standing by his man and giving an unqualified vote of confidence (the kiss of death in politics) Tom was out of the picture the next day.
Nancy Killefer was to fill the newly created role of chief performance officer. Killefer, a senior director at management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co., was to be in charge of combing through the federal budget to weed out unnecessary programs and streamline government efficiency. Part of Ms. Killefer's resume included being the chief operating officer at Treasury as well as the first chairman of the IRS Over Sight Board. In a disturbing trend, Ms. Killefer is perfectly content to oversee others performance but not herself as it became known she had failed to pay payroll taxes. She withdrew with this comment that when she had "come to realize in the current environment that my personal tax issue of D.C. unemployment tax could be used to create exactly the kind of distraction and delay" that must be avoided in responding to urgent economic problems.
No Nancy, that is not the issue at all. The issues are simple, is Obama's vetting process so careless that these types of items are missed or is he so out of touch in Washington that he thinks that the American people don't care if our leaders pay their taxes? This nonsense about "bungling" and "simple oversight" is hogwash. Tom Daschle did not bungle over 130,000 dollars in back taxes. He knew it was an issue and paid it up just before the nomination hoping he would get the same kid glove treatment Geithner got from his senatorial buddies.
The latest appointment with tax problems maybe even more egregious than the last three. During Congresswoman Hilda Solis' (D California) hearing for appointment to the post of Labor Secretary, a tax issue was reported by USA Today. The Obama administration conceded it had not discovered on its own that California tax liens had been filed against Solis' husband, Sam H. Sayyad. Apparently Mr. Sayad had tax liens on his business and property that dated back 16 years and they only got paid because Ms. Solis got a nomination.
Now it would be unfair to blame Ms. Solis for her husbands scofflaw attitude, however, as we all know (or those of us who pay our taxes) that if you sign a joint return you are responsible for everything in it. Her hearing was postponed while the issue was looked into but under these circumstances and the number of consecutive failures, I see Obama throwing her under the bus very quickly.
The latest little bit of reality versus campaign rhetoric has come about over the stimulus plan. The same guy that ran on the politics of hope versus fear has been heard the last few days uttering the words "an urgent and growing crisis", "devastating and "catastrophic" and "irresponsible" if the plan is not passed immediately.
Look, if congress is going to spend another 800 billion dollars do you think they could at least read the bill? Look on the web and see if you can get even a brief summary of what this thing consists of. Do you think our representatives have any more access to the leadership's position on this spending than we do? Some how I doubt it. For all the talk about openness, even the people in the majority are claiming that they are getting shut out of the deliberations.
Is it bad out there, you bet, however a look back in history presents similar scenarios. When Reagan replaced the bumbling Carter, interest rates were near 14%, inflation at 13% and unemployment peaked at 10%. Reagan campaigned on a feel good America can do type platform and then tried to emulate that attitude as president. Obama could do well to follow his example. He has come into office with more good will and good wishes from the voter than any candidate in recent history. Let's hope he is more deliberate and thorough in his decision making so that he doesn't squander that good will in record time.
