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Posts Tagged ‘Eric Shinseki’
May 30th, 2014 at 5:30 pm
The Right Choice for VA Secretary
Posted by Print

I wrote here last week that I was ambivalent as to whether Eric Shinseki should lose his job as Secretary of Veterans Affairs over the scandal involving VA hospitals. My reluctance owed not to any doubts about the gravity of the scandal — it’s utterly horrible — but to a long-held belief that firings should be targeted at the person most directly responsible for error. My feeling was that only if Shinseki either (A) was that person or (B) had knowingly enabled that person, he wasn’t necessarily the right person to get the axe. And, as I noted last week, it seems clear to me that the real problem at the VA has a lot more to do with the structure of the institution and the policies it employs than the management (though it’s utterly plausible that Shinseki wasn’t the right guy to address those deeper issues).

It’s all moot now, of course, as Shinseki’s resignation was announced this morning. This was probably for the best. If anything, I came to lean more towards thinking his departure was the right thing over the last week — not because of the underlying scandal but because Shinseki’s reaction to this outrage seemed muted almost to the point of drowsiness.

It’s nice to see someone in the Obama Administration finally be held responsible for failures (no doubt Kathleen Sebelius’s management of the ObamaCare rollout had a lot to do with her departure, but she was still allowed to leave on her own terms). That said, however, no one should be sanguine about what lies ahead. Sacrificing Shinseki to the media gods may have bought the Obama Administration some time, but it doesn’t solve any of the underlying structural problems at the VA.

One of the reasons that the VA scandal has had so much traction is that it’s utterly non-partisan. Everyone believes government should be doing everything in its power to assist those who’ve worn the uniform of their country. With that in mind, this would be a good time for President Obama to do something truly presidential and look for the best man for the job regardless of political affiliations. What he needs is a proven fixer, someone who can turn around a major organization and root out inefficiencies and rot throughout the system; someone who will do the job as a service to the country rather than as a stepping stone to greater visibility; someone who’ll take the charge seriously even after the story has dropped off the front pages.

There’s a guy out there who’s a perfect fit for this job. Barack Obama ran against him in 2012.

May 22nd, 2014 at 1:17 pm
Should Shinseki Go?
Posted by Print

In my column this week, I look at the controversy surrounding the VA scandal. As I note, it presents a problem for liberals, who can’t rationalize this failure on ideological grounds the same way that they did with Benghazi or the IRS. As the always astute Byron York notes today in the Washington Examiner, left-wing ideology may also play a role in whether or not VA Secretary Eric Shinseki loses his job over the debacle:

The retired general has for years been a particular hero to Obama’s supporters on the left for his conflict with the George W. Bush administration during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

In early 2003, as the U.S. was planning the invasion, Shinseki angered his superiors in the Pentagon and White House by saying he believed victory and post-war stabilization in Iraq would require far more U.S. troops than President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were planning to deploy. “Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required,” Shinseki told Congress in February 2003.

By [2007], Shinseki had become a legend to anti-war liberals, and all the more so by December 2008, when President-Elect Obama was choosing his cabinet. “By tapping Mr. Shinseki to run the VA, [Obama] has provided a sop to the left,” wrote the lefty blogger Steve Kornacki, now an MSNBC personality, when Shinseki’s appointment was announced. A poster at the leftist website DailyKos had a shorter reaction: “Hallelujah!” Even though Shinseki was not chosen for the military policy position some had hoped for him, the reaction to his appointment showed the enduring gratitude of many on the anti-war left.

This is, of course, an indefensible rationale for keeping someone in a position where they’re failing. Shinseki should be judged for present performance, not past positions.

That said, I’m ambivalent on the question of whether the VA Secretary should be given his walking papers. President Obama, like President Bush before him, is not inclined to reflexively fire people because of bad press. That can be a good instinct if it means you’re more concerned with actually solving problems than just creating the image of responsiveness for the press. But therein lies the problem.

Who serves as Secretary of Veterans Affairs is a lot less important than the makeup of the system they’re presiding over. Whether it’s Shinseki or someone else, they’ll still be responsible for managing a gargantuan single-payer health care bureaucracy. It’s a similar dynamic to the Department of Health and Human Services — don’t expect much to change because Kathleen Seblius is gone. The underlying policies and infrastructure remain the same. Whoever sits behind the desk is little more than a captive to the administrative behemoth.

Should Shinseki get the boot? I don’t know and I’m not sure it makes much of a difference. What would really help would be upending the entire process — for example, giving veterans vouchers for their health care, which would allow the federal government to still finance their treatment without actually providing it. John McCain recently suggested that step (as did Mitt Romney in 2012 — when he was pilloried for it). At the time, it was decried as inhumane. Anyone who wants to know what real inhumanity looks like ought to visit the VA in Phoenix.