Julia Pierson: Poster woman for executive branch failures

By:  LeRoy Goldman

Asheville Citizen - Times

The day following her disastrous hearing on Capitol Hill Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned. No one is surprised. She should never have been promoted to lead the Secret Service. The failures that have occurred on her brief watch make that abundantly clear. But beyond her lack of competence, and proclivity to focus on protecting her job and reputation, rather than the President, the public exposure of Pierson’s failings serve to highlight a much broader problem in the Executive Branch. It has far too many “Julia Piersons” in positions of leadership and authority. Too many of them, like Pierson, occupy those posts as a consequence of the perniciousness of political correctness.

Pierson testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on September 30th and made matters worse for herself by appearing to be unprepared, unforthcoming, and self-protectively bureaucratic. The bipartisan blistering she received was a rare example of Congress working together and doing the right thing.

Pierson was appointed by President Obama to head the Secret Service in March of 2013 following the damaging revelations that multiple Secret Service agents had been with as many as 20 prostitutes at the Caribe Hotel in Cartagena, Colombia in 2012 just prior to the president’s arrival.

A year after Pierson’s appointment three Secret Service agents responsible for protecting the President in Amsterdam were sent home after a night of drinking. One of the agents was found passed out in a hotel hallway. They were in Amsterdam preparing for President Obama’s trip to Europe and Saudi Arabia. All three were members of the Secret Service’s Counter Assault Team. The team is an elite unit that is the last line of defense in protecting the President—hard to do when you’re unconscious. Regarding the mentally ill fence jumper who entered the White House before being taken down, the Secret Service first said he was unarmed. He had a knife. Then they said he was subdued immediately upon entering the Mansion. In fact, he was not taken down until after penetrating deeply into the Mansion. In addition, a security contractor with a gun and multiple convictions for assault was allowed to ride in an elevator with the President during his visit to the CDC in Atlanta only days before the fence jumper incident. More troubling was the fact that it appears that the Secret Service’s review of that incident was an effort to keep the matter concealed, according to reporting by Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post.

The best Pierson could say at the House hearing on September 29th was, “Yes, mistakes were made”. In the Washington Post on September 30th Dana Milbank sums it up by saying, “it looks as if Secret Service secrecy is not meant to protect the president’s life but to protect an arrogant agency from reform and embarrassment.”

Pierson has demonstrated she can’t do the job. Moreover, she should never have been appointed in the first place. Her appointment had much to do with the optics of appointing a woman following the Service’s “prostitute” scandal in Cartagena. It was an appointment driven by political correctness.

What many Americans do not realize is how pervasive political correctness decision making has become throughout the Executive Branch. It’s been underway since the 1980s, and that means after 35 years, it’s well entrenched. In addition, the byzantine nature of Federal work rules are a powerful ally of this corrosive force. Everybody knows that it’s almost impossible to oust a Federal employee. In fact, it’s so hard that it’s rarely attempted.

When you add a directive to employ and promote individuals simply because they are members of this or that group to a workforce that is already hamstrung by work rules that cripple managers you end up with agencies that too often can’t or won’t fulfill their mission and are expert in resisting efforts to expose or correct their deficiencies. Paradoxically far too many white male senior managers contribute mightily to this systemic problem. Fearful of being the recipients of the blizzard of discrimination complaints that would jeopardize their careers, they turn a blind eye to this problem and, thus, become its accomplice. Ousting Julia Pierson is barely the beginning of what needs to be done. If you think you can fix the IRS, or the VA, or the HHS, or the Pentagon without confronting this problem, you’re Whistling Dixie.

Goldman lives in Flat Rock. He was member of the Federal Government’s Senior Executive Service for many years. He can be reached at:  EmailMe 

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Obama’s legacy: Stalemate

By LeRoy Goldman
Special to The Observer

Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, NC 

Posted: Wednesday, Oct. 01, 2014

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/10/01/5213708/obamas-legacy-stalemate.html#storylink=cpy

Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama brought down the house at the 2004 Democratic National Convention with his electrifying speech. That speech assured his election to the Senate, but more importantly it gave birth to his quest for the presidency.

Without doubt the lines from the speech that engendered the greatest applause were, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Those words were the foundation of his presidential campaign in 2008 that promised “Hope and Change.” Obama had read the mood of the nation correctly, and the electorate responded by providing him with a mandate to govern and a Congress with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

But today, half way through the president’s second term, his soaring words from 2004 ring hollow.

Today America is more polarized than it was a decade ago.

Today the stalemate in Washington that has emasculated the national government is easily understood by the existence of a no-man’s land that separates Red States from Blue States, whites from minorities, conservatives from liberals, and men from women.

The paralysis is so severe and so longstanding that we are now at the point where both sides accept its existence as the new normal.

Instead of finding ways to grapple with the major problems facing the nation, the president and the Congress remain locked in a zero-sum game in which each side believes that the only way to win is for the other to lose.

What’s worse is the fact that this problem will continue long after President Obama leaves office.

To understand why, we need to go back to the scene of the crime – the president’s first two years in office when he had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Democrats controlled the House 257-178 and the Senate 60-40.

On Feb. 19, 2009 CNBC reporter, Rick Santelli, broadcasting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, called for the creation of a “Chicago Tea Party.” It was the spark that lit the fuse of the tea party whose supporters were already outraged at the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that President George W. Bush signed into law the previous October and the Stimulus bill that President Obama had signed less than a month after taking office in January of 2009.

But what really fueled and sustained the growth of the tea party was their full-throated, intransigent opposition to President Obama’s plan to alter more than one-sixth of the national economy by proposing health care reform – Obamacare.

In June of 2009 the president laid out his strategy for sweeping health care reform. From then, until he signed Obamacare into law nine months later, the president attempted to explain his program to the American people dozens of times. He failed each time. They never understood it.

In addition, the president chose to turn the job of writing the legislation over to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and a few key committee chairmen on Capitol Hill, partisan Democrats. And all of this took center stage with Wall Street in turmoil, the mortgage market frozen, economy in free-fall, unemployment skyrocketing, stock market plummeting, and the recession deepening.

Obama’s unwise, unnecessary, and unforced error gave the tea party just what it needed – power.

On Election Day 2010 they took control of the House and they were hugely successful in state legislative and gubernatorial races all over the nation, just in time for the 10-year census and the congressional redistricting that follows the census.

The GOP added 720 state legislative seats in 2010, increasing its total to 3,941 Republican state legislators – more than at any time since 1928!

And since then those Republicans have so gerrymandered the House that there is no chance the Democrats can reclaim it until 2022 at the earliest. North Carolina is a perfect example.

Prior to 2010, its delegation had seven Democrats and six Republicans. Today it has nine Republicans and four Democrats. After this November’s election, it likely will have 10 Republicans and three Democrats.

Unwittingly, President Obama combined his naivete, arrogance, and inexperience in a way that neutered his presidency and brought to power radical Republicans who have repeatedly demonstrated their incapacity to govern. They have blood in their mouths, vengeance in their hearts, and insufficient electrical activity between their ears.

Thank you, Mr. President!

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