Gergen: "nobody in charge in the administration."
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Appearing on CNN’s Newsroom program Saturday night, David Gergen, a known Washington "fixer" some veteran Washington observers have even suggested that Obama should bring in to help manage the Obamacare rollout crisis, was asked by CNN Anchor Deborah Feyerick about the GAI report.
Feyerick cited a report from “an outfit called the Government Accountability Institute [that] finds the president and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius held just a single one-on-one meeting after Obamacare was signed into law over three years ago.”
"I don’t think this is simply sloppiness on the part of the White House," Gergen said. "What seems to me is there’s a case of near malfeasance here."
Gergen, who has served as Director of Speechwriting for the Nixon White House, Director of Communications for both Presidents Ford and Reagan, and then as a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, is intimately familiar with how the White House operates. In addition, he normally takes a "neutral" position on most matters and often gives those in power the benefit of doubt.
But Gergen emphasized that the GAI report concerning the lack of meetings between Sebelius and Obama raises troubling issues about about the conduct of affairs in the Obama White House.
Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer unveiled the report on Wednesday on Fox News's Hannity and Breitbart News.
As Breitbart News has reported, Schweizer said there was no evidence on the White House schedule that showed Obama cared about Obamacare
"In the case of President Obama, if you look at his calendar, there is no evidence whatsoever that he is focused or has much interest in health care at all," Schweizer said on Hannityon Wednesday.
Feyerick, the CNN host, added that the White House had attacked the report, “Jay Carney [is] saying that the report’s misleading and based on a ridiculously false premise, those are his words david Gergen, what do you think about this?”
Gergen responded by saying the GAI report was a big deal and should not be dismissed. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Obama and Sebelius meet "regularly" but their meetings were not recored on the visitors logs. Schweizer had previously noted that GAI also looked at White House visitor logs and found that whenever Sebelius went to the White House, it was for social functions with "dozens or hundreds of people." And he noted on Hannity that if Obama met with Sebelius and left the meeting off the books, Sebelius would be the only cabinet secretary whose meetings with the White House were concealed.
Gergen faulted the White House for this lack of contact and condemned the whole White House operation.
“The fact that he was not meeting with her one-on-one, I think, frankly, is not so much an indictment of her but of the White House operation," he said.
Gergen said that "at the same time three years pass with no one-on-one meetings according to this Politico article. The president had 277 one-on-one meetings with other members of his cabinet.”Gergen referenced Schweizer's Politico article in which he mentioned that "perhaps the insular White House team wanted to distance the president from the bureaucratic process in the hopes of granting him a halo of deniability if the launch failed."Schweizer also noted "the lack of meetings reinforces the severity of what the New York Times describes as the 'deeply dysfunctional relationship between the Department of Health and Human Services and its technology contractors, and tensions between the White House chief of staff and senior health department officials.'"
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breitbart.com
Was someone in the White House savvy enough to know Obamanable care was going to be so horribly unpopular, they advised Obama to keep his fingerprints off it? But if that's the case, why did they let it be branded Obamacare? |
