Bolding mine, but the last line probably is the most relevant question that can be asked about the current administration:

There is nothing that any president needs more than a team of competent people around him who can keep him and his key initiatives on track. President Obama is in his fifth year in office, and he isn’t getting the level of performance from his staff you’d need to be an effective principal of a middle school. At this point, that failure doesn’t just reflect badly on the staff; it reflects on the man who selected them. More and more people in the United States and beyond are asking the obvious and painful question: Why can’t the President of the United States find and keep a minimally competent staff?

Walter Russell Mead is right: Barack Obama’s inability to maintain a functional staff reflects incredibly badly on Barack Obama. It’s one reason why we like to see executive branch experience in our Presidential candidates, too. You see, contrary to popular belief it is actually fairly easy to learn how to make quick decisions… if you are ignorant. Or dumb. Or headstrong. Or lazy. Or any combination thereof. Unfortunately, none of those conditions really help with the other part, which is the twin arts of being able to identify people who can do a job without too much supervision and knowing when “too much supervision” is actually “not enough supervision,” or “just enough supervision.”

This is something that Barack Obama has never bothered to learn, of course. And where would he? He’s never run a business. Or administered a town. Or led troops into combat, or coached a sports team, or any other type of activity that had a success metric other than ‘popularity.’ Even when a legislator Obama spent his time as an advocate (usually for himself), not as an administrator. The President had had people to do that for him since he started his political career, and the news that it turns out that Barack Obama has absolutely no idea how to get and keep his staff on-track for a smooth policy implementation experience does not surprise me in the slightest.

What does surprise me? That a lot of Democratic pundits are blinking in increasingly desperate befuddlement. God love them, but what did they think was going to happen? That Barack Obama was going to break out a magic staff and cast transform rhetoric to good policy? – Because I hate to break it to people, but the President was not, in point of fact, ever actually a Lightworker. He just, you know, played one on TV.

Played Democrats too, it looks like.

Moe Lane (crosspost)