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Obama's 'czars:' Bull's-eyes for critics
by Mark Silva
President Obama is dancing with the czars, the way some of his critics would have it.
And those critics have grown louder and louder lately, complaining about not only the president's alleged "socialist'' health-care plans, but also his alleged "communist'' adviserVan Jones (pictured below), the environmental adviser whom FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck is calling "the green czar.''
(That's one of the nicer things Beck calls Joneswho, like a few others who have arrived in Washington with a zeal for public service, possessed somewhat more radical views about politics in his college days. Beck should know about radicals.)
As for those czars...
Obama has "more of them than the Romanovs,'' Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona joked today at his "town hall'' meeting in Sun City, Arizona, repeating a laugh line that he has played again and again. (But the audience wasn't laughing about something which some see as a threat to their very Constitution -- that is the threat of advisers to the president whom people lightly call "czars.")
This czar-struck administration is raising the hackles of the anti-czar crowd, for sure.
Beck calls it "The new Republic... apparently the old one wasn't good enough,'' Beck says. "One area I have a lot of questions on is the czars... There are nearly three dozen of these czars. They don't answer to anybody. They are advisers to the president.''
Actually, they answer to the presidentand Obama hardly is the first president to have an array of senior assistants who have a say in White House policy.
And Beck really has it out for the "green czar,'' Jones, whose actual title has more to do with being a special advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Some "czar'' Jones is, on this White House CEQ roster:
Chair: Nancy Sutley
Chief of Staff: Jon Carson
Deputy Chief of Staff: Nikki Buffa
General Counsel: Ted Boling
Associate Directors: Land and Water Ecosystems: Mike Boots; Climate Change: Jason Bordoff; NEPA Oversight: Horst Greczmiel; Communications: Christine Glunz; Green Jobs: Van Jones; Legislative Affairs: Jessica Maher;Policy Outreach: Amy Salzman.
This czar-business, like the car-business, has gotten out of control. The title itself has become a "clunker'' with little cache, considering how many there may be.
When the administration dropped the word "toxic" from its talk of financial markets' woes, the press secretary was asked in March: "Do you have some marketing czar now who decided that "legacy loans" is more attractive to private investors than the word "toxic"?
"If there's a marketing czar,'' Press Secretary Robert Gibbs replied, "I've failed to get his or her memo.''
The president himself has helped fuel the fervor for the word, czar.
"Will immigration reform be part of this whole process?'' Obama was asked during an interview by Juan Carlos Lopez, president of CNN EN ESPAÃ'OL , in April. "And also you've named a border czar. Was this consulted with Mexico, and what is he going to do?
"Well, the goal of the border czar is to help coordinate all the various agencies that fall under the Department of Homeland Security, and so that we are confident that the border patrols are working effectively with ICE, working effectively with our law enforcement agencies,'' Obama replied. "So he's really a coordinator that can be directly responsible to Secretary Napolitano and ultimately directly accountable to me.''
But the power of the czars may be overrated.
Kenneth Feinberg, one of the Obama administration officials whom the news media have anointed as a "czar," hardly has the powers that would impress an Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great, or former colleague Mike Dorning has noted.
"Feinberg, widely described as the White House's "pay czar," will have real control over compensation of executives at exactly seven companies that have been large recipients of government bailout money,'' Dorning wrote a while back for the Chicago Tribune. "And he has discretion over only the top five executives and 20 most highly paid employees in those companies. At most, that's 175 people.
"But czars are proliferating in Washington with a White House that has demonstrated a clear inclination to concentrate broad authority in its top officials by crossing traditional bureaucratic boundaries and a 24-hour cable news culture that has discovered that the appointment of a czar is more exciting than, say, an adviser on urban issues.
"There's a health reform czar, a drug czar, a border czar, a regulatory czar, an info-tech czar -- everything, it sometimes seems, but a Russian czar.''
McCain likes, and often uses, his line about "more czars than the Romanovs.''
It's not a job title that you'll find on anyone's federal paycheck, however.
It's more of an informal thing. The magazine, Foreign Policy, counted 18 under its definition, back in April. Reuters counted 21. At town hall meetings these days, people are complaining about "30 or 40'' of them.
Beck has found "more than three dozen.''
And he has one, Jones, in his cross-hairs.
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