Even though the lame-duck loser continues to foul himself and desecrate the free and fair election process, I am determined – this week, anyway – to highlight the upside of life. The latest evidence, thanks to the wisdom of the electorate, is the impending ascent of Ron Klain.
It ain’t sexy to talk about effective governance. But President-elect Biden wants to ensure that his White House will be run well, free of the chaotic idiocy that has made the last four years so traumatic. The road to sanity begins with the chief of staff.
Trump had four of them. The first, GOP toady Reince Priebus, lasted seven months; the second, John Kelly, loathed his boss until he couldn’t take it anymore; the third, Mick Mulvaney, helped run a rogue operation to squeeze Ukraine for dirt on Biden; the fourth (and last) is maskless Mark Meadows, who’s currently Covid positive.
Kelly, in particular, reportedly shared this assessment of Trump with his friends: “The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me – the dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Klain doesn’t think of Biden that way. That alone will be an improvement.
You’ve likely never heard of Klain – unless you remember his stint as President Obama’s point man on the Ebola scare – and that’s a good thing. During his long career in Washington he has rarely made news, and he rarely made news because he rarely if ever screwed up. As the economist Jared Bernstein remarked a few years ago, “He understands the intersections of politics and policy better than anyone I’ve ever worked with, and is thus uniquely effective in getting things done.”
After four years of Keystone Cops incompetence, let’s put our hands together for seasoned government experience. Klain was chief of staff to two vice presidents – Biden and Al Gore – and he knows how to work the power levers. And that was best evidenced by his stint as Obama’s Ebola “czar,” coordinating the massive inter-agency response after the disease in West Africa threatened to engulf us here.
Klain’s job was to marshal the Department of Health and Human Services (most notably, its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to work in concert with the World Health Organization, the Pentagon, the State Department, the World Bank, the National Security Council, Obama’s office, state health authorities, and various hospitals nationwide.
He got involved on a granular level, supervising the trucking of a sick doctor’s waste all the way from New York to a disposal facility in Texas. He gave special cellphones to travelers returning to America from West Africa so that the authorities could call and track them daily during the required 21 days of monitoring for symptoms. He got daily reports showing the locations of all the returned travelers – pinpointed by yellow dots – and their distance from hospitals that could treat the disease if God forbid.
Klain cracked the whip for five months. When he departed in February ’15, take a guess what the American death toll was.
One.
Actually, the death toll was one when Klain came aboard. So the number of deaths on his watch was zero.
You didn’t hear much about Klain’s success, largely because a pandemic did not happen. And what’s most amusing, in retrospect, is how right-wingers went ballistic when Klain was put in charge. Rush Limbaugh ranted that his appointment was “100 pure politics.” Laura Ingraham called Klain “a parade of horribles.” Geraldo Rivera called Klain “a hack.” The general conservative consensus – and this is hilarious, given what we’ve witnessed this year – is that the person leading the fight against a potential pandemic should be a medical expert steeped in science.
But the best quote (try not to spit out your coffee) came from Ted Cruz. With the national death toll at one, Cruz declared that Klain’s ascent was proof that Obama had forfeited leadership: “The person who needs to be on top of this is the president of the United States!”
Rest assured, Ted, the next president of the United States won’t spend his days sitting on his ass watching cable news. With Ron Klain as his point man, he’ll be on top of this governing thing.
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Fun fact: Klain will be the first chief of staff ever to have been played by Kevin Spacey. You can look it up.