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December 06, 2013
Number of Times Obama Met With HHS Secretary Sebelius Between the Passage and Rollout of Obamacare: One
A confident hand at the wheel of the ship of state.
Peter Schweitzer writes at Politico's Magazine:
Amid the Obama administration’s endless rounds of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, scant if any attention has been paid to the amount of time and executive leadership the president personally devoted to implementing his signature legislative achievement.
“Nothing frustrates me more than when people aren’t doing their jobs,” Obama has said. So, with so much riding on the line, one would assume he held weekly, if not daily, one-on-one meetings with his Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to isolate problems, challenge assumptions, apply executive pressure where needed and successfully manage a project of scale.
Nope.
That did not happen, at least not according to Obama’s own official White House calendar.
A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) analysis finds that from July 12, 2010, to Nov. 30, 2013, the president’s public schedule records zero one-on-one meetings between Obama and Sebelius.
Obama did meet with Sebelius and Treasury Secretary Geithner once. That was likely about Obamacare.
There was one such meeting.
Perhaps Obama's too extraordinary to oversee large projects:
The president's closest advisers, like Valerie Jarrett, say the problem is Obama “knows exactly how smart he is” and has “been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.” Obama says the trait he deplores most in himself is that “there’s a laziness in me.”
Sorry it's taken so long to get up a post today. I just can't do what ordinary people do.