The Democrats Misallocated Resources
Ezra Klein on Peter Orzag and the Obama administration’s shuffling of the troops:
But the Obama administration did a lot of that kind of thing when they took office. Although you could’ve made a case for Orszag at OMB, as there was obvious value in having a budget director who understood CBO, it was harder to explain why the White House named Iowa’s Tom Vilsack, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, Colorado’s Ken Salazar and Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius to Cabinet posts given that they were the most popular Democrats in states where a Senate seat was in-cycle in 2010. The Obama administration tried to hire “the best people for the job,” but it gave short shrift to the consequences of taking those people out of the jobs they were already holding and races they were considering/could be cajoled into entering.
