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White House staff exodus exposes Obama to charges of disarray
More senior staff including defence secretary Robert Gates, and senior advisor David Axelrod, leave their jobs



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Ewen MacAskill in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 October 2010 19.37 BST
Article history
National security adviser James Jones announced his resignation this week. Jones was often at odds with Obama's closest aides. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters
More senior White House staff are to leave in the next few months, adding to the high exit rate from President Barack Obama's administration.

Political analysts attribute the attrition rate to exhaustion, but Republican opponents blame disarray inside the White House, with an insular team responsible for too many policy failures.

The imminent departures include those of defence secretary Robert Gates, who has said he hopes to retire early next year, and Obama's senior White House adviser, David Axelrod, who is planning a return to his home town of Chicago early next year to concentrate on planning for Obama's 2012 re-election bid.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has been mentioned in the past few weeks in connection with a range of jobs, including White House adviser or chairman of the Democratic national committee, which runs the party.

This follows the departure of the national security adviser, General James Jones, after less than two years in office, as well as almost the entire economics team, of whom Peter Orszag and Christina Romer have already gone. Larry Summers is due to return to Harvard before the end of the year. The chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, left last month to stand for mayor of Chicago.

The changes provide Obama with a chance to reshape his team after the 2 November midterm elections, in which polls indicate the Republicans stand to make big gains.

Obama's popularity in opinion polls has dropped from 70% last year to the mid-40s this year, so a reshuffle offers an opportunity to reverse that trend and to change economic and foreign policies and political strategy. Regular staff changes were not uncommon during the Bill Clinton presidency and those of his predecessors, but this exodus is unusual in that it is happening before the result of the mid-term elections, when staff reshuffles normally take place.

In a blog on the Politico website, Alvin Felzenberg, the presidential historian and author of The Leaders We Deserved, writes: "These departures are a reflection of Obama's leadership style. Why he has such a difficult time earning and retaining the loyalties of people outside his circle of intimates is anyone's guess."

Gibbs last month attributed the changes to 15-or 16-hour work days, seven days a week. Professor Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, agrees exhaustion is a factor but attributes the exodus to the scale of the problems the team has faced, especially over the economy.

"The exhaustion rate for this administration is more accelerated due to the problems they encountered in January 2009. There was no presidential 'honeymoon'," Baker said today. He added that some of them had been working intensively on economic policy in the six months before Obama took over.

"These are worn-out, depleted people who are not waiting for the fire alarm to be sounded before heading for the emergency exit," Baker said.

But they have also made big mistakes. Romer, in a statement she has since said she regretted making, promised Obama's economic stimulus plan would get unemployment down to 8%, whereas it has stayed above that, with the latest figure at 9.6%.

On foreign policy, Jones is a victim of White House infighting. A long-time friend of Obama's presidential rival John McCain, Jones was brought in to reassure the military as Obama took office, but was frequently at odds with Axelrod, Emanuel and others in the inner circle.

His departure, before the end of the month, allows his successor, Tom Donilon, to have a greater say in the review of Afghanistan policy scheduled for December.

"Frankly, a lot of what the December review is about is the next phase now," a senior Obama aide told the Daily Beast website. "So it would be good to have a new structure in place as we make those decisions.

If the House is in Republican hands, the prospect of gridlock in Washington is high. Obama faces the choice of appointing a team that is more centrist and might find it easier to work with Republicans in getting legislation through Congress. Obama, given high feelings about the size of the federal deficit, might focus on ways to reduce spending, something the Republicans might agree with.

An alternative strategy would be to appoint political staff as fiercely partisan as their predecessors and fight the next presidential election on Republican obstructionism.

Axelrod, speaking yesterday on CBS's Face the Press, said he hoped there would not be gridlock after the election. "I hope that with more seats, they [the Republicans] will be more co-operative," Axelrod said.

Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican State Leadership Committee, on the same programme, said co-operation was possible on trade agreements and proposals that "will put a brake on reckless spending".

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