Maybe, but it’s hard to see how the right pick was, essentially, a Democratic political hack. Ronald Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice Presidents Joe Biden and Al Gore, will be heading up the federal government’s response to Ebola, which has been neither disastrous nor impressive so far.

As Yuval noted here yesterday, there is no need to find some particular villain here: It’s not surprising that the Centers for Disease Control has not been capable of executing a perfect response to Ebola or enabling every major hospital to deal with the disease safely when it pops up. Such a bureaucracy is probably impossible and certainly undesirable. Here’s how he put it:

Do we really expect (or even want) our government to have the power and ability to smooth all of life’s edges and be ready in an instant to address the consequences of, say, a major hurricane or massive oil spill or deadly disease outbreak? What do we think that government would be doing with that power the rest of the time? What we should want and expect is a government that can respond to unexpected emergencies by calling upon generally plausible prior planning, quickly building up capacity when it is needed, and learning from unavoidable early mistakes.

So in that context, it could make sense to appoint a government official to oversee the CDC’s build-up. If Ebola is a crisis that seriously threatens the United States, sure, another government position is not necessarily a bad idea — we never objected to the Defense Department going on a hiring spree after 9/11, for instance (of course Ebola remains a much smaller threat than Islamic extremism). Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist points out that there is already a division of HHS, headed by an assistant secretary, that’s in charge of dealing with threats that are sort of like Ebola — any public-health emergency, essentially, which can range from earthquakes to bioterrorist attacks.

But there’s at least one reason this isn’t adequate: The Ebola crisis involves two essentially separate issues: how do we keep the disease out of the United States and treat and isolate it when it gets here, and how do we quell the outbreak in West Africa, preventing the disease from killing tens of thousands and becoming endemic there. (The first effort also involves two prongs: public-health efforts to contain the disease and a research drive for more treatments and a vaccine.)

What’s needed for an Ebola czar, if we accept that such a position may be useful — it’s hard to see how it would hurt — is someone who has some expertise in both of those issues (how the U.S. health system works and how to help primitive foreign health systems) and some managerial and bureaucratic competence so that he or she can hit the ground running in the federal government. Czar Klain, as far as I can tell, has possibly a bit of the latter category, from having worked as an executive-branch chief of staff, and utterly none of the former.

He’s clearly a smart guy (he was on the Harvard Law Review — what could go wrong?), but he’s run helped distribute stimulus grants, worked in finance and corporate law, and served as a legal staffer in Congress. When the president could pick literally anyone to do this job, more than general managerial competency would be nice. He helped run Al Gore’s recount operation after the 2000 election, but whatever liberals’ feverish visions are of what happened in Florida, it’s still not quite like dealing with the Liberian government. Intellectual talent and managerial ability can only go so far, especially when it comes to something as complicated and often counterintuitive as global health and public health (for example, whatever one makes of the merits of a travel ban, it’s remarkable how many smart people think it makes perfect sense, and how few global-health experts agree).

I don’t know if there are people at HHS right now who have someone like Klain’s smarts and the requisite expertise. He just doesn’t have them, but there are people who do — off the top of my head, President Obama’s erstwhile appointment to run our foreign-aid agency, Paul Farmer, is one.

In any case, even if Klain doesn’t seem like the perfect pick for the job, let’s hope he can do it competently and is surrounded by people who can too. We all want him back to finding Andy Borowitz hysterical as soon as possible.