Near the beginning of his term, President Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, inadvertently offered up a line that defined the breathless, panting rush of spending and regulating of the administration’s first two years: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
Yesterday, while answering questions from a group of business executives in Washington, the president’s second chief of staff, William Daley, may have inadvertently offered up a slogan for the administration’s second two years. Some of those in the audience pointed to the kinds of uncertainty and heavy-handed bureaucracy they are dealing with these days and, as today’s Washington Post describes it:
Daley said he did not have many good answers, appearing to throw up his hands in frustration at what he called “bureaucratic stuff that’s hard to defend.”
“Sometimes you can’t defend the indefensible,” he said.
Sometimes you really can’t.