HMM. WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT BARACK OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY? Elizabeth Drew: The Firing of Chuck Hagel.

While I had come to admire Hagel as a thoughtful man, there’s a question of whether anyone can make the leap from a senator’s office—with an average staff size of 34 people, to the Pentagon, the world’s largest institution, which employs about 26,000 personnel on site, plus about a half million overseas, plus an active military of about 1.5 million men and women. In general, transitions from Capitol Hill to a cabinet office, in either party, haven’t been markedly successful. The Pentagon has been a sinkhole of failures.

So if the transition from Senator to SecDef is too much, how about from Senator to Commander In Chief? The evidence would seem to support Drew’s position there, too . . . .