Two Questions of Competence

Brit Hume on the new White House leak:

This, I think, in political terms is damaging to the administration because it feeds into the question of whether the administration can in fact administer. We had first the fiasco with the rollout of the health care program. Now we’ve got the troubles at the VA. now this blunder by the White House press office.

Think about this, this is an administration that is fond of telling us — that the president is fond of telling us that he finds out about these things in the press. In this case, this was something that his press office put out and the mistake wasn’t noted until somebody in the press told him about it. So they found about this from the press all right, after they put it out. That’s a high level of bungling, I think it’s fair to say.

There’s video at the link, too.

Now for Byron York in today’s Washington Examiner on Ditherton Wiggleroom’s competence in general:

Fixing the Obamacare website — sort of — did little to improve Obama’s reputation. In a Quinnipiac poll in January of this year, 53 percent said the administration is not “competent in running the government,” while just 42 percent said it is competent.

Now comes the Veterans Affairs hospital scandal, and the president again appears in over his head. It seems inevitable that public opinion of Obama’s competence will fall still more. The president and Democrats can blame Republicans — has there ever been a moment when they didn’t? — but the fact is, voters have less and less faith in Obama’s ability to run the government.

That loss of faith could shape his last two years in the White House.

Obama’s agenda — beyond protecting the progressive “gains” of 2009-10 — was dead on Capitol Hill after the 2010 election. His reelection was more or less a rearguard action against the repeal of Dodd-Frank, ♡bamaCare!!!, or a return to semi-sensible spending levels. Anything else he’s gained or hopes to gain comes from executive action, which is antithetical to the Founders’ intentions — and scarily effective in the modern age.