Tough Times at Obama Inc.

This piece by Gail Collins is really good.

I know it’s been a tough week, little Obamaites. You’ve been feeling ... unstimulated. But think of it this way — the drama in the Senate drove Tom Daschle completely out of the news. In a week or so, nobody will even remember that he was nominated for anything.

Good point; very good point.

Perk up and feel free to ask questions:

Each question gets its own answer; some are brilliant.

How could so many cabinet nominees get into trouble? The Obama transition team was supposed to be so organized! Did their seven-page questionnaire ask about Facebook pages but not tax liens?

Wasn’t Tom Daschle crucial for health care reform? What are they going to do without him?

We have to get past the idea that transformative change requires one great cabinet member to steer it. That’s the kind of thinking that got us Donald Rumsfeld. Tom Daschle always seemed like a lovely man, but the idea that only he could get a big, important, dramatic health care reform through the Senate seems a little flawed, given the fact that he never got any big, important, dramatic reforms through the Senate when he was the actual majority leader.

I wanted them to work together on global warming, not on cutting money for Head Start out of the stimulus.

Why did Obama nominate Senator Judd Gregg to be commerce secretary? He’s not just a Republican; he isn’t even that moderate. And he voted to eliminate the Commerce Department!

It’s not exactly a big gamble. Although the Commerce Department has many important duties, like supervising the patent office, it’s sort of like an old attic where people throw stuff that doesn’t fit anyplace else. And while there have been some sterling commerce secretaries, it has been run for lengthy periods of time by complete morons and the nation didn’t seem to suffer appreciably.

O, and the Commerce Department (Commerce.gov) has a list of Secretaries over the ages. [Herbert Hoover, 1921-1928; Harry Hopkins, 1938-1940; Henry Wallace; Averell Harriman; Good Ole Maurice Stans; Eliot Richardson]

I still miss the way it was before the election, when everything seemed clearer.

Face it, you miss George W. Bush. Ever since he slunk off the scene, things have gotten all vague and squishy. You want somebody to rally against and Mitch McConnell is not an adequate substitute, even if he does look a little bit like the groundhog that assaulted the mayor of New York City this week.

Really, everybody’s getting so cranky.