Scare tactics in czar city
Shorthand term for special assistants now being used as a political specter
One thing we need to remember about all those ominous “czars” that President Obama has appointed, the ones that are causing such concern in Congress and in the blogosphere, is that nobody at the White House calls them that. Not within earshot of the press, anyway.
Not only is the term un-American, and thus bad politics, it isn’t accurate. The Czar of all the Russias was someone who ruled over vast numbers of people with unquestioned authority. The czar of health care policy and the czar in charge of stopping climate change are just two more bureaucratic infighters whose only claim to power is that the president might see them in the hall sometimes.
Far be it from us to play Blame-The-Media. But the fact is that calling some White House official whose job is to tie together all the loose strings of a major policy concern a “czar” is a creation of the press.
(Put the word “czar” into the White House Web site search engine, and you come up empty. Using the alternate spelling “tsar” gets you one hit: A biography of first lady Louisa Catherine Adams, who found the charm of the tsar’s court too little to overcome the brutal winters and family issues that beset her while her husband, future president John Quincy Adams, was U. S. ambassador to Russia.)
Inexpertly wielded by tsar-crossed lubbers, the term has become a would-be weapon. But for workaday reporters, the word czar is a headline-sized term for someone more properly, and dully, referred to as a “policy director” or “assistant to the president for . . . ” For the president’s political rivals, on the right and further on the left, it is a deliberately frightening term meant to connote a government official who has accumulated too much power with too little oversight. And to attack the holder of the shorthand title, who may or may not deserve it.
Not that a little oversight isn’t a good idea. There wasn’t anything wrong, for example, with the hearing that Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., put on the other day. He asked a panel of constitutional scholars whether the appointment of so many policy chiefs and advisors violated the Constitution’s requirement that top executive branch officials be confirmed by the Senate.
Not really, said the eggheads. Most of them fall into two categories: Either they also hold another title that is subject to Senate confirmation, or they are an “inferior officer” who reports to someone who is under the Senate’s microscope, an example being Wall Street pay czar, er, special master for executive compensation Kenneth R. Feinberg, who works for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
For presidents to hire various and sundry assistants and aides to help them keep track of many matters that clearly cross the boundaries of Cabinet offices is a tradition that goes back at least as far as Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was widespread in the George W. Bush White House.
Feingold and other members of Congress are correct to be concerned that various members of the executive branch may, on occasion, exceed their authority. Or, conversely, fail to discharge their duties. But any regal terms for White House assistants are misapplied, and a distraction from the real issues before us.
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