Ebola & Obama

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Ebola & Obama

WASHINGTON — Beneath the calming reassurance that President Obama has repeatedly offered during the Ebola crisis, there is a deepening frustration, even anger, with how the government has handled key elements of the response.

Those frustrations spilled over when Mr. Obama convened his top aides in the Cabinet room after canceling his schedule on Wednesday. Medical officials were providing information that later turned out to be wrong. Guidance to local health teams was not adequate. It was unclear which Ebola patients belonged in which threat categories.

“It’s not tight,” a visibly angry Mr. Obama said of the response, according to people briefed on the meeting. He told aides they needed to get ahead of events and demanded a more hands-on approach, particularly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “He was not satisfied with the response,” a senior official said.

People briefed on a cabinet meeting said Mr. Obama was angry at the Ebola response. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

On Friday, Mr. Obama took a step to both fix that response and reassure the public, naming Ron Klain, a former aide to Vice President Joseph R. Biden, to coordinate the government’s efforts on Ebola.

The appointment followed the president’s statement Thursday that the job was necessary “just to make sure that we are crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s going forward.”

“Part of the challenge is to be assertive, to be in command, and yet not feed a kind of panic that could easily evolve here,” said David Axelrod, a close adviser to the president in his first term. “It’s not enough to doggedly and persistently push for answers in meetings. You have to be seen doggedly and persistently pushing for answers.”

For two turbulent weeks, White House officials have sought to balance those imperatives: insisting the dangers to the American public were being overstated in the news media, while also moving quickly to increase the president’s demonstration of action.

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and its arrival in the United States, is the latest in a cascade of crises that have stretched Mr. Obama’s national security staff thin. As the White House scrambled to stop the spread of Ebola beyond a handful of cases, officials were also grappling with an escalating military campaign against the Islamic State, the specter of a new Cold War with Russia over Ukraine, and the virtual disintegration of Yemen, which has been a seedbed for Al Qaeda.

Senior officials said they pushed Mr. Obama to name an Ebola coordinator as a way of easing pressure on the staff at the National Security Council.

At the meeting on Wednesday, officials said, Mr. Obama placed much of the blame on the C.D.C., which provided shifting information about which threat category patients were in, and did not adequately train doctors and nurses at hospitals with Ebola cases on the proper protective procedures.

On Thursday night, in televised remarks, Mr. Obama sought to reassure the public about the dangers from Ebola. But the sense of crisis that emanated from the White House was in sharp contrast to Sept. 30, when Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian who had traveled to Dallas, tested positive for Ebola. Mr. Obama received a telephone briefing from Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C., after which the White House issued a sanguine statement that concluded: “We have the infrastructure in place to respond safely and effectively.”

In the days that followed, Mr. Obama carried on as usual while his aides gamely added Ebola to their bulging portfolios. On Oct. 1, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and later had dinner with friends at the RPM Steakhouse in Chicago, where he had traveled for fund-raisers and to deliver an economic speech.

By early October, as questions about the Dallas hospital’s treatment of Mr. Duncan mounted, federal officials began reassessing their response, even as they continued to express confidence.

C.D.C. officials publicly dismissed the effectiveness of screening for Ebola at airports in the United States. But Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, found a way to make it work over the weekend of Oct. 4. Mr. Obama announced the screening protocol the following Monday.

Even after Mr. Duncan’s death on Oct. 8, officials betrayed little sense of a change in approach. Mr. Obama traveled to California for campaign fund-raising and on his return to Washington, received a briefing from his secretary of health and human services about the announcement that a nurse who treated Mr. Duncan had contracted Ebola.

The business-as-usual sentiment at the White House changed abruptly, officials said, when it got word early Wednesday that a second nurse in Dallas contracted the disease. The fact that she had traveled on a Frontier Airlines flight despite having a fever added to the concern, officials said.

“This Frontier thing took it out of the abstract thing and to this level where people could identify with and made them scared,” a senior official said. Within hours, White House aides canceled a planned trip by Mr. Obama to Connecticut and New Jersey. Hours later, Thursday’s trip to Rhode Island and New York City was also scrubbed.

Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, has been leading the effort to prod Britain, Germany, France and other countries to do more to respond to the outbreak. One of Ms. Rice’s deputies, Lisa Monaco, who is responsible for homeland security and counterterrorism issues, has been coordinating the domestic response, which involves working with the C.D.C., state and local health authorities, and the Transportation Security Administration on issues like scanning of incoming passengers.

Administration officials insist the president has been deeply engaged since late August, when he played host to African leaders, in prodding them to ramp up the fight against Ebola in West Africa. Last month, he warned world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly to do more.

“It’s not that people aren’t doing anything,” a senior official said. “It’s that they’re not yet doing enough.”

Complicating the administration’s international push, it is also pressing European allies to contribute military resources to the campaign against the Islamic State. Officials said they were satisfied with Britain and Germany, but that France had been dragging its heels.

Administration officials also said Mr. Obama felt that the United States needed to intensify its Ebola efforts because the World Health Organization was “slow to react to this,” an official said.

On Friday afternoon, even before Mr. Klain started, the White House showed signs of returning to normal.

Mr. Obama headed a meeting of the National Security Council to discuss the state of the fight against the Islamic State, which has become a grinding campaign in recent days, with American officials urging Iraq’s new government to deploy its troops more aggressively. The president is scheduled to campaign for candidates running for governor in Maryland and Illinois on Sunday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/amid-assurances-on-ebola-obama-is-said-to-seethe.html

[Ballistic Gelatin]

Appointing one of his political operatives to address Ebola is a great way to reassure the American people. Typical Obama.

[SPECTRUM]