Blatant Reality

Obama is supposed to announce today that Carol Browner will be his choice of “Energy Czar”. As I stated a couple days ago, the position of energy czar is something that we should all be worried about if it is actually effective. Luckily for us, the Wall Street Journal is already predicting that this position of ‘energy czar’ will be doomed from the get-go.

“There’ve been so many czars over last 50 years, and they’ve all been failures,” said Paul Light, an expert on government at New York University. “Nobody takes them seriously anymore.” He pointed to officials placed in charge of homeland security and drug policy.

 

The problem is that “czars” are meant to be all-powerful people who can rise above the problems that plague the federal agencies, he said, but in the end, they can’t.

 

“We only create them because departments don’t work or don’t talk to each other,” Mr. Light said, adding that creation of a White House post doesn’t usually change that. “It’s a symbolic gesture of the priority assigned to an issue, and I emphasize the word symbolic. When in doubt, create a czar.”

Basically, ‘czars’ have been worthless in a historical context in United States.

Also, see Jonah Goldberg’s take on the tossing around of the word ‘czar.’