Louisiana Sen. David Vitter is ripping President Obama’s “political” choice to be the administration’s Ebola response coordinator and says Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Thomas Frieden needs to be fired and the U.S. Congress should be reconvened to pass travel restrictions on people linked to the African nations hit hardest by the Ebola outbreak.
On Friday, just hours after saying he hadn’t decided whether to appoint an “Ebola czar”, Obama tapped Ron Klain for the job. In that role, Klain will report to National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco.
Klain served as chief of staff to former Vice President Al Gore and held the same position from 2009-2011 for Vice President Joe Biden. Klain may be best known for his role with the Gore campaign during the Florida recount following the 2000 presidential election.
The choice leaves Vitter confused and unimpressed.
“I’m still looking for (his) health care background. Maybe it’s there. I’m still looking for that. In terms of a manager, he quite frankly seems more of a political manager than a strong policy manager,” said Vitter.
Regardless of the appointment of Klain as the response coordinator, Vitter says it is imperative that Obama relieve Frieden from his position as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“I think his response to the crisis has been pathetic. I think that was underscored again yesterday with his testimony before the House committee. He didn’t have strong, clear answers and he hasn’t had strong, clear actions. So he’s not the leader we need. President Obama needs to fire him and have a strong, competent leader at the CDC and elsewhere who can lead this effort,” said Vitter.
According to Vitter, there are three glaring reasons why Frieden has lost credibility and must be dismissed.
“Number one, the CDC has not been competent and proactive in terms of helping the hospitals involved with adequate protocols. We now know, after all this happy talk about strict protocols, that they weren’t in place anywhere near in time that they had to be,” he said.
Even worse, says Vitter, was the stunningly bad advice given to Dallas nurse Amber Vinson, who checked in with the CDC before boarding a flight following her work with now-deceased Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan.
“They made horrible mistakes in other cases, like telling the second person who came down with the disease, who had contact with the patient, that she could go on a flight because her fever was only 99.4 (degrees) instead of 100.6. That’s ludicrous. Then she went on a flight and was obviously in contact with dozens or hundreds of people who were distributed all around the country,” said Vitter, who also faults Frieden for not doing more to keep the threat out of the U.S.
“Dr. Frieden has been very, very weak on travel restrictions. I think he’s letting political correctness trump caution and common sense,” he said, clearly frustrated by the entire administration’s refusal to impose a temporary travel ban on transportation to and from the African nations hit hardest by Ebola.
“President Obama has to get real and immediately look at travel restrictions. That was a key element of the successful strategy that isolated and then eradicated the Ebola epidemic in Africa in the 1970s. We need to learn from that positive experience,” said Vitter.
And the senator is not just talking about flights directly into or out of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
“I think we need to think of it in terms of individual travel restrictions, not just flights. You can end direct flights and still have folks in through Europe or elsewhere. So I think we need to talk about travel restrictions into the U.S. and barring certain folks from certain countries,” said Vitter, who is strongly urging congressional leaders to call members back to Washington to pass legislation to restrict travel.
“I’ve called for that with Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) today. I think we should be back now. I think we should get back as soon as possible. I think we need to talk about these important things , starting with travel restrictions,” he said.
Public trust in the federal government was already quite low. Vitters says it may very well plummet further and that would be very understandable given how recent headlines show the government not being up to the job on key issues.
“I think it’s adding to an already dismal lack of confidence, and I don’t blame the public. They see over and over and over again these huge sprawling bureaucracies which have become incompetent or worse, like the IRS and all of their scandals, like the (Veterans Administration) and the CDC and other federal agencies with Ebola,” said Vitter.
However, a new wrinkle to this debate is conservatives wondering if criticizing the competence of the CDC and other federal agencies is a tacit GOP admission that big government is OK so long as the leaders can do their jobs well.
“Though there are fair criticisms of the CDC’s handling of Ebola, by giving into the temptation to point fingers at Obama, Republicans run the risk of reinforcing the idea that any crisis or perceived crisis can be handled if only there were a better person in charge. And this could cut against many of the arguments that conservatives usually make about the inherent problems with federal bureaucracies,” wrote Washington Examiner columnist Philip Klein.
Vitter says there are some things the federal government is supposed to lead on and this is one of them.
“I do think in a national situation like this , CDC as a federal agency is the right entity to have a big role. Certainly, talk about travel restrictions has to come from the federal government. Individual states can’t do it. So I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with how all of this has been decided and executed by the Obama administration,” he said.