I've had to live with some hard promises

Insider - Tom Petty

One of Obama's campaign promises was to fill his administration with people who weren't coming directly out of lobbying gigs. It turns out that this is more difficult than might have been anticipated, resulting in a lot of unfilled positions. The conventional wisdom seems to be that this was just a promise made for the campaign trail which has come back to haunt them now that they actually have to govern.

Which is true to an extent. But why does everyone treat this like it's a failure of the Administration? Doesn't the very fact that it's difficult to even construct an administration without tapping into people coming straight out of lobbying suggest some very bad things about our political process?

Maybe it was a mis-step to make the promise. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the administration right now who are incredibly frustrated by it. But maybe it's one of those situations where the right thing doesn't correspond with the easy thing.

One other thought: I know we're in a period of major crisis and it feels like everything needs to get done instantly. And there's some truth to that, too. But looked at another way, we're only 50 days into the new administration. If it takes them another month or two to get all these spots filled, will the entire world collapse? I don't think so.

And if timing is really so crucial, doesn't that once again signal a larger problem with our lame duck system? Why wasn't stimulus passed back in November? The will of the public had been made clear, the effort was attempted, but there weren't enough votes and there wasn't a president willing to push for or sign it.