WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s commander in the fight against Ebola was expected to operate below the public radar.
But did that mean invisible?
Ron Klain barely has been seen, and a week before midterm elections, Obama is pressing to dispel criticism that the government can’t manage the Ebola crisis.
The White House’s behind-the-scenes coordination of the Ebola response is being severely tested, while the Pentagon and states such as New York and New Jersey take public steps that are far firmer than federal guidelines — including a quarantine for medical workers returning from Ebola-affected countries. That’s creating the appearance of a crazy quilt of Ebola measures.
“The CDC is behind on this,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Tuesday. “Governors ultimately have responsibility to protect the public health of people within their borders.”
But President Barack Obama rejected the idea of a quarantine, arguing that such an approach would undermine the broader effort to eliminate the epidemic altogether.
Politicians in the United States, including the president, have come under increasing pressure to curtail the movements of medical personnel returning from Ebola-affected regions after Craig Spencer — a doctor who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea — was diagnosed with the virus 10 days after he returned home to New York.
While the president did not directly criticize Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for imposing mandatory quarantines, he made clear that he thought those moves were a bad idea and were not based on the best medical information.
“We don’t just react based on our fears. We react based on facts and judgment and making smart decisions,” Obama said, just after placing a call to members of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, which has been in West Africa since early August.
However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a formal recommendation to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that he require all U.S. troops returning from West Africa be subjected to 21 days of quarantine-like conditions.
Some public health law experts say the government could have anticipated differences in approaches and acted sooner to establish federal guidelines for states to follow.
“What happened is the case showed up in New York and New Jersey, those two governors respond, knee-jerk reaction … then you see the federal government catch up to that a little bit,” said James G. Hodge Jr., a professor of public health law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. “It would have been more beneficial if CDC’s guidance had come out, gosh, maybe a week or so ago.”
White House officials say Klain was brought in for his management skills and ability to coordinate the work of agencies, leaving most of the talking to the public health doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Klain, who has been in the job since Wednesday, has been dealing with the various agencies to streamline the federal response. He has met virtually daily with Obama, including a lengthy Sunday meeting with the administration’s Ebola team.
Obama has tried to place his own imprint on the government’s response, making sure photographers captured images of him meeting with the Ebola team and embracing Nina Pham, one of the Dallas nurses who recovered after contracting the disease. Tuesday, he called U.S. workers in West Africa and delivered a statement from the South Lawn before leaving on a campaign trip to Wisconsin.
“It’s also important for the American people to remind themselves that only two people so far have contracted Ebola on American soil: the two Dallas nurses who treated a patient who contracted it in West Africa,” Obama said.
Critics say Obama’s deliberative style leaves him open to criticism. Yet others blame an insular White House that is too centralized to distribute decision making to Cabinet officials.
Shirley Anne Warshaw, a presidential expert at Gettysburg College, said Obama’s decision to select Klain was a capitulation to Republican criticism that should have been avoided.
“Ron Klain is a great guy, smart, couldn’t be a better guy,” she said. “But to have any Ebola czar is huge mistake. This says we lack confidence in our own HHS, in our public health system.”
The Washington Post contributed to this report.
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