They left the front door unlocked.
I sat in the White House briefing room, listening to spokesman Josh Earnest commenting on the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson, and couldn’t get that image out of my head.
Whether it’s protecting the President, fixing potholes or protecting online bank secrets, we seem to be suffering through a period of shame-free national incompetence.
The White House front door that the Secret Service was guarding is now a window onto our ineptitude. It’s also cause to consider both our frequent unwillingness to accept responsibility and, perhaps, the managerial style of President Obama.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” was a famous line uttered by Army General Counsel Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) during McCarthy’s redbaiting 1954 hearings on communism in America.
Similarly, have the likes of now former Secret Service Director Julia Pierson, Roger Goodell, Rob Ford, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Mark Sanford no shame?
Pierson did finally resign, but it seemed late and only after the very belated disclosure of a second bungle in protecting Obama in an Atlanta elevator two weeks earlier.
Responsibility can be complicated, notes John Mark Hansen, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. That’s true at a huge agency when the guy or gal at the top is operationally divorced from underlings far away.
“Some accept responsibility for transgressions, some don’t. The Montana senator decided not to run when confronted with plagiarism. After multiple lapses by her agents or a breakdown in systems, Pierson (initially) declines to step down,” said Jeff Seglin, an ethicist at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
But what does it say about the man atop the food chain that he seemingly tolerates this kind of shirking of responsibility?
Of the three most senior advisors around him, only Valerie Jarrett has some real managerial experience, in her case with a big real estate firm in Chicago (Obama on Thursday worked out at a fancy health club they built in Chicago).
Obama himself had really none. His formative years were as a community organizer, where the impulse was to get people to amicably settle differences.
In both the Illinois legislature and four years in the U.S. Senate, he nominally ran small operations. Taking the reins at the White House was a marked departure.
So he didn’t have a long history of hiring or firing people. And his general manner tends to be understated, with a longer-term perspective on most matters.
It’s no coincidence that during his 2008 presidential campaign, he carried the nickname, “No Drama Obama,” for being cool and calm and not given to hasty decisions and overreacting.
Throw in an admirable tendency to see the good side of most people and, well, it can make for a managerial style simply not given to abrupt decisions, say folks who know him well.
So one might be chagrined but not surprised that he didn’t fire Pearson.
You can say the same about his decisions to stand by with several other top officials who screwed-up royally. They include former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who oversaw the initially disastrous health care website.
Then there’s Mark Sullivan, the previous Secret Service boss whose tenure included agents hiring prostitutes in Colombia and his reassigning two White House agents to protect a personal friend.
And, come to think of it, might heads have rolled as a result of intelligence agencies blowing the rise of the ISIS terrorists, as Obama concedes?
Sherry Jeffe, a political and public policy expert at the University of Southern California, has a theory. We were discussing the lack of shame in society, even amid the increasing media penchant to embarrass, especially via reality shows and on gossipy online sites.
“Reality shows may shame the participant, but I see our being inured” — meaning increasingly accustomed — “to shame,” she said.
“People all believe Pierson should have resigned earlier,” said Jeffe. “But it’s more about perceived incompetence than the shame that might follow due to a show of weak leadership.”
This brings us to Jeffe’s reminder about the great insight offered by Coco Chanel, the French fashion icon.
“Sin can be forgiven,” Chanel said, “but stupid is forever.”
jwarren@nydailynews.com
