Sebelius pick shows Obama personnel strategy

Succession of do-overs at top agencies

President Obama hailed Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, shown in August in Denver, an accomplished insurance regulator. (Win McNamee/ Getty Images/ File)

WASHINGTON - When President Obama announced his first nominee to be secretary of health and human services, he declared that former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle was uniquely able to direct White House efforts to change the healthcare system because of the "respect that he earned during his years of leadership in Congress."

Yesterday, he touted Daschle's replacement, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, as an accomplished insurance regulator with a record of state-level problem-solving. Sebelius has no experience in federal lawmaking, and her closest ties to congressional leadership probably run through her father-in-law, who once served in the House.

The nomination of Sebelius is the latest in an unusual succession of do-overs at top departments, a process that has revealed Obama's hiring decisions to be driven more by a desire to recruit particular people than to match qualified individuals to predetermined missions.

"In some jobs, you can try to conjure up in your mind a profile and go find someone who fits it," said Mickey Kantor, who served as commerce secretary in the Clinton administration. "In other places, there are people you want in the Cabinet and you see where you can fit them in."

Responsibility for pushing Obama's ambitious agenda lies in the hands of a highly credentialed cadre of Cabinet secretaries and White House staffers, some given unprecedented responsibilities, yet observers of the administration express uncertainty about how they all will fit together.

"There is a lot of flexibility in these positions, which is what allows the president to appoint these political generalists and then to define the Cabinet-level job around them," said Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard professor who specializes in American political institutions.

As a candidate, Obama embraced a "team of rivals" approach of enlisting campaign opponents as a unity gesture, choosing Joe Biden as vice president and Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. He also brought two former Cabinet officers into the West Wing as policy advisers with vast portfolios, economic adviser Lawrence Summers and climate change czar Carol Browner, and named high-profile envoys including George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke to trouble-shoot abroad as freelance diplomats.

Last week, Senator Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, said the new rank of White House "czars" coordinating efforts among departments on climate change, healthcare, and urban affairs were undermining congressional authority. The jobs, which unlike Cabinet positions do not require Senate confirmation, had allowed "lines of authority and responsibility [to] become tangled and blurred," Byrd wrote to Obama.

Yesterday, when he announced Sebelius as his new choice, Obama made clear that he was splitting off half of the duties tentatively set aside for Daschle, who withdrew last month after revealing he had owed back taxes. The president named Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, a former Clinton administration official and Tennessee human services commissioner, to direct the "public and legislative effort" as head of the newly created White House Office for Health Reform. DeParle, unlike Sebelius, does not need Senate confirmation to start her job.

"Obviously every person brings different skill sets to the job," said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. "What the president wants in a secretary of health and human services or a secretary of commerce is to be an integral part of the domestic policy team."

A record in elected politics has become a notable qualification for many of Obama's nominees, and one of the few attributes shared by the three he picked to be commerce secretary. He said New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, an experienced international negotiator, would be a good fit as the country's "leading economic diplomat."

After Richardson withdrew, Obama announced a second pick for the job, Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican with a record of bipartisanship as a "master of reaching across the aisle to get things done," and who would play a crucial role in pushing Obama's domestic policy agenda. Once Gregg decided to stay in the Senate, Obama's third choice, former governor Gary Locke, would continue the good work he did in Washington state, where he helped to incubate "the jobs of the 21st century - jobs in science and technology, agriculture and energy," the president said in announcing the nomination last week.

"You can fit many different skills into the job," said Kantor, noting the range of offices that report to the head of the department, several without direct ties to matters of commerce. "No one has all the skills - at least at the outset - to do all of the job well."

Past administrations have pursued similar talent-driven personnel strategies, with mixed results. Some of the most provocative, big-name appointments early in President George W. Bush's administration - including Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, and faith-based-initiatives czar John DiIulio - ended in contentious breakups after they chafed at the way power was centralized among Bush's political advisers.

Often a president will seek out a nominee with an unconventional background to signal a goal to refocus an agency or shift its primary mission, said Terry Sullivan, executive director of the nonpartisan White House Transition Project.

In Obama's case, the choice of Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu to be secretary of energy reaffirmed a stated desire to let the department's scientific responsibilities prevail over political interests, while his pick of Leon Panetta, a former congressman and White House chief of staff for President Clinton, to manage the Central Intelligence Agency seemed to minimize its technical needs.

"Leon Panetta is not exactly what you'd call a 'spook's spook,' and here he is leading the agency," said Sullivan, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "He's not going to be sitting down and telling you how to task satellites, because that's not what he does. What he does is figure out the environment the agency is in politically and fix that."

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.