It may look like a long way down the power-packing food chain from Director of National Intelligence to Surgeon General, but Obama's Surgeon General pick, Sanjay Gupta, reveals the same fundamental problem as Admiral Blair: he's part of the problem, not part of the solution, and promoting him in the name "competence" merely serves to expose the rhetoric of "competence" for the hollow shell it is, when, after 8 years of utter incompetence, it ought to be something real, concrete and capable of unifying Americans across the boards.
Like Blair, Gupta utterly fails that test, despite a considerable skill set. Technical skills without integrity and without a commitment to the public good are not enough to qualify as competence for high-level public office, no matter how impressive those technical skills may be. And, in fact, a closer look at the skill set reveals some real deficiencies there as well. Paul Krugman raised the red flag on Gupta earlier this week, and now John Conyers has issued a " Dear Colleague" letter seeking support in opposition to Gupta's appointment.
On his blog, "Conscience of a Liberal," Paul Krugman kicked things off when he wrote Jan 6 ("The trouble with Sanjay Gupta"):
So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN's Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don't have a problem with Gupta's qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don't have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore "fudged his facts", when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he's uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It's sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less "serious" than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it's a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
2009 already is shaping up to be a year of surprises. Yesterday, we learned that America's favorite TV doctor, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, will likely be the next Surgeon General of the United States.
