Shinseki exit marks shift for Obama

Shinseki exit Instead of getting in front of the outrage over the veterans situation, President Barack Obama got behind it. Instead of firing VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, Obama accepted his resignation with “significant regret. “Instead of blaming the decision on systemic mismanagement and misconduct at VA medical centers, he attributed the decision to agreeing with Shinseki’s “belief that it was a distraction from the task at hand.” In other words, politics and optics forced him to act at the moment.

“He’s not averse to admitting where the problem is and going after it,” Obama told reporters in the White House briefing room on Friday morning. “But we’re not just occupying an environment that needs leadership fixes. We’ve got to deal with Congress and you, and I think Ric judged that he couldn’t implement the next stages of reform without disrupting it himself.”

Obama made the announcement after an Oval Office meeting with Shinseki — their first conversation in more than a week — in which the secretary and Rob Nabors, the deputy chief of staff tapped by the president to lead changes at the VA, presented the first draft internal audit ordered by the president last month. The audit found at least one abuse at 64 percent of the VA facilities it examined, though it did not determine whether those cases “resulted from a lack of understanding or negligence, unless clearly evident.”Obama said the findings were “completely unacceptable” and that Shinseki would first oversee the firing of several VA employees involved.

“They found that the breach was not limited to a few VA facilities, but many across the country,” he said, though he later added that neither he nor Shinseki had previously known anything about what was discovered. Still, Shinseki will become the highest-ranking member of the Obama administration to be ousted — a significant departure for Obama, who has consistently stood by aides in crisis.

But Obama struggled to explain why he chose to accept Shinseki, given the scale of the problems he described and his decision not to accept the resignation offered by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the height of the HealthCare.gov debacle last fall. Then he said Sebelius leaving the administration “would have been a distraction.”