They didn’t ask the first, most basic question
Senator Obama addressed his problem with the embarrassing revelation (or two) about vice Presidential vetter James Johnson. you be the judge of the quality of Senator Obama’s response:
“Well, look…the, the, I mean – first of all I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages…It becomes sort of a, um, I mean, this is a game that can be played – everybody, you know, who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships — I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters. I mean, at some point, you know, we just asked people to do their assignments.
Jim Johnson has a very discrete task as does Eric Holder, and that is simply to gather up information about potential vice presidential candidates. They are performing that job well, it’s a volunteer, unpaid position. And they are giving me information and I will then exercise judgment in terms of who I want to select as a vice presidential candidate.
So this – you know, these aren’t folks who are working for me…They’re not people you know who I have assigned to a job in a future administration and, you know, ultimately my assumption is that, you know, this is a discreet task that they’re going to performing for me over the next two months.”
Vetting a VP would appear to be a very important, as well as highly personal, task for a Presidential candidate. It is certainly not a “tangential” responsibility to be left to “volunteers,” and “people not working for” the candidate. That’s one point.
Perhaps even more important is that neither Obama nor anyone on his staff asked the most basic and preliminary question of the vetters — indeed, it is the question that the vetters themselves are supposed to ask: is there anything in your past, any statement or association, which, if it becomes public, will prove an embarrassment to the candidate? (Johnson’s taking $7 million in loans from Countrywide, a target of Obama’s sharp criticism, would seem to imply that no one asked this question. But why? Why were these particular vetters chosen and not themselves vetted?)
Update: Johnson resigned.