Why can't Obama make good hires?

It's actually kind of hard to keep up with the Who's Who of dropouts:

Here's what we know so far:

1) Richardson - Nominee for Sec of Commerce - Federal Corruption Investigation - Withdrew

2) Geithner - Nominee for Sec of Treasury - Serial Tax Cheat - Confirmed because he's the only person smart enough to save the economy

3) Daschle - Nominee for Sec of Health/Human Services - Yet another tax cheat - Trying to get him pushed through because he's on board for socializing our medical system but likely to withdraw [Yep, he withdrew]

4) Nancy Killefer - Nominee for Chief Performance Officer(aka Performance Czar) - Oops another tax cheat - Withdraws

5) Eric Holder - Nominee for Attorney General - Controversial pardons of Marc Rich, FALN terrorists and generally pathetically weak on terrorism - Confirmed. (Try to remember when America was safe)

Running total: 2 Nominees withdraw, 3 nominees with tax issues.

That's from six weeks ago, and doesn't count March 6, when three nominees withdrew.

Lordy. What's going on?

What's going on is "nothing's changed" - Obama has never been able to hire well. He has a long history of blaming his staff for his own mistakes, as ABC's Jake Tapper wrote last summer:

[Lots of stuff deleted - go RTWT]

So, for those keeping track at home, that's ten instances of Obama publicly blaming his staff for various screw-ups.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10!

(You of course could also add Austan Goolsbee, Samantha Power, Gordon Fischer, and retired Gen. Tony McPeak.)

That would be 14. We will continue to keep track.

He can't hire well, by his own admission:

President Obama acknowledged yesterday that he had "made a mistake" in trying to exempt some candidates for positions in his administration from strict ethics standards and accepted the withdrawal of two top nominees, including former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle, in the first major setback of his young presidency.

I'm sure that he would phrase it differently than I did, but we're seeing serial failures of a sort that we simply haven't seen maybe ever. That suggests that the problem isn't in the trenches, it's in the CP. It's him.

You can't blame him, though:

The problem of unqualified employees rising through the ranks is well chronicled in Laurence Peter's 1969 book, "The Peter Principle," which argues that people in business organizations rise to their level of incompetence. But are these climbers, who are surrounded by the cult of ambition that pervades most corporations, really at fault for striving for what an organization rewards? What about the one person in close proximity to whom the manager's incompetence isn't tortuously obvious: the fool who promoted him?

...

High-tech executive Paul Kedrosky also believes "the people who wrong-headedly promote these ragingly incompetent people and don't do anything about it" are the problem. He once had a sales manager who called weekly meetings, asked all the wrong questions, told his subordinates they were idiots and spent the rest of the week frantically making sales himself to cover for his "incompetent" staff. "We spent a great deal of time golfing," Kedrosky says. "To my knowledge, (the man) was still in the job 10 years later, as bad as ever."

51% of the voters put him in this job. If President Obama doesn't stop screwing up regularly (the reset button, snubbing our allies, flip-flopping from panic-city to don't-worry-be-happy on the economy), then the voters will need to act like the Board of Directors, and ask the CEO to stop down. Given Obama's history, that's looking like where the smart money will bet.