Ron Klain Is the Ebola Czar, But What Does That Mean?
President Obama has named an Ebola czar: Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden and former Vice President Al Gore who was played by Kevin Spacey in the 2008 movie “Recount.’’ Though Klain does not have any health care experience, political commentators said before his appointment that he is a good manager and coordinator, and he has experience on Capitol Hill working closely with the funds in the 2008 Stimulus Act.
But what is a czar?
Russia called its highest-level rulers “tsars’’ until the Bolsheviks took over and Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate in 1917. Nowadays, the term “czar’’ refers to someone with a particularly high amount of power, and it’s often used when talking about White House advisors.
Klain’s official title is “Ebola response coordinator,’’ but he’s been called a “czar’’ in countless headlines. Gil Kerlikoswke was head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, although he was more often referred to as the country’s “drug czar’’ during his term, which ended in March. John Goss, the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Asian Carp Director, has even been called the “Asian carp czar.’’
In 2009, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) criticized Obama for having too many czars.
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The White House noted that “the job title ‘czar’ doesn’t exist in the Obama Administration. Later that year, “Time’’ blamed the media for overusing the term, saying, “Essentially it’s a media creation… used as a snappy shorthand to identify and describe the array of policy officials swarming the West Wing.’’
Questions remain over the effectiveness of czars.
“There’ve been so many czars over the last 50 years, and they’ve all been failures,’’ New York University public-service professor Paul Light told “The Wall Street Journal’’ in 2008. “It’s a symbolic gesture of the priority assigned to an issue.’’
Klain has managed lots of money, but his experience when it comes to matters of public health is unclear. Biden, however, is optimistic about his former chief of staff’s leadership chops:
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