White House senior adviser Susan Crawford resign

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Note this is a conservative site djf

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/11/02/for-petes-sake/print

White House senior adviser Susan Crawford resigned last week to little  
fanfare, but some White House insiders say her leaving may reveal  
growing tensions inside the Obama Administration about just how  
radical the administration has become in developing policies.

Crawford, who was one of the leading voices during the Obama  
transition period, and then stayed on as Obama's key adviser on  
technology and communications policy, was credited with putting in  
place the general policy overlays in those subject areas that guided  
many of the Administration's hiring and appointments to the Federal  
Communications Commission and the Commerce Department.  She was a  
strong proponent of Net Neutrality regulations, which would allow the  
government to regulate the Internet, and in her role sitting on the  
president's councils on economic policy, she supported strong  
government interventions and controls of private business.

But White House sources say that she ran afoul of senior White House  
economics adviser Larry Summers, who claimed he and other senior Obama  
officials were unaware of how radical the draft Net Neutrality  
regulations were when they were initially internally circulated to  
Obama administration officials several weeks ago.  "All of sudden  
Larry is getting calls from CEOs, Wall Street folks he talks to,  
Republicans and Democrats, asking him what the Administration is doing  
with the policies, and he isn't sure what they're talking about," says  
one White House aide. "He felt blind-sided, and Susan was one of those  
people who heard about it."  In the end, the proposed regulations were  
slightly moderated from the original language FCC chairman Julius  
Genachowski, a Crawford ally, circulated.

Crawford resigned, citing the need to return to her tenured position  
at the University of Michigan law school, but White House sources say  
that when Crawford signed on to the administration, she told them the  
university had given her a two-year waiver before requiring a return.  
"There may have been miscommunication there, but we thought it was two  
years," says the White House source. Similar waivers -- usually two or  
three years -- were given to a number of academics who joined the Bush  
Administration in various positions back in 2001.

Crawford's exit comes at a time when some Obama Administration aides,  
after seeing the fallout from the resignation of Van Jones and the  
spotlight placed on leftists inside the administration, like Anita  
Dunn, wonder if it is too late to pull back many of the more radical  
aides now placed in a number of different cabinet level departments,  
including the Department of Justice, and the Energy and Education  
departments, and federal agencies. "They haven't done us any good on  
any level," says the White House aide. "And now they are just a bunch  
of targets on our back that we can't shake."


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