Failed Leadership or Failed Government?

Attacking Obama and Shinseki for the VA mess misses the underlying problem.

U.S. News & World Report

Failed Leadership or Failed Government?

The Associated Press

If retired four-star general Eric Shinseki couldn't run the V.A., who can?The Associated Press

Over at Commentary, Peter Wehner posits that President Obama has proved himself to be “epically” incompetent when it comes to the business of governing. And with last week’s resignation of his Veteran’s Affairs secretary amid a scandal involving the deaths of scores of former service members, it’s not hard to see how he arrived at that conclusion.
Yet I find myself wondering if this telling is really fair to the commander in chief. Ought we to consider that no mortal could have done better at the goliath task of running the world’s most expensive government, which reaches tentacles into every facet of our lives and every industry of our economy, than President Obama has? Is it reasonable to expect any man (with our without the executive experience he infamously lacked upon assuming office) to possess the wisdom required to consistently make the right decisions about how the world around us should operate?
Or is it possible that government is just inherently bad at everything it tries to do, without exception and regardless of who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania, that the VA and Obamacare and the “shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready” are not so much a series of managerial failures as the unavoidable consequence of big government in action, and that, as the federal leviathan grows larger, it also grows slower, and more beholden to special interests, and ultimately less able to fulfill its mandates?
[GALLERY: Editorial Cartoons on the VA Scandal]
Perhaps the real knock on President Obama is not that he couldn’t do all the things he said he would but rather that he was naïve enough to believe himself capable of what others are not. The number of sometimes comically impossible promises he made, both on the campaign trail and from behind the Resolute desk, seems to have ensured he would not be able to meet expectations. But it’s worth considering whether any person could.
Recall that the man who fell on his sword after the most recent scandal broke, the now-former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, was himself a retired four-star general and decorated war veteran, and not even he was up to the task of running the department in a way that ensured our returning heroes would receive the care they deserved in an acceptable timeframe.
One can look at the parade of failures that have attended this presidency and conclude the current occupant of the Oval Office is ill-equipped to govern well. But I wonder if we wouldn’t be better-served by asking what lessons this experience offers about government itself. I suspect we long ago began asking too much of Washington. If it can’t even get its essential functions right, like caring for our veterans, we probably should not trust it with much else.