Not So New Politics

Then, the day after the inauguration, Dybul received a call asking him to submit his resignation and to leave by the end of the day. There was no chance to reassure demoralized staffers, or PEPFAR teams abroad, or the confused health ministers of other nations. The only people who seemed pleased were a few blogging extremists, one declaring, "Dybul Out: Thank you, Hillary!!!"

As in most political hit-and-run attacks, the perpetrator was not anxious to take credit. It seems unlikely to be Hillary Clinton herself -- Dybul's ultimate boss at the State Department -- who had not even been confirmed when Dybul received his call. But someone at State or the White House determined that sacrificing Dybul would appease a few vocal liberal interest groups. One high-ranking Obama official admitted that the decision was "political." Yet the AIDS coordinator is not a typical political job, distributed as spoils, like some deputy assistant at the Commerce Department. It involves directing a massive emergency operation to provide lifesaving drugs, through complex logistics, to some of the most distant places on earth. And now that operation may be months without effective leadership -- undermining morale, complicating interagency cooperation, delaying new prevention initiatives and postponing budget decisions.

It is difficult to imagine what vision of public service could cause any Obama official to celebrate their victory by sabotaging a good man and good cause. And it is difficult to conceive what political gain Obama has achieved. This type of captivity to extreme interests is precisely what has discredited Democrats so often in the past. It is a kind of politics with all the "newness" of a purge, all the "freshness" of a mugging.

Governing, admittedly, is not badminton. But it costs little to be graceful. And pettiness, in this case, may impose a cost on the world's most vulnerable people.

"We, who seven years ago," wrote William Butler Yeats, "Talked of honour and of truth, / Shriek with pleasure if we show / The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth." For some in the Obama administration, the baring of the weasel's tooth took merely a day.

But none of this should bother Mark Dybul, who sleeps well in the knowledge that he helped save millions of lives -- an experience his critics will never share.