NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] White House senior adviser Susan Crawford resigns
----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave@farber.net> ----- Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2009 07:59:05 -0500 From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Subject: [IP] White House senior adviser Susan Crawford resign Reply-To: dave@farber.net To: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com> 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." ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message -----