A PORTENT OF PRESIDENTIAL DISASTER

The flap over Desiree Rogers, insignificant in itself, illustrates why Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency is headed for an epic fail.

Social climbing publicity hounds Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashed President Obama’s state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Nov. 22.  The Secret Service was unaware of the security breach until the Salahis posted photos of themselves with the president and with Vice President Joe Biden on their Facebook page.

Mr. Obama was never in danger, because the Salahis — like the invited guests — were screened for weapons and explosives.  But Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan said he was "deeply concerned and embarrassed" by the incident.

He should be. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Cal) compared the security at the White House unfavorably to that at a Bruce Springsteen concert she attended.

The Secret Service took "full responsibility" for the security breach, and three officers were placed on administrative leave.  But those officers may be scapegoats for a failing of Ms. Rogers.

Desiree Rogers is the White House social secretary.  A Chicago socialite, she’s a pal of White House counselor Valerie Jarrett, and of Michelle Obama.  Ms. Rogers and her ex-husband, John, raised a ton of money for Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.  It’s no secret how she got her job.

In previous administrations, someone from the social secretary’s office was at the gate when the guests arrived, checking their names off the guest list as the Secret Service checked their identification.  But Ms. Rogers felt she could do without this sensible (and obvious) precaution.  She demoted Cathy Hargraves, the woman who performed this task during the administration of George W. Bush. 

"We don’t feel we have a need for that anymore," Ms. Hargraves told Newsweek magazine Ms. Rogers said to her.

"A state dinner requires a lot of work, and maybe they didn’t realize this going into it," Ms. Hargraves said.

Desiree Rogers evidently didn’t. She treated herself more as a guest than as someone whose job is to see to the comfort of the guests.  She had herself seated at the dinner, something her predecessors wouldn’t have done, and showed off her dress by designer Commes des Garcons.

"I never sat down at a state dinner because I was always to busy taking care of what needed to be taken care of," Maria Downs, social secretary during the Ford administration, told the New York Post.

Members of Congress wanted Ms. Rogers to testify at the same hearing at which Secret Service Director Sullivan testified.  But the White House invoked executive privilege to keep her from doing so.

"There’s a pretty long history of ensuring that White House staff can provide advice to the president and do so confidentially," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

This astounded normally supportive journalists and law professors.

"I’d completely fall out of my chair if they invoked Executive Privilege with regards to a social secretary arranging a party," George Mason University Prof. Mark Rozell, who recently wrote a book on executive privilege, told Time magazine.

It’s also hypocritical of Mr. Obama, who had sharply criticized President Bush for invoking Executive Privilege to keep aides from testifying on intelligence matters, to invoke the privilege for his social secretary.

No one was howling for Ms. Rogers’ head, and because she’s a pal of the first lady’s, it was always safe.  The effort to shield her from embarrassment will succeed, because the Democrat majority on the House Homeland Security Committee won’t issue a subpoena for her to testify, thus testing the preposterous claim of executive privilege. 

But it drew criticism from normally supportive journalists who couldn’t help but notice the gulf between the Obama administration’s claims of openness and transparency and what it actually does.

"The Obama White House is morphing into the Bush White House with frightening speed," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd Sunday.  "Its transparency is already fogged up."

The incident highlights the arrogance, defensiveness, insularity, hypocrisy and amateurishness of the Obama White House, which I think make it more likely something really bad will happen, and which may leave the president friendless when it does.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.