veterans out into the private sector. david, i mean, you have served in white houses that have had problems that rise to the level of an agency or cabinet official being forced to resign. what is it like? do you think it is inevitable that shinseki is gone? i think it has become a untenable and a tragedy. in one sense he is one of the finest soldiers of his generation served his country well. but unfortunately he has lost the confidence of the congress. 24 senators now against him. he has lost the confidence of the veterans, and the confidence of a growing number of americans who are watching this with some horror. so in that situation you do need new leadership and it has to come from the outside. and i think what the white house is trying to do is figure out how to make that transition. my expectation, that general shinseki, a patriot, will voluntarily fall on his sword. and why do you think, david, that president obama has not let him go at this point? that is a good questio
leadership. shinseki, any va secretary is supposed to have the people under him that can then accurately, fully, professionally administer the system. the secretary provides the leadership. so that is perhaps the key question there, whether there is confidence in his ability to lead the organization and to affect the management changes that are needed, no different perhaps than in the u.s. military. one of the things in the military is, if you lie to your boss, you re gone immediately. there s no civil service regulations. you get the boot. you have fired. shinseki has the civil service issues that he has to deal with because this is a civilian part of the government. i ve talked to some people about what about finding a new nominee. one of the issues is there s only a couple years left in this administration. they would need to find someone perhaps who is a veteran who has
him what s going on inside that agency. i had white house officials tell me there s a big difference between the president s loyalty to kathleen sebelius for example during the obama care website fiasco where she stayed on the job for several months before she eventually stepped down. white house officials telling me they always had confidence that the website was going to be fixed. they are not as confident that these problems inside the va can be repaired by eric shinseki and all of that leads us to the conclusion that shinseki s days are numbered and it may be just today. exactly what you said almost speaks to the necessity to really clean house from the top down. he said it himself. there are all kinds of mismanagement and lack of leadership, deception, he s been misled if you can t trust people. this is a discussion we ll continue to hash out right here. we have barbara starr standing by and gloria borger, people in
after 13 years of war and the organizational capacity the va currently has to meet that demand. the va faces an acute shortage of doctors amid a swelling patient population, has been trying to fill 400 vacancies for primary doctors, doctors who are paid less serving the v.a. than they are in private practice. so this scandal is going to continue. we re going it find out about more problems because it appears the system is completely overrun. and replacing general shinseki is not going to change that. in fact, in a moment of wisdom none other than speaker of the house john boehner made exactly that point today. the question i ask myself is him resigning going to get us to the problem of the problem? is it going to help us find out what s really going on? and the answer i keep getting is no. of course he then went on to blame the president, which again misses the point entirely. so close, john boehner, so close. joining me now, congressman jim himes, democrat from
himself said he was misled about that. that was one of the key factors and then you have this course of mounting voices from capitol hill, more than 100 lawmakers, including a fifth of senate democrats, calling for secretary shinseki to resign. i think it was too much pressure and that is what ultimately led to the developments of the day. andrea? ann, you covered the pentagon and know the culture before you covered the state department and now wider beats as the white house as well. you ve seen it from all angles in washington. was the pentagon reluctant to also make this change or was it just the white house and personal loyalty that obama felt to shinseki? you heard the president s respect and true appreciation for the decades of service of general shinseki, the pentagon is a separate chain of command from the va and it s a constant