Sherrod affair is "a wake-up call for the White House gang..."

By Tina Brown

Shirley Sherrod’s firing isn’t a teachable moment. It was a wake-up call for the White House gang that can’t shoot straight.

Let’s NOT have a conversation about race. The calls for Obama to now make the Shirley Sherrod debacle a teachable moment fills me with panic that the president will retreat to the Oval Office and craft a soaring piece of oratory, instead of getting on with the humdrum business of firing the stumbling, bumbling members of his own team who, as the saying goes, can’t find their ass with either hand.

It doesn’t take much imagination to know how much the president must have seethed to be derailed from his policy agenda by this Republican attack mutt, Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart’s genre of dirty tricks were old news even in the Whitewater era. Public figures know from the daily incinerated reputations that any time you open your mouth near a Twitter feed, your career can go up in smoke. It remains amazing that USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack didn’t even accord Shirley Sherrod the kind of pause a minor executive in a corporate human resources department would have felt obliged to offer and have someone—anyone—listen to the full tape of Sherrod’s NAACP speech or even read the text.

When Obama heralds another “teachable moment,” it means he has already made an egregious rookie mistake.

But Obama can’t keep doing catch-up up outrage two media cycles after the fact. On the campaign trail, he was the chief executive of a laser-guided, on-message apparatus, the candidate who seemed to lead from a head that was always the most level of the people round him. Instead, he sounds as out of it as his old adversary John McCain when he said on Good Morning America that “we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” Yeah, right. There is something loose and jittery about the atmosphere round Obama at the moment of which Vilsack's clumsy over-reaction gives us a whiff.

It’s as if inside the White House the belief in Obama’s inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it’s a startling revelation.