Van Jones & Government Knowledge

Marc Ambinder has a smart, clear post on what the ouster of Van Jones, President Obama's green jobs adviser, who resigned over the weekend after making intemperate remarks about Republicans and the revelation that he signed a 9/11 Truther petition. Obviously, there are a lot of political lessons to be drawn from Jones' downfall, and many people are drawing them, in many directions. But what's most interesting to me is the lesson about what people know about government. As Marc points out:

Jones was a mid-level adviser on green energy issues. He was not a critical player; he had no budget authority, nor access to classified information, nor direct access to the president's ear. He wasn't a "czar," although it seems as if the White House was OK with the label as long as admiring environmentalists were applying it....The administration hasn't withdrawn the nomination of Cass Sunstein for an important and powerful OMB post, nor did they ask Rosa Brooks to leave the administration when she was subject to loud criticism, nor have they stopped fighting for Dawn Johnsen's nomination to be the key legal adviser in the Justice Department. Or Harold Koh, who is now the State Department's chief legal adviser. Or John Holdren, the chief science adviser, who thirty years ago wrote dispassionately about abortion as a method of population control. Actually, when it comes to defending administration officials in key positions who make daily contributions to policy, the Obama White House defends its own pretty well.

In other words, the political lessons that get drawn about Jones' resignation will be distorted because of an outsize sense of the role that he played in the administration. But because folks don't actually know how important--or frankly, unimportant--Jones was to the administration, they'll treat his ouster as a triumph or a tragedy, rather than as the relatively minor personnel decision that it seems to have been.