Leon Panetta continues to make us proud.
Leon Panetta continues to make us proud.
The former Congressman from Monterey represented San Benito County for 16 years starting in 1977 before his appointment to President Clinton’s cabinet, where he shined as a public servant and built his reputation as an expert in management and budgeting, as a politico with credibility.
Lately, again, Panetta has been thrust into the limelight on the national scale. President Obama entrusted Panetta with a crucial security job with his 2009 appointment as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, despite the Democrat’s lacking experience with spy work. The move paid off big time for Obama and the nation, as Panetta helped to vastly improve operations and efficiency at the troubled CIA.
Last week, Obama announced Panetta would get a promotion to secretary of defense. And on Sunday, we learned at least part of the reason why – when a U.S. intelligence operation led to the death of terrorist Osama bin Laden at a Pakistani compound.
Panetta has a lot of difficult challenges ahead in running the financially bloated Department of Defense, as leaders look to make billions of dollars in cuts in efforts to close the nation’s deficit. He has a lot of challenges in overseeing military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya, along with numerous other sites and anti-terrorism efforts around the world.
It’s a tremendously complex job. It’s a job that requires all of the positive traits reflected in Panetta’s past, and there is no doubt he will continue doing an admirable job serving the nation.
