“Just because you are a Nobel Prize winning physicist doesn’t mean you’d be a good orthopedic surgeon,” said one former Bush Energy Department official. “They’re different skill sets.”…

Hazel O’Leary, who served as Energy secretary for President Bill Clinton’s entire first term, said that despite Chu’s impressive resume, Obama’s transition team advisers might not have gotten it right when they picked him to run the department.

“Generally, if you’re in the first administration, the people advising the senior folks in the White House about how to place folks in jobs have very little understanding about what the challenges of the job are,” she told POLITICO…

“The great irony, the big critique [with Solyndra] is the suggestion of too much politics and political influence, when in fact the realities on this might be exactly the opposite, that there was too much science and too little intuition,” the person added.