If the president wants to turn around the disdain in which his pronouncements are increasingly held by the public, he needs to get better at firing people. He has had a very slow trigger finger so far, having failed to complete the purge of his original economic brain trust until well into his second term. By comparison, the unaccountable George W. Bush went through two secretaries of the Treasury during his first term, which included a real-estate bubble that was very popular at the time. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton went through three secretaries of the Treasury each despite presiding over lengthy economic booms marked by healthy job creation and a strong dollar (and in Clinton’s case, budget surpluses with substantial debt reduction). By comparison, Obama’s Treasury secretary Tim Geithner managed to keep his seat warm through four years of what has turned out to be the longest period of economic stagnation since the Roosevelt administration.

Obama has never affected any passion for military affairs, but he has been occasionally willing to defenestrate defense officials — particularly those, like General Stanley McChrystal, whose offenses diminish the dignity of the executive. But endangering the nation is a more serious offense than insulting the vice president, even if historically it has usually not been treated that way. Take the president at his word: Posit that Clapper’s team didn’t realize what was going on among the Sunnis in Syria and failed to comprehend that the Iraqi army — whose incompetence was hardly a big secret — would not fight. How do you square that failure of intelligence with continued confidence in the head of the intelligence community? As that great expert on national security Samuel L. Jackson (who has starred in both spy and military films) said in another context, “There must be a very short line for your job.”