Krauthammer: Klain's Appointment as Ebola Czar a 'Farce'

President Barack Obama naming his vice president's former chief of staff Ron Klain as the nation's new Ebola "czar" is a "farce" and a "public relations maneuver," Fox News correspondent and columnist Charles Krauthammer said Friday night.

"Here we are looking at an epidemic, and there is an official quoted in The New York Times today saying Klain was chosen because he is good at messaging," Krauthammer told Fox News "On the Record" host Greta Van Susteren. "This isn't a messaging issue. This is an epidemic issue. This is a medical issue."

However, Krauthammer said, he doesn't think Klain will either do any good, or any harm.

But the appointment is just the way the Obama administration responds to a crisis, he said.

"It thinks that its failures on all fronts is a matter of messaging, public relations rather than the substance," said Krauthammer. "You want to calm the public? Show that you have a handle on the epidemic that you know how to quarantine people that you will impose a ban on travel if you have to."

Further, Krauthammer said he wonders why officials are waiting to announce victims' names.

"If you want people to be aware of any contact, the fastest way to make them aware is to release the name," said Krauthammer. "But, of course, for reasons of privacy, we don't. That is completely misplaced. We have to get out of those habits and understand we have got a serious issue here."

But Krauthammer said it's "lousy" that the United States is in a position of tracing Ebola victims' contacts.

"We had notice at least as early as March," he said. "We could have stopped and headed it off at the pass before it even got here and helped a lot of people in a lot of these western African-American nations."

But instead, he said, "everyone was asleep at the wheel. I'm not sure we could have stopped the spread (of Ebola)."

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