WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Darren Samuelsohn, Politico) October 6, 2011 ― Energy Secretary Steven Chu faces questions over whether his laboratory smarts and Silicon Valley background have undercut his ability to operate inside the Beltway.

Chu has kept a very low profile during the Solyndra affair, traveling to China and Vienna in September and speaking almost exclusively on other topics within his domain as questions pile up from Congress about the lost $535 million loan guarantee.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday Chu has "the president's full confidence." But Chu, the Nobel laureate praised last year for spending weeks in a Houston control room brainstorming up engineering ideas that ultimately helped cap the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, is not out of the woods.

"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."

"Impressive credentials, but sadly miscast for the rough and tumble, oft unforgiving world of oil and energy markets and its cast of malign actors," Raymond Learsy, author of "Oil and Finance: the Epic Corruption," wrote in a blog post published Monday on the Huffington Post.

The GOP-led House wants answers on how Chu and the rest of the administration missed — or just ignored — red flags surrounding Solyndra when it won the loan guarantee and then restructured the terms of the loan two years later so that taxpayers were on the hook if the company defaulted.

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the subcommittee chairman at the center of the House investigation, said Friday Chu is on very thin ice.

"Chu obviously must have known about this," Stearns told WLS radio in Chicago. "If they knowingly broke the law here, that's a serious problem. I think for the secretary, I'd like him to testify what he knew and when he knew it."

Carney said it's no surprise Chu would have made the final call on the loan guarantee.

"Chu is the head of that department," Carney said. "The department, which we've made clear, where career professionals have administered the program, reviewed the loan applications and made the recommendations.

"Obviously, ultimately the head of that department is responsible for it," Carney added. "But let's be clear there were numerous people involved who were career professionals and worked on those kinds of issues every day."

Hazel O'Leary, who served as Energy secretary for President Bill Clinton's entire first term, said 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," said O'Leary.

An environmentalist with close ties to the Obama administration said Chu didn't help his cause with his own staffing decisions, picking people with science and technical backgrounds over people with solid political and policy chops.

"On some levels, it's exactly what you'd like to believe to be the best team, the environmentalist said. “But in the realities of this town these days, you need some people who have a different kind of intuition.

"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, there was too much science and too little intuition," the person added.

Among those who fall into the science/technical heavy category, the source said, are DOE science deputy Steve Koonin, a former California Institute of Technology provost and BP chief scientist; former DOE stimulus specialist Matt Rogers, a McKinsey & Co. energy consultant; and Chu’s former chief of staff, Rod O'Connor, who advised Vice President Al Gore and had a deep background in event planning, including running the 2000 and 2004 Democratic National conventions.

Since his appointment, Chu has been candid about his efforts to break down red tape at DOE and other government agencies — including the White House and Treasury Department — to get the loan guarantees out the door. High-ranking Republicans, as DOE often notes, have been making the same case for years, including at Chu's own Senate confirmation hearing.

This week, Chu spokesman Damien LaVera said the secretary took responsibility for giving the green light to the Solyndra loan when it got announced in March 2009. Chu also supported the change in the loan terms as part of a new package designed to give the company at least a fighting chance of survival.

House Republicans have been demanding someone step up on both questions. They called for DOE's loan guarantee office chief, Jonathan Silver, to be fired because they thought he gave evasive answers at a recent hearing on the Solyndra loan process.

For Chu, it's unclear if any explanation will be acceptable to GOP lawmakers who envision there are problems higher up in the chain of command.

"It would be interesting for him to determine what pressures from the White House existed," said Nebraska Rep. Lee Terry, a senior member of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Chu has his defenders, people who say DOE was trying to do transformational things on clean energy with record sums of money going out the door via the stimulus, even amid roller coaster oil prices, the nation's worst oil spill and a nuclear crisis in Japan that brought the industry's safety record under considerable glare.

"It's easy to criticize a Cabinet secretary," said former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.). "It's very hard to do the job in these circumstances. The energy issues confronting our nation are significant."

"Everyone's assumption was he was going to come in without any political background and have a really tough time," said Roger Ballentine, president of the consulting firm Green Strategies.

"I think he's exceeded expectations, frankly. I've never seen a period of 2½ years where the DOE has been more central to a broader political dialogue. That's not always because of good things. But this is a secretary who's been thrust into the limelight from circumstances in a way few ever have."

But Ballentine, a former Clinton White House climate aide and top environmental adviser to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, said he still wouldn’t be surprised if Chu wanted out.

"I do think his credibility as a scientist has served him very well," he said. "But there's no question his world fundamentally changed when the House changed parties. The real test for him, frankly, is whether there's much about the job left to enjoy."