President's Day, by George - The Washington Post Wolf recently reintroduced a bill that would do away with the congressionally established Monday holiday (it's set for the third Monday of the month) and instead designate it as Feb. 22 - George Washington's actual birthday. He bemoaned many schoolkids" ignorance on the subject. Wolf even trotted out endorsements of the idea from presidential scholar and author David McCullough and from Jim Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon. But what would happen to all those great Presidents" Day deals on mattresses? New blood As key members of Team Obama move on, a new study finds that President Obama is beginning his second term with fewer than a third of the senior staff members who made up his original team - a level of turnover that's pretty typical among modern second terms. The report from the Brookings Institution shows that 71 percent of Obama's "A-team" has left, compared with 78 percent for Ronald Reagan, 74 percent for Bill Clinton and 63 percent for George W. Bush. The paper also examines the importance of senior staff to the president and the toll that turnover takes: "a loss of institutional memory, time lost hiring and orienting a successor, the disappearance of unique networking contacts." Most companies in the private sector would consider the typical White House turnover rates "unthinkable." But there's a silver lining here, the author suggests. Second-term hiring affords the White House the chance to bring in new blood and fresh ideas. And it could assuage "disgruntled" constituencies by hiring from their ranks. "Repaying political debts could advance the president's efforts to pursue a vigorous legislative agenda," they write. And finally, a bit of advice: in Obama's second term, the paper assesses the president's agenda and suggests that Team Obama recruit from Capitol Hill, which could "provide necessary expertise for the legislative battles that lie ahead. " Out of Africa, and back in Democratic National Committee Executive Director Patrick Gaspard , former political director in the Obama White House, appears to be the administration's pick to be the next ambassador to South Africa. Gaspard, a major player in New York City politics - he was a campaign staffer for former mayor David Dinkins, for example - was a top operative of the Service Employees International Union and a political organizer. Although he grew up in New York City, Gaspard was born in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after his Haitian-born parents moved there for his father's teaching job. Kerry on Another longtime aide to Secretary of State John F. Kerry is taking a senior post at the State Department. David McKean is to be director of policy planning, a plum position created in 1947 by George F. Kennan and held in later years by foreign policy heavy hitters such as Paul H. Nitze, Mort Halperin and Richard N. Haass. McKean became the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's staff director when Kerry took over the committee in 2009 and was his Senate office chief of staff from 1999 to 2008. He left the committee in early 2011. Last April, McKean become a senior adviser to then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, assessing State Department operations.