All Posts Tagged With: "cabinet"

While I have no regrets about my vote and support for the current president I am thoroughly disgusted by the “do as I say, not as I do” that Obama has demonstrated with his appointments of former lobbyists in direct contradiction to his much touted ethics order. Hypocrisy grates on me more than most other irritants. I will call Obama on it just like I called out the previous administration and others on it. Campbell Brown is spot on with her commentary on the matter:

Unfortunately, we are again asking the president to explain why exactly he announced, with great fanfare, new ethics rules if he had no intention of abiding by them.

The Obama administration is yet again asking for a waiver to its very own rules about hiring lobbyists.

This time, it is the new treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. He wants a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs to be his top aide at the Treasury Department.

My view is simple: Mr. President, if you want to hire former lobbyists because you think they are the best people to do the job, then hire former lobbyists. Just don’t hold a big news conference first to tell us how your administration is going to be so different from previous administrations in that you won’t be hiring lobbyists.

Don’t make your disdain for lobbyists and your pledges that they won’t wield influence in your administration a centerpiece of your campaign.

It’s the hypocrisy and the double-talk that makes so many of us so cynical. Do what you think is best for the country. Just be straight with us about how you’re going to do it.

In announcing his nominees for his national security team, including Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State and Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense, Obama made this declaration:

And so, in this uncertain world, the time has come for a new beginning — a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century, and to seize the opportunities embedded in those challenges. We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our friends. We will renew old alliances and forge new and enduring partnerships. We will show the world once more that America is relentless in defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world: democracy and justice; opportunity and unyielding hope - because American values are America’s greatest export to the world.

To succeed, we must pursue a new strategy that skillfully uses, balances, and integrates all elements of American power: our military and diplomacy; our intelligence and law enforcement; our economy and the power of our moral example. The team that we have assembled here today is uniquely suited to do just that.

This is welcome news:

Sources tell ABC News that Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be staying on in the top Pentagon job, for at least the first year of the Obama administration. “It is a done deal,” a source close to the process tells ABC News.

Gates, while a registered independent, has served numerous Republican administrations. President George W. Bush nominated Gates to replace the Donald Rumsfeld after the 2006 midterm elections, when the war in Iraq was spiraling out of control.

Politico’s Mike Allen explains why the Gates pick is a smart one:

The selection of a member of President Bush’s inner circle allows Obama to deliver on his promise of a bipartisan Cabinet, even though Gates has an intelligence background and has not been an active Republican.

The appointment has substantial advantages for Obama, who now can keep is pledge of drawing down troops in Iraq with the aid of an architect of the Bush administration’s successful troop “surge” strategy.

The presence of Gates also will help finesse Obama’s relationship with Gen. David Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq and now the head of the U.S. Central Command, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.

The GOP is clammering about Obama’s cabinet selections:

“Leader Boehner obviously hopes and expects that the president-elect will keep his promise to include Republicans in his Cabinet,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner. “Obama has pledged to govern in a bipartisan way, and we have pledged to work with him when he does.”

“Choosing one or two token Republicans in lesser Cabinet positions won’t pass the smell test,” said Dan Bartlett, who served as communications director and counselor to the current President Bush. “Keeping Secretary Gates would be a huge signal and important governing move.”

I wonder. Could either Boehner or Bartlett point to how their party’s most recent White House administrations have done that? I had to go all the way back to Nixon to find a Democrat in a Republican president’s administration (unless you can point to a more recent example). President Bill Clinton appointed Republican William Cohen to be his defense secretary during his second term. What Democrats did George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan appoint to their Cabinets or White House staffs?

Obama has signaled that he may very well appoint Bush’s own defense secretary to continue in that role. He has also considered Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) for a role in his administration as well as former NATO commander Jim Jones for national security advisor.

Even so, grumbling within the right-wing blogosphere is that Obama’s choices aren’t Republican enough. Again I ask, how many Democrats did Dubya have in his Cabinet and White House staff? Why didn’t Boehner — or even the president’s own communications director Dan Bartlett — hold Bush to the same standard?

“43″ certainly was elected by much narrower margins than “44″ — in fact, he didn’t even have the popular vote in 2000. You would think if anyone should govern in a bipartisan way, it would be someone who was elected by the slimmest of margins among a bitterly divided electorate. But that didn’t happen, did it?

In yesterday’s Politico story about the scrutiny of Obama’s picks for his administration, one sentence in particularly really jumped out at me:

“Gates is not a sharply partisan figure.”

Okay… is that a bad thing? Is that why he’s not Republican enough to pass “the smell test”? Because he’s not a “sharply partisan” figure, does that disqualify him as a Republican or mean that Obama isn’t trying to bridge the partisan divide? Do we really want a sharply partisan figure? I thought one of the things about this election is that the American people wanted to move beyond the gridlock of the bitterly divided Washington and transcend such “sharply partisan” politics.

So far, in my opinion, Obama has done a better job than his predecessors of assembling pragmatic, centrist and arguably bipartisan team to help govern this nation through very difficult times. Based on some of the complaints in the left-wing blogosphere, Obama certainly hasn’t picked aggressive progressives that would satisfy the more left-wing branches of the Democratic Party — despite what fear-mongering you may hear from the radical right-wing bloggers. His economic team, which he is set to announce later this morning, is being pretty warmly greeted by Wall Street, which tells me that Obama can’t be too bad for business like the conservative pundits would have you believe.

This election, I believe the significant majority of the electorate made their choice clear, not only electing the candidate they felt best represented change, but also repudiating the governance of the dominant party for the last eight years by electing wider majorities in both the House and the Senate for the other party. Why, then, would we let members of that failed party’s leadership judge who’s best to serve in this new administration? We shouldn’t and Obama won’t.

I believe Obama is firmly committed to governing pragmatically, which means an administration filled with opposing viewpoints — whether it’s Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, pro-business or pro-worker, hawk or dove. There will be many voices led by one leader. It certainly will be a nice change.

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reports on Obama’s selection to head the Justice Department:

President-elect Obama has decided to tap Eric Holder as his attorney general, putting the veteran Washington lawyer in place to become the first African-American to head the Justice Department, according to two legal sources close to the presidential transition.

[...]

A New York City native who graduated from Columbia University and Columbia Law School, Holder spent years as a federal prosecutor—a job in which he earned a reputation as tough and aggressive foe of public corruption. After serving in the pubic integrity section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and later a District of Columbia Superior Court judge, Holder was named by President Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. He became deputy attorney general in 1997 under Janet Reno and was viewed as a centrist on most law enforcement issues, though he has sharply criticized the secrecy and the expansive views of executive power advanced by the Bush Justice Department.

I really don’t have strong feelings one way or another on Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in Obama’s administration. She’s surely capable. The cynical side of me wonders what the back story is on all of this as well as what problems might result from such a pick, especially given the animosity of Bill Clinton toward Obama. However, the president-elect seems committed to a “team of rivals” in his administration, a concept employed by President Lincoln that I heartedly agree with. (I’ll write more about this in an upcoming post.)

What’s mildly surprising is the level of growing support amongst the right-wing punditry. The Weekly Standard’s Michael Golfarb certainly seems to like the choice:

There appears to be little angst among conservatives at the prospect of Hillary Clinton joining the Obama administration as Secretary of State. The idea was warmly embraced by Henry Kissinger, who our President-elect seems to hold in high-esteem, Governor Schwarzenegger, who likely has no more sway on Obama than the proverbial guy in the neighborhood, and Jon Kyl — surely Senator McCain put in a good word today as well. The love affair that was sparked last spring between Clinton and the Obama-fearing right continues to smolder, surely a surprise to those who suspected that such an unholy alliance couldn’t last beyond the convention. Whether Clinton would accept the job, or why she would want it, is not clear, but the right would be happy enough to have her.

[...]

Clinton would be a fine Secretary of State, and she is likely to be a nuisance to Obama whether she is inside or outside of his administration, but as our top diplomat she could reprise a role that made Powell a kingmaker in this year’s election. And perhaps she could even present the case for war with Iran to an insubordinate United Nations in the event that Obama’s personal diplomacy somehow fails to deter the mullahs from their present course.

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Something in his last sentence jumped out at me: “…perhaps she could even present the case for war with Iran…” Seriously… have we not had enough of war to satisfy our blood thirst at least for a little while? We’re not even finished with the two we’ve got going on right now, which is bankrupting us and stretching our military to the breaking point. Our economy is barely hanging on by a thread and we want to start up another conflict that will surely be more costly than the current conflicts, both in financial terms and in human lives.

If we think Iraq was a challenge, it will pale in comparison to a conflict with Iran. Let’s not make another mistake. Let’s recover from these last seven years first before we dig ourselves into any more war pits.