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If I Wanted a Cabinet of Clintonites, I Would Have Voted for a Clinton.

November 23rd, 2008

It’s tough to get too bent out of shape over any particular Obama appointment so far. They all seem to be very bright, competent folks. There is probably the most concern on the left over the Hillary appointment, and Spencer Ackerman has a very good piece detailing why this could be a problem. But it is hard to single out any one choice and say this is categorically a baaad idea.

However, viewed in totality, there are a few troubling signs. Obama didn’t run as a progressive ideologue and those expecting a bleeding heart cabinet were sorely misguided. But progressives had a lot to do with Obama’s victory in the primary and in the general as well. At some point in the night, you need to dance with the girl that brought you. Which means progressives can’t be completely shut out of an Obama administration. And so far, his foreign policy team (Clinton and Gates) is markedly to the right of where a lot of his supporters are. Holder and Napolitano are pretty much in the “effective pragmatist” mold we keep hearing about — not exactly innovative government reformers. Geithner and Summers are smart, but certainly not progressive. The list goes on.

The problem for progressives is that they usually are locked out of the big government gigs. So it’s easy to say don’t appoint any lefties, because everyone will be mad, and they don’t have any experience running things, anyway. And to a certain extent, you want a steady, well-practiced hand in times of crisis. Additionally, you don’t want to expend political capital on appointments that are spit out by the Senate or ineffective once accepted.

This, however, is the same slippery slope Bill slid down. He worried about criticism he’d take (and did take) for picking progressives, and basically played it safe. So by the time he left office, he hadn’t really made any progress in terms of injecting liberals into the bloodstream of power. This isn’t even a question of dominating all areas of bureaucracy, it’s just a matter of giving the side that fucking won a seat at the table.

Dubya, of course, had the opposite problem. One of his enduring legacies will be all the young conservatives he stuffed the federal courts with, and all the ideologue hacks he tossed into various government bureaucracies. Obama can’t only hire “pragmatic centrists” who are going to worry about hurting feelings if they clean house and get rid of the folks who had no business holding those jobs in the first place. Pragmatic need not be a synonym for conventional.

Smarter men than I have noted that the key isn’t to keep from appearing too left wing or too weak or any of those things. The key is getting things done, which will involve pushing for institutional change and dramatic reforms, when necessary. If we have affordable health care and our troops home in four years, etc., voters will have no trouble reelecting progressives, or socialists, or pragmatists, or nihilists, or whatever god damn word we want to attach to the folks who work for a successful administration.

Entry Filed under: Politics