Barack Obama will surround his presidency with powerful men and women. The models of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan are instructive. So is that of George W. Bush.
The current president, eight years ago, selected the formidable Colin Powell as his secretary of state, and the almost-as-formidable Donald Rumsfeld as his defense secretary. They produced a team of rivals that thoughtlessly, and with little serious debate, started a war and devastated America’s standing in the world.
The lesson is not to avoid strong-minded people with different views; it is to appreciate that this works only with a strong-minded, temperamentally secure president who thrives on intellectual combat.
The inspiration for Obama is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” a riveting and much acclaimed account of how Lincoln recruited for his cabinet former political opponents who initially thought themselves superior to the man who went on to become America’s greatest president.
Actually it’s more a team of heavyweights than of rivals. Obama has already assembled an unusually strong White House staff, and now it appears it will be even more powerful with a former Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, on economics, and a former Marine Corps commandant, James Jones, on national security. The cabinet will be as strong with Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Robert Gates perhaps being retained at the Defense Department, and the New York Federal Reserve president, Timothy Geithner, being tapped as Treasury secretary.
Geithner may look like a teenager, but that belies his expertise and the respect he commands in global financial circles. With the financial crisis, Summers’s role at the White House may be Kissingerian in scope.
Franklin Roosevelt would love this assemblage.
Also discussed in this article are Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, Governor Janet Napolitano as head of Homeland Security, and Tom Daschle as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
TPM writes about Obama’s Communication team.
Greg Craig will be Obama’s White House Counsel.
Bill Richardson will be Commerce Secretary, and Eric Holder is the pick for Attorney General.
Former Deputy National Security Adviser Jim Steinberg to be Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State.
The New York Times writes about other’s filling out the new Administration: Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod as chief advisors to the new president. Axelrod is senior advisor.
Obama selects Summers to lead National Economic Council, Gibbs as press secretary
PETER ORSZAG TO BE HEAD OF OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET:
If you’re interested in health care reform, the appointment of Peter Orszag to be director of the Office of Management and Budget is second only in importance to the the elevation of Tom Daschle to health czar and HHS secretary.
Did I miss anyone so far??
Glenn Greenwald is “mystified” as to the Progressive complaints about Obama’s appointments.
1 Comment
November 23, 2008 at 11:43 am
I think I can boil this down to a clear contrast between the way Bush acted as President and the way Obama will govern. When Bush allowed his advisors to tell him what to do, it was always the wrong thing for the majority of Americans, and when he thought he knew what to do, and stubbornly stamped his foot in a tantrum to get it, it was always the wrong thing for the majority of Americans. Obama is going to be the informed President who can grasp the complexities of issues by having both sides discussed, and the decisions will be made to do the right things for the majority of Americans, while securing the rights of the minority, for whom the Constitution was written to protect. Rant over for now.
In reading the Greenwald article, he includes an e-mail from Digby about the centrist appointments, where she says “If you want to press for a cabinet appointment at this late date who might bring some ideological ballast, I would guess that labor and energy are where the action is.”
We obviously need a pro-labor Labor Secretary after all these years of having one whose mission was to marginalize and demoralize the middle class. Energy is unquestionably important if we are to avoid more wars for dwindling resources and avoid slowly poisoning the Earth, and us along with it.