Obama's most recent choices — former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to head Health and Human Services and Jacob Lew, a budget director for former President Clinton, to lead the National Economic Council — "highlighted the three personnel pools" from which picks are being made, Meckler and Weisman write:
- "Most prominent are Clinton administration veterans." Included in this group is Hillary Clinton herself, who may be the leading candidate for secretary of state. Certainly Lew falls into this group.
- "Some high-profile appointments are also long-serving members and staff from Capitol Hill." Daschle, who served three terms in the U.S. Senate after being elected to the House four times, clearly belongs in the second group.
- "Then there are the influential Chicagoans — a group that seems smaller than the hometown crowd that usually accompanies a new president to Washington."
That "hometown crowd," they write, is noticeably smaller than the ones "George W. Bush brought in from Texas, Bill Clinton from Arkansas and Jimmy Carter from Georgia. Those presidents were former governors and had large cadres of state-level aides to draw from. Mr. Obama, by contrast, has just a handful of key political advisers."
Conservative Michelle Malkin calls it "recycling you can believe in."
Jennifer Rubin strikes a similar note in Pajamas Media.
"If several months ago someone had said that the Obama administration would be chocked full of Clinton administration retreads and have a national security team featuring the woman who advocated bombing Iran to smithereens in the event it launched a nuclear attack on Israel," Rubin writes, "few would have believed it. But that’s what seems to be in the offing."
I'm inclined to agree with Robert Stein in The Moderate Voice.
"Obama’s goal all along was to persuade voters wary of his inexperience that the best of the past would not be swept away in rhetorical enthusiasm for the new," writes Stein.
"He is fulfilling that promise and concentrating on the real change from the Bush-Cheney years, bringing competence back to Washington, wherever he finds it — in the over-touted Lincolnesque 'team of rivals' or in the best of the 1990s."
It makes sense, to me, that Obama would seek people with experience in the Clinton administration — in spite of the fact that Mrs. Clinton was his main challenger in the primaries.
"To insist on a government that has no experience would serve neither the incoming president nor a nation beset by problems," writes the Washington Post.
In order to get people with experience in a Democratic administration that was not led by Bill Clinton, Obama would need to dip into the pool of veterans from the Carter administration. They left office almost 28 years ago. Many are no longer living.
President Carter himself is in his 80s now. It's reasonable to think that most of the people from his administration who are still alive are in roughly the same age range.
A few are not quite in their 80s — but, honestly, do the people who voted for Obama want important government posts — like secretary of state or attorney general — to go to someone who is older than John McCain? And whose executive experience may — I might add — predate the Reagan presidency?
The most recent pool of people with experience in the executive branch are veterans of the nearly eight-year George W. Bush administration.
How do you suppose Obama's supporters would react if he picked someone from Bush's team for his administration?
(And, incidentally, it seems increasingly likely that a few — including Robert Gates, Donald Rumsfeld's replacement at Defense — will remain after the rest of the Bush team departs in January.)
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