December 9, 2008

Grading the staff

So Obama's picked a centrist cabinet? With a couple of 'minor' exceptions, I beg to differ. Here's a quick synopsis for those keeping score.

State Department: Hillary Clinton. American Conservative Union lifetime score - 7.71. Obama's score was 7.61, yep she's far right of him. She's drag him back to that center line right quick.

Commerce Department: Bill Richardson. Very liberal record of voting and ideas is on display here, and here. Environmentalists' choice. This is a scary bad choice for Commerce.

Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano. Amnesty supporter for Homeland Security? The hits just keep on coming.

Justice Department: Eric Holder. Had Atta survived the 9/11 attack we shouldn't regard him as a POW? Well, I guess he'd want to try him over at Justice. Right. I wonder what he would have done if he'd captured Rudolph Hess.

Treasury Department: Timothy Geithner. Supposedly the most moderate, but with a somewhat thin resume and it's argued, more of the same as Paulson - bailouts, lack of transparency. Well, at least he's supposedly more centrist than everyone else on the list so far.

Defense Department: Robert Gates. Okay, I can live with Gates. But I believe he's there just to serve a purpose for Obama. Obama can play the moderate, consensus-builder card by having Gates and Geithner on board. It also helps with the international visual of continuity.

NSC: Jim Jones. Again, livable but somewhat of an unknown. Probably serving the same purpose as Gates. According to Democracy Arsenal;

He’s a career military guy who wasn’t known during that time for doing much “off
the record” sharing of his views on policy issues — he followed orders,
impressed people enough to keep getting promoted, and either kept his views to
himself or else only shared them with people who are extremely tight-lipped.


UN Ambassador: Susan Rice. Former foreign policy advisor to Michael Dukakis during his 1998 campaign. Good stuff, that. Then there's this disturbing bit from Wikipedia;

In a 2002 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, former Ambassador to Sudan
Timothy Carney and news contributor Mansoor Ijaz implicated Rice and
counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke in missing an opportunity to neutralize Osama bin Laden while he was still in Sudan. They write that Sudan and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wre ready to cooperate on intelligence potentially leading to bin Laden, but that Rice and Clarke persuaded National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to overrule Albright.


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