Appoint like you really mean it
President Obama has asked a few Republicans to serve on his cabinet. Just today, Senator Gregg announced he was no longer seeking the Commerce post (negating my message of yesterday, by the way, dang him.) He has cited that he and the President have to many differences on matters of commerce policy, such as the stimulus package and the census. Gregg is probably right, but there’s one thing left unsaid, and that is, Gregg should probably have never been nominated in the first place.
As I mentioned, I personally applaud the idea of both parties trying to work together and of nominating members of the opposite party to your cabinet. But if you do so, there’s certain things you should do to keep it from being, well, a fraud. The main thing is that if you appoint someone to a Cabinet post, you have to be ready to see him disagree with you, and to see him implement things in a way you might not have.
Or, to put it more bluntly, don’t appoint the opposition to a post that lies within your priorities. You can tell Obama was never comfortable with Gregg’s posting, especially with the idea of Gregg controlling the census. You can tell that because of his attempt to end-run the census office and put it under White House control, whether directly or indirectly. Gregg has long-standing issues with the census so this wasn’t really a surprise but it created genuine issues in Washington.
If I were President – and let’s home that never comes to pass – my cabinet would consist of members of both parties. But one of the issues very important to me is education, and I tend to side with the Democrats, so I would appoint a Democrat. On issues of national defense and law enforcement, I tend to side more on the Republican (though not, significantly, the neo-conservative Republican) side, so a Republican Secretary of Defense and AG are not out of the question. For me.
President Obama has clear progressive agendas on a number of issues. Some of them clearly fall in the Commerce department’s agenda, and he should just appoint someone who will implement them rather than try to do an end-run. The end-run is inefficient, misleading, and a little bit insulting. For other departments where he has a more moderate or even slightly-right stance, he can (and has) made appointments that fit that agenda – for example, keeping on Gates at Defense.
But we’d all be a bit surprised if he appointed a staunch Republican at Health and Human Services when he’s so gung-ho about national health care, and we’d all be a bit astonished if he then said that the national health care policy was going to be run by Rahm Emanuel.
I honestly think that Obama knows what bipartisanship is all about and I honestly feel that he wants to work in a bipartisan manner. But this nomination was, on the whole, a fairly big gaffe, and further, it could give some people who are not so interested in bipartisanship ammo to further derail Obama’s agenda, making it an even bigger gaffe.
As my colleague pointed out in his breaking news bit, we’ll learn a lot about Obama and Obama’s plans when he answers the simple question of “Where do we go from here?”
