The New Neo

So far Obama’s choices for Cabinet and other advisers seem to be shaping up as Clinton redux.

This is somewhat ironic, considering that Obama ran on a “change” platform and his closest rival was Hillary (Clinton, in case there’s anyone who needs reminding). So even before he’s been officially inaugurated, he’s faced a lot of criticism about this, from both friends and opponents.

Well folks, hold onto your hats, because I’m about to defend Obama. Sorta, anyway.

A new president has a limited number of ways to go in making appointments. He/she (and I will henceforth dispense with this awkward PC pronoun arrangement and just go with the masculine) can either: (a) hark back to earlier administrations’ picks and choose people with federal government experience; (b) select those with no role in previous governments but who (we can hope) are qualified because of jobs they have held in other sectors; or (c) deal in cronyism (this does not necessarily rule out being qualified, but it is more likely to do so).

So far, Obama is trending mostly towards (a). Because of his own rather extreme inexperience, it’s not a bad way to go if he wants to reassure people that he’s not a wild-eyed radical who will appoint other radicals and/or neophytes. His appointments have a grounding effect, at least potentially. However, they also appear to be an early disappointment to those who believed he would somehow wave a magic wand and Change Everything.

The Clinton administration was the most recent Democrat presidency. To go back and try to find non-Clinton Democrats with experience in a previous administration, Obama would had to have reached back to the 70s and Carter. I for one am highly relieved that he has not done so—not only because many of those people would be ancient (or dead), but because I think that for the most part Carter’s policies were more disastrous than Clinton’s. But these two administrations—Clinton’s and Carter’s—are pretty much the only games in town for Obama if he wants Democrats with previous experience at that level.

What of (b), however? When one looks back at history, it’s an approach practiced to a large extent by FDR and JFK. The former had his “brain trust,” a shifting group of academicians who advised him through the long years of the New Deal. According to Wiki, “Many newspaper editorials and editorial cartoons ridiculed them as impractical idealists.” And this may indeed have been true, if the current view of Roosevelt as adopting policies that prolonged the Depression is correct.

An earlier manifestation of the same idea was Woodrow Wilson’s “The Inquiry,” a group of academics who advised him on matters pertaining to negotiations at the end of WWI. Of course, Wilson himself was an academic prior to becoming President, so it’s hardly surprising that he turned to them for advice. But if the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath are any guide, they didn’t do a very good job.

JFK’s administration was a mixture of all three approaches. Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s Secretary of State, was an example of (a). He had been in the State Department since the Truman Administration, so this was a fairly conventional pick. Johnson kept him on as well (as he did for most of JFK’s appointees).

But Kennedy was famous for his own version of the brain trust, otherwise known as the Best and the Brightest. In fact, fifteen Rhodes Scholars were in high Kennedy administration posts:

“From Eisenhower to Kennedy,” observed a Harvard professor, “is a shift from the “gentleman C’s’ boys to the Phi Beta Kappas.”

The most well-known of Kennedy’s picks without previous government experience were Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Their policies in Vietnam are not much of a recommendation for method (b), either.

McNamara was appointed by Kennedy and kept on by Johnson as Secretary of Defense. A Harvard MBA and professor who later fought in WWII, he was President of Ford when he was tapped for the government job of Defense. Kennedy had initially offered the post to Lovett, who had been Truman’s Secretary of Defense. This appointment would have been an example of (a). But Lovett turned it down for health reasons and recommended McNamara, who was given the choice of Treasury as a cabinet post, one to which he may have been far better suited. But he turned it down and settled for Defense. On such small pivots does history turn.

McGeorge Bundy was prominent as JFK’s national security adviser. He was an academic who went into government for the first time during Kennedy’s administration, and stayed on through part of Johnson’s term:

Bundy was one of Kennedy’s “wise men,” a noted professor of government””although not a PhD””at Harvard University. He was later appointed Dean of the Faculty at Harvard, the youngest in the school’s history. He moved into public life in 1961, becoming national security adviser in the Kennedy administration. He played a crucial role in all of the major foreign policy and defense decisions of the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administration. These included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, most controversially, the Vietnam War.

Not a very impressive resume, in the end. This is not to say that choice (b) is always a bad one. But I’ve offered the prominent examples that happened to come to mind for me, and they certainly indicate that (b) is not necessarily a better way to go than (a).

And then of course there is choice (c). I’m especially glad Obama does not seem to be going that route so far, since so many of his allies and confederates during his rise to power have been either shady, Leftist, corrupt, hatemongers, or several or all of the above.

One of the best examples of nepotism in a previous administration was Kennedy’s appointment of his brother Bobby as Attorney General. Widely criticized even at the time, it resulted in the passage (in 1967) of the so-called “Bobby Kennedy Law” prohibiting such nepotism in the future. There is evidence that JFK was initially wary of appointing Bobby as AG, but that his father (speaking of nepotism) insisted on it.

Obama is a fatherless only child, so we don’t have to worry about the undue influence of a Joseph Kennedy or a brother Bobby. As for Obama’s erstwhile “spiritual father,” Reverend Wright, we can assume that Obama will not touch that particular third rail during his administration, at least publicly. But one of the reasons Obama’s associations were examined so closely (at least by the Right; the MSM didn’t much care) was the understandable concern that people such as Wright, Ayers, and Frank Marshall Davis might have input (or, in the case of the deceased Davis, have had input), not in an Obama administration, but as simpatico influences on the formation of his thoughts and policies.

It is still very early, and Obama has made few decisions yet. This is also not surprising; he seems to be a guy who takes his time and then some.

Obama’s delay in choosing a Treasury Secretary has not been reassuring to the financial markets, as they keep plunging in a kind of “how low can you go?” limbo dance. And I think very little of his Attorney General pick Holder, a man with a history of promoting policies that are too liberal for me (read “progressive”) such as the strict DC ban on handguns, as well as many of the very questionable pardons Clinton issued in the last days of his administration.

But I don’t think this automatically means that the appointment of former Clintonites is a bad idea per se for Obama. Consider the alternatives.