Barack Obama’s cabinet is drawing praise for all the wrong reasons, starting with the mad-dog right — like Anne Coulter, who says she can’t fault it, or Karl Rove, who heaped praise on Obama’s economic team in a Wall Street Journal column. Move to the corporate mainstream and there’s measured congratulation for the respectability of Obama’s team — pro-biz, pragmatic and, whether proximately from the Bush or Clinton administrations, often at source from Harvard.
So far as the progressive Obama base is concerned, it’s been one bitter pill after another, starting with Rahm Emanuel (the only man in the Illinois congressional delegation to vote yes to the war on Iraq), moving on to Hillary Clinton (another yes on the war), Robert Gates, and the whole economic team. There was a brief ray of hope when Larry Summers didn’t return to Treasury. Then he bobbed up as director of Obama’s economic recovery team, formally known as the National Economic Council, based in the White House.
What is Obama’s progressive base getting by way of reward? The pickings are very slim. Nowhere has businessas-usual more glaringly been given the green light than at the Department of Defense. Anyone looking for change in America’s political economy has to take on the Pentagon, a vast and steadily widening crater of corruption and Augean waste. Obama has simply kept on Robert Gates, who first made his name faking intelligence estimates at the CIA in Bush Sr.’s day, exaggerating Soviet military strength and aggressive intentions. Nominated as Gates’ No. 2, presumptively as Gates’ successor, is William Lynn. Appointed by Clinton as a Pentagon reformer in ’98, Lynn — in the words of famed Pentagon employee/assailant Chuck Spinney — “managed to construct a logically inconsistent and morally indefensible strategy to protect the unworkable status quo.” Dashed by the disasters at State and Treasury, the progressives looked for comfort at the departments of Agriculture and Interior, which supervise vast slabs of the homeland.
At Ag they got the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, who would opposed Obama in the primaries and who is best known as being a fanatic lobbyist for genetically engineered biocrops and ethanol. He’s Monsanto’s pinup boy and comes factory guaranteed as a will-do guy for the agrochemical complex. For a moment, hope glowed from the transition team’s office in Chicago as the panel listened attentively to those lobbying for Raul Grijalva, a US representative from Arizona who is first-rate and has done more than anyone in recent years to root out scandal in Bush’s scandalsodden sojourn as custodian of the nation’s forests, energy reserves and public waters.
In the end, Interior went to Colorado’s senior senator, Ken Salazar. He’s a born
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