Opinion: A Dust-Up alum’s reaction to Obama’s picks
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David Weigel and Scott Lilly were gracious enough last week to participate in our Dust-Up on Barack Obama’s transition to power. Much of the discussion involved speculation over the president-elect’s Cabinet picks. Now that some names have emerged from Team Obama, I asked Weigel and Lilly to e-mail me their thoughts on Obama’s choices. Below is the reaction from Weigel, an associate editor at Reason magazine, who writes that Obama ‘is disappointing all sorts of people. Including me.’
Weigel begins:
Well, it was fun while it lasted. Now that Barack Obama is ignoring the fantasy Cabinet picks of people like us and selecting the people he actually wants to work with, he’s disappointing all sorts of people. Including me.
Read the rest of Weigel’s reaction after the jump.
Weigel continues:
I’m not all that bothered by Clinton administration and Senate veterans climbing to the top of the pile, even though that’s raising hackles on blogs and talk radio. Eight years ago, a fairly popular and, by that point, successful Democratic administration was packing up its boxes and plucking “W”s off White House keyboards. (Yes, yes, that was more or less a hoax.) Why shouldn’t Obama seek out some of them to help run his administration? He’s being far cannier than Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Remember the two failed attorney general nominees Clinton chose before he settled on Janet Reno? Obama is a model of success, by that comparison. That said, I am incredibly skeptical of Eric Holder, Obama’s choice to replace Michael Mukasey at the Department of Justice. His role in approving Bill Clinton’s end-of-presidency pardons of people like Marc Rich is compelling to GOP Sep. Arlen Specter, but not as worrying as his 12-year-old suggestion that Washington, D.C. institute longer sentences for marijuana possession, or his 7-year-old suggestion that any “petty bureaucrat” who opposed the new provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act find another job, pronto. I know that drug policy activists and ACLU lawyers are still confident in Obama’s campaign promises (not all of them so popular) to stop Drug Enforcement Agency raids in states that have legalized some medical marijuana, or to revisit President Bush’s executive orders, but if Obama wanted to make that crystal clear he could have chosen another attorney general. I’m skeptical, but not surprised, by the ongoing drama of the Hillary Clinton nomination for secretary of State. (I’m not surprised by the drama part either.) The dirty little secret of the primary campaign was that the gulf between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy was narrow and based on only two or three issues -- her Iraq war vote, her vote to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and Obama’s pledge to meet with rogue state leaders. Compare that to the gap between Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman -- or even Dean and John Edwards -- in 2004. In his famous antiwar speech of October 2002, Obama told liberals he was against “dumb wars,” not “all wars.” They should have listened more closely. Janet Napolitano and Tom Daschle are good, unsurprising choices for Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, respectively. They have been on the short list for months, as Napolitano has tussled with the current DHS over REAL ID and immigration law, and Daschle has reinvented himself as a mandate-happy health care guru. Neither pick is a sop to libertarians like me. But we didn’t elect Obama; the Democrats who did are being well rewarded.