It’s not helpful if your press secretary is hapless (Scotty McClellan), clueless (Dana Perino), or a liar (Ari Fleischer). If you want to advance your agenda, it is important that the press gives you a fair shake, and a good, competent, informed, and honest press secretary is a non-trivial factor in any administration’s success. Robert Gibbs is an excellent choice for the Obama administration. I think it’s great that the face of the administration is going to have an Alabama drawl. It might be a largely Chicago operation (which is fine by me), but it’s going to sound a bit more diverse than that.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
by pummeling him over Andy Martin, I agree that this is a strong pick. I also happen to think Rahm Emmanuel is a good pick, since like Joe Biden he’s a pretty tough character. For all the talk of “Obambi”, Obama doesn’t really surround himself with softies.
MSNBC just called NC for Obama.
makes that 364 you gotta give the dog his bone. Rove had it solid in Obama’s basket. Missouri still out.
BREAKING NEWS: Rahm Emanuels has told associates he has accepted WH CoS.
As for the other Administration personnel picks for cabinet and top tier.
I’d like to see no re-threads like Larry Summers. Those floating his name have short memories – “he stepped down from Harvard – ya know “women brains are”…thingy and he was the biggest inarticulate dud whene he held Secretary Treasury. Why would anyone want him back?
Politico has an interesting pool of list of names under consideration
Hart would be brilliant as sec homeland security…he gets it, and has for a long time if you’ve followed his writings.
a bit ot, but ll notice dodd’s missing from nearly all the cabinet lists l’ve seen…giving me hope he’ll replace reid.
that would be a positive change!
Volker would make a good SecTreas. Certainly better than Summers or Bob Rubin.
Hagel as Defense Secretary won’t happen, Obama will be strongly pressured to keep Gates and Saint Petraeus.
BooMan, didn’t you go through this list a couple months back? You had some damn good calls there if I remember.
Volcker is too old for the job. I don’t understand this anti-Summers screed on the left. So what if he made an unguarded remark about women in academe in an private economics seminar. He was being an economist, not President of Harvard. His mistake was forgetting that he was Pres. As to his capacities, there’s none better unless you want a Wall Street retread, which raises question of fairness in the bail-out. He’s is a great, not just good, economist. We are going into the worst Depression since 1930; I’d rather have a pro in there than a banker. He is also close with Bernanke, which will be essential for any fiscal intervention to succeed.
Summers is an outstanding choice. There may be others out there, but he’s got the experience. May be able to call back some old-timers like Ted Truman into the admninistration, and some relatively new-timers like Brad Delong, with whom he wrote academic papers back in the day. Also Barry Eichengreen might come in from Berkeley and Janet Yellen. You never know.
Does he have some major legal background, or is he thrown in there simply as a big name? I’m also perplexed by Janet Napolitano for Attorney General. Does she have strong law experience?
I think Attorney General is a critical spot. We need someone who is tough and will go after Bush administration crimes. For that reason I’m not sure Cass Sunstein is a good choice. We need a Democrat version of Patrick Fitzgerald, someone who will pull no punches and will not let bygones be bygones. Someone who is not naive about Bush’s crimes would be great as well. I’d like somebody along the lines of Henry Waxman.
former U.S. Attorney for Arizona and former state attorney general
Actually, Summers didn’t impugn women’s brains at all. He merely suggested, as a hypothesis, that the predominance of male researchers at top levels of the hard sciences could be partially explained by the quite well-established fact that the normal distribution curve of mental abilities is slightly flatter for males than for females, even if the average (mean and median) is the same.
In popular terms, there are slightly more idiot males than idiot females, as well as slightly more brilliant males than brilliant females. Since top scientists tend to be recruited from the brilliant end of the curve, this predicts that males will be somewhat overrepresented in Ivy League physics etc., in the same way that they are overrepresented among (say) mouthbreading Michael Savage fans.
The veritable PC inquisition facing Summers for these remarks was not not a credit to those involved. (One recalls Armando droning on about the alleged thought crime for months at the Daily Kos, always taking care to misrepresent the issue.)
That said, there are also valid reasons to disapprove of Summers. Notably, I understand he is a most ardent Israel apologist, and I think we have enough of those.
On a positive note, how cool is it that the real-life the model for Matt Santos picks as his Chief of Staff the real-life model for Josh Lyman? Next, we need to dig out Sam Seaborne!
it’s what the ears hear and the memory retains. Seems to me that remark about women scrubbed Summers’ Harvard gig.
and?
And?
Well
…. in the post of Sec. of the Treasury, Larry Summers was an inarticulate dud; insecure in his skin — that led to Robert Rubin replacing him.
Ask Wall Street. I have a vivid recollection of his tenure. Financial sectors had no confidence in Summers. Really uninspired.
Summers may be brilliant but communicating and decision making is missing in his skill sets. That’s key.
Many other qualified candidates out there without resorting to re-threads.
I don’t recommend Summers for presidential pet minder. That was not my point. And again, we (you) have Zionists enough in high places. I just pointed out that, contrary to myth, he said nothing insupportable about “women’s brains.” He was swiftboated by malicious operators of a feminist persuasion, exploiting the public’s inability to comprehend elementary statistical concepts. Stephen Pinker says it better than I can. The smear campaign for his resignation was one of the vilest attacks on academic freedom since the US House of Representatives unanimously condemned a peer-reviewed research paper. So I was just asking you to not help perpetuate those lies, whatever his other flaws.
CNN had a feature on election night of two young students representing young Dems and Repugs respectively. (can’t remember names) The Dem girl was absolutely brilliant – all incisiveness, sweetness and light – and would make a good junior spokesperson on “youth” issues. (The repug absolutely choked and was so cringemakingly awful it was painful to watch by comparison).
everyone is so focused on youth right now….they need to go back and look at what the old people are saying;
from one of my favorite blogs,
http://margaretandhelen.wordpress.com/
“I just don’t understand how your Howard can listen to that Rush Limbaugh each day. I tuned into him yesterday and couldn’t believe it. I mean, I know he is a Republican mouthpiece, I just didn’t realize we were dealing with Hoof and Mouth Disease.
Ask Howard to follow the logic of his argument today if you can. He said Republicans lost because they didn’t stick to their core values. They tried to be nice and tell people that they aren’t racists, bigots and homophobes. Once the Republicans got soft and started trying to be compassionate they began to lose. That is the problem with Republicans right now according to Rush. As proof he pontificated that conservative initiatives passed on the ballots.
So let me see if I understand. If Republicans would just admit that they are racists, bigots and homophobes and stop trying to be nice, they would win more elections. And the conservative movement which stands for less government was somehow validated because California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas just forced government even farther into people’s bedrooms? And yet all of the conservative pro-life measures (the bread and butter issue for most of that group) failed to pass. So basically the conservative movement has been reduced to Anita Bryant’s diary. My, my but how they love their aging beauty queens… and we all know that beauty queens are the brightest bulbs on the chandelier.
Wow. I guess all the drugs Limbaugh takes have finally eaten away most of the gray matter that was stored in that fat head of his.”
“Rahm Emmanuel is a good pick“
Based on WHAT, exactly? For anyone who gives even a very small damn about Middle East policy, particularly as pertains to Palestinians, it is a disastrous pick.
Rahm Immanuel’s father was a member of the Irgun, a Zionist Jewish terrorist gang that introduced terrorism to Palestine well before Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims ever thought about it.
Rahm Immanuel is an extremely militant supporter of Israel’s right wing. He has always been and remains an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s worst and most wantonly bloody war crimes, including its unspeakable month-long attack on Lebanon in 2006 – an attack which had been planned long before the capture (not kidnapping) of the two soldiers, and whose stated purpose was to take Lebanon back thirty years (I can provide the quote, and ask me about the bridges if you want an excellent on-the-ground example – I saw it with my own eyes). He is also a supporter of Israel’s worst depredations against the Palestinians.
Having Rahm Immanuel in a position of that much power in the White House does not bode well for Iran, let alone Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and heaven help the Palestinians. Nor does it bode well for anyone who really wants peace for Israel.