Obama’s key cabinet picks…

… Won’t be announced very soon, if I heard David Axelrod right yesterday.
He was asked on MSNBC when Obama would be announcing his top picks, and I believe the questioner even threw a few suggested names into the mix. But Axelrod replied, very clearly, something like: “While Obama will be proceeding with due haste he also recopgnizes that he needs to undertake his cabinet appointments with all the necessary deliberation…”
I think this is entirely right. Governing this country– especially at a time of so many great challenges, which have been openly acknowledged by the president-elect– is a challenge quite different from that of running for election.
Obama needs to reach down deep within himself at this point. He and those to closest to him need to change gears. He may well need to bring in and listen to voices of advice different than those he listened to during the campaign. I certainly hope he does these things before he makes any firm decisions on his cabinet team.
They will take a certain amount of time. As will the process of vetting possible top-level picks before he makes the final offers to them.
So I’m not going to make any public recommendations re possible picks. The only things I’ll say are that, in foreign policy and probably also in economic policy, choosing people who had high-level responsibility in the Clinton years would, in nearly all cases, undermine Pres. Obama’s ability to implement his agenda. He definitely needs to think outside the Clinton-era box.
For now, I merely want to urge Obama to take his time, and to reflect more deeply on how to implement the key portions of his transformation agenda, as he deliberates on the possible top-level picks. These are some of the absolutely most important decisions he will make in his life. They will strongly affect the effectiveness of his entire presidency.
I’m sure he has also given some thought to the key question of how he will get the information he needs to make his presidential decisions, and how he will organize the decision-deliberating functions of the cabinet. Those are key aspects of governance. In George W. Bush’s first term, effective executive power was exercised overwhelmingly by VP Cheney, who controlled the entire information flow to the president and completely subverted the concept of cabinet-level deliberations on the country’s most important decisions. (Cheney’s influence eroded noticeably during W’s second term.)
I think we can be confident that Joe Biden won’t be playing a role anything similar to Cheney’s. But as a long-time ‘Washington insider’ he can certainly be of some help as Obama navigates the shoals of 2009 Washington, including dealing with all the big egos and special interests associated with most (though not all) of the Democratic leaders in Congress.
Obama’s victory owes something to the large monetary support he received from big lobbying interests. But it owes most to the monetary support as well as dedicated ‘footwork’ support he received from 62.5 million voters throughout the whole country yesterday, and our desire for deepseated change. I guess for now we have to trust him not to forget that.
But I’m also, quite simply, praying for his survival.