Untangling Obama's Cabinet

By Matt Stoller, Open Left. Posted December 25, 2008.

Following up on Chris Bower's earlier blog post on Obama retaining Bush officials to staff the Pentagon, it's worth noting that there are substantial policy differences between people on the left of the Democratic Party and those soon to be in power.  Ultimately it's these policy differences that matter.  Here are a few.

• Afghanistan: Joe Biden says that withdrawing troops from Iraq is imperative so that the administration can put more troops in Afghanistan.  Steve Clemons, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Vague think that we should cut deals with the local Taliban, perhaps do some economic development, and leave.  

   

• Iraq:  Obama's current plan is to leave a residual force in Iraq (which John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman praise).  A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq called for no residual troops, as did Bill Richardson.

   

• The $700 Billion Bailout:  Obama whipped House members aggressively for the Treasury to establish the TARP program.  Opposition to the bailout was spread out among populists on the right and the left, without coherent form.  

   

• Infrastructure:  Biden is talking about the transportation part of the infrastructure stimulus going to roads and bridges, many of us want SUPERTRAINS and less investment in the oil-dependent sprawlconomy.

There are probably a lot more splits, as well as areas of alignment, but starting out with a big split on war and peace in Afghanistan isn't a small deal, with all that killing.  Domestically and abroad, we just don't know what policies the Obama administration is going to put forward, and so we have to guess.  This is actually by design, as Biden makes clear.

"You get to see what's in the package when we've completed the package, and when we've negotiated a little bit more with our colleagues in the House and Senate," Biden said. "Keep in mind that it's really important that this package when submitted to the Hill succeed and pass."

Guessing as to what's in there is inherently uncertain, but the personnel is the best heuristic we have, aside from stated policies during the campaign (many of which have become obsolete when a trillion dollar stimulus and a nasty credit crunch fully flowered).  That's what Chris Bowers was doing when he noted the ideological loyalties of the Obama cabinet members.  Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ed Kilgore both argue that Chris is wrong.  Coates suggests that leaving out White House staffers renders Chris's judgment inaccurate, and furthermore, the DLC tends to overstate its influence with officials.  Kilgore, the former policy director of the DLC, credibly points out that the DLC involved a wide variety of politicians in its activities, so having associations with that group is not necessarily indicative of anything in particular.  I should also add that Kilgore is one of the few former DLC officials who has really taken the time to understand our arguments, and respond to them with an intellectually curious streak rather than intense defensiveness.

Fortunately, we don't have to throw opinions at each other to settle the argument about Obama's cabinet; Nolan McCarty at Princeton compared voting records of the Cabinet members, and showed that "the evidence is pretty strong that the administration lies considerably to the right of the Democrats in the House, but is reasonably representative of Senate Democrats."  Coates's point about senior White House staffers is reasonable; Melody Barnes for instance has no measurable track record equivalent to a voting record.  Still, who Obama picks to his cabinet-level appointments can't mean nothing at all.

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Read more of Matt Stoller's work at Open Left.

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