Ever since the US presidential election, advice has been showering down on president-elect Barack Obama like snowflakes in a driving blizzard.
Pundits right and left, politicians of every stripe, think tankers inside and outside Washington, lobbyists galore and not a few private citizens have been trying to instruct Obama on everything from negotiating with a rising China to dealing with an enigmatic North Korea to resolving the seemingly intractable conflict between Israel and the Arabs.
Indeed, it might not be too much to say that the US today has one president-elect and 300 million advisers who proffer policies to adopt, books and papers to read and diagrams on how to reorganize the government — all of which, in a robust democracy, may not be such a bad thing.
In particular, Obama has been deluged with the names of people who might be appointed to his Cabinet or other senior positions in his administration. Therein runs a process riddled with wondrous irony.
The president-elect ran a campaign on the theme of “change.” That he rarely defined what he proposed to change was immaterial; “change” was to be the byword of the Obama administration.
Yet the lists of candidates for high office are filled with the names of throwbacks to the era of former president Bill Clinton and of Washington’s Democratic establishment.
Obama’s regime thus seems to be shaping up as the Clinton Restoration. In the context of Democratic politics, Obama defied the establishment to win his party’s nomination and may have been as much a maverick as his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain. Now the Democrats, led by the Clinton clique, have set out to capture Obama before he moves into the White House.
IN CHARGE
In charge of the Obama transition is John Podesta, onetime chief of staff for president Clinton. Overseeing the selection of a foreign policy team is Warren Christopher, Clinton’s first secretary of state. Doing the same on defense is former senator Sam Nunn, who chaired the Armed Services Committee during the Clinton days. The new White House chief of staff is Rahm Emanuel, a staff aide to Clinton.
Amid jockeying for position inside the Beltway around Washington is said to be Clinton himself, possibly for ambassador to the UN or another highly visible job, and, of course, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Former vice president Al Gore is being considered for secretary of the interior where, as a Nobel Prize winner, he would influence environmental policy. Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in 2004, is reported to be running hard to be secretary of state. Lawrence Summers, Treasury secretary under Clinton, may come back from Harvard.
On it goes, with scores of sub-Cabinet officers during the Clinton era angling for higher posts in the Obama administration. Fluttering out of Washington are names like Strobe Talbot, Susan Rice, Robert Zoellick, James Steinberg, Kurt Campbell, Richard Danzig and Anthony Lake, all connected one way or another with the Clinton cluster.
Perhaps most ironic is the persistent rumor that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the widely respected Republican, will be asked to stay on, maybe even indefinitely. Obama campaigned on withdrawing US troops from Iraq promptly and on a schedule. Gates is the architect of the strategy of bringing the troops home only after the Iraqis can fight their own battles.
Dick Morris, the acerbic former Clinton adviser, wrote recently: “Obama based his innovative campaign on an emphatic and convincing commitment to change the culture of Washington and bring in new people, new ideas, and new ways of doing business. But now, Obama has definitely changed his tune.”
Morris concluded that “Obama appears to be practicing the politics of status quo, not the politics of change.”
Mr President-elect, a quiet plea from the island of your birth: Be true to your battle cry of “change” and look across the nation for fresh faces. Appoint no one else who has served in Washington for the last 16 years — no Clintonistas, no Bushies, no lobbyists, no beltway bandits, unless he or she has compelling credentials. You can always reach out, case by case, if you need counsel from former insiders.
In Chicago where you learned your politics, there was an old saying: “Throw the rascals out.”
You might sandpaper that to: “Keep the rascals out.”
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
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