Steve Hilderbrand, William Greider Obama's economic advisors

Kudos to brother blogspot blogger at choosingdemocracy for bringing attention to Steve Hilderbrand's blog post at Huffington Post, and to William Greider's column at The Nation. (Hilderbrand's bio at HuffPo reports that he was "National Deputy Campaign Manager where he oversaw the state, field and political operations [of Obama's campaign.")

Hilderbrand asks President -elect Barack Obama's left critics to go easy on him.

Huh??

In a time of economic crisis that threatens to get worse, and snowballing corporate layoffs, why should we accept Obama's economic appointments? These people are corporate neo-liberal retreads from the Clinton administration. The status quo got this economic sick.

This is the time to reverse course, not to listen to the conventional wisdom from the pro-corporate establishment.

In fact, many of these advisors are straight from the disreputable mega-banks themselves. Witness, the Citigroup connection that William Greider called attention to last month in "The Nation," "Past and Future."

An opening excerpt from the Nation opinion piece:

A year ago, when Barack Obama said it was time to turn the page, his campaign declaration seemed to promise a fresh start for Washington. I, for one, failed to foresee Obama would turn the page backward. The president-elect's lineup for key governing positions has opted for continuity, not change. Virtually all of his leading appointments are restoring the Clinton presidency, only without Mr. Bill. In some important ways, Obama's selections seem designed to sustain the failing policies of George W. Bush.


William Greider: Timothy Geithner is responsible for much of the generous deal-making now underway with Wall Street. If Obama's not careful, he will be blamed.


This is not the last word and things are changing rapidly. But Obama's choices have begun to define him. His victory, it appears, was a triumph for the cautious center-right politics that has described the Democratic party for several decades. Those of us who expected more were duped, not so much by Obama but by our own wishful thinking.
. . .
. . . . Now [Robert] Rubin is himself a Citicorp executive and his bank is now being saved by his old protégé (Geithner) with the taxpayers' money.

The connections go way beyond irony. They raise very serious questions about where the new president intends to lead and whether he has the nerve to break from the weak and haphazard strategy of the Bush administration. It has dumped piles of public money on the largest financial institutions and demanded little or nothing in return, hoping for the best. Geithner has been a central player in the deal-making, from Bear Stearns to AIG to Citi. The strategy has not only failed, it has arguably made things worse as savvy market players saw through the contradictions and rushed out to dump more bank stocks.

NY Times: Progressives holding tongues on frustration over Obma's centrist cabinet

Liberals Wonder When Obama’s Team Will Reflect Them

By PETER BAKER
Published: December 8, 2008

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama’s appointments have tilted so much to the political center that they have drawn praise from the likes of Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh. That alone would seem enough to set off a revolt in his liberal base. But a month into Mr. Obama’s transition, many on the political left are trying to hold their tongues.

President-elect Barack Obama’s team is being cast as centrist.

In assembling his team to date, Mr. Obama has largely passed over progressives, opting to keep President Bush’s defense secretary, tapping a retired general close to Senator John McCain and recruiting economists from the traditionally corporate, free-trade, deficit-hawk wing of the party. The choices have deeply frustrated liberals who thought Mr. Obama’s election signaled the rise of a new progressive era.

But so far, they are mainly muting their protest, clinging to the belief that Mr. Obama still means what he said on the campaign trail and remaining wary of undermining what they see as the most liberal president sent to the White House in a generation. They are quietly lobbying for more liberals in the next round of appointments, seeking at least some like-minded voices at the table. And they are banking on the idea that no matter whom he installs under him, Mr. Obama will be the driving force for the change they seek.

“It’s a great question — one that many of us have been trying to avoid,” said Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, the incoming co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, when asked last week how liberals viewed Mr. Obama’s team. “The euphoria of the election is still there, and still there for me. It’s not a question of benefit of the doubt. It’s a question of trust, and I trust that we’re going to be moving in the right direction.”

As it happens, Mr. Grijalva is the focus of some of that trust. The Obama transition team has let it be known that he is under consideration for secretary of the interior, and many liberals have made that possible nomination a litmus test for whether Mr. Obama really is serious about including them in the top echelon of his government.

Others are swallowing concerns about personnel to concentrate instead on policy. Some see a New Deal for the 21st century in Mr. Obama’s plans to push an economic recovery program that would devote hundreds of billions of dollars to infrastructure projects, social safety-net programs and environmentally friendly industry.

“He ran on such a progressive agenda, if he’s not breaking away from that, if he’s getting centrists to implement it, we’ll take that,” said Robert L. Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future and once a top adviser to Jesse L. Jackson’s presidential campaign.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential Daily Kos site on the Internet, said it was way too early to begin judging Mr. Obama. “Some people may be nit-picky about his choices but at the end of the day, he’s going to make better choices than John McCain would have made,” Mr. Moulitsas said by telephone. “There will be a time to push him, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to wait to see what it means on a policy basis, not on personalities.”

Some bloggers have been less patient. “Why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left?” asked Chris Bowers on his site, OpenLeft.com. Kevin Drum, writing on the Web site of the liberal magazine Mother Jones, echoed that sentiment: “I mean, that is why most of us voted for him, right?”

In an opinion article for The Washington Post on Sunday, David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, wrote that “progressives are — depending on whom you ask — disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied.” But he added that “there’s no rebellion yet at hand” because the left still is hoping that Mr. Obama will hijack the establishment to advance liberal causes.

Mr. Obama’s loyalists have appealed for calm.

“This is not a time for the left wing of our party to draw conclusions about the cabinet and White House appointments that President-elect Obama is making,” Steve Hildebrand, one of his top campaign aides, wrote on The Huffington Post in a message to progressives on Sunday. “Some believe the appointments generally aren’t progressive enough. Having worked with former Senator Obama for the last two years, I can tell you, that isn’t the way he thinks and it’s not likely the way he will lead.”

The mixed emotions on the left reflect a larger uncertainty about how to view Mr. Obama. Although National Journal deemed him the most liberal senator based on major votes and many liberals flocked to his campaign, Mr. Obama ran more on inspiration than ideology and has not always adopted the orthodoxy of the left. He proposed expanding health care coverage but does not favor a government-run single-payer system. He has criticized the Bush counterterrorism policies but voted for a compromise surveillance bill.

In the weeks since his election, Mr. Obama or his advisers have signaled that he might delay some promises that appealed to progressives, like raising taxes on the wealthy, reopening negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement and ending restrictions on gay men and lesbians in the military. While renewing his desire to withdraw combat forces from Iraq in 16 months, he has emphasized that he will listen to alternatives presented by the military.

Some liberals said they would have only themselves to blame if their expectations were not met. “So many progressives were misled about what Obama is and what he believes,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in the online magazine Salon. “But it wasn’t Obama who misled them. It was their own desires, their eagerness to see what they wanted to see rather than what reality offered.”

At the same time, Mr. Obama arrives in office at a moment when the political dialogue has shifted to the left. Ideas that used to be considered on the fringe are now much more centrist, including heavy government spending in the short term to lift the economy and addressing energy and climate change through green technology. The debate over Iraq no longer is whether to withdraw troops but how quickly.

Even some of his appointees have evolved in their views. Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary chosen to be Mr. Obama’s chief White House economic adviser, talks much more about income inequality, financial industry regulation and other favorite causes of the left. “The Larry Summers of 2008 is not the Larry Summers of 1993 or 1999,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, a liberal magazine.

Ms. vanden Heuvel has been more critical of the national security team, to be anchored by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, with Robert M. Gates staying on as defense secretary and Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser. In her magazine, Ms. vanden Heuvel asked why those who had opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, as Mr. Obama did, do not seem to have a place on the team.

Yet she said liberal activists must learn to work from the inside when possible while also pushing from the outside when necessary. “Progressives need to be as clear eyed, tough and pragmatic about Obama as he is about us,” she said in an interview last week. “It’s too early to tell.”

While hewing mostly to the center, Mr. Obama did heed the left in giving up on John O. Brennan, a longtime Central Intelligence Agency officer who was in line to lead the agency, after complaints about his views of interrogation programs. Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. named a liberal economist, Jared Bernstein, as an adviser last week. And Mr. Obama said on Sunday his choice for veterans affairs secretary would be Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the retired Army chief of staff who became a hero to Iraq war opponents for his public clash with top Bush administration officials over troop levels.

Having lost out in most of the top-tier positions, liberals are pushing favorites for remaining jobs: Mr. Grijalva for the Interior Department, Representative Xavier Becerra of California for United States trade representative, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts for energy secretary and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts for agriculture secretary.

“We assume that there will be a philosophical balance when we’re all through with this,” said Representative Lynn Woolsey of California.

Tim Carpenter, national director of Progressive Democrats of America, which was founded in 2004 out of frustration with Senator John Kerry’s position on the Iraq war, said the retention of Mr. Gates was “startling” and complained that as Mr. Obama builds his team, “everybody he’s bringing in is to the right of him.” But he expressed cautious optimism.

“Change is in the air,” Mr. Carpenter said. “The question is what kind of change. We hope Barack Obama will be a more progressive president.”

Rich of NY Times: Brightest are not always the best

Columnist Frank Rich in the New York Times:

Note to Obama: The Brightest Advisors Are Not Always the Best

By Frank Rich, The New York Times. Posted December 8, 2008.

The media haven't asked the tough questions they should about Obama's superstar cabinet.

In 1992, David Halberstam wrote a new introduction for the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest,” his classic history of the hubristic J.F.K. team that would ultimately mire America in Vietnam. He noted that the book’s title had entered the language, but not quite as he had hoped. “It is often misused,” he wrote, “failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.”

Halberstam died last year, but were he still around, I suspect he would be speaking up, loudly, right about now. As Barack Obama rolls out his cabinet, “the best and the brightest” has become the accolade du jour from Democrats (Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri), Republicans (Senator John Warner of Virginia) and the press (George Stephanopoulos). Few seem to recall that the phrase, in its original coinage, was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note. Perhaps even Doris Kearns Goodwin would agree that it’s time for Beltway reading groups to move on from “Team of Rivals” to Halberstam.

The stewards of the Vietnam fiasco had pedigrees uncannily reminiscent of some major Obama appointees. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was, as Halberstam put it, “a legend in his time at Groton, the brightest boy at Yale, dean of Harvard College at a precocious age.” His deputy, Walt Rostow, “had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something,” whether at Yale, M.I.T. or as a Rhodes scholar. Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was the youngest and highest paid Harvard Business School assistant professor of his era before making a mark as a World War II Army analyst, and, at age 44, becoming the first non-Ford to lead the Ford Motor Company.

The rest is history that would destroy the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and inflict grave national wounds that only now are healing.

In the Obama transition, our Clinton-fixated political culture has been hyperventilating mainly over the national security team, but that’s not what gives me pause. Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates were both wrong about the Iraq invasion, but neither of them were architects of that folly and both are far better known in recent years for consensus-building caution (at times to a fault in Clinton’s case) than arrogance. Those who fear an outbreak of Clintonian drama in the administration keep warning that Obama has hired a secretary of state he can’t fire. But why not take him at his word when he says “the buck will stop with me”? If Truman could cashier Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then surely Obama could fire a brand-name cabinet member in the (unlikely) event she goes rogue.

No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

CLick here for entire Rich column.

Liberals waiting for a populist administration

With all of the campaign trail rhetoric steeped in economic populism, and "Main Street" over "Wall Street," liberals and progressives are wondering, where are the progressives in President-elect Barack Obama's cabinet.

Columnists at Politico.com weighed in yesterday:

Liberals voice concerns about Obama
By: Carol E. Lee and Nia-Malika Henderson
December 8, 2008 03:49 PM EST

Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices.

Obama has reversed pledges to immediately repeal tax cuts for the wealthy and take on Big Oil. He’s hedged his call for a quick drawdown in Iraq. And he’s stocking his White House with anything but stalwarts of the left.

Now some are shedding a reluctance to puncture the liberal euphoria at being rid of President George W. Bush to say, in effect, that the new boss looks like the old boss.

“He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet. But we do hope that before it's all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America.

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn't there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?”

Even supporters make clear they’re on the lookout for backsliding. “There’s a concern that he keep his basic promises and people are going to watch him,” said Roger Hickey, a co-founder of Campaign for America’s Future.

Obama insists he hasn’t abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left’s bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won’t enact the tax.

Obama’s pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he’s struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he’ll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama’s post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democrats even more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama’s says that on his first day in office he will begin to “design a plan for a responsible drawdown,” as he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. Obama has also filled his national security positions with supporters of the Iraq war: Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize force in Iraq, as his secretary of state; and President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, continuing in the same role.

The central premise of the left’s criticism is direct – don’t bite the hand that feeds, Mr. President-elect. The Internet that helped him so much during the election is lighting up with irritation and critiques.

“There don't seem to be any liberals in Obama's cabinet,” writes John Aravosis, the editor of Americablog.com. “What does all of this mean for Obama's policies, and just as important, Obama Supreme Court announcements?”

“Actually, it reminds me a bit of the campaign, at least the beginning and the middle, when the Obama campaign didn't seem particularly interested in reaching out to progressives,” Aravosis continues. “Once they realized that in order to win they needed to marshal everyone on their side, the reaching out began. I hope we're not seeing a similar ‘we can do it alone’ approach in the transition team.”

This isn’t the first liberal letdown over Obama, who promptly angered the left after winning the Democratic primary by announcing he backed a compromise that would allow warrantless wiretapping on U.S. soil to continue.



Now it’s Obama’s Cabinet moves that are drawing the most fire. It’s not just that he’s picked Clinton and Gates. It’s that liberal Democrats say they’re hard-pressed to find one of their own on Obama’s team so far – particularly on the economic side, where people like Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers are hardly viewed as pro-labor.

“At his announcement of an economic team there was no secretary of labor. If you don’t think the labor secretary is on the same level as treasury secretary, that gives me pause,” said Jonathan Tasini, who runs the website workinglife.org. “The president-elect wouldn't be president-elect without labor."

During the campaign Obama gained labor support by saying he favored legislation that would make it easier for unions to form inside companies. The “card check” bill would get rid of a secret-ballot method of voting to form a union and replace it with a system that would require companies to recognize unions simply if a majority of workers signed cards saying they want one. Obama still supports that legislation, aides say – but union leaders are worried that he no longer talks it up much as president-elect.

“It's complicated,” said Tasini, who challenged Clinton for Senate in 2006. “On the one hand, the guy hasn't even taken office yet so it's a little hasty to be criticizing him. On the other hand, there is legitimate cause for concern. I think people are still waiting but there is some edginess about this.”

That’s a view that seems to have kept some progressive leaders holding their fire. There are signs of a struggle within the left wing of the Democratic Party about whether it’s just too soon to criticize Obama -- and if there’s really anything to complain about just yet.

Case in point: One of the Campaign for America’s Future blogs commented on Obama’s decision not to tax oil companies’ windfall profits saying, “Between this move and the move to wait to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it seems like the Obama team is buying into the right-wing frame that raising any taxes - even those on the richest citizens and wealthiest corporations - is bad for the economy.”

Yet Campaign for America’s Future will be join about 150 progressive organizations, economists and labor groups to release a statement Tuesday in support of a large economic stimulus package like the one Obama has proposed, said Hickey, a co-founder of the group.

“I’ve heard the most grousing about the windfall profits tax, but on the other hand, Obama has committed himself to a stimulus package that makes a down payment on energy efficiency and green jobs,” Hickey said. “The old argument was, here’s how we afford to make these investments – we tax the oil companies’ windfall profits. … The new argument is, in a bad economy that could get worse, we don’t.”

Obama is asking for patience – saying he’s only shifting his stance on some issues because circumstances are shifting.

Aides say he backed off the windfall profits tax because oil prices have
dropped below $80 a barrel. Obama also defended hedging on the Bush tax cuts.

“My economic team right now is examining, do we repeal that through legislation? Do we let it lapse so that, when the Bush tax cuts expire, they're not renewed when it comes to wealthiest Americans?” Obama said on “Meet the Press.” “We don't yet know what the best approach is going to be.”

On Iraq, he says he’s just trying to make sure any U.S. pullout doesn’t ignite “any resurgence of terrorism in Iraq that could threaten our interests.”

Obama has told his supporters to look beyond his appointments, that the change he promised will come from him and that when his administration comes together they will be happy.

“I think that when you ultimately look at what this advisory board looks like, you'll say this is a cross-section of opinion that in some ways reinforces conventional wisdom, in some ways breaks with orthodoxy in all sorts of way,” Obama recently said in response to questions about his appointments during a news conference on the economy.

The leaders of some liberal groups are willing to wait and see.

“He hasn’t had a first day in office,” said John Isaacs, the executive director for Council for Livable World. “To me it’s not as important as who’s there, than what kind of policies they carry out.”

“These aren’t out-and-out liberals on the national security team, but they may be successful implementers of what the Obama national security policy is,” Isaacs added. “We want to see what policies are carried forward, as opposed to appointments.”

Juan Cole, who runs a prominent anti-war blog called Informed Comment, said he worries Obama will get bad advice from Clinton on the Middle East, calling her too pro-Israel and “belligerent” toward Iran. “But overall, my estimation is that he has chosen competence over ideology, and I'm willing to cut him some slack,” Cole said.

Other voices of the left don’t like what they’re seeing so far and aren’t waiting for more before they speak up.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich warned that Obama’s economic team of Summers and Geithner reminded him of John F. Kennedy’s “best and the brightest” team, who blundered in Vietnam despite their blue-chip pedigrees.

David Corn, Washington bureau chief of the liberal magazine Mother Jones, wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post that he is “not yet reaching for a pitchfork.”

But the headline of his op-ed sums up his point about Obama’s Cabinet appointments so far: “This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Envisioned.”

Pondering Obama's Secretary of Education appointment

Tim Kaine of Virginia has pulled himself out of the running.
These insider columns indicate that Joel Klein is still a candidate. Given Obama's pattern of picking different voices, it is conceivable that he will have both a positive appointee (i.e., Darling-Hammond) and a negative one (Klein or Rhee).
From NY Times: David Brooks' column on education secretary choice:

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.

During the presidential race, Barack Obama straddled the two camps. One campaign adviser, John Schnur, represented the reform view in the internal discussions. Another, Linda Darling-Hammond, was more likely to represent the establishment view. Their disagreements were collegial (this is Obamaland after all), but substantive.

In public, Obama shifted nimbly from camp to camp while education experts studied his intonations with the intensity of Kremlinologists. Sometimes, he flirted with the union positions. At other times, he practiced dog-whistle politics, sending out reassuring signals that only the reformers could hear.

Each camp was secretly convinced that at the end of the day, Obama would come down on their side. The reformers were cheered when Obama praised a Denver performance pay initiative. The unions could take succor from the fact that though Obama would occasionally talk about merit pay, none of his actual proposals contradicted their positions.

Obama never had to pick a side. That is, until now. There is only one education secretary, and if you hang around these circles, the air is thick with speculation, anticipation, anxiety, hope and misinformation. Every day, new rumors are circulated and new front-runners declared. It’s kind of like being in a Trollope novel as Lord So-and-So figures out to whom he’s going to propose.

You can measure the anxiety in the reformist camp by the level of nervous phone chatter each morning. Weeks ago, Obama announced that Darling-Hammond would lead his transition team and reformist cellphones around the country lit up. Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford, is a sharp critic of Teach for America and promotes weaker reforms.

Anxieties cooled, but then one morning a few weeks ago, I got a flurry of phone calls from reform leaders nervous that Obama was about to side against them. I interviewed people in the president-elect’s inner circle and was reassured that the reformers had nothing to worry about. Obama had not gone native.

Obama’s aides point to his long record on merit pay, his sympathy for charter schools and his tendency to highlight his commitment to serious education reform.

But the union lobbying efforts are relentless and in the past week prospects for a reforming education secretary are thought to have dimmed. The candidates before Obama apparently include: Joel Klein, the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions; Arne Duncan, the reforming Chicago head who is less controversial; Darling-Hammond herself; and some former governor to be named later, with Darling-Hammond as the deputy secretary.

In some sense, the final option would be the biggest setback for reform. Education is one of those areas where implementation and the details are more important than grand pronouncements. If the deputies and assistants in the secretary’s office are not true reformers, nothing will get done.

The stakes are huge. For the first time in decades, there is real momentum for reform. It’s not only Rhee and Klein — the celebrities — but also superintendents in cities across America who are getting better teachers into the classrooms and producing measurable results. There is an unprecedented political coalition building, among liberals as well as conservatives, for radical reform.

No Child Left Behind is about to be reauthorized. Everyone has reservations about that law, but it is the glaring spotlight that reveals and pierces the complacency at mediocre schools. If accountability standards are watered down, as the establishment wants, then real reform will fade.

This will be a tough call for Obama, because it will mean offending people, but he can either galvanize the cause of reform or demoralize it. It’ll be one of the biggest choices of his presidency.

Many of the reformist hopes now hang on Obama’s friend, Arne Duncan. In Chicago, he’s a successful reformer who has produced impressive results in a huge and historically troubled system. He has the political skills necessary to build a coalition on behalf of No Child Left Behind reauthorization. Because he is close to both Obamas, he will ensure that education doesn’t fall, as it usually does, into the ranks of the second-tier issues.

If Obama picks a reformer like Duncan, Klein or one of the others, he will be picking a fight with the status quo. But there’s never been a better time to have that fight than right now.

From Associated Content, 12/6/08:
Although everyone seems to agree that America's public school system needs help, experts disagree about how to fix it. One side advocates sweeping reform; the other side favors less reform and more status quo. During the presidential campaign, President-Elect Barack Obama managed to gain the support of both sides by eluding a definitive position. Now, with the new Secretary of Education to be appointed, the suspense is whether he will choose reform or status quo?

Reform versus Status Quo

The reformers are education advocates who believe that certification programs and the teachers' unions have thwarted true improvement in education. They advocate an influx of new teachers, standardized testing, and accountability for teachers. The other side insists that raising the quality of existing teachers is the key to improving student performance. The oppose Teach for America, a program that allows top college graduates to teach in low-performing schools without certification. They oppose the No Child Left Behind program, which attempts to assess both student and teacher performance with objective measures.

To all these passionate advocates, the choice of the Secretary of Education will signal the path ahead. The nomination is not so much about a person as about a policy. The reform candidates reportedly being considered are Joel Klein, Michele Rhee, and Arne Duncan. On the other side is Linda Darling-Hammond. Ms. Darling-Hammond was an adviser to the Obama campaign and was chosen to lead the transition's education policy team. Whether her role in the transition will lead to an appointment is unknown.

Interpreting Obama's cabinet picks

Today's "New York Times" has a lead analysis piece, interpreting President-elect Barack Obama's cabinet choices as indicating a pragmatic, rather than ideological, direction: "Obama Tilts to Center, Inviting a Clash of Ideas".

I would say that this holds for some posts and not for other posts. In this tumultuous economic crisis period, he is inclined toward finance choices that are not lurching into new directions. His choice of New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner for Secretary of the Treasury is representative of these choices. (Note conservative commentator Larry Kudlow's gushing over Geithner over this choice. --"Lawrence" at his blog.)

And, yes, centrism and continuity is at work in Obama's choice of defense choices:

"[T]he names racing through the ether in Washington about the choices to follow also suggest that Mr. Obama continues to place a premium on deep experience. He is widely reported to be considering asking Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on for a year; and he is thinking about Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant, for national security adviser."

Yet, as one blog noted, the appointment of Tom Daschle (former senator from South Dakota) has been over-shadowed by the all-but certain appointment of Senator Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State, and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson to Secretary of Commerce, I would add. Obama's choosing Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services indicates an interest in a progressive, "change"-oriented (to use the slogan/tired cliche from the campaign) approach to the health care crisis.
Note Dashle's phrase "we can't afford not to" [cover everyone] below, quoted in a "Publisher's Weekly" review:

The U.S. is "the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee necessary health care to all of its citizens," and as former senator Daschle observes, "Skeptics say we can't afford to cover everyone; the truth is that we can't afford not to" because U.S. economic competitiveness is being impeded by the large uninsured population and fast-rising health costs. Daschle's book delineates the weaknesses of previous attempts at national health coverage, outlines the complex economic factors and medical issues affecting coverage and sets forth plans for change. Daschle proposes creating a Federal Health Board, similar to the Federal Reserve System, whose structure, functions and enforcement capability would be "largely insulated from the politics and passion of the moment," in addition to a merging of employers' plans, Medicaid and Medicare with an expanded FEHBP (Federal Employee Health Benefits Program) that would cover everyone. "There is no more important issue facing our country," Daschle asserts, "than reform of our health-care system," and the book's "health-care horror stories" bring this immediacy home.

Obama, Education Secretary; petitions for, against

Wednesday afternoon, November 19, 2008, it became official: Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond is leading President-elect Barack Obama's education working team.

Gotham Schools interpreted her ascendancy as a rebuke to the policies of New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and New Leaders for New Schools CEO Joe Schnur.

Her opponents include the unnamed “reformers” that today some GothamSchools readers have commented should be called “idealocrats” — people like Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and New Leaders for New Schools founder and CEO Jon Schnur who support high-stakes testing, alternative teacher certification programs, and other efforts to shake up schools.

Darling-Hammond opposes those policies, according to an earlier article at Gotham Schools:

Darling-Hammond has been consistently skeptical of the nameless movement’s efforts to shake up public schools. She has criticized Teach For America, the alternative certification program for teachers; criticized high-stakes testing, and criticized No Child Left Behind for narrowing the curriculum.

A petition against Klein as education secretary is leading a petition for Darling-Hammond as secretary, by a ratio of 3 to 2.

The selection of Darling-Hammond, to lead the education working team is a step in the right direction. She agrees with educators and parents that view policies such as NCLB as misguided. Thank you, President-elect Obama.

Potential Agriculture Secretary, Michael Pollan, great writer, thinkier on food policy

A crucial person for Secretary of Agriculture would be Michael Pollan. He is someone that makes the connections between the economy and healthfulness of certain diets (diets in the sense of eating regimens).
He was interviewed yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show.


Here is an open letter that he wrote to the next president, published in October, in "The New York Times Magazine." As in the Lehrer Show interview, in the Times article, he connected the policy of cheap --but unhealthy-- food and bad diets.
He cites the connection of pesticide use, food growing with fossil fuel burning and climate change:

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

Food prices, the governmental endorsement of the growing of certain foods arise:

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

The bad and the good news, in the connection to food policy:

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform. Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

He cites post-World War II policy as the foundation for the food and energy dilemma we have today:

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

(Credentials might be a problem to appointing him to be Agriculture Secretary. He is very wise; but his credentials would be unorthodox: he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at University of California-Berkeley, rather than an agricultural professor.

Nonetheless, there is a petition circulating for appointing Pollan as Secretary of Agriculture.

To: President-Elect Barack Obama

We citizens of The United States of America request the appointment of Michael Pollan to the Office of Secretary of Agriculture of the United States of America.

Through his academic lectures and papers, published books and articles Mr. Pollan has proven capable of gathering wide-ranging research, organizing it into a coherent whole and reaching non-biased conclusions. This research has provided him a unique understanding of the history, development, and contemporary practices of U.S. Agriculture and its relationship to the health of the citizens of The United States. He is singularly qualified to identify inefficiencies and present improvements in production, nutrition, and our problematic reliance on petroleum and petro-chemical based fertilizers, for the benefit of food producers and consumers both. As an academic and journalist, Mr. Pollan is free of the type of conflicts of interest rampant in the current administration which have led to abysmal performance and deficient oversight of industry at the expense of the people.

It is our belief that this scholarly approach coupled with his unique ability to synergize and coherently communicate to a wide audience makes Mr. Pollan the best choice for Secretary of Agriculture in an administration whose stated goals include affordable health and healthcare for the citizens of this nation and wholesale change from the practices of the Bush administration.

11/10: Radio for your Obama cabinet obsession

For those who are obsessing: Will Obama be a centrist? -will he be a progressive [i.e., left-liberal] -or a liberal?
For the always intelligent, timely discussion and analysis, tune in to WNYC radio's Brian Lehrer Show, November 10, 2008, 10 AM. Peniel Joseph, Brandeis professor and PBS "Newshour" consultant and Tim Noah of Slate.com will weigh in. Joseph on the historical persepective, and Noah on the possible cabinet choices.
Tim Noah made several good arguments in "The Uncabinet: A guide to key appointments Obama should resist" as to why President-elect Obama should not appoint Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, John Kerry, Anthony Lake, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Arnold Schwarzenegger and on and on. Some of his criticisms strike me as a bit cynical, but his article is worth the read.

Obama to have bipartisan cabinet

Barack Obama has said that he will appoint a bipartisan cabinet. This is disappointing. The Republicans have not pursued wise policies. How could Obama or we be sure that a Republican cabinet secretary is following an Obama/Democratic vision?
From Reuters, in the New York Times:
Obama Says Would Include Republicans In Cabinet

SUNRISE, Florida (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Wednesday he would include Republicans in his Cabinet if he wins the election.

Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois, also said he had "some pretty good ideas" about people he might tap for senior government jobs, though he emphasized he is focused for now on the final days of the campaign and takes nothing for granted....

Obama said he "absolutely" considered it important to have Republicans in the Cabinet but he sidestepped a question on whether he would ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his job. There has been speculation that either Obama or his Republican rival, John McCain, might ask Gates to stay on.

"I'm not going to get into details," Obama said, but he added that national security policy, in particular, should be nonpartisan.

Other people mentioned as possible defense secretary picks in an Obama administration include former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican senator from Nebraska....

Interview video clip of Obama with Charlie Gibson, on cabinet.