Geov Parrish | EatTheState.org 

The Obama spin machine has spent much of the last two months telling America that Barack Obama’s administration will draw from a wide ideological range of leaders. In turn, corporate Beltway media, taking this pledge to mean that Obama will appoint some Republicans, has been broadly supportive of Republican appointments like Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. (Hey, we’re talking ideology here, not who they caucus with.)

But there’s one ideology that has been conspicuously absent from Obama’s appointments — not just in the Cabinet positions, but in the dozens of sub-Cabinet posts that have been announced thus far. Obama has appointed exactly zero progressive Democrats (no, that’s not an oxymoron)–nobody who was right about Iraq, or right about the economic bubbles and the hazards of deregulation and free trade, for example. Obama’s appointments thus far suggest a badly needed return to reality-based policy-making in Washington; but they also suggest a very cautious, conservative approach from what corporate pundits like to call the “center.” It’s an establishment-friendly, corporate-friendly antithesis to almost anything that could be construed as change.

This center is far to the right of American voters (let alone progressives) on almost every major issue of the day. Nonetheless, most, if all, of these officeholders will be an improvement over their immediate predecessors–sometimes dramatically so. It’s a low bar.

With that in mind, as we did with the incoming administration in 2001, let’s take a look at Obama’s 24 Cabinet-level nominations: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Each gets a prospective grade, with Dubya’s nearly-uniform crew of “F” and “F-” predecessors as a benchmark. Between Obama’s convincing win, the Democrats’ Senate majority, and the ties many of these nominees have to Congress (who wants to vote against their good buddy and former colleague? The last time a Cabinet nominee from Congress was rejected was John Tower in 1989), few if any of these folks will have trouble being confirmed.

This issue, we’ll look at Obama’s leadership team and his environmental and economic picks. Next issue, we’ll deal with his national security, foreign affairs, and social services selections.

The Inner Circle:

Vice President: It’s a testimony to Obama’s star power that while Sarah Palin drew headlines throughout the campaign, almost nobody took a serious look at the record of Obama’s Veep, Joe Biden.

That’s too bad. Biden represents just about everything vile in career congressional Democrats. As a 36-year senator from Delaware, he was a wholly owned pawn of that state’s banking and chemical industries. As Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he never met a foreign military intervention he didn’t like, or an Israeli atrocity he didn’t love. (The combination of Biden and Rahm Emanuel in Obama’s inner circle is awful news for beleaguered Gazans.) From his senior post on the Judiciary Committee, he helped grease the über-reactionary Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And he’s one of the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic champions of the disastrous, racist War on Drugs. Among many, many other problems.

Biden has been given a special portfolio by Obama, to look out for the well-being of the middle class. Like he did in the Senate on financial deregulation and on the bankruptcy bill, where he was basically Wall Street’s bitch. It’s a triumph of Beltway marketing that this hasn’t been dismissed out of hand as some sort of sick joke.

The bright side: he’s not a Dick. Grade: D+

Chief of Staff: There are a lot of reasons to hate Rahm Emanuel. The hard-nosed conservative former Illinois Congressman and Clinton adviser fought Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy tooth and nail in his capacity running of congressional campaigns for the Democratic Party. He epitomizes the triangulating Democratic Beltway insider who never met a principle he couldn’t compromise, or, more likely, sell off. Emanuel financed his House seat by making millions in hedge funds, and is a huge booster of the speculative economy that landed The Rest of Us where we are today. And–speaking of “palling around with terrorists”–Emanuel’s father was one of the original Zionist terrorists who busied himself blowing up Palestinians prior to Israel’s creation in 1948. To say Emanuel is a Middle East and pro-Israel hawk is mild to the point of absurdity.

That said, the Chief of Staff fills two main functions, neither concerning policy, and here Emanuel is a mixed bag. He filters information that goes to the President (bad), but he also takes the President’s policies and makes sure they get done. And for that role, being a head-knocking asshole who’s worked both Capitol Hill and the White House and knows every skeleton in DC can be a good thing. We’ll see which Rahm Emanuel we get, good or bad. Likely, both. Grade: D+

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs joined Barack Obama’s run for the US Senate in 2004, and now follows him all the way to the White House. Gibbs will reportedly play much more of a role as an active adviser, particularly on media and political tactics, than most of Dubya’s press secretaries did. Grade: B

Environmental

Dept. of Agriculture: Former Iowa governor (and ex-head of the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council) Tom Vilsack is one of Obama’s worst picks. He’s in bed with big agribusiness (and the farm bill teat it sucks at), and is a tireless promoter of the ethanol fuel scam and genetically modified crops. He’s best known for his brief run for president last year, designed to draw delegates in his homestate Iowa caucuses so he could then hand them off to his good friend Hillary Clinton. Almost no Iowans voted for him, which should tell you a lot. Apparently this is Obama’s thank-you for helping Hillary lose. More likely, it’s a former farm state senator picking another pol who, like Obama himself, is fully on board for the very profitable corporate degradation of our food supply. Grade: D-

Dept. of Energy: Obama’s nominee, Steven Chu, is an actual scientist, coming after eight long years of federal contempt for the scientific method and, well, the laws of physics. Chu, by contrast, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997. This is a polite way of saying that he has a higher IQ than Dubya’s entire cabinet, combined.

But intelligence only gets you so far. Chu, a nuclear physicist, is a predictably enthusiastic backer of nuclear power, a technology Obama also supports. He also seems likely to do little to question the country’s commitment to nuclear weaponry (which the DoE produces and stockpiles) or to help prioritize cleanup of nuclear waste at Hanford and other national sacrifice areas. Chu also likes the oxymoronic “clean coal.” (How clean? Ask East Tennessee.) On the bright side–literally–Chu does also support greater reliance on solar power and new energy efficienct technologies, as does Obama.

But that’s not where Chu’s made his reputation; nukes are. Pity Obama couldn’t have chosen an actual scientist to, say, protect the environment instead. Grade: D+

Environmental Protection Agency: Lisa Jackson ran New Jersey’s state EPA, and by the accounts of most environmentalists, not very well. And what is it with two EPA picks in eight years (along with Carol Todd Whitman) coming from one of the country’s most densely populated states? Jackson seems unlikely to be a strong EPA administrator. Grade: C-

White House Energy and Climate Czar Obama is giving this newly created position to one of the many Clinton retreads on his team, former EPA head Carol Browner. In Clintontime, Browner was at best an indifferent environmental steward, greenwashing various Clinton corporate giveaways and doing absolutely nothing to respond to global warming (a phenomenon scientists understood well by 1992). Browner may well overshadow the less-experienced Chu and Jackson, whose portfolios overlap with hers. That’s probably not good news. Grade: D+

Dept. of Interior: Interior has stewardship of the nation’s public lands (including the BLM, national parks, and Indian reservations). For some reason, modern protocol requires that picks for Interior come from a Western state with lots of industries that exploit the land–and hence, as a politician, the nominee is invariably in bed with those industries.

Meet Sen. Ken Salazar, a former rancher and conservative Democrat from the same state (Colorado) that gave us Gail Norton (a Salazar friend) and James Watt. He’s ostensibly a Democrat, but Salazar seems poised to do his homies proud. He’s a big backer of strip-mining for coal; in his previous role as Colorado’s Attorney General, he did little to hold mine owners accountable for the Summitville Disaster, the worst mining pollution catastrophe in US history. As a senator, Salazar also supported offshore drilling, backed keeping Dubya’s tax breaks for Big Oil, and opposed increased fuel efficiency standards. He’s also opposed Endangered Species Act protections.

Some conservationist. Grade: D-

Dept. of Transportation: Retiring Illinois Rep. Ray LaHood got this job because he’s a Republican friend of Obama, and Obama wanted some actual (as opposed to spiritual) Republicans in his Cabinet (Robert Gates is the other one). LaHood didn’t get the job because he’s any kind of expert on transportation.

In an era of peak oil and climate change, and after eight years of an oil cabal running us into the ground (so to speak), the country needs to dramatically rethink its transportation priorities, especially in its urban infrastructure. While LaHood has been relatively supportive of AmTrak, as a rural congressman from Peoria he’s rarely dealt with these issues. Like Jackson, he seems unlikely to have either the vision or experience to shepherd through the big policy changes the country needs on his watch. Grade: C-

Economic

Dept. of Commerce: With the abrupt withdrawal of Gov. Bill Richardson from nomination, the likelihood is that whomever Obama chooses next will be less of a political star and have more actual expertise in this field than Richardson did. In particular, given that Commerce will, in the next four years, have a great deal to say about net neutrality and Internet and cable access in emerging technologies, it would be nice to have someone conversant in these issues who is not in the pocket of big corporations. We live to dream. Grade: incomplete

Dept. of Treasury: One of the bigger reasons for our current economic meltdown is the deregulatory tendency, during Dubyatime but also in every other administration for 30 years, to let Wall Street’s foxes guard their henhouses.

Obama, “change” mantra notwithstanding, clearly respects this tradition. Timothy Geithner, now head of the New York Federal Reserve, is the man being asked to parcel out literally trillions of dollars of your kids’ and grandkids’ money, most of it to the same people who got us into this mess in the first place. Like him.

Among many other things, Geithner is a protégé of Henry Kissinger, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and figuratively (if not literally) is Henry Paulson’s fraternity brother. He will undoubtedly be more competent than Paulson as an administrator (again, low bar). Given that part of his mandate will be to restore consumer confidence, Geithner’s relatively transparent approach can’t help but be a better fit than Paulson’s incoherent dissembling.

But both, ultimately, are on the same side in the class wars. Geithner prioritized the needs of institutional investors in his previous gig, and he will do so at Treasury as well. That’s not all bad, but it does precious little to either cushion the mass suffering of the current mess or to avoid the next mess down the road. Grade: C-

Office of Management and Budget: Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orszag follows Obama up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Executive Branch. Under Orszag’s leadership, the nonpartisan CBO has often proven to be a realistic counterweight to the bogus, hyperbolic, politicized financial estimates of Bush’s OMB. Grade: A-

Chief Economic Adviser: Lawrence Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, is back. Summers, like Geithner, is invariably described with words like “brilliant,” but you’d never know it by his results. His notoriously outsized ego is expected, within the Obama financial team, to be a forceful advocate for less regulation (at a time when the financial sector desperately needs reregulation), “free” trade (now that the White House itself is triple-mortgaged to China), and deficit hawkishness (now that the federal government desperately needs to pump money into the economy).

In other words, Summers will push very, very hard for the policies that failed all but the very wealthy, and for everyone to party like it’s 1999. Among all of Obama’s Clinton retreads, it’s hard to imagine any–save Hillary herself, which we’ll cover next issue–more poorly suited to the times. Grade: F

Next issue: National Security, Foreign Affairs, and Social Services!