Wednesday, December 3, 2008

TPM: Josh does the work for me...

Congressional Quartery, for some reason, wrote a piece slamming Obama's lack of Republicans on the Cabinet so far.

Josh, in turn, ripped CQ a new one.

I guess maybe it's a slow news period and there's not much to write about. But this is about as nonsensical as it gets. In recent decades it hasn't been particularly common for presidents to have any appointees from the opposite party. And when they do it's usually like Bush appointing Norman Minetta to be Transportation Secretary, a secondary cabinet post of no real consequence to the president in question.

Obama's put not only a Republican but his predecessor's choice in charge of the Pentagon. He's also named as his National Security Advisor a retired general who appears also to be a Republican, albeit one who was advising Obama during the campaign and not a particularly ideological sort.

I don't have any problem with Obama's cabinet picks so far. But it's certainly true that Democrats with a high partisan profile haven't figured prominently among his major appointments, with the notable exception of Rahm Emanuel.

I guess the idea is that Obama could only have come through on his promise of governing in a bipartisan spirit by staffing a cabinet with half Democrats and half Republicans.

Go figure.

Next time, I see Josh, I owe him a beer...and I'm going to write him, and I'll tell him as much.

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