No Transition From Nonsense

Congressional Quarterly bemoans Obama's broken promise of a bipartisan cabinet since he's only appointed one Republican to one of the top three positions in government -- State, Defense and Treasury ...

Now that President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet is, by his count, half picked, the odds are fading that he'll have more than one Republican on his team -- suggesting that his campaign promise to include Republicans may have meant nothing more than the usual token appointment from the other side.

Obama did attract a lot of attention by asking Robert Gates to stay on as Defense secretary, and liberals have debated whether he's the right man to oversee a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But that debate overshadows the fact that Gates isn't likely to have much, or even any, company. Of the Cabinet jobs that are left at this point, virtually all are domestic policy positions that would be hard to give to a Republican without prompting vicious internal fights, and it's almost impossible to find Republicans who have been mentioned as candidates for any of them.

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.