Gerson, in today’s Washington Post, describes the team Obama is forming up as “mature” and “centrist”. Fair enough. But he slips in a couple of other things that are either misapprehensions or attempts to spin a particular narrative.
First, this one which we see coming up here and there from the right presently…
Obama is doing something marvelously right: He is disappointing the ideologues
As is the case in other instances of this claim, those “ideologues” aren’t identified. I’ve seen one exception in all the examples of this “the radical left is angry at Obama’s appointments” narrative, an individual from Code Pink. It serves obvious purposes to claim division and discord among Democrats and it serves a purpose to claim there’s a large and influential body of radical lefties ready to pounce, but we aren’t being directed to any evidence for these claims.
The second narrative Gerson tries to slip in here is “Bush got it right, his policies aren’t that bad”…
Second, Obama’s appointments reveal something important about current Bush policies. Though Obama’s campaign savaged the administration as incompetent and radical, Obama’s personnel decisions have effectively ratified Bush’s defense and economic approaches during the past few years. At the Pentagon, Obama rehired the architects of President Bush’s current military strategy — Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Raymond Odierno. At the Treasury Department, Obama has hired one of the main architects of Bush’s current economic approach.
This continuity does not make Obama an ideological traitor. It indicates that Bush has been pursuing centrist, bipartisan policies — without getting much bipartisan support.
There’s an alternate explanation here, of course. When you buy a piece o’ shit DeSoto from someone who didn’t maintain it, you aren’t going to head out onto the freeway and drive blithely across country. You are going to have to put a quart of oil in every day just like the last guy until time allows you to do something more substantial. Maintaining the armed services command structure proves no validation of Bush policies, it is a necessary prudence until other necessary changes might be made. Likewise, smooth transition and continuity are necessary preliminary steps as regards the financial sector. Again, this doesn’t entail some logically necessary conclusion that the policies and people who’ve brought us to this state aren’t bad because Obama isn’t blowing them apart with dynamite.
Gerson can be a fairly level-headed guy, but part of what he’s doing here is Bush legacy propaganda.
Gerson’s column here… http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/02/AR2008120202720.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
update: Here, by way of contrast, is an example of where a rather more abrupt form of housecleaning can be done…
The incoming Obama administration has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, a State Department official said.
continue reading here… http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/12/03/obama_gives_political_ambassad.html
