Posted by
Jabra on Thursday, December 04, 2008 10:32:07 AM
I have no clue why everyone is all excited about the Obama cabinet. I like that there are more women but that's about it! So far it is seriously Clinton's third term with Hillary at State rather than the East Wing (trying to work on a failed health care plan). Let us look at Bush's cabinet for the past 8 years (I am no fan of Bush but one has to be fair).
First of all Bush had his own team of Rivals, who could have been a better Sec. of State than Colin Powell, who was ideologically and militarily completely on a different page than Bush, Rumsfield and Cheney? Paul O'Neil was no fan of Bush's either and he was such a rival that he quit the team and wrote a book about it because he didn't like that the buck stopped with Bush who in the end made his choices after receiving the advice. Obama plans to do the same and I believe that this is how it should be. You get advice but after all the President has to do what the President sees fit since it is his stewardship.
The press lauds Obama for keeping Bob Gates, a successful SecDef, even though he was in the Bush administration. All agree now that Gates has been a successful SecDef. I concur with Gates that the reason he was successful has been due to the changes that Rumsfield started (read the TIME Magazine interview with Gates). Bush on the other hand kept George Tenet, a leftover from the Clinton Administration and a terrible CIA chief who presided over the most tragic failure in US intelligence. If he wanted a rival on his team then George Tenet fit that bill perfectly. Tenet was a confirmed Democrat who embraced Clinton's failures and was kept on the team despite his incompetence and providing bad intelligence on Iraq's WMDs saying to Bush that the case was 'in the bag'.
You can read the bios of Bush's Cabinet here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_George_W._Bush). I am not going to talk about all of them but they were such a team of rivals that every one of them either wrote a book or is in the process of writing a book about their Bush years and how they didn't agree with Bush. Having read many of these books or skimmed through them at airports and bookstores I can tell you that their disagreement with Bush went way back before they became staff members.
There were Asians, Blacks, Arabs, Afghanis, Hispanics and a lot of women actually from different backgrounds. People with great achievements in industry, business and government. Of course they didn't have a foul mouthed, ruthless little Saddam, called Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff to discipline them. Andy Card was a light weight polite person who was actually so polite that members of the Cabinet had him serve them burgers and coke on occasion (read Paul O'Neil's book about his tenure as Treasury Secretary). Bush's cabinet choices were far superior to Obama's. He failed because he followed too many Liberal policies, started gigantic inefficient government agencies, tried nation building and started a bail out process that will lead us to another great depression. His "Team of Rivals' played a role in that and it doesn't seem that the new Obama Team of Rivals is ideologically any different. They are just a bunch of leftovers from the Clinto Administration who were a part of the problems we are in anyway.
So why the fuss about Obama's 'Team of Rivals'? Well, it all goes back to a book about Lincoln by the same name talking about the Lincoln years and Obama trying to portray himself as a Lincolisque figure who is a savior and redeemer of the Republic. The man is not President yet and TIME magazine Photoshopped him into an FDR image. Contrary to most Americans I despise Lincoln and FDR. After reading at least 30 books and a few hundred articles on the two characters I concluded that both were tyrannical and despotic characters who suspended the constitution and paved the way to many of the gross failures we have today but this is a topic for another entry. If Obama is following in their steps then all hope is gone. I like the guy, he is hard to hate, he just says all the right things and I even have affection and admiration for him. It makes it easy for me to see why people probably liked FDR so much. The problem I have is that it doesn't look like he will shut Gitmo down, or withdraw from Iraq in 2009 as he promised or even stop torture methods of prisoners in different CIA and FBI facilities around the world (again read the latest TIME issue on the subject).
I will keep hoping for the best even though the writing is on the wall.