The Politics of Presidential Appointments
Jigsaw Activity
Directions: The four articles below highlight the ways in which politics influences the presidential appointment process for members of the cabinet. You will first be assigned to a group. Then you will meet in small groups (your “expert group”) with other people who were given the same article and discuss it, using the guided questions provided. The purpose of this meeting is to become an expert on your particular article.
Group 1: Obama Faces Political Minefield With Appointments
Group 2: Liberal Democrats on Obama’s Cabinet Appointments
Group 3: The Shine Comes Off: Another Setback for Barack Obama
Group 4: Appointments and Disappointments: Sizing Up Obama’s New Cabinet
The second part of the activity involves peer-teaching. You will be put into different small groups (your “teaching group”) with people who had a different article than you. Your job is to explain to your “teaching group” the highlights of your article, using the questions you discussed with your “expert group” as a guide. Each member of the teaching group will explain their particular selection in turn. Finally, once everyone in your teaching group has shared their material, you will all discuss the last three overarching questions.
Round 1: “Expert Group” Discussion Questions
- Identify the author’s thesis (main idea) in the article.
- What biases can you detect in the writing? [be sure to start with ideology and provide evidence].
- What does the article reveal about the influence of politics in the presidential appointment process? Provide specific examples from the article to support your generalizations.
The Politics of Presidential Appointments
Jigsaw Activity-2
Round 2: “Teaching Group” Over-Arching Questions– begin by briefly sharing the central idea of each article.
- What challenges or pit falls did President Obama face in getting his cabinet appointment process?
- What has been the response of conservative Republicans to Obama’s cabinet choices?
- What has been the response of liberal democrats to Obama’s cabinet choices?
- Based upon insights you gleaned from the four articles, discuss several generalizations about the cabinet confirmation process.
Obama Faces Political Minefield With Appointments
by Jonathan Weisman
The Wall Street Journal
November 15, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama has set ambitious goals for assembling his government, vowing to name appointees at a record pace while balancing pledges of post-partisanship with the needs of the groups that helped deliver his victory.
So far, the process is going smoothly, thanks in part to remarkable cooperation from a Bush White House that Mr. Obama spent two years bashing. But the politics remain thorny. The intricate scheming and speculating surrounding cabinet choices was on full display Friday, a day after Mr. Obama met in Chicago with one-time rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some top Obama advisors are pushing her for secretary of state. Neither side would discuss the details of the conversation.
Amid two wars and an economic crisis, Mr. Obama must cement support in Red States he flipped and Blue States he struggled in, placate liberal activists and minority groups whose electoral boost was crucial, and form a government that looks like the change he promised.
"Obama has the most complicated calculus for selecting a cabinet of any recent president," said Paul Light, a public-policy professor at New York University and longtime adviser on presidential transitions.
A little more than a week after his election victory, Mr. Obama's team is further along than outward appearance might suggest, said Clay Johnson, a deputy White House budget director who was executive director of President George W. Bush's 2000-2001 transition and is helping Mr. Obama's. Mr. Bush and President Ronald Reagan set a record of 25 cabinet and subcabinet posts filled by April 1 of their first years in office. The Obama team is aiming for 100 to 150 by that date.
To help get them there, the Bush team has worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to expand its capacity to do background checks. In 2001, it took an average of 60 days to get a nominee's name to the Senate after presidential approval. The Obama team, with White House assistance, is aiming for a maximum of 30 days.
"There will be three times to four times more personnel decisions in the opening weeks of this transition than any president-elect has ever faced," Mr. Johnson said.
More than 300 cabinet secretaries, deputies and assistant secretaries and more than 2,500 political appointees will be picked. About 144,000 applications came in through the Obama transition team's change.gov Web site within five days of its creation.
All incoming presidents face a tricky balancing act as they build their government. But Mr. Obama's task is especially tough, in part because he was politically adept at appealing to partisan Democrats and centrists alike. If he keeps Republican Robert Gates as secretary of defense, for instance, he will likely have to placate angry liberals with a more left-leaning secretary of state. Sen. Clinton, of New York, could be a crowd pleaser in that role, and she has staunch advocates in Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff, and transition director John Podesta, according to Democrats familiar with the transition process.
But Mr. Obama risks alienating Latino supporters if he passes over New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, currently the favorite of a lobbying campaign by Hispanic activists, for the State Department job.
"It leads you into a downward spiral that ends up pleasing nobody," said Leon Panetta, a chief of staff in the Clinton White House who witnessed just such a "circus" in President Clinton's transition of 1992-93.
Two other Bush appointees, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Director of Central Intelligence Michael Hayden, also would like to stay on in their jobs. But some Senate Democrats are pushing hard for their removal, citing policy disagreements over warrantless surveillance and interrogation policies.
Even before a single name has emerged, Mr. Obama's would-be cabinet is under fire. The liberal Web site Huffington Post is waging war on the idea of keeping Mr. Gates at the Pentagon.
Perhaps no potential nominee is taking more heat than Harvard University economist Lawrence Summers, a potential pick as Treasury secretary. Mr. Summers served in that post for President Clinton and has moved to a position of prominence in Mr. Obama's economic team. Women's groups are particularly distressed about his possible appointment, recalling comments he made as Harvard president that innate characteristics may prevent women from achieving more prominence in science.
"The American electorate has changed the course of history by demonstrating that an African-American can do anything. We hope that the messages of the Obama presidency will be broader than that -- that any American can do anything. That includes women," said an anti-Summers broadside from the Rosalind Franklin Society, an honors group for women in biosciences.
Labor groups and liberal economists are suspicious of Mr. Summers's free-market principles, which helped guide a deregulation of the financial-services industry at the end of the Clinton era.
"It would be a really bad start to his administration if President Obama picked a Treasury secretary who shares a substantial part of the blame for the bubble economy and the financial crisis," liberal economist Dean Baker recently wrote.
But Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, took a swipe at Mr. Summers's chief rival for the post, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy Geithner, who, he made clear, is an unknown quantity to labor.
"I always worry about somebody who has spent his whole life at the Federal Reserve," Mr. Stern said, plugging a new name for consideration, New Jersey governor and former Goldman Sachs chairman Jon Corzine.
Source:
Liberal Democrats on Obama’s Cabinet Appointments
by Karen Harper
December 3, 2008
Since November 24th when President-elect Barack Obama began announcing nominees for cabinet positions, the main stream media has pondered the notion that "left-wing" Democrats might not be happy because Obama hasn't surrounded himself with liberal Democrats.
When Obama held a press conference announcing his choices of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, Eric Holder, Jr., as Attorney General, Robert Gates as Defense Secretary, and Jim Jones as national security adviser, political reporters on all of the major news networks pondered the reaction of liberal Democrats to some of the centrist appointments. Robert Gates has been Defense Secretary under President Bush. Hillary Clinton is considered to be more moderate than Obama, and Jim Jones supported John McCain in the Presidential election.
On MSNBC, David Shuster quoted a web poll that appeared on liberal blog site, DailyKos saying that it "shows about a third of the respondents think Obama is making excellent choices, 38% are cautiously optimistic, but 16% say Obama is crazy like a fox....and 5% vote for 'what a sellout, the cabinet should be loaded with progressives." Shuster then went on to posit that this was evidence that the left is "worried about the direction of Obama's foreign policy."
According to the unscientific web poll, 5% of liberal Democrats are unhappy with Obama's choices and somehow, Shuster was able to construe this tiny fraction to mean that the left is dissatisfied with Obama's foreign policy.
David Shuster's comments are typical of the many reporters on CNN, MSNBC and other major networks who, despite evidence to the contrary, think that liberal Democrats are unhappy that President-elect Obama is building a cabinet best suited to address the concerns the United States is facing. Reporters ask over and over if this is the "change we can believe in." The answer is an unequivocal yes. The change is that we have a president who is willing to set aside politics in order to build a strong team of supporters.
President-elect Obama wants to "hit the ground running". He is making preparations to take over the country after 8 years of one of the worst administrations in U.S. history. Obama has set aside 'politics as usual' in order to build a cabinet that will be ready to address the economic crisis, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, growing threats of terrorism, and the health care crisis from his first day in office.
Democrats understand this. Moderate Republicans understand this. Independent voters understand it too. Why doesn't the mainstream media understand it? Obama's creation of a bipartisan cabinet is change. It is change that signals that unilateral partisanship is over. It is change that is not based on ideology but change that is designed to save our country from the downward spiral President Bush put us in. Liberals, moderates and rational, thoughtful people are confident that President-elect Obama is choosing the best people to address our most pressing concerns. That is change we can believe in.
Source:
The Shine Comes Off:
Another setback for Barack Obama, as Judd Gregg withdraws as commerce secretary
Economist.com
February 13, 2009
ANOTHER day, another blow for Barack Obama's hopes for a “new politics”. On Thursday February 12th, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire announced that he had withdrawn as Mr. Obama's proposed secretary of commerce. Mr. Gregg is a Republican—and one, to boot, who once voted for the Commerce Department to be abolished. Bringing him into the cabinet had been billed by the Obama team as an important sign of Mr. Obama's commitment to government from the centre. Mr. Gregg would have been the third of Mr. Obama's “post-partisan” appointments: his transport secretary, Ray LaHood is a Republican, and his defense secretary, Robert Gates, served in the same job under George Bush (though he does not describe himself as a Republican).
Mr. Gregg's withdrawal is rather odd. He said that he was doing it because of political differences over the president's mammoth stimulus package, worth some $789 billion over two years and likely to be passed on the ominous date of Friday 13th. Yet when he agreed to take the job only ten days ago, it must surely have been clear to him what the nature of the stimulus package was to be; the bill, after all, had been in discussion for months.
He also claims that the split had to do with a row over the taking of America's census next year—an undertaking of vast political importance because it determines the allocation of congressional seats and electoral college votes to the 50 states. It also determines where certain government funds are deployed. The census is overseen by the Commerce Department, but the White House for the first time will have the final say over operational matters. It may be that Mr. Gregg was surprised by this fact, though on the vital question, whether or not to use sampling to estimate populations (this tends to favor the Democrats), the White House was always likely to have been in control.
Mr. Gregg's departure may also be to do with his realization—astonishingly late in the day for a man who has been in politics for 30 years—that despite Mr. Obama's talk of bipartisan government, it is politics as usual on Capitol Hill. The first sign of this was the vote, on January 28th, for Mr. Obama's stimulus package in the House of Representatives: it went through with not a single Republican supporter; and the bill later cleared the Senate with only three Republicans in agreement. The House vote was almost a week before Mr. Gregg said yes to the president, but perhaps it took the senator a while to grasp the implication of it.
Mr. Gregg must have come under considerable pressure from his Republican colleagues not to join the cabinet—especially because, by leaving the Senate, he gave the governor of New Hampshire, a Democrat, the chance to nominate a new senator to serve for the next two years. True, the governor had agreed to appoint a Republican. But by choosing a reliably moderate Republican (which Mr. Gregg is not), he would have probably have been able to secure a vital extra Senate vote for Mr. Obama on crucial issues. (There are only a few East Coast Republican senators left; but they know that their states voted strongly for Mr. Obama in the presidential race, and they fear being tossed out by their voters if they are seen to be frustrating him.)
None of this should really be surprising. The Republicans are in opposition, so of course they are not inclined to help the president when he wants to do things that they oppose, such as spending hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' cash on projects that they think are not good value for money. The Democrats have a solid majority in the House and, thanks to a few Republican renegades who fear for their political lives, a working majority in the Senate; one that is big enough to make it extremely hard for the Republicans to block legislation by use of the filibuster. The dream of bipartisanship, in other words, was always just that. The simple truth is that there are big ideological differences between the two parties, and no amount of sweet-talking can conceal that.
The bigger blow to Mr. Obama comes not so much from the failure of a project that was never, given the nature of politics, really viable. It is that the latest episode contributes to a surprising picture of incompetence that is building up around his presidency. This is the third of his cabinet nominations to go down in flames, and he has also lost the woman whom he had hoped to appoint to the job of chief performance officer to the government. He should additionally count himself extremely lucky that he did not lose his treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, who failed to pay some of his taxes and who would surely not make it through to confirmation if he had to do now rather in the first post-inauguration flush.
Mr. Geithner has proved a disappointment in other ways, almost igniting a trade row with China with a thoughtless statement, and producing on February 10th a bank bailout package of such vapid generality that it sent the markets into a tailspin. Mr. Geithner needs to raise his game. And so does Mr. Obama.
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Appointments and Disappointments: