At the moment, I am willing to give President-elect Barack Obama some leeway on his cabinet selections, even going so far as to not criticize the potential that Hillary Clinton could end up as secretary of state.
But the sum total of the names we’ve been seeing have not exactly been reassuring, from a progressive standpoint.
Matt Rothschild, my editor at the Progressive Media Project, offers a somewhat harsher — but deserved — assessment of the Obama transition:
When is Obama going to appoint someone who reflects the progressive base that brought him to the White House?
He won the crucial Iowa caucuses on the strength of his anti-Iraq War stance, and many progressive peace and justice activists worked hard for him against John McCain.
So why in the world is he choosing Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State when she was one of the loudest hawks on Iraq and threatened to obliterate 75 million Iranians?
And it’s not just Hillary.
He has alternatives, he says, including Joseph Stiglitz for Treasury and Russ Feingold for attorney general, but he’s stayed away from the more progressive choices, raising some questions about how much change he really is offering.
There are some excuses — if he wants executive branch experience, he needs to bring in some Clintonites — but the question remains why the plum assignments have to go to the Clinton folks. Admittedly, AG pick Eric Holder was an early supporter, but so wer many others who haven’t defended Chiquita in “a case in which Colombian plaintiffs seek damages for the murders carried out by the AUC paramilitaries – a designated terrorist organization.”
Rothschild’s boldest suggestion — which he says would “honor progressives who backed him early on and then did the grunt work against McCain” — would be to “nominate Dennis Kucinich as Secretary of State.”
That sure would indicate a welcome departure from empire as usual.
But at this point, progressives are getting absolutely nothing from Obama.
Hank Kalet 