The bigfoot media is going to call this a defeat for the president, which is true. But they are going to focus on the wrong aspect of it, tying Judd Gregg to the other failed cabinet appointees. That, of course, is just inside baseball.
What makes this important is that it should have been obvious it was going to happen — if not now then at some point in the future. Gregg is a conservative Republican; Obama a relatively liberal Democrat. They share little in terms of political philosophy and were bound to come to loggerheads.
Consider this from Chris Cillizza’s The Fix on washingtonpost.com:
“It became clear to me to me that it would be very difficult day in and day out to serve in this Cabinet,” Gregg said in a press conference late Thursday. He added that in the days since he was nominated he realized that to be “part of a team but not 100 percent with the team” was an untenable position.
In his written statement, Gregg cited recent developments regarding the economic stimulus package and the decision to have the next census director report directly to senior White House officials as evidence that he and President Obama were too different ideologically for the pairing to work. “This was simply a bridge too far for me,” Gregg said of his decision.
No kidding? David Sirota, writing about the nomination on Feb. 3 on Open Left, summed up Gregg’s utter incompatibility with the Obama administration. While he didn’t anticipate his quick withdrawal, he did point out the basic pitfalls:
As I said, Gregg is the guy who voted for almost every single corporate-written trade policy in the last generation. He’s a guy who took to his state’s largest paper to deride efforts to reform the proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement (that Obama says he opposes) – an agreement that includes no labor, human rights or environmental provisions, and would reward a right-wing government that colludes to execute union leaders.
In a very real sense, the appointment of Gregg is the equivalent of the Bush administration hiring people to government offices they had previously worked to destroy. Gregg not only voted to eliminate the Commerce Department he now heads, he will run the trade enforcement agency he has worked to undermine.
Had Obama traded the Commerce slot for a Democratic senator, there might have been a case that the Gregg appointment was understandable – even in the context of trade. You could have argued that with another Democratic vote in the Senate, it would have been that much easier to pass new fair trade reforms. But the fact that that’s not happening as part of the deal, means the Gregg appointment is just a straight-up sell out on all the issues that Commerce oversees – trade being one of the biggest. The idea that there’s no one better than a radical free trader to head up the Commerce Department in the administration of a president who campaigned against free trade is preposterous.
The problem here is not a pattern of withdrawals. Rather, it is that the Gregg appointment, like too many other things the new president has done, showed Obama to be more committed to a squishy bipartisanism than progressive policy goals.
So, as he goes back to the drawing board on Commerce, let’s hope he considers bringing in someone with whom he has some common understanding.
Hank Kalet 