Answering the Sunday Question for Liberals... Where does the Cabinet rank?

Jonathan Bernstein asks a weekly question of liberals and conservatives. I'm going to try and answer him as best as I can most weeks. Here is his question for today,

Obama's cabinet: who are the winners so far? Losers? Who do you hope will move up to a bigger job? Who do you hope will disappear and never be heard from again? Biggest disappointment? Biggest (positive) surprise?

Really interesting question. I am not going to have something to say on each Cabinet member but here is where I see a few of them...

#Winning!!

1. Hilary Clinton. Arguably she had the biggest job starting on Day 1, maybe you put Tim Geithner ahead of her. Regardless, she was charged with fixing State after the George W. Bush administration and restoring some sense of America's honor around the globe. I think she has done a solid job in the face of numerous international crisis as well.

2. Hilda Solis. She has given DOL a new direction and new life. Much like Eric Holder and his revitalization of the Civil Rights Division, Solis' has brought new energy and focus to long dormant agencies which protect worker safety. The West Virginia mining disaster helped remind us all just how important these agencies really are.

Here is a great profile of Solis from The Nation from a year ago.

Losers

1. Tim Geithner. Given his tax issues he's lacked credibility from day one. He projects all of the aura of charisma of a flacid penis. And his role within the cabinet appeared to be on the level of Larry Summers pool boy. The economy has stabilized somewhat but Geithner is widely reviled in the public for all of the above named reasons and then some. People hate him so much that they just assume he used to work at Goldman Sachs - he's not.

Good piece from The Atlantic from April, 2010 on Tim Geithner.

2. Ken Salazar. After the debacle in Louisiana and the related Minerals Management Service screw-up (wherein Salazar utterly and inexplicably failed to implement reforms of a known corrupt high-profile agency until BP helped push it to the front-page - again) I really can't believe he still has his job. I really did not like him as my Senator but I felt that Interior would be a good fit for him given his background. But Salazar has failed and failed publicly, his image is forever tarnished.

Want to Make Him a Winner but...

Eric Holder. As terrible as John Ashcroft was (and I am from Missouri, so I am well aware of the depths of his depravity) the reign of Alberto Gonzalez is just an utter embarrassment. So Holder had quite a crater to pull the DOJ out of and I think on many, many fronts he has. The Civil Rights division in particular has been utterly resurrected. But then there are the civil liberties issues as most recently highlighted by the Bradley Manning fiasco. My gut tells me (or possibly it is just a naive hope) that Holder's heart isn't into it and that the White House is driving these decisions but nonetheless Holder is out front defending them. So I can't make him a winner, but I also have a hard time labeling the man a loser too - he most decidedly is not.

I highly recommend this GQ piece from last year on Holder, it cuts to the heart of the internal conflict which Holder is facing.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. 

Ray LaHood. The guy is on my television twice a week. I'm not really sure what he does besides prepare for, then give, then de-brief from press conferences. He seemed to pursue Toyota vigorously (though plaintiff's attorneys are gunning for the Toyota-exonerating NHTSA report) but his anti-texting zealotry reminds me of C. Everett Koop. Not that he's wrong mind you, just that I'm not used to seeing a Secretary of Transportation taking such a public stance on anything. Where any of them like this over seat-belts or airbags back in the 70's and 80's?

If you're not reading E.D. Kain at Forbes...

Then you are missing some of the best writing anywhere on workers, unions, Wisconsin and economics. E.D. is not some militant leftist (like yours truly?) either, his knee-jerk reaction is not pro-union (like yours truly?). And he self-identifies as a conservative - though that may have changed recently.He writes in a wonderfully lucid fashion and he has the intellectual ability (and patience) to expose the fabulists and their propaganda.

Here is E.D. today highlighting a speech from Michael Moore in Wisconsin,

“America is not broke,” he says. It’s just terribly unequal. Four hundred of the very wealthiest Americans have more wealth than 155 million Americans on the other end of the scale combined. And yet it’s the teachers who need to sacrifice. This is the new class war.

My only quibble is that I don't believe that this is the new class-war. Rather it's been the status quo for close to 40 years.


And here is E.D. calling Matt Yglesias out for being... well... Matt Yglesias and branding those opposed to his particular brand of school "reform" as edu-nighlists,

Nihilism is essentially a philosophy of meaninglessness. If you’re a nihilist, you don’t believe that life has meaning. Graft that into Matt’s ‘edu-nihilism’. He’s basically saying that anyone not on the reform side of the table thinks that nothing at all can be done to fix our education system. Reform is meaningless.

Granted, I think we’ve taken reform way too far, and I think rumors of the appalling state of our nations’ schools are very exaggerated, but nobody in the edu-nihilist crowd that I know of is suggesting that we do nothing at all to make schools better. We just don’t think school-choice, the corporatizing of public schools, and a system of deeply flawed testing and accountability measures are the best way to go about it – and we certainly don’t think blaming teachers is the right approach.

But we edu-nihilists actually do have a lot of ideas. I suggested universal pre-K education in my last post. If that’s too pie-in-the-sky then there are plenty of others. Some critics of the choice and accountability movement have suggested national voluntary curriculum and standards so that kids in Arizona and kids in Connecticut are learning at the same level, or at least have the same basic set of guidelines. The point is, there are really tons of ideas being floated. And none of them fuel the sort of reforms we’re seeing with Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

I don’t think Matt Yglesias wants to see massive teacher layoffs or the sort of heavy-handed tactics Scott Walker is taking against teachers. But he and other reformers like him have praised other similarly top-down approaches in New York and elsewhere. Barack Obama and Arne Duncan have as well. When you start blaming teachers and looking for ways to constantly identify and punish bad teachers, this is the logical conclusion. Scott Walker is just an outgrowth of this movement, emboldened by a national dialogue that has placed teachers on the altar of school reform and that has labeled anyone who might choose to defend them as edu-nihilists.

Thank you E.D. And I would like to add that Matt Yglesias is a proudly ignorant and arrogant son of privilege. And he's kind of an asshole about it too.

McCain, Qahafi, and No Fly Zones

Allow me to steal an entire post from Atrios, 

Today on This Week:

On getting President Gadhafi of Libya to step down, McCain said: “He's insane. But perhaps the people around him would begin to depart the sinking ship, and by, again, a no-fly zone, declaring our assistance or support of a provisional government, perhaps which is being formed up now. There's a lot of steps we can take, providing significant humanitarian aid.”

August 2009 on the Twitter:

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.

And one day earlier:

TRIPOLI, Aug 14 (Reuters) - U.S. Republican Senator John McCain praised Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi for his peacemaking role in Africa and said Congress would support expanding ties, Libyan state news agency Jana said on Friday.

Ties? Oh. Ties.

Since Washington ended its major sanctions on Libya, U.S. energy companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron have been active in Libya.

This isn't a particularly novel point but rarely is it spelled out so blatantly. I endorse Robert Farley and Seth Masket on this no-fly-zone business