Obama’s hiccups
Everyone is saying this has been a near-flawless transition:
I haven’t been quite as impressed.
- Bill Richardson had to withdraw his nomination due to pesky federal investigations. The investigation existed well before his nomination. How did they miss that?
- Eric Holder. His involvement with the Marc Rich pardon was such a deep secret that it emerged before Holder was even nominated. Now we’re finding out that Holder pushed for the FALN members commutation as well.
- The Rick Warren flap. I still don’t understand where that came from. Granted I’m sure Obama realized his personal pastor was damaged goods, but surely he personally respects others. Regardless, Warren’s history is well documented and they should have seen that he would offend a lot of people that voted for Obama.
- Leon Panetta as CIA director. Panetta’s background has been in the anti-CIA arena. His rhetoric recently has been very anti-intelligence gathering. It was obvious to me when I heard the name that this would raise eyebrows. How no one on the transition team couldn’t come to the same conclusion confounds me. My guess is they had no choice.
- Now, his pick to run the Treasury Department, Timothy Geithner, apparently had a flap with, get this, the Treasury Department, over not paying some withholding taxes for several years. He paid them once he knew he would be nominated. However, this makes his first recommendation to Barack Obama look almost silly, lower withholding taxes.
So far, I’m not terribly impressed. Most are hold-overs from the Clinton years. I have stated here in the past that the country was done wrong horribly by the Clinton cabinet. Only the cult status of Bill Clinton being protected as much as possible by the media kept his cabinet from becoming a political bloodbath. Otherwise, the policies of Janet Reno, Jamie Gorelick, and especially George Tenet created problems we are still dealing with today. Paul Rubin, Timothy Geithner’s mentor, has this financial meltdown all over him. His policies from 1997-1999 were followed IMMEDIATELY by a recession from 1999-2002. He is in the middle of the financial sector meltdown, being a board member for Citibank, which received billions in bailout funds, only to be broken up. Geithner’s ties to the meltdown and bailouts could get very contentious. Toss in the failure to pay his own taxes and it looks even worse. So, I am not at all impressed with the transition so far. Leon Panetta does not believe in torture or wire-tapping. How are we going to collect intelligence? That was the problem we had with Tenet. Eric Holder defends terrorists, just as Janet Reno demanded the protection of their civil rights. The “change” people expected is simply throwing out what we have for something even older that didn’t work in the first place.
