Obama's Cabinet is a Centrist's dream [View All]

[wyldwolf]

* From Politico.

President-elect Barack Obama spent the campaign fighting the notion that he’s an unabashed liberal.

Now he can point to Exhibit A: a Cabinet that’s a middle-of-the-roader's dream.

Consider the scorecard: The centrist Democratic Leadership Council claims ties with half the group. Movement progressives count a single one, Calfornia Rep. Hilda Solis at Labor, a union favorite.

But if Obama gives with Solis, he takes away with former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, a free-trade advocate for trade representative, no union favorite.

Classic Obama, some grumbled.

---snip---

“Barack Obama has never made any bones about it: He is a moderate,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate public policy think tank. “People who ignored that did so at their peril.”

Obama’s Cabinet, which will be rounded out Friday with formal announcements for labor and transportation, is politically moderate and ethnically diverse. There are Ivy Leaguers and hoopsters, loyalists to Hillary Rodham Clinton and longtime allies of Obama, and Midwesterners, Westerners and New Yorkers. Texans filled 43’s White House, but not 44’s, with just one in Kirk.

n recent years, the Democratic Leadership Council struggled to attract a single presidential candidate to its national convention, while an annual gathering of liberal bloggers saw its cache rise.

Their fortunes have been reversed.

Labor’s not loving Kirk, and no one is mistaking Timothy Geithner at treasury and Lawrence Summers as Obama’s top White House economic adviser for union guys. But still, the cabinet will be “night and day compared to the last eight years,” said Jonathan Tasini, executive director of the Labor Research Association, a New York nonprofit that works with trade unions.



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