The calendar may say 2009, but there are people wondering if President-elect Barack Obama is partying like it's 1999, if his picks for Cabinet positions are any indication. I thought the point of change was to bring in fresh blood, fresh ideas and fresh faces. However, it seems that Obama is breaking his New Year's resolutions early, and is instead opting to bring in old hands to help steer the ship of state. It's giving a lot of people an eerie feeling of déjà vu when we hear names like Clinton, Panetta or Holder. I thought that America just elected Barack H. Obama, not William J. Clinton!
All these reheated Clinton leftovers have me wondering, what's happening? Eric Holder, Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton, is Obama's pick for Attorney General. Holder helped criminal financier Marc Rich get a pardon from Clinton, hours before the clock ran out. In 2000, Holder had a role in the controversial at-gunpoint seizure of six-year-old Cuban immigrant Elian Gonzales from his great-uncle's Miami home.
Lately, President-elect Obama has been doing more back-flips than an underage Chinese gymnast in an Olympic competition. After spending time in the spring mocking her for claiming she had foreign policy experience, Obama picked Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. Obama made enough political hay to fill a barn by reminding us that he opposed the Iraq war (as a lowly state Senator), but now turned around and told Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - a holdover from the Bush administration no less - that he's got a job after January 20. Tom Puff Daschle, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services and former Senate Minority and Majority Leader under Bill Clinton's reign, has experience in the lobbying field, but zero experience in the medical field. The closest he's ever come to being a doctor is lobbying Congress on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies.
The same goes for Obama's recent choice for head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta. Panetta spent most of the 1990s trying to micromanage and cut funding to the CIA, and now he's the one put in charge of the agency? Am I missing something here? Lest you think that maybe Penetta is the best man for the job in spite of his love of cutting intelligence funding, even arch-Democrat Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was upset by the choice, saying that her position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional run the CIA.
Obama's Department of Homeland Security head, Janet Napolitano, appears to subscribe to the Tina Fey School of Political Experience: she can see Mexico from her window; therefore she's qualified for the job. Being a governor of a border state with immigration problems isn't anything to sneeze at, but is she the best person for the job? Doubtful. Not surprisingly, Napolitano is another Clintonite: in 1993, Bill Clinton appointed her to be Arizona's U.S. district attorney.
I'm finding myself unimpressed by his picks, because I've seen most of them already, and they're typical Democrats, excepting Robert Gates, of course. But I am left wondering if all those liberals out there who voted for Obama - hoping that he would bring something new to the table and take America in a new direction - want a refund on all that change.
Jesse Hathaway is a senior studying English.
Send him an e-mail at jh309105@ohiou.edu.
4 Opinion
