Archives » Wednesday, November 19, 2008
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Michael Hirsh
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Nov 19, 2008 05:47 PM
Tracking the Obama transition requires more than a little Kremlinology
and tea-leaf-reading, as well as ordinary shoe-leather reporting. With
a couple of exceptions—Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and Greg Craig as
White House counsel—the president-elect’s office has not made any
announcements on top White House and Cabinet posts. Meanwhile the media
is hard at work trying to ferret out the names of Washington’s new
power elite. Yesterday our own Michael Isikoff broke the news that Eric Holder will be attorney general. On Wednesday Roll Call reported that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle will be secretary of Health and Human Services.
The Obama-ites aren't confirming those choices publicly, but earlier
Wednesday they did announce the heads of a series of “policy working
groups” whose task is “to develop the priority policy proposals and
plans from the Obama Campaign for action during the Obama-Biden
Administration.” That sounds pretty serious, huh? “Developing priority
policy proposals”—why, that’s what Cabinet secretaries do. And in fact
the head of the “Health” policy working group is Tom Daschle, just as
the head of the “National Security” group is Jim Steinberg (along with
longtime Obama adviser Susan Rice); Steinberg, a deputy national
security adviser under Bill Clinton, is considered a fair bet to become
Obama’s national security adviser.
But here’s where the tea-leaf-reading gets a little murky. An Obama
spokesman says it’s wrong to think that the head of each of these
groups will be acting in effect as a Cabinet secretary. Their job
instead "is to present the information they collect to the [future]
Cabinet secretary.” In some ways that makes sense (though it sounds as
if Daschle, for one, will be presenting information to himself). The
head of the Obama team’s “Economy” group is Dan Tarullo. Tarullo, a
Georgetown law professor and trade expert who once worked as Bill
Clinton's personal “sherpa” to the G-8 industrialized nations, would be
just the man to collect the various proposals stemming from last
weekend's G-20 summit on the financial crisis. But in other ways it's
an odd choice. While Tarullo was a member of Obama’s economic brain
trust in October when the financial crisis was in full roar, he was not
considered one of the big guns, like Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Paul
Volcker and Warren Buffett. He’s not an economist or financial markets
expert, and he’s certainly not going to be named Treasury secretary.
So why isn’t Summers or Rubin in charge of policy on these important
policy working groups? OK, granted, the election was only a little more
than two weeks ago. Obama officials note that they haven’t moved any
slower than most transitions: Give the new guy some time, they say. But
what if Obama doesn’t have the time that president-elects normally do?
Market players are looking for leadership. As Obama himself noted in
his "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday, the economic crisis America is in
is the worst since the ‘30s. On Wednesday the stock market took yet
another plunge, with the Dow dropping below 8,000 for the first time
since 2003. The meltdown is not over. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson,
who has been much criticized for his somewhat erratic handling of the
$700 billion bailout package, is a lame duck like his boss.
And we have no word at all from the Kremlin—er, Obama headquarters.
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