Obama-ology: It's Daschle for HHS, but what about Treasury?

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3:18 PM, January 19, 2009 | Comments (25)

Celebratory is a safe way to describe the mood in Washington. And not just for Barack Obama's big day on Tuesday. When Obama raises his right hand, it will mark for millions of his supporters the end of something else. At Dupont Circle in Northwest Washington,...

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Michael Hirsh

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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Posted By: MET9 (November 20, 2008 at 9:32 PM)

The whole country is abuzzz with anticipation about who will be appointed where. All for different reasons. As is obvious from this article, alot of people are anxious to place as much blame as possible and as soon as possible upon our new president-elect for our nation's current woes. Does it not seem strange to anyone other than me that a nation that is experiencing it's worst financial crisis in nearly a hundred years due to unemployment, higher costs of consumer goods, greed that caused/is causing stock fluctuations, and severe mortgage issues has enough money to go out and buy so many guns and so much ammo that weapons dealers are haveng a better year than the automobile industry? All since 11-05-2008? I think that its a genuine shame that our media has frightened the people soo much since the election into thinking that there will not be anything other than a continuation of the same failed policies that has brought us to our knees as a country and made us a laughingstock among the other nations of the world. Give the man a chance to actually do something before you start talking about what he will do.

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Posted By: Anonymous (November 20, 2008 at 6:33 PM)

PingBack from http://bill-clinton.bestpoliticalblogs.co.uk/2008/11/19/obama-ology-its-daschle-for-hhs-but-what-about-treasury/

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