Obama's administration picks

Criticizing those don't approve of Hillary becoming Secretary of State as "Clinton haters" (as a statesman letter writer does) is grossly misplaced.

I for one think Hillary Clinton might actually have made a better President than Obama, and one reason is Obama's curious and in some case poor personnel choices. Hillary Clinton was the obvious Vice Presidential pick that Obama curiously passed over for Biden, a pick I called "subaverage" and which was confirmed as such when the Obama campaign hid Biden in an undisclosed location during the campaign. By picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, Obama pulled another bone-headed move.

So he picked a guy who had a different view on Iraq for his foreign policy expertise, and put him in the VP slot. Hillary showed grit and determination in the latter part of her primary run, but "diplomatic" is not a word you associate with her. Further, her foreign policy achievements, other than an imagined sniper-fire landing in Bosnia, amount to: Nothing. Her accomplishments overall are replete with failures and fiascos; she blew the health care policy in the Clinton administration, and she blew it in her own primary run. Last, surely there is irony in Obama running as the guy who didn't vote for the war in Iraq, yet now putting foreign policy team in the hands of people who did.

All in all, it adds up to an appointment that makes no sense, except as a political payoff to his primary opponents, a payoff that would probably have been better allocated by putting Hillary in the VP slot and finding a real foreign policy expert for SoS, e.g., wheel out George Mitchell if you need a Democrat. The leftwing progressives should be doubly-reeling from this, since Obama has kept on Bush appointee Gates in DoD and got non-liberals in his national security advisor slot, and the Hillary they sniffed as being not pure enough on foreign policy issues is the face of the Obama administration on such matters. It's so confusing.

Dick Morris makes some sense of it, by explaining Obama is trying the parliamentary approach - getting the factions and rivals in the Democrat party into the administration:

Obama has appointed a group of rivals. Nobody in the Clinton White House or cabinet was his equal or could have considered challenging his re-nomination for a second term. But by naming Joe Biden Vice President, Bill Richardson Commerce Secretary, and, especially, by appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State, Obama has filled his government with people who could run against him in the primaries of 2012 should he falter and his ratings sink.

There is both method and madness in this. The method is to keep the rivals under his control; the madness, as Morris, explained is that "Even if these erstwhile rivals do not bring disloyalty to such a level, the likelihood is that they will always seek to burnish their own images, even if doing so hurts the President."

There are other nominations forthcoming that are much more concerning. Obama has appointed an immigration expert who knows nothing about terrorism to head Homeland Security. He is pushing Eric Holder to head the Dept of Justice, who in the Clinton department of Justice pushed the pardons of the FALN terrorists and billionaire Marc Rich, and who is linked to the Fannie Mae failures. So Obama is picking people who are neither the best for the job, nor the best to serve the President or administration first. President Obama will come to regret some of these selections.