Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Is This What You Were Looking Forward To?

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According to this story in the London Times, Barack Obama is talking about appointing two Republicans to his cabinet, one as Secretary of Defense and one as Secretary of State.  Is this what you were anticipating?

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  1. I wouldn’t mind to see chuck hagel as defense sec.

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    p>Clinton had at least one repub in his cabinet and bush had one holdover.

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    p>An Obama/Bloomberg ticket, and I would likely vote for Nader.  

  2. I want a president who surrounds him or herself with people who disagree with him. An echo chamber is okay for a blog, not for a cabinet. FDR was famous for putting people who vehemently disagreed on the same projects, and President Lincoln’s cabinet included all of his major rivals for the Republican nomination for President in 1860. It stimulates debate, brings unity (we’re all on a team now), and competition within the administration breeds better ideas. Plus unifying the country means unifying the country. So, yes.

  3. …and never went through with it. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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    p>Chuck Hagel is named in the article; he’s one of the few Republicans that have integrity on the war and if getting him into the Obama administration makes other Republicans more Democrat-ish and malleable – meaning pealing them from the hard right, do-nothing base  into a cooperative moderate center – it is an idea worth analyzing.

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    p>I am not in favor of a Democrat president appointing a token Republican. And I’m not informed enough about Chuck Hagel to give a sophisticated opinion on the political plusses and minuses of putting him in the cabinet. But this GQ interview from January 2007 sticks out in my mind. Here, Hagel talks about the administration lying us into war, regretting his vote to authorize force, and opposing the surge.  How refreshing.

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    p>

    And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be doctored.
    Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t believe them.” But I was told by the president-we all were-that he would exhaust every diplomatic effort.

    You were told that personally?
    I remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said, “This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.”

    Did he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as his father?
    Yep. He said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” But the more I look back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of 2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about what Saddam had than anybody, said, “Give us two more months before you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there.” They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So to answer your question – Do I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that vote.

    And you feel like you were misled?
    I asked tough questions of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld before the war: How are you going to govern? Who’s going to govern? Where is the money coming from? What are you going to do with their army? How will you secure their borders? And I was assured every time I asked, “Senator, don’t worry, we’ve got task forces on that, they’ve been working, they’re coordinated,” and so on.

    Do you think they knew that was false?
    Oh, I eventually was sure they knew. Even before we actually invaded, I had a pretty clear sense of it-that this administration was hell-bent on going to war in Iraq.

    Even if it meant deceiving Congress?
    That’s right.

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    p>A year later you still can’t get that kind of candor and integrity from most Republicans, elected or otherwise.

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    p>Cabinet position for Hagel? Call me skeptical, hesitant, but open minded. Yet a disillusioned Hagel most assuredly could be a political asset to the Democratic administration and an asset to the country as a whole. The real Republican Maverick is Chuck Hagel – forget McCain.  

  4. I would love to watch senators’ heads explode as they try to explain why they think there are too many African Americans on the cabinet without sounding racist. đŸ˜‰
     

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