PROFESSOR. SCHOLAR. AUTHOR.
Setting Obama’s Agenda

Setting Obama’s Agenda

We all have hopes and dreams for what our 44th president might do to help restore our country’s honor both at home and abroad. I’ve been reading a lot of proposals of one kind or another in this regard, but I’ve found one of the most succinct and well-considered to be Michael Grunwald’s, from Time Magazine.

Among my personal favorites among this proposed agenda are some of the items under the heading “Repeal Bush,” including this sequence:

And while he’s at it: No more timber lobbyists running the Forest Service, oil lobbyists editing climate reports, Wall Street lobbyists running the sec or Arabian-horse commissioners running anything. (Sorry, Brownie.) No more T-ball in the Rose Garden either. It’s cute, but it might bring back memories.

The Do Not Call Registry and that marine reserve in Hawaii can stay.

Underlying these suggestions is the habit of making political appointments to oversee federal agencies, which reached wider and deeper and more costly than ever under the Bush regime administration: its estimated that he has made an unprecedented 3,000 of them across the government (ah, a true small-government man!). Simply put, it makes zero sense to have political friends overseeing the day-to-day operations of entrenched federal agencies; it reeks of the kind of Christmas-stocking handing out of ambassadorships to big campaign donors that is also an old Washington habit. It prevents progress at every level.

So let’s get some leadership into these positions that’s honorable, intelligent, non-partisan, and — preferably — already respected in the agencies they’re appointed to oversee.