The Obama administration-to-be: is it time for progressives to start worrying?

[..]

Now that the first wave of confirmations about who will populate the new administration is coming in and outstanding business is being dealt with, [Jello] Biafra’s comments seem like an appropriate warning to dig up. There are a great many Clinton veterans being moved into place. There are a great many centrists being moved into place. The choices are persuasively defended as revealing an uncompromising emphasis on competence - at least that lesson is learnt from the Clinton-era failures. But are the only competent, experienced candidates out there really all centrists?

Most eye-catchingly, there’s Hillary herself, who will be the Secretary of State, it became clear today. That is to say, she doesn’t get to do a job reforming, say, health care, on which she stands to the left of Obama, but instead gets responsibility for foreign policy, on which she has been notably more hawkish than Obama. It was just in 2007 that foreign policy - Iraq, Iran - was at the very core of Obama’s fundamental push against the Hillary candidacy, but it seems long ago now.

Meanwhile, Tim Geithner seems like a very sharp mind and competent administrator, but you don’t need to want Dennis Kucinich in the Cabinet to wonder whether someone else wouldn’t have represented a more fundamentally critical revision of past economic policies. What about former Chief Economist at the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz? Also a Clinton-era veteran with tons of experience, but one who’s actually spent much of the last decade dissecting the substantive flaws of the 1990s economy and the prospects for systemic changes?

Wouldn’t it be reassuring if the names we recognize from the centrist wing of Clinton-era economic policy (Rubin c.s.) were at least balanced out by some explicitly liberal voices? James Galbraith perhaps, Robert Kuttner? If Obama wants to prove, as with appointing Hillary, that he can get beyond grudges easily and work with strong personalities, what about approaching Krugman? If Obama wants to showcase how big a tent, how heavy-weight a team of rivals he can shape together, what about appointing a prestigious progressive politician as well, someone like Russ Feingold?

Instead, some extremely troublesome names are being floated. Former National Counterrorism Center head John Brennan is apparently already recruiting a team he hopes to bring with him if he’s appointed the new head of the CIA. This is someone who, “in interviews since leaving the government, [..] has expressed support for the government’s rendition policy, [..] “enhanced” interrogation techniques and immunity for telecommunications companies involved in government spying efforts.”

For Agriculture, the choice is apparently between the bad (Vilsack) and the worse (Wolff, Stenholm, Peterson). For National Security Advisor, the bet of the day is on General Jim Jones, who is apparently best described as “non-partisan”, although he supported John McCain in the elections.

No wonder impatience is growing. “[A]t this point,” writes Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive, “progressives are getting absolutely nothing from Obama”. Chris Bowers at Open Left feels “incredibly frustrated“:

"Let’s say that all of the leading contenders for Obama’s national security team end up in his administration. This would give him a core foreign policy team of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano, Jim Jones, and Robert Gates. [..] All of them, with the possible exception of Jones, supported the Iraq war from the outset. At least two of them, Gates and Napolitano, opposed withdrawing troops as recently as 2007 [..]. [T]wo members of this group, Gates and Jones, supported McCain. [..]"

"Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? [..] It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is [..] being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far."

Christopher Hayes at The Nation chimes in:

[..]