Five years ago, USA Today reported, “With little fanfare and not much credit, President Bush has appointed a more diverse set of top advisers than any president in history”:
Some political analysts argue that Bush’s appointments and his matter-of-fact approach to them signal a new stage in the racial history of the nation, one in which diversity in the top ranks is taken as a matter of course. Bush and Clinton, who don’t agree on much, together may have set a new standard that future presidents in both parties will be expected to meet.
“Bush did not go out and say, ‘I’m going to create an administration that looks like America,’ which is how Clinton led off,” says Paul Light, a political scientist at New York University who has studied presidential appointments. “He has just gone about recruiting a diverse Cabinet as an ordinary act. That’s remarkable in the sense it sends to future administrations: ‘This is just the way we’re going to do business.’ “
But such a commonsense approach to governing seems like it was a millenia ago. As Nick Schulz, my old editor at Tech Central Station highlights in a stunning bar graph, business experience is the key attribute that President Obama’s cabinet lacks:
And in that sense, it’s a cabinet that looks — and acts — very much like its nominal CEO. Here’s a flashback to what I wrote last year about Obama’s lifelong antagonism towards business:
As spotted by Jim Geraghty, David Mendell in Obama: From Promise to Power writes:
“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”
And as scared as he is about the daily Metro-North commuter train, we know he’s not very happy about commuters driving into work.
But Obama’s not too crazy about people further out in the exurbs, either, as he mentioned in April when he was talking to, as Jean Kirkpatrick would say, San Francisco Democrats:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama back in February:
“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”
Geez, remember when Democratic presidential candidates and their spouses actually bothered to go through the motions of appearing to support the working man?
And Obama began last year promising the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle that he’d bankrupt one sector of the economy:
Let me sort of describe my overall policy.
What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.
I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
And if ObamaCare passes, here’s what it will do to the rest of what remains of the economy:
Cloward/Piven, anyone? Corporatism? Mere Californication?
In any case, Jonah Goldberg has a modest proposal for what the GOP should do if this monstrosity should actually come to pass.
Update: Smitty, Stacy McCain’s co-blogger, believes the the above chart of the Obacabinet’s lack of private sector acumen is a red herring:
If you’re driving toward a brick wall, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re coasting in, or all ahead full-tilt boogie. You smack the wall, the Corvette’s modern art, and your name is not Rick Allen.
Read the whole thing.
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