Almost all of Barack Obama’s cabinet members have been
outstanding. You can quarrel with Hilary
Clinton’s foreign policy views or Tom Vilsack’s position on organic food or New
York Fed Chief Tim Geithner’s proximity to Wall Street, but you can’t quarrel
with their qualifications for the job. And
Obama has managed to pull together a
cabinet that represents the full spectrum of his majority coalition without a
hint of tokenism. Who better than
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to run Homeland Security or Dr. Steven Chu as
energy secretary? That leads me,
however, to Obama’s last two cabinet appointments, Ray LaHood as Secretary of
Transportation and Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor. I’m not saying these aren’t good people, but
they don’t seem like the strongest candidates for the job. Obama’s choice of them suggests to me that he
is not serious about either transportation or labor.
First of all, these were his very last cabinet picks, and
they came after second level White House aides and agency heads. The order of
picking means something. It was no accident that Obama introduced his economic
and his national security team first. Secondly,
he picked second tier House members for these jobs. Does that matter? Well, consider what the various advocates of
national health insurance, like our own Jonathan Cohn, would have said if Obama
had picked former Connecticut Rep. Nancy Johnson as head of Health and Human
Services. Johnson is a Republican, so he
would have kept his commitment to bipartisanship. She had far more familiarity with health
issues than LaHood has had with transportation or Solis with labor. I suspect Cohn and others would have regarded
the choice of a second tier House person as a sign that Obama wasn’t committed
to passing national health insurance in his first term. (If you think the Johnson example is too
tricky, then substitute a Democrat, Rep. Pete Stark, a good guy who knows
health, but like Solis or LaHood, is not a heavyweight in national politics.) If you think these are important jobs, what
you want is someone of national standing who can sell your and their program to
the public and to Congress--and particularly to the Senate, where the
Democrats are going to need 60 votes on some key issues. You also want someone who is deeply familiar with
the issues.
So maybe the Departments of Labor and Transportation aren’t
that important. Certainly, they weren’t
important in George W. Bush’s administration. But they should be important in Obama’s administration. Transportation has a stake in America’s
two biggest manufacturing industries, planes and auto. Much of the $900 billion and rising in
infrastructure funding is going to go through the Transportation Department. The secretary is not just going to be
responsible for shepherding this spending through Congress, but also for
shaping what kind of spending occurs. What gets funded--highways, airports,
rail, mass transit--and in what proportion will determine what the country
looks like well into the next decades. LaHood
is being touted as being pro-rail because he didn’t vote against AMTRAK, but I
have heard little to convince me that he will bring any kind of vision to the
job or that he will able to sell controversial provisions in the Senate. If Obama had wanted someone who had thought a
lot about these issues, he could have picked Minnesota Rep. Jim Oberstar, the
chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was also
discussed for the job. If he wanted a Republican, there is always former
Wisconsin Gov Tommy Thompson, a train nut who wanted to be Sec. of
Transportation in the Bush administration and reluctantly agreed to take HHS.
As for the Labor Department, its concerns are already
apparent in the fight over the auto bailout, where Southern senators from
right-to-work states are attempting to blame the American industry’s plight on
unions. Business groups are already
running ads against the Employee Free
Choice Act, which would dramatically reform labor law and halt the slide of the
labor movement. And they will fight tooth and nail against any attempt to
strengthen and enforce regulations on worker health and safety. Recall the battles that took place in the Clinton administration. I don’t expect Obama to push the free choice
act during his first year, but if he wants to get it, he has to convince 60
senators to back it, and judging from the vote on the auto bailout, I’d say
that he has at most 54. Is Rep. Solis the best person to make this case to
Congress and to the American people? Does
she have the clout with Obama himself to get the administration in back of a
strong bill? My guess is that American
workers would have been better off with former Reps. David Bonior or Dick Gephardt, both of whom had national political
reputations. Don’t get me wrong--LaHood
and Solis could turn out to be a great choice. Harold
Meyerson, whose opinion I respect, certainly thinks Solis is a great choice, and so do some of my friends in the labor movement. But right now neither she nor LaHood look like the kind of big shots that Obama picked
for his other cabinet posts. And that
makes me worry about his priorities.
--John B. Judis