By Stephanie Ramage
Each January, Georgia’s legislative session opens with an influential meet-and-greet shindig called the Wild Hog Supper. The man in charge is the state’s Secretary of Agriculture, Tommy Irvin, the longest-serving statewide elected official in America. He was voted into office in 1969.
Last year, the 79-year-old Irvin welcomed Michelle Obama, wife of then-presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., to the event. He says she was the guest of honor. It was an excellent opportunity for her husband to pick up votes, the kind of opening that any candidate would cherish. Irvin, a HIllary Clinton supporter, hoped it also would be a chance to introduce Mrs. Obama to a potential Cabinet member, just in case her husband won.
Now that Mrs. Obama has become First Lady Obama, his hope has been dashed.
“There is not even one person from the South in Obama’s entire Cabinet,” says Irvin. “Not even one. He didn’t have to pick me, although choosing the longest-serving Democratic state secretary of agriculture would not have been inappropriate. But it sure seems like he could have picked someone from the South, at least one.”
Instead of Irvin, Obama tapped attorney and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack for the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture post. What’s Iowa got that Georgia hasn’t?
“Corn, corn, corn,” says Irvin. “I know. I’ve been there. It’s all corn.”
Georgia, on the other hand, is the nation’s No. 1 producer of chicken, and Irvin would like to see some changes in trade policy that would help some of the state’s farmers avoid foreclosure and others to make more money.
“You’ve got to have a market,” he says. “I’d like to see the federal government open up China to more of our chickens. I would also like to see them do away with the ban on trade with Cuba.”
Though he ran on a platform of change, Obama’s snubbing of the South might be the biggest change his Cabinet represents. Much will remain the same. Here, experts talk to The Sunday Paper about some of his Cabinet nominations and what they mean.
Foreign policy and terrorism
Secretary of State: Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.
Secretary of Homeland Security: Gov. Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz.
Director of CIA: Former Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Calif.)
“One change that’s clear will be the approach to dealing with Iran. Obama sees diplomacy as a tool to advance strategy, but it doesn’t have to be soft,” says Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Talking to Iran doesn’t mean giving them what they want. It can be more difficult to be tough when you talk with them because you’re sitting across the table. However, the person who all the reports say is likely to head up efforts in the Middle East is Dennis Ross and, in full disclosure, he sits down the hall from me; I have the utmost respect for his ability to negotiate.”
Ross was a Middle East peace negotiator under President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. He’s Levitt’s colleague at the Washington Institute. In his book, “The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace,” Ross is critical of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, describing him as stubborn and arrogant. Now, Netanyahu is again running for prime minister and is favored to win in next month’s elections. No one, so far, seems to have noticed that Ross and Netanyahu are on a collision course.
Levitt served both as a senior official within the Department of Treasury’s terrorism and financial intelligence branch from 2005 to early 2007, and as deputy chief of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. He says the financial pressure in diplomacy will be increased.
“Hillary Clinton will be a very strong secretary of state,” Levitt says. “There will be a variety of different types of pressure on Iran. But I don’t think you’ll see major changes in the way we deal with sub-state actors, whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah.”
Levitt expects Obama to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan and to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility where terrorism suspects are jailed.
Another change will be the new head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who served as President Clinton’s White House chief of staff. Panetta has no intelligence experience.
“First, he’s the consummate Washington insider,” says Levitt. “Second, he’s someone who’s not connected to any of the real or perceived failures of the past few years—the use of torture, the weapons of mass destruction, etc. It is difficult for someone coming from the outside of intelligence to show himself as a member of the intelligence community, but the administration wants to show there is a clear break from the past.”
Obama’s selection of Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security makes sense, says Ben Friedman, a fellow with the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, “because as governor of Arizona, she’s run a bureaucracy, and the Department of Homeland Security is a huge bureaucracy.” Much has been made of Arizona’s border control under Napolitano, but Friedman discounts the issue entirely, pointing out that not even one attempted or suspected terrorist has ever come across our Southern border.
“We have a large illegal immigration problem now and we will have one in the future, because we are a relatively prosperous country with neighbors whose economies are not as prosperous,” he says. “The No. 1 priority of her administration at DHS should be to try to calm people down. I think we’ve been in a state of hysteria since 9/11. We need to stop trying to promote a zero-risk, perfect safety situation, which is impossible.”
The Economy
Secretary of the Treasury: Tim Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Director of the National Economic Council: Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary under President Clinton
“Among all of the appointments, I think Geithner is the one that shows continuity with the Bush Administration,” says Jagadeesh Gokhale, who served in 2002 as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Treasury and was senior economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland from 1990 to 2003.
Geithner was head of the New York Federal Reserve and, says Gokhale, worked closely with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. As of press time, Geithner’s confirmation had bogged down in the Senate Finance Committee, despite broad bipartisan support, over his failure to pay self-employment taxes while working at the International Monetary Fund.
Gokhale, who is now a fellow with the Cato Institute, believes Geithner’s “hands are dirty” from the recent bailouts.
“When Lehman Brothers was allowed to go under, but all the stops were pulled out to save AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and others, all of these things were things he was presiding on,” he says.
The top priority for the Obama Administration, he says, should be to encourage Americans to save money regardless of whether their wages are flat and costs are up.
“Savings is not determined by whether your wages keep up with the cost of living,” he says. “You have to smooth your consumption between today and tomorrow. It’s not ‘I’ve got to have what I want today and tomorrow be damned.’ If you’re going to eat caviar today and gruel tomorrow, that’s a decision you’ve made, and you need to live with the consequences.”
Gokhale says Larry Summers’ job will be to shoot down bad ideas, but since he was once Geithner’s boss and promoted him, it remains to be seen how critical he will be of the Treasury’s ideas, or vice versa.
Health Care
Secretary of Health and Human Services: Former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
Tom Daschle’s book “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis” was published last year. Now that Obama has designated Daschle as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the book provides a handy reference to the former senator’s plans for the future of health care in America. In it, he calls for the creation of a Federal Health Board modeled on the Federal Reserve Board. He also favors a government health insurance plan that would compete with private insurers to drive down health-care costs—not the sweeping national health-care plan some Obama supporters wanted.
“I think Americans are uncomfortable with radical change. We learned that in 1992,” says Elliott Fisher, director of Health Policy Research at Dartmouth Medical School. In ’92, First Lady Hillary Clinton’s national health-care plan was buried under public consternation. “I think Daschle’s idea, and Obama’s idea, is to strengthen the current system and expand coverage to others. If we tried to do away with things like employer-provided health care, I think the magnitude of the change would be so great that we could not get the coverage.”
He adds, “Europe has private health care alongside public health care, and that is kind of what the American system will look like.”
As of press time, Senate Republican review of Daschle’s tax records and trips he took at the expense of an education loan provider had delayed his confirmation.
Energy
Secretary of Energy: Steven Chu, a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California-Berkeley
Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: Carol M. Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton.
“I'm not sure how Chu will affect policy. On climate change, it looks like Carol Browner will be the biggest political influence, not Chu,” says Ray Hill, a business professor at Emory University, and former CEO of one of the largest independent power companies in Asia, which was owned by Southern Company.
“My cynical side tells me that Obama knows that the country and the government’s economic condition will prevent him from doing anything meaningful on climate change for a while. Foreseeing this, he has chosen Browner and Chu to deflect some of the political heat that will result,” says Hill.
For example, he explains, if the government institutes the cap-and-trade carbon emission program that Obama has been talking about, using a target of $350 per ton as the desired cost for emissions, this implies a $3.40 per gallon increase in the price of gasoline.
“That would certainly not help to get us out of the recession,” he says. “In any event, if the locus of climate-change policy is going to move upstairs from the Energy Department, then the biggest role for the Energy Secretary would be to get nuclear energy started again in this country.”
The Los Angeles Times, reporting on Chu’s confirmation hearing last week, said the physicist assured Republicans that he would “help fast-track a resurgence of domestic nuclear power.” He offered similar support for new oil drilling, clean coal technology, wind and solar energy.
Education
Secretary of Education: Arne Duncan, CEO of Chicago Public Schools
For years, the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) initiative has been the focus of education debates. Most agree that its execution has been the problem. Frederick Hess, a faculty associate at the Harvard University Program in Education Policy and Governance, says so far everyone agrees that NCLB should stay in place, so he doesn’t expect the Obama Administration to rush into modifying it. But he does expect more emphasis on a student’s portfolio of work rather than on test scores alone. He also expects more support for charter schools, because Obama’s nominee for the Secretary of Education slot, Arne Duncan, has a track record of supporting charter schools.
“He’s also said to be open to innovation, but while Chicago has a lot of innovative efforts up and running, it’s not a system that’s running dramatically better than it was seven years ago when he took over,” says Hess, a fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Hess expects Obama to spend more money on grades K-12. Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the Cato Institute, agrees, but he doesn’t think spending more money is the answer to education’s problems.
“If you look at the past 40 years, you’ll see there’s an inverse relationship between federal funding for education and student outcomes,” he says. “The spending is like the Himalayas, and the outcomes are like Death Valley.”
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