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Friday, December 18, 2020

Yesterday NYT pubished a listing with short bio statements of the Biden team appointments announced already, pending Senate approval.

Link. Still to be announced, AG.

Would Kieth Ellison take the job, if offered?

Beyond that, the Buttigieg appointment as Transportation Secretary seems sound. 

As a well educated and McKinsey trained technocrat Buttigieg likely will be good as an infrastructure maintenance and upgrade manager. Trains running on time, efficient airports, and overseeing transition to electric auto dominance with more nationwide charging stations than gas stations, all that - with the man not being in any particular relationship to the fossil fuel industry for successes in his past political career.

An interesting thing is Mayor Pete had no hands-on role in the Obama administration, nor any staff history with Biden in the Senate. Such appointments are best. Mayor Pete did, however, drop his own presidential campaign at what proved to be an opportune time for Mr. Biden, and whether that was a Biden consideration is a matter we may guess at, but  never know. At any rate, holding a national cabinet position will be a career boost for the South Bend, Indiana mayor.

Presumably Tom Perez will remain DNC head under a Biden administration.

________UPDATE_______

The Haaland nomination for Interior also appears sound. The Minnesota concern would be that the climate of the mining-imperiled Boundary Waters and lake country near the Boundary Waters is different from the climate region Haaland represents and has lived in; so that her sympathy for the immense threat sulfide mining raises might be less resonant with her than otherwise. However, on the plus side she is distanced from the jobs, jobs, jobs BS chorus constantly raised out of Minnesota's Iron Range politicians, Democrats and Republicans, and should have no conflicting interests with natural resource exploitation money. We can have HOPE she is, if confirmed by McConnell's and Shumer's Senate, a likely friend of environmentally sound decision-making. Hopefully, she will not be unduly influenced by the Stauber, Smith, and Klobucher bending toward sulfide mining advocacy that Minnesota Dem citizens experience from such high-placed State politicians. We HOPE. We wait, to see. 

Steve Bullock would also have been a good Interior nominee; Montanans knowing how copper barons operate. With Biden having enjoyed Comcast support, a guess is that Bullock will not be given any administration position where his past net neutrality advocacy could flourish.

________FURTHER UPDATE________

The Neera Tanden OMB nomination has received much web comment, and you'd be hard pressed to find a progressive who'd nominate her for dog catcher. But Biden is who he's been. 

As a progressive, and dog lover, my opinion is clear. 

OMB is where money policy and administration happens. Tanden is and has been a hyper-partisan Clinton operative and acolyte, and it is not strange to see money and Clintonian people and things convergent. Yellen at Treasury is a world apart from Tanden, at anything. 

Tanden has displays the mentality of a petty Mayor-Daly ward healer dealing in favors and punishments, having run a Podesta-founded alleged "think tank" that way.

Biden did not have to include Tanden, but he did, and that is indicative of what his administration, at it's very worse, might turn out to be.