Obama’s Cabinet: A team of liberal ‘yes men’?

Say goodbye to the “Team of Rivals,” said Scott Wilson in The Washington Post. President Obama’s second-term Cabinet is shaping up as “a band of brothers”—an insular inner circle of male loyalists. When Obama took office in 2009, he was widely praised for bringing in a diverse group of Cabinet officials with “contrarian” tendencies. Obama asked his bitter rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, to be his secretary of State; selected Wall Street insider Tim Geithner to be Treasury secretary; and even kept Republican Bob Gates at Defense. But four years later, convinced that he’ll have but a year or two to effectively push his agenda, Obama would appear to have lost his appetite for internal debate and “political drama.” Now that he’s “free from the constraints of public opinion,” said Seth Mandel in CommentaryMagazine.com, Obama is hiring doctrinaire liberals he knows and trusts: John Kerry (for State), Chuck Hagel (Defense), Jack Lew (Treasury), and John Brennan (the CIA). Four years in the Oval Office has left Obama supremely confident of his own views on foreign policy, the budget, intelligence, and everything else on planet Earth, so instead of “the best, smartest people” who can bring original ideas to the table, he’s hiring “yes men.”

Prepare the articles of impeachment! said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. The president of the United States “is brazenly trying to fill his Cabinet with people he likes,” and in a further assault on our democracy is even “nominating people who agree with his policies!” Seriously, has there ever been a weaker, or weirder, criticism of Obama than this latest attack? In one more sign of Republican derangement, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com,they’re complaining that nominees Lew and Hagel “do not agree with Republicans on public policy issues.” Yes, you read that correctly. The GOP says highly experienced, obviously qualified candidates are unfit to implement Obama’s policy agenda because they “agree with Obama’s policy agenda.”

Let Obama have his yes men, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, but where are the women? With Clinton and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis retiring, Obama’s second-term Cabinet so far is a bunch of “white dudes.” The White House last week released a photo of Obama with 11 of his closest advisers, and 10 are men. Maybe Obama should ask Mitt Romney for his “binders full of women,” said Margaret Carlson in Bloomberg.com.Not incidentally, of those 10 male advisers, only one is a minority. Obama may be our first African-American president, but his chorus of trusted confidants “looks more like the Augusta National Golf Club than America.”

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Some perspective, please, said John Dickerson in Slate.com. Obama’s obviously not a racist, and on women’s issues such as contraception, equal pay, and the Violence Against Women Act, he has proven his feminist credentials. His Cabinet picks aren’t done, and you can be sure there will be some women and minorities in the next batch. Of the last four secretaries of State, three were women and two were black, said NationalReview.com in an editorial. Now a white man will apparently serve in the post. “So what?” A president should pick Cabinet members based on their talent and qualifications. As conservatives, we don’t like Obama’s Cabinet choices, and we believe that, with their help, the president will repeatedly “get it wrong” over the next four years. But it won’t be because of his “lack of enthusiasm for ‘diversity.’”