A lot of the hand-wringing over Obama's reported cabinet picks is fairly knee-jerk. These are largely solid, intelligent people with views that line up with Obama and, yes, most progressives. Jim Jones and Bob Gates, despite the military background of the former and the Republican history of the latter, basically share the major foreign policy goals of Obama: withdrawal from Iraq, redeployment to Afghanistan, diplomacy with Iran and major engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Geithner has been a major advocate in the past year for increased financial market regulation. Tom Daschle is a die-hard advocate of universal health care.
But even if these *are* imperfect choices, ask yourself this: who implemented the New Deal?
The people who put in place FDR's program were not raging liberals. They were largely establishment figures -- Republicans and Democrats -- most of whom had for decades before internalized the prevailing, conventional economic and foreign policy views of the previous few decades. FDR himself campaigned on deficit-reduction and attacked Hoover's tentative interventions in the economy as being counter to the free market.
As for the rest of FDR's team, you had some of the following:
Treasury Secretary: William Hartman Woodin - A Republican industralist with close ties to Wall Street. Yet he flipped in 1933, becoming a key advocate of FDR's Bank Holiday and the creation of the FDIC.
Treasury Secretary (2nd): Henry Morgenthau, Jr. - A conservative Democrat firmly in favor of the then-popular "sound money" approach. He advocated balanced budgets, the gold standard, debt reduction, and was suspicious of labor.
Senior Advisor and Interior Secretary: Harold Ickes - Another Republican, albeit a progressive one who had supported Teddy Roosevelt's third-party bid in 1912. Yet he became FDR's closest adviser and one of the key architects of the New Deal.
Secretary of Agriculture: Henry A. Wallace - Yet another Republican, he was again picked for the appearance of a bipartisan cabinet; his father had been Ag Secretary in the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. Yet Wallace would turn sharply progressive and become Roosevelt's second Vice President in 1940.
And that's just one narrow selection.
There are two key points to take away from this:
(1) Expertise matters. To affect major change, you need people who know Washington and understand how to make things work. Being able to work institutions if probably the biggest task of any reform effort. By necessity, you're going to need people who have establishment ties if you're going to pass major reforms, and it's usually only when you can the establishment on board for major reforms that you can create
durable reform.
(2) Timing matters. Events are a huge driver of political trends. The people who implemented the New Deal weren't radicals. They were often cozy industrialists and people who had spent years being diametrically opposed to all kinds of things they were suddenly implementing. What caused the change? The Depression. Already, we're seeing all kinds of people from unexpected quarters recanting long-held views. For all the (often justified) outrage over Larry Summers, in the past couple years, he's moved sharply leftward, endorsing universal health care and major redistributionist policies. There was Alan Greenspan's jaw-dropping statement that he'd found a "glitch" and that his free-market ideology was "flawed."
None of this is to support complacency or some healthy skepticism. But it's absurd to freak out about personnel to the extent people are doing. Everything that the reported appointees have said jives with the broad policy goals of virtually all Democrats and mainstream progressives. Let's actually wait and see what kind of policies these people plan to implement before we decide they need to be tossed overboard, OK?
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