There'll be much more to say on this as the day goes on, but it's worth taking a moment for a kind word about Bush. For all the patronage and ideology and inattention that marked the major appointments of his first-term, he elevated some serious and capable individuals to key positions in his second term. Most agree, I think, that Robert Gates has been an able Defense Secretary, Condoleeza Rice has done an extraordinary amount to modulate the administration's foreign policy as Secretary of State, and Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson have been performing admirably under extraordinarily intense and unpredictable conditions. Their efforts may, in the end, prove insufficient, but if they fail, it won't be because they got hung up by ideology or inexperience. Everyone is out of their depth right now, but Paulson, a former investment banker, and Bernanke, an economist who studied the Great Depression, are about as near to the waterline as anyone. As the saying goes, a presidency is only vaguely about the president. Various agencies have, in general, a fairly large amount of autonomy, and the individuals chosen to staff those arms of the government are incredibly important. Which makes it something of a shame that presidential candidates aren't supposed to offer a preliminary look at their cabinets. The general way we understand a president's agenda is through policy papers, but just as no plan survives contact with the enemy, no legislation survives contact with the Congress. Nominees, however, generally do -- the Senate can't amend a person -- and it's extremely odd that we don't demand the ability to evaluate their proposed cabinet during the campaign. It's exactly the sort of thing that should figure into electoral decision making. For instance: A few months ago, there was reporting that McCain meant to elevate Phil Gramm as Treasury Secretary if he won. Obviously, the campaign wouldn't admit to any such thing now, but if they had admitted to it then, if they couldn't deny that they had once harbored that impulse, it would be telling.
