Netroots Nudge Obama: "Fun with Steve and Jane"

John Avarosis:

Jane Hamsher disagrees with Obama campaign deputy Steve Hildebrand about the direction of Obama's appointments. Steve points out that Obama is picking the best people, and he has chosen some excellent people, and clearly a true brain-trust (and that is change). But it does seem that no one from the progressive side of the party is getting any cabinet posts at all. And that's not a litmus test, or a desire to lurch the Obama administration to the far left (at least not as far what I'd like to see) - it's the simple desire to have a Cabinet that aspires to "look like America" actually look like America, and some of those Americans are progressives. Progressive Democrats deserve a place at the table. Just as importantly, Obama's cabinet should be as intellectually diverse as possible so as to ensure that no good idea is left behind, and that whatever course Obama chooses to follow has truly been thoroughly vetted by a brain trust representing good ideas of all philosophical persuasions.

Howie P.S.: "Nudge"--'to push or poke somebody gently, usually with a motion of the elbow'. Unlike the definition here, there is another version I learned growing up in a Jewish family where some Yiddish was spoken. It is a noun and it is pronounced "noodge": this is a person who pesters and irritates. David Sirota and Paul Rosenberg advance other lines of criticism against Obama's early moves. Rosenberg says

Quite simply, the narrowly-defined "expertise" and "competence" that's being touted by Obama might be enough to get by in ordinary times, if nothing untoward happened. But it's clearly out of its depth in dealing with the tumultuous situation we find ourselves in today.

Rather than being a hindrance to insight, ideology is an invaluable aid to those who are mature, self-aware thinkers, as all cabinet-level appointees surely ought to be. A diversity of such ideological viewpoints ensures that Obama will actually hear directly and regularly from a mix of these views, involved not just in occasional sparring, mostly for show, but in a deep and prolonged multi-stage argument, in constantly-changing tensions with the constantly changing nature of the problems his team will have to confront.

Barack Obama