Opinion: Obama’s Cabinet picks spot on

December 09, 2008
By Armando Vega
Columnist

It’s been more than a month now since Obama’s victory back in November, capping off months of intense political campaigning.  Save for a day or two, the President-elect has hardly had much opportunity for rest and relaxation since.

Grappling with a rapidly deteriorating economic situation (533,000 jobs lost in November alone), Obama and his team have been compelled to—to an extent—try to fill the power vacuum left by a lame-duck administration which has not been able to put much dent in those deteriorations.

While usually incoming Presidents make appointments to the national security apparatus first, highlighting the nation’s current economic malaise, Obama instead appointed in the days before Thanksgiving his economic team, post-haste but with care.  Rounding off the top of the ticket and set to replace Henry Paulson at Treasury is Timothy Geithner, current President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a former deputy Treasury official under the Clinton administration.  He’s had heavy dealings in financial crises before, from various international tumults of the late 1990’s to his facilitation this year of Bear Stearn’s fire-sale to J.P. Morgan Chase and the bailout of AIG.

Other academic advisers include Lawrence Summers, Geithner’s former mentor and soon to be predecessor at Treasury, as Director of the President’s National Economic Council (meant to coordinate economic policy throughout the administration) and Christina Romer as Director of the Council of Economic Advisers, whose role is to be the President’s key adviser on economic policy and currently a professor of economics at Berkeley.  All are “heavy-hitters,” economists near the top of their game.

London’s The Economist notes points to the disparity to an “outgoing administration, in which economists never had much clout,” citing the office of OMB, which oversees trillion in federal spending, as an example.  The article notes that Obama’s current “nominee, Peter Orszag, the outgoing director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, is a professional economist known for such page-turners as ‘Saving Social Security’, a 300-page tome boasting 37 pages of footnotes and eight appendices.”  Mr. Bush’s four appointments over his tenure, by contrast, included congressmen, a pharmaceutical representative, and a former government liaison for an investment bank—all trained as lawyers.

To receive further targeted advice on the current situation specifically, Obama has even created a new President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) to be headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.  He has placed other prominent economists in other nooks and crannies of the administration as well, the key spots mentioned aside. 

Largely centrist in approach and drawing heavily on former Clinton staffers, Obama’s new economic team seems as ready and able as any that could be assembled to deal with the looming financial problems this country now faces.  Reading the headlines these days, you couldn’t have asked for a heck of a lot more to be grateful for this Thanksgiving past.