How do you feel about Obama's cabinet picks? For or against? Good or bad?

Im curious, how many of you feel that Obama's cabinet choices are a good thing? Why? How many of you feel that his choices are a bad thing? Why?

I'd list them all but cant seem to find a list at the moment so maby this site will help - www.bloomberg.com...

Barack Obama has moved faster than any modern president-elect in selecting his Cabinet, scouring Wall Street, academia and the Senate to assemble a diverse team that has won bipartisan praise.

“He has every basic entity within his government,” said U.S. Representative David Scott, a Georgia Democrat. “He’s got Jewish people, he’s got Protestants, he’s got white, black, you name it.”


Personally i feel that he isnt doing too bad of a job (so far), but who knows, he may have assembled the worse group of people possible.

Ethnic diversity is always a bad thing.

Timothy Geithner is to be his Secretary of the Treasury:

www.ny.frb.org...

President of the Federal Reserve of New York?

Very bad.

reply to post by dalan.


wow. thank you for that. Im starting to not look forward to the next 4 years and there may be something to the whole 2012 thing after all...

its a sad thing, but most of Obama's picks have been disappointments to the people who elected him hoping for true change. When most of my "rightist" friends who feared his election are sighing in relief at his "centrist" appointments... the term "centrist" here meaning people approved of by the right, that should tell you something. At each appointment i see people saying "he is just trying to appoint a comprehensive cabinet" and yet there is not a single leftist in the group.
I think this shows that Obama is demonstrable a rightist ideologist, and we shall see over the next few years, as I stated to my friends before, that Obama is no different than any president before...otherwise he never would have been elected. The powers that be knew this, tis but a shame that no one else saw it coming.

Well as I have said on other threads I fully support Gates remaining on as Secretary of Defence . Gates if not the rest of Obama appointments represents change for the better because he understands the direction that the US military needs to take in order to fight insurgency's . At the same time Gates is beginning the long process of reserving the damage done by Rumsfeld .

Cheers xpert11 .

From a science viewpoint, I'm delighted at his picks. We FINALLY get someone who knows something about energy as the head of the Energy department!! And someone with a good track record in cleaning up one of the shadiest messes in a very tough state in charge of the environmental sector.

What we all think this will mean is that there's less chance for Stupid Projects to get funded. The Bush administration was notorious for censoring any scientific finding they didn't like. Non-government sources could report on it and present it, but any scientist working for the government would have his research edited and censored until it said what the Bush administration wanted it to say. A lot of them tried to raise a real stink about it in the newspapers but the public didn't think that was quite as important as Brittney Spears in a rehab clinic.

The Bush Administration was making the same mistakes that Communist Russia made back when it started to fall behind in science (any science that didn't fit Official Policy was censored. In Russia's case, however, scientists who continued this research were jailed or silenced.)

I like the rest of the picks as well. They're a scholar's pick in that he's choosing people with decent track records in the field and has a nice mix of gender and race as well as political affiliatioin.

As I understand it, he's starting early because Bush seems to be abdicating all efforts at running the country... except for a few items. Yesterday (to my horror), Bush put into law a regulation that means medical people can deny treatment that they feel goes against their moral principles: www.washingtonpost.com...

While I support health care workers with these concerns forming their own clinics and hospitals, I am not comfortable with them being in the same place as others who see these issues differently.

I believe that many of Bush's other fiats (which, like this one, didn't go through ordinary legislative processes) will be challenged and hopefully overturned by the new administrations. At the very least, they're bound to have a lively review.

[edit on 19-12-2008 by Byrd]

reply to post by Byrd


Good post Byrd. I agree with you on those points you put out there so well. He does seem to be making better picks than both the bushes or the clintons when it comes to what may be the right way of doing things. (i still shudder when i remember Bush picking his war hawk cabinet before he was even approved of being the pres,).