More former Clinton administration officials (Summers was actually in the REAGAN administration too!), and avowed proponents of globalization and free trade. In other words, these appointments directly contradict every principle Obama ran on and every reason his supporters voted for him. Suckers.
Of course, there are also voters who voted for Obama only because McCain-Palin were serious about carrying out their promises - and Obama was obviously an opportunist, who would need policies that will work in the real world well enough to get him re-elected in 2012. Clinton revisited is not heaven, but astronomically better than Obama the candidate (or an "honorable" McCain-Palin administration) would have been.
2 comments:
I'm certainly glad that Obama is diluting certain aspects of his 'progressive' agenda. His horrid proposals for national civilian youth service, for instance, have been watered down from conscription to 'merely' thumb-on-the-scale governmental 'encouragement'.
(The purpose of these kind of proposals is to ensure that the socioeconomic status ladder increasingly rewards group-think yes-man collectivists over individuals who desperately need to control their own time; the effect will be, among other things, to increase the need for familial and societal connections and to shut out not only originality and talent but all social out-groups. Hardly 'progressive' for those of us whose progressivism consists of wanting to cut the stranglehold of these socio-economic establishments)
But the pick of Summers is hardly a reason for any rational person to be encouraged. I'll leave aside the 'Summers memo' stuff, which could be either be taken as tactlessly worded macroeconomics or cold and ruthless imperial pragmatism. But I'm still very angry at his 'women can't do math' speech. A person who is unable to perceive female intelligence is not only a sexist pig (which is *quite* bad enough) but, in an era where women of intellectual accomplishment are certainly not invisible, demonstrates a mental inflexibility which suggests an uncurious, inactive mind. The fact that the American power-elite reliably promotes this kind of arrogant superficiality is alarming enough without the slap in the face of rewarding a man like Summers for his attitudes. Summers screams to me as person of fake accomplishment, a "Voltaire's bastard" social game-player like most administrative types. In that sense, he is, of course, perfect for the Obama administration. But he's also the sort of person whose existence won't easily settle in my stomach.*
* I. e., he makes me 'barf'. ;)
Aster,
Heads of institutions - presidents of universities, CEOs of corporations and so on - often harbor delusions of omnicompetence (I'm the boss of professors of cognitive psychology, so it follows that I am able to evaluate the alleged evidence of alleged gender differences in mathematics performance better than they can.) Political time-servers are not moral models for anyone, and that is true regardless of who is President of the United States. The point is that there is not, among actual Obama appointees to his incoming administration, so much as one real socialist - or any other ideological leftist. He is choosing people who have a track record in their own specialties of doing a good enough job to get him re-elected four years hence. "Change" in the direction of socialism and protectionism is off the table now, and that is good news.
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