I drank a lot of Kool-Aid the last two years, so maybe this post is coming from that perspective. Also I donated money to Barack Obama every time he  appeared on television from time to time so I have a vested interest in rooting for the guy. Accordingly, this post may end up wildly naive. But where I'm at today is pretty simple: the hand-wringing on the left over Barack Obama's cabinet appointments is too much, too soon, and it misses the bigger picture about the serious (and needed) changes that are coming down the pike.  First, the hand-wringing. There are serious concerns right now that Barack Obama's cabinet and staff appointments signal a betrayal of his campaign promises and electoral mandate. Hillary Clinton at State! (We worked so hard to defeat her.) Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff! (He's partisan.) Tim Geithner at Treasury! (He's a Clintonian and a champion of free-markets. He's also a "cursing, skateboarding hipster," which is neither here nor there.) Tom Daschle is at Health and Human Services! (He was a lobbyist.) Sasha and Malia at Sidwell Friends! (What about public schools?)  The argument is that Barack Obama promised to bring change, and that change isn't possible with all these insiders. Moreover, by appointing the cadre of centrists and Clinton advisors so far, the shaping of the administration is a betrayal of the left. Progressives are disheartened, particularly by Obama's failure so far to throw us a bone and appoint a token progressive to his cabinet. That's the argument.  A few responses:  1. We're dealing with politicians, and politicians play to political realities shaped by the context in which they are governing. The condemnation of ex-Clinton appointees misses historical context. Bill Clinton was elected with a smaller slice of the vote, facing a less supportive congress, then ran an administration into the ground and spent years alternately staving off scandal and trying to recover from a false start. The policies his administration pursued from that point on were small and centrist; in some cases they were disastrous. (Welfare reform.)  The question, then, in evaluating ex-Clintonites is pretty simple: Were those 8 years what they wanted, or would they have accomplished more if they thought they could? It's a little of both, I suspect, but even in the case of someone like FDR you have a President who took office promising certain things (FDR didn't campaign promising a New Deal anywhere near what he delivered, and his advisors -- save one cabinet appointment, Frances Perkins -- were as unpopular on the left as Obama's are today) but then shaped a presidency around the political reality of the time. We are staring into a pretty extreme time in American history right now, and these appointees have much greater political latitude than they did 10 years ago. In simpler terms: Politicians have an extremely mutable ideology, and politicians will do whatever it takes to stay in power. Sure that's depressing, but right now staying in power means pushing through a massive and unprecedented expansion in the role of government. And we like that. Yes, Rahm Emmanuel ran the war room to pass NAFTA. Passing NAFTA was what the political moment required for the Clintons at that time. But I doubt he believed in the policy passionately. He's a mercenary who was fighting for the policy his President mandated, in an effort to maintain Democratic power. And right now he is a mercenary who's President is telling him to push through a huge public jobs program and a massive investment in green jobs. Fine.  2. Obama is appointing "insiders," but also people who could get something passed. Carter and Clinton, our last two Democratic Presidents, won elections and made the kind of genuine progressive appointments that we long for today. They challenged entrenched power right from the start. And they failed. Today we have a President four years out of the Illinois State Senate taking office in the midst of two wars and an enormous crisis. To me, having an administration that is helmed at the start by people who run solid organizations, who can learn from past mistakes, and who know realistically how to move legislation is what we want. It's entirely possible that Obama won, sat down in some meetings, crunched the numbers, reviewed the security briefings and said, OMFG. Maybe it is more important to have a steady team some of whom have been there before, given the gravity of the challenges they face right now. I think that's fine too. Some early successes are important.  3. There are some good policies on the move already:  * Obama is proposing a massive, half-trillion dollar jobs program built on investments in infrastructure, public works and green jobs. His advisors, even Larry Summers who I am thrilled won't be Treasury Secretary, support the approach:

Mr. Summers, who served as a campaign adviser to Mr. Obama, has advocated for a forceful stimulus plan in recent newspaper columns, saying the federal government should be doing more, not less, in areas like health care, energy, education and tax relief. Mr. Obama seemed to echo those thoughts in his radio address.

We want that right? Government to be doing more, not less? A President who makes the case that deficits are okay, and that we can't rely on "trickle down" and tax cuts? Furthermore, Obama's team clearly sees the economic crisis as a chance to advance liberal goals:

Advisers to Mr. Obama say they want to use the economic crisis as an opportunity to act on many of the issues he emphasized in his campaign, including cutting taxes for lower- and middle-class workers, addressing neglected public infrastructure projects like roads and schools, and creating “green jobs” through business incentives for energy alternatives and environmentally friendly technologies.

Whoever the advisors are, that sounds like liberalism to me. If it happens, it sounds like what I voted for. The scale of these efforts will be telling, but that sounds great so far.  * Health Care. Daily Kos the other day had this interesting rundown of how the Obama administration is moving the ball forward on health care reform, and how they are lining up their administration to make that happen: 

There are a couple of thing to be gleaned from reading the tea leaves ... The new administration seems serious on spending political capital early on health reform . With Tom Daschle at HHS, another side-issue is whether public health will get the attention and respect it deserves (it needs to be funded properly as part of health reform). It will help to have a star-power figure at HHS. 

That sounds great too.  *Reversal of key Bush administration executive orders.No firm decisions yet, but from Day One (or close to it) it appears that a raft of regulations and Bush policies will be out the window including restrictions on stem cell research, rules limiting regulation of CO2's, and hopefully a repeal of the disastrous Global Gag Rule, which has killed or harmed thousands worldwide since 2001.  * Closing Guantanamo. Obama was clear about shuttering the base in his interview with 60 Minutes. He could always reverse course, but such a strong statement post-election would be hard to go back on now.  Those are just a few examples, but they underscore the point that some priorities critical to the left are moving forward and will happen quickly. The change is in the policies, not in the people.  Another place where I believe Obama is and will govern based on political realities is foreign policy. Sadly, I think that's the area where the critics are right: we are looking at a center-right, conservative diplomatic view over the next four years. Chris Bowers at OpenLeft laments the construction of Obama's foreign policy team as center-right and conservative, and he's right. (He links to a radio interview he did on the subject that's a good listen.) It does appear that while an Obama administration is ready to move left on domestic policy, it will remain hawkish on foreign policy, meaning the best we can look forward to is an administration far more competent and thoughtful than Bush, but only marginally more progressive. Why? It's simple. The Obama team doesn't believe the political will exists right now for a progressive foreign policy team, or that the country is willing to trust a genuinely liberal foreign policy. (See above under politicians holding power.) Perhaps a strong and competent four years that sees an Obama Administration pull the US out of it's depression could embolden the President, but my guess is that he will tread cautiously in international affairs. And my guess is that progressives need to be gearing up for the one real fight on our hands, that is just and valid: Escalation in Afghanistan. We can get enmeshed in the details of health care reform or panic over a nomination or two, but the serious line in the sand comes sometime next year when we have to fight over Obama's policy on war in the Middle East. (One exception: Department of Agriculture, where Obama is considering a really dangerous candidate, and where his own policies and campaign promises are less explicit.) I guess what I'm saying is that we have to have some patience. I view Obama's presidency as an 8-year project, where there will be ups and downs and a lot of work to be done. But from my view there are some remarkable changes that are in the works, and some great things about to happen just as a baseline. There are fights to be waged (Vietnam killed LBJ's "Great Society" and a quagmire in Afghanistan could kill whatever well-branded economic stimulus/New New deal Obama puts forward). But the man just won a 20-month campaign we were all sure was going down again and again and again. We need to watch the policies more than the people. On the domestic front I think those policies are looking sound right now; internationally I think we as the left have a lot of work in front of us to make progressive foreign policy politically viable. [Update: I'm so in the tank that I'm about to recycle a talking point from David Axelrod, Obama's own political advisor, but what it comes down to is this. Obama is hiring a team to help him execute, not to give him vision. The hand-wringing and fretting about who did what in 1994 and what meeting did so and so attend in 1999 obscures the fact that, on the domestic side at least, we're talking about politicians who are joining an administration to help the Democrats keep power and get something done.]