Cabinet picks
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am incredibly happy with Obama’s cabinet picks so far. He seems to be picking intelligent people who are experts in the field in which they are being appointed. He’s getting people who know the business and will give him strong advice. They number of purely political appointments seems to have been minimized, as far as I can tell.
Isn’t this how the cabinet is supposed to work? As president, you can’t be an expert on everything. So you assemble a team to give you trusted knowledge and advice that you can then use to make your decisions. They don’t need to be politicians. They just need to know their field.
His most recent appointment, and one that I am most happy with, is the announcement of physicist Steven Chu as his energy secretary. Dr. Chu is highly accomplished. He was a leader at Bell Labs (an organization who has pumped out some of the most brilliant minds of our generation), a department chair at Stanford, a Nobel Prize winner, and now the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Wow, a real scientist! And while he is best known as a physicist, he has been highly involved in climate change for years, being a vocal advocate for conducting real research on global warming in order to make the best decisions.
I can only hope that the remainder of his appointments go this well.