The departments and agencies don’t need a housecleaning of Republicans because they can’t manage. They need a housecleaning to get rid of people who were never qualified in the first place, to overturn procedures that run counter to the objectives of the agency, and to reorient the agency toward its mission so that it makes efficient use of its resources.

Every agency is headed by political appointees, and by “headed” I mean the top several layers. These positions always change hands with a new administration. They are the essence of “The Plum Book”.

The problem is that the Bush Administration has pushed this farther down into every agency than has ever happened before. For example, Monica Goodling admitted to using a “political litmus test” for hiring career lawyers in the Justice Department. The fact that they are Republicans is incidental (they could just as easily be Democrats in a different day and age, as you pointed out originally). The fact that people who should have been hired because of their competence were, in fact, hired because of their political ideology is one facet of the problem. Remember “Brownie”?

Another facet of the problem is that once these folks brought politics into positions where competence should reign, they drove out competent people. The obvious example here is the “muzzle” put onto NASA’s climate scientists so that they did not publicly make comments which contradicted the Bush Administration’s tenacious insistence that global warming either didn’t exist or was a non-problem.

If you’ve ever been part of an organization that ballyhoos its principles but acts in total contradiction to them, you know that it’s generally the most principled and competent people who get thoroughly disgusted, get a better job elsewhere, and leave. The ones who stay (at the risk of generalizing too much) are the ones who don’t care much about principles, can’t get a better job anywhere else, or actually agree with the direction the organization is taking (even though it contradicts the stated principles).

These, then, are the people who will need to be rooted out: the ones who corrupted the system and the ones who kind of prefer the corrupted version.

(Incidentally, I laughed out loud at your mention of Tom Coburn. I think even the GOP Senators recognize that he’s a bit of a loony. He is the original crusader against pork — and perhaps John McCain’s inspiration in this area — but otherwise is a one-trick pony. I suppose he could take a role in the new administration, but it would have to be a very circumscribed position. His pre-Senate gig was as an OB/GYN, so there’s not much carryover there.)

Obama will still have plenty of appointee debts that he’ll be obliged to pay back, even in a “new politics” administration. But I think he’ll be able to be more pragmatic about his options than you seem to prefer. At least I hope so.

Name me one Republican currently in office who has excelled at running anything without injecting competence-destroying ideology within the past 8 years, and I’ll walk back my comments even further. Hell, name me one agency that has been better run under the Bush Administration than, say, under the Clinton Administration. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?

My point in the post, which apparently wasn’t completely clear, is that Obama’s cabinet is no place for extreme ideologues. Cabinet positions are department heads, with large agencies to manage. Worse than that, every agency will need some serious repairs after the last 8 years.

Obama has quite a large job carved out for him, trying to instill some sense of competence back into the mechanism of our government, while trying to solve some of the massive problems caused or passed along by the Bush Administration. Inviting partisan ideologues onto the cabinet and giving them the reins of any agency is a very bad idea. There’s a government to run.

But when policy issues are tackled, Republican partisanship will certainly rear its head in Congress. Boehner will start crying about something or another, Pelosi will be likened to a vampire (or something equally awful), McConnell will bleat about how there used to be such comity in the Senate before the low-rent Democrats came into power, rinse and repeat. The partisans will need to be included and involved, if only so they don’t scuttle passage of whatever it is. If they behave themselves, and offer sound ideas and concerns rather than playing obstructionist, they can provide some value.

I fail to see how this is “old school thinking” in any way. I certainly don’t expect anyone with a D after their name to practice any sort of obstructionism; that will be reserved for the minority party.

If Obama is the leader that the people who gave him the election think he is (hint: it was not the committed left base), he will, in fact, look at many things other than the letter R or D. He will look for who can best get the job done. That’s not to say that the administration won’t obviously be dominated by Democrats. But a proclaimed “new kind of politics” shouldn’t be limited by the old-school thinking that you’ve just demanded.

Right.

Like Prop. 8 for example, even in CA no less!! Mmmmhu…
..yea that makes sense.

Even with all the sliding away from their base support that the Republicans have done, their base in CA didn’t mind voting their convictions in a free and fair election.

So will you lefties allow us to make our voices heard on the public opinion square, or, will you support a liberal Ahnold Governator in encouraging the property damaging rioters and thus pushing the fair minded non-rioting gays into the underground and over to our side of the voting bloc?

Huh?

Keep that up and you will see what progress really is.

Seriously, I really don’t get why folks on the right get the vapors about George Soros. You think he’s scary; okay, I get that. Do you honestly think he’s any scarier to you than, say, Pat Robertson is to us? But you don’t hear us generating these absurd conspiracy theories about him, do you?

For God’s sake, grow a pair.

I became scared enough over Obama’s election to begin researching. Instead of finding comfort in my research, I found lots of scary ties.

You know the weirdest coincidence. If you google Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, you learn that she had a Marxist teacher in HI as well as other Marxist influences. Then you go on to find out that she met her 2nd husband, Lolo Soetoro in Indonesia in Russian language class. I believe that was in 1967, immediately after the Communist uprising that was violently squelched by Suharto.

Then you worry about Socialism, so you go to the library and you look up capitalism, and you find a book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, written by one George Soros. You research George Soros on the internet, and you find out that he gave several million dollars to MoveOn.Org, which was responsible for filtering $88 million into Obama’s campaign. You also find out that George Soros is an atheist who has a strong belief in something called “Open Society”, which when you read about it, is basically Communism modernized and repackaged to be sold to people by the egomaniac that I have determined George Soros to be after reading only the preface in his book. It appears that he has used his market knowledge and wealth to manipulate and collapse markets, then blame the collapse on capitalism. Is something starting to sound familiar here?

I have only read the preface of his book and already discovered one really strange coincidence. On page “xi” of the preface, he mentions Indonesia. To quote, “In Indonesia, for instance, most of the gains in living standards that accumulated during 30 years of Suharto’s regime have disappeared.” Have the Communists been waiting this long to get back at their violent overthrow by Suharto’s regime in the mid-60s?

So Obama’s our president-elect. His mother was in Russian language classes in Indonesia in 1967, a couple of years after Suharto’s regime violently squelched a communist uprising in the Country. George Soros mentions Indonesia and Suharto in his book. George Soros gave several million dollars to MoveOn.org. MoveOn.org donated $88 million to Obama’s campaign. So who is our President-Elect, really? Obama or Soros.

Quoting from Soros’ book again “The only way CHANGES could come about is through the pressure of public opinion, particularly in the United States. What makes the idea of an open society coalition realistic is that democratic governments are responsive to the demands of their citizens. But first people must subscribe to the idea of open society.” So how much does it cost to change a capitalistic/democratic government to an “open society”? Around $88 million.