Matt Yglesias

24 Responses to “Chief of Staff”

1. Dan Kervick Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 10:17 am

   The spooks should be sending notes of profuse thanks to Obama that he had the foresight to appoint a noted Washington insider and fixer to head their soon-to-be-besieged agencies. Haven’t these guys figured out that their agencies are going to spend the next few years appearing before congressional committees and responding to special investigations?

   And perhaps, just perhaps, when Obama’s team vetted all the top candidates from inside the community, they discovered there just aren’t many who aren’t tainted by the Bush era ugliness and intelligence failures, and who wouldn’t quickly be turned into targets. So they had to go outside to get an intelligence virgin who isn’t up to his neck in Bush-era crap.

   Panetta has, we will recall, experience dealing with scandal. With Bush gone, the legal system and Congressional watchdogs are going to be coming for a lot of the Bush riff-raff with torches and pitchforks, now that the agencies no longer have the gang of crooks in the White House to protect them. There might be a new incarnation of something like the Church Commission. So as the cleaning-out of the stables goes forward, who do the intelligence guys want up there on the hot seat before Congress: Friendly, politically and bureaucratically experienced and well-liked Leon Panetta? Or some supercilious, pipe-smoking spook of spooks that everyone in Congress would just love to take down a peg?

   The intelligence system is a byzantine mess, filled with needless redundancies and overlap, and crazy and counterproductive interdepartmental rivalries. And Obama has actually promised to cut some major wasteful stuff from the budget somewhere to help pay for the more productive stimulus agenda. Panetta is an experienced bureaucrat and well-connected figure – including connections to a certain someone in the State Department – who will protect the agency as the reorganization goes forward. If the CIA really wants to escape decimation in the coming house-cleaning and reorganization, they should thank their lucky stars they now have a guy like Panetta to go to bat for them.

2. Dan Kervick Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 10:17 am

   And Rockefeller and Feinstein are tools.

3. J Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 10:30 am

   Good! I was waiting for some one to ask the obvious question, viz. how many heads of the CIA had intelligence experience (how many of those were, furthermore, ‘professionals’), e.g., GHW Bush, how well the non-professionals performed by comparison with those who were professionals and so on?

4. joe from Lowell Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am

   I have a sneaking suspicion that it isn’t the line workers in the CIA who have a problem with a director who doesn’t come from the agency’s aristocracy, but merely a layer or two of that bureaucracy.

   Remember all the yammering from the conservative media about the “partisan Democrats” at the CIA who refused to provide “the truth” about Iraqi WMDs? Remember the creation of the Office of Special Plans, to go around the CIA? Remember Cheney’s visit to Langley? Remember the massive flight of talent after the 2004 election, and the wingnutosphere crowing about it? Remember Valerie Plame?

   I think the Bushies did the same thing to the CIA that they did to the Justice Department, and the apolitical professionals have spent the past few years working under the whip of wingnut political hacks, whether carefully plucked from the ranks for their loyalty (the Richard Myers method) or imposed from the outside (the Monica Goodling method). I think some of the quietest people in America are applauding this pick, and we just can’t hear them.

   I think the Bush administration did the

5. Evan Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 10:42 am

   And now we are using the James Baker/Cheney/Rumsfeld precedent as support for Obama’s decisions? I’m not passing judgment – just asking the question

6. McKingford Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 10:51 am

   it’s also long been the case that past service as a White House Chief of Staff has been viewed as a wide-ranging qualification for future public office.

   Until George Bush came along and decided instead that the Chief of Staff was the guy who was supposed to fetch him cheeseburgers…

7. Flo Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 11:06 am

   So will Andy Card reappear as Sec. of Commerce?

8. Aaron S. Veenstra Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 11:11 am

   Obviously, all Republicans are innately qualified to fill any intelligence or security related job, regardless of what their resume looks like. This is a known known, Matt.

9. John Says:
   January 6th, 2009 at 11:15 am

   Looking at previous directors -

   John Deutch – no previous intelligence experience
   Jim Woolsey – no previous intelligence experience (a diplomat)
   William Webster – no previous intelligence experience (head of the FBI)
   William Casey – had worked in OSS during WWII, but no intelligence experience since then
   Stansfield Turner – an admiral, but no specific intelligence experience
   George H. W. Bush – no intelligence experience
   James Schlesinger – no previous specifically intelligence-related experience (he had been an analyst for Rand, and so forth)
   William Raborn – another admiral with no intelligence experience
   John McCone – no specific intelligence experience that I can see (was head of the Atomic Energy Commission)

10. Dan Kervick Says:
    January 6th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    I could still see an awful lot of people at the CIA not being sure which (baby or bathwater) they personally represent.

    Yep, I agree DTM. So I’m sure the dominant internal consensus at the CIA is for their friends in Congress, like Feinstein and Rockefeller, to set up roadblocks everywhere, protect them and keep them safe. But that’s not going to happen.

    It’s interesting that Obama went right over the heads of Feinstein and Rockefeller, and apparently didn’t consult them at all. It looks like the big guy doesn’t trust them.

11. no comment Says:
    January 6th, 2009 at 12:05 pm

    1) Incoming Democratic President appoints senior intelligence official without consulting incoming Democratic chair of Senate Intelligence Committee.
    2) Intelligence Committee chair is pissed President went over her head, expresses pissedness by making nasty comment to press.
    3) “Nonpartisan” blogger expresses outrage at treason by committee chair.

12. J Says:
    January 6th, 2009 at 5:32 pm

    John,

    V. illuminating! You left out Dulles, who I think had worked in intelligence in Switzerland during the war, but on the basis of your research, he looks like an exception.

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