Opinion: Dust-Up alum: Obama’s Cabinet picks a welcome change from Bush’s ‘anti-intellectualism’

News reports indicate that President-elect Obama has chosen strong, experienced, independent-minded nominees to run four departments of the executive branch. Since these are not just important positions in an of themselves but probably represent a pattern for the remaining appointments, they raise important questions. Do Obama’s picks represent change? Will his Cabinet officials pursue Obama’s view of change? These are questions that we won’t fully know the answer to for some months, but I think the signs are largely positive.

In my mind, the most important change that needs to be made in the federal government is a shift toward information-based decision making. As The Economist points out in its Nov. 13 issue, anti-intellectualism in the Bush administration became more than a wedge issue for campaigning; it became a style of governance. President Bush himself professed to make decisions with his “heart,” not his “head.” He willingly gave critical appointments to grossly incompetent individuals. But the most devastating aspect of Bush-era decision making was top-down policy development. Bush was the first modern president to deliberately give away the greatest asset an American president has -- the ability to know more about a given issue than any man in the world. In addition to building roads, fighting wars and providing for peoples retirement, the federal government is a vast information collection machine. When the White House directs departments and agencies to produce only that information consistent with pre-determined policies, it shuts down that machine and takes away from the president his biggest advantage. Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle are all individuals who have extensive experience in government. That is a good thing. Those who define change by the number of outsiders given the responsibility of managing bureaucracy with which they have little familiarity don’t recognize that constructive change requires intimate knowledge. One of the choices that Obama reportedly made this week was for Daschle to head the Department of Health and Human Services, an organization with a budget nearly as large as the combined annual revenues of Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobile -- the two largest corporations in the world. Just as important as the experience that the people said to have been picked this week bring to these positions is the independence and toughness they bring to their jobs. I feel reasonably confident that all of them would step down rather than be bullied into producing fudged “evidence” to the White House’s agenda. Obama has demonstrated great self-confidence in his willingness to give individuals of this standing and independence key roles in his administration. Now we will see if he also has the toughness to ensure that their agendas remain reasonably in-sync with his own. At any rate, so far I think we can say that this is the “change we need.”