According to his nomination speach, McCain pledged to appoint the best and brightest to his administration. Who do you think he will call upon?
The obvious ones are Kerry, Leiberman, and maybe Biden, all of whom he has spoken favorably of in the past. I think Obama is out. I don’t think he would accept, and it would look patronizing. Plus, I just don’t think he has enough experience for a cabinet position.
Are there any prominent democrats that would accept?
Since his selection of Palin to be VP, and the totally negative, Karl Rove-like tone of his campaign, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats would would serve under McCain (excepting Lieberman or some hardly known conservative Democrats (probably from the South)).
The idea that McCain can be a radical, bipartisan reformer, while hiring associates of Karl Rove to run his campaign message, and attract Democratic support for his Administration is just laughable. It’s just further evidence of McCain/Palin to simply lie through their teeth: and the bigger the lie, the more the press is willing to unquestioningly report it.
On edit:
Are you kidding? Don’t tell me you think Palin has the right experience to be Vice President, I might just die laughing.
While I agree with you that Biden has plenty of experience, a Cabinet member has a much more important operational role than the VP does. Barring death or removal of office of the prez, the VP doesn’t really have to do much of anything. Casting a tie vote in the Senate is pretty much a no-brainer-- just ask the prez what he wants to do. Even the “presiding over the Senate” thing isn’t much done these days. Too many funerals of Third World Dictators to attend. Cheney is powerful, but only because Bush wants him to be.
Sec. of State Clinton?
The offer:
Eight years of near-constant exposure in an executive, diplomatic position if you support my policies. You know where I’m going and how things are going to pan out – and our differences don’t strongly enter the SoS area (e.g., Supreme Court picks). Try and screw me and I’ll have you embroiled in a no-win, embarassingly blameworthy situation in an instant. Work with me and be part of an historic administration, setting yourself up to make a huge run in '16.
I think most of the better politicians can separate the campaign trail rhetoric from their real work. If they couldn’t, they’d never get anything done. If, for an outrageous example, McCain asked Gore to be the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, you think it would be better for Gore to turn it down?
Please, this thread doesn’t have anything at all to do with her. Can we have just 1 thread not about her?
News flash: Washington is getting worse at getting things done because Karl Rove-style election politics has injected poison into the ways in which the parties had to work together in the past. I’ve been in DC for about a decade and a half, and the steady deterioration of the ability of the two parties to get work done has, IMHO, closely matched the decline in election-year civility.
Without a doubt. It shouldn’t take half a second of thought for Gore to turn down the job. Even though McCain acknowledges climate change as a problem, given McCain’s questionable record on other environmental matters, there’s no reason why a prominent Dem would hitch his cart to that horse. Once a Dem signs up to the Cabinet, he transfers all his credibility on his issues right to the President, and in return is expected to render complete loyalty and surrender any right to dissent from White House policy.
You brought up the experience question. Comment or not, but what, precisely, makes Obama unqualified to be, say, Secretary of Labor?
That’s an antique view of the VP. Before Cheney, Gore was probably the most powerful VP ever. Now, Quayle was pretty much out of the loop, but before that, both Bush I and Mondale were both intimately involved in serious policy debates. I would argue that running important White House initiatives is now just as much a part of the VP job as is going to funerals, even though the Constitution doesn’t require the Veep to do either.
Well, when I made my snarky little comment, I was thinking more of the big fish positions. But still, here’s a clipped bit of the resume of the current Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao:
As you can see, she has a fairly length record of government administration (over 3 decades, if you are counting…)
In all honesty, Secretary of State is the position that Obama would excel most in, but it is also the one he is most disqualified for, since foreign policies is one of the big differences between McCain and Obama. State is probably the one position where conforming with the president is the most important qualification.
Anyway, I will retract my comment about Obama in order to keep this thread on track.
Yeah, I definitely think Lieberman would be at the top of the list. He and McCain are friends, and if the Democrats gain a significant majority in the Senate his career is basically finished. At a minimum he’ll probably lose his Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, and he could be stripped of his seats on other committees as well.
Joe Biden might also be a possibility. I was watching Biden give a speech the other day and he had such effusive praise for McCain it made me laugh. You’re supposed to criticize him, Joe! I think they differ too much on policy for McCain to offer him a spot, though.
And McCain might try to offer a cabinet position to a moderate or blue-dog Democratic senator from a state with a Republican governor. I don’t know how many of those there are, but it would be a win-win for McCain. If they turn him down he can say he was trying to be bipartisan, if they accept then he’s just reduced the Dems’ majority in the Senate.
Obama and Clinton seem unlikely to me. McCain supposedly has a personal dislike of Obama beyond just being an opponent in the election. And Hillary is going to run for President again so I don’t know if a cabinet position is the best platform for that.
It’s hard for me to come to a decision on McCain’s tactics here. He has a longstanding conflict with the far/religious right. But he just hired the GOP operative who smeared him with the “illegitimate black baby” stuff in South Carolina during the 2000 primaries. And of course there’s Palin. It’s obvious he’s doing everything he can to get elected but I don’t know if that’s an indication of how he will conduct policy as president.
Other than Liebermann, and he’d not a Democrat, McCain’s promise bears the same relation to truthfulness as Bush’s 2000 promise to regulate carbon dioxide as one of the “four main pollutants.”
It’s merely a ploy to help the old man get elected.
I’m sure someone like Zell Miller is the sort of “moderate” Democrat that McCain will turn to.
(Please replace “moderate” with “batshit crazy”.)
There are a number of moderate Democrats in Governor’s offices who might come into the administration. Paul Bredesen, Tim Kaine, people like that.
Dan Boren, Heath Schuler, Jim Marshall, and Travis Childers, all moderate Democrats in the House, have refused to endorse Obama. It’s people like that who could find a job in a McCain administration were he looking for Democrats.
But it’s more likely, if you ask me, that he would reach into the past and pull some old Democratic Colleagues up with him. I could see Sam Nunn being offered SecDef or State. I’m sure there are a lot of retired Democrats who McCain got along with famously and left before things became this partisan. He could resurrect one or two of those.
And Lieberman goes without saying. He destroyed his career for his friend. McCain will probably give him whatever position he wants.
And if McCain is killed or removed from office, the VP has to be good enough to step into his shoes. If the VP doesn’t really have to do much normally, doesn’t that just mean you have the freedom to pick someone who is best suited to that one major duty, instead of having to pick a Jack Of All Trades?
Oh, yes. If I were Gore, an offer like that would give me visions of what happened to Colin Powell’s reputation happening to mine.
Why would any of them step down from their current offices and accept?
Why? Colin Powell wasn’t forced to do anything. If you are asked to do something against your conscience, you step down. You then have the perfect podium to the country. If you aren’t asked to do anything against your conscience, then you have been given the power and means to make a difference for your cause.
Or, you can trust your boss not to lie to you and then look like a dupe when it turns out what you’ve put your personal credibility behind turns out to be wrong.