The New Center-Right

David Sanger for The New York Times:

Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet – Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury – suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party.

Honestly, I’d like to see some more hard-core liberals in the cabinet — and maybe we’ll get ‘em at Energy, Interior, etc. But in some respects this is the genius of picking a relatively moderate cabinet. We’ve got Rahm Emannuel promising to “throw long and deep” on health care and energy, Tom Daschle spearheading the charge for universal health care, the president-elect talking about hundreds of billions in new stimulus spending, and endless reiteration of the idea that there will be no retreat from the campaign’s ambitious goals on carbon curbs. Putting reassuring faces on an agenda of ambitious policy change strikes me as dramatically preferable to appointing a lot of liberals whose job is to sell the progressive base on the need to trim and abandon campaign commitments.

Jockeying for jobs is a very important part of life for DC insiders, and I would never deny that I’d strongly prefer to see my various friends and acquaintances get choice positions than see the reverse happen, but in the real world its the policies that matter. If universal health care, a clean energy economy, withdrawal of troops from Iraq, an end to torture, and massive new infrastructure investments are a “center-right” agenda because Tim Geithner is Secretary of Treausry then I’ll take it. The crux of the matter is to keep pressing for the agenda.