Big memo below the fold from the Transition. Headline is that the Agency Review Team looking at the Department of Treasury will be led by Josh Gotbaum and Michael Warren about whom I know nothing, the State team will be led by Tom Donilon (author of a transition-relevant Foreign Affairs article) and Wendy Sherman (sound views, worked closely with Madeleine Albright and understands the department), and the Defense team by John White (expertise in defense organization issues, Kennedy School Middle East Initiative) and Michèle Flournoy (who’s already being talked about as America’s first woman defense secretary).

Beyond that, it’s very nice to see the named Reed Hundt and Sarah Sewall as members of the Agency Review Working Group.

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One of my first print articles ever was dedicated to bashing Max Baucus so let’s say I’m a Max Baucus skeptic. But earlier today while I was out on the Toblerone Line (anti-tank fortifications, not candy) and the global financial system continued to melt down, he released an ambitious blueprint for health care reform. Such things are too important to be left to someone like me who can’t give it full attention. So consider some links:

• Krugman.
• Volsky.
• Cohn.
• Klein.

All are fairly enthusiastic. Which turns out to be because Baucus’ plan is basically Hillary Clinton’s plan which was basically John Edwards’ plan. And, indeed, those plans were quite similar to Barack Obama’s plan. But Baucus differs from Obama in including a universal mandate to purchase health insurance.

One point that illustrates to me is that it was always a bit misleading to construe the mandate debate as one pitting a “more ambitious” mandate-laden plan against a more politically timid mandate-free plan. Rather, I think it’s better to look at this as pitting two different theories of political expediency against each other. To the man on the street, things probably look better if your plan can be attacked as forcing people to do stuff. But of course to an insurance company executive or his lobbyists, things look better if your plan doesn’t allow the young and healthy (i.e., the actuarially desirable clients) to opt out of buying your product. Max Baucus is not much of a political risk-taker, but he is very attuned to the moods of insurance company interests and feels, plausibly, that the kind of quid pro quid structure of a mandate/regulate plan is the best chance to get things through even if it’s also more vulnerable to rhetorical assault in some ways.

The surprising thing to me, however, is that Baucus’ plan retains the public/private competition aspect of the generic Democratic health care proposal. That’s always seemed to me to be a very important goal that would probably need to be bargained away in order to pass a bill. But Baucus is one of the most conservative Democrats (Johnson, Landrieux, and Ben Nelson were to his right in the last congress) and if he’s really willing to back that idea, and especially if he’s willing to contemplate moving through the reconciliation process, we may well get it.

As Josh Marshall indicates, you need to understand talk of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary in the broader context of an effort to coopt the pragmatic realist wing of the GOP (for which “Scowcroft” is a good shorthand) and bring it into Obama’s coalition. I wrote my post-election column about this last week.

But here’s the nickle version. What you don’t want to do is “move to the center” on national security issues with Gates on board as a bipartisan token of said centrism. What you want to do is redefine the center away from the neocon / liberal hawk center that dominated public debate in 2002-2005 in favor of a new progressive / realist center that’s prepared to undertake bold regional diplomacy aimed not only at extricating ourselves from Iraq, but also achieving diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran and Syria and making progress on Israel/Palestine issues. There’s some reason — Gates’ 2004 CFR Task Force Report on Iran, the Jim Baker’s call for a “diplomatic surge” in the Baker/Hamilton report, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama, pointed non-endorsements of McCain by Brent Scowcroft and Chuck Hagel, Nick Burns’ Time article on the need to talk with dictators — to believing that forging such a synthesis in a bipartisan way is possible.

But at the same time that I think there’s promise in this approach, on some level it’s just hard for me to assess. Obviously, before appointing anyone to anything you’d want to talk to them and see what they think. But of course Gates isn’t going to take my calls. Perhaps he has terribly wrongheaded views on all sorts of key subjects. But perhaps not. This is the kind of thing the Obama transition team needs to assess and unfortunately there’s not much light that those of us on the outside can really shed on the whole thing.

It’s a wonderful thing to see a black man preparing to be inaugurated as President of the United States. This, naturally, has led to a lot of feel-good rhetoric about race relations. But it seems to me that there are some ways of looking at the data that suggest that Obama’s candidacy has actually increased racial polarization in the political domain. Read this from Larry Bartels, for example:

However, there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting that racial resentment eroded Obama’s support among white voters. His gains relative to Kerry were significantly smaller in states with large numbers of African-Americans—a pattern disguised in the overall vote totals by his strong support among African-Americans themselves. In the former Confederacy he gained only slightly over Kerry among white voters, despite making big gains in two key swing states, North Carolina and Virginia. The only states in the country in which he lost more than a point or two of white support were Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The notable resistance of southern whites to Obama’s candidacy continues a half-century trend sparked by the demise of the unnatural southern Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era. From 1952 through 2004, the average level of support for Democratic presidential candidates fell by more than 15 points among white southerners while increasing slightly among whites in the rest of the country. This year’s pattern reinforces that long-term shift, underlining the extent to which the Democratic Party’s much-discussed “culture” problem is really a regional problem rooted in white racial resentment.

The issue in play here is to some extent obscured by the general upward trajectory. But overall, Obama improved on John Kerry’s vote share by 4.2 percentage points. His share of the white vote, by contrast, went up by only two percentage points whereas his share of the African-American vote went up seven points and of the Hispanic vote by 14 points. In other words, there was more rather than less divergence in white and non-white voting behavior.