The Washington Post reports that corporate crooks are rushing to cut deals with the Bush Justice Department in order to avoid the looming Wrath of Barack. Kevin Drum remarks:

This is good news. It means that real corporations, with real money at stake, think that Obama’s unity talk isn’t worth banking on. When push comes to shove, they really do think he’s going to drive a harder bargain than the Bush administration when it comes to dealing with charges of corruption, pollution, and overcharging.

Fair enough, but “not as bad as Bush” is a pretty low bar to cross. Meanwhile, Bush has done enormous harm to the country. One could be a decent president who mostly improves things and still leave us below where we were when Bush took over in the first place. There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Obama could improve on the Bush record. But mere improvement isn’t, to coin a phrase, the change we need.

I didn’t really think of this when it was first announced, but one advantage to appointing a big-shot like Hillary Clinton — and perhaps more important than being a big-shot, someone for whom saying “yes” wasn’t a no-brainer — to head the State Department is that it gives her the clout to argue forcefully for a rebalancing of institutional power away from the Pentagon and toward Foggy Bottom. That’s something the country needs, and even Robert Gates has acknowledged that it’s something we need, but Secretary-designate Clinton has both the motivation and the clout and network and credibility needed to get the job done. The official news that James Steinberg will be her Deputy is also good news. As Steve Clemons observes Steinberg was one of those who recognized the wisdom of setting a date for getting out of Iraq before that became the politically kosher stance for big-shot Democrats to take. Ironically, his co-author on the piece in question was Michael O’Hanlon who later backed off that view, but Steinberg never has. Steinberg also wanted to meet some bloggers at Netroots Nation over the summer, which I think makes him more aware than most security wonks of where things are headed in terms of activist groups.

I’m less sure that having the State Department play a bigger role in international economic policy is really such a great idea. Letting the Treasury lead on this worked fine during the Clinton administration and insofar as it hasn’t worked under Bush it’s been because his Treasury Secretaries have been unimpressive and subcabinet jobs have often lingered vacant for long periods of time. In general, I’d like to see economic people more involved with foreign policy rather than foreign policy people more involved with economics.

The idea of reviving the practice of sending “special envoys” to places is a good one. The three people specifically named as potential envoys to deal with the Israel-Arab conflict, however, were not so encouraging — I’m not sure either Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, or Richard Holbrooke would be seen as credible honest brokers in that role. There are a lot of other parts of the world where Holbrooke, in particular, could be very effective and where that wouldn’t be an issue. Of the buzzed-about names for Israel-Arab issues, Dan Kurtzer continues to be my favorite, though in principle anyone could be good in that job if they really want to be.

Transition announcement today that Barack Obama intends to form a White House Task Force on Working Families, to be chaired by Joe Biden and to include “the Secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce, as well as the Directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, and the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.”

It’s a bit hard to say what that’s going to accomplish, but in the announcement Biden says “Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering? President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.” It’s good to see these questions getting asked. Over the past eight years to a remarkable degree the focus has been on trying to put as good a spin as possible on things rather than on trying to actually improving wages and living standards for the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

It seems Barack Obama is poised to nominate Dan Tarullo for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to being a law professor at Georgetown, Tarullo is a CAP senior fellow:

Professor Tarullo held several senior positions in the Clinton administration, ultimately as Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy, responsible for coordinating the international economic policy of the administration. He was a principal on both the National Economic Council and the National Security Council. Prior to his appointment to that position, he had been Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, with special responsibility for regulatory and international issues.

From 1993 until early 1996, he was Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs. In March 1995, President Clinton appointed Tarullo as his personal representative (“sherpa”) to the G-7/G-8 group of industrialized nations, with responsibility for coordinating U.S. positions for the annual Leaders Summits. He continued this assignment after he moved to the White House, participating in four summits.

Before joining the administration, Professor Tarullo practiced law in Washington and served as Chief Counsel for Employment Policy on the staff of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Earlier in his career he worked in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, served as Special Assistant to the Undersecretary of Commerce, and taught at Harvard Law School.

You can read some of his CAP stuff on reforming the IMF and World Bank, or trade deals and labor rights, and the case for reviving the Doha round. Now as it happens none of that is especially relevant to his new job. But still, there it is.

UPDATE: This might be more relevant: Banking on Basel: The Future of International Financial Regulation.

The Hill is almost reporting that Barack Obama will appoint Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois as Transportation Secretary.

In principle, I think this is a great slot for a bipartisan pick. In practice, Democrats tend to be better on transportation issues than Republicans, but there isn’t actually a ton of ideological linkage between these issues and the broad disagreements between the parties. You could think abortion is murder, and also that investment in high-speed rail would be a good idea. Or you could favor tax cuts and congestion pricing on roads. And of course lots of Democrats have terrible views on transportation issues.

As for LaHood, he’s no Paul Weyrich, but he did break with the GOP to support the Passenger Rail Investment Act and the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act so that seems promising.

I didn’t know a great deal about Ken Salazar’s environmental record, but according to Grist‘s Kate Sheppard he’s been quite solid on most “green” issues with the important exception of agriculture where he’s done things like vote against “a subsidy-reform amendment to the farm bill that would have boosted conservation funding by $1.2 billion and made access to the funds more equitable.” And the shocking reality of the legislative politics of agriculture is that the amendment in question failed by a large margin.

Meanwhile, Tom Vilsack is going to be Agriculture Secretary. Vilsack did some very important yeoman’s work a few years back trying to heal the wounds between the labor-oriented and centrist factions of the progressive movement, but on farm issues as far as anyone knows he’s a very conventional Iowa subsidy guy. Given the Obama administration’s high environmental aspirations, it seems perverse to just pretend that agricultural policy doesn’t have environmental impact. But that’s the convention in American politics and it looks like something Team Obama is comfortable with.

Arne Duncan always seemed like the obvious choice for Secretary of Education to me. He works in Chicago, just like Obama. Obama knows him personally. He went to Harvard and he plays basketball. On top of that, he’s had a good record in Chicago. And compared to other reform-oriented big city superintendents he has a much better relationship with teacher’s unions.

Under the circumstances, it seems to me that there was an enormous tactical cleverness in the way Obama let this thing play out with increasing levels of hysteria from unions and reformers about potential choices. If Obama had done the obvious thing early, it’s possible that both sides would have come away disappointed. But by getting everyone afraid of the specter of Joel Klein or Linda Darling-Hammond, he wound up making a pick who makes everyone happy. And, honestly, everyone should be happy! Of course this means conflicts will now be deferred onto subcabinet choices and so forth. But I would say that with NCLB architects George Miller and Ted Kennedy still running the relevant committees in congress and a reformist in the White House, the basic principles of testing and accountability look set to remain in place.

Meanwhile, the team of ballers has just added its most accomplished player. Duncan was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and after graduation he played professionally in Australia for several years. That puts him a cut above the pick-up crew that you’ll see in the rest of the administration.

Inauguration planning we can believe in:

In the tradition of past Presidents-elect, the daylong trip will include a series of events on the way to Washington, D.C. Saturday morning, President-elect Obama and his family will hold an event in Philadelphia before boarding a train bound for Wilmington, Delaware, where he will be joined by Vice President-elect Biden and his family. Together, the families will travel to Baltimore, Maryland, and hold another event, before finally arriving in Washington, D.C. on Saturday evening.

Good times.

Via James Fallows, a 2004 interview with Energy Secretary Designate Steven Chu from Harry Kreisler’s “Conversations With History” series at UC Berkeley:

Also a further thought on Chu. When his appointment was announced, I observed that the Secretary of Energy doesn’t actually have the sort of sweeping authority over energy policy issues that the title implies to many people. It was observed to me by a correspondent that Chu’s background as a research scientist, rather than say in economics or public policy, actually makes him quite well-suited to the realities of the job as various endeavors in the research and innovation fields are probably the most important programs the Energy Department actually runs.