Dodd for Health and Human Services, a missed opportunity

There's a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde that goes something like this --- "Enemies stab you in the back but friends stab you in the front". Something like that could possibly be said about U.S. politicians given the lack of cohesion and coherence among some Democrats.

Among President Obama's choices for his team, two stood out as meaningful beyond just their resumes and intelligence and they were Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. The Biden choice makes complete sense on the surface. He's experienced in foreign affairs and Obama is not and he has working class Pennsylvania roots where Obama had just been thrashed. The Clinton choice makes even more sense as she is a diligent and tireless worker, she had traveled the world and met foreign leaders throughout the Clinton adminstration and, for Secretary of State, she is a tough pragmatist. The added element here is that Obama effectively gained control of two of the biggest loose cannons in D.C., Biden and Bill Clinton. He did not need any possible sniping, second guessing, and wild mistatements during the first years of his presidency. So from this perspective his choices served more than one purpose.

At this point the President probably wishes that he could have come up with the same type of solution for Nancy Pelosi and Chris Dodd.

Pelosi has an amazing job that she would never be budged from so there was no possibility of doing anything about a House Speaker who is universally detested by the Republican representatives. Maybe she had to be the tough politico that she is to establish herself as Speaker. That said, she has not been any significant support to Obama and makes any bipartisan progress in the House more impossible than it already is.

With Dodd, and he's the catalyst for this entire comment, he should have been approached for Health and Human Services, which it's not entirely certain that he would have turned down. He could have pushed his buddy Ted Kennedy's long time dream of universal health care and wound down a long senatorial career with a new role, after representing a state that is unlikely to elect him again. Unfortunately he's Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the midst of this financial crisis. Yesterday's thoughtless and self aggrandizing comments on a Bloomberg Radio interview were indicative of how little he understands about the financial markets. The "we may have to national some banks for a short time" comment and the "no new money, just old TARP money" opinion voiced on the car companies were both so unwise. He's the senior Senator on banking. Either he was not thinking, not at his sharpest, or purposefully upstaging the White House. Barney Frank had to come to the rescue, quickly stating clearly what should be well known to Dodd, both the White House's position and the only way to act sanely at this point in time.

Daschle didn't make it, and if the first choice would have been Dodd he now could have been using his big picture bluster on health care proposals and out of harm's way for this crisis.