Paul McCartney famously remarked to his soon-to-be nemesis Allen Klein, “If you are screwing us, I don’t see how.” Conservatives may have the same feeling about Barack Obama’s appointments, which have been notable for their Establishment, centrist bent after a campaign of Leftist populism. The latest headscratcher comes at the Office of Management and Budget in the selection of Peter Orszag, who got praise from conservative stalwart Rob Portman, one of his predecessors:
Former Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who served for several years as director of the Office of Management and Budget for President George W. Bush, today enthusiastically praised President-elect Obama’s pick for the job, Peter Orszag, the current director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Portman told me in an email that Orszag is a “good man” and a “solid choice.”
“He has demonstrated courage in addressing the unsustainable growth in entitlement spending and health care costs while at the CBO,” Portman wrote. “He will now have a bigger platform to continue those efforts.”
Not everyone feels so sanguine about Obama’s economic team, as RJ Matson expresses in his St. Louis Dispatch cartoon (via TMV):
King Banaian says he can’t complain, either. John Hinderaker thinks that Obama will mostly follow the Bush model in economic policy, and speculates that this is more evidence that Obama himself was the entire scope of the change he promised, and that he alone is “the One we have been waiting for”. Thus far, given the lack of change at Defense, the inclusion of so many Clinton-era officials in his incoming administration, a Scowcroftian foreign policy, and a Greenspan-admiring economic team, it’s hard to see how Obama is screwing us.
In fact, the only ones who got screwed thus far were the far-Left groups that bought into the Hope and Change populism and thought Obama would start a new Golden Age of Progressivism. They’re going to see another round of DLC leadership instead, or the Clinton Era II — with the Clintons included.
Of course, things changed for McCartney and Klein, and they’ll change with Obama, too. At least that’s what he promised.
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