‘Tis the season for great bargains, including in government! Instead of paying full price for Hope and Change, the incoming Barack Obama administration plans on knocking off 63%. That’s the number of Clinton officials in the transition team:
As the Obama transition team reviews the federal government’s network of agencies, President Bill Clinton’s appointees and staffers are playing a major role.
Just how big? At least 85 of the 135-odd members of President-elect Barack Obama’s agency review teams served in the Clinton administration, a Washington Wire count shows.
That’s nearly two-thirds of the members of the working groups reviewing agency issues, and the Clinton resurrection has not gone unnoticed. “Here’s how you can tell the campaign is over and done with,” wrote Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown in Politico. “Clintonites are everywhere.”
The quality of change is even more strained within that 63% of rehires. Easha Anand notes that several of them are in charge of their former policy areas, which makes some sense — if you don’t want change but a return to the Clinton Era. Washington can be an insular town, but surely Obama could have found other people with fresh ideas for the future.
It’s worth asking what that percentage would have been in a Hillary Clinton administration. Would she have dared to comprise two-thirds of her staff with Clinton-era retreads? Or would she have wanted to get some space between her husband’s presidency and her own?
Hope and change …. discounted 63%.
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