The incoming Biden administration’s cupboard carries a powerful whiff of deja vu, and that’s no accident – the uninspiring president-elect is staking every thing on evoking a misplaced utopia that by no means existed beneath ex-president Obama.
The Biden marketing campaign’s rule of thumb for his cupboard appointments appears to be to channel the Obama administration – with an additional serving to of wokeness the place attainable. This has seen him float Pentagon veteran and dyed-in-the-wool megahawk Michele Flournoy because the first-ever feminine Secretary of Protection and former DACA czar Alejandro Mayorkas as the primary Latino-Jewish head of the Division of Homeland Safety.
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There’s additionally the rumor he’s planning to choose Obama’s former Fed chair Janet Yellen because the first-ever feminine Treasury Secretary – however even when she’s not the fortunate girl, fellow former Clinton adviser Lael Brainard might get the nod, or one in all two black candidates – one in all whom occurs to be homosexual. Whoever he picks, they’ll be a “first” – and, given their institutional historical past as dependable servants of the ruling class beneath Obama, a reliable supply of more-of-the-same fiscal insurance policies.
Lest all this wokeness flip off the Republicans who defected to Biden out of distaste for President Donald Trump’s willpower to upset the military-industrial applecart, the presumed president has additionally introduced again ex-Secretary of State John Kerry, who’ll be returning to Washington to function a ‘local weather czar’ on the Nationwide Safety Council. Whereas Kerry could be the primary individual to carry such a place, which is able to enable him to skip a Senate affirmation that may very well be unfriendly given the chamber’s Republican management, Kerry’s time on the head of the State Division noticed the Obama administration proceed digging the US deeper into its portfolio of ill-advised wars. And Kerry was the person who signed the Paris Local weather Accords on behalf of Washington in 2016, a treaty President Donald Trump wasted no time eradicating the US from. He ought to go down lots easy certainly.
A lot of the Biden picks have been second-stringers in the course of the Obama years and thus haven’t fairly grow to be family names but. That is more likely to be a degree of their favor – if the historical past of would-be Secretary of State Antony Blinken is any indication, Biden has good purpose for selecting relative unknowns. A report from the American Prospect revealed Blinken had spent the post-Obama years getting wealthy fast at consulting agency WestExec – which coincidentally (or not) was co-founded by would-be Pentagon chief Flournoy after her most up-to-date stint on the Pentagon. The agency focuses on “serving to new firms navigate the advanced paperwork of successful Pentagon contracts” – suggesting a Biden presidency gained’t simply ship a fatter Pentagon funds, however new wars to go together with it.
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It’s no shock, then, that Washington-watchers are sinking into deja vu. Biden was elected because the “anti-Trump,” a return to some imprecise fantasy of “normalcy”. Besides the nostalgia for the Obama period that helped shoehorn Biden into workplace earlier this month was primarily based on an entirely artificial reimagining of the eight years wherein the profession politician served as vp.
Obama could have inherited George W. Bush’s monetary disaster in 2008, born of rapacious funding banks that mistook individuals’s life financial savings at no cost chips from a on line casino, however the “restoration” he claimed as his personal by no means bothered to elevate up most working- and middle-class Individuals. Many of those misplaced their properties, and in the event that they didn’t, their kids “didn’t launch,” in no place to strike out on their very own. The youthful technology have been both mired in scholar debt or merely unable to afford even the most cost effective ‘starter properties’ on account of an absence of living-wage jobs open to younger adults getting into the office.
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Biden made it clear repeatedly within the run-up to this month’s election that he had no real interest in feeling these individuals’s ache. “I’ve no empathy for it – give me a break,” he stated, complaining that millennials had been given every thing by his personal technology, the Child Boomers. In actuality, these “whiners” so loathed by the president-to-be made 20 p.c lower than Biden’s technology on the similar age at finest – assuming they have been fortunate sufficient to have a job in any respect. Again when it was nonetheless thought-about acceptable to trash Biden, most institution shops raked him over the coals for such tone-deaf feedback. However such negativity was memory-holed when the Democrats topped Biden their choose to run towards Trump – talking unwell of the anointed one obtained progressives labeled Trump supporters or Nazis or worse.
These whose rose-colored glasses allow them to see Biden because the second coming of Obama overlook that “Bush in a black-man go well with” turned two wars into seven, allowed Citibank – one of many worst offenders of the 2008 monetary disaster – to form his cupboard, and handed a mockery of “common healthcare” that pressured the lower-middle-class to buy medical health insurance they couldn’t afford or shoulder a tax penalty in addition they couldn’t afford. Biden has promised to reignite the struggle in Syria, veto the precise common healthcare coverage that’s Medicare for All, and guarantee nothing will basically change for his fat-cat Wall Avenue donors – and people donors appear to be choosing his cupboard identical to they did his boss’ in 2008.
The extra issues change, the extra they keep the identical.
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