Cross-posted from The Field.
The most interesting news out of the press conference just concluded by President-elect Obama was the appointment of an unabashed progressive, Melody Barnes (in the photo, above), to head the Domestic Policy Council. Barnes will coordinate the mega-board of the Cabinet secretaries of Health and Human Services, Justice, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Energy, Treasury, Agriculture, Transportation, Interior and Veterans Affairs. Basically, she'll be domestic policy czar.
The other announcements were interesting, too...
Remember just a week or two ago when the conventional wisdom screeched in the language of "done deals" that President-elect Obama would nominate Lawrence Summers to the newly all-powerful role of Treasury Secretary?
It was only late last week that signals were sent that Tim Geithner - who, we learned this morning, speaks Chinese and Japanese, in addition to English - would get the nod instead. Interestingly, Geithner has never worked on Wall Street. His career has been mainly devoted to public service and not private profit. That's encouraging (and makes him quite distinct from the Robert Rubin looter-and-pillager mold that the media drones on about today).
Summers has instead been nominated to head the National Economic Council. But more interesting about today's press conference was that Obama also nominated two women to the other top economic posts that until earlier this morning nobody, but absolutely nobody, had predicted.
Melody Barnes, Domestic Policy Council served as chief counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee from 1985 to 1993. Want to get an idea of how progressive she is? Read this: In January of 2007, prior to President Bush's state of the union address, Barnes wrote this essay for the Washington Post, What a Progressive President Might Say:
Here at home there is urgent work to do to fight the historically high -- and growing -- gap between our richest and poorest citizens. While the mean income of households on the low end of the income spectrum -- the bottom 20 percent -- is just $10,655 a year, the income of the top twenty percent of households averages almost $160,000. That's 15 times as much. At the same time, according to the latest census figures, the middle class, beset with stagnant wages and mountainous debts, is shrinking. The sad fact is that one of our most cherished values as a society, namely equality of opportunity, is fading as a reality for far too many people...
No news agency predicted it or broke the story until two hours ago this morning when theThink Progress blog became the first - beating all commercial media at their own game - to do so.
Likewise, the nomination to head the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, went un-predicted and without leaks until just three hours before today's press conference when Politico broke the story.
Note: All the great mentioners claim that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson will become the next Commerce Secretary (clearly, that post will be part of the economic team). And that might still become so. But Richardson was not at the press conference today, nor was any such announcement made.
The lesson: When it comes to upcoming appointments, don't believe the spin. Half the appointees announced today went totally unmentioned by the rocket scientists of the political press corps until just hours before the press conference. And the guy that almost all of them claimed, at first, would get the big job at Treasury didn't get it.
Basically, until last Friday, Obama head-faked everybody (just as he did so many times during the campaign), allowing many to claim that Summers was going to be Treasury Secretary without any pushback at all until three days prior (and really, officially, until yesterday when David Axelrod basically confirmed it on ABC's This Week).
And it's still a week (or more) to go before the national security team, including Secretary of State, is announced.
Think there will be no surprises then? Think again.