It's too early to judge how effective President Obama's programs will be, but almost all of us have formed some opinion about the substance and style of his administration based on his Cabinet appointments, the economic stimulus bill that he is trying to get passed, his repudiation of some of the more extreme policies of the Bush Administration, and his attempts at trying to push for what some Democratic commentators describe as bipartisan or centrist solutions to the nation's problems.
For many people all the early signs are reassuring, if nothing else because Obama comes across as reasonable and intelligent, unlike his predecessor, and because most of what he has proposed at a macro level doesn't seem wildly out of step with the consensus view of Democratic politicians and the more liberal and moderate members of the pundit class.
Those of us who believe the country is in much more desperate straits than generally acknowledged have a less favorable view of Obama and his administration—based mainly on a belief that much more radical measures are required to salvage the economy, and based to a somewhat lesser extent on a bias against letting insiders from past administrations dominate the process of undoing the harm caused by those same administrations.
But looking back to the start of the 2008 Presidential campaign, I'm wondering: how different do people think things would be if one of the other Democratic candidates had emerged victorious in the primaries and general election?
Specifically I'm thinking of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and, to a lesser extent, John Edwards and Bill Richardson. One view you could take regarding the primaries was that they were basically a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" test, weeding out the candidates who weren't able to present themselves as credible and inspiring. So by that standard Barack Obama won because he was the best candidate. Besides being a bit tautological, this ignores that being the best candidate in the Democratic primaries does not always mean one will be the best candidate in the general election, even when Democratic voters are foregoing their ideological concerns in favor of trying to pick a candidate based on "electability".
In retrospect it's obvious that John Edwards and probably Bill Richardson would never have survived a general election campaign because of scandals and allegations of scandal, so it appears Democratic voters did the smart thing by rejecting them. While Richardson's future is still up in the air, Edwards has probably seen the end of his political career. But even with Richardson's unequivocal promise to bring the troops home from Iraq and Edwards's populist campaign themes about the Americans being left behind by the (then) New Economy, in the unlikely circumstance that either had made it through a general election and won the Presidency, would their appointees and policy initiatives have been that different from Obama's?
And the same question could be asked even more pointedly of Clinton, Biden and Dodd. While their differences were made out to be large in the primaries, the reality is that there didn't seem to be any very dramatic areas of disagreement among them. Paul Krugman made much of whether Clinton's plan to "mandate" that uninsured Americans give their money to profit-driven insurance companies (for minimal medical coverage policies) was better than Obama's merely wanting to "incent" the same behavior. But those were minor shades of difference in comparison with Dennis Kucinich's Medicare-For-All plan. I'm leaving Kucinich out of this thought exercise (and Mike Gravel) because the Democratic Party establishment will never allow someone that "far out" to have a shot at the nomination (any more than the Republicans would let a Ron Paul type have a real shot in their process).
The pool of talent that the Democrats have to draw upon is relatively small if you look mainly to people of relatively recent vintage in Washington and New York power circles for potential appointees. New Presidents also are likely to bring along other politicians and civil servants from their home states, like Jimmy Carter did with Griffin Bell and Hamilton Jordan, and as Obama has done with Rahm Emanuel and Ray Lahood. But there is considerable resistance to bringing in too many real outsiders. Even a former insider like Gary Hart, who seemed like the obvious choice for either Defense or Homeland Security to some of us, has been away from the bright lights for too long to be given much serious consideration now. The people who have kept their faces in the media and stayed close to the Democratic campaign organizations are the ones shaping the new administration.
So, despite the passions engendered by the campaign for the Democratic nomination, would we really be seeing that many different faces or any different policy emphasis in a Hillary Clinton administration or a Chris Dodd administration or a Joe Biden administration? Would even John Edwards have brought in outsiders and unknowns, or would he also have accepted the wisdom of party elders as to where to look for filling senior administration posts? Were the primaries chiefly about finding us the most charismatic and effective campaigner, or were policy issues of major substance and the overall direction of the next administration ever really in doubt based on who the eventual nominee would be? Would Hillary Clinton have brought in that many more alumni of the Bill Clinton administration versus the number Barack Obama has appointed? Would John Edwards have whipped up a populist frenzy against the Wall Street banksters, or would he also have looked at the party's big donor list and decided to tread more cautiously?
The ultimate question, I guess, is how much opportunity election campaigns offer the voters to fundamentally change their own party's preferred policy options and insider versus outsider domination of leadership positions. Even turning to the Republican side, we can see that the positions of all the candidates (except Paul) rapidly converged to the same orthodoxy, to the point that John McCain lost the faux maverick glamor that he had worked so carefully to build up over the preceding decade—and, with it, probably his only real chance of winning the election. On the Democratic side there was more disagreement, but the disagreement was more in implementation details than over the broad direction or philosophy of the party. Or that's how it seems to me anyway, although my opinions often seem to be out of step (either too left-wing or too right-wing, depending on the issue) with what seems to the consensus here. What's your opinion?