Say what you will about the Carter administration...he had some very bright people around him. This will be a short diary, but the bottom line is that talent counts.
Everytime I've ever seen Zbig on TV for the past few years, I'm left with the feeling..."why don't we have people this smart in our government anymore?" He is, by far, the most serious and analytical foreign policy analyst that I've ever listened to since I graduated High School. And he is fiercely honest. Not long ago he appeared in "Morning Joe", confronting bot Joe and his daughter, and shredded them into tiny, indistinguishable pieces with his logic. His daughter was left with the only option...to hang her head. It wasn't, I think, in shame...rather it was in deferrence to his intelligence and debating skills.
Wouldn't it be nice to have smart men like this in government once again?
Carter was criticized as a technocrat. That's another way of saying that he cared about the policy, and he cared about the details. And he respected facts. Maybe more so, to his detriment, than he respected Harris polls.
But he surrounded himself with better talent than most Democratic presidents since then...with the possible exception of Hamilton Jordan. (To be fair...Ham did the job he was hired to do...he was probably just kept on the payroll too long.) Cecil Andrus was an exceptional Secretary of Interior. Cy Vance was a pretty competent Sec. of State. Griffin Bell was a good Attorney General. He chose good people...and good people matter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was an impressive National Security Advisor. He understood, and continues to understand, the world and how its players interact. He doesn't look at things through an ideological prism, nor did he ever look at things through the particular prism of the president he worked for. He is clear sighted. And damned smart.
Shame we don't have more like him in public service these days. And by "these days", I don't mean the last 12 months. I mean the last 20 years.
But then...I'm a sucker for technocrats. I guess it's their dedication to problem solving, instead of internal polling.
Rather than add a poll, which I thought of doing but couldn't figure out how to pose...I'd ask all respondents to simply name the cabinet official they consider to be the most competent, most intelligent or most effective over the past 30 years. It would be interesting to see what personalities, and personality traits, rise to the top.