Into this situation comes Obama, then. His strategy requires him to do many things, but one of the central ones of these is to reassure America, to make Americans feel safe and that they are in competent and trustworthy hands, and that we can approach our problems in a spirit of constructiveness and hope rather than a spirit of conflict.
A part of that strategy of reassurance is to appoint people who say to America, "President Obama is not some sort of dangerous wild radical guy (as many of you have feared). He's not going to go off half-cocked into some kind of unAmerican vision of how things should be. He's brought on board the kind of people we've felt in good hands with before. It's going to be OK: we're not in deep, scary and uncharted territory. Obama can be trusted.” As a people, after all, we Americans are afraid of radical things. We think they are a threat."
These appointments, therefore, represent a cloak of reassurance. But it is also genuine, because Obama respects the art of the possible. And he's willing to work with what he's got (as a community organizer, as he shows in DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, what he had to work with was often pretty pathetic). And for both those reasons, he understands and accepts that he needs people who have the expertise to utilize the tools of government effectively.
They can provide the How. He can provide the What. When he said that HE WOULD SUPPLY THE VISION, he really said something profound.
People have not shown sufficient respect for that statement: his whole movement has consistently presented A VISION, and that's not just because he has good people. Those people, serving another candidate, would have readily given us a different kind of campaign. No, the consistency of the Obama campaign happened because Obama is good at putting together a group, a movement, an entity that communicates his vision.
For example: Robert Gates as Obama's Secretary of Defense will be able to be a very different Robert Gates than he was allowed to be under the Bushites. Hillary will be a different Secretary of State working for Obama than she would have had her secretary of state be if SHE were president.
Out of these people, Obama will make a team to achieve his vision.
They are just as well-selected (if not as well-suited) for that mission as Axelrod and Plouffe. The inner circle partakes more of the same spirit, but the new outer circle is capable of receiving that vision and carrying it forward --by virtue of the flow of authority if not as much by the inspiration of the spirit-- to move things as Obama wants them moved.
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