A Few Days Later

So on Wednesday, as part of my post-election re-adjustment, i was watchng Rachel Maddow, and Rachel Maddow says something about how Obama is thinking of Larry Summers for Treasury Secretary and she's all, "Really? Larry Summers? Who said something like girls can't do math?" She was referring to a comment Summers made when he was President of Harvard in which he mused on some biological difference or brain structure thing that made women less successful in math and science. Granted, it was enraging that he said it and he didn't seem to take into account the machismo culture of those fields or the funding structure that makes family life extremely difficult. But when I heard Maddow's comment, I thought, "C'mon Rachel, that's not fair. The guy's already been Treasury Secretary once...."

Which is to say I'm already sick of people second guessing Obama's decisions. In one of the many postmortems of the Clinton administration, I read that one of the problems with the first administration was that all of Clinton's people came in on this huge high as swashbucklers who didn't know the ways and means of Washington and didn't care. They thought they could do things their own way, and so they did. And what did we get with them doing things their own way? We got: Don't ask don't tell, a doomed health care plan and, in 1992, the Contract with America and a Newt Gingrich-Republican-controlled Congress.

So, you know what I say? I say it would be a change for a new administration, a new Democratic administration, to come in and hit the ground running and work the system effectively. There's change from within and change from without and Rahm Emanuel may be a jerk and Lawrence Summers might have been the wrong guy to run Harvard, but they know their fields, government and the economy respectively, and they've proven they know how to get things done within them.

Granted, this might be a little bit of blind faith on my part, but the change we need is not only an end to hyper-partisanship, it's an end to armchair quarterbacking every single decision from day one. Sure, the blogosphere needs words, but it also needs some thoughts. And some patience. Damnit.