Team Of Drivel

by digby

If you’re looking for an intelligent dissent from the received wisdom that Obama’s “team of rivals” is really all that diverse, Tomgram has one. Here’s the intro:

Historian Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, has been writing at TomDispatch about both the Great Depression and the possibility of a modern version of the same for some time. Now, he returns to the dawn of the Rooseveltian era to offer a unique and telling comparison — between FDR’s expansive, experimental “brain trust” and Obama’s new “team of rivals.” In his usual fashion, he raises the truly pregnant question: What kind of new administration could actually get beyond Roosevelt’s era as well as our own staggering disaster, leaving “the bailout state” behind us?

His view is that rather than concentrating on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s pop history about Lincoln, Obama should be thinking about Roosevelt’s first cabinet, which brought together a very diverse group of original thinkers to do some seriously imaginative experimentation. He characterizes the Obama choices so far as being from a fairly narrow group of neo-liberals who are unlikely to bring the kind of intellectual diversity that’s needed for the magnitude of this crisis.

It’s well worth a read.