babble of homophobes

With Days until inauguration I'll share my thoughts on the pick of Rich Warren. Many on the left have been upset by the selection of Rick Warren to dive the invocation at Obama's Inauguration. I think he is a much better choice than many of Obamas actual appointments. All of his major foreign policy and economic advisers are from the right wing of the movement that got him elected.

Obama should at least have one progressive economist on his team, someone not trained by Robert Rubin. The logical choice would be Dean Baker, the only economist I know of who predicted a housing bubble at least a couple years before the burst.

In foreign policy there is no obvious choice because of the institutional set up that rewards macho. the people we would really want would all be rejected, but he could have found someone who had real and outspoken doubts about the war for a position other than administering the VA. Shinseki was described by the media as a repudiation of the Iraq war by Obama, but he isn't in a place to advise on policy. Our best hope for progress would be the development of a department of peace.

But back to the inauguration and Warren, this is an excellent position to offer to someone to is anti abortion, and homophobic. The culture wars have seen these wedge issues used to elect Republicans again and again. The symbolic hand reached out to across the cultural divide does a lot to undermine elections won on wedge issues, and costs nothing in policy. Policy of course is what we care about regarding reproductive choice and gay rights. The real question on this front is not who will give the invocation but who will Obama appoint when there are openings on the supreme court.