This analysis — reported by AEI and sourced to JP Morgan researchers — examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy.
It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.
AEI, Help Wanted, No Private Sector Experience Required, November 25, 2009
http://blog.american.com/?p=7572
In the Obama administration over 90 percent of the players’ prior experience was in the public sector, academia, or law practices. Virtually no “business experience” per se.
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Ken’s Take:
(1) Quibble with the numbers, but directionally the conclusion fits — which is why the Faux Stimulus didn’t work, why the spending is out of control, why there’s sloppy implementation (think Cash for Clunkers), and why businesses refuse to rebuild their payrolls.
(2) Note that the analysis was sourced to JP Morgan. I’ve heard from my sources that off-the-record boardroom commentaries re: the Obama administration has turned very, very negative. But, public commentary is constrained by fear of vindictive government retribution (think pay caps, voiding of contracts, etc.). Surprised me that JPM is associated with the analysis.
(3) Liberal blogs have marshalled to debunk the 10% number for Obama’s advisers. Their rebuttals are laughable — largely claiming that private sector experience includes having had a parent who had a real job. having been a lawyer with at least one private sector client, having run a campaign, or having been a university administrator. For example, here are a couple of my favorites:
Vice President Joe Biden – Private experience: Yes. Biden’s father worked in the private sector his entire life — unsuccessfully for a critical period. Biden attended a private university’s law school (Syracuse), and operated a successful-because-of-property-management law practice for three years before winning election to the U.S. Senate. Running a campaign is a private business, too — and Biden’s first campaign was masterful entrepreneurship.
Secretary of Interior Kenneth L. Salazar – Private sector experience: Yes. Besides a distinguished career in government, as advisor and Cabinet Member with Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, Salazar was a successful private-practice attorney from 1981 to 1985, and then again from 1994 to 1998 when he won election as Colorado’s Attorney General. Salazar’s family is in ranching, and he is usually listed as a “rancher from Colorado.”
Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis – Private sector experience: Yes. Solis’s father was a Teamster and union organizer who contracted lead poisoning on the job; her mother was an assembly line worker for Mattel Toys. She overachieved in high school and ignored her counselor’s advice to avoid college, and earned degrees from Cal Poly-Pomona and USC. She held a variety of posts in federal government before returning to California to work for education and win election to the California House and California Senate, and then to Congress.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – Private sector experience: Yes. Duncan earned Academic All-American honors in basketball at Harvard. His private sector is among the more unusual of any cabinet member’s, and more competitive. Duncan played professional basketball: “From 1987 to 1991, Duncan played professional basketball in Australia with the Eastside Spectres of the [Australian] National Basketball League, and while there, worked with children who were wards of the state. He also played with the Rhode Island Gulls and tried out for the New Jersey Jammers.” Since leaving basketball he’s worked in education, about four years in a private company aiming to improve education.
To verify the above examples — and for a few more chuckles — check out
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/obamas-well-qualified-cabinet-conservatives-hoaxed-by-j-p-morgan-chart-that-verifies-prejudices/
The Homa Files 
December 4, 2009 at 7:33 pm |
You highlight the experience you don’t like of these people, but you fail to note I only count the work experience of the person in the cabinet, and not their parents.
The author of the chart at J. P. Morgan is withdrawing it, because, he says, it strove for a simple answer to a complex question, and the simple answer that resulted is “wrong” in his terms — I would say simply misleading.
What sort of business do we really need in our Secretary of Labor, for example? Putting in a company CEO (or finance officer) proved disastrous for labor, for the management of companies that were unioinized, and to the economy.
But what would you have said had Obama picked Rich Trumka for Labor?
Steven Chu is probably the best qualified man in the world to talk jobs and energy right now. You deride his extensive private sector experience — but he is the only cabinet member ever to have won a Nobel prize for his private sector work. Is that not exactly the sort of example we need? Is there not at least the possibility that Nobel-winning scientist might have a good idea? The public was well served by Dick Feynman’s service on the Challenger Shuttle disaster commission.
What we need is someone who can get the job done, and do it right — and in this climate, the job isn’t even well define, let alone the solutions.
Obama’s cabinet is better poised for such turmoil than any other cabinet in history. Look at the wrecks that resulted from business stacked cabinets in Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Nixon administrations.
Your claim here is the perfect sort of argument for a party and political philosophy who have nothing but complaints and whines to offer. It sounds bad, though it’s not. It gives some opportunity to bumpkins to complain that these well-qualified men and women are somehow inferior. And it frustrates any rational action to save the nation.
Isn’t the destruction of the American nation what you’re really after?
Then tell us, in detail, what bad decisions have been made in the Obama cabinet, especially that can be laid at the feet of Steven Chu, Gary Lock, Hilda Solis, and Tim Geithner? What was the alternative anyone else offered?
June 15, 2010 at 6:50 am |
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