Good Picks

With all the focus and attention on Hillary Clinton, some of the other strongly rumored choices for the Obama Administration are getting less scrutiny. One is pretty big: Eric Holder as the next Attorney General.

President-elect Obama has decided to tap Eric Holder as his attorney general, putting the veteran Washington lawyer in place to become the first African-American to head the Justice Department, according to two legal sources close to the presidential transition.

Holder, who served as deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, still has to undergo a formal “vetting” review by the Obama transition team before the selection is final and is publicly announced, said one of the sources, who asked not to be identified talking about the transition process. But in the discussions over the past few days, Obama offered Holder the job and he accepted, the source said. The announcement is not likely until after Obama announces his choices to lead the Treasury and State departments.

Holder was #2 at Justice under Janet Reno and the DC US Attorney from 1993-1997. He was an early and enthusiastic Obama supporter. He apparently was involved with signing off on the Marc Rich pardon, but that won't hold up the confirmation process. And he's really good on what we care about:

Holder charged the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was a "moral hazard," which he compared to the original constitutional flaw that permitted slavery to continue, to President Lincoln's decision to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War and to the decision by President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Japanese internment camps during World War II.

"We have squandered one of our greatest strengths as a nation," Holder said, taking a partisan swipe at the Bush administration.

He insisted it was disgraceful that the Supreme Court "had to order the president to treat detainees in accord with the Geneva Convention."

In the months and years since 9/11, the Bush administration took many steps that were excessive and unlawful," Holder continued. "We authorized torture and we let fear take precedence over the rule of law, as we overreacted to perceived danger."

In addition to closing Gitmo, Holder insisted the next president should:

* Declare without qualification a policy that the United States will not torture political detainees, engage in forced interrogations or submit people to degrading treatment in prison;

* End all programs, covert or otherwise, to transfer detainees to nations that practice torture;

* Stop domestic search and seizures without warrant and end wiretapping of citizens.

"We have lost our way before," Holder told the 350 attendees at the Friday evening session. "Now we must step back into the shining path envisioned by our founding fathers in such icons of liberty as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

I'm OK with that.

And I'm even more OK with the appointment of Peter Orszag as White House Budget Director.

President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to tap Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag, once a veteran economic adviser in the Clinton White House, to become his budget director, according to several National Journal sources. The Office of Management and Budget job -- seen as a key post to help Obama deliver on his domestic policy agenda amidst the gloom of a $700 billion federal financial rescue, a recession and the prospects of a $1 trillion deficit next year -- carries Cabinet rank. An announcement is expected soon, but could come with other personnel decisions Obama is making to lead the Treasury Department and National Economic Council in his White House.

Orszag is young, smart, and has been fantastic on health care policy (he says reform is desperately needed to stave off a budget nightmare) and climate change. He also happens to be the only Budget Director ever to have been a blogger.

These are Clinton Administration officials, but I would hardly call them "Clintonites." The fact is that finding anyone with relevant experience to lead in the new Administration will ultimately have ties to the only Democratic President of the last 28 years. And besides, a lot of people LIKED the Clinton Administration. It had a lot of diligent employees working in it, and not everyone there was somehow tainted by the missed opportunities at the top.

Now, if Obama would give Eliot Spitzer a second chance and a shot running a regulatory agency, I'd be pretty happy about all this....