Categorical Aperitif

Dammit, I'm going to try to be cheerier this morning by pointing to John Judis arguing that, while attention has been elsewhere, Obama has been quietly re-progressivizing government under the radar by appointing honest-to-gosh experts—people who actually know, and care about, what they're doing—to key roles in government rather than relying on, you know, fancy-horse-association commissioners and whatnot:

Yet there is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for--but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions. In doing so, he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Obama’s revival of these agencies is arguably the most significant accomplishment of his first year in office.

// posted by nash @ 8:22 AM