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In foreign and security policy, where Trump tried new avenues with some diplomatic success in the Middle East, among other places, Biden is investing in secure cards.
If the pattern of appointments continues, the Biden administration could be a disappointment to the radical left flank of Democrats. As for the millions of Trump voters whose interests Biden has promised to try to obey as president of the entire United States.
In 2016, Trump voters voted about a president who promised to “repeal the administrative state” and “drain the swamp.” That is, breaking with established truths and reducing the power of the bureaucrats in Washington DC.
Now Biden is promoting some of Obama’s most loyal officials to ministers. The “administrative state” is making a full-blown return at the same time that the institutions of the state are being questioned by broad layers of voters.
Democrat Leon Panetta, former CIA president and defense minister, calls Biden’s proven appointments “bread and butter.” But is it really meat and potatoes that Americans demand?
In Atlantic magazine, writer Graeme Wood jokes about Biden’s faithful old servant. Some of them just need to exchange their Obama administration business cards, he writes. A few light touch-ups with tippex are sufficient.
Biden’s candidate for foreign minister, Antony Blinken, was Obama’s undersecretary of state. Jake Sullivan, the new national security adviser, was Vice President Biden’s national security adviser. Michèle Flournoy, who is rumored to be nominated for Biden’s secretary of defense, was undersecretary of defense under Obama.
“If you’re wondering how these people are going to rule, just close your eyes and dream of 2016,” writes Atlantic’s Graeme Wood. An exaggeration?
Some democrats on the left edge they are already cursed.
Congressmen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who represent New York and Detroit, respectively, are reacting very strongly to speculation that Biden has considered nominating Rahm Emanuel as the new Secretary of Transportation.
Emanuel was Obama’s first chief of staff in the White House and later mayor of Obama’s hometown of Chicago.
But Emanuel’s legacy as mayor is marred by a scandal involving white police violence against blacks, in which the mayor was accused of hiding from the public a movie of the fatal shooting of 17-year-old African American Laquan McDonald.
The fact that Biden is even considering giving Rahm Emanuel a ministerial position after a summer of nationwide protests against racist police violence appears to be a provocation on the party’s left flank.
But maybe it’s unfair judge Biden’s ministers solely on the basis of Obama’s policies.
Tony Blinken, Biden’s foreign minister, was undoubtedly a close associate of Obama. But Blinken also had crucial objections to the former president’s policies, especially in Syria, where Blinken wanted the United States to take military action against dictator Bashar al-Assad when Obama hesitated.
Several of Biden’s nominated ministers say the Trump administration got them by revising Obama’s line.
Blinken tells the Washington Post, speaking of Obama’s tendencies toward isolationism, that the world demands “more, not less, collective action, while increasing nationalism and decreasing trust in the state” hinders the international cooperation we need.
Jake Sullivan, nominated as Biden’s security adviser, says Trump’s opposition to free trade agreements shed light on Americans who lost deals whose benefits Democrats and Republicans previously took for granted.
Biden also adds Obama staff members breaking historic barriers by promoting to the ministerial level.
Alejandro Mayorkas, with roots in Cuba, will be the first Latin American minister to head the Department of National Security. An appointment with symbolic weight, when Trump’s Ministry of Security followed a brutal border policy that particularly hurt asylum seekers from Latin and Central America.
The reestablishment of the Obama administration may therefore provide much-needed comfort to Americans who have suffered under Trump.
Mayorkas was the architect of Obamare’s reform, which gave thousands of children of undocumented immigrants the right to study and work legally in the United States. A program that Trump repealed even though most Americans perceived it as successful.
The best known The appointment so far, John Kerry as special envoy for climate affairs, may seem mossy at the top.
But Obama’s former secretary of state, the 76-year-old professional negotiator behind the Paris Agreement, has strong support among the new generation of climate activists.
“Good to know!”, Greta Thunberg wrote enthusiastically on Twitter.
Another co-founder the youth movement Sunrise movement, who is behind a new American environmental policy, extended a hand to Kerry, who has been involved in climate since growing up in the middle of the last century: “An encouraging move from the Bident team: we now keep our eyes open for an equivalent national”.
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