The transition news that’s grabbed the most attention this week has been the likely choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. But a job that might prove as important was also rumored to be filled– Eric Holder as Attorney General.

Unlike a State Dept. that maintained some level of buereaucratic integrity during the Bush administration, Justice was eviscerated and embarassed. Thanks to torture memos, fired U.S. Attorneys and selective prosecution, "Main justice" in Washington, D.C. and federal prosecutors have lost the confidence of the legal community and public.

The presumed new leader of the tattered department is as anonymous as Clinton is famous. The little that has been written about Holder so far– like this Washington Post editorial– is that he’s a solid pick with one blemish: his role in the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

I suppose we’ll learn more about Holder during Senate confirmation hearings. But it seems odd that I can’t find any news article over the past few days that’s taken a long look into his role as U.S. Attorney, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, as private sector lawyer over the past eight years, and, yes, as enabler in the Rich pardon.

I’ve started doing some digging myself to find out if Rich is indeed the only blemish and also how much of a role Holder did play in that embarrassing pardon. It also may turn out that Holder has done a lot of other stuff in the past 20 years than pardon Marc Rich, good and bad. I’ll let you know what I find.-MB

David Brooks New York Times’ column today documents the super-fancy schools that Barack Obama, his wife, and most of his top advisers attended. Brooks calls it the triumph of high school valedictorians but he also lauds Obama’s team as insiders but really well-qualified insiders that can actually achieve major social change.

Brooks articulates a bit of conventional wisdom that’s emerged from the first two weeks of Obama’s transition: the change Obama hopes to deliver are changes in public policy. To do that he will employ very familiar faces and not search across America for a broader representation of values and perspectives.

After the Bush administration, we should probably be happy to have a cabinet of striving, high achievers. I wonder, though, if there shouldn’t be some acknowledgment along the way of the limits to meritocracy. A cabinet should have the smartest people in the country but there can be different kinds of intelligence. One idea might be for Obama, the former community organizer, to seek out more people from the worlds of organized labor, environmental justice and affordable housing advocacy.

At this point the cabinet will surely be dominated by dispassionate, consensus building elites. And that’s fine. But there should also be some advocates to show the human, grassroots source of needing to achieve sweeping national policies.-MB

A hot cabinet rumor two days ago was that Penny Pritzker, Barack Obama’s national finance chairwoman and a longtime fundraiser for Obama’s political career, would become Commerce Dept. secretary. But Pritzker quietly removed her name from consideration yesterday.

The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports that the reason might be Pritzker didn’t want to go through a vetting process that examined the billionaire’s family fortune. Most notably, Pritzker was chairwoman at Superior Bank, which pioneered the bundling of subprime mortgages into securities. They started the practice around 1993– and abruptly went bankrupt in 2001. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation made the family pay a jaw-dropping $460 million to cover claims.

Another questionable Pritzker practice is the use of offshore tax havens.

I think Savage has come up with enough here to make the case that Pritzker’s appointment would have been an embarrassment. It bears monitoring what capacity she might have as an unofficial adviser.-MB

The Washington Post’s Del Quentin Wilber reports on a D.C. district judge’s decision to free five Algerian detained at Guantanamo Bay for seven years. The Algerians were captured in Bosnia and accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. George W. Bush mentioned thwarting this plot in his 2002 State of the Union address.

But the plot proved to be utterly bogus– as the Justice Dept. quietly withdrew the allegation last year. Even the Bosnian government has exonerated the men. Now that they’re freed, Bosnia will welcome them back.

Is there a precedent for a presidential administration detaining and possibly torturing five innocent men for seven years for seemingly political purposes? How many more innocent detainees remain at Guantanamo?-MB

The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler and Jonathan Weisman have a decent story today buried under a bad headline: "Experience Reigns, Not ‘Change’." The jist, of course, is that Barack Obama, who had the completely novel and revolutionary idea of being a president who ran on "change," particularly "changing the culture of Washington" is actually appointing a bunch of Clinton administration retreads to his cabinet. And when he’s not naming Clinton folks, he’s choosing Tom Daschle. He said he would bring change, but nooooo — he’s another compromised, insidery politician.

A couple of points on this. First, as Meckler and Weisman report, Obama is the first non-governor since Lyndon Johnson elected as president. Unlike George W. Bush or Bill Clinton he doesn’t have a deep executive staff that he can bring with him to Washington. So in order to find experienced people he has to select the Eric Holders and Tom Daschles of the world.

Second, and more important, what kind of change was Obama talking about? In terms of promises, the electorate can actually hold him to, the most concrete Obama got was in his Democratic National Convention speech. There he laid out the policies his presidency would prioritize (his campaign Web site also clearly detailed his policy prescriptions).

Obama promised no fresh faces other than his own. His promise was relatively progressive social policies and a return to constructive governance. I, personally, am nauseated about the prospect of former World Bank kingmaker Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary. But Summers and Daschle and Holder and most everyone else (okay, not Hillary Clinton) were part of Obama’s team all along.

Obama’s appointments can be criticized on their merits. But it seems premature to suggest that they violate the overarching ideas his campaign was based on.-MB

CORRECTION: George H. W. Bush also wasn’t a governor. But Bush ran as heir to Reagan so that might be one presidency that didn’t explicitly promise change (though he did promise a "kindler, gentler" America).

Barack Obama announced yesterday that Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader and a prominent member of Obama’s campaign, would be selected as Secretary of Health and Human Services. As the New York Times’  David D. Kirkpatrick reports, Daschle’s appointment appears to violate Obama’s rule not to select people to run a policy area they once lobbied on. After losing his Senate seat in 2004, Daschle became an adviser on health care matters to uber-lobbying firm Alston & Baird. Daschle was also a board member of the Mayo clinic, which receives numerous Health and Human Services grants.

I’m ambivalent about the Daschle choice. On the one hand, it makes Obama look hypocritical in his battle against lobbying. But appointing such a high-profile figure to lead HHS might signal that health care reform will truly be a priority. That or the pharmaceutical companies that Daschle advised will continue to run amok.-MB

This February I interviewed a federal employee about improper politicization at his agency. I asked if the recent charges of politicization surprised him. "At this point in the Bush administration," he said, "nothing surprises me."

It has been for a while now, perhaps since Hurricane Katrina or maybe the fired U.S. Attorneys or maybe the unveiling of Justice Dept. memos that condone torture, that the Bush administration has lost its capacity to shock. Yet the administration continues to take actions that, under normal circumstances, would be stunning. (more…)

The Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu reports this morning that Arizona Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano will be named Secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security. Napolitano was an early supporter of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president and for a while was on the short-list of his VP choices. I had heard some talk that Napolitano would be Attorney General, but that position will apparently go to former Clinton administration Deputy AG Eric Holder.

There are few positions more important than the head of DHS. The five year-old agency has yet to devise a way to coordinate its huge policy and law enforcement areas: counterterrorism, immigration, and emergency response. Napolitano has won praise for her work on immigration as a border governor. Perhaps she’ll bring an end to the agency’s recent trend of seemingly arbitrary immigration raids.-MB

Over at the American Prospect, Dayo Olopade has an excellent piece about the "20 progressive think tanks, issue groups, and media outlets" trying to get Barack Obama’s ear during the transition. These groups, which include the New America Foundation and Institute for Policy Studies, have published voluminous, binded tomes telling Obama everything from how to engineer an energy policy to how to cut defense spending. The list of titles sound like a list of rejected names for Understanding Government’s Obama transition blog:

Investing In America’s Future

Mandate for Change

Opportunity ‘08 (which seems a bit dated as a transition title)

Rebooting America

Making Sense

Transitions in Governance (which for some reason reminds me of a jazz fusion album title)

But the biggest name in the transition literature is the Center for American Progress Action Fund and their 600-page poolside reading directive "Change for America." By focusing on "personnel and process" as much as ideal policy, CAP appears to be doing no less than precisely instructing Obama how to govern. It’s not clear how much Obama will listen– as Olopade points out it’s not like his campaign was bereft of ideas. That said, CAP senior fellows worked on Obama’s campaign and, of course, CAP founder John Podesta heads Obama’s transition team.

Olopade reports that what CAP is doing very much has a precedent. In 1980 the Heritage Foundation presented Ronald Reagan a 1,100 page "Mandate for Leadership."

Indeed, the parallels between CAP and Heritage are unmistakable. Heritage was born during the Watergate fallout– a terrible time for Republicans. CAP was birthed after 9/11 when Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress and Democrats who spoke truth to power were branded as weak on the "war on terror."

Moreover, CAP and other prominent think tanks like New America have made no secret of their admiration for Heritage and its abilitly to articulate a conservative agenda.

One difference, though, may be that Heritage was starting with a relatively clean slate. The disgrace of Nixon wiped Washington clean of many establishment conservatives. CAP, on the other hand, was founded by and actively employs a boatload of Clinton administration figures. So even if CAP does have a Heritage-like influence, it might bring a comparably less sweeping change in governance.-MB

Yesterday I blogged that burrowing — the practice of executive branch political appointees landing jobs as career civil servants at the end of a presidency — was rampant under George W. Bush. Yet it appeared little could be done to stop it.

Well, the Washington Post’s Carol D. Leoning and R. Jeffrey Smith report that there is some pushback about this burrowing. Sen’s Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Diane Feinstein (D-Ca.) wrote to the president saying that the burrowing is "regrettable but entirely foreseeable." The White House responded that it was not their policy to tell political appointees to seek career jobs.

But the list of successful burrowers thus far is at least a little suspicious. They include two legal advisers at the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Justice Dept’s civil rights division. The Bush administration has pushed an anti-regulatory agenda at CPSC to new levels. And the civil rights division seems perpetually wrapped up in investigating bogus charges of voter fraud. Will these burrowers push to continue Bush’s agenda?-MB