I’ve been planning to write a post in defense of my friend Leo Hindery, who has been a friendly-fire casualty of the Daschle mess.  But Ezra Klein beat me to it:

So who is Hindery? In short, he’s a progressive rich guy. He made hundreds of million in telecommunications, then founded a sports network, then ran a public equity firm. In recent years, he’s become a rare creature in progressive politics: A very rich, very vocal, labor-liberal.

He was a senior economic policy adviser to John Edwards and, when he endorsed Barack Obama, he said he was doing so because Barack Obama “believes in all workers having an easy and unrestricted ability to join a union, including part-time and contract workers…in fairer and more progressive individual income taxation…[because] at the core of his Campaign and its economic policies are his abiding commitments to working men and women and to economic fairness.”

This is not the sort of rhetoric you tend to hear from wildly successful corporate executives. But it’s the sort of rhetoric you wish you heard from wildly successful corporate executives. More to the point, it’s surely not the sort of rhetoric you’re going to hear from Secretary Gregg. Frankly, on this one, Daschle was right.

That pretty much covers it.  It has pissed me off to no end that many progressives have taken cheap shots at Hindery just because he happens to have been successful.  I know it’s easy right know to hate rich people — God knows that the vast majority of them, particularly those running our corporations and our financial institutions are absolutely worthy of such scorn — but there are still a few out there who are both a) rich and b) decent.  (Bill Gates, white courtesy phone please).

Leo is one of those.  He’s a terrific guy, personally decent and always interested in what others have to say.  My conversations with him have always covered a wide range of topics, and I think he’d be an asset to the Obama Administration.  He also happens to be one of the few corporate executives who understands that you have to build companies by giving workers a genuine stake in the company’s success, including decent wages and real benefits.

If you have the time, go read his book from a couple of years ago, It Takes a CEO, in which, among other things, he highlights all the ways our government was failing to protect workers in order to benefit corporations and the rich.  As he puts it succinctly, “tax cuts for the rich only benefit rich people.”  He also eviscerates Wall-Mart by demonstrating that Costco provides real benefits to its employees yet still manages to bring in higher earnings per store.  As Ezra says, this is exactly the kind of things that we all wish more corporate executives not only would say, but would do.

And for the record, neither I nor any organization with which I’ve worked has ever received a dime from Leo.

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Two brief foreign policy-related observations about word that Obama has asked former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services and current Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security.

1.  Daschle and Hillary Clinton.  The appointment of a prominent figure like Tom Daschle to what heretofore was a relatively minor (or at best mid-level) Cabinet post points to Obama’s commitment to healthcare as a major issue.

One of the main arguments in favor of Clinton taking the SecState job is that she is years away from a committee chairmanship in the Senate.  In addition, she’s unlikely to play a leading role on her signature issue, healthcare.  Both Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus have made it clear that they intend to lead the effort to get some form of universal coverage through the Senate, and Kennedy rebuffed her efforts to establish (and lead) a special subcommittee on healthcare reform.

Late in the primary season, when it appeared increasingly likely that Hillary was going to lose, some pundits speculated that Obama would offer her the HHS job, both to reconcile the two factions and to demonstrate the prominence of healthcare issues in his Administration.  As it turns out, he has tried to do both these things, but not together:  he offered Hillary State and HHs to Daschle and equally prominent figure.

What nobody else seems to have noticed is that this puts Hillary in a bind:  she either becomes Secretary of State or returns to the Senate.  There no longer is any other option for her.

2.  Napolitano. I’ve already written about the challenges posed by the Bush Administration’s nearly wholesale exclusion of the State Department from national security decision-making, but Homeland Security had it even worse:  neither Ridge or Chertoff participated in principals’ meetings.

That needs to change under Obama; if he chooses Napolitano, as reported, DHS will get a strong advocate and effective administrator.  What it will not have, however, is someone with national security experience.  To addess that, Obama should choose someone who knows those issues — for example, Rand Beers or Dick Clarke — to serve as Deputy Secretary.

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David Frum makes a good point today on why Hillary Clinton might sitll have doubts about becoming Barack Obama’s Secretary of State:

[If Hillary] says yes—poof, there vanishes her independent power base. She serves at the pleasure of the president. More consequential still, in order to pass the vetting process, she must open to Obama’s team all the tangled financial records of the Clinton family. If there is any part of her that imagines, say, a primary challenge to Obama in 2012, or even a campaign to replace Biden on the ticket in the VP slot, that hope diminishes with the opening of the files. She will have done Obama’s oppo research for him. From then on, she is utterly exposed and vulnerable.  She gets only what Obama chooses to give.

Karen Tumulty and Massimo Calabresi report that some of her friends and advisors are urging her not to take the job:

Her allies point out that the move would not be without its negatives. Friends like New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter are counseling her not to take the job. They say she would be giving up important work in the Senate, particularly on the health-care-reform cause that is her passion. Others warn that her job description at Foggy Bottom would mean she’d lose her own voice.

Ultimately this may come down to Clinton’s sense of her place in history.  Her run helped make both Obama’s candidacy — and even Sarah Palin’s — possible.  But no matter how historic it may have been, I have to believe that Hillary wants more than to to be the first woman to mount a competitive campaign: she wants to be the first to win.

If that’s the case, then how does taking this job in an Obama administration move her closer to that goal?  Albright and Rice already shattered that particular glass ceiling.  There is nothing historic about being the third woman to serve as Secretary of State.

Were she to achieve some momentous breakthrough — say a permanent Middle East peace — the job could help advance her cause.  But how much, really?  Over the past several decades, foreign policy achievements (e.g. G.H.W. Bush, whose tenure included both the end of communism and the successful prosecution of the Gulf War) haven’t translated into electoral success.  In contrast, foreign policy disasters (e.g. Carter and the Iran hostage crisis, G.W. Bush and Iraq) have helped ended Presidencies.

I may be wrong.  Hillary may see this as a rare opportunity to help Obama move the country (and the world) away from the disasters of the past eight years.  It may be that, like many before her, she is willing to set aside her ambition to serve loyally the man who defeated her.

Hillary isn’t just any other candidate.  If she were, the conventional wisdom would say that she should take the job, just as Biden agreed to be Vice President despite his supposed reservations and Tom Daschle has now agreed to be HHS Secretary after being passed over for the position of chief of staff.

Hillary is anything but conventional.  Her place in history may be secure, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t (or shouldn’t) want more.  And Barack Obama, more than anyone else out there, will understand why if she decides to say no.

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Holder, Daschle. . . .  The Dance Card is filling up quickly.

Talk amongst yourselves.

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