LaHood for Transportation? It Wasn't That Long a Stretch.

By Al Kamen
Monday, December 22, 2008

There was much surprise last week when President-elect Barack Obama selected outgoing Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) for secretary of transportation. After all, LaHood isn't an expert on transportation matters.

His district is pretty rural and not known for having great transportation problems -- save for when Capponi's Restaurant in Toluca closes on the weekends and diners head down the road to Minonk. Won't hardly see a traffic light for miles.

And okay, so maybe his congressional district isn't a passenger rail hub. (If you ask Amtrak for an itinerary from Washington to Peoria, the largest city in his district, you're offered a 17 1/2 -hour train ride to Indianapolis and then a four-hour wait for a bus to take you on a four-hour trip to the bus station at the Peoria airport.)

On the plus side, LaHood is on the House Appropriations Committee, so he knows how to spend money, he defends earmarks, and he's no doubt been to O'Hare Airport, so at least he's got air travel experience.

Still, there had been chatter for a while that LaHood was thinking of setting up shop at a law firm here in Washington when his term ends next month. So when word spread last week that incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had called LaHood on Tuesday to offer him the job, the cognoscenti were taken aback.

But maybe they shouldn't have been. Obama did, after all, pledge to put Republicans in his Cabinet. We're told that when Obama and LaHood ran into each other on the House floor this past spring, LaHood went over to him and Obama said, "You're at the top of my list." Earlier, after Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004 and was planning to visit Peoria, he reached out to LaHood, who helped set up his schedule. Then there were those bipartisan lunches with Emanuel.

In retrospect, seems pretty obvious that LaHood was a solid contender for a top Cabinet post.

Taking a Shine to a Certain Shoe

Who says President Bush isn't doing what he can to help the economy? Well, the Turkish economy, anyway. Seems that shoe an Iraqi journalist threw at him last week has become a hot-ticket item, with orders for 300,000 pairs pouring in from Iraq, the United States and Iran, Bloomberg News reported.

The Turkish shoe manufacturer, Ramazan Baydan, said he may rename the brown shoe, called "Model 271," the "Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush," and he's hired an agency to look into television advertising.

The new orders for the shoe are four times what he normally sells in a year for that model, he said, so the company is going to hire 100 more people to boost production. In addition to orders in the Middle East, Baydan said he's received a request for 4,000 pairs of shoes from a Maryland-based company called Davidson.

A Two-Year Tryout?

Many New York Democrats are much put out by the notion that Caroline Kennedy has decided recently that, well, it would be pretty neat to be a senator. So she'd like Gov. David A. Paterson to make her one.

The initial reaction to putting the late president's daughter in the Senate was routinely negative. Our favorite shot came from Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), who told a radio station: "I don't know what Caroline Kennedy's qualifications are, except that she has name recognition, but so does J-Lo. . . . I wouldn't make J-Lo the senator unless she proved she had great qualifications, but we haven't seen them yet." Ackerman later backed off, however.

And Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who's angling for the Senate seat herself, is reported to have complained last week on the House floor about Kennedy's "complete lack of experience."

But the odds would indicate this is going to happen. New York just renamed the Triborough Bridge after the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), also known as Uncle Bobby, and we didn't hear any protests there.

Obama and Vice President Cheney have shown that experience doesn't mean much and besides, this is the Senate, for crying out loud, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So the whining and bleating may fade as New Yorkers, partial to drama (the Yankees) and glitz (Broadway or Seventh Avenue), settle down and accept the inevitable. Having Ms. Kennedy in the Senate for a two-year trial period is not the worst thing that could happen to New York.

New Yorkers might look to Massachusetts as an example, one Bay State Democrat suggested. Since John F. Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952, there's been "one seat for the Kennedys and one seat for everyone else." And it's "not like it's hurt Massachusetts," he added.

Keeping Count

Obama's Cabinet is stacked with Democrats who campaigned for or advised the president-elect during the primaries or the general election. Twelve of the 20 Cabinet members were campaign advisers or surrogates, including such prominent backers as former senator Tom Daschle, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and foreign policy adviser Susan A. Rice.

The Cabinet is equally split when it comes to elite education. Half the Cabinet members are overachievers who, like Obama, received bachelor's or advanced degrees from an elite U.S. university or a prestigious British school such as Oxford or Cambridge. Seven of those 10 attended an Ivy League institution, with Harvard and Princeton in the lead with two graduates each. (We'll tip our hat to Harvard, though, by counting the president-elect as graduate No. 3.) The other 10 Cabinet members attended state universities or more mainstream colleges.

You might have thought Obama would fill his Cabinet with political friends from Chicago, but just two Cabinet picks are from the Second City: Emanuel (for chief of staff) and Arne Duncan (for education secretary). You could make that three if you count LaHood, whose district is only a few hours from Michigan Avenue.

Obamamaniacs vs. Clintonites

Remember all those 20-somethings who labored for Obama in the trenches of Iowa back when he was a long-shot candidate? We're hearing some buzz that they, along with Obama campaign workers from across the country, are having trouble landing good jobs in the new administration.

Seems there's anxiety among the Obamamaniac set that the incoming Cabinet officials who hail from the Land O' Clinton -- including Madame Hillary herself, the secretary of state-designee -- will hire Clinton campaign underlings to fill jobs in their agencies.

Timing Is Everything

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, e-mailed his reaction Friday at 1:41 p.m. to "President-Elect Obama's nomination of Admiral Dennis Blair as the next Director of National Intelligence."

"I appreciate Admiral Blair's long record of distinguished service to the nation," Bond said, and he wanted to hear Blair's "views on the direction for the DNI."

Unfortunately, while it had been expected that Obama might name Blair to the job Friday around 2:30, it never happened.

With Philip Rucker and Alice Crites