That was then. This is now.
Obama's Cabinet shaping up to be a boys club
Washington (CNN) -- As Democrats in Congress celebrate a historic number of women elected to their ranks, the White House's top ranks reflect a very different picture -- one that is largely male.
CNN has learned President Barack Obama is expected to nominate White House chief of staff Jack Lew as treasury secretary.
The likely contenders to replace Lew -- including Ron Klain, who once served as Vice President Joe Biden's chief of staff, and Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser -- are all men.
Then there's the president's recent choice for defense secretary: former Sen. Chuck Hagel. The preferred choice to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state is another man: Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.
The trend troubles those who study the role of women in government.
"What you're hearing is that as new openings come up, there are missed opportunities to bring women in at that level," said Debbie Walsh, director of Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics, which tracks women in elective office.
"It is concerning at a time when you have a gender gap that put (Obama) over the top, and that gap was a diverse gender gap," Walsh said....
.... White House spokesman Jay Carney said the president speaks with a number of diverse candidates for various positions and selects who he thinks is the right person for the job.
"It's not uniform, it's a broad sentiment and he believes the country is served by a process that does seek out the diverse talent in this country for different positions," Carney said this week.
Now this flashback may seem like a lifetime ago...
... but it's only been four years (and a month) since this ran in USA Today:
Bush is opening doors with a diverse Cabinet
WASHINGTON — With little fanfare and not much credit, President Bush has appointed a more diverse set of top advisers than any president in history...
In his first term, Bush matched the record that President Clinton set in his first term for appointing women and people of color to the Cabinet, and Bush had a more diverse inner circle at the White House. Since his re-election last month, the president has made a series of groundbreaking nominations.
Bush has named his White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, to be the first Hispanic to hold one of the powerful "big four" Cabinet jobs, attorney general.
He named his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to be the first female African-American secretary of State, the Cabinet's senior position.
He also nominated Margaret Spellings, his domestic policy adviser, to lead the Education Department and Cuban-born business executive Carlos Gutierrez to head Commerce.
Some political analysts argue that Bush's appointments and his matter-of-fact approach to them signal a new stage in the racial history of the nation, one in which diversity in the top ranks is taken as a matter of course. Bush and Clinton, who don't agree on much, together may have set a new standard that future presidents in both parties will be expected to meet.
"Bush did not go out and say, 'I'm going to create an administration that looks like America,' which is how Clinton led off," says Paul Light, a political scientist at New York University who has studied presidential appointments. "He has just gone about recruiting a diverse Cabinet as an ordinary act. That's remarkable in the sense it sends to future administrations..."
Bush's defenders and some other analysts say his record on diversity deserves more notice than it has received. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, calls it "a strong governing management trait that has been under-reported."
One reason it has gotten little attention is because Bush himself rarely talks about it.
The bottom line is: The Left doesn't really value anything... other than winning.
Posted by: Elan | Thursday, 10 January 2013 at 03:23 PM