Joe Biden’s cabinet
Some observers have pointed out that while President-elect Biden has picked a number of solid and highly qualified people for his cabinet and administration, he hasn’t really done anything thus far to elevate the next generation of Democratic Party political leaders. I have a theory about that.
During the course of the election, Joe Biden stated many times that he would use his presidency as a transition to the next generation of Democrats. In fact he specifically stated that people like Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke would be in his administration. Biden is a man of his word, so there’s no way he would have said these things if he didn’t mean them.
I could end up being wrong about this, but my guess is that Biden decided to roll out the nonpartisan, low profile names first, in order to establish a basis of solid and non-controversial picks. That way, by the time he starts naming rising political stars to his administration, it won’t look so partisan.
Keep in mind that President Biden has to do two things simultaneously in order to keep his broad coalition together. He has to do a strong job of setting up the next generation of the Democratic Party in order to keep the base happy, and he has to look like he’s not being overly partisan in order to keep the people in the middle happy. My guess is he’s boring us to death by rolling out his picks whose names aren’t well known, so that by the time he rolls out the bigger and more partisan names, there will be a more widespread appetite for picks that the average American has heard of.
