Battle of the All-Star Cabinets

Ezra Klein and Megan McArdle have divergent takes on the caliber of Obama's incoming cabinet vs. Bush's incoming cabinet back in 2000.  Intriguingly, on this issue they go against their ideological predilections. Klein first:  "Isn’t it amazing," asks Krugman, "just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent." That certainly feels true. But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O'Neill --a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation -- as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia's Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed by graybeards like Baker and Scowcroft and Greenspan. What could go wrong? McArdle dissents:  Obama's got a much, much better economics team than Bush started out with.  I agree with his endorsement of Glenn Hubbard.  But Paul O'Neill wasn't exactly an a-lister even before he turned out to have fantastic(ally entertaining!) verbal impulse control problems.  And Larry Lindsay did not match up to Larry Summers in stature, though of course what he got fired for was not being incompetent, but telling the truth.  Bush's second term team has actually been pretty stellar, but his first term left a lot to be desired.  I actually think they're both right.  Klein is correct that, John Ashcroft excepted, Bush's first cabinet was viewed at the time in largely glowing terms.  Remember when everyone thought Tommy Thompson was the perfect guy to take over HHS?  When Bush deciding to keep George Tenet and Norm Mineta in his cabinet were acts of statesmanlike bipartisanship?  Ironically, Ashcroft is likely the only first-term cabinet member whose reputation has gone up in retrospect.  At the same time, McArdle is correct that the economic team was not considered the strength of the cabinet -- the national security team had the all-stars in Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, etc.  The simple fact is that what matters in any organization is the leadership from the top.  George W. Bush put together a group of strong-willed individuals, but displayed little interest in refereeing disputes among them.  Will Obama do better?  I'm cautiously optimistic, but we won't know for a while.