Heard it Through the Grapevine

I love this interregnum between administrations. More rumors than you can imagine pop up as to who will to named to which cabinet post. The other day a friend called me and said, "Did you hear that XXX will be named to YYY position?" I told him to forget that he had ever heard that rumor and to take two aspirin and call me in January.

The rumors pop up for the usual reasons for these things. People are afraid of the unknown future and they want to exercise a degree of control over their lives. All of the names are, of course, nonsense, and they have as much of a chance of being correct in their assumptions as those unlimited number of monkeys pounding away at that unlimited number of typewriters who eventually write Shakespeare.

Names hit the rumor mill for a variety of reasons. Some are placed there by people who want to inject an idea for a possible position. Some are released by those famous "unnamed sources" to see how they would play in the media: would they be shot down like so many clay pigeons at a skeet range or would they fly like the real ones? Some rumors come from too-active minds who think they have all the answers.

One of the more interesting rumors about is that President-Elect Obama will ask Current Secretary of defense Gates to stay on for at least one year. One source of this particular rumor is the Republican inspired and oft-cited belief that Democrats just don't or can't "get" the army-navy-air force thing and that they would rather weave hemp quilts down by the riverside.

While Secretary Gates has proved to be far better in his job than his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, there is no reason to believe that a Democrat can't do the job. One Democrat fully capable of handling the position is former former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, but Nunn is 70 and that could be a deciding factor for Obama.

I believe that Obama is the kind of person who will hold his cards close to the vest and that we will know who he has in mind when he makes an announcement. The one thing that concerns me is whether Obama will chose a cabinet based on race and gender so that it "reflects" America, as his confidant, Valerie Jarrett, said recently. In other words how far will he go in designing a cabinet for appearance over functionality?

Until you hear names coming directly from the president-elect's mouth, it is better to follow the advice in that old r&b song:

Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear.