Quote:
Originally Posted by scottw
you are asssuming Politifact is somehow the final word? they are hardly
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Final? There's always room for more information.
I wouldn't call an ACORN rant a good defense though, I see you're still out to kill the messenger rather then defend the facts.
Here.
* Vice President Joe Biden – Private experience: Yes. 4.5% of the cabinet. Biden’s father worked in the private sector his entire life — unsuccessfully for a critical period. Biden attended a private university’s law school (Syracuse), and operated a successful-because-of-property-management law practice for three years before winning election to the U.S. Senate. (I regard a campaign as a private business, too — and Biden’s first campaign was masterful entrepreneurship.)
* Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton – Private experience: Yes, significant. 9% of the cabinet. Extremely successful private practice lawyer in Arkansas for the Rose Law Firm, one of the “Top 100 Lawyers” in a classically dog-eat-dog business.
* Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner – Private experience: Yes, significant. 13.6% of the cabinet (The chart’s error is established in the first three people checked — surely no one bothered to make a serious count of the cabinet in compiling the chart.) Geithner traveled with world with his Ford Foundation-employed father. He graduated from private universities, with an A.B. from Dartmouth and an M.A. in economics from Johns Hopkins. Starting his career, he worked three years in the private sector with Kissinger Associates. After significant positions at Treasury and State Departments, he again ventured into the private sector with the Council on Foreign Relations; from there he moved to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — in what is at worst a semi-public organization. Running a Federal Reserve Branch is among the most intensive jobs one can have in private sector economics and management. If an analyst at a bank named after J. P. Morgan didn’t understand that, one wonders just what the person does understand.
* Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – Private sector experience: Yes, at high levels. 18% of the cabinet. Bob Gates spent a career with the Central Intelligence Agency, finally as Director of Central Intelligence, an executive level position with no equal in private enterprise. He retired in 1993, and then worked in a variety of university positions, and joined several different corporate boards; in 1999 he was appointed interim Dean of the George W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, and was appointed President of Texas A&M in 2002, where he served until his appointment as Secretary of Defense in 2006.
* Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr – Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 23% of the cabinet, total. After a sterling career in the Justice Department, as a Ronald Reagan appointment to be a federal judge, as a U.S. Attorney, and again at the Justice Department, Holder spent eight years representing high profile private clients at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. His clients included the National Football League, the giant pharmaceutical company Merck, and Chiquita Brands, a U.S. company with extensive international business.
* Secretary of Interior Kenneth L. Salazar – Private sector experience: Yes. 27% of Obama cabinet. Besides a distinguished career in government, as advisor and Cabinet Member with Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, Salazar was a successful private-practice attorney from 1981 to 1985, and then again from 1994 to 1998 when he won election as Colorado’s Attorney General. As Senator, Salazar maintained a good voting record for a Republican business-supporting senator; Salazar is a Democrat. Salazar’s family is in ranching, and he is usually listed as a “rancher from Colorado,” with life experience in the ranching business at least equal to that of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner.
* Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsack - Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 32% of Obama cabinet. Vilsack spent 23 years in private practice as an attorney, 1975 to 1998, while holding not-full-time elective offices such as mayor and state representative. He joined government as Governor of Iowa in 1998, and except for two years, has been in employed in government since then.
* Secretary of Commerce Gary F. Locke – Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 36% of Obama cabinet. As near as I can determine, Locke was in private law practice from 1975 through his election as Executive in King County in 1993 (is that a full-time position?). He was elected Governor of Washington in 1996. After leaving office in 2005, he again worked in private practice with Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP, until 2009. 22 years in private practice, three years as Executive of King County, eight years as Governor of Washington.
* Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis – Private sector experience: Yes, but I consider it insignificant. 36% of Obama cabinet with private sector experience, 4.5% without. Solis’s father was a Teamster and union organizer who contracted lead poisoning on the job; her mother was an assembly line worker for Mattel Toys. She overachieved in high school and ignored her counselor’s advice to avoid college, and earned degrees from Cal Poly-Pomona and USC. She held a variety of posts in federal government before returning to California to work for education and win election to the California House and California Senate, and then to Congress.
* Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius – Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 41% of Obama cabinet with private sector experience, 4.5% without. Former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius worked in the private sector for 12 years, at least nine years as director and lobbyist for the Kansas Association for Justice (then Kansas Trial Lawyers Association). One might understand why the American Enterprise Institute would not count as “business experience” a career built on reining in insurance companies, as Sebelius did as a lobbyist and then elected Kansas Insurance Commissioner.
* Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun L.S. Donovan – Private sector experience: Yes, only 4 years, but significant because it bugs AEI analysts so much. 45% of cabinet with private sector experience, 4.5% without. With multiple degrees from Harvard University in architecture and public administration, Donovan was Deputy Assistant Secretary of HUD for Multifamily Housing during the Clinton Administration; and he was Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). In the private sector, he worked for the Community Preservation Corporation, a non-profit in New York City, and he worked for a while finding sources to lend to people to buy “affordable housing” in the city, a task perhaps equal to wringing blood from a block of granite.
* Secretary of Transportation Raymond L. LaHood – Private sector experience: No (not significant); school teacher at Holy Family School in Peoria, Illinois. [As a teacher, I'm not sure that teaching should count as government experience, but it's not really private sector stuff, either. Education isn't as wasteful as for-profit groups.] 45% of cabinet with private sector experience, 9% without. Ironically, it is the Republican former Representative who pulls down the private sector experience percentage in the Obama cabinet.
* Secretary of Energy Steven Chu – Private sector experience: Yes, extremely significant. 50% of cabinet with private sector experience, 9% without. Chu worked at Bell Labs, where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel Prize-winning laser cooling work, from 1978 to 1987. Having won a Nobel for private sector work, I think we can count his private sector experience as important. Chu also headed the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is seeded by a government contract to a university but must operate as a very highly-regulated business. (I’ll wager Chu is counted as “no private sector experience,” which demonstrates the poverty of methodology of the so-called “J. P. Morgan” study AEI claims.)
* Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 55% of cabinet with private sector experience, 9% without. Duncan earned Academic All-American honors in basketball at Harvard. His private sector is among the more unusual of any cabinet member’s, and more competitive. Duncan played professional basketball: “From 1987 to 1991, Duncan played professional basketball in Australia with the Eastside Spectres of the [Australian] National Basketball League, and while there, worked with children who were wards of the state. He also played with the Rhode Island Gulls and tried out for the New Jersey Jammers.” Since leaving basketball he’s worked in education, about four years in a private company aiming to improve education.
* Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki – Private sector experience: Yes, but to give AEI and “Morgan” a chance, we won’t count it. 55% of cabinet with private sector experience, 13.6% without. Shinseki is a retired, four-star general in the army, a former Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. While Shinseki served on the boards of a half-dozen corporations, all of that service was in the six years between his official retirement and his appointment as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
* Secretary of Homeland Security Janet A. Napolitano - Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 59% of cabinet with private sector experience, 13.6% without. After a brilliant turn in law school at the University of Virginia, and a clerking appointment with a federal judge, Napolitano joined the distinguished Phoenix firm Lewis & Roca, where she practiced privately for nine years before Bill Clinton appointed her U.S. Attorney for Arizona. AEI probably doesn’t want to count her private sector experience because, among other irritations to them, she was the attorney-advisor to Prof. Anita Hill during her questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue of Clarence Thomas’s nomination to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
* White House Chief of Staff Rahm I. Emanuel – Private sector experience: Yes, significant. 64% of cabinet with private sector experience, 13.6% without. Emanuel’s major private sector experience is short, but spectacular. “After serving as an advisor to Bill Clinton, in 1998 Emanuel resigned from his position in the Clinton administration and became an investment banker at Wasserstein Perella (now Dresdner Kleinwort), where he worked until 2002. In 1999, he became a managing director at the firm’s Chicago office. Emanuel made $16.2 million in his two-and-a-half-year stint as a banker, according to Congressional disclosures. At Wasserstein Perella, he worked on eight deals, including the acquisition by Commonwealth Edison of Peco Energy and the purchase by GTCR Golder Rauner of the SecurityLink home security unit from SBC Communications.” J. P. Morgan and AEI wish that Emanuel had not had such smashing success is such a short time.
* Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson – Private sector experience: No, significant. 64% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without. Despite a brilliant career cleaning up environmental messes, with EPA and the New Jersey State government, Jackson has negligible private sector experience. She was a brilliant student, valedictorian in high school and honors graduate in chemical engineering.
* Office of Management & Budget Director Peter R. Orszag – Private sector experience: Yes, short but significant. 68% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without. Orszag is the youngest member of the cabinet, but he had a brilliant academic career (Princeton, London School for Economics) and a series of tough assignments in the Clinton Administration. During the Bush years he founded an economic consulting firm, and sold it, and worked with McKinsey and Company, mostly on health care financing (he’s a member of the National Institute of Medicine in the National Academies of Science).
* U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Ronald Kirk – Private sector experience: Yes, long and significant. 73% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without. Son of a postal worker, Ron Kirk used academic achievement to get through law school. He practiced privately for 13 years, interspersed with a bit of political work, before being appointed Texas Secretary of State in 1994 — the office that most businesses have most of their state regulatory action with. About a year later he ran for and won election as Mayor of Dallas, considered a major business post in Texas. Re-elected by a huge margin in 1999, he resigned to run for the U.S. Senate in 2002. After losing (to John Cornyn), Price took positions with Dallas and then Houston law firms representing big businesses, especially in government arenas.
* U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice – Private sector experience: Yes. 77% of cabinet with private sector experience, 18% without. Rice was a consultant with McKinsey and Co., sort of the ne plus ultra of private sectorness, for a while before beginning her climb to U.N Ambassador.
* Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer – Private sector experience: Yes, but academic. We won’t count it to make AEI out to be less of a sucker. 77% of cabinet with private sector experience, 23% without significant private sector experience. Dr. Romer’s chief appointments have been academic, and at a public university, though her education was entirely private. A specialist in the Great Depression and economic data gathering, she’s highly considered by her colleagues, and is a past-president of the American Economic Association.
-spence