The New Attorney General

I was surprised that my posts about Ted Olson got so much pick up. Fox News did an item on it and so did National Review's "The Corner" blog. It seemed to me that I was making a now familiar point, that smart people of integrity should be able to get top government appointments even if they're controversial. The right cited me as a "liberal" to bolster their case. Having been a political appointee in the Reagan administration and a writer for the centristThe New Republic and The Washington Monthly in the years since, I'm not sure I'd call myself that. I called the post "The Liberal Case for Ted Olson" not because I'm a liberal but because it's in the interest of Democrats, especially when they're on the verge of taking the White House, not to fight edgy nominees when they're likely to soon be submitting plenty of their own

In any event, Olson's out and today we'll get a new attorney general, Michael Mukasey. With only 414 days until the election, the Mukasey years aren't likely to be widely remembered. I don't see any change in policy that might give business pause. Antitrust is likely to remain pretty dormant and the civil division isn't about to sic business. The Olson tenure would have been more exciting. Politically, I think Bush would have been smarter to pick a fight with Harry Reid. Olson would have rallied the base, although I guess Republicans in the Senate had no stomach for another defeat. They already have to explain why keeping 130,000 troops in Iraq through the next eleciton is a good idea.