In 2016, the President’s Cabinet consists of 15 Department heads (all named Secretary, except the Attorney General of the Justice Department). These are the highest ranking government executives in America, besides the constitutionally elected President and Vice-President. The Vice-President is considered part of the Cabinet. Each of the 15 Cabinet officers must be approved by the Senate, after nomination by the President. In addition, there are seven other government officers considered of Cabinet rank:
America’s first Cabinet was chosen by George Washington, and consisted of five others to advise him, plus Vice President John Adams. Two of these six also went on to be elected President themselves. The five Cabinet departments Washington established are still active 227 years later, except for the Postmaster General, which has been demoted in authority. As an aside, will the new Trump broom sweeping clean lead to a new Cabinet position for the Department of Twitter and Social Media Affairs? Stranger things have happened recently.
From the Wikipedia entry on the Cabinet of the United States:
The Cabinet of the United States is composed of the most senior appointed officers of the executive branch of the federal government of the United States, who are generally the heads of the federal executive departments. The existence of the Cabinet dates back to the first President, George Washington, who appointed a Cabinet of five people to advise him and to assist him in carrying out his duties (his cabinet also included Vice President John Adams):
- Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson
- Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton
- Secretary of War Henry Knox
- Attorney General Edmund Randolph
- Postmaster General Samuel Osgood.
All Cabinet members are nominated by the President and then presented to the Senate for confirmation or rejection by a simple majority (although, before use of the nuclear option during the 113th US Congress, they could have been blocked by filibuster, requiring cloture to be invoked by 3/5 supermajority to further consideration). If approved, they are sworn in and then begin their duties. Aside from the Attorney General, and the Postmaster General when it was a Cabinet office, they all receive the title of Secretary. Members of the Cabinet serve at the pleasure of the President; the President may dismiss or reappoint them (to other posts) at will.
The current Cabinet includes the Vice President and the heads of 15 executive departments, listed here according to their order of succession to the Presidency. Note that the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate follow the Vice President and precede the Secretary of State in the order of succession, but both are in the legislative branch and are not part of the Cabinet.
And from the White House.gov website:
The tradition of the Cabinet dates back to the beginnings of the Presidency itself. Established in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, the Cabinet’s role is to advise the President on any subject he may require relating to the duties of each member’s respective office.
The Cabinet includes the Vice President and the heads of 15 executive departments — the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Attorney General.
All told, the President and his Cabinet then comprise the Vice-President, 15 cabinet officers, and 7 more Cabinet level officials, a total of the Top 24 U.S. government officials, counting the President himself.
Our 2016 election result is now just over a week old, and perhaps the hottest topic of speculation is about which people Trump will select to fill these positions, outside of what Trump himself will do to implement or modify the myriad of campaign promises he made, with or without specific details at the time. This is a primary goal of the somewhat fractious Transition Team, which Trump assures is running like clockwork, smooth, very smooth.
Since there have been only two different Transition Chairman, and three high level firings of senior advisors from the team during the first week, perhaps Trump is on to something about unifying his party and then the country behind his MAGA agenda.
While little is certain abut Trump’s final decisions on his Cabinet after nine days, it seems like a good idea to compare the current Presidential Cabinet with the one to take effect on January 20th or thereabouts, after the Senate confirmation process, which might not be quite as seamless as the Republican control of all three branches of government would suggest.
As one example, Senator Rand Paul has said he will filibuster and fight tooth and nail against notorious neocon and hawk John Bolton, if he is nominated for Secretary of State. A little family feud with the champagne toasts.
The 2017 Presidential Cabinet (Is) Is Not Your Father’s Cabinet
One of the most famous and memorable ad slogans of the late 20th century was Oldsmobile’s confident assertion on TV and in print:
It’s Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile. The New Generation of Olds
In 1988, the Oldsmobile Division of America’s largest car company, General Motors was faced with a rapidly aging customer base, loss of market share, and a decline in popularity of its brand. Oldsmobile had had a strong reputation for style and engineering quality, but its prospects were fading.
The company bet heavily on a new advertising campaign which has become famous for its tag line and commercials, even as the ad campaign actually accelerated the company’s demise, which folded completely only 12 years later, in 2000.
Here are some excerpts from a post written in 2010 by a member of the ad team, Steffan Postaet, who came up with the tag line in 1988.
This is not your father’s Oldsmobile. The line has become a pop culture catch phrase, in the same ilk (albeit attached to worse advertising) as “Got Milk?” Try reading your morning paper and not finding a variation on it. For example, about a candidate: “This is not your father’s Democrat.” About a technological innovation: “This is not your mother’s sewing machine.” And so on. Sadly enough, more Americans are familiar with the Olds’ slogan than they are of Shakespeare’s finest sonnets. Way more.
As I remember it, a soft-spoken creative director at Leo Burnett by the name of Joel Machak wrote that famous line. Yours truly actually came up with the campaign’s tag: “The New Generation of Olds.” Both pieces were intended as lyrics. That’s right, a jingle! As a matter of fact, I was brought in (just a kid at the time) to help Joel come up with the refrain. The piece went together as follows (sing along): This is not your father’s Oldsmobile…This is the new generation of Olds.
Given it’s continued popularity I decided to write a piece about it, in 2008. Since then the story continues to provoke readers to comment on the campaign. The debate mainly revolves around who actually penned the line, including a recent missive from then creative director, Don Gwaltney.
What’s ironic is that when this campaign was in its heyday most of us were not particularly proud of it. We knew it was catchy but we also realized it was damn silly. As the commercials caught on I remember feeling pretty foolish about what I’d created. It wasn’t until years later I actually put a couple of the spots on my reel and even then I did so with trepidation. To my recollection the campaign never won a single creative award. A few years later Oldsmobile went out of business. The ad line proved true to a fault. This was not your father’s Oldsmobile. Dad’s Oldsmobile was good. These cars were mediocre and overpriced.
Be that as it may, the campaign became a part of advertising history –even American history. And people want their props.
The campaign commercials consisted of filming several famous fathers with their daughters driving a new generation Olds Cutlass Supreme model. I think the funniest is with Star Trek’s own Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, and his college-aged daughter, Melanie which aired in October 1988. Watch it and you can’t help but smile. Kirk to helmsman Sulu, “Steady as she goes.”:
Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile Commercial (1988)
Watch that again, for the smile and the endorphins. Bet you never thought Trump has any connection to the classic sci-fi television series of the 1960’s. The ratings for the original three seasons (79 episodes) did not achieve blockbuster ratings, but the legion of fans were incredibly devoted. Subsequently, the Star Trek franchise has become a veritable world-wide industry of its own with multiple spin-off TV series, and at least a dozen Hollywood movies. In 2011, the NBC network decision to cancel the show was named the fourth stupidest TV move of all time by TV Guide.
Another in the series of original 1988 Oldsmobile Your Father commercials was one with Ringo Starr and his daughter. Watch here.
Refreshed in spirit and humor, now let’s look at and compare what we can between the current U.S. Cabinet, and the one likely to replace it in January 2017. First, President Obama’s sitting Cabinet.
Here is a chart listing the Departments, the top cabinet officer in each, and some basic information on their gender and ethnic heritage. The object is a high level overview of the extent to which the group of Cabinet executives reflects the population whose interests they is honor-bound and pledged to serve, regardless of party.
Here is the skinny on Obama’s picks, not including the Top Dog: 7 women and 16 men. Ethnically, there are 16 Whites, 4 Hispanics, and 3 African-Americans. Finally there are three who are American citizens now, but were not born in America: Sally Jewel (British immigrant), Samantha Power (Irish immigrant), and Maria Contreras-Sweet (Mexican immigrant).
For those counting, that’s 66% White (including President Obama himself), 17% Hispanic, and 13% African-American. Of the total of 23 officials besides the President, 30% are women, and 13% are American citizens who immigrated to our country with their foreign born parents to pursue their life’s dreams.
Since much of the new focus for the next four years will be Trump’s DWA (Distressed White America), we might comment further that in 2015 the U.S. is 61% White, Non-Hispanic, so Obama’s cabinet stacks up rather well against our nation’s combined ethnic background. Right on the money, one could say. No major lop-sided favoring of one group of our citizens over another. There is still an under-representation of women at the highest levels, at 30% instead of 50%, but that discrepancy in government is slowly diminishing.
So much for diversity, and Obama’s governing choices, what can we say about the Trump Cabinet forming now and coming soon?
Trump’s 2017 Cabinet: Educated Guesses
So far, few final choices have been announced. There are some pretty good guesses for other spots based on Transition Team statements, team leaks, insider talking out of school, and the parade of which people are marching in and out of Trump Tower every day.
The following three very recent articles are believed to contain the best information available as of this Wednesday afternoon, November 16. Of course , this is a moving target, and Trump may decide to upset his own apple cart, even after Mike Pence, who is the Transition leader, makes a final recommendation.
Best Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-administration-appointee-tracker/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/politics/donald-trump-administration.html
Here are some additional selected sources about the latest round of candidates from responsible sources, not designed as trial balloons to benefit one job-seeker or another.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/donald-trump-cabinet-rudy-giuliani.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/trump-transition.html
http://fortune.com/2016/11/16/donald-trump-carl-icahn-steve-mnuchin-wilbur-ross-twitter/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-idUSKBN13A2I7
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/donald-trump-transition.html
Here is the comparable Trump chart for the one given just above about Obama’s Cabinet. There are lots of blanks, but 6 position choices seem pretty solid as of this evening. For the 23 Cabinet positions, there are 6 White Males, and nobody anything else.
Based on a review of the three most informed sources just above, we can offer some additional comment, however to this thin soup. According to the Washington Post, there are 6 women in contention for 3 cabinet posts. Kelly Ayotte for Secretary of Defense (1 of 7 candidates); Pam Bondi of Florida for Attorney General (1 of 4 candidates); and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Jan Brewer of Arizona, Sarah Palin of Alaska, and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming for Department of the Interior (4 out of 7 candidates).
All 6 women mentioned are White. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that a woman prevails for all three of the Cabinet positions for which they are being considered. That makes Trump’s likely current head count 6 White Men and 3 White women, with 14 slots unaccounted for.
The Post lists one or more likely candidates for 12 of the 15 official cabinet offices. Among these 46 names, there are 6 White women, and 40 White men. There are no African-Americans or Hispanics of either sex that I could find in the article. Nor any American citizens who are immigrants for a Cabinet position, White, Brown, or Black.
Three Cabinet Departments have no viable candidates at all identified as of today: they are the Department of Transportation, the Department o Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Labor. This is at least somewhat curious since Trump has promised $1 trillion in infrastructure construction and upgrades, so the Department of Transportation will be critical to identifying projects, evaluating the bid proposals, negotiating the contracts, and making sure Americans get their money’s worth from the contractors. Trump is lagging behind here.
As for the Department of Labor, you would think Trump would be quite proactive here, since that Department is in charge of workplace and construction safety rules. They also set work rules for the coal mining industry, where Trump has promised to bring back good jobs and profits. Trump has said repeatedly that federal regulations are excessive and hurt American business, and cut productivity and strangle economic growth, but he did not single out OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) or MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) in the campaign as a major focus of criticism. Nothing so far on this front.
Trump had little to say about the Department of Housing and Urban Development operations during the campaign, so it does not seem to be one of his hot button issues for immediate relief. As he has asked African-Americans, who depend heavily on some HUD programs, several times, “what have you got to lose”?
Curious. As Detective Sherlock Holmes said to his sidekick Watson in the short story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, “what about the dog that didn’t bark in the night”?
Besides the actual Cabinet level positions to fill, there are several additional Presidential advisors, who are still important to the President. They include his Senior Counselor (Trump has chosen Steve Bannon), and Lt. General Mike Flynn, the likely choice for National Security Adviser. Both are White Men.
So, the current tally is a definite number of 8 White Men. There is a possible added group of as many as 3 White Women. No identified likely candidates who are Hispanic or African American. Trump is working on a clean sweep after one week.
Trump has selected 6 White men, including his Vice-President and 5 of 16 actual Cabinet posts. The identified serious candidates for the remaining 11 slots include 40 White men out of 44 candidates, a ratio of 91% for White Men.
Trump makes up his own mind, but these are his Transition Team results, with his Vice-President in charge of vetting. Trump could be on track to selecting 12-14 White Men for his official cabinet, an old-fashioned back to the past ratio of 80-90% overall, before you factor in Trump himself or Reince Priebus (both White Males), or the 6 remaining Cabinet rank officials not in the formal cabinet.
It seems like it may be a good day for old fashioned ways. It ought to bring DWA relief, succor, and pride. This would be concrete evidence from the first actual workings of the Trump Administration that he intends to MAGA, just as he promised. It will undo a small part of the mischief Obama has caused in the last 8 years, straining the cordiality of DWA almost to its breaking point sometimes.
Trump intends to help everyone in America; they just need to wait their proper turn, in a business-like manner.
The Inexorability of America’s Population Dynamics After 1920
Just one final demographic note. The last time America’s population was 90% White, Non Hispanic was 1690. That’s not a typo, folks. The year was 1690, 325 years ago, America’s total population was 200,00 nationwide, and the White, Non-Hispanic population was 92%. After that the percentage fell through the 18th and the middle of the19th centuries to 81%. The percentage of Whites in the U.S. population began another rise to a peak in 1920 at 89%.
Trump’s 2017 Cabinet may end up looking just like America did in the 1920’s. Except for the ethnic and racial distribution, there is very little else DWA would find attractive about living then, I expect.
Since 1920, there has been a steady decline until today, when the White, Nom-Hispanic population in America is 61% of the total. America’s White, Non-Hispanic population has been in a consistent, un-reversed decline for 100 years, and is going to continue on this same path. Nothing Trump does or contemplates doing about immigration and/or minorities will permanently affect this century old structural change.
Adapt or get run over. We need to figure out a way to accommodate change and make it work for all of us to prosper, together.
A Musical Coda on Timed Changes
When I was growing up in New York in the 1950’s there was a show on our CBS network station, WCBS-TV, every afternoon called The Early Show (1952-1967), which screened a variety of older movies. The show actually started in 1951 in the late evening as The Late Show:”. It was so popular that the next year a weekday afternoon version was put on the air (I believe it ran from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM).
The same theme song was used on both shows. I must have heard it play a thousand times. It is so catchy and spirit lifting, as well as being associated with free movies, that to this day I think it is the best, and certainly my favorite, TV theme music.
Anyone who ever lived in New York in the 1950’s or 1960’s knows it to toe-tap. It is called “The Syncopated Clock”.
It was written in 1945 by a G.I. working at the Pentagon, and played at the Boston Pops (with Arthur Fiedler) in 1946, conducted by Leroy Anderson**, the soldier who wrote it, while wearing his military uniform on a 3-day pass. When it was chosen as the theme for both the CBS Late and Early Show, it became an instant hit and best selling record for Leroy Anderson and Decca Records.
The demise of Oldsmobile is a textbook example of a company getting ahead of itself and changing its message before it had a new market to align with the new message. Management at Oldsmobile realized that it had a specific market that wanted a specific kind of car. For decades they had been convinced that there would always be people who wanted Oldsmobiles, and that those people would always want Oldsmobiles to look like Oldsmobiles. They did quite well with that market. The problem was that they were securing a growing share of a shrinking market. The people who wanted Oldsmobiles were elderly, and they were dying. Young people didn’t want Oldsmobiles.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Oldsmobile hired an advertising agency to create a last-gasp, hail-Mary campaign to try to reach the younger car buyers who could give new life to the brand. The ad agency came up with quite a memorable slogan: This is not your father’s Oldsmobile. It turned out to be the nail in the coffin for the Oldsmobile brand. Oldsmobile’s existing market said, “Not my father’s Oldsmobile? But my father’s Oldsmobile was what I wanted; it’s what I’ve always had. I’m seventy-seven years old. If it doesn’t look like an Oldsmobile, I don’t want it.” More to the point, that existing market had been looking for an excuse to break with tradition and buy a Cadillac anyway. It was Cadillac that benefited most from the not your father’s Oldsmobile campaign.
Meanwhile, the young car buyers who were the target of the campaign looked at the new Oldsmobiles and said, “It sure looks to me like my father’s Oldsmobile.” The misleading advertising lost Oldsmobile its existing market without winning it a new market. That was 1988. Oldsmobile hung on another twelve years, finally shutting down in the year 2000. But not your father’s Oldsmobile was the beginning of the end. All because Oldsmobile had let its message get ahead of its market.
And an earlier post from 2008.
Finally, another perspective on a great ad campaign, and a failing brand.
One of the all time classic storytelling fails belongs to General Motors (GM).
Oldsmobile was a classic American car built by GM. It carried traditional American values and a story that resonated well with it’s audience (the proud American consumer).
During its heyday, The classic GM brand was one of the most innovative cars on the market. It always pushed the boundaries on technology and design. The advertising cleverly and effectively told this story, “Escape from the ordinary”.
By the late eighties to mid nineties, the Oldsmobile brand began losing its identity. Faced with tough competition from Asian rivals, and in an effort to appeal to a younger audience, it went about re-inventing itself, to its detriment.
What Oldsmobile didn’t count on was the power of story. It didn’t factor in the negative implications associated with telling a different story; one that radically contravenes the essence of the brand and what it stood for.
Needless to say, the brand eventually went out of production.
**Leroy Anderson story:
In 1945, before there was television, I was stationed in Military Intelligence at the Pentagon after returning from Army duty in Iceland as translator and interpreter. When Arthur Fiedler learned that I was back in the country, he invited me to be guest conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra at the annual Harvard night.
Before the was I had written “Jazz Pizzicato” and “Jazz Legato” for the Pops Concerts and Arthur Fiedler had recorded them while I was overseas. Naturally I included these pieces on the program and set about thinking of a new number, preferably humorous, that would make a good encore.
Suddenly the title “The Syncopated Clock” came to mind. It occurred to me that hundreds of composers had written music imitating or suggesting clocks, but that all these clocks were ordinary ones that beat in regular rhythm. No one had described a “syncopated” clock and this idea seemed to present the opportunity to write something different.
In wartime we worked a 12 hour day at the Pentagon but I managed in a few spare hours to write the music, score it for orchestra and mail the manuscript to Symphony Hall. Mr. Fiedler had the orchestra parts copied from the score and, making the trip to Boston on a three-day pass, I conducted this very unmilitary music in uniform on May 28, 1945.
The most memorable thing about the performance is that Mack Stark, General Manager of Mills Music, made a special trip from New York to hear the new pieces. Mr. Stark had already published “Jazz Pizzicato” and “Jazz Legato” and was eventually to become my good friend and advisor. After the concert Mr. Stark told me to send him a copy of the score so that he could publish it right away. Because of the wartime shortage of paper the first copies appeared in print in 1946.
Then followed four years of frustration. All over the United States professional and amateur orchestras were playing “The Syncopated Clock” from the published edition but no record company was interested in recording it. Mr. Stark and his staff tried and tried but record manufacturers remained indifferent to the poor little clock.
The break came in 1950. In that year I was approached by Decca Records to record an LP of my own music with my own orchestra. When the record was released an unusual coincidence occurred. CBS was just starting an evening television program of old movies called The Late Show and the producer searched through recent record releases for a theme. Among them was “The Syncopated Clock”, which caught his fancy. From the very first show CBS was flooded with telephone inquires for the name of the theme and both CBS and I found ourselves with a hit on our hands: theirs the show, mine the theme music.