Strange choices of the next prresident - allthough Pandetta could be interesting

Obama picks keep being disappointing and amazingly uncreative - picking all the Clinton people is weird as some of them have obscure track records ( chief of stuff Emmanuel earned multi million dollar bonus being 3 years with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson - no prior banking experience and that's about what the top people in wall street earned that years who did make hundreds of millions for their firms, or Mr :Geithner who 's lack of supervision helped to produce hundreds of billions of losses in wall street) - I am not referring to Mr Panetta as being obscure. He actually switched from the Reps to the Dems and established civil rights under Nixon against his resistance - that makes him not the ideal candidate for being the boss of the CIA ironically. The whole thing sounds as Ms. Clinton is the next president

Excerpt WSJ

By SIOBHAN GORMAN

In a surprise move, President-elect Barack Obama has picked Leon Panetta, a former congressman and chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Democratic officials. His appointment is expected to be announced later this week.

The pick was unexpected because many of the names discussed for the job had been intelligence professionals. Mr. Panetta, whose background is in politics and government, has not worked for an intelligence agency.

He was selected for his management experience, one Democratic official said, citing Mr. Panetta's tenure as chief of staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration's first term. In those posts, Mr. Panetta was involved in setting the intelligence budget and handling key foreign-policy issues such as the Bosnian conflict, the official said.

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Another key factor in the selection of Mr. Panetta, a Democratic official said, is Mr. Panetta's reputation for centrism. "He's someone who is known as being even-handed and bipartisan," the official said.

A former Democratic congressman from California from 1977 to 1993, Mr. Panetta is currently the director of the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, a nonpartisan think tank based at California State University, Monterey Bay. He was also a director of the New York Stock Exchange and a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which assessed U.S. Iraq policy and provided recommendations in late 2006.

Mr. Obama is also expected to announce soon the nomination of retired Adm. Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence, the top intelligence post.