Hoagland on Obama

Jim Hoagland takes Obama to task for tabbing Jim Johnson to head his vice presidential search team in a today's column. Johnson had allegedly received special treatment from Countrywide, and had served on the board of several major companies.

Hoagland:

[The affair] also brought new scrutiny to the curious decision by Obama to name Johnson to the job in the first place, given the candidate's fierce vows to transform Washington's insider culture and ways.

I disagree completely (though I should mention that this isn't the crux of Hoagland's criticism). There's nothing illegal or even particularly ethically questionable about Johnson's conduct. It isn't pristine, but there has to be a limit to Obama's idealism. Johnson's track record might be more problematic if he had an important post in the White House, but if there is one job where you really need to have a Washington insider, this would be it. An operator like Johnson has for years been privy to all sorts of potentially important chatter (Candidate X has a drinking problem, Candidate Y cheats on his wife) that a well connected person from Chicago wouldn't necessarily have heard. His job is, as far as I understand it, to look for dirt on potential veeps, not to influence administration policy. Does anyone care if their private investigator knows a few drug dealers? On the contrary, it's probably a good sign that he does.