if you indeed understood so thoroughly that Obama would choose a raft of beltway insiders for his administration, how can you possibly have the hide to now show this moral outrage at the kind of vermin his net drew in? As you say, this is how Washington insiders work!

I think you missed the point of what I wrote. I'm not expressing outrage at his appointments. For many reasons, that he's appointing Washington insiders doesn't surprise me in the least. Obama has courted centrist Beltway power since he arrived. That's what I meant with that post two weeks ago that I don't understand how anyone could be surprised by this.

I'm arguing here that these appointees don't deserve praise, not that I'm outraged over them. The whole point is that it remains to be seen what their appointments mean -- does it mean Obama will adopt their ideology and governing style, or is he co-opting Washington power to implement his elevated vision?

Everyone can guess now. I have my own guesses. But why not wait and see what he does?

Real journalists are never going to take you seriously if you continually keep making these sorts of unprofessional moves:

Since then, The New York Times has published two piece... which make conclusively clear that the word "peripheral" [in what I wrote earlier] is inaccurate.

Not only did you admit an error, you LEAD with the admission of error, and you did so in unequivocal language "make conclusively clear."

If you absolutely must point out one of your own errors, it should take the following, less direct form:

"Earlier I claimed... but some critics have suggested that this may not have been entirely accurate."

That's just Journalism 101.

... that doesn't mean I think he walks on water. What I voted for (and worked the polls for, and fundraised for...) was first and formost his judgment, as well as his maturity and principled consistency. Like any human being, he will make some mistakes, and the people he appoints may not turn out the way he hoped. He picked Holder because, Rich pardon aside, Holder holds similar views about all the most important Constitutional issues of our time. I do not doubt that Obama and Holder will do all they can to restore limits on domestic surveillance and end the horrors of rendition, torture and Guantanamo. Their most fundamental principles and beliefs require it.

Glenn:

I recognize that many Americans, from just about all walks of life, share the following sentiment:

More than anything else, Obama's endless invocation of the "change" mantra was not about promises of sharp ideological or even policy shifts -- as needed as those may be -- but instead, was about changing this core Beltway dynamic, delousing the Washington culture.

Obama's decision to "get along by going along" with the FISA amendments in July persuaded me that however much I might wish that "delousing" is what Obama means by "change", I seriously doubt he means to disrupt the "core Beltway dynamic". Leaving Joe Lieberman as chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is another example of how the "core Beltway dynamic" is likely to continue purring along for some time to come.

I think Obama is more of a Beltway Establishment type than either of the past two Democratic presidents, Clinton and Carter. That may actually help Obama accomplish more, in view of the strength-sapping battles about "legitimacy" both Carter and Clinton had to fight with the Beltway Establishment. But I think Obama views "change" as generational and incremental, much like John F. Kennedy, and not as transformative in the tradition of Progressive Era Reformers.

Franklin Roosevelt's senior appointments (or indeed his 1932 campaign) did not particularly portend the change that came -- much of the ferment of the New Deal came from activists at sub-Cabinet levels and in the agencies (which of course were a favorite FDR technique for side-stepping Washington gridlock). So I could be wrong about Obama and real reform. And not even FDR changed Washington overnight, or indeed in a single term of office. So even for the more hopeful among us, it would be prudent to lengthen and manage our expectations.

Some of the comments here were laughable. The most humorous was someone claiming that the Rich pardon was a "merciful act".

I wish Obama would reconsider Mr. Holder. I'd rather he pick someone without the stain of the Rich pardon and the Clinton's. Yes, I'm a Clinton hater.

With Obama I dreamed that we could move beyond the domestic and international nightmares brought on by Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II. I had hoped for a field day on the establishment. New people. A new approach. I know I'm not supposed to judge yet but this sucks. It just sucks.

... is appoint anyone who could seriously be called a liberal Democrat to his cabinet. So he is either disingenuous when he claims not to care what stripe of the political spectrum someone hails from or he believes that genuine liberals are not qualified to hold posts in his White House. Either way, the next four years are going to be very frustrating for liberals like me, I'm afraid.

As if it mattered in the first place.

Glenn is relying on failure to follow "established procedure" in order to justify his condemnation of the Rich Pardon, and deliberately ignoring the mitigating circumstances -- or dismissing them because "ordinary citizens" can't take advantage of such mitigations, not if they follow "established procedures" -- when the whole thing was and is a little bit of ginned up OUTRAGE!!!™ brought to us by the howler monkeys of the perpetually put upon anti-Clinton cohort, and they will not let is rest.

The President -- any President -- has plenary pardon powers. "Procedure" is all well and good, but guess what? The President can pardon anyone for anything at any time regardless of procedure, and nobody can do a g-d thing about it. It's in the Constitution. Don't like it? You know what to do.

The thing of it is Marc Rich's pardon was and is that it doesn't really matter. The ones that matter -- say Ford's pardon of Nixon, or the pardons of the Iran-Contra criminals -- have lasting consequences for the nation (take a look at what's going on around you, for example.) It's a stretch to claim that the Rich pardon matters because it reinforces the corruption of the Palace, when many of them do that but don't have the kind of policy consequences that the I-C pardons did.

A Palace operates on a personal level as well as a policy level, and in its personal operations, mutual grooming and back-scratching is almost ritualized and absolutely necessary. Rich knew the right people, groomed the right people, and made his case to the right people and got his pardon. "Ordinary citizens" probably can't do that. Yet somehow they get pardons, too, and sometimes those pardons don't follow "procedures" either.

They don't have to.

To change that system requires somewhat more than most Americans care to devote to the task.