The judicial analogy is terrific, and particularly appropriate for a Constitutional Law scholar. The main post includes a link to a forum at the Kennedy Library in which Sunstein himself expands on the themes you outline.

I'll have a full post on this up in the next hour or so. But the bottom line is that, ironically, keeping Gates is an enormous blow against the status quo.

Obama is set to name Paul Volcker as the chair of the newly-created President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board at his daily press conference. That's more of the same; another respected graybeard named to a senior economic post to calm the markets. But who'll actually run the Board, while also sitting on the Council of Economic Advisors? Austan Goolsbee.

Orszag, Romer, Goolsbee. There's a pattern there, and it's not just Obama's openness to the insights of behavioral economics. We're seeing him fill the high-profile posts with respected establishment figures, but turn to innovative, thoughtful economists of an academic bent to staff the key insider posts.

There are picks that Obama has made that have alarmed or disappointed me. When Brennan was rumored for CIA, I was disheartened. Dennis Blair enjoyed a rocky tenure at IDA, even before it was cut short by his conflicts of interest. Ellen Moran generally speaks in a different tone than Obama. But overall, I think his transition team has done a very good job of filling in its top-level posts. I hope that more of the second- and third-tier positions will be filled from a somewhat more diverse pool of applicants; if you're going to turn to insiders to manage these agencies, it becomes all that much more important to surround them with advisors and aides who can bring a fresh perspective. Let's watch closely as those appointments dribble out.

Side note: I cherish my anonymity, not the least because it allows my posts to be judged solely on the merits of the arguments they advance. So I'll politely decline to respond to your queries.

Clinton took office with 259 votes in the House, and 56 in the Senate. Obama looks poised to have roughly the same number in the House, and perhaps three more in the Senate. Both ran for office during economic downturns, after extended periods of GOP rule, although the differences in scale are notable.

But if Obama enjoys substantial congressional support, he actually did a great deal to create that situation. In 1992, Democrats lost nine seats in the House, and fought to a draw in the Senate. That wasn't entirely Bill's fault. Redistricting and the longterm realignment of the south played major roles. But it was also the case that Clinton's resources were more limited, and he focused on states that were deemed winnable. By outraising his rival, building a nationwide grassroots effort, and broadening the map, Obama accomplished two critical things: he swept more Democrats into office along with him, and in many districts, he outperformed the Democratic candidates.

So yes, he owes a great deal to luck. But he also did a great deal to manufacture his own luck.

I wonder if this report from Brookings on presidential transitions, which bolsters my broad points, might get the discussion back on track.

I regret that I don't have the time, tonight, to give your post the in-depth reply it deserves. I'll just say, for now, that there are roughly 7,000 posts in the Plum Book, and we've seen Obama fill a couple dozen. You're right; Washington has no monopoly on experience, and experience is no guarantee of wisdom or success. Obama will need to draw on those with operational experience at all levels of government, not just Beltway insiders. If come January, this administration is filled solely with insiders, I'll join you in voicing disappointment. But from the White House staff picks already announced, I suspect that won't be the case.

To your last question, I'd reply, "Of course not." Our understanding of the problem has changed since Obama unveiled his agenda on the campaign trail; I imagine that the nature of his proposals will evolve, as well.

Your New Labor analogy is intriguing. But I'd note Blair's co-optation of Gordon Brown looks a lot like Obama's appointment of Clinton. And there are new figures in this administration: Christy Romer hails from academia, and Melody Barnes from precisely the think-tank world you reference. Others have moved between governmental positions and think-tanks. I think Heather Higginbottom, Peter Orszag, Chris Lu, and Mona Sutphen, are extremely encouraging picks. And Susan Rice, of course,

Right now, we know the names of some of the most prominent cabinet officials. Those aren't the posts where you expect to see outsiders. As the deputy and assistant secretaries are named, the lower-profile cabinet posts filled in, I'd expect to see Obama reach outside of Washington. It's in these posts that he'll have the chance to groom the next generation (or, if clearthinker prefers, the next non-age-specific-group) of talent. And, a few years in, these newer faces will start to assume more prominent roles. That's how most of the current crop of insiders got to be that way. Larry Summers, it's worth remembering, was an academic star who had spent a couple of years at the World Bank before being chosen as an undersecretary. Eric Holder had worked for Justice and was sitting on the DC bench when he was tapped as the District's US Attorney. They worked their way up from those posts; I'm sure another crop will do the same.

Assuming that keeping a Defense Secretary on for a year necessarily involves keeping the same defense policies comes perilously close to making a speculative extrapolation about Obama's future policy proposals. The interesting thing about Gates is that he's been a lonely voice within the Bush Administration and the Pentagon. His most substantive proposals haven't received any support from the GOP.

I argued last week that this represents a crucial opening. That there's space to assemble a substantive Democratic defense platform that goes beyond paring expenses or stressing diplomacy. In a nutshell, it involves shifting our focus away from equipment and technology and toward personnel. It would also involve jettisoning multi-purpose weapon boondoggles in favor of single-purpose equipment. Gates has made tentative steps in this direction, but without support from the President or Republicans in Congress, has been largely stymied. I can't think of a better way to introduce a massive overhaul in procurement, a recalibration of our force allocations, or an overhaul of our personnel policies than to have them first proposed by someone like Gates.

We can afford to keep Gates because we're right, and on the crucial questions of the nature and structure of our military, he largely agrees. (How and when it should be deployed is another matter; with Jim Jones as NSA, I would expect Gates to have little say in those decisions.) We don't have to act like we're desperate. We don't need to prove anything. We'll be trusted on defense the day that we, as a party, start to act with the confidence we ought to enjoy, and not a moment before then.

For instance, as Chris Bowers argues persuasively, keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates is inherently a bad idea, because it keeps the same leadership in charge of half the Federal budget and, worse, sends the message that Republicans are needed to manage national security.

Bowers' post is specious. He doesn't offer a single concrete point on which he differs from Gates. He doesn't enumerate the changes he'd like to see take place at the Pentagon. His case, such as it is, rests entirely on image and symbolism, not substance. He doesn't want Gates because he's afraid that it will signal Democrats can't handle defense. He doesn't want him because he's afraid that retaining him will undermine the case for change.

Fortunately, Obama appears not to have internalized the same insecurities. He's sufficiently strong and confident as a leader, and enjoys a broad enough mandate, that he doesn't need to choose a Democratic defense secretary just to send a symbolic message. If keeping Gates on for up to a year is the wisest course - and I've argued that it is - Obama is clearly prepared to do so. It's worth noting that even the article quoted by Bowers says that the reservations among transition advisors relate to Gates' subordinates, and not to Gates himself.

If there's a reason not to keep Gates on substantive policy grounds, I'm all ears. But to dismiss him on January 20 solely because he happens to be a Republican is precisely the sort of political decision that Obama campaigned against. It would represent the change that Chris Bowers would like to see - progressive triumphalism - and not the change Obama promised.

Let me offer, if I may, a counter-example. The early years of the Clinton administration largely followed the model you detail. His cabinet famously "looked like America." He installed an Arkansas businessman as chief of staff. His administration was generously sprinkled with business, civic, and academic leaders with no prior government experience. And the result was a chaotic mess. Health care is the classic example; an innovative and largely-sound proposal, when judged on policy grounds, turned into a political nightmare. Hillary later reflected that she'd learned some valuable lessons about "the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done."

There's often little overlap, in my experience, between those best suited to offer advice, and those best suited to run large federal agencies. So, for example, Obama has installed a couple of truly brilliant academics as his senior economic advisers: Larry Summers and Christina Romer. (That they don't exactly agree on a number of crucial issues, I take as an encouraging sign.) It's been well-reported that he's been deeply influenced by behavioral economics and other cutting-edge research. But he chose Tim Geithner, a career public servant, to run Treasury.

The same seems to hold true across the board. In choosing staff for senior administrative posts, he's placed stress on the strength of their existing relationships with key players, and on the depth of their experience. That's led him to the roster of Washington insiders. But when you look at those who advised him during the campaign, or the small circle of senior advisers he's taking with him to the White House, you get a very different picture. David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett. Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein. These are precisely the sort of outside-the-beltway figures you're calling for. Our current president seems to have cut himself off from the outside world, relying on an increasingly narrow circle of advisers for ideas and policies. So long as Obama continues to cast a wide net for his ideas, I'm less than alarmed that he's chosen conventional figures to implement them. (It's also worth noting that Obama has pledged to revitalize the civil service, and to recruit a new generation of Americans to government and public service of all kinds. If he succeeds, he'll re-seed the ranks of government workers with bright, creative minds in a way that we haven't seen since the Kennedy years.)

I'm not arguing that his ultimate goals mark any kind of sharp departure. It's not the desire for, say, universal access to health care that marks a departure from the status quo; it would be the enactment of that policy, something previous administrations and congresses have notably failed to achieve. Actually ratifying these changes into law would constitute a major shift by any account. But even that doesn't really capture it.

I had an exchange with Greg Sargent on this subject, after I posted this entry, that helped me to clarify my thinking. The upshot was tripartite formulation: Obama supports pragmatic methods, progressive goals, and adaptive solutions. And it's the third element that I'd offer as answer to your questions.

Conservatives critics have listened to Obama tick off the same items that have comprised the progressive agenda for decades, and concluded that he's a run-of-the-mill liberal. Progressive worriers have watched as he's filled his administration with establishment figures, and concluded that he lacks either the inclination or the ability to implement that agenda. And they're all missing a crucial element of the picture.

Obama is at his most interesting, his most innovative, when he discusses the actual nitty-gritty policy solutions that he's considering to achieve his goals. These are what I'm terming his 'adaptive solutions.' So he supports cap-and-trade, which would have a potentially enormous impact on our systems of production. He wants to make healthcare universally available, but to do it by expanding the existing system and plugging its holes. He wants to expand access to education, but supports charter schools, and college funding in exchange for service. And he supports these ideas, not because they're more politically palatable versions of the changes he wishes he could advocate, but because he's a genuine believer in harnessing markets and compensating for their limitations. These are the solutions he actually prefers, not the ones for which he's settling.

We've been stuck, for too long, in a political world in which the significance of an idea is measured by its distance from the status quo, and in which its worth is seen as a function of its ideological purity. Thus incremental proposals tend to be dismissed as timid, and proposals that draw together the strongest elements of competing ideas tend to be reviled as weak-kneed compromises. In fact, incremental changes are often more sweeping than revolutionary changes, for better or worse. Simply adding prescription drug coverage to Medicare, for example, may cost more than $2 trillion over the next decade. It didn't involve an entirely new program, or a fundamental change in our approach. But it's going to have an enormous impact on every budgetary discussion for years to come. As it happens, the prescription drug benefit, in its present form, is terrible public policy. But I hope it illustrates the broader point, that incrementalism describes the style of change - evolutionary - and not its scale or the depth of its impact.

So Obama's policy proposals are exciting in two respects. The first is tactical. Obama's minimalism, his incrementalism, seems to represent a way to slice through Washington's Gordian Knot. It's enormously difficult to usher revolutionary programs through Congress, despite the desperate need for transformative change. Legislation that starts with existing programs, and then modifies and adapts them, stands a far better chance of passage and implementation. And, if done properly, the changes achieved this way can be at least as transformational. So for the first time in years, when I look at the Democratic agenda, I see a realistic path to its enactment, despite the likely opposition of entrenched interests.

The second element of the Obama agenda that I find exciting is its empiricism. One of the key advantages of an incremental approach is that it allows for experimentation. You don't have to figure out all the answers before you switch systems; you can tinker around the edges, and then expand the things that work. And any proposal that gets passed into law doesn't represent an end-state, a new orthodoxy. It's just a step along the way, a move toward a more perfect solution, recognizing that most problems are ultimately imperfectable. When two orthodoxies clash, the result is bitter partisanship - advocates on each side press onward in support of their system, since systemic approaches are mutually-exclusive. A minimalist approach aims instead to find point of overlap, issues on which enough people on both sides agree that they can cooperate to implement change.

That's why I'd make the case that Obama's approach is both more likely to pass, and more likely to succeed. But you're right. It's not revolutionary - it offers no radical points of disjuncture. But that's not the same as saying it's not innovative, substantive, and sweeping.

Obama endorses those goals, but has been skeptical of those solutions. And where other progressives - notably Clintonian New Democrats - often advanced the case for pragmatism by arguing that progressives needed to focus on what it was possible to attain, that's not Obama's case. He's pragmatic in the sense that he's intensely focused on finding solutions that work; not in the sense that he's focused on what he can enact, instead of on what he'd ideally like to achieve. His ambitions are sweeping, but his policies are pragmatic. And that's not just a euphemistic way of saying 'unambitious'; in fact, they're more sweeping than any President has proposed in a generation.

So Obama supports expanded funding for education, but also charter schools, and is open minded on the subject of vouchers. He'd rather adapt our multiple-payer model of healthcare and use government to fill in the gaps, and doesn't want a mandate. And his economic proposals have always paired redistributive taxation with economic growth.

My point is that Yglesias seems to be conflating Obama's unequivocal embrace of progressive goals with some sort of support for progressive solutions. And even Dionne seems unsure about which kind of pragmatism he's advancing. So let's put it this way: He's pragmatic in his means, progressive in his goals, and adaptive in his solutions. How does that strike you?

But I do think that there's an alternative to the polar choices you present - that Obama is crafting a pragmatic approach to progressive ends. Yglesias, by contrast, essentially argues that he's cloaking his progressive approach in pragmatic clothing. I think that's a fairly fundamental distinction.

I took a couple of stabs at posting a comment in response, but the thing kept on getting longer, so I ultimately turned it into a post of its own, outlining where I agree and where we part. I'd be curious to hear your response.

Several readers have scorned the topic as unworthy of serious attention. If that's their opinion, their argument is probably more with our President-elect than with me.

There seems to be an emergent consensus among other readers that I misfired with this post. They agree with aspects of my critique of the revenue-generating programs in Division I, but fail to see how adding playoffs would make that situation substantially worse. A couple add that since playoffs might correct other problems with the BCS, they're worth considering.

They may well be right; I certainly lack the evidence to challenge them on the hypothetical. So, if I may, let me refocus attention on the broader point at which this post was aiming. It's clear that Obama was having some fun with the question. It was the last thing he was asked in an hour-long interview. And Kroft, fully aware of what he'd volunteered on Monday Night Football, gave him a slow pitch right over the fat part of the plate. That's not unusual; many interviews end with a light-hearted question that the interviewee can knock out of the park. And from a political perspective, Obama nailed his response.

My gripe is that college athletics has some real problems. I identified some in post; readers have since pointed out more. And Barack Obama has to know this, as an alumnus, an avid fan, and a brother-in-law. Right now, he's an immensely popular and influential figure. He chose to score some easy points on this topic. Fine. But the story was picked up in every sporting news outlet in the country, and in the sports sections and segments of the mainstream press, as well. And millions of Americans were left with the impression that when our new president thinks of college athletics, he's mostly worried about attaining a clear resolution at the end of the football season.

Reading the transcript, and viewing the video, that answer struck me as a little glib. It smacked of the campaign trail. It scored points; it didn't advance an agenda or a set of policies. And I guess what set me off was that Obama was explicitly weighing in as President. He was asked what he'd do "as president of the United States...about getting a college football playoff for the national championship?" If he wanted to answer the question as a sports fan, he needed to first disavow its premise. He needed to say something like, "Look, as a fan, I can tell you what I'd like to see happen." But he didn't. Or he could have said that he didn't think he'd take any actual steps as president to make a playoff happen. But he didn't do that, either. There was even the classic way out - he could have promised to appoint a commission to study the problem. No dice. Instead, he threw the weight of the presidency behind his views as a fan. And that's amateurish. The only justification for the president weighing in on the structure of the college football championship is if his position is intended to advance some public good. And though some posters here have made that claim, Obama himself did not. He simply said that as president, he'd use the influence and authority of the office to satisfy his interests as a sports fan. And that's not the sort of thing a president should say, even in jest.

I'm glad to learn that my posts past muster, but I do feel obliged to correct you on one crucial point: I don't have an independent blog. That shameless bit of self-promotion at the bottom of my posts links to my TPM page. On occasion, I've been fortunate enough to have some large blogs (e.g., Sullivan's Daily Dish or Obsidian Wings) link back to my posts, and when readers arrive here who are unfamiliar with TPM Cafe, I like to provide them with links and instructions. This is the only place I publish my posts, and I'm grateful for the opportunity it provides.

That's not intended as a reflection on other bloggers. I agree that many of the most interesting and distinctive voices around here cross-post their thoughts, and our community is richer for it. But I certainly don't want anyone to think I'm using TPM to drive traffic to some other, non-existent site.

The first thing I want to emphasize in response is that the argument you're making is that a playoff system would be no worse academically than the status quo. To my mind, that's not exactly a compelling case for change. If our President-elect is going to weigh in on a subject like this, I'd prefer him to advance a proposal that might actually improve the situation for student athletes, and not just one that might not make things any worse. Can you find any affirmative academic reason for the change?

To your series of questions, I'd answer a qualified 'Yes.' The money, and all that it brings with it, raise the stakes immeasurably. The players in D-I are on athletic scholarships, which means, in many cases, that they have to remain on the team or lose their funding. The pressure to win is greater. The hours allowed for practices longer - and in D-I, during playoffs and bowl season, students lose their mandatory one-day-off per week. (To cite one particularly stark contrast, in 2003 D-III moved to cut back on the length of defined seasons and to end red-shirting of freshmen. Can you imagine that in D-I?) And, perhaps most importantly, most players in D-I harbor dreams of professional careers, however unrealistically. Very few in D-III have similar delusions, so they generally use their time in college to prepare for some other path in life. All of this suggests, at least to me, that players in D-III are better positioned to endure the extra games a playoff entails than are their D-I peers.

I can't speak to the motives of university presidents, some of whom are undoubtedly simply seeking to maximize revenue. But frankly, I don't particularly care. I oppose a D-I football playoff because it seems to reinforce the same negative trends that have been at work in big-time college football for decades; if others advance similar arguments with less-than-pure motives, I don't see why that should have any bearing on our evaluation of the underlying argument itself. And you're correct that presidents, ADs and coaches bear a large measure of responsibility for the current mess, but isn't that a further reason to set it right?

It's true that FCS, D-II, and D-III all have football playoffs. I haven't focused on them because our president-elect didn't raise the subject. But if we must go there, I'd point out that the scale of the problem in other divisions is wildly different. If you think that the ability of Mount Union College to field consistently excellent football teams that engage in playoffs without compromising academic standards has any bearing on what it would be like for a lineman at Texas to play two or three playoff games at the end of the season, well, I'm not sure how to respond to that.