I can’t believe that Mike Huckabee and Elaine Chao (Bush’s former labor secretary) have reportedly taken President Obama to task for not having a “diverse” enough set of Cabinet appointments for his second term.
You can call him a hypocrite for insisting on selecting the best-qualified applicants while his Justice Department is telling the Supreme Court that it’s not a good idea for universities to do so, but hypocrisy is, after all, the tribute that vice pays to virtue. And Obama is, for once, being virtuous in insisting on hiring the best-qualified candidates, regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex (they are not the people I’d choose, but that’s a different story).
What this episode shows is that no one really believes that you can select people with an eye on their color while also trying to pick the best people. It’s a good thing that the administration has unwittingly acknowledged that.