President Obama has just nominated MacArthur Genius Grant-recipient Dr. Regina Benjamin to be the nation’s surgeon general, and she seems to me a better choice than Obama’s first selection of TV doc Sanjay Gupta. The post, despite its glorified title, has relatively little policy-making power, and is best used as a platform for highlighting a specific public-health issue. C. Everett Koop did this well with his work on the perils of smoking; Jocelyn Elders was somewhat less successful when, er, suggesting that we teach teenagers about alternative forms of tension release (click here, if you must). Only those who really follow the Public Health Service know this, but the Surgeon General reports to the assistant secretary of health (ASH), not to the president or the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This often, though not always, leads to tension between the surgeon general and the ASH, as the surgeon general is better known, but the ASH is higher ranking. Because of this tension, the best thing for all concerned is usually if the surgeon general focuses on being the nation’s leading spokesperson on public-health issues and leaves the policy determinations to the ASH. This reality may be why Gupta ended up not taking the job, but is probably the best route for Dr. Benjamin, assuming, of course, that she picks the right issues to highlight.