This "Conversation", about the imminent Obama administration, between NYT columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks is a good and breezy read.
I learn from it that the real reason Krugman couldn't make the meeting with Obama is that he had to go to Sweden to collect his Nobel prize. That must surely rank as the most excruciating double-booking diary mishap ever in the history of the world.
Also, this is interesting (from Brooks):
He’s done some big things right — hiring people like Dennis Ross and Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. He’s also done some less obvious things right. For example, the other day, I read that he rehired Mark Dybul as his Global AIDS Coordinator.
Dybul is one of those heroes one meets too rarely in government. He worked as an AIDS doctor in San Francisco in the 1980s and when the worst effects of the plague migrated to Africa, he did too. Then George W. Bush hired him to run the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program before promoting him to Global AIDS Coordinator.
It must have sometimes been difficult for a gay man to work in the Bush administration, but Dybul handled it all with exceptional grace and super-human competence. I traveled through Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique with him once and was incredibly impressed.
My point is that there must be many people in the Democratic orbit who would like the job Dybul holds. There are no political rewards for rehiring someone from a past administration. But Obama bypassed them for the sake of the program. It was a pure merit choice, and typical of a lot of the moves he has made.
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