In the past few weeks, I've been repeatedly asked by friends and acquaintances, "Well, what do you think of Obama's first appointments?" These various inquisitions gave me a chance to organize conflicting thoughts--which was fortunate, for The Washington Post's "Outlook" section asked me to contribute a piece on this question. The article will appear on the front page of the section on Sunday. But it's already been posted--old media meets new media--and here are some excerpts:

The more things change, the more they stay . . . well, you know. And looking at President-elect Barack Obama's top appointments, it's easy to wonder whether convention has triumphed over change -- and centrists over progressives.

A quick run-down: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who supported the Iraq war until she initiated her presidential bid, has been handed the Cabinet's big plum: secretary of state. And Bush's second defense secretary, Robert Gates, will become Obama's first defense secretary. The Obama foreign policy adviser regarded as the most liberal in his inner circle, Susan E. Rice, has been picked for the U.N. ambassador slot. Obama is elevating this job to Cabinet rank, but he's still sending Rice to New York -- and in politics and policy, proximity to power matters. For national security adviser, Obama has picked James L. Jones. The retired four-star general was not hawkish on the Iraq war and seems to be a non-ideologue who possesses the right experience for the job. But he probably would have ended up in a McCain administration, and his selection has not heartened progressives.

Obama's economic team isn't particularly liberal, either. Lawrence H. Summers, who as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary opposed regulating the new-fangled financial instruments that greased the way to the subprime meltdown, will chair Obama's National Economic Council. To head Treasury, Obama has tapped Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who helped oversee the financial system as it collapsed. Each is close to Robert Rubin, another former Clinton Treasury secretary, a director of bailed-out Citigroup and a poster boy for both the corporate wing of the Democratic Party and discredited Big Finance. Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board will be guided by Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman whose controversial tight-money policies ended the stagflation crisis of the 1970s but led to a nasty recession. (A genuinely progressive economist, Jared Bernstein, will receive a less prominent White House job: chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.)

It's no surprise that many progressives are -- depending on whom you ask -- disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied. Sure, Obama's appointments do represent change -- that is, change from the widely unpopular Bush-Cheney status quo. But do these appointments amount to the kind of change that progressives, who were an essential part of Obama's political base during the campaign, can really believe in?

Perhaps Obama is trying to pull off something subtle -- a sort of stealth liberalism draped in bipartisan centrism. But it's understandable that progressives are worried....

So with these hawkish, Rubin-esque, middle-of-the-road picks, has Obama abandoned the folks who brought him to the dance?

My hunch is that Obama has made a calculation. In constructing his administration, he has decided not to create a (liberal) Washington counter-establishment. Instead, he's fashioning a bipartisan, centrist-loaded version of the Washington establishment to carry out his policies, which do tilt to the left. (And good news for the establishmentarians: Having screwed up on Iraq or the economy is no disqualification.) When asked at a Nov. 26 news conference whether his appointments of old Washington hands indicated that his administration was not going to be a festival of change, Obama replied, "What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But understand where the -- the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me." His job, he added, was to "make sure . . . that my team is implementing" his policies. In other words, la change, c'est moi.....

For the moment, the watchword for progressives ought to be a version of an old Reagan trope: hope, but verify....

You can read the conclusion and the entire piece here.

If you want to see why John McCain and his spinners might get away with their ramped-up sleaze attacks on Barack Obama, turn to page four of Thursday's Washington Post. There you will find an article headlined "McCain Camp Hits Obama On More Than One Front.". The piece begins:

Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign launched a broadside against Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, accusing him of a sexist smear, comparing his campaign to a pack of wolves on the prowl against the GOP vice presidential pick, charging that the Democratic nominee favored sex education for kindergartners, and resurrecting the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

And the next several paragraphs go on to describe these attacks and the consequent back-and-forth between the Obama and McCain campaigns. The piece reports,

The attacks over the first three days of this week have come at a sometimes dizzying pace. Within 24 hours, the McCain campaign released a television advertisement saying Obama favored "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners, produced an Internet ad charging that the Democrat had referred to Palin as a pig, then concluded with another ad saying, "Obama's politics of hope? Empty words."

....McCain allies think they have succeeded in knocking Obama on his heels since he accepted his party's nomination in Denver two weeks ago.
"They really are in a meltdown," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), a McCain adviser.

Only after describing the gleeful GOPers and upset Dems does the article evaluate the ads, essentially noting they were, well, crap. For instance: "The sex education ad referred to legislation Obama voted for -- but did not sponsor -- in the Illinois Senate that allowed school boards to develop "age-appropriate" sex education courses at all levels. Kindergarten teachers were given the approval to teach about appropriate and inappropriate touching to combat molestation." The piece suggests--but does not spell out--that it was a complete lie for the McCain camp to say that Obama wanted to teach kindergarteners "comprehensive sex education."

Next to the article on the hard copy of the Post was indeed an analysis of the sex education ad, noting the ad had misrepresented Obama's record and awarding it three Pinocchios (out of a possible high of four).

But here's the perennial problem: the campaign story of the day was not that McCain was lying about his opponent; it was the fight between the two candidates. Whenever the media report false charges in an evenhanded manner--A said X about B; B said X was not true--the party hurling the mud wins. And wins big. Sure, the Post's "Factchecker," Factcheck,com, and Politifact.com each rate political accusations for accuracy and fairness--and often slam a campaign for peddling falsehoods. But, it seems, campaigns dependent on sleaze can all-too-easily survive the negative reviews from these outfits.

The issue then is whether a campaign's reliance on such tactics becomes a key component of the overall media account of the election--and whether a candidate has to answer for such actions. So far McCain has not.

The current issue of Mother Jones has an essay I wrote along similar lines about how the media handle presidential prevarications. You can read it here.

Newspapers often don't like to call public figures liars or dissemblers. But read this passage from the Washington Post article on the recent attempt of the McCain camp to portray Obama as weak on terrorism because he praised how Islamic terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were prosecuted:

Tuesday, the McCain team drew a direct line between the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying that submitting the bombers to the criminal justice system was, in the words of former Navy secretary and 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, "a material cause" of the 2001 attacks. Lehman participated in the McCain conference call.

Lehman said grand jury evidence in the 1993 bombing was "put under seal" and not made available to the CIA, thus denying the agency timely access to information that "would have enabled many of the dots to be connected well before 9/11 and . . . give a good chance to have prevented" the later attack. In particular, he cited information concerning a connection between Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged ringleader of the 2001 attacks who is imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, and the bombing.

But both the report of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated intelligence failures leading to the 2001 strikes, and the prosecutor of the 1993 case disagreed with Lehman's version of history. The commission's final report, which Lehman endorsed as a member of the panel, gives no indication that any failure to share information on the bombing with the intelligence community had "significance for the story of 9/11."

Instead, the report cites political and intelligence failures to understand the scope of the terrorist threat after the 1993 attack, as well as a failure to fully analyze the implications of the available information. It also blames the FBI and the CIA for failing to effectively communicate with each other, problems that were later addressed in the USA Patriot Act and the reorganization of the intelligence community.

Grand jury secrecy "could have operated in these cases as a barrier to information flowing from law enforcement to intelligence," former U.S. attorney Mary Jo White, who successfully prosecuted six major terrorism cases including the 1993 bombing, said Tuesday. But, she added, "as a matter of fact it did not."

White and several people involved in the 9/11 Commission disputed Lehman's assertion that "the CIA was not allowed to see that evidence." Lehman also described then-CIA Director George J. Tenet as "flabbergasted at what he found in that material" once it was made available to him. But Tenet made no such claim in his 2007 book.

Bottom line: the McCain campaign attacked Obama falsely. It made up facts. It distorted history.

But this was not the focus on the Post's article which was headlined, "Candidates Clash on Terrorism: In Sharp Exchange, Each Side Calls Other's Position a Risk." The story led with the cat fight: McCain attacks Obama; Obama attacks McCain. The yadda-yadda-yadda of political coverage. Yet the reporters--Anne Kornblut and Karen DeYoung--did the heavy lifting and demonstrated that the McCain squad was stretching the truth to make its case, and they placed this information at the end of the article.

But how about breaking out of the he said/he said box? Here's an alternative lead: "On Tuesday, the McCain campaign accused Barack Obama of having a weak position on terrorism, though it partly based its charge on assertions that were not accurate." That is, don't even give a candidate the room to make a charge that is supported by false information.

Throughout the media, there has been an increase in the factchecking of candidates' claims. The Post does this in a regular feature and awards Pinocchios to fib-telling pols. (Remember Hilary Clinton and the sniper fire in Bosnia?) But such vetting hasn't stopped politicians from playing with the truth. Perhaps it's time for the MSM to escalate and call out the truth-manglers in a direct manner within the news coverage. I don't know if that will slow down the flow of political lies. But it sure ain't likely to increase them.