Liberals who worried that President-elect Obama was stocking his administration with too many centrist eggheads can finally rest easy. His choice to head the White House Domestic Policy Council got her start in politics at the age of eight, selling cupcakes to benefit George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
Melody C. Barnes, who was among the economic team members that Obama introduced on Monday, is a former chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., on the Senate Judiciary Committee who served as executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress - the lefty Washington think tank founded by John D. Podesta, who heads Obama’s transition effort - before joining Obama’s campaign as a senior adviser.
Working out of the Executive Office of the President, Barnes will preside over a panel of Cabinet officials and agency heads and coordinate initiatives dealing with issues including health care, education, immigration and law enforcement.
The job entails matching proposed rules and policy initiatives with the president’s stated goals. Barnes also will have a big say in the workings of the Office of National AIDS Policy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives - that often controversial epicenter of President Bush’s compassionate conservatism.
A C-Span clip making the rounds on YouTube reveals Barnes to be something of an idealist. Much of her political thinking was shaped by dinner table conversations about Vietnam and President Nixon during her childhood in Richmond, Va. Her parents’ political leanings led to a grassroots effort to support McGovern - and to Barnes’ very early stint as a culinary fundraiser.
Describing her job at the Center for American Progress, Barnes said, “Quite frankly it’s all about changing the world, changing the country, helping the American public realize what it means to have a progressive America, to hear the other side of the debate that we think that they’ve been missing for a long time.”
Barnes also brings an extra glitz factor to what’s already shaping up to be a starry White House. Last year, she made Washingtonian magazine’s 2007 list of the best-dressed Washington women . In the magazine, she described her style as “understated but interesting,” and added, “The best life advice I’ve received is also the best fashion advice: Be authentic.”
— Adriel Bettelheim
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