Commerce Department! Qu'est Que C'est?

One of the more fascinating parts of this transition has been watching new Secretaries show up at various departments and be greeted as liberators. A notable exception, of course, has been Commerce, where Acting Secretary Otto Wolff labors in obscurity and employees are still waiting for new leadership to be put in place.

All of this, predictably, has inspired a fresh round of blogospheric navel-gazing about the Commerce Department's raison d'être. Harold Meyerson, tongue firmly in cheek, contemplates the Department's role in a post-centralized-industrial-base world. David Rothkopf, a former Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade (and author of a great book on the NSC), puts things less delicately but ultimately comes to the right conclusion:

Here's the problem: the job of this administration is to rebuild our economy and for all its myriad structural flaws and like of budgetary clout, the Commerce Department is the only place with anything like the capability to play a role this area. High financial policy types don't typically think much about the grunt work of job-creation or supporting the businesses that actually create the jobs. And we have been so ideologically opposed to anything that had a hint of industrial policy to it for so long that there is no capability elsewhere to help determine where to best invest stimulus money or what the future of the U.S. economy will look like.

Bingo. The Obama Administration has made a point of noting that this whole stimulus deal depends on something like 90% of the jobs being created in the private sector. That, of course, requires cajoling leaders of non-decrepit industries to get back into gear and start making stuff again. I think it's great that Obama is engaged in this issue, but when you've got the President himself personally congratulating individual corporate executives on their continued participation in the economy, there's a capacity issue somewhere along the line. While we wait to learn who will ultimately take the Commerce gig, it's important to remember why the post exists in the first place, and that whatever you think of the Department's org chart, the top job is one vacancy that needs filling ASAP.