Building The Next Cabinet

Vaughn Ververs is Senior Political Editor for CBSNews.com.

Candidates for months have been out gobbling up top talent for their campaigns – consultants, pollsters, gurus and, especially, fundraisers. There are plenty to go around – but there are also plenty of candidates for them to choose from. Many have longstanding ties to certain candidates but others are party activists who may be looking for a winner who might reward them with a job, an ambassadorship or even maybe a Cabinet spot.

Of course those kinds of positions don't get handed out to just anyone, there needs to be some level of experience – and profile. Reading between the lines, two items appearing in the papers over that past couple of days struck me as rather interesting in that regard. The first, reported in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Birnbaum and Matthew Mosk, told of a gathering of top fundraisers for Hillary Clinton at her Washington Home last night.

These weren't just your run-of-the-mill fundraisers, these were a group of about 70 individuals who have committed to raising at least $250,000 for Clinton's campaign. Some have promised to raise as much as $1 million. One of those in attendance was a New York investment banker by the name of Steven Rattner.

Rattner is a longtime Democratic activist. His wife, Maureen White, is a former top fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee and helped John Kerry's campaign in 2004. Rattner helped Al Gore in 2000 and was seen as a potential member of a future economic team in a Gore administration. He's also angered some Democrats by supporting current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican.

That's why it was interesting that yesterday, the very day of that Clinton fundraising meeting, an op-ed by Rattner appeared in the New York Times. Writing on the budget presented yesterday by the Bush Administration, Rattner used the op-ed to take a shot at what he called the "misleading" accounting used by the government, but also to issue a high-minded call for better reporting:

Building a political consensus behind difficult measures would be easier if the public were more accurately apprised of our fiscal condition. Unfortunately, simply importing private sector accounting practices wouldn't properly express the complexity of the federal government's activities and obligations.

Instead, we need to elevate "accrual accounting," which better measures the government's future pension responsibilities, to the same level of public visibility as the "cash accounting" figures that are now emphasized. And our primary measure of our deficit should exclude the Social Security surplus. Finally, our obligations for future entitlements payments — the $39 trillion — should also be emphasized in reports like today's.

Back in 1802, Thomas Jefferson beseeched his Treasury secretary to adopt finances for America "as clear and intelligible as a merchant's books" so that "every man of any mind in the union should be able to comprehend them." More than 200 years later, that advice remains regrettably unheeded.