CHILLY TOWARD PANETTA

Posted at 7:55 a.m.

The Obama team, as it starts its maiden voyage in government, may have brushed an iceberg.  The president-elect's selection of Leon Panetta to head the CIA has been met with a big chill.

It isn't that Panetta is unpopular.  He's a former congressman and White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and is respected as both competent and smart.  But in a time of war the nation usually expects a CIA director to have some experience in intelligence work.  The Panetta resumé is blank on that one.  CQ reports, in a dispatch carried by Yahoo:

The incoming and outgoing chairs of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee signaled concerns about President-elect Barack Obama's choice of Leon E. Panetta to head the CIA, primarily because of Panetta's thin intelligence resume.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who was miffed that she wasn't consulted on the nomination, reiterated her stand that a CIA director should have relevant experience.

Added an aide to John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., who served as chairman of the committee in the 110th Congress: "I think, based on press reporting if it proves correct, Sen. Rockefeller has some concerns about his selection. Not because he has any concerns about Panetta, whom he thinks very highly of, but because he has no intelligence experience and because he has believed this has always been a position that should be outside of the political realm."

Not much applause there.

Christopher S. Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, questioned the choice.

"Job No. 1 at the CIA is to track down and stop terrorists," Bond said in a statement. "In a post-9/11 world, intelligence experience would seem to be a prerequisite for the job of CIA director."

If Panetta were a Broadway show, it would be closing already.

But not everyone was opposed:

"First of all, he's certainly dealt with a lot of intelligence," said Hamilton, an Obama ally. "In the Iraq Study Group we dealt with it every day. As chief of staff in the White House, you deal with it every day, too."

Hamilton said Panetta would need top deputies from the intelligence community. "It's a complicated, arcane business," he noted. But he added, "What his strength will be is he brings an outsider's perspective to the intelligence community."

I'm not sure Panetta will want such faint praise.  "Dealing" with intelligence is far from being an expert on intelligence operations or how to run a spy agency.  I "deal" with medical matters whenever I read a medical story.  But I'm not a physician. 

Look, he'll probably be confirmed.  But the choice is disappointing because Obama has bowed to the left wing of his party, which opposed any new CIA director who had anything to do with intelligence operations under the Bush administration.  That pretty much ruled out anyone who'd served in the last eight years.  The Panetta apointment is the equivalent of Harry Truman choosing a military leader in 1946, to confront the Soviet Union, who hadn't served in World War II.

Not change we can believe in.

January 6, 2009.