A pastime of every political operative is to indulge in speculation, the opportunities for which are endless when it comes to a Presidential election.  We speculate on who will win a Presidential nomination when it’s up for grabs.  We speculate on who the nominee will choose as his or her running mate.  We speculate on which Presidential nominee will carry which states in the electoral college.  And we don’t even wait until the general election to speculate on who will be in a new President’s cabinet, and in which post.

To speculate, of course, is not the same as to predict.  Speculation is akin to the Yiddish “to Kibbitz.”  Those of you unfamiliar with Yiddish, who would include no one who heard me speak, may know the word from a Jewish deli in Cherry Hill, The Kibitz Room.  It’s my favorite deli in the New Jersey, hands down, even if it spells kibbitz wrong.  To Kibbutz means to chew the fat.  To kibbitz is engage in wishful thinking.  To kibbitz is to figure out the best-case scenarios before the baseball season begins by which the Yankees, Mets or Phillies could win the pennant, even if the scenarios are from another planet   That’s what a pastime is.

Allow me, then, to speculate – or more precisely to kibbitz – on which public servants from New Jersey would be good choices for cabinet posts in a prospective Biden Administration.

Secretary of State.  Cognescenti in both political parties understand that the State Department is the most tragic cabinet mess of the Trump Administration.   Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, having had no government experience and scant familiarity with the State Department, threw a wrecking ball indiscriminately at the department’s structure and morale.  The current Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is Trump’s ideological lapdog who has done too little to heal the department.

What the State Department needs next is not a generalist.  The next Secretary of State must enter on day one with foreign policy know-how and knowledge of the department’s intricacies.

New Jersey may well have the most logical possibility among all Democrats in the country to be our next Secretary of State.  He is Senator Bob Menendez, ranking Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.   Should Democrats take control of the Senate, you’d have to doubt whether Menendez would give up the committee chairmanship.  But if there’s a cabinet post prestigious and equally powerful enough for him to say yes, it’s Secretary of State.   Bob is probably the most underappreciated intellect in New Jersey politics today.  His grasp of foreign policy is extraordinary.  His knowledge of the State Department has become deep, no doubt, by virtue of his oversight of the Department.

Secretary of Defense.  Is it too early in Mikie Sherrill’s Congressional career – she’s only in her first term in the U.S. House – to speculate on why she would make an extraordinary Secretary of Defense?   Having graduated from U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, she was in the first class of women eligible for combat.  She flew missions throughout Europe and the Middle East.  She was a Russian policy officer who worked on implementation of nuclear treaty responsibilities.  Her knowledge of U.S. Defense is broad, deep and first-hand.   She would also have the credibility with a Democratic Congress on budgetary priorities.

Secretary of the Treasury.  Here’s my bias:  I consider Phil Murphy to be the best New Jersey governor of my lifetime.  Building upon several signature progressive achievements and coming off his brilliant national leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Murphy is on track to win reelection next year by the convincing margin he deserves.  My gut tells me not much could get him to leave New Jersey before the end of his second term.  But a future President Biden would have to consider Murphy as a potential Secretary of the Treasury – and besides, we’re only kibbitzing, remember?  Murphy, a Goldman Sachs alumnus like Clinton Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubin, would bring to the position a combination of indisputable progressive values with broad economic know-how.

Secretary of the Environment.  Note how I worded that – Secretary of the Environment – rather than EPA Administrator.  Though previous Presidents have upgraded the position of EPA Administrator to cabinet-level status, the agency is not part of the cabinet by statute or constitutionally.

President Biden should elevate the agency at last to become a cabinet department, an important signal to send after the national has suffered through a reality-removed, climate change-denying hoax of an Administration.  It’s doubtful Congressman Frank Pallone, the extraordinary environmentalist who serves as Chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, would leave to serve as EPA Administrator.  But would becoming the first Secretary of the Environment be a different story?   Perhaps it would be a different story to President Obama’s first-term EPA Adminstrator, New Jerseyan Lisa Jackson, notwithstanding her having a great job at Apple.

Two other possibilities are former Congressman Rush Holt, himself an environment leader of the first rank, who would bring his scientist’s acumen to a federal government that desperately needs objective science to replace subjective ignorance.  And how could I not mention my dear friend and fellow InsiderNJ columnist Alan Steinberg, President George H.W. Bush’s Administrator of EPA Region II?  Alan, as all of you know, was among the country’s first Republicans to endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016.

I didn’t ask Alan, and he is doing a mighty fine job as a political analyst and writer right here.  But remember, I’m just speculating.  I’m reveling in the joy of kibbitzing.  And until we kibbitz again, l’chaim.

www.stevengoldstein.com