Paul Mirengoff raises some interesting questions on Eric Holder's nomination to be Attorney General. At issue: Why has Holder been, as Mirengoff puts it, "less than forthcoming" about his work for Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich in 2004?

Several weeks ago, reporters discovered that Holder failed to disclose that he'd been hired by Blagojevich to investigate the Illinois State Gaming Board. His defenders suggested that while his firm had indeed been retained and while Blagojevich had announced the hiring at a press conference, Holder had not actually done any substantive work for the governor. The story quickly disappeared..

But Mirengoff reports that Holder sent a letter to the Chairman of the Illinois Gaming Board making some very specific requests. That letter, released in response to a FOIA request, certainly suggests that Holder -- or someone acting on his behalf, writing under his name -- did in fact perform some substantive work as a result of his hiring by Blagojevich.

Holder, as my mother might say, is in a pickle. Having once failed to disclose his work for Blagojevich, he now seems to be misrepresenting it.

(One possible out: Holder could say that someone else drafted the letter under his name and he was unaware of it. But for an incoming Attorney General who is supposed to be brining competence back to the Justice Department, that's not reassuring.)

Several Republicans have expressed concerns about Holder's role in Clinton Administration pardons and Arlen Specter, ranking Republican on the Judiciary, teed off on Holder in a speech last week on the Senate floor. I spoke to several Republicans on Capitol Hill yesterday and they all agreed that Holder was in for some tough questioning. And one senior GOP aide told me that Holder would face "real problems" with his confirmation.

Very smart column this morning by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal. By "smart," of course, I mean that I share his views.

Rove writes that while Barack Obama is receiving good grades for his appointments thus far -- Cabinet and top staff -- the president-elect may be creating problems for himself. "Organizing and operating the White House will be a much bigger challenge than he can possibly yet understand," Rove writes.

He cites the example of incoming National Security Adviser, General James Jones. There has

historically been tension over the roles of the national security adviser and secretary of state. How that tension is resolved depends largely on the able National Security Adviser-designate, James Jones.

Mr. Jones has been Marine Corps commandant and NATO supreme allied commander, posts whose occupants are treated as demigods. How easily will he fit into a staff role? Will Mr. Jones see his responsibility as ensuring the president receives a broad range of options, or will he put a higher priority on advocating his own substantive views? Could Mr. Jones's personal relationship with so many top brass undermine Secretary Robert Gates's control of the Pentagon during what could be Mr. Gates's last year at Defense?

Jones also worked extensively on the Middle East peace process. Will he subordinate his views to Hillary Clinton's? Susan Rice, who wanted to be Secretary of State or National Security Adviser but is instead Obama's UN Ambassador, has already made clear that she intends to wield lots of power from New York and has sought to expand her staff.

Other problems may arise from what seem to be "sweeteners" that enticed his powerful top aides to take jobs that some might have not otherwise accepted. There were news reports that Tom Daschle did not want to serve only as Secretary of Health and Human Services. So Obama named him head of the White House office of Health Care Reform. Bill Richardson wanted to be Secretary of State; Commerce Secretary was something of a consolation prize. So Obama made him something akin to Commerce-Secretary-Plus. He introduced Richardson, a former UN Ambassador, as a "leading economic diplomat" for the United States and promised that Richardson, a former Energy Secretary, will help end "our dependence on foreign oil."

As Rove points out, Obama has added a "climate czar" to the already-complicated environmental policymaking apparatus in the executive branch. There is the EPA, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Interior Department, the Energy Department, etc. A lot of egos to manage.

In theory, of course, it's great to get advice from as many different sources as possible. And in theory it's great to give even White House interns walk-in privileges with the president. But reality makes those things problematic.

When Gerald Ford came to the White House, one of his priorities was to run a White House that gave as many people as possible access to the president. Following the top-down organization of the Nixon White House, Ford was determined to bring change to White House operations -- an operation that would be more collegial and less hierarchical. Ford wanted to have a White House that was transparent and open and responsive to the press. So he told his transition team -- which included incoming chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld's replacement, Dick Cheney -- that he wanted to operate on a spokes-of-the-wheel model, in which Ford would be the hub and some twelve advisers would be the spokes. How did it work? When Cheney left the White House after Ford lost in 1976, his staff gave him a mangled bicycle tire with nearly all of the spokes snapped in two.

So I would imagine many White House veterans will chuckle when they learn that Obama's top strategist, David Axelrod, told Mark Leibovich of the New York Times that the Obama White House will be "very collegial" and “not excessively hierarchical."

Good luck with that.

The Obama transition office just sent out this release about its internal "review" of contacts with disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich:

"At the direction of the President-elect, a review of Transition staff contacts with Governor Blagojevich and his office has been conducted and completed and is ready for release. That review affirmed the public statements of the President-elect that he had no contact with the governor or his staff, and that the President-elect's staff was not involved in inappropriate discussions with the governor or his staff over the selection of his successor as US Senator.

"Also at the President-elect's direction, Gregory Graig, counsel to the Transition, has kept the US Attorney's office informed of this fact-gathering process in order to ensure our full cooperation with the investigation.

"In the course of those discussions, the US Attorney's office requested the public release of the Transition review be deferred until the week of December 22, in order not to impede their investigation of the governor. The Transition has agreed to this revised timetable for release," said Obama Transition Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer.

Last week, in a press conference on Thursday, President-elect Obama announced that his staff would conduct an internal review of contacts with Blagojevich and his office. At the same press conference, Obama announced that this internal review would find no inappropriate dealings between his staff and Blagojevich. Since Obama announced the findings of the promised internal review at the same time he announced the internal review, it should come as no surprise that the internal review found just what Obama said it would.

If none of those contacts were "inappropriate" could releasing the details really "impede" the investigation? Such a public release would reveal the nature of some Blagojevich discussions about the Senate seat and would necessarily compromise the identities of the individuals involved in those discussions. Presumably, Fitzgerald is interviewing some of those people now and the less they know about these discussions, the better.

But how will waiting a week -- until Christmas week -- help? We'll see. But for political reasons it will be incumbent on Obama and (or?) Fitzgerald to explain in some detail why waiting a week was necessary.

This is outstanding -- better than I could do if I were trying.

A question at Politico's "Arena" about the Obama team and a potential stimulus package elicits this response from Harvard (Harvard!) Professor Stephen Walt:

"On economics, Obama is putting the right pegs in the proper holes. But the other shoe still has to drop: what will we be doing overseas while we are trying to dig ourselves out at home? If the foreign policy and defense team funds the full DoD wish list and continues the interventionist tendencies of the Bush and Clinton eras, the ship of state will keep taking on water no matter how fast Geithner and Summers can bail."

Maybe if Obama would put some of those pegs not just in the proper holes but in holes on the sinking ship of state, we could stop taking on water! How can Geithner and Summers keep digging us out at home and avoid dropping shoes? By keeping their eye on the ball and tightening their belts?

It will be some time before we know the full extent of Obama's ambitions on domestic policy, but progressives are sure to feature prominently in any debate over health care, energy, banking, etc. In the realm of foreign policy, however, progressives seem already to have been marginalized, or dismissed entirely.

Barack Obama's national security team is beginning to take shape and there is not a progressive in sight. Assuming the leaks and rumors are true, Hillary will be at State, Jones will serve as national security adviser, Brennan will head the CIA, Gates will stay on at Defense, and Obama will be taking counsel from Scowcroft all the while. These people are not progressives (except Clinton on domestic policy); they are generally considered to be in the realist camp, with the possible exception of Clinton, a liberal internationalist. Jones, Gates and Scowcroft aren't even Democrats.

None of this is surprising. Obama never seemed to take progressives very seriously on foreign policy. Throughout the campaign he signaled his respect for the foreign policy of Bush 41, and his advisers tended to split between realists like Richard Danzig and liberal internationalists like Samantha Power. In the one instance that Obama did genuinely excite progressives -- his call to sit down with the leaders of rogue states for direct and unconditional negotiations -- there was no formal roll out or set-piece speech announcing the policy. Instead, even supporters of the idea acknowledged that his arrival at the position had been 'accidental,' and Obama backpedaled over the course of the campaign.

What is clear is that the split between realists and neoconservatives has been resolved, for the time being, in favor of the realists, whose titular leader, Colin Powell, endorsed Obama at the end of the campaign. Over the last eight years this split produced some genuine personal animosity between the two camps, and, in fact, it may have been personal animosity more than anything else that drove Powell away from McCain and into the arms of Obama. So what had been an intra-Republican fight has now led the realists to take refuge in an ascendant Democratic party.

But the real losers here seem to be progressives. If progressives can't get their foot in the door on national security in an Obama administration, it's difficult to imagine precisely what conditions would bring them to power, since we are unlikely to see a more liberal president for decades.

Meanwhile, in foreign policy, the fight for the soul of the Republican party -- realists vs. neocons -- has shifted venues, with realists drifting into prominent positions in a Democratic administration and neoconservatives staying behind. The liberal internationalists, led by Hillary, will also be a powerful force in the new administration, and in their battles with Obama's realists they may find willing allies among the neocons on the right. After all, liberal internationalists have been allied with out-of-power neoconservatives before, most notably during the fight inside the Clinton administration over U.S. policy in the Balkans.

Since progressives will have their hands full with domestic policy over the next four years, they could well be completely locked out on matters of national security. The same fights that riled the Bush administration could then continue into the Obama administration -- with different winners and losers perhaps, but the same basic framework guiding the debate. Progressives are getting wise to this pretty quickly. From their point of view, neocons, realists, and liberal internationalists are separated by only a few degrees of difference. Their frustration may be some small consolation to conservatives of all stripes.

One final thought on this: John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, is running the Obama transition. CAP was the most visible proponent of a 'muscular progressivism' during the Bush years, and yet the transition appears likely to bring very few muscular progressives into government. Does Podesta really subscribe to the foreign policy ideas produced by his own organization, or does Obama simply disagree with Podesta on these issues?