So Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson gave a  major policy speech on Monday and the market plummeted.  ‘Nuff said.

I am not one of those who think that George W. Bush should resign the presidency early, to make way for Barack Obama. But I am in favor of the early—make that immediate—exit of Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson.  Alfred E. Neuman would do a better job.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (AP)

And so I am confident that Obama’s pick, Timothy Geithner, couldn’t be any worse.
We’ll soon finds out about Geithner & Co., but in the meantime, we are stuck with a proven failure.

Paulson brings to Washington a lethal combination of stubbornness and indecisiveness.

This headline in Tuesday’s New York Times sums it up: “Bailout Monitor Sees Lack of a Coherent Plan.”

According to the Times’ Diana B. Henriques:

“The head of a new Congressional panel set up to monitor the gigantic federal bailout says the government still does not seem to have a coherent strategy for easing the financial crisis, despite the billions it has already spent in that effort.

Elizabeth Warren, the chairwoman of the oversight panel, said in an interview Monday that the government instead seemed to be lurching from one tactic to the next without clarifying how each step fits into an overall plan. “You can’t just say, ‘Credit isn’t moving through the system,’ ” she said in her first public comments since being named to the panel. “You have to ask why.”

Wow.  That’s not much of an expression of confidence from someone who is supposed to be safeguarding the management of the program.

The December 1 issue of Business Week underscores the urgency of getting rid of Paulson, a man who brings to Washington a lethal combination of stubbornness and indecisiveness. That is, he has been stubborn in his determination to secure bailouts now measured in the trillions, but he has been indecisive, bordering on catatonic, when it comes to actually implementing the bailout.

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Last night’s special screening of new movie “Frost/Nixon” in Washington, D.C. was an early holiday gift to Beltway liberals, delivering glad tidings of anti-Nixonian feelgood vibes to the permanent Washington establishment, which has felt shut out of power for so long, during the dark night of Gingrich-DeLay-Bush these past 15 years, before the Obama dawn.

Frank Langella portrays Richard Nixon, left, and Michael Sheen portrays David Frost in an image released by Universal Pictures

But even during this happy masque of lefty triumphalism, FOX News’ Chris Wallace threw a fair-and-balanced apple of discord into the middle of the festivities. Wallace had the nerve to defend George W. Bush from the ongoing liberal effort to Nixonize the 43^rd President.

After the film’s screening, at the National Geographic Society headquarters in downtown Washington, director Ron Howard, playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan, and Nixon-hater James Reston Jr. (son of the legendary New York Times columnist) appeared onstage for a question-and-answer session with the audience. The discussion was moderated by Robert Dallek, the retired Boston University professor and well-known historian.

Wallace had the nerve to defend George W. Bush from the ongoing liberal effort to Nixonize the 43^rd President.

Howard was, well, Hollywood-ish, talking about the making of the film and the screen-testing of various alternate endings. And Morgan was arty and somewhat abstract, seemingly more hostile to Frost—who conducted the 1977 “checkbook journalism” interviews with the disgraced 37^th president that are the heart of the film—than to Nixon. But Reston, portrayed in the film as a young Nixon-hating researcher for Frost, was relentlessly vehement, using every occasion he could to steer the discussion back to Nixon’s “criminality” and the need to confront it. Again. And again. And again.

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Should some of the same people who helped get us into this Wall Street meltdown mess be relied upon to get us out? And is it OK if the colleagues and mentors of the new Obama economic team make millions and maybe billions along the way? President-elect Obama seems to think that the answers to those two questions are “yes,” and “yes”—and his appointments today proved it.

Tim Geithner, the pick to be the next Treasury Secretary, is the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was intimately involved in all the bailout decisions of the past year, including the decision to bailout AIG, the insurance giant.

Tresury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner/AP photo

Back in October, right here on FOX News, I noted that the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was in the room when the bailout decision was made—a decision which, according to The New York Times, protected a $20 billion Goldman Sachs position with AIG. And, of course, Goldman Sachs is the Wall Street firm once headed by the Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. I compared that incestuous financial relationship to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 20s, but the Obamans don’t seem to agree.

Meanwhile, in the words of the Competitive Enterprise Institute economist Jon Berlau, Geithner means “More of the same… more bailouts, more lack of transparency in the bailouts, and more corporate welfare. … In choosing Geither, Obama might as well have nominated Hank Paulson to another term!”

So when Obama said today of the man he’s nominated to lead the Treasury Department, “He will start his first day on the job with a unique insight into the failure of today’s markets,” the President-elect was more right than he knew.

But there is one figure that looms above them all, a man who was once the boss to both Geithner and to Larry Summers (who was named today to chair the National Economic Council inside the White House) and is the leader of the dominant political-economic school of thought in the Democratic Party today. And that man is Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton and currently the Chairman of the Executive Committee at Citigroup.

As The New York Times puts it this morning, “It is testament to former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s star power among many Democrats that as President-elect Barack Obama fills out his economic team, a virtual Rubin constellation is taking shape.” A “Rubin constellation“—how ‘bout that?

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Former Republican presidential candidate and current FOX News host Mike Huckabee has just published a new book, “Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America,” in which he seeks to rally conservatives and Republicans, dispirited by the recent election results. And along the way, he provides some insight into his success as a television personality.

Watch “Huckabee” weekends at 8 p.m. ET on FOX News Channel

At a Washington breakfast for reporters and pundits, Huckabee began by noting that while John McCain, Sarah Palin, and many other Republicans were defeated on November 4, conservatism was not. As an example, he pointed out that traditional marriage (anti-gay marriage) amendments were passed by the voters in Florida and California — two states that Barack Obama and Joe Biden carried earlier this month. And yet the Republican ticket failed to highlight this Democratic liberalism, or to emphasize Republican conservatism.

Huckabee argues that the Republican Party needs to decentralize, moving out into the states.

To put it another way, if all the tradition-minded voters in those two states had also chosen to cast their ballots for McCain-Palin, that would have meant an additional 82 votes for them in the electoral college—nearly the margin of victory right there. Indeed, traditional marriage amendments have carried in all of the 31 states where the question has been put before the voters. That’s testament to the enduring power of conservatism in America.

These are the “values voters,” and obviously they have other concerns, which the Republican ticket failed to adequately address this year. Huckabee, the former three-term governor of Arkansas, cited another major issue that the Republicans muffed in 2008: the horribly expensive, and horribly ineffective, Wall Street bailout that President Bush and the Democrats—and too many Republicans—agreed upon in October. The bailout vote was a “defining moment” in the campaign, Huckabee declared, adding that it could have been a “game changer” for McCain if he had voted against the bailout and rallied opposition to it.

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Remember that Led Zeppelin song, “The Song Remains the Same”? That’s all this aging Baby Boomer can think about as we learn of the familiar appointments that President-elect Barack Obama has been making. But it’s one thing to recycle old faces under the guise of “change” (think Joe Biden, first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972), and it’s quite another to bring back folks who were unapologetically in the middle of the various foibles and scandals of the Clinton administration (think Greg Craig).

And now, here’s another one: Eric Holder, now tipped to be the next Attorney General.

Eric Holder/AP photo

This is the way The Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman summed up the quick critique of Holder:

As Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general, he was the gatekeeper for presidential pardons. Most famously, he waved through the pardon for fugitive financier Marc Rich in the waning days of the Clinton White House. But Republicans — through the Republican National Committee, conservative media outlets like The Wall Street Journal editorial page and aggressive freelance operators — are spreading their net wider. One target of opportunity: Clinton’s pardon of 16 Puerto Rican nationalists (or terrorists, depending on your perspective) linked to the FALN, the Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation.

Yes, those are good places to begin: Marc Rich, who broke U.S. law by trading with the Ayatollahs’ regime in Iran, and those Puerto Rican “nationalists” (the U.S. government thought they were terrorists when they were convicted).

Let’s hope that our senators, especially the Republicans, brush up on the Constitution, and the duties that document affords–and imposes. I’m especially thinking of Article Two, Section Three, which stipulates the “advice and consent” procedure for confirming high officials to office.

Such confirmation hearings are not just a formality: They are a vital part of our system of Constitutional checks-and-balances. So Holder—or anyone else—should not be confirmed without a full and detailed examination of his past. Because it won’t be “change we can believe in” if it is, in fact, the same old song and dance.

Is this change we can believe in—or not? Just two weeks ago, Barack Obama was the fellow who was going to change the way Washington works. But then he got elected. And then he picked Rahm Emanuel, a toughie pol from the Clinton White House. We talked about him here in the past .

And Obama has reportedly offered the job of Secretary of State to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Despite her oft-professed devotion to New York State, she is eager to take the job. Unfortunately for her, according to the papers this morning, the hangup is her husband, Bill Clinton. Gee, does that sound familiar?

And now comes the news that Greg Craig has been hired as White House counsel.

Greg Craig/AP photo

Now who is he, exactly? According to The Politico, he is a longtime aide to Teddy Kennedy. And here’s some more:

Craig, who had been friends with Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School, was recruited for the impeachment job by John Podesta, then deputy White House chief of staff and now a leader of Obama’s transition. A Washington Post profile in 1998 by Lloyd Grove and John Harris reported: “Craig brought along his best bedside manner when Clinton summoned him to the White House residence on the night of Sept. 10 — the day after independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s lurid report to Congress was published on the World Wide Web. On a balcony overlooking the South Lawn, Clinton and Craig sat talking for two hours.”

OK, so his biggest claim to fame is that he helped our ethically challenged former president beat the impeachment rap. Is that the hallmark of a new broom in D.C.?

If I ever got the chance to interview Craig, I’d have a lot of questions for him.

But wait! There’s more:

Among Craig’s other high-profile cases: successfully representing Elián González’ s father, a Cuban, in his efforts to regain custody of his son; and representing U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in connection during the Volcker Commission’s investigation of the oil-for-food program at the United Nations.

So let’s get this straight: Craig’s other clients have included the father of Elian Gonzalez—the subject of a celebrated international custody case back in 2000. Which is to say, Craig’s real client back then was the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. And then Craig helped defend Kofi Annan on the UN’s scandalous “oil for food” program.

Wow. If I ever got the chance to interview Craig, I’d have a lot of questions for him. And so might U.S. Senators, in both parties, if the post of White House counsel were a Senate confirmation job. But it’s not, so Craig will be free to walk into the White House, and operate behind closed doors.

Bringing real change to Washington, of course.

Miami — So did you watch Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on FOX News this morning? She said she was going to talk about the Republican agenda for the coming year and for the 2010 elections—but of course, the 2012 elections are on her mind, and on everyone else’s mind.
So how did Palin do at the Republican Governors Association annual meeting? How is the next phase in her career coming along?

Let’s say that her speech today was not her best. She was hesitant and halting, showing only occasional flashes of the charisma she displayed at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, or the swaggering confidence of campaign stump appearances.

She has clearly been rattled by the sniping of ex-staffers, or by losing the election—or both.

Let’s say that her speech today was not her best.

But of course, Palin has lost elections before, and she has plenty demonstrated her own gumption, as well as her own enormous potential for comebacks.

And she laid out six issues and concerns that will be benchmarks for the future—and for her future career:

#1:The role of governors. “We balance our budgets,” she said, “the buck stops with us. We are not voting yea, or nay, or present. There’s no ‘present’ in our offices.” That, of course, was a dig at Barack Obama, who voted a wussy “present” some 130 times in the Illinois legislature.

The states are indeed the “laboratories of democracy”: Most of the great domestic reforms of the last few decades—tax cuts, welfare reform, school choice—came from out beyond the Beltway. And so Palin and her fellow governors have the opportunity to demonstrate “the power and the growth and the jobs that come from lower taxes and more efficient bureaucracy.” Because chances are that there won’t be much of either—lower taxes or more efficient bureaucracy—coming from Washington. Then Palin went further: “If the new Congress and the President err on the side of excess taxes, then it will fall upon us to show them the way.”

Palin herself, of course, has been in the governor’s office for less than two years. So she needs to create her own positive track record in the years to come. That’s her challenge—and her opportunity.

She needs to create her own positive track record in the years to come. That’s her challenge—and her opportunity.

#2: The Wall Street bailout. The bipartisan bailout, passed last month, is a bipartisan disaster. Nobody knows what’s happening, nobody knows where the money is going. And of course, that’s the point: Power never wants accountability, and money never wants transparency. And in the meantime, even as the well-connected in Washington and New York profit, the real economy continues to worsen for ordinary people.

And here Palin has a problem. Making a clever play on words, she mocked the bailout as “opium”—spelled, she quipped,”O-P-M” for “other people’s money.” But the unfortunate fact for her is that she supported the bailout.

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Miami – Here at the Republican Governors Association annual meeting, there is no great sense of defeat, but rather a sense of positive anticipation—and for good reason.

Despite the general GOP wipeout of 2008, no incumbent Republican governor was defeated for re-election this year; in fact, two Republican incumbents, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Jim Douglas of Vermont, hung on, even as their states went for Obama. Indeed, the case of Vermont’s Douglas is particularly striking: he won a fourth term with nearly 55 percent of the vote, while Obama was winning the Green Mountain State by more than 2:1.

So while the Grand Old Party’s presidential candidate, and its Congressional wing, were both soundly repudiated at the polls earlier this month, Republican governors did well. Republicans still have 21 governors—including a certifiably hot political property for the future, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who speaks here this afternoon.

And staffers at the Republican Governors Association (RGA) look forward to 36 governorships that are up for grabs in 2010. With George W. Bush and his deep unpopularity gone from the White House, and Barack Obama as the incumbent, the “off year” election of 2010 is likely to go quite well for the Republicans. The RGA could well find itself back in the majority come 2011.

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Republicans may have voted for the $700 billion bailout, but Democrats are going to reap the benefits. The Bush administration fought to create this giant “porky bank,” and the outgoing Bushies are now turning it over to The Party of Robert Byrd.

Of course, details are hard to come by—and that’s on purpose. Indeed, according to a new must-read blog that calls itself Bailout Sleuth, the people running the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program have no intention of being open and transparent. And so the few documents grudgingly released by the government come with the dollar totals blacked out or redacted. Back in September, when the crisis first broke, I suggested, here at FOX Forum , making the bailout fully transparent—that is, put all the transactions on eBay. Strangely, such advice was not heeded by Beltway Powerbrokers, who do their best work behind closed doors.

So while impact of the bailout on the national economy is going to be negligible—we’re slipping into a recession anyway—the impact on Washington, D.C. is going to be substantial.

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John McCain could never decide if he wanted to be a winner—or a martyr.   He took arbitrary stands (he would prefer, of course, the adjective “principled”) on issues that cut against the grain of his party, as well as undercut his potential victory coalition, which always had to include populist Reagan/Hillary Democrats.  He opposed drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and denounced those who mentioned Reverend Wright or Barack Obama’s middle name.  And he supported “comprehensive immigration reform” and “cap and trade” on global warming—liberal positions which were anathema to the GOP faithful, as well as turnoffs to moderate-conservative Democrats.  All of these “high-minded” stances garnered McCain favor from newspaper editorial boards and self-declared establishment thought-leaders, but all taken as insults to the Republican base.

And yet when it came time for the general election, environmentalists, the mainstream media, and Hispanics all went solidly for Obama, joined by a sufficient number of swing Democrats, who saw no compelling reason to cross the aisle and vote Republican.   In particular, McCain got no “credit,” if that’s the right word, from good-government types for not bringing up Obama’s support for drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens–probably the single best populist arrow the Republicans had in their quiver, and yet an arrow that McCain never fired.

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