Making The Military Brass Lean Left?

By Patrick Appel
Hilzoy wonders how Obama will change the composition of the military:

Obama's choices to date...raise the serious possibility that he could end (or at least mitigate) the Republican tilt of the senior officer corps. They have already experienced life under George W. Bush, and by all accounts, they did not care for it. But their distrust of Democrats might easily have prevented them from seriously considering drawing the obvious conclusion from Bush and Rumsfeld's trashing of the armed forces. If Obama can get past that hurdle, he could, just possibly, cause a very significant change.

I don't expect that the senior officer corps would go Democratic the way they are now Republican, nor, frankly, would I really want them to. I think that it's bad for the senior officer corps to be overwhelmingly aligned with either party. I would just like the two parties to be on a level playing field, as far as the officer corps goes. Obama might actually achieve that. And that would be a very big deal.