Welcome to Politics Weekly Extra. I'm Jonathan Friedland. The date on the candidate is

looming where Joe Biden will mark his hundredth day in office that moment when interim verdicts

are passed on how a president is doing. So far the reviews for Joe Biden have been pretty

good and one of the big reasons for that is that he has had a successful run at filling his cabinet.

Pretty well, all of his choices have got through. You would be amazed how many presidents have

stumbled and fallen at that first hurdle. Back in the early 1990s Bill Clinton, for example,

got into all kinds of trouble picking people who had to withdraw because of

revelations other people were defeated. It can be tricky. I wanted very much to speak to somebody

I knew well back then covering the Clinton presidency and that is Paul Baggala. He was a crucial

adviser to Clinton during the 1992 campaign that got Clinton elected president. It meant that he

had been in the room when that candidate and incoming president had to start picking the people

who would sit around the cabinet table with him. And so Paul Baggala, who is continued to

observe politics really closely, author of a book last year called rather appropriately your

fired the perfect guide to beating Donald Trump. Paul Baggala is in an unusually good position

to talk about the process of picking a team and particularly to give me his views of how Joe Biden

has done it. So my first question when catching up with Paul Baggala was to say

back when he was involved in the Clinton effort, what is the process like?

Today I am proud to present to you and to the American people a cabinet of talented

diverse and seasoned leaders. You were involved with that Clinton campaign in that banner year

of 1992 and obviously when Bill Clinton arrived into the White House in January 1993, he made

a very big noise with the cabinet appointments and saying he wanted a cabinet that looked like

America. There was a lot of attention, but I want you, somebody who was in the room in that Clinton

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