Welcome to Beg to Dipper, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil

conversation across the political spectrum.

From center left to center right, I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwark. I'm joined by our regulars, Bill

Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskannon Center, and Damon Linker of the Week.

Our special guest this week is Charles Lane, columnist for the Washington Post.

Welcome one and all. All right, when we last gathered, we had some, well,

Bill in particular had some criticisms of the President elect's choices for the cabinet.

And so I am going to turn to you first, Bill Galston, and ask how you think Biden is doing this week.

Do you have any desire to revise and extend your comments from last week or

double down?

I was afraid you'd ask me that question.

Look at this point to quote our soon to be former president it is what it is. You know there is an unfortunate aura

around the selection process, which is more prominent than I thought it would be,

although perhaps I should have anticipated, you know, an aura that the president-elect is scrambling to fulfill the demands of different groups

one by one. Perhaps that's inevitable, but I do think that it reflects something

about the disparate coalition that the president elect stitched together in order to win the election.

Perhaps it was inevitable that it would take on this

transactional cast and I am not inclined to be critical of the competence of individual people who have been selected.

But I am. selected.

But I am, I will confess, not thrilled by the narrative within which these individual selections seem to be embedded.

How much of a difference that will make in the long term?

I don't know.

...