Eclectic Cabinet seen as largely centrist in outlook

Washington: The Cabinet that President-elect Barack Obama completed on Friday is a largely centrist and pragmatic collection of politicians and technocrats without a pronounced ideological bent.

Liberals are satisfied but not delighted. Conservatives say the nominees aren't as leftist as they'd feared. Powerful interest groups with conflicting agendas are appeased.

But compared with what comes next, assembling the 15-member team was the easy part.

Obama wants this cabinet to market and put in place the most dramatic policy changes in the country since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal: a mammoth programme to improve roads and bridges; a health care system that covers more sick people at less cost; limitations on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming; big investments in energy efficiency; middle class tax cuts along with a tax hike on wealthy Americans.

For Obama to impose this ambitious agenda, he'll make some people angry.

And that will strain the political coalition he has painstakingly built. In the short term, Obama's cabinet nominations strengthen him politically. Even Capitol Hill Republicans say they are reassured.

Obama has picked an eclectic group. There are women, Latinos, westerners, several Bill Clinton appointees, a full-fledged Clinton (Hillary), a Bush holdover, Republicans, a black (plus two other blacks of cabinet rank, though not officially in the cabinet), free-traders, free-trade opponents and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.