Who is Leon Panetta?

Obama has lots of people to appoint once he becomes President. One of those posts is the Director of the CIA. Word is that he will be appointing Leon Panetta.

First, let's look at the process used to appoint the Director of the CIA. The position is always appointed by the President, although he (or she) is expected to get a recommendation from the Director of National Intelligence. The Senate must also approve the appointment.

The post, called Director of Central Intelligence when it was first created by Truman, actually predates the CIA.

Leon Panetta is the name that's been floated out there as Obama's candidate. While Panetta has an impressive resume, it's not exactly what you'd expect for the Director of the CIA.

He did serve in the Army from 1964-1966 and has had a varied political career, serving at one point as the Director of Civil Rights under the Department of Education, Health and Welfare. It was 1969, and Nixon was peeved that he chose to enforce civil rights and equal education laws, mainly because he had promised Southern Senators that his administration wouldn't enforce such laws as a political concession.

Panetta resigned in 1970 because of the political pressure, and then switched parties from Republican to Democrat in 1971.

From 1977-1993, he served as a Congressman.

Here are the committees he served on according to Wikipedia:

His positions included:

• Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on the Budget
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• Chairman of the Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing, Consumer Relations, and Nutrition
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• Chairman of the Administration Committee's Subcommittee on Personnel and Police
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• Chairman of the Task Force on Domestic Hunger created by the U.S. House Select Committee on Hunger
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• Vice Chairman of the Caucus of Vietnam-Era Veterans in Congress
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• Member of the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies.

The part of his resume that's the most convincing argument for a position as the Director of the CIA is the position he took in 1994 as Clinton's White House Chief of Staff, a job that some might say would qualify a man for anything.

He has chaired, co-chaired and headed all sorts of committees and even founded his own organization: the Panetta Institute for Public Policy.

Panetta is a real departure from the last two Directors of the CIA. The current Director, Michael Hayden, has a military background, and the Director before that, Porter Goss, was an ex-intelligence officer in the CIA.