The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Obama's AG Pick

On my blog, I wrote at length about what Obama's attorney general pick may mean to the adult movie industry. I've been writing about the sex business for over a decade now, and while every previous presidential election has seen some discussion around obscenity, this one was remarkable for its total lack thereof. As Declan McCullagh opined on CNET, Eric Holder is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to free speech. A decade ago, as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, he pushed U.S. attorneys to prosecute pornographers, although the Clinton administration took a mostly hands-off approach toward obscenity prosecutions. Interestingly, Clinton's leave 'em alone attitude toward the adult industry spawned one of the most dramatic changes in the business, as the largely unchecked business of making porn movies became increasingly more extreme. These days, most liberals believe the less government intervention the better when it comes to free speech, but in Porn Valley, "anything goes" isn't always the best answer when it comes to the hardcore day-to-day lives of adult performers.

Eric Holder for Attorney General?

And now on to a different Obama Cabinet post: At Newsweek, Michael Issikoff is reporting that Eric Holder will be tapped as Obama's attorney general, assuming he vets well. What I like about this choice is that it's bold but not crazy bold. The strike against Holder is that he signed off on Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich, a crackup wherever you are on the ideological spectrum. On the other hand, Holder has a solid-to-gold reputation as a federal prosecutor. And he served as a not-fancy judge in the District of Columbia's Superior Court. When the right tried to tar him with the Rich screw up when he was on Obama's vice-president selection team, it didn't much stick--at least, not enough to fell him. The Obama folks must be making a similar calculation here.

I don't know enough about Holder's particular role in the Rich episode to know for sure whether they're right to look beyond it, but taken as a whole, Holder's record shows that he knows his stuff and should be able to run the Justice Department well. On national security, his rep is not hard left. That's of a piece with the move to the center that Obama made on wiretapping by the National Security Agency over the summer. It could mean that he's going to disappoint liberals who want to rip up every Bush administration DoJ order. This is the test of governing as opposed to criticizing from the outside. The Democrats are about to own the war on terror. Holder will be nothing like Alberto Gonzales; that I think we can count on. It's harder to know how many degrees apart he will be from the current attorney general, Michael Mukasey, who was sent in to clean up the Gonzales mess. For example, what will Holder do with Mukasey's recent order expanding the FBI's powers to infiltrate and investigate? May the tests begin.