Obama's Gates

What's a cheap, easy and meaningless way for Barack Obama to reassure voters rightly nervous about his national-security inexpertise? Have one of his advisors advocate keeping Robert Gates as defense secretary. No one will hold Obama to it, Gates himself says he won't do it, and it obscures Obama's lack of background knowledge to independently judge anything that any advisors or future cabinet secretaries tell him about national security. As politics, though, it's brilliant. Predictably, Andrew Sullivan is enthusiastic.