The good news is that it really is no different than any other time the Plum Book appointees have been swapped out. They come and they go, but the senior career employees remain to keep the engines running while training these new "leaders" on what the agencies really do and can do.

As most of the appointees have never run anything larger in staff than a basketball team, expecting them to be effective executives over operations with staffs of several dozen thousand to a couple hundred thousand employees stationed worldwide is really expecting miracles. They may get the press clippings, but its many others who really get the job done and make most of the policy and almost all of the day-to-day operational decisions.

So, when Sen. Clinton - whose largest managerial effort has been over a Senate staff of less than 50 - takes over the Department of State which has a staff of almost 150,000 and offices in almost every nation on the planet and has several highly technical and diverse subsets, what is the REAL expectation of her performance? Perhaps the most capable executive named so far is Gov, Napolitano, as she has acquired experience running a comparably sized operation encompassing many of the missions of DHS.

As has always been the case, the senior federal careerists will keep the new appointees from screwing up too much, just like every senior sergeant has had to do when the new second lieutenant who thinks s/he's Patton arrives on scene.

In other words - same game, different day.