President-Elect Joe Biden has been making lots of news with his slow rollout of nominees for various cabinet choices, top advisors, czars, and agency heads. So far, Team Biden has taken a very systematic approach, choosing one or two main areas each week (such as pandemic response or the economy), and then rolling out entire teams of top advisors all at once. This helps the media and the public keep their focus on individual areas of responsibility, and as a result it gives all the Biden picks lots of good press (for being so gradual and comprehensible).

Of course, as with any incoming Democratic president, there are a lot of groups vying for influence in the upcoming Biden administration, some playing pure identity politics (arguing for more of a certain minority or gender or what have you) while others are playing more of an ideological game (trying to get more progressives appointed, for example). With each new announcement, some groups are happy while others are disappointed. Such is the nature of filling out an administration, it is worth pointing out, and such is the nature of the Democratic Party's various wings and power centers (the Will Rogers quote: "I am not a member of any organized political party -- I am a Democrat" springs to mind).

I have been waiting to write about Biden's choices so I could make a few overall comments rather than get too heavily into the specifics of any individual choice or set of choices, though. Partly this is because a lot of the nominees are not exactly well-known names (except by the wonkiest of political wonks), therefore I just didn't know a whole lot about them -- other than that they all seem to be eminently competent and sane people, so that'll be a big change right there.

My own expectations for a Biden cabinet team were pretty low, I have to admit. I thought he'd fill it out with a bunch of centrists, corporatists, party hacks, and friends and allies from his days in the Senate and as vice president. I thought the team would be largely boring, but also well-qualified. But I didn't have a whole lot of expectations higher than that. To be fair, I would have said (and probably did, at the time) the same thing about Barack Obama's initial cabinet choices -- I could see the centrist and Wall Street-friendly side of Obama even during the campaign, so that's what I expected for his cabinet, and he largely fulfilled this expectation. I expected much the same from Biden, but with a larger emphasis on the working class. Biden would probably be marginally better in cabinet choices than Obama, and a whole lot better than those Hillary Clinton would have chosen, to put the choices on the Democratic political spectrum.

I didn't expect much in the way of exciting, and I didn't expect any fire-breathing progressives to make the cut. I've been saying ever since he secured the nomination that if Biden won, his presidency will probably draw a lot of comparisons to another boring and soporific president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. So that's kind of what I expected for Biden's cabinet as well.

Biden is now somewhere around half-finished with his cabinet announcements. So there is still room for improvement, no matter how you personally define that. But at the halfway mark, I have to say that I am more impressed than I thought I would be. Biden seems to be walking the tightrope dangling between all the various factions pretty well, at least so far. No group has been entirely shut out of the process, and no one group has dominated it either. Biden's picks are all (as mentioned) competent people who have a proven ability to lead large organizations, almost without exception. There will be "first ever" milestones set for women, Blacks, Latinos, and probably plenty of other groups by the time Biden is done. Perhaps not the exact milestone each group may have been shooting for, but like I said, Biden's doing a fairly good job of walking this tightrope.

Biden said he wanted his cabinet to "look like America." So far, he's doing a pretty good job of that. Sure, there are a few old White guys who have been in Democratic leadership positions in previous administrations, but even old White guys can't get totally shut out of the process, right? To be honest, I thought there would be a lot more of them in a Biden administration than I've so far seen, so even on this metric Biden is doing better than I thought he would.

There have been some surprising picks, some of whom might eventually prove to have been somewhat misguided. Someone who clearly has a certain expertise in one field gets a rather unrelated leadership job, to put this another way. Xavier Becerra will head the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, when I would have bet more on him becoming Biden's attorney general (the job he currently holds in California). That's just one example that stood out for me.

As for ideology, well, Biden did run as the ultimate centrist, please remember. He beat out all the other centrist Democrats and then the race came down to him and progressive champion Bernie Sanders. Because Sanders did so well (he was truly the only Democrat to give Biden a run for his money at any time during the race), he has had much more influence on Biden, both throughout the campaign and during the transition process. If Bernie hadn't been the second-to-last man standing -- if it had come down to a race between Biden and Pete Buttigieg, for example -- then this almost certainly never would have happened. So far, both Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have not been named to Biden's cabinet, but even that snub would be agreeable if Biden eventually names at least one person with very solid progressive credentials to a high-ranking post. A few progressives have already gotten leadership positions, just not very prominent ones for the most part.

Of course, the big difference was one we all expected and can greet with a collective sigh. Joe Biden has not chosen any idiots at all for his administration. There are no patently unqualified individuals at all. Also, no close family members at all. And, even better, there also don't seem to be any boot-lickers, toadies, or other sycophants on the list either. So that right there will be a complete sea-change from what we have seen for the past four years in Donald Trump's White House.

We're still only roughly at the halfway point. There will be some surprises ahead, no doubt. One group or another is going to be delighted, which will leave others disappointed. But all around, none of them have completely gotten the cold shoulder from the transition team. Biden's cabinet and leadership team shows a wide degree of diversity in pretty much any sense of the word, really. Some of Biden's picks might work out, and some might not. Some may not even survive confirmation in the Senate. In general, though, Biden seems to be doing a better job than I had expected in filling out his cabinet.

But the best news, once again, is that none of them are idiots or toadies. Imagine that!

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant