We all know that the quality of a President's Cabinet can make or break his/her term. But what makes for a great Cabinet?
We all have our own ideas. Mine are not overarching, but post-by-post.
Foreign Affairs. The conventional wisdom is that Presidents need a sage adviser with deep knowledge of foreign policy as their MoFA. I disagree. Since two years ago, when we first made a sustained effort to focus on foreign policy, most big decisions have been made by the President personally, with input from a cadre of advisers from both inside and outside the administration. The MoFA is usually just one voice among many in this process. The MoFA is solely responsible, however, for the day-to-day functioning of the Foreign Ministry -- keeping embassies staffed, getting foreign updates produced, handling requests for new embassies, and so on. This is a better job for a highly active emergent leader than a wizened FA guru who's mostly interested in dispensing advice and engaging in diplomacy. Despite the early controversy surrounding his selection, I think Cerian was an inspired pick and will do an outstanding job.
Culture. Whereas conventional wisdom says the Foreign Minister must be experienced and knowledgeable, the Culture Ministry is most often entrusted to an emergent leader. Again, I disagree with the conventional wisdom. The difference between a good CM and a great one is that while a good one does a lot of work him/herself to create content on the forums, a great one motivates others to do the same. This is no small task -- in my time here, only Lethen has succeeded in doing this over any extended period of time. (Rachel did a nice job also, but served only part of a term.) It's no accident that Lethen is one of the region's giants (and Rachel is on the border of that territory). It's simply not realistic to expect a relatively new citizen to be able to muster the sort of JM support that someone like Lethen can. As a result, the Culture Ministry has become a career dead-end of sorts -- ministers who aren't active obviously get poor marks, but even those who do the job reasonably well get pigeonholed as social/cultural citizens, because their time here is consumed with content creation.
Interior. At election time, we hear a lot about recruiting contests, mandatory recruitment, and so on, but when the rubber hits the road, recruitment rises or falls based on whether we have a few dedicated recruiters willing to bust their ass for the good of the region. Probably the most important attribute of a good Interior Minister is to be the region's hardest working recruiter. Obviously, the MoI needs to enlist others to recruit also, but his/her success on that front usually has more to do with the overall health of the region -- and its willingness to reward prolific recruiters with rapid advancement in our system -- than it does with the quality of the MoI's efforts to enlist recruiters.
Grand Admiral. Continuity is key. From experience, we know it takes about a full term of dedicated work to transform a moribund Navy into even a mediocre fighting force. Our best GAs have stood on the shoulders of giants -- either inheriting the outstanding foundational work of his/her predecessor (as Apollo did, succeeding Rachel), or having done that foundational work him/herself in a prior term (as with CSP currently).
Citizen Integration. This job has only been done well in fits and starts -- Rachel was the best we've had in this position, but she only served half a term before being "promoted" to MoFA, and the foundations she laid were quickly washed away. I suspect we need a regional giant to transform this ministry, the way Lethen transformed Culture last year or Asperta transformed Interior in 2010-11.
Attorney General. For starters, you need a President who deems the AG important enough to include in the Cabinet. Then, you need an AG who is highly active, knowledgeable about our system, and willing to use his/her limited powers to shape policy. Hyanygo is far and away the best exemplar of such an AG.
