The knock on Tom Strickland, during his two unsuccessful runs for the Senate, was that he was a (shudder) "lobbyist-lawyer." Not as appealing, it turned out, as folksy horse-vet Wayne Allard, whose basic charm seemed to be an almost complete absence of anything that might be described as a fresh idea.
Yet Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has named Strickland as his chief of staff -- a move that suggests the new Secretary is quite possibly serious about "cleaning up the mess
