President-elect Barack Obama has run circles around his predecessors when it comes to appointing his Cabinet with dispatch. All of his nominees are in place before Christmas.

One of his last announcements was that Rep. Hilda Solis, D-California, would be the secretary of labor. Solis hit political observers like a bolt out of the blue. Her name may have been on some speculation lists, but it wasn’t anywhere near the top.

Now we’ll have to see whether she will wield any true power in her role at the labor agency. The labor incumbent, Elaine Chao, served for all eight years of the George W. Bush administration but didn’t have much discernable influence, as Workforce Management editor John Hollon pointed out last week in his blog.

Solis is better known for her work on environmental issues than on workplace policy. Although unions showered her with encomiums for her support of organizing drives in Los Angeles and for co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act, her most substantive efforts on employment law came during her tenure in the California Senate. There, she spearheaded a bill to raise the minimum wage.

The fact that Obama plucked Solis out of relative obscurity may be a sign that labor groups couldn’t agree on a candidate. Solis was the compromise.

“Sometimes [presidential appointees] in Washington are picked because they’ve offended the least people,” says Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Solis may become a dynamic and influential labor secretary. But she is not starting out as a titan of the Cabinet, which doesn’t bode well. Neither does the fact that labor was one of the last two Cabinet slots filled.

For eight years, the agency has been in the wilderness of the Bush administration. Some good ideas emanated from the department, like a regional workforce planning and training program that helps communities develop their labor market based on emerging industries.

That program got its momentum because it was led by an official who was a White House favorite, according to a department source. For the most part, President Bush consolidated control of the administration in the West Wing.

Obama may institute the same practice. One clue is that he’s naming “czars” to oversee several policy areas, including energy, the economy and health care. There also will be a “car czar” to sort out the mess in the auto industry. The term “czar” has been used more during the Obama transition than at a film school seminar on “Doctor Zhivago.”

The power that these czars wield often comes at the expense of Cabinet secretaries—except when the czar is a Cabinet official like Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Tom Daschle.

The important thing about a czar is that his or her appointment highlights an area that an administration cares about deeply. That’s why it’s interesting that Obama has not appointed a “workforce czar” to sort out disparate, costly and often ineffective federal training programs. Neither he nor Republican nominee John McCain addressed this area with much vigor during the campaign, as I pointed out in an October 17 post.

Most Workforce Management readers would say that one of the top challenges they face each day is a lack of talent for key jobs. At the press conference announcing Solis’ appointment, Obama and Solis mentioned training as a priority. 

But a large part of the responsibility for addressing that area will fall to the White House Task Force on Working Families, which will be chaired by Vice President-elect Joe Biden. One of the panel’s charges is “expanding education and lifelong training opportunities.” But it also will delve into “improving work-family balance; restoring labor standards, including workplace safety; helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes; and protecting retirement security.”

That’s a big agenda led by Biden. The task force could supplant the labor secretary as the leader on key workplace issues—diluting the impact that a strong Cabinet member can make.

Washington teems with former class presidents. Sometimes too many leaders can run an issue into the quicksand of inertia.