The National Organization for Women has long had a low threshold for support of candidates for office and position. The criteria they use to judge worth generally consist of two requirements (1) Be Female (apparently 21st century androgeny and transgendered-rights haven’t yet caught on in this corner of Leftopia), and (2) Be Liberal.

Luckily enough for Democrat Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, she meets both of these requirements (despite her fence-straddling support of the Iraq war and her profiting from criminal and Democrat bundler Norman Hsu to the tune of $27,000), meaning she’s a natural to receive the active endorsement of NOW for the “NOW”-empty position of Health and Human Services secretary.

The following release hit my inbox just after dinner last night:

NOW Urges Nomination of Sen. Debbie Stabenow as Secretary of Health and Human Services

February 3, 2009

With the withdrawal of Sen. Tom Daschle from consideration, the National Organization for Women urges President Barack Obama to nominate another strong and consistent advocate for universal health care to the position of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) has long focused on health care as a priority, and with her background as a social worker she is well positioned to take the helm of this agency that is so critical to women and families.

Sen. Stabenow’s first bill in the Senate was the Medical Equity and Drug Savings Act to lower prescription drug prices by encouraging competition, and she has been a stalwart champion of full health coverage. The National Association for Home Care named her a Home Health Hero, and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare bestowed on Stabenow their highest award.

With the nomination of Sen. Judd Gregg, the fourteen filled cabinet departments will be headed by eleven men and three women. Adding a highly-qualified woman, such as Sen. Stabenow, would increase the representation of half the population at the cabinet table, while adding health care and human needs expertise to HHS.

Sen. Stabenow doesn’t exactly have an eye catching record of success (or even competence) on anything in the Senate, including health care. As RedState friend and Michigan GOP chair Saul Anuzis pointed out during her reelection run in 2006, Stabenow’s first term in office saw the passage of one piece of legislation with her name on it: renaming a federal building in Michigan.

When it comes to health care, Stabenow’s verbal and voting records have been solidly left-wing. She favors massively expanding the failed State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a government-run health care program so unpopular that nearly half of the eligible uninsured were enrolled in it (or its big brother, Medicaid) in 2007 and voluntarily declined to re-enroll. She supports foreign importation of drugs (despite the growing problem of fake pharmaceuticals being substituted for authentics outside our borders — a problem which has led to several deaths), opposes tort reform in any form, opposes Health Savings Accounts (despite the fact that HSA holders are doing better than their peers in terms of being able to afford health care during the current economic downturn), and prefers Walter Reed Building 18-style government-run health care to any workable, beneficial free-market input.

Oh, and did I mention that she believes the cause of the Big Three automakers’ oncoming collapse isn’t efficiency or union demands, but the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have “universal health care” and government-administered pensions? The UAW exacted such high pension benefits from the Big Three that they are being dragged under by massive retiree benefit costs — a problem Sen. Stabenow would like to “solve” by taking those retirees off of the automakers’ books and putting their benefits onto the taxpayers’ collective tab.

Now, I’ll concede that Sen. Stabenow (D) is likely every bit as qualified for the position as was former Senator Daschle (D), whose two-part value-added to the administration’s health care expertise appears to have been that he wrote a book on health care last year (talk about a low threshold for expertise) and, more importantly, that prior experience meant he knew how to finesse legislation and regulation through Congress. Stabenow’s background is as an elected official, a social worker, and a “leadership training consultant,” whatever that is (motivational speaker, perhaps? office retreat organizer?), something that may provide her a decent amount of insight into public policy, but almost none into the actual workings of the health care system and health care policy as a whole.

As a friend and former Senate staffer said yesterday, “Being a social worker does not make you qualified to be HHS Secretary.” Indeed, the rhetoric emanating from the Left about what an imminent state of crisis our health care system is in suggests the bar to be considered qualified for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (not to mention White House health care czar) should be far higher than that which Mr. Daschle and Sen. Stabenow are able to clear.