Regulators...mount up

Yglesias writes about the structural problems with those trying to regulate the financial markets:

It’s just very hard to imagine, in the United States political system as it works, civil servants really being able to crack heads and prevent wealthy individuals from doing something that they want to do and that appears to be benefiting a fairly wide group of other people.

This is a good restatment of the problem. So what is his proposed solution to this?

[A] President interested in building a new effective regulatory system would need to do something to make...a new, more consolidated agency. With a new name and a new logo. And you’d need to bring in a few people from the outside to head it up initially, who are seen as respected and having clout. But beyond the first wave, you’d want to professionalize the organization and not have very many political appointees. And in the early years, you’d need to make a conscious effort to show that well-meaning politicians are deferential to the regulators and take their ideas seriously—to establish the presupposition that anyone who doesn’t treat the regulators somewhat deferentially is dodgy and untrustworthy. (emphasis mine)

This seems like a plan that would be destined to fail because it involves politicians consistently deferring to the appointee. But they have no real stake, in the short-run, with this deference. The do have an immediate stake in defering to political donors. Which is to say, that the problem, more globally, is the influence of campaign contributions.

Furthermore, it seems to me that "regulators" are never going to have the same weight with politicians as "law enforcement officers". If these people are already charged with enforcing the law, why not change their titles and place them in the appropriate department, the DOJ?