Sources: McCain aide fired for 'trashing' staff (Dana Bash, 11/05/08, CNN)
Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain, was fired from the Arizona senator's campaign last week for what one aide called "trashing" the campaign staff, three senior McCain advisers tell CNN.One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading "disinformation" about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.
"He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain's campaign message," said one of the aides.
Nine races still too close to call (ANDY BARR | 11/5/08, Politico)
Senate races in Minnesota, Alaska and Oregon may be headed toward recounts. Georgia’s Senate race, meanwhile, is likely headed toward a runoff.While Democrats picked up five seats Tuesday night — falling four short of the 60 seats needed for a filibuster-resistant majority — Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Matthew Miller said the committee is still focused on the potential pickup opportunities remaining on the board. [...]
National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Rebecca Fisher seemed upbeat about Tuesday’s results, pointing out “we consider it a win if they didn’t get to 60.”
“I don’t think anybody expected us to hold where we held,” Fisher added.
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For the Republicans, It Could Have Been Worse (Michael Grunwald, Nov. 05, 2008, TIME)
Looking back at our races to watch, just about all the conservative Republicans in traditionally red territory held seats needed by the GOP to avoid a blowout: Senators Roger Wicker in Mississippi, Mitch McConnell in Kentucky and, probably, Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, along with House members John Shadegg in Arizona, Cynthia Lummis in Wyoming and the Diaz-Balart brothers in Florida. It looks like graft-convicted Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska will somehow retain his seat long enough to get expelled, and his ethically and temperamentally challenged porkmate, Don Young, was reelected as well; Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota survived her McCarthyite rant on Hardball, and Ohio's similarly obnoxious Jean Schmidt once again avoided a well-deserved early retirement. Republicans even ousted four first-term Democrats before they could get entrenched in deep-red districts — not only the clearly doomed Casanova Tim Mahoney of Florida, but Nancy Boyda of Kansas, Dan Cazayoux of Louisiana and Nick Lampson of Texas. (See the Top 10 video campaign moments.)Democrats did knock off a few fire-breathing right-wing targets: wacky Bill Sali of Idaho, who protested a minimum-wage hike by introducing a bill to repeal the law of gravity; Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado, who once declared gay marriage the greatest threat to America; Tom Feeney of Florida, an escapee from the Abramoff scandal; and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who ran ads calling her Christian opponent "godless." They also defeated some impressive Republicans who could have helped lead the party out of the wilderness, like moderate Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, conservative Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, and pragmatic Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, who had hoped to swim upstream into the governor's office. (See pictures of 60 years of election night drama.)
Still, it could have been worse.
Deep religious feelings drove O.C. approval of Prop. 8: Even areas of the county that chose Obama voted for the gay marriage amendment. (TONY SAAVEDRA and JENNIFER MUIR, 11/05/08, The Orange County Register)
Deeply religious ethnic minorities, political conservatives and family-conscious voters found common ground in the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.In fact, Proposition 8 was more popular in Orange County (57 percent) than GOP presidential hopeful John McCain (50.8 percent).
Democrats say McCain can help mediate standoffs (BETH FOUHY, 11/05/08, Associated Press)
Democrats, who padded their majorities in the House and Senate, have a suggestion: McCain can mediate solutions to partisan standoffs on key legislation as he did to help avert a constitutional meltdown over judicial confirmations in 2005.
In the absence of any agenda for Mr. Obama, John McCain, working with guys like Ted Kennedy and Hillary, can drive the next two years to a greater extent than the new president.
Obama picks Clinton alum Emanuel chief of WH staff (DAVID ESPO and NEDRA PICKLER, 11/05/08, Associated Press)
President-elect Barack Obama pivoted quickly to begin filling out his new administration on Wednesday, selecting hard-charging Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff while aides stepped up the pace of transition work that had been cloaked in pre-election secrecy.
'Jurassic Park' Author Michael Crichton Dies at 66 (HILLEL ITALIE, 11/05/08, The Associated Press)
He was an experimenter and popularizer known for his stories of disaster and systematic breakdown, such as the rampant microbe of "The Andromeda Strain" or the dinosaurs running madly in "Jurassic Park." Many of his books became major Hollywood movies, including "Jurassic Park," "Rising Sun" and "Disclosure." Crichton himself directed and wrote "The Great Train Robbery" and he co-wrote the script for the blockbuster "Twister."In 1994, he created the award-winning TV hospital series "ER." He's even had a dinosaur named for him, Crichton's ankylosaur. [...]
In recent years, Crichton was the rare novelist granted a White House meeting with President Bush, perhaps because of his skepticism about global warming, which Crichton addressed in the 2004 novel, "State of Fear." Crichton's views were strongly condemned by environmentalists, who alleged that the author was hurting efforts to pass legislation to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
If not a literary giant, he was a physical one, standing 6 feet and 9 inches, and ready for battle with the press. In a 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Crichton came with a tape recorder, text books and a pile of graphs and charts as he defended "State of Fear" and his take on global warming.
"I have a lot of trouble with things that don't seem true to me," Crichton said at the time, his large, manicured hands gesturing to his graphs. "I'm very uncomfortable just accepting. There's something in me that wants to pound the table and say, 'That's not true.'
We have a few reviews here
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McCain Ran the Sleaziest Campaign in History?: Not even close. (David Greenberg, Nov. 5, 2008, Slate)
The claims about McCain's supposedly unprecedented negativity, then, don't signify any deep truth about his character. Rather, they reveal important aspects of American politics today. The efforts to purify politics at the turn of the last century may not have succeeded in eliminating negativity, but they did erect new norms that stigmatized ungentlemanly campaign tactics—norms that remain powerful. When candidates go negative, they almost always draw scorn from the news media and often hurt their own campaigns more than they help. When McCain went after his opponent, this powerful disdain for negative campaigning kicked in, bringing out all our censoriousness.The scorn for going negative, moreover, has been especially acute among reformist high-minded liberals in the tradition that runs from Adlai Stevenson to Eugene McCarthy to Obama—men whose successes rested on their supporters' wish for a politics free of the compromises and rough-and-tumble inherent in democracy. By introducing his campaign in a Stevensonian vein, Obama fashioned an image as one who would never initiate attacks. Remarkably, and much to his credit, Obama sustained that image throughout the campaign, even during those moments in August when, flagging in the polls, he acceded to his supporters' calls to hit harder against McCain or, the previous fall, against Hillary Clinton.
Behind Obama's Victory: Women Open Up a Record Marriage Gap: Unmarried women voted for Obama by a massive 70 to 29 percent (Kent Garber, November 5, 2008, US News)
Unmarried women—a group that includes single, separated, divorced, or widowed women—voted for Obama over Republican opponent John McCain by a whopping 70 to 29 percent in yesterday's election, according to numbers released today by Women's Voices Women Vote, a nonpartisan organization.Married women, by contrast, preferred McCain by a slim 3 percentage-point margin, 50 to 47 percent.
Unmarried women have historically voted for Democrats—in 2004, for example, 62 percent chose Sen. John Kerry over President Bush—but Obama's performance easily surpasses that of his predecessors.
President Dmitri Medvedev orders missiles deployed in Europe as world hails Obama (Tony Halpin, Times Online, 11/5/08)
President Dmitri Medvedev took advantage of the euphoria in America today to order the deployment of missiles inside Europe as a response to US plans for a missile defence shield.Speaking within hours of Barack Obama's election as the new US President, Mr Medvedev announced that Russia would base Iskander missiles in its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad next to the border with Poland.
He did not say whether the short-range missiles would carry nuclear warheads. Mr Medvedev also cancelled earlier plans to withdraw three intercontinental ballistic missile regiments from western Russia.
"An Iskander missile system will be deployed in the Kaliningrad region to neutralise if necessary the anti-ballistic missile system in Europe," Mr Medvedev said in his first state-of-the-nation address. [...]
[I]n a criticism directed at the US, Mr Medvedev declared: "Mechanisms must be created to block mistaken, egoistical and sometimes simply dangerous decisions of certain members of the international community."
He accused the West of seeking to encircle Russia and blamed the US for encouraging Georgia's "barbaric aggression" in the war over South Ossetia in August. He issued a warning that Russia would "not back down in the Caucasus".
Same-sex marriage ban wins; opponents sue to block measure (John Wildermuth, Bob Egelko, November 5, 2008, SF Chronicle)
After a heated, divisive campaign fueled by a record $73 million of spending, California voters have approved Proposition 8, which would change the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Opponents promptly filed suit to try to block the measure from taking effect.With 96 percent of the vote counted, Prop. 8 was winning by a decisive 400,000-vote margin, 52.2 percent to 47.8 percent.
Obama Can Persuade, But Can He Decide?< (Eric Felten, 11.05.08, Forbes)
Richard Neustadt--the late professor of political science and adviser to Democratic presidents--famously observed that a president's prime asset is his power to persuade. He recognized that to get anything done, a president has to rely on aides, officials and bureaucrats, mechanisms as tangled and troublesome as the wiring in an old Jaguar.The first order of business, Neustadt argued, is for a president to convince his subordinates "that what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their interest, not his." To do that effectively requires a much larger sales job--convincing the public (or at least convincing the part of the public that a given official cares about pleasing and impressing). At every level of government, from cabinet heads to worker bees, officials are gauging how the public views the president and "how their publics may view them if they do what he wants."
Neustadt not only emphasized the importance of making the sale in making policy, he suggested that focusing on bold decision-making is a strategy for a hobbled president, as every decision made and promulgated gobbles up the executive's limited stock of influence. Or, as Neustadt put it, "choices are the means by which he dissipates his power."
If Obama follows the Neustadt model of presidential power, it would no doubt be a comfortable fit with a personal style that has served him well for years. While head of the Harvard Law Review, Obama managed to navigate the treacherous politics of the organization by avoiding those power-dissipating choices.
"People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Obama's words," Jodi Kantor wrote in The New York Times of those Law Review days. His trick, in the midst of contentious disputes, was to get "students on each side of the debate [to think] he was endorsing their side." As one of Obama's professors, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. put it, "Everyone was nodding, 'Oh, he agrees with me.' "
Come his days in the Illinois Senate, Obama maintained the veil by voting "present" when need be.
But the appeal of choice-avoidance may be just as debilitating as the lure of being the Decider-in-Chief.
Inequality and Growth: Challenges to the Old Orthodoxy (Erwan Quintin and Jason L. Saving, January 2008, Economic Letter—Insights from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)
Until recently, a broad set of ideas led much of the economic profession to opine that inequality was, if anything, favorable to—or at least a necessary by-product of—economic growth.In classical models, economic growth depends chiefly on the rate at which nations accumulate productive resources, a factor that traces to aggregate savings rates. In this context, distributional considerations matter for growth only if households’ propensity to save varies systematically with wealth. If the rich save at a high rate, a view closely associated with prominent economist Nicholas Kaldor, unequal societies can actually build up their productive infrastructure faster than equal ones, achieving higher growth rates.
Inequality could also foster growth because new industries typically require large initial investments. If credit markets function poorly, a society’s savings may not be efficiently transferred to investments. In this environment, a high concentration of wealth may allow some investors to overcome these impediments and stimulate growth by bringing capital-intensive industries into being.
In the early work, income or wealth redistribution policies are overwhelmingly viewed as detrimental to growth based on at least two arguments. First, redistribution via such instruments as progressive taxation distorts incentives to save, which reduces resource accumulation. Second, some variation in economic rewards helps provide incentives to invest and work.
The classical view long dominated economic thought and emphasized that policies designed to reduce inequality would entail adverse consequences for economic growth.
Recent Challenges
Over the past two decades, these conventional notions have been challenged both on empirical and theoretical grounds. In cross-country comparisons, for example, researchers have generally found a negative relationship between income inequality and subsequent economic growth. These empirical findings, taken at face value, suggest that more equality could, in fact, foster growth.[3]
We illustrate the empirical argument by plotting income inequality in 1960 against average growth rates over the next four decades for all countries with available data. The results suggest, albeit weakly, that nations with more initial income inequality have tended to fare worse in the long run than countries with greater equality (Chart 1). In this example, inequality alone accounts for a fairly small fraction of the variance in growth across countries.
Even so, a growing body of empirical work finds that inequality remains significantly correlated with future growth even after controlling for other important factors, such as nations’ initial level of development. Furthermore, the correlation between inequality and growth seems particularly strong among certain subgroups of nations—for example, those in which private credit is scarce.
Of the current proposals to address income inequality, the universal 401(k) is the most likely to bring general prosperity.The core idea is simple. The federal government creates tax-free retirement accounts for lower-income Americans, supplementing private accounts where they already exist, and matching personal contributions to those accounts. The amount of the match would depend on the income of the family and how much they save.
Gene B. Sperling, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the best-known proponent of this idea (americanprogress.org/issues/2004/01/b289151.html), calls for a mix of 2-to-1 and 1-to-1 matches, but of course the exact ratios depend on what we are willing to spend.
Just as the earned-income tax credit pays poor people to work, the universal 401(k) would pay poor people to save. The idea is to bring the benefits of markets and investing to the poor. An H&R Block study (“Saving Incentives for Low- and Middle-Income Families: Evidence From a Field Experiment With H&R Block,” by Esther C. Duflo, William G. Gale, Jeffrey Liebman, Peter R. Orszag and Emmanuel Saez, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in November) indicated that lower-income Americans have a strong demand for easy-to-use matching retirement accounts.
But currently only 55 percent of Americans working full time hold a job with a retirement savings plan; the rate is even lower for part-time workers and the poor. Thus the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers receives only 10 percent of the tax incentives for savings.
A universal 401(k) plan would spread these tax benefits more evenly and induce more Americans to save. As in current 401(k) plans, the assets would be protected from creditors, the account would be attached to the individual and thus be portable, and penalties would discourage early withdrawal.
By directing the benefits toward the neediest, the universal 401(k) savings plan tries to increase economic security in a cost-effective manner.
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Still a Good Idea (Andrew G. Biggs, October 28, 2008, AEI Online)
Consider a simple personal account plan similar to those introduced in Congress. Workers could voluntarily invest four percentage points of the 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax in a "life-cycle portfolio," which would shift from holding 85 percent stocks through age twenty-nine to only 15 percent stocks by age fifty-five. At retirement, the account balance would be converted to pay a monthly annuity benefit.Workers who chose to divert a portion of their payroll taxes to a personal account, however, would also receive a reduced traditional benefit. Traditional Social Security benefits for account holders would be reduced by the amount they contributed to the account, plus interest at the rate earned by government bonds held in the Social Security trust fund. This would keep the current system's finances roughly neutral.
Account holders' total Social Security benefits would increase if their account returned more than the interest rate on government bonds. This makes analyzing how account holders would have fared a relatively simple task.
Using historical stock and bond returns since 1965, I simulated an individual who held a personal account his entire career and retired in September 2008. A typical retiree in 2008 would be entitled to a traditional Social Security benefit of roughly $15,700 per year. For workers who chose personal accounts, this traditional benefit would be reduced by around $7,800. But if the worker had a personal account, the balance of $161,500 would pay an annual annuity benefit of around $10,100. This $2,300 net benefit increase would raise total Social Security benefits by around 15 percent.
While today's retiree would have faced the subprime crisis and the tech bubble earlier in the decade, he also would have benefited from the bull markets of the 1980s and 1990s. The average return on his account--4.9 percent above inflation--would more than compensate for a reduced traditional benefit.
While this is an isolated case, it is telling that the very example Senator Obama uses to illustrate the dangers of personal accounts in fact refutes the point he is attempting to make. Even workers retiring today would have increased their Social Security benefits by choosing a personal account.
But we can go further. Using stock and bond data from 1871 through 2008, I simulated ninety-five separate cohorts of account holders retiring from 1915 through 2008, as shown in figure 1. Despite the ups and downs of the stock market, every single group of retirees would have increased their benefits by investing in personal accounts. Total benefits would have increased by between 6 and 23 percent, with an average increase of 15 percent.
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Iran also ripe for change (Hossein Askari , 11/06/08, Asia Times)
Iran already has one strike called against it - it is on the verge of an economic implosion - and is facing a second and a third strike in rapid succession over the next six months. Indeed, for the first time since the early days of the Iranian revolution in 1979, regime change, more accurately a "velvet" regime change, in Tehran may not be out of the question.
[...]Iran does not have an efficient tax system and relies heavily on oil revenues to finance its expenditures. It is estimated that oil and gas revenues constituted over 75% of total central government revenues in 2006, with tax and non-tax revenues contributing the balance.
A modern government needs an efficient tax system to provide relatively stable revenues, a mechanism for effecting income distribution and a tool for macroeconomic management. In Iran, only government employees pay their complete income tax bill because the tax is taken out of their paychecks; the private sector does whatever is necessary to minimize its tax obligations and hardly anyone pays capital gains taxes. The absence of an effective progressive income tax and a capital gains tax have in turn been a major determinant of Iran's highly skewed income distribution, a large blot on the record of any revolutionary government.
Iran's economic shortfalls have been dramatically exacerbated by widespread and regressive government subsidies, and by administered prices. These were a legacy of the war with Iraq, but the subsidies have been continued for the sake of political expediency. The single largest subsidy, that for gasoline, was in the range of 11-22% of GDP during 1997-2006. Implicit and explicit subsidies typically have accounted for 15-25% of GDP. [....]
The lessons for the regime in Tehran are clear:
1. Immediately develop an economic and financial plan that assumes oil prices of $40 per barrel, with a clear eye and absolute commitment to urgent comprehensive economic and financial reforms. There is no time to waste. Get people who understand supply and demand on this project, not religious and political ideologues.
2. Be prepared to respond to thoughtful "sanction-like policies" that the new US administration might adopt - Iran should at least know its own vulnerabilities even if the US has not recognized them up to now.
3. Elect a president on June 12, 2009, who has little or no baggage, is thoughtful, intelligent and who could appeal to Obama and to the American people.
The regime in Tehran has taken a free ride for the last 20 years. It has put off needed economic reforms. As a result, the average Iranian has become dependent on wasteful subsidies and even then is still barely getting by, while a select few are amassing large fortunes, in the millions of dollars, in the hundreds of millions of dollars and even in the billions of dollars safely abroad.
A confluence of international economic developments and a thoughtful US president would severely test the regime in Tehran. Iran's leaders should keep a low profile, refrain from incendiary rhetoric and instead burn the midnight oil to come up with a viable economic, financial and social plan to face falling oil prices and a new American president.
The lowly forces of supply and demand and a new American president may achieve what the threat of mighty military force and high-profile economic sanctions did not achieve. In the end, Iran may no longer turn out to be the next US president's major foreign policy issue.
The Enforcer: Rep. Rahm Emanuel is leading the Democratic charge to retake the House next year. Will his old-school combativeness rub off on his more timid colleagues? (JOSHUA GREEN, Oct 20, 2005, Rolling Stone)
"We're the party of change," Emanuel tells me. "We're the party of a new direction -- a break from rampant cronyism and the status quo. Period."If that message has a familiar ring, it may be because Republicans used essentially the same formula to seize control of the House a decade ago. Indeed, given his hard-charging reputation, Emanuel often elicits comparisons to the man who led the GOP to victory in 1994. "Rahm is the Democrats' Newt Gingrich," says Bruce Reed, who served with Emanuel in the Clinton White House. "He understands how much ideas matter, he always knows his message, he takes no prisoners and he only plays to win."
Other Clinton veterans are even more pointed about Emanuel's assets. "He's got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear 'em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress," says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton's staff. "The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars -- Rahm is a road warrior. He's just what the Democrats need to fight back."
Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There's the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."
Of the three stories, only the second is a myth -- Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it's a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton's White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don't earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.
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In the battered GOP, Jindal still shines (Stephanie Grace, November 04, 2008, The Times-Picayune)
Rather than get dragged into a civil war over the party's post-Bush direction, Jindal stayed above the fray. He vocally supported McCain, but he never got stuck delivering the campaign's increasingly desperate talking points.At first, it seemed that Jindal might have missed his big break when he skipped his prime time speaking gig at the Republican National Convention to quarterback Louisiana's Gustav response. But his absence just enhanced his brand among party leaders, who, still stinging from President Bush's disastrous handling of Katrina, reveled in Jindal's televised show of competence.
Romney still has loyalists, but his wholesale reinvention since his days in Massachusetts makes him an imperfect conservative standard bearer.
Palin still seems to have a hold on the party base, but Jindal can match her movement conservative credentials, her youth and her non-traditional background. Yet unlike Palin, who ended the season with extraordinarily high negatives, Jindal isn't divisive, and he rarely finds himself in over his head. For conservatives looking to redefine the GOP as smart, conciliatory and idea-oriented, Jindal could easily fit the bill.
Actually, even before today, he was starting to fill it.
Jindal held four fund-raisers for his own re-election bid on the road this fall, in Gainesville, Fla., Houston, Washington and Greenwich, Conn., even though he won't go before voters until 2011.
Republicans Confront Formidable Task Ahead: Leaders Agree on Need for Party Restructuring (Michael Abramowitz, 11/05/08, Washington Post)
At least one thing seemed clear after the electoral drubbing the GOP suffered yesterday: Republicans will soon find themselves in the throes of an intense debate over the direction of a party that has no obvious leader and no clear path back to power."It's amazing how a butt-kicking can help clear people's heads," said Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who received serious consideration to be McCain's running mate. "The Republican idea factory has gotten stale. We are still running on the policy ideas of 20 or 30 years ago. . . . The defeat and the setback saddens me, but it's now an opportunity to dust ourselves off."
Exit polls suggested a considerable rebuilding task for the GOP: Not since 1980 has a lower percentage of the electorate described itself as Republican. Ominously for the party, McCain was crushed among young voters and Hispanics, the fast-growing minority population once seen as potential gold for Republicans.
Utah's Republican governor, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., predicted a "broad discussion of the future of the party" with virtually every big issue on the table. "Was there anything that went right for us over the last several years?" he asked, saying that the party's international agenda has been "flawed" and U.S. prestige abroad "squandered, in terms of where you see our level of respect overseas."
"Domestically we have been totally tone-deaf in terms of recognizing the environment and where most Americans are in terms of having a healthy environment," said Huntsman, a popular governor who easily won reelection. "We have been missing in action in terms of any semblance of fiscal responsibility, [and] we have put forward nothing meaningful in terms of health-care reform that has any traction."
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), another individual often mentioned as a possible party leader, said the GOP must do a better job talking about the issues that most concern middle-income Americans, including health care and economic security. "There is a challenge for us to reconnect to people, to show that our policies are what the middle class really cares about," he said.
Other prominent party figures said the GOP should not overreact to the election results, asserting that Democrat Barack Obama moved toward the center during the general election campaign and co-opted traditionally Republican themes such as lower taxes.
(1) Hispanics: Immigration reform that legalizes those already here after a few obligatory hoop jumps and widens quotas enough that they're illusory.
(2) Environmental concerns: Carbon tax that makes people pay for the externalities of their own behavior.
(3) Health: Universal Health Care, but via HSAs and other similar vehicles.
(4) Taxes: Vote for the tax cuts.
Take advantage of Barack Obama running to the center and make him govern towards you. There'll be plenty more to run on later.
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President Bush Discusses Presidential Election (George W. Bush, Rose Garden, 11/05/08)
Good morning. Last night, I had a warm conversation with President-elect Barack Obama. I congratulated him and Senator Biden on their impressive victory. I told the President-elect he can count on complete cooperation from my administration as he makes the transition to the White House.I also spoke to Senator John McCain. I congratulated him on a determined campaign that he and Governor Palin ran. The American people will always be grateful for the lifetime of service John McCain has devoted to this nation. And I know he'll continue to make tremendous contributions to our country.
No matter how they cast their ballots, all Americans can be proud of the history that was made yesterday. Across the country, citizens voted in large numbers. They showed a watching world the vitality of America's democracy, and the strides we have made toward a more perfect union. They chose a President whose journey represents a triumph of the American story -- a testament to hard work, optimism, and faith in the enduring promise of our nation.
Many of our citizens thought they would never live to see that day. This moment is especially uplifting for a generation of Americans who witnessed the struggle for civil rights with their own eyes -- and four decades later see a dream fulfilled.
A long campaign has now ended, and we move forward as one nation. We're embarking on a period of change in Washington, yet there are some things that will not change. The United States government will stay vigilant in meeting its most important responsibility -- protecting the American people. And the world can be certain this commitment will remain steadfast under our next Commander-in-Chief.
There's important work to do in the months ahead, and I will continue to conduct the people's business as long as this office remains in my trust. During this time of transition, I will keep the President-elect fully informed on important decisions. And when the time comes on January the 20th, Laura and I will return home to Texas with treasured memories of our time here -- and with profound gratitude for the honor of serving this amazing country.
It will be a stirring sight to watch President Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House. I know millions of Americans will be overcome with pride at this inspiring moment that so many have awaited so long. I know Senator Obama's beloved mother and grandparents would have been thrilled to watch the child they raised ascend the steps of the Capitol -- and take his oath to uphold the Constitution of the greatest nation on the face of the earth.
Last night I extended an invitation to the President-elect and Mrs. Obama to come to the White House. And Laura and I are looking forward to welcoming them as soon as possible.
Thank you very much.
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National well ahead in poll on economic leadership (Paula Oliver, 11/06/08, New Zealand Herald)
National is a clear favourite to best steer the economy through an international downturn, according to a new Herald-DigiPoll survey taken just days out from the election. [...]With just two days to go until New Zealanders cast their ballots, the poll results suggest National is winning the battle to convince voters who would be the best economic manager.
Underlining this is the strong support National also enjoys when it comes to which party voters think will lead the next government.
National rated 49.5 per cent, and Labour was trailing on 36.8 per cent. National's backing is particularly strong among males, with 56 per cent of men naming the party as the best handler of the economy and 52.9 per cent thinking it will lead the next government.
What Will President Obama Do? (Howard Gleckman, 05 Nov 2008, TaxVox)
Economic Stimulus: Congress will not enact a stimulus plan in a lame duck session, but it will set the stage for big tax cuts and spending hikes in the first weeks of the Obama Administration. The measure could include many of the tax credits he proposed in the campaign, as well as costly new alternative energy subsidies he favored. Obama could quickly name a Treasury Secretary so his nominee can work with current Treasury boss Hank Paulson to address the ongoing financial market crisis. Reregulation will be another tough issue that will sap a lot of his administration's vigor.Tax hikes on the wealthy: They are not going to happen as long as the economy is in a slump. Obama may try for these rate increases in 2010, but not in 2009.
Health Reform: For at least a month, Obama operatives have been quietly passing the word: There will be no major reform of the health insurance system in a first Obama Administration. Instead, the new president will focus on expanding SCHIP, the health program for low-income children, and pushing incentives to encourage hospitals and doctors to adopt information technology.
Climate Change: Forget about cap and trade—the critical effort to raise prices to discourage the use of fossil fuels. It won’t happen in a slumping economy.
Deficit Reduction: Off the table.
Obama’s Third Way: Obama can create a new governing ideology for the West (Fareed Zakaria, 11/05/08, NEWSWEEK)
The world has moved on from the 1960s. Few believe that the government should own the commanding heights of the economy, that central planners should allocate resources and that protectionism will save jobs in the long run. Look at the left in power, from Britain to Australia, and you see pro-market, pro-trade policies aimed at promoting growth. The difference is that they also encourage government efforts in certain areas where the private sector isn't sufficient.
Rahm Emanuel on Principles & Values: Democratic Representative (IL-5)> (On the Issues)
Supports Hyde Park Declaration of "Third Way" centrism.
Emanuel adopted the manifesto, "A New Politics for a New America":As New Democrats, we believe in a Third Way that rejects the old left-right debate and affirms America’s basic bargain: opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and community of all.
* We believe:that government’s proper role in the New Economy is to equip working Americans with new tools for economic success and security.
* in expanding trade and investment because we must be a party of economic progress, not economic reaction.
* that fiscal discipline is fundamental to sustained economic growth as well as responsible government.
* that a progressive tax system is the only fair way to pay for government.
* the Democratic Party’s mission is to expand opportunity, not government.
* that education must be America’s great equalizer, and we will not abandon our public schools or tolerate their failure.
* that all Americans must have access to health insurance.
* in preventing crime and punishing criminals.
* in a new social compact that requires and rewards work in exchange for public assistance and that ensures that no family with a full-time worker will live in poverty.
* that public policies should reinforce marriage, promote family, demand parental responsibility, and discourage out-of-wedlock births.
* in enhancing the role that civic entrepreneurs, voluntary groups, and religious institutions play in tackling America’s social ills.
* in strengthening environmental protection by giving communities the flexibility to tackle new challenges that cannot be solved with top-down mandates.
* government must combat discrimination on the basis of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation; defend civil liberties; and stay out of our private lives.
* that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
* in progressive internationalism -- the bold exercise of US leadership to foster peace, prosperity, and democracy.
* that the US must maintain a strong, technologically superior defense to protect our interests and values.
A New Politics for a New AmericaAt the beginning of a new century and new millennium we see a nation in the midst of a great transformation.
As modernizers of the American progressive political tradition, we call for a new politics for the next decade to reflect new realities.
These new realities include:
# An information-, technology-driven, and ever more global New Economy that is changing the way Americans work, live, and communicate with each other.
# A population that is rapidly becoming more diverse, more affluent, more educated, more suburban, more "wired," less political, and more centrist.
# The emergence of a new social structure, in which the "learning class" of well-educated and skilled citizens prospers while those without education and skills are at risk of being left behind.
# The aging of the population, creating new intergenerational tensions over resources for schools, retirement, and health care.
# A generational change in attitudes as the New Deal/World War II generation gives way to the baby boom and GenX generations that are far more skeptical about politics and government, even as they crave a "higher politics" of moral purpose.
# A rapidly changing global environment in which American values and interests are predominant, but in which we face a new series of international challenges based not on a monolithic threat from another superpower, but on regional instability, economic rivalries, ethnic conflicts, rogue states, and terrorism.
Where We Stand
In keeping with our party's grand tradition, we reaffirm Jefferson's belief in individual liberty and capacity for self-government. We endorse Jackson's credo of equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none. We embrace Roosevelt's thirst for innovation and Kennedy's summons to civic duty. And we intend to carry on Clinton's insistence upon new means to achieve progressive ideals.
As New Democrats, we believe in a Third Way that rejects the old left-right debate and affirms America's basic bargain: opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and community of all.
We believe in free enterprise to stimulate economic innovation and growth and in public activism to ensure that everyone can share in America's prosperity.
We believe that government's proper role in the New Economy is to equip working Americans with new tools for economic success and security.
We believe in expanding trade and investment because we must be a party of economic progress, not economic reaction.
We believe that global markets demand global rules and institutions to ensure fair competition and to provide checks and balances on private power.
We believe that fiscal discipline is fundamental to sustained economic growth as well as responsible government.
We believe that a progressive tax system is the only fair way to pay for government.
We believe the Democratic Party's mission is to expand opportunity, not government.
We believe that education must be America's great equalizer, and we will not abandon our public schools or tolerate their failure.
We believe that all Americans must have access to health insurance in a system that balances governmental and individual responsibility.
We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals and that America's criminal justice system should be rooted in and responsive to the communities it serves.
We believe in a new social compact that requires and rewards work in exchange for public assistance and that ensures that no family with a full-time worker will live in poverty.
We believe that public policies should reinforce marriage, promote family, demand parental responsibility, and discourage out-of-wedlock births.
We believe in shifting the focus of America's anti-poverty and social insurance programs from transferring wealth to creating wealth.
We believe in replacing top-down bureaucracy with more flexible public institutions that enable citizens and communities to solve their own problems.
We believe government should harness the forces of choice and competition to achieve public goals.
We believe in enhancing the role that civic entrepreneurs, voluntary groups, and religious institutions play in tackling America's social ills.
We believe in strengthening environmental protection by giving communities the flexibility to tackle new challenges that cannot be solved with top-down mandates.
We believe government must combat discrimination on the basis of race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation; defend civil liberties; and stay out of our private lives.
We believe that the common civic ideals Americans share transcend group differences and forge unity from diversity.
We believe that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
We believe in progressive internationalism -- the bold exercise of U.S. leadership to foster peace, prosperity, and democracy.
We believe that the United States must maintain a strong, technologically superior defense to protect our interests and values.
Finally, we believe that American citizenship entails responsibilities as well as rights, and we mean to ask our citizens to give something back to their communities and their country.
A New Agenda for the New Decade
Based on the new realities of American life and on our enduring values as progressives, we present the following agenda for America's next decade.
Making the New Economy Work for All Americans
1. Expand the Economy While Expanding the "Winner's Circle"
Our first economic priority must be to keep today's "long boom" alive through the formula that created it: fiscal discipline, open trade, support for innovation and entrepreneurship, and investment in the knowledge and skills of the work force.
Fiscal discipline means not only balanced federal budgets, but action to reduce the national debt and to deal with the obligations associated with the retirement of the baby boom generation.
Open trade is integral to growth because it creates new markets abroad for our goods and services, lowers consumer prices, and spurs innovation. At the same time, we must tap new markets in inner-city and rural neighborhoods at home.
The key to lifting wages and living standards for all Americans is to boost productivity by investing heavily in technology and skills. As the economic rewards of education rise, we must continue to expand access to higher education. We should also stimulate the spread of new technologies and the Internet to every industry, every classroom, and every family. As e-commerce grows, citizens must be empowered to control the use of personal information they disclose online.
As we expand our economy, we must expand the winner's circle of Americans equipped to benefit from the New Economy. This is the New Deal for economic security in the New Economy: lifelong learning for everyone, portable pensions and health insurance, and new opportunities for working families to save, build financial assets, and become homeowners.
Goals for 2010
# Boost investment in technology and lifelong learning.
# Pay down the national debt.
# Increase the percentage of Americans owning capital assets (including homes) from 50 percent to 75 percent.
# Double the percentage of minority families owning homes.
# Make access to the Internet as common as access to telephones.
# Ensure that all students who make a "B" average or agree to serve their country can afford to go to college.
2. Write New Rules for the Global Economy
The rise of global markets has undermined the ability of national governments to control their own economies. The answer is neither global laissez faire nor protectionism but a Third Way: New international rules and institutions to ensure that globalization goes hand in hand with higher living standards, basic worker rights, and environmental protection.
U.S. leadership is crucial in building a rules-based global trading system as well as international structures that enhance worker rights and the environment without killing trade. For example, instead of restricting trade, we should negotiate specific multilateral accords to deal with specific environmental threats.
Goals for 2010
# Conclude a new round of trade liberalization under the auspices of the World Trade Organization.
# Open the WTO, the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to wider participation and scrutiny.
# Strengthen the International Labor Organization's power to enforce core labor rights, including the right of free association.
# Launch a new series of multinational treaties to protect the world environment.
3. Create World-Class Public Schools
Now more than ever, quality public education is the key to equal opportunity and upward mobility in America. Yet our neediest children often attend the worst schools. While lifting the performance of all schools, we must place special emphasis on strengthening those institutions serving, and too often failing, low-income students.
To close this achievement and opportunity gap, underperforming public schools need more resources, and above all, real accountability for results. Accountability means ending social promotion, measuring student performance with standards-based assessments, and testing teachers for subject-matter competency.
As we demand accountability, we should ensure that every school has the resources needed to achieve higher standards, including safe and modern physical facilities, well-paid teachers and staff, and opportunities for remedial help after school and during summers. Parents, too, must accept greater responsibility for supporting their children's education.
We need greater choice, competition, and accountability within the public school system, not a diversion of public funds to private schools that are unaccountable to taxpayers. With research increasingly showing the critical nature of learning in the early years, we should move toward universal access to pre-kindergarten education.
Goals for 2010
# Turn around every failing public school.
# Make charter schools an option in every state and community.
# Offer every parent a choice of public schools to which to send his or her child.
# Make sure every classroom has well-qualified teachers who know the subjects they teach, and pay teachers more for performance.
# Create a safe, clean, healthy, disciplined learning environment for every student.
# Make pre-kindergarten education universally available.
Creating a New Social Compact for The New Economy
1. Help Working Families Lift Themselves from Poverty
In the 1990s, Americans resolved to end welfare dependency and forge a new social compact on the basis of work and reciprocal responsibility. The results so far are encouraging: The welfare rolls have been cut by more than half since 1992 without the social calamities predicted by defenders of the old welfare entitlement. People are more likely than ever to leave welfare for work, and even those still on welfare are four times more likely to be working. But the job of welfare reform will not be done until we help all who can work to find and keep jobs -- including absent fathers who must be held responsible for supporting their children.
In the next decade, progressives should embrace an even more ambitious social goal -- helping every working family lift itself from poverty. Our new social compact must reinforce work, responsibility, and family. By expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, increasing the supply of affordable child care, reforming tax policies that hurt working families, making sure absent parents live up to their financial obligations, promoting access to home ownership and other wealth-building assets, and refocusing other social policies on the new goal of rewarding work, we can create a new progressive guarantee: No American family with a full-time worker will live in poverty.
Goals for 2010
# Finish the job of welfare reform by moving all recipients who can work into jobs.
# Cut the poverty rate in half.
# Double child support collections and require every father who owes child support to go to work to pay it off.
2. Strengthen America's Families
While the steady reduction in the number of two-parent families of the last 40 years has slowed, more than one-third of our children still live in one- or no-parent families. There is a high correlation between a childhood spent with inadequate parental support and an adulthood spent in poverty or in prison.
To strengthen families, we must redouble efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies, make work pay, eliminate tax policies that inadvertently penalize marriage, and require absent fathers to pay child support while offering them new opportunities to find work. Because every child needs the attention of at least one caring and competent adult, we should create an "extended family" of adult volunteer mentors.
Family breakdown is not the only challenge we face. As two-worker families have become the norm, harried parents have less time to spend on their most important job: raising their children. Moreover, parents and schools often find themselves contending with sex- and violence-saturated messages coming from an all-pervasive mass entertainment media.
We should continue public efforts to give parents tools to balance work and family and shield their children from harmful outside influences. For example, we should encourage employers to adopt family-friendly policies and practices such as parental leave, flex-time, and telecommuting. Public officials should speak out about violence in our culture and should press the entertainment media to adopt self-policing codes aimed at protecting children.
Goals for 2010
# Cut the rate of out-of-wedlock births in half.
# Recruit a million mentors for disadvantaged children without two parents.
# Provide affordable after-school programs at every public school.
# Make every workplace "family-friendly."
# Promote policies that help parents shield their children from violence and sex in entertainment products.
3. Promote Universal Access and Quality in Health Care
That more than 40 million Americans lack health insurance is one of our society's most glaring inequities. Lack of insurance jeopardizes the health of disadvantaged Americans and also imposes high costs on everyone else when the uninsured lack preventive care and get treatment from emergency rooms. Washington provides a tax subsidy for insurance for Americans who get coverage from their employers but offers nothing to workers who don't have job-based coverage.
Markets alone cannot assure universal access to health coverage. Government should enable all low-income families to buy health insurance. Individuals must take responsibility for insuring themselves and their families whether or not they qualify for public assistance.
Finally, to help promote higher quality in health care for all Americans, we need reliable information on the quality of health care delivered by health plans and providers; a "patient's bill of rights" that ensures access to medically necessary care; and a system in which private health plans compete on the basis of quality as well as cost.
Goals for 2010
# Reduce the number of uninsured Americans by two-thirds through tax credits, purchasing pools, and other means.
# Create a system of reliable "report cards" on the quality of care delivered by health plans and providers.
4. Strengthen America's Common Civic Culture
The more ethnically and culturally diverse America becomes, the harder we must all work to affirm our common civic culture -- the values and democratic institutions we share and that define our national identity as Americans. This means we should resist an "identity politics" that confers rights and entitlements on groups and instead affirm our common rights and responsibilities as citizens.
Multiethnic democracy requires fighting discrimination against marginalized groups; empowering the disadvantaged to join the economic, political, and cultural mainstream; and respecting diversity while insisting that what we have in common as Americans is more important than how we differ.
One way to encourage an ethic of citizenship and mutual obligation is to promote voluntary national service. If expanded to become available to everyone who wants to participate, national service can help turn the strong impulse toward volunteerism among our young people into a major resource in addressing our social problems. It will also help revive a sense of patriotism and national unity at a time when military service is no longer the common experience of young Americans.
Goals for 2010
# Reduce discrimination based on race, gender, national background, religion, age, disability, or sexual orientation.
# Shift the emphasis of affirmative action strategies from group preferences to economic empowerment of all disadvantaged citizens.
# Expand the AmeriCorps national service program so that everyone willing to serve can serve -- with 1 million participants enrolled by the end of the decade.
# Promote character education in all public schools.
5. Balance America's Commitments to the Young and the Old
An ever-growing share of the federal budget today consists of automatic transfers from working Americans to retirees. Moreover, the costs of the big entitlements for the elderly -- Social Security and Medicare -- are growing at rates that will eventually bankrupt them and that could leave little to pay for everything else government does. We can't just spend our way out of the problem; we must find a way to contain future costs. The federal government already spends seven times as much on the elderly as it does on children. To allow that ratio to grow even more imbalanced would be grossly unfair to today's workers and future generations.
In addition, Social Security and Medicare need to be modernized to reflect conditions not envisioned when they were created in the 1930s and the 1960s. Social Security, for example, needs a stronger basic benefit to bolster its critical role in reducing poverty in old age. Medicare needs to offer retirees more choices and a modern benefit package that includes prescription drugs. Such changes, however, will only add to the cost of the programs unless they are accompanied by structural reforms that restrain their growth and limit their claim on the working families whose taxes support the programs.
Goals for 2010
# Honor our commitment to seniors by ensuring the future solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
# Make structural reforms in Social Security and Medicare that slow their future cost growth, modernize benefits (including a prescription drug benefit for Medicare), and give beneficiaries more choice and control over their retirement and health security.
# Create Retirement Savings Accounts to enable low-income Americans to save for their own retirement.
Reinventing Government and Politics
1. Performance-Based Government
The strong anti-government sentiments of the early 1990s have subsided, but most Americans still think government is too bureaucratic, too centralized, and too inefficient.
In Washington and around the country, a second round of "reinventing government" initiatives should be launched to transform public agencies into performance-based organizations focused on bottom-line results. Many public services can be delivered on a competitive basis among public and private entities with accountability for results. Public-private partnerships should become the rule, not the exception, in delivering services. Civic and voluntary groups, including faith-based organizations, should play a larger role in addressing America's social problems.
When the federal government provides grants to states and localities to perform public services, it should give the broadest possible administrative flexibility while demanding and rewarding specific results. Government information and services at every level should be thoroughly "digitized," enabling citizens to conduct business with public agencies online.
Goals for 2010
# Require public agencies to measure results and publish information on performance.
# Consolidate narrow federal-state grants into broad performance-based grants that offer greater flexibility in return for greater accountability for results.
# Make it possible for citizens to conduct all business with government online.
# Create a chief information officer to drive the digitization of the federal government.
2. Return Politics to the People
At a time when much of the world is emulating American values and institutions, too many Americans have lost confidence in their political system. They are turned off by a partisan debate that often seems to revolve not around opposing philosophies but around contending sets of interest groups. They believe that our current system for financing campaigns gives disproportionate power to wealthy individuals and groups and exerts too much influence over legislative and regulatory outcomes.
The time for piecemeal reform is past. As campaign costs soar at every level, we need to move toward voluntary public financing of all general elections and press broadcasters to donate television time to candidates.
The Internet holds tremendous potential for making campaigns less expensive and more edifying and for engaging Americans directly in electoral politics. We should promote the Internet as a new vehicle for political communication and champion online voting.
Goals for 2010
# Introduce voluntary public financing for all general elections.
# Allow properly regulated voter registration and voting online.
# Implement civic education courses in every public school.
3. Modernize Environmental Policies
National environmental policies, mostly developed in the 1970s, have been remarkably successful in improving the quality of our air and water. But we face a new set of environmental challenges for which the old strategy of centralized, command-and-control regulation is no longer effective.
The old regime of prohibitions and fines levied on polluters is not well equipped to tackle problems such as climate change, contamination of water from such sources as farm and suburban runoff, loss of open lands, and sprawl. Without relaxing our determination to maintain and enforce mandatory national standards for environmental quality, it is time to create more effective, efficient, and flexible ways of achieving those standards.
For example, a system of tradable emissions permits would give factories, power plants, and other sources of air pollution and greenhouse gases a powerful incentive not only to meet but to exceed environmental standards. Decisions about solving local environmental problems should be shifted from Washington to communities, without weakening national standards. Finally, to empower citizens and communities to make sound decisions, government should invest in improving the quality and availability of information about environmental conditions.
Goals for 2010
# Create a domestic emissions trading system to reduce greenhouse gases by 10 percent.
# Promote innovative agreements for community and regional partnerships to achieve national environmental goals and standards through local strategies.
# End government subsidies for sprawl.
Promoting Peace and Security At Home and Abroad
1. Make America the "Safest Big Country" in the World
After climbing relentlessly for three decades, crime rates started to fall in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the public remains deeply concerned about the prevalence of gun violence, especially among juveniles, and Americans still avoid public spaces like downtown retail areas, parks, and even sports facilities.
To continue reducing crime, we need to keep policing "smart" and community-friendly, prohibiting unjust and counterproductive tactics such as racial profiling; focus on preventing as well as punishing crime; pay attention to what happens to inmates and their families after sentencing; use mandatory testing and treatment to break the cycle of drugs and crime; and enforce and strengthen laws against unsafe or illegal guns. Moreover, we need a renewed commitment to equal justice for all, and we must reject a false choice between justice and safety.
Technology can help in many areas: giving police more information on criminal suspects so they do not rely on slipshod, random stop-and-search methods; allowing lower-cost supervision of people on probation or parole; and making it possible to disable and/or trace guns used by unauthorized persons.
Above all, we need to remember that public safety is the ultimate goal of crime policy. Until Americans feel safe enough to walk their neighborhood streets, enjoy public spaces, and send their children to school without fear of violence, we have not achieved public safety.
Goals for 2010
# Reduce violent crime rates another 25 percent.
# Cut the rate of repeat offenses in half.
# Develop and require "smart gun" technology to prevent use of firearms by unauthorized persons and implement sensible gun control measures.
# Ban racial profiling by police but encourage criminal targeting through better information on actual suspects.
# Require in-prison and post-prison drug testing and treatment of all drug offenders.
2. Build a Public Consensus Supporting U.S. Global Leadership
The internationalist outlook that served America and the world so well during the second half of the 20th century is under attack from both ends of the political spectrum. As the left has gravitated toward protectionism, many on the right have reverted to "America First" isolationism. This collapse of the old Cold War consensus threatens America's ability to provide international leadership on both the economic and security fronts.
What's needed is a new foreign and security strategy for a new era. Our leaders should articulate a progressive internationalism based on the new realities of the Information Age: globalization, democracy, American pre-eminence, and the rise of a new array of threats ranging from regional and ethnic conflicts to the spread of missiles and biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons. This approach recognizes the need to revamp, while continuing to rely on, multilateral alliances that advance U.S. values and interests.
A strong, technologically superior defense is the foundation for U.S. global leadership. Yet the United States continues to employ defense strategies, military missions, and force structures left over from the Cold War, creating a defense establishment that is ill-prepared to meet new threats to our security. The United States must speed up the "revolution in military affairs" that uses our technological advantage to project force in many different contingencies involving uncertain and rapidly changing security threats -- including terrorism and information warfare. This also means undertaking a systematic overhaul of the military to create a force that is more flexible, integrated, and efficient.
Goals for 2010
# A clear national policy with bipartisan support that continues U.S. global leadership, adjusts our alliances to new regional threats to peace and security, promotes the spread of political and economic freedom, and outlines where and how we are willing to use force.
# A modernized military equipped to deal with emerging threats to security, such as terrorism, information warfare, weapons of mass destruction, and destabilizing regional conflicts.
Conclusion
The ideas in this Hyde Park Declaration are not an exclusive or exhaustive agenda for America in the 21st century. We welcome other ideas based on the enduring values of opportunity, responsibility, and community.
But we do urge our fellow Democrats, and fellow citizens, to take heed of the rapid pace of economic, social, and political change here and abroad; the great potential of new technologies to transform how we live, work, and interact; the inequality of opportunity that will emerge if we do not address it; the dangerous disengagement in public life of our citizenry; and the fresh needs and perspectives of the young people who will succeed us.
This is the wrong time in history for politics as usual: for empty partisanship; for treating citizens simply as members of contending groups; for divisive appeals based on race, religion, ethnicity, or culture; for efforts to encourage voters to focus on narrow self-interest; and for perpetuating the issues and ideologies of an ever-more-distant past.
We are firmly convinced that our party, which is more than ever and must always strive to be a New Democratic Party, has the right values, policy goals, and ideas to represent the new politics our country needs. But we cannot rest. We must continue to embrace change if we are to engage the electorate and offer a governing agenda that can produce positive results. As the squire of Hyde Park, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said, "New conditions impose new requirements on government and those who conduct government."
That is why we best honor the true legacy of FDR not by acting as guardians of the dead letter of past progressive achievements but by living up to the bold, innovative spirit that made those achievements possible. With this Declaration, we affirm our intention to do just that.
Making It: How Chicago shaped Obama (Ryan Lizza, July 21, 2008, The New Yorker)
ne day in the spring of 2001, about a year after the loss to Rush, Obama walked into the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, a shabby nineteen-fifties government workspace for state officials next to the regal state capitol. He went upstairs to a room that Democrats in Springfield called “the inner sanctum.” Only about ten Democratic staffers had access; entry required an elaborate ritual—fingerprint scanners and codes punched into a keypad. The room was large, and unremarkable except for an enormous printer and an array of computers with big double monitors. On the screens that spring day were detailed maps of Chicago, and Obama and a Democratic consultant named John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district. Corrigan was the Democrat in charge of drawing all Chicago districts, and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in the campaign against Rush.Obama’s former district had been drawn by Republicans after the 1990 census. But, after 2000, Illinois Democrats won the right to redistrict the state. Partisan redistricting remains common in American politics, and, while it outrages a losing party, it has so far survived every legal challenge. In the new century, mapping technology has become so precise and the available demographic data so rich that politicians are able to choose the kinds of voter they want to represent, right down to individual homes. A close look at the post-2000 congressional map of Bobby Rush’s district reveals that it tears through Hyde Park in a curious series of irregular turns. One of those lines bypasses Obama’s address by two blocks. Rush, or someone looking out for his interests, had carved the upstart Obama out of Rush’s congressional district.
In truth, Rush had little to worry about; Obama was already on a different political path. Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.
“It was a radical change,” Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. “He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic.”
Obama’s personal political concerns were not the only factor driving the process. During the previous round of remapping, in 1991, Republicans had created Chicago districts where African-Americans were the overwhelming majority, packing the greatest number of loyal Democrats into the fewest districts. A decade later, Democrats tried to spread the African-American vote among more districts. The idea was to create enough Democratic-leaning districts so that the Party could take control of the state legislature. That goal was fine with Obama; his new district offered promising, untapped constituencies for him as he considered his next political move. “The exposure he would get to some of the folks that were on boards of the museums and C.E.O.s of some of the companies that he would represent would certainly help him in the long run,” Corrigan said.
In the end, Obama’s North Side fund-raising base and his South Side political base were united in one district. He now represented Hyde Park operators like Lois Friedberg-Dobry as well as Gold Coast doyennes like Bettylu Saltzman, and his old South Side street operative Al Kindle as well as his future consultant David Axelrod. In an article in the Hyde Park Herald about how “partisan” and “undemocratic” Illinois redistricting had become, Obama was asked for his views. As usual, he was candid. “There is a conflict of interest built into the process,” he said. “Incumbents drawing their own maps will inevitably try to advantage themselves.”
The partisan redistricting of Illinois may have been the most important event in Obama’s early political life. It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the Senate in 2004: money and power. He needed to have several times as much cash as he’d raised for his losing congressional race in 2000, and many of the state’s top donors now lived or worked in his district. More important, the statewide gerrymandering made it likely that Obama’s party would take over the State Senate in 2002, an event that would provide him with a platform from which to craft a legislative record in time for the campaign.
Obama’s political activity from 2001 to 2004 reveals a man transformed. The loss to Rush drained him of much of the naïveté he once exuded. [...]
One insight into the transition that Obama was making during the short period between his painful loss to Bobby Rush and his Senate victory can be gained by comparing his reactions to the two major national-security crises of the time: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war. For many Illinois state legislators, September 11th was not an event that required much response. The attacks occurred just before an important deadline in the redistricting process. John Corrigan, the Democratic consultant in charge of redistricting, told me that he spent September 12th talking to many legislators, Obama not among them. “It was like nothing had happened,” he said. “Everybody came in and all they cared about was their districts. It wasn’t any one particular legislator from any one particular community. I learned a lot about state government. Their job was not to respond to September 11th. They were more worried about making sure that they had a district that they could run in for reëlection.”
Obama’s response to the event was published on September 19th in the Hyde Park Herald:
Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.
We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.
We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.A year later, Obama agreed to speak at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago, organized by Bettylu Saltzman and some friends, who, over Chinese food, had decided to stage the protest. Saltzman asked John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago—and, later, the co-author of the controversial book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”—to speak, but he couldn’t make it. “He was one of the main people we wanted, but he was speaking at the University of Wisconsin that day,” Saltzman said. Then she called her rabbi and then Barack Obama. Michelle answered the phone and passed the message on to her husband, who was out of town.
Saltzman also called Marilyn Katz, who runs a Chicago public-relations firm and is close to Mayor Daley. Katz managed to get Jesse Jackson as a speaker, and handled many of the organizing details. Katz, a petite woman who was, improbably, the head of security for S.D.S. at the 1968 Democratic Convention, described what she felt the political mood was at the time of the rally. “Professors are being turned in on college campuses, Bush’s ratings are eighty-seven per cent,” she said. “Among my friends, there hasn’t been an antiwar demonstration in twenty years. There’s huge repression, Bush has got all this legislation. They’re talking about lists, they’re denying people entry into the country. . . . Bush’s numbers were tremendously high, but we had no choice. Unless we wanted to live in a country that was fascist.”
Despite the politics of Saltzman and Katz, Obama’s now famous speech was notable for the absence of the traditional tropes of the antiwar left. In his biography of Obama, David Mendell, noting that Obama’s speech occurred a few months before the official declaration of his U.S. Senate candidacy, suggests that the decision to publicly oppose the war in Iraq was a calculated political move intended to win favor with Saltzman. The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!”
The sensitive language of his September 11th statement was gone. Instead, Obama distanced himself from the pacifist activists who were surely present. “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances,” he told the crowd. He then went further, defending justifiable wars in almost glorious terms. “The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s Army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow-troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don’t oppose all wars.” It took some nerve to tweak the crowd in this way. After all, it was unlikely that many of the protesters knew who Obama was, and in a lengthy write-up of the event in the Chicago Tribune the following day he was not mentioned. Yet the speech reads as if it had been written for a much bigger audience.
During this period, Obama also became more of a strategist, someone increasingly comfortable discussing the finer points of polls, message, and fund-raising. According to his friends, Obama does not delegate campaign planning. Marty Nesbitt, his best friend, who became a familiar presence on the campaign trail this spring, flying in to play basketball with Obama on primary days, described the first meeting in which Obama pitched the idea of running for the U.S. Senate to his closest advisers and fund-raisers. This was in 2002, and things seemed to be going his way. The incumbent Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, was unpopular, and the race was attracting a large field of Democrats.
“He didn’t start telling people he was interested in running for Senate until he figured out what the road map was,” Nesbitt said. “He had a good sense of the odds, and he knew there were certain things that had to happen. . . . The first thing he said was, ‘O.K., nobody with approval ratings like this has ever been reëlected, so it’s not gonna be him, right?’ And then he said there’s a bunch of candidates who can potentially run, one of whom was Carol Moseley Braun. And he said, ‘If she runs, I probably don’t have a chance, because there’s gonna be certain loyalty within the African-American community to her, even though she had some mistakes, and I’m probably not gonna get those African-American votes, which I need as my base if I’m gonna win. So if she runs, I don’t run.’
“Then he just laid out an economic analysis. It becomes about money, because he knew that if people knew his story they would view him as a better candidate than anybody else he thought might be in the field. And so he said, ‘Therefore, if you raise five million dollars, I have a fifty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise seven million dollars, I have a seventy-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise ten million dollars, I guarantee victory.”
That year, he gained his first high-level experience in a statewide campaign when he advised the victorious gubernatorial candidate Rod Blagojevich, another politician with a funny name and a message of reform. Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama’s, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich’s campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich’s victory. He and Obama “participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor,” Emanuel said. “We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two.” [...]
Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.
Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.
Obama’s establishment inclinations have alienated some old friends. During the 2004 Senate primary, Obama sometimes reminded voters of his anti-machine credentials, but at the same time he shrewdly wrote to Mayor Daley’s brother, William, who had backed one of Obama’s primary opponents, asking for his support if he won the primary. As he outgrew the provincial politics of Hyde Park, he became closer to the Mayor, and this accommodation, as well as his unwillingness to condemn the corruption scandals ensnaring Daley and Blagojevich, both of whom he supported for reëlection, have some of his original supporters feeling alienated and angry. “I am not thrilled with Barack, simply because we elected him as an Independent, and he switched over to Daley,” Alan Dobry said. Ivory Mitchell, speaking of Obama’s Senate race, said, “When he won the primary out here and he went downtown, it appears as though Daley took over the campaign for him. . . . We were excluded.” David Axelrod told me, in response, that some of the Independents on the South Side blame Daley for just about anything. “I think there’s kind of this Wizard of Oz mystique,” he said. “Daley had virtually no role in the Senate campaign.”
Another transition from primary to general election is now under way for Obama, and it is causing him a similar set of problems, all of which stem from a realization among his supporters that superheroes don’t become President; politicians do. Judging by the reaction to Obama’s most recent decisions—his willingness to support legislation to modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, his rightward shift on interpreting the Second Amendment, his decision to “refine” his Iraq policies—some voters will be crushed by this realization and others will be relieved. In another episode that has Obama’s old friends feeling frustrated, Obama recently blamed his first campaign manager, Carol Anne Harwell, for reporting on a 1996 questionnaire that Obama favored a ban on handguns. According to her friends, Harwell was furious that the campaign made her Obama’s scapegoat. “She got, as the saying goes, run over by a bus,” Lois Friedberg-Dobry said.
Kim could make Obama flinch (Kosuke Takahashi, 11/06/08, Asia Times)
The problem of North Korea's intractable nuclear development could grow even worse for Tokyo and Seoul if Barack Obama, the next United States president, seeks direct diplomacy without preconditions to end the threat from Pyongyang. Experts in East Asia are raising serious concerns about the adverse effects of the next US administration's possible conciliatory approach against North Korea on regional security.Obama, who has said he is willing to meet with the leaders of some of the US's "enemies", including Iran and North Korea, seems to believe the US can largely exercise its own discretion in coping bilaterally with North Korean issues, possibly with new incentives for it to completely abandon its nuclear weapons program, such as normalization of ties and a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, following the US delisting of Pyongyang from a terror blacklist last month.
But Obama's relative go-it-alone diplomatic approach on defusing the North Korean nuclear crisis could definitely upset the US's Asian allies Japan and South Korea, as it could damage the ongoing process of the six-party talks, a common political and regional safety valve for all of the six countries: North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US. Obama could even play into the hands of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.
Top Hispanic Republican Wins Gubernatorial Election in Puerto Rico: Early Results Show Luis G. Fortuno Garners Historic Landslide (Fortuno 2008, 11/04/08, PRNewswire-USNewswire)
The U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico voted today, in what early results show to be record numbers, to elect fiscal and social conservative Luis G. Fortuno as the next governor of Puerto Rico - making him the Island's first Republican governor since 1968. [...]"This historic victory demonstrates that the people of Puerto Rico want change for progress, and I am fully committed to delivering it," said now Governor-Elect Fortuno. "I have a vision for a stronger, more economically sound and prosperous Puerto Rico, and I am confident that together we will re-energize the Island's economy. The people of Puerto Rico voted to re-instate good government, and my administration will deliver on our promise."
Throughout his campaign, Fortuno proposed a profound reform of the Island's government to transform it into a smaller and more agile facilitator of individuals' initiative that will result in spurring economic growth.
The wave of change chosen by voters in Puerto Rico today bodes well for Puerto Rico's economy as it sends a clear message that the Island is once again open for business under Fortuno's leadership.
A rising star in the Republican Party, Luis Fortuno will continue to work with the GOP leadership to grow and strengthen the party.
Top 10 Countries (Heritage Index of Economic Freedom)
..."In my next life let me come back as an English-speaking, Calvinist, island.""
Obama and McCain Walk Into a Bar ... (JOHN TIERNEY, 11/04/08, NY Times)
[R]esearchers picked out a variety of jokes — good, bad, conventional, absurdist — to look for differences in reactions between self-described liberals and conservatives.They expected conservatives to like traditional jokes, like the one about the golfing widower, that reinforce racial and gender stereotypes. And because liberals had previously been reported to be more flexible and open to new ideas, the researchers expected them to get a bigger laugh out of unconventional humor, like Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts” about the reindeer effect and Hambone.
Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.
“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”
Which Barack Obama will govern?: He won on a campaign that combined ambitious goals and a cautious temperament. But as president, he faces peril if he hews too far left or pursues cautious mediation at the expense of his agenda. (Doyle McManus, November 5, 2008, LA Times)
Barack Obama won the presidency Tuesday by persuading voters to embrace a seeming paradox: leadership based on contradictory principles of change and reassurance.The Illinois senator combined ambitious goals and a cautious temperament. He promised tax cuts, better healthcare, new energy programs and fiscal discipline all at the same time, and all without the bitterness and stalemate that arose when those issues were tackled in the past.
Now, as Obama moves through his transition to the White House, this effort to square the political circle becomes the defining challenge in the months ahead. Which Barack Obama will dominate as he begins to govern?
Too much of the ambitious liberal, and he rekindles partisan squabbles he was supposed to transcend.
Too much the cautious mediator who reaches across the aisle to compromise with Republicans, and he risks losing the energy and idealism that attracted millions to his candidacy.
But, as to policies, he cannily offered no significant challenge to those of Clinton/Gingrich/Bush. Not only do his tax cuts offer seeming continuity with W, but he came out of the infamous White House meeting as the de facto ally of the Republican president and his Secretary of the Treasury, with John McCain oddly stuck in the oppositional camp with the House GOP. The talk is that Rahm Emmanuel, an architect of the Clinton presidency, will be Chief of Staff and that both Henry Paulson and Robert Gates may be asked to stay on, which would give two of the four original cabinet spots, and still among the most important, to Bush men. Never has a vote for "change" been more about voting for the status quo.
The key to understanding all this remains Mr. Obama's experience in becoming the first black president of Harvard Law Review. Here's one of his black supporters at that time and current advisor, Cassandra Butts, from the Frontline election special:
He essentially spent his life trying to synthesize the duality of being one person in one place and being another person in another place. What I like to say to people is that Barack never meets a stranger, and that's one of the things that makes him so effective as a politician. When he meets people, when he sees people, when he's interacting with people, he isn't inclined to stereotype people. He ultimately has met you before in some other experience, or someone just like you. …Barack was not and is not predictable. He's thoughtful. He'll tell you what he believes. But it isn't always what you expect. … His ideological approach is to the left and there was an expectation that as the president of the Law Review that he would side on the part of his more progressive colleagues. But he recognized that his role was such that he had to bring both sides together. And in order to publish the Law Review and to be productive in his term as president, he had to figure out how to make it work and how to make both sides work together, which meant that he wasn't always going to side with his progressive colleagues, that he had to take the interests and the ideas of the people on the right into account.
It's not to suggest that where he was on the issue was being reflected in the decision that he made. But it did reflect what he needed to do as a leader in order to produce the Law Review. …
It is Barack's natural inclination to reach across the aisle. It's personality. And it's also just his intellect. … He's not interested necessarily in dominating the conversation. He wants to bring people into the conversation. He wants to understand different points of view. And understanding those different points of view informs the way he thinks about issues. …
Honestly, we were just very polarized on the Law Review, we really were. It's like you go to a college campus, and the black students were all sitting together. It was the same thing with the Law Review; the black students were all sitting together. Barack was the one who was truly able to move between the different groups and have credibility with all of them.Why?
I really don't know. He grew up in a multiracial environment. I don't know what he's like now with conservatives, but I don't know why at the time he was able to communicate so well with them, even spend social time with them, which was not something I would ever have done. …
I don't think he was agenda-driven. I think he genuinely thought, some of these guys are nice, all of them are smart, some of them are funny, all of them have something to say. …
Now, as you may know, I had personal hopes for my own future on the Law Review. I was kind of hoping to get a masthead position, and I did not get a masthead position. So we went from the high of having Barack elected -- now, this is just me speaking, as at the time I was a very narrow-minded, almost radical student. I was 22 years old at this point, so I kind of saw everything in terms of race. I try not to do that anymore.
So I did assume I would get the position that I thought I had coming. I [did] think I had earned it as far as the quality of my work. But I'll tell you now, I had not earned it as far as the quality of my diplomacy with the other students. ... He did know I was a hard worker, that he did know. That's why I felt betrayed, because I worked so hard. I pulled so many all-nighters, I thought I should be rewarded. But he put the good of the Law Review ahead of my agenda. That's what makes him such a great leader. ...
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Obama to Assemble Transition Team (Shailagh Murray, 11/04/08, Washington Post)
He is expected to name a White House chief of staff in the next day or two, and the clear front-runner is Rep. Rahm Emanuel, his longtime friend and ally from Chicago. [...][O]bama's effort to create a smooth transition that puts his stamp on government will face major tests almost immediately. Congress will convene for a lame-duck session on Nov. 17, and the junior senator from Illinois will have to decide whether to become immersed in its proceedings or keep his distance, as some allies are advising.
The White House will hold an economic summit on Nov. 15 that 20 world leaders will attend; Obama, who called for such a meeting in September, has been invited to participate. His advisers are also debating whether to ask Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to stay on, to allow planning for a withdrawal from Iraq to begin as soon as possible. A U.N. conference on global warming will be held in Poland in December, an ideal stage for Obama, or a high-profile surrogate such as former vice president Al Gore, to declare that the era of Bush energy policies are over.
Obama remains largely a stranger to the vast federal bureaucracy and will be besieged by Washington insiders he barely knows -- and whose loyalties are untested -- seeking positions of influence.
"He was extremely good at running for office, but there's no way to predict what comes next," said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar with the Brookings Institution. "There's no school for presidents. A lot of this is on-the-job training, and we take a lot on faith."
Significantly, W not only had a strong chief but two former chiefs in the top spots of his administration and then a raft of governors. There's talk of John Kerry for State and if that's the direction Mr. Obama is headed, mainly legislators in cabinet spots, he's making a huge mistake. How about asking these business guys who backed him to come be $1 a year men--a good old Democrat tradition?
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As Economic Crisis Peaked, Tide Turned Against McCain (MONICA LANGLEY, 11/04/08, Wall Street Journal)
The next day, while conservative House Republicans maneuvered behind the scenes to block the bailout bill, Sen. McCain sat largely silent at a crisis summit at the White House. Afterward, Sen. Obama called his staff from his car: "I've never seen anything like this," he said, according to several aides. "Some of the Republicans are clueless. Bush and I were trying to convince them."The presidential candidates were essentially tied at the time, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed, with Sen. McCain just a point behind. But in the next few weeks, as the handling of the economic crisis overshadowed all other issues, Sen. Obama opened a 10-point lead. Although Sen. McCain began to gain some ground at the end, he never fully recovered from the pivotal late-September juncture.
It's strange how clear it is, and was even as it happened, that the single moment at the White House determined the final outcome.