WAIT'LL JOE BIDEN FINDS OUT HE ISN'T INVITED TO CABINET MEETINGS EITHER...:

Nobody Knows the Trouble He'll See: A few clouds on Obama's horizon. (Fred Barnes, 12/29/2008, Weekly Standard)

As president, Obama will step into an ideal political situation, at least on the surface. He'll be dealing with a Congress with solid Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. What more could a Democratic president ask for? What's the problem?

Obama and Democrats agree on the big issues, but on power-sharing, process, and priorities they part ways. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has declared that once Joe Biden becomes vice president, he won't be invited to the weekly meetings of the Democratic caucus. This had to be a bitter pill for Biden. He was a senator himself for 36 years and, as veep, actually has a constitutional role in the Senate. But, as a White House man, the senators don't want him butting in. They prefer to decide things on their own.

If Reid's message wasn't clear to the Obama team, House speaker Nancy Pelosi removed any doubt. She told Rahm Emanuel, her former House colleague and now Obama's choice to be White House chief of staff, to stay out of internal House Democratic matters. According to John Bresnahan of Politico, she was clear about what she expects from Obama and his aides, a wish list including "no surprises, and no backdoor efforts to go around her and other Democratic leaders by cutting deals with moderate New Democrats or conservative Blue Dogs."

The subtext is that Reid and Pelosi fear Obama may be more willing to compromise on liberal issues than they are. And they don't want a repeat of President Clinton's so-called "triangulation" with Republicans, despite Obama's promise to pursue bipartisanship. Bottom line: The relationship between Obama and congressional Democrats will be tense. It is already.

There's another aspect of that relationship that's potentially troublesome. More than Obama, congressional Democrats are sensitive to the wants of liberal special interest groups. They're impatient to pass the entire liberal agenda, sooner rather than later. They're eager to fill the $850 billion economic "stimulus" package that Obama is expected to sign soon after being inaugurated with goodies for these groups, notably organized labor and environmentalists.

The problem is Obama didn't run on the liberal agenda and the public didn't vote for it.