Category Archives: Barack Obama

Something completely different

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
Perhaps it would be a bit much to quote from the Book of Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new!” How about Monty Python? “And Now For Something Completely Different….”
    There is a tension in the air today between two ways of viewing the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States. On the one hand you have thousands upon thousands who have scraped and planned and arranged to be in Washington — or the millions upon millions who will be watching from a distance and with them in spirit — who are fairly vibrating, resonating with communal anticipation. This includes elderly black folk who are praising God because they never thought they’d see the day. It contains — just barely, given the magnitude of their excitement — young people of all colors who left school and jobs and suspended their lives for a year and more to work toward this day. And more conventionally, it includes Democrats who are as thrilled as any group of partisans have ever been that their guy is finally going to replace that other guy.
    On the other hand, there are those who think this is all a bit much, or more than a bit: Whoop-tee-do, they think. A guy won an election. He’s just this guy, you know. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss. Nothing changes: One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
    Some of the latter, jaded, unexcited group are Republicans. Pretty much all of them are white. There’s not necessarily anything bad about them; they don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade. They just sort of want it over with. As Kathleen Parker suggests in the column on the facing page, there’s just so much earnestness and idealistic hoorah that one thinking person can possibly stand as we stride forth into this new age. That doesn’t make Ms. Parker a bad person. And I know that neither she nor the others in the “this is all a bit much” set are bad people, because, well, I’m sort of one of them.
    Or at least, I was. In the last few days, I changed my mind. The cynics are wrong, and the folks who just can’t contain themselves have it exactly right.
    I wrote the editorial above. I went into it as a chore that needed to get done and out of the way — one of those obligatory editorials you sometimes do, not because you had something you and your colleagues on the editorial board were burning to say, but because the particular moment in history demanded that you take note and say something.
    You may think that writing an editorial is about figuring out how to say what you already know you think. And often it is. But sometimes, it’s a process in which you discover what you think. That’s what happened here. The more I looked and read and reflected upon where we are as a nation and how and why we got here, the more I realized how significant this inauguration is, and how it differed from the previous 13 of my lifetime.
    No, it’s not that he’s a black guy. Yes, that’s a huge milestone for the country, and worth celebrating, but if you focus too much on that you miss just how different this moment is. As I said in the editorial, the nation chose much more than a racial first in this election: “It chose youth. It chose intellect. It chose pragmatism over the constant ideological bickering of recent years. It chose the promise of action rather than stalemate. It chose, in a word, change.”
    Yes, any new president represents change. But this change is generational, and attitudinal, and fundamental. The closest thing in my lifetime was when the generation of Dwight Eisenhower handed off to the generation of John F. Kennedy, but even that falls short. In choosing Barack Obama, the nation really took a risk and got out of its comfort zone. For Democrats, the safe and obvious choice was Hillary Clinton, or someone like Joe Biden (a point that underlines Mr. Obama’s wisdom in choosing his running mate, a move that made the risk more palatable). In the general election, even the “maverick” opponent was the safer, more comfortable, more conventional choice.
    This country decided it had had enough of the kinds of politics and government that we’ve had up to now. It chose a man who was practically a novice in politics and government — which made him untainted, but also meant he had almost no relevant experience. And yet, he possessed the eloquence and demeanor and intellect and attitude that persuaded us that he could deliver on the promised change.
    And you know what? I think he can, and will. I’ve seen proof. One example, which speaks volumes: his decision to pull South Carolina’s own Sen. Lindsey Graham — John McCain’s closest acolyte, leading advocate of our nation’s presence in Iraq — into his circle of foreign policy advisers. By sending Sen. Graham with Sen. Biden to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then appearing with both men to draw attention to the fact, explaining that he was “drafting” Sen. Graham “as one of our counselors in dealing with foreign policy,” the president-elect charted new ground. He threw out the rule book of partisan and ideological convention, and he did so in the pursuit of the very best ideas, the ones most likely to serve the nation and its interests and allies going forward.
    I’ve never seen anything like this, and neither have you. This is something completely different, and yet something that, after today, we’re going to see a lot more of. And that’s a wonderful thing for this country. It’s worth getting really excited about.

For more that’s different, go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

DeMint stars in Moyers report on how Dems killed earmark reform

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Here's something that will jar a few of your preconceived notions (at least, among those who were so dismissive of Bill Moyers a while back as a liberal shill): It's a Bill Moyers report on PBS that calls Democratic leaders to task for double-crossing Jim DeMint and deep-sixing earmark reform.

Remember when everyone was so impressed that Nancy Pelosi was working with Sen. DeMint on this issue? Well, this report tells the rest of the story, of how the promise was undone.

An excerpt from the transcript:

SYLVIA CHASE: But what Senator Reid wasn't saying was that the reform measure contained a caveat. Senators wouldn't have to disclose any earmarks that went to federal entities.
But in the Defense Bill, almost all the earmarks first go to federal entities before being passed along to private contractors. In effect, senators would be able to hide almost every earmark. And that prompted a challenge from Senator Jim DeMint — a champion of earmark transparency. The South Carolina Republican made a startling admission.
JIM DEMINT: Many in this Chamber know I don't often agree with Speaker Pelosi, but Speaker Pelosi has the right idea.
SYLVIA CHASE: And a stunning proposal.As an amendment to the Ethics Bill, the staunchly conservative Republican DeMint proposed that the Senate adopt word-for-word the House version of earmark reform marshaled through by the liberal Democrat Nancy Pelosi
JIM DEMINT: We proposed the DeMint-Pelosi Amendment. And I presented it on the floor. And the place was quiet.
JIM DEMINT: This is the language which the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has put in this lobbying reform bill in order to make it more honest and transparent.
SYLVIA CHASE: It was a brilliant tactical move. If the Democratic majority was to reject DeMint's amendment it would mean rejecting the much stronger earmark disclosure rules crafted under their own party's high profile Speaker of the House.
JIM DEMINT: Harry Reid did not want this to come for a vote. He made a motion to table it, which gives the members some cover because you're not really voting against the amendment. You're just voting to table it.
SYLVIA CHASE: "Tabling" the so-called DeMint-Pelosi Amendment would mean removing it from consideration — effectively, killing it.
HARRY REID: I would appeal to my friend from South Carolina. I repeat: I know you are doing this because you think it is the right thing to do. But take the opportunity to look at what is here. It is better than the House version – so much better.
JIM DEMINT: And Senator Reid assumed as most people did including me that he would get fifty-one votes to table it. And we had a few heroes on the Democrat side that joined us, Barack Obama, relatively new senator, bucked his party and voted with us.
SENATE PRESIDING OFFICER: On this vote the ayes are 46, the nays are 51. The motion to table is not agreed to.
JIM DEMINT: And we defeated the tabling motion. Well once the tabling motion failed by a vote or two, everyone knew they were going to have to vote on the real thing and it was like 98 to nothing. I mean this is the kind of thing that if, if senators know America can see what they're voting on, they were afraid not to vote for it.
SYLVIA CHASE: Indeed, with all eyes watching — 98 senators voted in favor of the artfully crafted DeMint-Pelosi Amendment; not one opposed it.
The junior senator from South Carolina had taken on the powerful Senate Majority Leader and won. Or so it appeared. Remember: this was an amendment to a wide-ranging ethics bill. And before a bill becomes a law, its final language must be worked out between both houses of Congress. Steve Ellis, a leading earmark reform advocate in Washington, explains how the game works.
STEVE ELLIS: So rather than doing what the House did which was simply change their rules. You're done the next day. Everything is changed and you have to abide by earmark reform, people could still modify it before it actually ended up becoming the rules of the Senate.
SYLVIA CHASE: Which is precisely what happened.

You can watch the video here (sorry, I couldn't find imbed code).

By the way, Barack Obama — whom DeMint had occasion to praise back at the start of this tale ("And we had a few heroes on the Democrat side that joined us, Barack Obama, relatively new senator, bucked his party and voted with us.") — does not escape Moyers' skepticism. Near the top, he notes:

BILL MOYERS: No earmarks will be allowed and if you thought you hadn't heard him correctly, he repeated it in his big speech on Thursday. None of those hidden pet projects with multi-million dollar price tags that individual members of Congress sneak into bills for special interests or campaign contributors. Can it be true? Have we really crossed the bridge to nowhere for the last time?
Don't hold your breath. As a senator, Barack Obama himself was no slouch when it came to passing out earmarks. And many of the people in his incoming administration are accomplished practitioners…

They threw away my Obama bottle!

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My brother, who will be 50 on his next birthday, still complains about the tremendous financial reversal he suffered when Mom threw out his baseball cards.

Well, I can top him on that: I returned from vacation, and the new cleaning people who started here last week had thrown out my Barack Obama water bottle! So much for my best opportunity to get rich on E-Bay.

You may or may not be aware that all things Obama are hot. You would definitely know this if you
worked here and saw the people lined up in our lobby to buy copies of the Nov. 5 front page pictured at right. And that was just a reproduction of a page ABOUT Obama.

So just imagine how much I could have gotten for a water bottle with actual Obama DNA on it. I had picked it up when I was gathering up my stuff from the table after our editorial board interview on Jan. 21 of last year. Actually, I wasn't entirely clear on whether it was HIS water bottle or MINE. But then, the photographic evidence indicates I was drinking coffee, while he was drinking water (from my special Initech cup from "Office Space"), not water, so it was most likely his (of course, I also have a photo below in which he had no water bottle before him, but what are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?). The photo above, by the way, is a blown up detail from the wider shot back on this post.

Anyway, I had left it on a credenza on the other side of my office, and it had sat there unmolested for 11 months. Every once in a while I'd look at it and wonder what I should do with it, then promptly forgot about it.

When I went on vacation Dec. 26, I cleaned up my office. My desk was spotless. There was no debris apparent anywhere — except for that old water bottle, which I no longer noticed. But obviously our new cleaning people did. They were getting paid to clean the office, and that was the only thing that looked out of place to them. Just my luck. (I only realized it was gone when I used a water bottle to water a dying plant — which I see the cleaning people or somebody had also trimmed back from where it had been trailing on the floor, and started to leave the bottle next to the plant, but thought that wouldn't be tidy, and happened to think of the Obama bottle…)

Weirdly, they left an empty water bottle on my window sill that says "Galivants Ferry Stump, May 1, 2006" on it. I guess it was more obviously a souvenir.

Of course, it might not have been the cleaning people. But I don't think my Mom has a key to my office, so they're at the top of the list. And there's nothing I can do about it, because they have a perfect comeback — it looked like trash. In this sort of dispute, the authorities never side with the pack rat…

Obama’s clean; let’s move on now

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ALL RIGHT, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it is my firm belief that Barack Obama had nothing to do with the (alleged) sordid doings of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
At this point (if you’re sane), you’re saying, of course he didn’t. But you just say that because you’re not a part of the narrow partisan universe of 24/7 TV news and blogs. Unfortunately, the president-elect himself ignores that world at his peril. Hence the statement released Monday from his transition office:

At the direction of the President-elect, a review of Transition staff contacts with Governor Blagojevich and his office has been conducted and completed and is ready for release. That review affirmed the public statements of the President-elect that he had no contact with the governor or his staff, and that the President-elect’s staff was not involved in inappropriate discussions with the governor or his staff over the selection of his successor as US Senator.

    Actually, that’s just the first of three paragraphs in the non-denial denial — a Watergate-era term that actually works better in this very different context: Obama has nothing to deny; there’s no reason for him to have to deny anything; and yet he knows that he must.
    Barack Obama is trying to organize an administration to govern in a time of war and serious economic crisis, and at least a portion of his staff is having to stop everything and investigate, in detail, whether anyone on the team ever had anything to do with that other Illinios Democrat that might in any way reflect badly on the president-elect, and then very carefully deny wrongdoing, being careful not to over-deny.
For instance, if the initial reaction of the transition had been to say “no one associated with Sen. Obama had any conversations with anyone in the governor’s office about the open seat,” they would already have to retrench — it was reported over the weekend that Rahm Emanuel talked with people on the governor’s staff about candidates for the Senate seat who would be pleasing to Mr. Obama. Which is a perfectly natural, innocent thing to do — but if your initial denial had gone too far, you’d be in trouble. You’d be having to retract, and then there would be blood in the water.
    That’s why, according to The New York Times’ Week In Review section Sunday, the Clinton administration veterans on Obama’s team (Mr. Emanuel et al.) “imposed a cone of silence on colleagues so they would not make a remark that could come back to haunt them…. Republicans were ready to pounce, rushing out statements linking Mr. Obama to Mr. Blagojevich within an hour or so after the governor’s arrest was reported. They too knew the script and that any opening must be exploited. Politics in this hyperpartisan age, after all, is the ultimate contact sport.”
    The Times piece was interesting, but it was flawed: It traced the atmosphere of reflexive defensiveness to the Clinton impeachment. The implication is that these Democratic veterans know to what lengths those dastardly Republicans will go to tar their guy. Let me explain the Clinton impeachment: It was related to what the president himself did, and what he said about what he did, in office. It was sordid; it was shameful; it was demeaning, and the president lied to us about it. Got the picture?
    Mr. Obama, by contrast, has done nothing. Nothing that is, except get elected president by running against the very culture of perpetual partisan character assassination, thereby creating a vacancy in the U.S. Senate that some sleazebag proposed (allegedly) to sell.
    The only thing the two incidents have in common is that in both cases, Republicans are poised to gleefully take advantage of the situation, to the Democrats’ detriment. Just as Democrats have used every sharp implement they could get their hands on (and more than a few dull ones) for the past eight years to rip and tear at George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on.
    And I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with it. We’ve got a president-elect who is an honest, decent man who wants to lead us beyond all that. And although I didn’t support him in the election — I liked the other honest, decent guy more — I want to say here and now that I stand ready and willing to follow him to that better place.
    The other day, my colleague Robert Ariail did a cartoon that showed Barack Obama walking across the surface of smelly sewage flowing from a pipe labeled “Chicago Politics.” A bystander remarks, “Walking on it’s one thing… not getting any of it on him — that’s the miracle.” Which is a good cartoon.
    The only problem is, it only makes sense within a context in which we assume that Obama has a problem when he hasn’t even done anything wrong. Ah, but you will say that man is born to sin, and wallows in it if he’s involved in Democratic Chicago politics.
    But here, too, is a difference. I point you to one of the editorials that prompted Mr. Blagojevich to try to get the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune fired. It invited the governor to come in and answer some questions about, among other things, his relationship with developer Tony Rezko. The editorial noted that when Sen. Obama was invited to do the same several months ago at a critical point in his candidacy, “He accepted the invitation and, during 92 minutes of questioning, answered literally every question put to him about his relationship with Tony Rezko…. With that interview session and a meeting at the Sun-Times, Obama largely put the Rezko issue behind him.”
    And, they could have added, it helped earn him The Tribune’s endorsement, its first for a Democrat for president in its 161-year history. The editors were able to tell the difference between an honest man and a crook.
    So can I. And since I see no reason whatsoever to doubt that Barack Obama is completely clean on this, I’d like to see him and his team spend their time on something more productive than this nonsense, from here on out.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

So when, precisely, do you suppose Inez got cozy with these “teachers’ unions?”

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It’s been a busy day, so I’m just now getting back to that bizarre AP story I read this morning about Inez and the Education secretary job. It said, in part,

Teachers’ unions, an influential segment of the party base, want an
advocate for their members, someone like Obama adviser Linda
Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor, or Inez Tenenbaum,
the former state schools chief in South Carolina.

Reform advocates want someone like New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wants teachers and schools held accountable for the performance of students.

Say WHAT? Inez is the one who led the nation in implementing accountability. And where on Earth did that stuff about "teachers’ unions" come from?

Something I meant to mention in my Sunday column, but it was just too complicated to get into, was the fact that it’s hard, if not impossible, to place Inez in the simplistic terms that David Brooks used to describe the conversation within the Obama transition over the Education Secretary nomination:

As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms…

He went on to suggest that potential education secretaries are being assessed according to where they fall on that spectrum.

Mind you, I’m not accusing Brooks of being simplistic. Rather, the problem is that NATIONALLY, that’s the way the whole issue of public education plays. And it just has nothing to do with Inez’ experience — or anyone else in South Carolina’s experience — of dealing with public education.

That’s because we don’t have a teachers’ union in South Carolina. In case you hadn’t noticed, teachers don’t engage in collective bargaining here, and that’s a GOOD thing. We don’t hold with
it here. Yes, we have an organization affiliated with the organization
that in other places constitutes a union, and that organization does
wield some influence at the State House. But not being a union takes
some intensity out of the conflict we see elsewhere.

This might doom her chances, for a number of reasons. First, she simply lacks experience dealing with unions, which are such a big factor elsewhere. Also, if Brooks is right, the two camps are each determined to have someone who is ONE or the OTHER (fer or agin the unions). But the fact that she doesn’t fit neatly on that scale speaks to another reason why I’d like to see Inez in that job: Maybe she could change the subject from this titanic ideological battle to one of dealing pragmatically with the challenges facing kids in our public schools.

That’s what Inez would bring: The pragmatism that Obama has sought in his nominees up to this point.

Sure, Inez has some experience dealing with entrenchment in the education establishment — she had to overcome a lot of that in implementing the EAA. But it was less fierce than you might find elsewhere. And in any case, she got the job done.

Also — and my colleague Cindi Scoppe has written about this — when folks in other parts of the country talk about "school choice," they mean charter schools as often as not. Well, we have charter schools in South Carolina. This newspaper has supported them from the start. That is NOT the case with the wacky stuff that "choice" advocates push, with out-of-state money, here. Charter schools are about innovation; vouchers and tax credits are about undermining the entire idea of public schools — accelerating the process of middle class abandonment that began with post-integration white flight. (And before you have a stroke and say you’re for vouchers, and you don’t want that, I’m not talking here about YOUR motivation — I’m talking about what the effect would be.)

So the vocabulary doesn’t really translate. What I’d like to see is a South Carolinian in the main national education pulpit changing the conversation, and therefore the vocabulary, to something that matches the reality that we see in our schools here.

Has Inez been a reformer? You betcha, on the grand scale — she’s the one who implemented the Education Accountability Act, which put us out ahead of most of the country on that point (and then came NCLB, which has been really discouraging because it compares how well South Carolina meets its HIGH standards to how well other states meet their LOW standards, and acts as though they’re the same thing).

Was Inez in the vanguard demanding the EAA? No. It was passed before she entered office. But she was the one who implemented it, and got high marks for how well she did it.

Note that of the three main sorts of reform Brooks mentions above — "merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards" — South Carolina is ahead of the pack on numbers two and three, and Inez has had a lot to do with the accountability one.

Merit pay is one of those things that we haven’t done much on, and we should. In fact, that’s one of the reforms we keep trying to push here on the editorial board of The State, along with school district consolidation and giving principals greater flexibility and authority to hire and fire.

But we don’t get much traction. Why? Because of this completely unnecessary, incessant battle over vouchers and tax credits, which consumes all the oxygen available for talking about education policy. The "choice" advocates yell so much, and defenders of public education yell back so much, that you can’t hear anything else. And it’s a shame.

Elected officials such as our governor will give lip service to favoring school district consolidation — and then put no appreciable effort into making it happen. And of course, his out-of-state allies who fund voucher campaigns have NO interest in pushing consolidation, because they have no interest in anything that would actually help public education in South Carolina. They don’t want to make our public schools better; they just want to pay people to abandon them, and the whole strategy depends on portraying the schools as being as bad as possible.

So, bottom line: Inez a reformer? Yes. Inez the candidate of "teachers’ unions?" Where did AP get that? Unfortunately, AP isn’t saying. But somebody at AP sure does seem to like Arne Duncan.

The imperial presidency-elect?

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This letter on today’s page got me to thinking:

New administration may be full of itself

For the past few weeks, I have witnessed our newly elected commander-in-chief and his subordinates on national and local news.

On the podium is a seal that denotes “the office of the president-elect.” Believing I had forgotten much of my ninth-grade civics class, I reread our U.S. Constitution. Described therein were the offices of, requirements for and duties of the president, senators, representatives, et al. Nowhere could I find a definition of the “office of the president-elect.”

How pompous and presumptuous of those so headily and gleefully poised to assume the reins of power. Could be a sign; I don’t know.

JOHN R. CLARK
Hartsville

Obamaseal1
What it got me to thinking was this: This keeps cropping up, and I keep wondering why, because Barack Obama doesn’t strike me as this kind of guy. He is, after all, The Tieless One. These overdone trappings of gonnabe power just don’t seem like him.

Remember how everyone talked about the "Imperial Presidency" during the Nixon administration? Well, who is it on Obama’s team who is so tone-deaf as to want to project an image of an "imperial presidency-elect," or earlier, an imperial candidacy (at right)?

I had noticed the seal, too, and I thought it was pretty weird. But what I don’t know is, whose idea is this? Why does this keep happening? And why doesn’t Obama put a stop to it?

Inez Tenenbaum for Obama’s Cabinet?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
NOW THAT HE’S got his economic and national security teams lined up, President-Elect Obama can turn to the “second-tier” Cabinet positions, such as Secretary of Education.
Normally, I wouldn’t take all that much interest in the Education job. I don’t see education as a proper function of the federal government; it’s a state responsibility. And when the feds have gotten involved in K-12, they’ve generally mucked it up. I’m not a fan of Ronald Reagan, but he did get some things right, and one of them was proposing to do away with the U.S. Department of Education. You’ll notice, however, that after all that talk, he didn’t actually get rid of it. So the department is there, and somebody is going to run it.
That being the case, I hope the somebody Barack Obama chooses is our own Inez Tenenbaum. At this point you’re thinking two things: First, “Does she really have a shot at that?” I don’t know. There are a lot of lists, short and long, floating around, and she’s on some and not on others. The Associated Press had her on a short list of five names (which also included Colin Powell) at the end of November, but when they moved the same list on Thursday, she wasn’t on it (nor was Gen. Powell). On the same day, MSNBC posted a long list on its Web site that included her (and Gen. Powell). Other names regularly mentioned include Arne Duncan, who runs Chicago public schools, and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
Inez (disclosure here — I call her Inez because her husband, Samuel, is a friend) doesn’t make it on David Brooks’ short list in his column on the facing page. But we’ll see.
Now for the second thing you’re thinking, especially if you’re one of those who buy into the notion that public schools in South Carolina are irredeemable, and anyone who has ever had anything to do with them is tainted. When I mentioned Inez as a contender for the job the other day, someone who should know better said it would be ironic for two Democratic secretaries in a row to be from South Carolina, since our schools struggle so.
No, it wouldn’t. It would be perfectly fitting, especially given Inez Tenenbaum’s record as state superintendent from 1999-2007.
There are achievements that can be quantified, such as South Carolina’s students scoring at or above the national average on nationally recognized standardized tests for the first time. Our fourth- and eighth-graders even scored at the very top in math and science on the National Assessment of Education Progress.
But what of the SAT, the favored test of naysayers? During her tenure, our average rose 32 points, the greatest gain of any state where most graduating seniors take the test. No, we didn’t catch up — we just improved faster than anyone.
But what impressed me most about her performance was that she took the situation she had and did the most she could with it. The most dramatic example: her implementation of the Education Accountability Act. The EAA was enacted the year she was elected, pushed by business leaders and a conservative Republican governor, and largely opposed by Democrats and professional educators. She might have dragged her feet, but instead she fully embraced the task of implementing accountability, in spite of institutional resistance.
How did she do on that? The year she left office, Education Week ranked South Carolina No. 1 in the nation for accountability. The research organization Education Trust ranked our state as tied (with Maine) at No. 1 in the rigor of our proficiency standards; The Princeton Review rated our testing system 11th best.
Our state’s leadership on this front ironically became a liability when No Child Left Behind came along. That’s because each state was judged by how well it met its own standards and expectations, and ours were higher than other states’.
So as long as there is a U.S. Department of Education, and especially while NCLB remains law, I want the person in charge of administering it to know the reality here in South Carolina.
But what makes Inez Tenenbaum, and Dick Riley before her, better suited than folks from other parts of the country at addressing the nation’s real K-12 problems? Consider the sheer magnitude of our challenges, based in generations of slavery, Jim Crow and abject poverty. Before the Civil War, our state had more slaves than free people. We integrated our schools 16 years AFTER Brown vs. Board of Education, even though the case started here. The achievement gap for poor and minority students is a national problem, but no one has more experience combating it than Gov. Riley and Inez Tenenbaum.
Inez isn’t talking about her candidacy, or non-candidacy. But she did say some things about Barack Obama and education that I liked hearing.
She’s had time to think about this because she’s one of the experts who helped him draft his education platform (which you can read online, linked from my blog). Rather than talk about the federal government trying to run our schools, she speaks of the historic opportunity Mr. Obama has to lead by example.
She remembers how John Kennedy got kids engaged in physical fitness when she was in school, mainly by talking it up. A president Obama can do the same with parental involvement, parlaying the excitement his election has generated into an ongoing movement. She has been deeply impressed by his own commitment to education, from seizing every opportunity offered in his own life to his involvement in his daughters’ schooling — she heard him, on the campaign bus here in South Carolina, talking to his girls on the phone about every detail of their day at school. He was engaged in the way all parents should be.
Barack Obama, as she describes it, has the potential to lead on education without pushing coercive new laws or creating new bureaucracies.
Now that’s a federal role in education I can get behind.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Obama and national security: Pragmatism, continuity

36 Replies

Sorry I haven’t posted today — actually, I DID post something, but it blew up when I hit SAVE, and I’m not about to type it again, so there.

Anyway, I thought I’d put up something that would provide a chance for y’all to discuss Obama’s National Security team. I’ve already expressed my concern about Hillary Clinton, and I don’t have a lot to say about the rest. I like that Robert Gates is staying. I’ve always liked Gates. (See my Nov. 10, 2006, column, "The return of the professional")I thought he was a great pick to rescue our military from the screw-ups of Rumsfeld, and he’s generally lived up to that.

But the Gates choice speaks to a larger issue, which is continuity of policy. Obama spoke of his "pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world." Which speaks to something I like about him, and appreciate. I hoped it would have been like this, and he’s not disappointing me.

Some of y’all who know about my support for our national endeavor in Iraq may have wondered how I could have been so wholehearted about endorsing Obama in the primary last year, given that he stressed so much how he was the one guy who would NOT have gone in there. Well, there’s the issue of whether we should have gone in, and the issue of what to do next. And the next president is about what to do next. And I believe Obama will be sensible and pragmatic about what to do next.

Some of his most ardent supporters are likely to be disappointed by the very things that reassure me about Obama and foreign policy. But personally, I don’t think Obama’s going to blow Iraq just to please them. He’s fortunate that the Surge (which he was wrong to oppose) has produced a situation in which an ordered withdrawal of American troops is actually advisable, and no longer reckless. I think he’ll be careful to do it in a rational manner, according to conditions on the ground. I think he’ll see the things that Tom Friedman sees, and wrote about in his Sunday column:

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from
moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against
pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq.
There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that
a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt
in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is
the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin
drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long
and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also
an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world
in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said
during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi
leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to
sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving
tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull
this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats
could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it.
Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national
security credentials than that.

The really miraculous thing that Friedman notes is a sign that an independent judiciary is emerging in Iraq: The high court came down on a member of parliament for trying to persecute a government official for visiting Israel. This is a startling development, almost miraculous, really. I remember several years back listening to Lindsey Graham talk about how very far Iraq was from developing the institutions that support the rule of law. Graham believed we needed to stay there; I believed we needed to stay there, but contemplating how long it would take for such institutional changes to take hold was extremely discouraging.

Now we’re seeing such encouraging signs as this, which is actually as important as the reduction of violence. As Friedman says, "It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try
to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of
law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for
its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries." That’s why Friedman was for the Iraq War, and it’s why I was, too. But I didn’t think something like this would happen so fast. As you’ll recall from what I wrote the week we invaded, I really didn’t expect us to be talking realistically about withdrawal this early in the process. But now we can — as long as we don’t screw it up. And keeping Gates at Defense is an important way of maintaining the continuity needed to avoid screwing it up.

I realize that doesn’t fit the hopes of those who thought an Obama administration’s policies would be as different from the Bush administration’s as night and day, and Obama’s going to have to do and say some things to keep those people happy, but I suspect he can do that and still chart a wise course. To them, "continuity" is probably a cuss word. But it’s the wise course, and it will be respected abroad. More than that, it’s what will work.

As David Brooks wrote today, in a column headlined "Continuity We Can Believe In:"

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a
series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In
recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and
development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat
organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.

Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short
run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals
improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots
around the world.

He has developed a way of talking about
security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government
and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of
counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to
describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns….

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

Some of you might not be seeing the change you believe in. But I’m already seeing continuity I can believe in.

And here’s the change that we WILL see, and that will matter: I think Obama can sell this policies, and make them work, better than Bush did. He was a lousy salesman. As I wrote about the Surge when I first heard about it, it was the right strategy, but Bush was the wrong guy to have selling it.

Obama’s the right guy. This is going to be interesting, and I hope gratifying, to watch.

Obama and the old white guys

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Several times in the last couple of weeks, various commenters have noted — either with approval or dismay — that Barack Obama is opting for experience in his choice of advisers.

For a sample of what I mean, note this piece from the front of The New York Times‘ Week In Review section Sunday, "Change is Landing in Old Hands:"

AS he sought the presidency for the last two years, Barack Obama liked to say that “change doesn’t come from Washington — change comes to Washington.”

Nearly three weeks after his election, he is testing voters’ understanding of that assertion as he assembles a government whose early selections lean heavily on veterans of the political era he ran to supplant. He showed that in breathtaking fashion by turning to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, his bitter primary rival and the wife of the last Democratic president, for the post of secretary of state.

Mr. Obama will bring pieces of Chicago to the White House in the form of longtime advisers like Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod. But even after vowing to turn the page on the polarized politics of the baby boom generation, he’s made clear that service in the Beltway wars of the last 20 years is not only acceptable, but in some cases necessary for his purposes.

Of course, y’all know what I think — experience is a valuable asset. I may object to the Hillary Clinton appointment, but less because she doesn’t represent "change" than the fact that the particular job seems a bad match. I applaud his turning to other Clinton veterans, such as Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers.

Anyway, this discussion reminds me of something. Way back last year, I had lunch with someone from the John Edwards campaign after my "Edwards is a phony" column. She was a strikingly attractive young woman of apparently multiethnic background. At some point in our discussion I asked, "Why Edwards?" (Meaning, "…out of all the Democrats running for president?," not "…since he’s such a phony?")

I was really struck by her answer. She said she had thought about working for Obama, but took a look at all the old white guys around him, and thought she wouldn’t feel at home on that team. Yes, the observation seemed ridiculous in light of all the young folks of multiple backgrounds who had flocked to the Obama banner by that time, but I didn’t say so. Maybe at the start of the campaign, his staff had really looked that way to a young political professional. After all, Ted Sorenson was one of his more prominent early supporters, and surely HE is an Old White Guy? Or maybe she was just rationalizing.

Anyway, I knew Obama was smart, and he’s proving it by choosing smart, experienced people for his team. And not all of them are old, white guys.

Gee, I don’t even want to talk with Geithner…

16 Replies

Just got this e-mail:

Hi
there,

My name is Jen
Parsons, I’m with Ketchum PR.

I wanted to see if
you’re doing any profiles on Tim Geithner. We work with
Keith Bergelt, the CEO of Open Invention Network, and
he worked with Geithner in the early 90’s while they were in Tokyo. Keith can
offer some good insight into Geithner’s work style, career ambition,
etc.

Let me know if you’d
like to chat with Keith.

Thanks,

Jen

Now, that’s service for you. Unfortunately, I don’t even know what I’d ask Geithner himself if I were to have a few minutes of his time. For me, the broad, high-altitude overview Obama provided today regarding economic policy was way more detail than I need.

So no, I don’t need to talk to somebody who just used to work with Geithner.

When I receive a shotgun release like that, especially on Thanksgiving week — when we tend to be more shorthanded even than the skeleton crew we normally have, and I’m cranking as hard as I can with routine, boring tasks that you do NOT want to hear about, just getting the pages out, without even thinking about interviewing or writing, even about subjects I know something about, much less the new Treasury secretary, I find myself wondering whether people who send out releases like that have the slightest idea what’s going on out here in newspaperland. The answer comes quickly: Probably not.

Sorry about the length of that sentence. I didn’t have time to write short ones.

Thomas Smith and the pirates

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Among my e-mails today was one calling my attention to an interview (by someone I’m not familiar with, if you’ll forgive the dangling preposition) with Columbia’s Thomas Smith about the pirates. A sample:

TUSR: Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was stunned
by the pirates’ reach. I was taken aback by Mullen’s surprise—the reach
has been well-documented in all manner of media, even a lengthy feature
in National Geographic this year that somewhat romanticized the
pirates. So why is an admiral stunned?
SMITH: Admiral
Mullen was ‘stunned’ by the pirate attack taking place so far from the
coast, about 450 miles offshore. The attack in fact was a bit
surprising. It was bold, very risky for the attackers, and much farther
out into the so-called ‘blue water’ than previous attacks we’ve seen by
similar bands in recent history.

Now, I’ve since seen a few
bloggers and others criticizing the admiral for his remarks –
suggesting that no true fighting admiral would say such – and perhaps
‘stunned’ was a less-than-stellar word choice. But the admiral is a
professional Naval officer, not a politician. And so I say, it’s easy
for those who have never been to war or to sea—and have no frame of
reference for an appreciation of just how vast and unforgiving the sea
can be—to criticize.

And as long as I’m on the subject, there was a nice piece in the WSJ Saturday drawing some parallels to the Barbary Pirates. I sort of knew the outline of all of that, being a history major who sorta kinda concentrated on that period, but I learned at least one interesting fact from the piece I don’t remember having known before:

By the 1790s, the U.S. was depositing an astonishing 20% of its federal income into North African coffers…

We finally decided maybe it would be better to build a Navy, and deal with the problem. Trying to buy off the pirates just encouraged piracy — which sort of stands to reason, if you think about it.

Anyway, the piece further encouraged a notion I’ve been kicking around, which might turn into a column: The idea that the Somali pirates actually pose an opportunity to President Obama once he’s in office. It’s a chance to show the willingness to use force in the defense of international peace and security, with a ready-made multinational coalition to dramatically demonstrate his unBushness:

Of course, the world is a vastly more complicated place than it was two
centuries ago and America’s role in it, once peripheral, is now
preeminent. Still, in the post-9/11 period, America would be
ill-advised to act unilaterally against the pirates. The good news is:
It does not have to. In contrast to the refusal to unite with America
during the Barbary Wars, or more recently the Iraq War, the European
states today share America’s interest in restoring peace to the seas.
Moreover, they have expressed a willingness to cooperate with American
military measures against the Somali bandits. Unlike Washington and
Jefferson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama need not stand alone.

Colombian FTA editorial

2 Replies

Our Colombia Free Trade Agreement editorial today (which, as with the Joe Lieberman piece, you should be able to tell I wrote) was based in so many sources that I thought it would be nice to give you a version with links here. So here you go:

Congress should
pass Colombian
Free Trade pact

WHAT DO The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all have in common? They all agree with The State: All say Congress should pass the Colombian Free Trade Agreement.
“Pass the Pact,” says The Post. “Seal the deal,” says the L.A. Times. The Journal says the pact offers President-elect Barack Obama a “Lame Duck Opportunity” — tell Congress to agree to a deal with President Bush to link a Detroit bailout to passage of this and other free trade agreements before the end of the year: “U.S. business and the rest of the world would applaud…. President Bush could do the heavy lifting.”
Perhaps most impressive of all — it’s certainly caused some buzz in the blogosphere — is this opening sentence of the New York Times piece: “We don’t say it all that often, but President Bush is right: Congress should pass the Colombian free-trade agreement now.”
That puts The Times, uncharacteristically as it notes, on the opposite side of liberal Democrats in Congress — and in disagreement with Mr. Obama’s stated position. But as the broad consensus among editorial boards indicates, pretty much any one who looks at this issue who was not recently elected with the help of Big Labor sees the need to pass the pact.
Why? It’s common sense. Most Colombian goods already flow into the United States duty-free. This agreement would open Colombia to U.S. products, made by U.S. workers.
It also would, perhaps most importantly, solidify our relationship with a loyal ally in a region where we have too few friends. Not passing it would give the back of our hand to a country roughly surrounded by nations ruled by people who mean the United States ill.
It’s ironic that Democrats would oppose this agreement while Mr. Bush supports it. As The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote in a column that ran on our op-ed page in April: “For seven years, Democrats have rightfully complained that President Bush has gratuitously antagonized the world, exasperating our allies and eroding America’s standing and influence.
“But now the Democrats are doing the same thing on trade.”
So what’s the argument against the pact? Opponents say the Colombian government has been complicit in violence against union leaders in that country. Some point to recent indictments of top officials for colluding with right-wing paramilitaries who have terrorized unionists. But such indictments actually argue for the agreement, demonstrating how President Alvaro Uribe’s government has cracked down on such violence. Last year, violence against union members dropped below the rate for the general public.
Some, ironically echoing an argument used by John McCain in a different context, say the agreement should not pass this year because Sen. Obama was elected while opposing it and “elections have consequences.” But as we noted in endorsing Sen. McCain, “Few will cast their ballots on the basis of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement,” and indeed, some who disagreed with our endorsement took us to task for even bringing up a topic so irrelevant to their preference for Sen. Obama.
The president-elect, and congressional Democrats, are perfectly free to re-examine their positions on this issue. They should do so, and listen to the many independent voices that say they should pass this pact now.

Hillary at State: Bad call, Barack

36 Replies

You know the thing we talked about earlier in the week, the thing that David Broder and Tom Friedman and I all said was a bad idea?

Well, apparently it’s happened:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton
has decided to give up her Senate seat and accept the position of
secretary of state, making her the public face around the world for the
administration of the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential
nomination, two confidants said Friday….

That’s bad news for the simple fact that Barack Obama needs to be "the public face" of U.S. foreign policy, because he starts off with most of the world having such a great impression of him. Why squander that by putting Hillary Clinton between him and the world?

His secretary of state needs to be someone who is HIS agent and seen as no more than that, not a larger-than-life rival. The office of secretary of state is far too important to be anyone’s plum or concession prize.

This is Obama’s first significant mistake.

1st black AG (yawn!)? Is anyone still keeping score?

23 Replies

So we’re told Eric Holder would be another historic "first:"

WASHINGTON — Eric Holder, a former No.
2 Justice Department official, has been told that he can become the
nation’s first African-American attorney general, a person with
firsthand knowledge said Tuesday.

While Obama hasn’t formally
tapped Holder, one person with direct knowledge said "it’s his if he
wants it." This individual asked to remain anonymous because of the
sensitivity of the matter.

Beyond being a history-making
appointment, Holder would be faced with some of the nation’s most
divisive legal controversies, including the Bush administration
policies on torture, electronic eavesdropping, the extent of
presidential power and the imprisonment of terror suspects without
charges, trials or the right to challenge their detention….

Which makes me wonder: Now that everyone seems agreed that we just elected our first black president (my quibbles about the terminology aside), just how big a deal is it to have a black AG? Or whatever the job.

And at what point to we stop keeping track? When does it no longer excite comment? Or when does it get to be like baseball stats? I can hear my wife’s cousin Tim McCarver saying, "Joe, this is the first time we’ve seen a mustachioed AG nominee chosen by a left-handed president from Hawaii in the post-election season…"

Find a better job for Hillary

16 Replies

This advisory just came in:

{bc-broder-column advisory}<
{DAVID BRODER COLUMN}<
{(ADVISORY FOR BRODER CLIENTS: David Broder has written a column for} Wednesday publication on the potential selection of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Expect the column by noon Eastern.)<
{(For Broder clients only)}<
<
(c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Mr. Broder is reflecting the huge buzz inside the Beltway about appointing Sen. Hillary Clinton to State, which I think would be a mistake, for this reason:

Given the reaction his election has gained from around the world, Barack Obama’s best international ambassador is Barack Obama. His policies are more likely to gain acceptance among friends and foes because they are his policies. You put somebody as Bigger Than Life as his erstwhile opponent in the top job at State, and suddenly the State Department becomes the Hillary Department. Everyone, from the U.S. media to foreign potentates, would look at the actions of the State Department in terms of "What Hillary Clinton is doing," rather than what is being done in the name of Barack Obama.

I just can’t see her effacing herself enough not to get between Obama and the rest of the world — even if she wants to.

Sure, one doesn’t have to be a nonentity to be SecState — look at Colin Powell. But Gen. Powell was known as the Good Soldier, a man who serves something greater than himself. That’s not something I can see Hillary Clinton (or her husband; in that they are a matched pair) pulling off successfully.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem the right job for her. What would be the right job? You mean, aside from U.S. senator from New York, which is not too shabby in itself? Something special. Economy Czarina or some such. Something ad hoc, something geared specifically to her. Sure, she failed when she was given the health care thing, but that was a long time ago; I think her political skills have improved since then.

I don’t know; I just don’t see her as the right person for Secretary of State.

As for the other two who have stirred the most comment:

I don’t know whether Larry Summers is the best person to be SecTreas or not, but he certainly shouldn’t be given the job because of that Harvard nonsense. Whomever the president-elect chooses, he needs to make it clear he’s not kowtowing to the absurd prating of the sillier feminists. I don’t know whether boys are better than girls at math or not; I do know it’s offensive to this boy’s intelligence to say it just can’t be so, because I don’t want it to be so, which is what I heard from those who ran him out of Cambridge.
There seems to be a lot of bipartisan murmuring that Robert Gates should stay on at Defense. I don’t know whether he’s a great secretary of defense or just seems like one because he followed Rumsfeld, but I’ve always liked the guy. So it would be fine by me if he stayed. At the same time, the president needs to know he’s got his own person in that job, so I wouldn’t think it would be horrible if another highly qualified candidate were nominated. Gates sets the bar pretty high, though.

The Obama-McCain meeting

27 Replies

Not a lot to emerge from the president-elect’s meeting with John McCain (and Lindsey Graham and Rahm Emanuel) today, which is to be expected. Here’s the closest thing to substance I’ve seen, from their joint communique:

We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical
challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy
economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

Of those items, seems to me the greatest potential for collaboration would be on energy. (But I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

Here’s a scene-setter from the NYT politics blog:

Senator John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama are sitting
down together now and metaphorically smoking a peace pipe in their
first face-to-face session since the bruising campaign.

The two are meeting at Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters at a federal building in Chicago, where they just posed for the cameras.

The meeting space has a stagey look, in front of the kind of thick
royal blue curtain you see in an auditorium, not the usual
campaign-rigged blue backdrop. Flags are strewn throughout, with one
planted between the two principals, who are sitting in yellow,
Oval-Office-like chairs.

To their sides are their wingmen, Rahm Emanuel on Mr. Obama’s left
and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina on Mr. McCain’s right.

They’re all looking jolly (Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanual the jolliest), and we’ll soon get a read-out on the discussion.

The Obama team is hoping they can smooth any ruffled feathers and
build an alliance with the old John McCain — not the one whom the Obama
camp called “erratic” during the presidential campaign but the
self-styled “maverick” who worked across party lines for various causes
that Mr. Obama wants to advance — global warming, immigration, earmark
spending among them.

In the brief moment before the cameras, Mr. Obama said: “We’re going
to have a good conversation about how we can do some work together to
fix up the country, and also to offer thanks to Senator McCain for the
outstanding service he’s already rendered.”

Mr. McCain was asked whether he would help Mr. Obama with his administration.

“Obviously,” he said.

Those pesky reporters tried to shout out other queries, like about a
possible bail-out for the auto industry, but the pool report says they
were “shouted down by the pool sherpas,” and that “Mr. Obama finally
said with a smile, ‘You’re incorrigible.’”

The last in-person meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain took place more than a month ago, at the third and final presidential debate at Hofstra, remembered chiefly as the coming-out party for Joe the Plumber.

Updated | 2:12 p.m.: A joint statement was released from President-elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

“At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of
all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the
bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent
challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive
conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where
we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in
order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and
opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work
together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like
solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and
protecting our nation’s security.”

Beyond that, here are versions of the story from:

The Associated Press (on thestate.com)

The Chicago Tribune

The Wall Street Journal (really just an update of their story from this morning’s paper)

The New York Times

Hoping, audaciously

42 Replies

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
BACK IN JANUARY, I said — on video; you can view it on my blog — that this year’s presidential election presented the American people with a no-lose proposition.
It was the first time in my career when the two candidates we (and I) enthusiastically endorsed for their respective nominations actually made it onto the November ballot. So how could we lose?
Well, there’s one way — the guy we preferred between the two guys we liked didn’t win on Nov. 4. But now that the other guy has won (and did you ever really think he wouldn’t?), I’m putting that setback behind me and looking forward to what happens next, with Barack Obama as my president.
You could say I have no choice, but you’d be wrong. Unfortunately, we have before us a plethora of examples of how to have a perfectly rotten, stinking attitude when your preferred candidate loses, from the “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bush” bumper stickers that appeared on Republican cars before Bill Clinton was even inaugurated to all that nonsense we’ve heard for eight years from Democrats about how the election was “stolen” in 2000.
We always have the option of being mean, petty, poor losers. But not me. Call me audacious, but every day I see fresh cause to be hopeful:

First, there’s Barack Obama himself. Just as John McCain was the best conceivable Republican to unify the country, Sen. Obama offered himself as the one Democrat most likely to put the bitterness of the Clinton/Bush years behind us. As we wrote when we endorsed him in the S.C. primary, “for him, American unity — transcending party — is a core value in itself.” In a column at the time, I cited “his ambition to be a president for all of us — black and white, male and female, Democrat and Republican.” When a guy like that wins an election, nobody loses.
Sen. McCain’s gracious (and typical, for him) concession speech left his supporters no room for bitterness, as he wished “Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.”
Sen. Obama’s promise that same night, in his first flush of victory, “to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn.” He said, “I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.”
The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff. He’s been called a partisan attack dog, but he was defended against those who called him that by our own Sen. Lindsey Graham, John McCain’s close friend and ally. Yes, he ran the Democrats’ successful effort to take over Congress in 2006, but he did it by recruiting candidates who appealed to the political center — something his party’s more extreme elements haven’t forgiven him for. In an interview just before he was offered the job, Rep. Emanuel said, “The American people are unbelievably pragmatic. Have confidence in their pragmatism. It’s the operating philosophy of our country.” (The Associated Press says exit polls back that up: “This year 22 percent called themselves liberal, compared with 21 percent in 2004; 44 percent moderate, compared with 45 percent; and 34 percent conservative, same as four years ago.”)
The image of the Obamas visiting the Bushes at the White House a week after the election. No big deal, you say? It is after the way the current president has been demonized by many Democrats. The presidential election of 1800 proved the miracle of the American system — that power can change hands in a peaceful, civilized manner. That never gets old for me.
After days in which the more partisan types in the Senate debated just what to do to Joe Lieberman in light of his unpardonable “sin” of supporting Sen. McCain, the president-elect said that of course the senator from Connecticut should still be allowed to caucus with the Democrats.
The fact that on Monday, Sens. Obama and McCain will sit down at transition headquarters to chart ways to move forward together. “It’s well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government,” said an Obama spokeswoman Friday, adding that the two men “will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality.” They will be joined by Sen. Graham and Rep. Emanuel.

You’ll notice a certain theme in my points, and just in case I haven’t hit you over the head with it hard enough, I’ll say it again: I draw my hope from signs that this country is ready to move beyond the stupid, pointless, destructive polarization that has been thrust upon us by the two dominant political parties, their attendant Beltway interest groups, the blogosphere and the mindless yammering of 24/7 shouting-head cable TV “news.”
You might say that mere nonpartisanship — or bipartisanship, or post-partisanship (or my favorite, UnPartisanship) — is not enough by itself. That’s true. But without it, there’s no hope. Fortunately, I see plenty of cause to believe we’re about to see something new, and better.

Join me in hoping at thestate.com/bradsblog/.

This turbulent priest

40 Replies

A reader, Matthew Butler, sent me this e-mail today:

Obviously I’ve read the news (over the top) about the actions of Fr. Newman
in Greenville, what appears to be NOT over the top is the type of echo
chamber that St. Mary’s is. This is Fr. Longnecker’s, the pastoral associate
(and a married priest!), response to the election. I know we’re supposed to
‘speak truth to power’ and sometimes that involves harsh words, but really?

http://gkupsidedown.blogspot.com/2008/11/prez-herod.html

Just wanted to get your opinion on the matter.

Here’s the reply I sent:

St. Mary’s is
a very conservative parish. I’ve been to Mass there. I know we’re not supposed
to make judgments about people based on outward appearances, but I have to admit
that that was the most WASPish, Republican-looking, country-club congregation I
ever remember seeing in a Catholic church. It gave me a sense of dislocation.
Not that any of that should matter.

As for Fr.
Longnecker (sounds like a guy you’d want to have a beer with, just going by the
name)… in his position, as a person who admittedly doesn’t think much about
politics, I could see having his attitude.

I like Obama.
But to like anybody, there’s always something you have to overlook. With Obama,
the biggest thing I have to overlook is his position on abortion (plus the
mental gymnastics he goes through to justify his position constitutionally). If
I did the opposite, if I looked at Obama primarily through his position on
abortion, I would be horrified by him. And being horrified, I could see myself
using some pretty strong language to describe him (although I’d probably be more
likely to invoke Henry II than Herod). Obama does have a cold-blooded view of
the issue that is disturbing, considered in a vacuum.

Obviously,
Fr. Longnecker’s view of Obama is untempered by any consideration of him beyond
abortion.

Ironically, that exchange occurred while I was working on my Sunday column, which is all about POSITIVE thoughts I’m having about the president-elect…

Energy Party’s worst nightmare: gas at $1.87

38 Replies

You may think it’s the Republicans who were the big losers last week, but you’d be wrong. It was the Energy Party.

I realized how awful things were last night as I passed the gas stations on the way home. Hess was at $1.879.

Folks, that’s the same as less than 30 cents a gallon back when I started driving in 1968. Which is less than we were paying then. And when I think of the 1968 Buick LeSabre I used to drive (before I bought my Vega, which was really a mistake), and the mileage it got, it sends a chill to the heart.

Even I, Energy Party stalwart that I am, thought about stopping to buy some of that cheap gas, even though I had plenty in my tank.

So now everybody’s going to start buying SUVs again (which of course will create upward pressure on the gas price, but we never learn), and Obama’s going to make sure we don’t drill in Utah or wherever, and Congress wants to bail out Detroit (or perhaps we should say, it wants to bail out the UAW), whether it gets its act together or not.

As The New York Times noted on Election Day,

Just a few weeks ago, the Big Three American automakers convinced
Congress to give them $25 billion in cheap loans to retool their plants
to make fuel-efficient cars. Then, with nary a blush, the Ford Motor
Company introduced the new star in its line: the 2009, 3-ton,
16-miles-per-gallon, F-150 pickup.

Lord help us, because we won’t help ourselves.

Just to review, here’s what we should do, and are not going to do:

Impose a tax increase to get the pump price of gasoline back closer to $4, so the money stays in this country, and demand is curtailed, thereby driving down world prices, thereby putting more money in our national coffers for hydrogen research, developing electric cars, paying for the War on Terror, credit bailouts, a National Health Plan, and all the other stuff we can’t actually afford now.
Produce more of our oil domestically, whether it’s off-shore, in Utah, in Alaska, wherever — for as long as we continue to need the stuff, which will be for quite a while.
Put all the resources we can muster into an Apollo/Manhattan Project to make our need for oil a thing of the past ASAP. How will we pay for it? I just told you.
Use "stimulus" funds to build mass transit, nuclear plants and other critical energy infrastructure, rather than throwing the money to the winds the way we did with the earlier stimulus program.
Do all the other stuff in the Energy Party Manifesto.

There. I said my piece. Nobody’s listening, but at least somebody said it.

Change I can believe in: Cable TV reform

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Looking for some art to go with a David Broder piece in tomorrow’s paper, I ran across this pic of Obama with his economic advisers, which had the following cutline:

President-elect Obama, center, meets with his economic advisory team in Chicago, Friday, Nov. 7, 2008. Facing camera, from left are, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons. Back to camera, from left are, White House Chief of Staff-designate Rahm Emanual and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

… which prompted me to think, Time-Warner Chairman? How about asking him, while he’s at the table, when he’s going to start letting us pay for the cable channels we want, a la carte, instead of having to buy expensive "packages?" Now that’s some change I could believe in, and you wouldn’t even have to pass a new law. You wouldn’t even have to be president yet. Just jawbone him, the way JFK did the steel companies.

Yeah, I know it’s not as important as Detroit collapsing or any of that stuff, but as long as he’s sitting there, why not ask?

bradwarthen.com

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