Obama

Some army planners are saying that Obama will keep between 30-50,000 troops in Iraq, perhaps even up to 70,000, even beyond 2011.  This is not a betrayal, as Obama promised to keep troops in Iraq during the election, a point often overlooked by worshipful progressives.  But for those who think that personnel does not indicate policy, think again.  read more »

In the outer cosmos of the blogosphere, the presidential election isn’t over.

In my earlier diary, Digby, Hegemony and the Policy-Personnel Debate, I wrote that:

Wednesday, Nate Silver weighed in with what purports to be a fairly comprehensive sorting of Obama's policy initiatives into their ideological positions, showing a huge overall tilt in the progressive direction. I think Nate's categorization is somewhat questionable, but I do think that the impression he has is one that is widely shared: Obama appears quite progressive to many who have supported him, and that is a major reason why they have felt little or no need to pressure him. Digby is correct in saying that there's misperception involved, but it's just not as simple as she indicates.

First off, Nate's general point that Obama's agenda is more liberal than centrist is certainly true.  read more »

The most important appointment decision Obama will make during the transition, bar none, is who becomes, or remains, Secretary of Defense. As I have noted in the past, the Department of Defense oversees the expenditure of 52% of all discretionary spending, rendering it literally impossible for any other cabinet Secretary to oversee as much federal money. Further, keeping Gates on would only worsen Democratic image problems on national security, as he would be the second consecutive non-Democratic Secretary of Defense nominated by a Democratic President. The message would be clear: even Democrats agree that Democrats can't run the military.

There is a debate about this inside the Obama transition team:

The speculation over Gates' tenure has been most intense inside the Obama transition team.

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I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the politics of the current bailout and transition.  The government is now going to lay out $7.2 trillion in lending to the financial system, which Congress ratified with the bailout vote.  And that TARP program is rumored to be enlarged to $1.2 trillion from its current $700 billion amount.  Citigroup is being bailed out with a remarkably awful deal for taxpayers, where the government takes a small percentage of the company in return for hundreds of billions of dollars.  read more »

I like this Generation O -- "O" as in Obama. I have to admit I'm a bit biased. Chris and I spawned one of its members -- 23-year-old Kevin in Tucson. Good job Kevin! We have another offspring, a 15-year-old pre-Gen O who will be 19 in 2012 and vows to vote for O for his second term.
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Right now, the rumors are that Larry Summers is the choice for the Treasury Secretary post.  As Dean Baker suggests, this would not be a good thing.

It would be a really bad start to his administration if President Obama picked a Treasury Secretary who shares a substantial part of the blame for the bubble economy and the financial crisis. It will not be easy to pick up the pieces and get the economy back on its feet, but we would be going in the wrong direction to put one of the people responsible for getting us in this mess in the top economic position in the Obama administration.

Summers was one of the key proponents of the banking deregulation of 1999 that led to the current financial crisis.  read more »

David's been doing excellent push-back against the "center-right nation" meme that's exploded post-election, just like 2006, but on steroids. While it's vitally important to keep up this fight, I'd like suggest opening up a second front--to wit, thinking about how to coopt all the building centrist narratives.  Doing so goes back to one of the most important 2004 post-election analyses, Chris's "Eureka! Or How To Break the Republican Majority Coalition", in which he distinguished a form of moderate that really didn't fit on the traditional liberal/conservative spectrum.  read more »

The day after Election Day is always a time for reflection (and coffee, Pepto, wheat toast, and whatever other concoctions cure a hangover). In my lifetime, none has ever been as nationally momentous as November 4, 2008.

For three obvious reasons, last night was an historic landmark - the election of the first African American president, the success of a campaign that was more grassroots than any past, and the very bold progressive mandate the country delivered thanks both to the sheer size of the victory and to the candidates making clear this was an ideological choice between Reagan-ism and Roosevelt-ism.  read more »

William Galston, one of the ideological leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council, takes election day today to write a piece in the New Republic insisting that a President Obama should ignore his own voters and abandon most of his big progressive campaign promises because America - no matter what happens on election day, no matter what the polls on issues say - will always be a center-right nation:  read more »

Mark Penn joins fellow corporate pollster Doug Schoen, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer and Jon Meacham as the latest member of the Punditburo to insist that no matter what happens on election day, America is a center-right nation, and therefore a President Obama must not govern as a progressive. Here's the excerpt from Penn's screed in the Financial Times:

The history of 1992 contains a clear warning that a centre-left coalition can fall apart quickly if the policies are seen as too far left.

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Wyoming voters have until Friday at 5 p.m. to cast absentee ballots in person at their designated county voting sites. All mailed absentee ballots must be received in your county clerk's office by 7 p.m. on the day of the Election to be counted. The rest of us will be voting on Nov. 4 from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Get out there and do your duty.

June Kronholz reported this today in the Wall Street Journal:

Almost 11 million voters already have cast ballots in the 2008 elections, and Democrats seem to have cast the majority of them, according to incomplete information compiled by George Mason University Professor Michael McDonald.

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This is the attitude of a large segment of Clintonites - people who saw idealism as a punchline, and the Democratic Party as a stepping stone to investment banks and seven-figure consulting contracts:

"The only people that go into government are either very young or very rich," Carville said.

There are two levels to this quote. First, is the gross economic elitism - the implication that making, say, $80,000 a year in a government job is only for kids who haven't yet learned that's a supposedly bad living, or for millionaires like Bob Rubin and James Carville who can afford to live on such supposedly low pay.

But there's also the deeper snipe at the concept of public service - an assertion that working in government and public service is only for the naive or those who have already made bank in the private sector.  read more »

This Photo (and one below) taken by Cheyenne's Tom Burdette while he waited to see Sen. Obama in Fort Collins, Colo.

As Glenn Greenwald points out , there's been a dramatic sea-change in the rules of effective political rhetoric. Glenn cites three examples over the course of one week's time--GOP Rep. Robin Hayes, VP nominee Sarah Palin, and GOP Rep. Michelle Bachmann--all attacking Democrats' patriotism, then denying it, turning tail and running away.

There's clearly something interesting -- and different -- happening here.  It's not that right-wing politicians are accusing liberals and Democrats of being unpatriotic, anti-American subversives.  There's nothing new about that.  To the contrary, that McCarthyite accusation has virtually been a central plank -- one could say the defining plank -- in the GOP platform for the last three decades, at least.

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