Here’s a Christmas wish list of stocking stuffers for the Obama transition team to consider. The big-ticket expenses, difficult decisions and intractable problems are one thing. Fixing the economic situation may be beyond anybody’s immediate reach. Undoing some of the damage the Bush Administration did abroad will take a while and there is going to be some suffering along the way.
But I think there are some small things to do in the early months of the Obama Administration which won’t cost much of anything but could return important benefits to the nation and the world. These are largely things that the new Administration can do on its own, without coordinating with Congress.
1. Quietly tell the Bush Administration that executive orders issued in the next two months will be immediately countermanded when Obama takes office unless those orders are mutually agreed upon (to deal with some crisis or immediate problem that arises during the transition period). Bill Clinton established a bad precedent with his misuse of departing executive orders: Obama needs to make it clear behind the scenes that he won’t be bound by similar attempts to lock in policies.
2. Thoroughly revive Freedom of Information Act commitments across the entire executive branch. Extensively declassify and release records from the last eight years. Hold Truth and Reconciliation style hearings on torture, extraordinary rendition and other Bush Administration security policies where the goal is not prosecution but just getting the record straight. Close Gitmo and any other secret detention facilities; prosecute any detainees in U.S. civilian courts if there is a reasonable case to be brought, release the rest.
3. Formally reject some of the claims about executive power made by the Bush Administration and reinforce this rejection at every possible legal and political juncture.
4. Strongly recommit to the principle of non-political hiring below the top level of political appointees throughout the executive branch. Issue strong directives to reinforce this commitment and ride herd on appointees to ensure that they live up to this commitment.
5. Make clear public demonstrations of a commitment to consultative process in which the views of constructive skeptics and critics will be sought as a part of that process. Show Americans what this looks like: model a new kind of political culture, a new kind of public sphere.
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One more stocking stuffer, as long as I’m at it. Harry Reid should treat Joe Lieberman like he’s a radioactive leper. There are going to be at least four and maybe more Republican senators who will vote for many reasonable Democratic legislative packages out of fear for their own seats. Even short of 60, they don’t need Lieberman for anything. I don’t say this just because of Lieberman’s political history of the last two years or so, either. My wife can tell you that I have hated that guy ever since he beat Lowell Weicker, who was a terrific political leader that deserved many more years in office. Lieberman’s perpetual culture war whining has always been loathsome. He is the quintessence of everything that the American majority rejected yesterday.
Also: Please don’t make Rahm Emanuel the Chief of Staff. I appreciate the appeal of an enforcer type who knows where the bodies are buried, but I also think we’ve had too many of those kinds of characters controlling the access gates to the Presidency in the last two decades.
In the FT on Oct 30, “Barack Obama has the largest and most disciplined presidential transition team anyone can recall. Headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s White House, it started work well before the financial meltdown hit in September but has been swamped by its implications ever since.” …
“‘The level of detail that the Obama transition team is getting into is extraordinary – they are leaving no stone unturned,’ said a senior former Clinton administration official who has been consulted. ‘I have been getting calls that you’d expect in previous transitions to get maybe in December or never at all.'”
Expect “no leaks, no drama” to be the watchword for a while.
Yeah. Which is good. The discipline inside Obama’s campaign and now I expect Administration has been just terrific. One aspect of that which I think has not gotten that much attention is just the fiscal discipline of the campaign. They had enough money to spend like drunken sailors, but the salaries, rents and so on that they’ve paid out have been very tightly controlled.
I agree with your list, but I have less than zero faith that the executive will yield any power accumulated by his predecessor. Instead, he’ll simply claim to use it ‘better.’ Politics remains primarily a contest about the accumulation of power.
This is my chief anxiety. But I give Obama a reasonable chance to do this to a meaningful extent, whereas I thought there was absolutely zero chance that Hillary Clinton would have.
You know, even after your brief explanation, I still absolutely do not get Lieberman hate. Seriously, Ned Lamont and his supporters acted as though he was running for Senator from Adhamiya rather than Connecticut. And then when I read people who seem reasonable center-left folks (e.g. you), whenever it gets to Lieberman, there’s a level of implacable hatred that leaves me scratching my head. I mean, he’s the only person in American politics I can think of that inspires phrases like, “Jew Liberman (D-Israel).”
For me, beyond beating Weicker, who I really admired, it goes back to engaging the debate over children’s media and coming across Lieberman as easily the most unctuous, manipulative, and often assertively ignorant culture-war crusader trying to censor or regulate various mass media. It wasn’t so much his positions as his approach, his style, his manner–full of contempt for any other possible position (indeed, believing that there were no other possible positions), smarmy, condescending, grandstanding. I thought he perfectly illustrated the principle that in cultural war, some ostensibly left-liberal positions collapse perfectly into conservative ones (as in, say, the odd alliances between evangelical activists and feminists on anti-porn legislation in the late 1980s). So the Iraq War position wasn’t a particular cause of my dislike for Lieberman: it just added a few new logs to the fire. And really, it’s first not his actual political positions but his style of pursuing them, which I have always found to be a toxic combination of dishonesty and condescension.
I am very glad that Obama won, and I am very glad that the Democrats have increased their majorities in the House and Senate. And I am impressed by the way in which the Obama campaign was run. There is much to admire.
And I don’t diminish the ability of intellectual power to compensate for and even overcome a lack of experience, but I worry about Obama’s personal strength. I saw him talk once about his plans for national health insurance. He promised to get the drug companies, insurance companies, and others together around the table. He said that he himself would have the tallest chair because he was president, but then all parties would start negotiating changes to the healthcare system. Either he was just kidding around, or speaking metaphorically, or perhaps he was still thinking through the problem, or he was just naive. But none of those could be true. It could be that he was wishing.
And I think that is why Rahm Emanuel’s name comes up. Perhaps Obama is compensating for his softness, his aversion to confrontation, his reluctance to use power for good, his unwillingness to tell everybody how this cow is gonna eat that cabbage.
LBJ used to say, “Come let us reason together,” as if he and his opponents would work things out in a spirit of good will and compromise. But that, as you historians know better than those of us who lived through those times, LBJ meant nothing of the sort. Like Evolution by Natural Selection, LBJ was relentless, merciless, amoral, and gave no second chances. But unlike Evolution he was not mindless. He knew exactly what he wanted and he was gonna get it.
If Obama had more LBJ in him instead of Hubert Humphrey, I would feel much better.
Well, we’ll see. I’m sure that’s at least some of the logic of the pick. I just hope Obama stays savvy enough to manage Emanuel rather than the other way around. But yes, every conciliatory executive also needs a Right-Hand Bastard of some kind or another.
I remember Weicker well, and I liked him. I liked what he said, but of course he was in no position to do anything about it. But now it seems to me that the reason I liked him so much was that he was one of the few Republicans of that time who seemed reasonable. I was glad to hear him because he was so different from his buddies. But later, after he left public service, I would from time to time hear him speak out on some issue or another and I found that I disagreed with him more often.
Sure. But even when I disagreed with him, I found I could trust in his process of reasoning, that there was something honest going on in his thinking, something persuadable and changeable. You never get any sense from Lieberman that he’s thoughtful in any way about any of the things he makes a lot of noise about, that he even pauses to consider other positions.
Don’t get me wrong, I am no Lieberman fan. As my brother says, “If it were not for dislike, I wouldn’t like Lieberman at all.”
I don’t have much prior history, but it looked to me like Lieberman got knocked a bit off his neurochemical kilter by the VP run. He???? showing some of the classic signs of ptsd: inflexibility, narrowed attention, stereotyped thinking, hypervigilance, apocalyptic worldview. Then again, some people age this way. He may be straining for legacy. Anyway I agree he’s toxic at this point.
However, Obama is going to need to deal with a lot of toxic people as if they’re worthy interlocutors if he wants to change the domestic political and international climate left by Bush. And we’re gonna need to be patient with him while he works through that.
“Perhaps Obama is compensating for his softness”
What softness? In two years he’s assembled an organization that has taken on the top two political machines in the country and beaten them both decisively. I don’t think he’s going to tell you how tough he is, I think people who stand in his way are going to wonder what happened.
Obama’s ability to organize and manage a campaign is no measure of his mental toughness. I acknowledged that he ran an excellent campaign. But his ability to use his oratorical skills to persuade people to do his bidding does not carry forward into establishing national health insurance.
Now that he is in power, Obama will have to deal with people who are opposed to him and his ideas. Majorities in the House and Senate depend on the mental toughness of the leaders of those chambers as much as the headcount. Obama will have no ability to threaten, credibly, the insurance companies and the drug companies. There will be an organized political opposition and he will have to deal with it, and the leaders of the healthcare industry’s components have their own ideas about NHI. The only way that Obama will get NHI in his first term is if the captains of the health industry get to write the bill.
No one wants NHI more than the health insurance industry provided they can set the rules. Obama already anticipated this problem, and the evidence is in the way he shaped the plan. He keeps the health insurance industry in control. The stage is set for the passing of an NHI plan that favors insurance and drug companies, that can be declared a victory politically, and that rolls over the People like Medicare Part D has done. LBJ passed civil rights and voting rights acts when there was rioting in the streets, when lynching and bombing were constant threats. And of course people say that his motives were venal, and perhaps they were. But what he did took great toughness. I look at LBJ and I look at BHO and I see a great difference in mental toughness. And, almost as a sidelight, LBJ passed Medicare and Medicaid, still very effective single-payer national health insurance systems. Their problems are not inherent but are the consequence of political tampering since LBJ created them. Medicare Parts A and B are LBJ’s when he was able to do the right thing. Part D is the child of the insurance and the drug industries, when they were able to do the wrong thing.
It is one thing to lead those who want to follow and another to lead those who themselves want to be the leader.
I think it’s a misperception to attribute Obama’s campaign success to oratorical skills. I’ll be honest: I think he’s only a fair-to-middling public speaker. He seems to be a really talented orator because he’s surrounded by weak-to-poor speakers in contemporary American politics.
What I think garnered him his reputation for speaking is less how he delivers his speeches and more some of their content–that he was, from his very first prominent appearance in 2004, strikingly trying to talk about more than just a few policy positions, and more than just some poll-driven talking points.
But this campaign is evidence of his mental toughnes, I think. First, it takes enormous emotional and intellectual discipline to maintain the kind of profile that he did in the debates with McCain. On one side, he could have easily fallen into a tit-for-tat escalation. On the other side, he could have looked like Mike Dukakis, a kind of policy-wonk robot. He did neither: he remained human, affable, engaged while also refusing, very performatively, to get down in the mudpit.
It’s not just his direct performances. One thing that is just not getting enough attention is that his campaign, for all of its $$$$$, was intensely frugal–they were very careful with salaries, perks, rentals, getting maximum value for their dollar. That’s obviously due to having the right management, but it’s also evidence for discipline and toughness from Obama down to his local managers. That’s leadership.
I think Obama has shown a lot of signs that he knows where the “give” in various systems will be and where it won’t, and where he’ll have to hit hard at entrenched opponents and not. The question for me is not whether he knows how to do that, but where he’ll choose to do that first. Because you probably only get a couple of opportunities in a single term to really carry out systematic change in some important national system or structure.
You say potato, I say potato.