Above: October 6th, 1981. The last time all current & former presidents met at the White House.
Read a good account of this encounter here.
It’s happening again today with President Bush, the President-Elect, & the surviving presidents having a White House lunch.
Read more about that here.
& this reminds me of one of my favorite Presidential jokes:
Q: Which 4 U.S. presidents aren’t buried on U.S. soil?
“How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.
Above: a look at the Bible President Abraham Lincoln used in 1861, for the 1st time he was sworn in as President.
Barack Obama plans to become the 1st president since Lincoln to use it at an inauguration. Details here.
Sorry, couldn’t resist the headline. If you only knew how many conversations I had with NewsChannel9 callers about “whether he’d swear in using the Koran.”
To which I always said, paraphrasing Colin Powell, “he wouldn’t use a Koran, he’d use a Bible - but so what if he did?”
From the New York Times Magazine, in a piece on Robert Gibbs, the new WH Press Secretary:
“Podium alums share a bipartisan kinship, signified by the ceremonial flak jacket that hangs in the closet of the press secretary’s West Wing office. It was placed there originally by Gerald Ford’s podium man, Ron Nessen. Outgoing press secretaries write notes of advice for their successors and leave them in one pocket. Every previous note remains there, neatly arranged and tied together in a ribbon. “You can’t see the jacket,” Perino told me when I visited her office a few days before Thanksgiving. It’s reserved for club members, apparently.”
The article also had this interesting nugget:
Above: The President-elect announcing his energy & environment team, yesterday. (note: Al Gore’s in the mix, too.)
Read more about the team here, & about the looming challenges they face here. Read a positive review of Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu (Obama’s pick for Energy Secretary) here.
Read skepticism over a complete energy policy makeover here.
Obama announced his Health & Human Services Secretary in Saturday’s radio address, which you can watch here.
Also, later this week: he’s expected to name Arne Duncan as Education Secretary (background here). Click here for a piece on why he’d be a good addition & here for a piece on why he wouldn’t.
& Colorado Senator Ken Salazar (oh-oh! another Senate seat open!) as Interior Secretary later this week; read more about that here.
On this, the anniversary of the release of ‘Gone with the Wind,’ Marc Ambinder points out the dearth of southerners in the incoming Obama cabinet.
“It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse… a lot worse.
There’s a lot of ways to read into Obama’s recent choices for his cabinet; Marc Ambinder tries to find some commonalities, including this:
Kinda sad - but kinda funny - post at the Washington Note, written by a person, according to Steve Clemons, “who really does deserve a very top spot in Obama Land but is sitting pensively waiting for a call while trying to pretend he/she is not:”
“…I wait in a state of suspended ambition. I too have the dreams featuring, in no apparent order, Vice President Elect Joe Biden, Secretary of State-designate Hilary Clinton and, yes, even the man himself, President-Elect Obama.
Sometimes in these dreams they offer me a job, and sometimes they say they can’t offer me a job because they can’t find my resume amidst the other 300,000 on www.change.gov. I wake in a cold sweat.
It’s common to give to a presidential campaign; it’s far less common to give to a presidential transition.
Today the Obama Transition team released its list of 1776 donors on its website, & they include a pair of local folks:
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush says there could be more decisions like the government’s dramatic rescue of Citigroup if other institutions need help.
Bush also says he consulted with President-elect Barack Obama on the Citigroup rescue. Bush says “There is close cooperation” between his administration and the Obama camp.
Referring to the Citigroup rescue, Bush said “We have made these kind of decisions in the past. We made one last night and if need be we will make these kind of decisions to safeguard our financial system in the future.”
He spoke outside the Treasury Department after consulting with Secretary Henry Paulson.
Read more about the Citigroup bailout here.
Well, it looks like after several days of waffling, Hillary Clinton has decided to accept President-Elect Obama’s offer to be Secretary of State:
Mrs. Clinton came to her decision after additional discussion with President-elect Barack Obama about the nature of her role and his plans for foreign policy, said one of the confidants, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the situation. Mr. Obama’s office told reporters Thursday that the nomination is “on track” but Clinton associates only confirmed Friday afternoon that she has decided.
The good news about this pick: it sends a great signal - & lesson - to world leaders who have rivals & factions & sects of their own. (see LBJ’s famous (& warning: salty) quote to understand the philosophy behind it)
She will be a good “face of the USA” around the world, there’s no question.
But in another respect, you should color me none-too-happy about this development.
Why?
I chose the picture above for a reason:
MSNBC reports this man is whom Obama will tap to become perhaps the most important cabinet positions of ‘em all.
…
Yeah, I didn’t know who he was either.
Read on to find out (somewhat) more about him.
Time Magazine’s Mark Thompson weighs the pros & cons of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary:
“Keeping Gates would make for a smoother transition amid two wars. (But that’s why the uniformed military leaders who are actually running the wars, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, don’t change when a new Administration takes over).
Keeping the Defense Secretary would continue his push to focus the military services on insurgencies of the type they’re facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than on the hypothetical conventional wars for which they prefer to plan — and for which they continue to order up costly weapons. (But continuity would also keep Pentagon spending, already at World War II levels, climbing into the stratosphere on autopilot.)
Above: the most recent offering from Change.gov.
I put ‘behind the scenes’ in quotes because you had better believe that this is not the full picture of what’s really going on behind the scenes.
Still: it’s nice to see the attempt at transparency.
Also from the blog: Obama addresses the Global Climate Summit earlier this week:
MSNBC runs through the early mistakes in the Clinton, Carter, & Kennedy administrations as lessons for Obama to learn. For Kennedy, it was the Bay of Pigs; for Carter, it was bringing in too many of his own people; for Clinton, it was pretty much everything.
Thanks go to my News Director, who found these on Hamilton County’s Election Commission site:
Nationwide 2008 turnout: Estimated at 62.5%, up from 60.3%
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We learn today that 240,000 jobs were lost in October; the national rate goes up from 6.1% to 6.5%.
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Illinois Congressman Rahm Emmanuel signs on as WH Chief of Staff. Read the statements from both Obama & Emanuel here.
Why Rahm? Marc Ambinder muses.
Hillary Clinton approves of the pick, House Minority Leader John Boehner does not.
The Emanuel pick signals the transition will be quick; read more about the overall plan here.
Obama plans to give his 1st news conference as president-elect; read more about what he’ll reveal today here.
Before that newser, he’ll hold a conference with his economic advisers; read more about that here.
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Charles Krauthammer says it was the economy:
“We have never had a full-fledged financial panic in the middle of a presidential campaign. Consider. If the S&P 500 were to close at the end of the year where it did on Election Day, it will have suffered this year its steepest drop since 1937. That is 71 years.
At the same time, the economy had suffered nine consecutive months of job losses. Considering the carnage to both capital and labor (which covers just about everybody), even a Ronald Reagan could not have survived. The fact that John McCain got 46 percent of the electorate when 75 percent said the country was going in the wrong direction is quite remarkable.”
Andrew Sullivan disagrees with Krauthammer’s premise.
He’s correct in that assessment, but I’d also give as much weight to the damaged Republican brand.
It’s my view that that the country did not swing more Democratic, as some left-leaning sites are saying. I would say this is a vote more against ideology & for pragmatism. This is a trend I’ve tracked ever since August 29th, 2005. & I believe Tuesday’s voters weren’t necessarily giving Democrats a big thumbs up - they were giving a thumbs-down to the ineffective policies of the party in power, which happened to be the Republicans.
Voters are hungry for results & had their fill of ideologues.
As I’ve said to many in the past 3 years, the successful politicians will be those who work to deliver results to their consituencies - no matter which party they belong to.
More thoughts throughout the day.
***(note: “e-day” = election day, “i-day” = inauguration day)
