All Posts Tagged With: "president-elect"

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These are also tough times for many Americans struggling in our sluggish economy. As we count the higher blessings of faith and family, we know that millions of Americans don’t have a job. Many more are struggling to pay the bills or stay in their homes. From students to seniors, the future seems uncertain.

That is why this season of giving should also be a time to renew a sense of common purpose and shared citizenship. Now, more than ever, we must rededicate ourselves to the notion that we share a common destiny as Americans - that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. Now, we must all do our part to serve one another; to seek new ideas and new innovation; and to start a new chapter for our great country.

The GOP is clammering about Obama’s cabinet selections:

“Leader Boehner obviously hopes and expects that the president-elect will keep his promise to include Republicans in his Cabinet,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner. “Obama has pledged to govern in a bipartisan way, and we have pledged to work with him when he does.”

“Choosing one or two token Republicans in lesser Cabinet positions won’t pass the smell test,” said Dan Bartlett, who served as communications director and counselor to the current President Bush. “Keeping Secretary Gates would be a huge signal and important governing move.”

I wonder. Could either Boehner or Bartlett point to how their party’s most recent White House administrations have done that? I had to go all the way back to Nixon to find a Democrat in a Republican president’s administration (unless you can point to a more recent example). President Bill Clinton appointed Republican William Cohen to be his defense secretary during his second term. What Democrats did George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan appoint to their Cabinets or White House staffs?

Obama has signaled that he may very well appoint Bush’s own defense secretary to continue in that role. He has also considered Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) for a role in his administration as well as former NATO commander Jim Jones for national security advisor.

Even so, grumbling within the right-wing blogosphere is that Obama’s choices aren’t Republican enough. Again I ask, how many Democrats did Dubya have in his Cabinet and White House staff? Why didn’t Boehner — or even the president’s own communications director Dan Bartlett — hold Bush to the same standard?

“43″ certainly was elected by much narrower margins than “44″ — in fact, he didn’t even have the popular vote in 2000. You would think if anyone should govern in a bipartisan way, it would be someone who was elected by the slimmest of margins among a bitterly divided electorate. But that didn’t happen, did it?

In yesterday’s Politico story about the scrutiny of Obama’s picks for his administration, one sentence in particularly really jumped out at me:

“Gates is not a sharply partisan figure.”

Okay… is that a bad thing? Is that why he’s not Republican enough to pass “the smell test”? Because he’s not a “sharply partisan” figure, does that disqualify him as a Republican or mean that Obama isn’t trying to bridge the partisan divide? Do we really want a sharply partisan figure? I thought one of the things about this election is that the American people wanted to move beyond the gridlock of the bitterly divided Washington and transcend such “sharply partisan” politics.

So far, in my opinion, Obama has done a better job than his predecessors of assembling pragmatic, centrist and arguably bipartisan team to help govern this nation through very difficult times. Based on some of the complaints in the left-wing blogosphere, Obama certainly hasn’t picked aggressive progressives that would satisfy the more left-wing branches of the Democratic Party — despite what fear-mongering you may hear from the radical right-wing bloggers. His economic team, which he is set to announce later this morning, is being pretty warmly greeted by Wall Street, which tells me that Obama can’t be too bad for business like the conservative pundits would have you believe.

This election, I believe the significant majority of the electorate made their choice clear, not only electing the candidate they felt best represented change, but also repudiating the governance of the dominant party for the last eight years by electing wider majorities in both the House and the Senate for the other party. Why, then, would we let members of that failed party’s leadership judge who’s best to serve in this new administration? We shouldn’t and Obama won’t.

I believe Obama is firmly committed to governing pragmatically, which means an administration filled with opposing viewpoints — whether it’s Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, pro-business or pro-worker, hawk or dove. There will be many voices led by one leader. It certainly will be a nice change.

President-elect Barack Obama today announced a bold initiative to save or create 2.5 million jobs in the next two years.

In his weekly address, President-elect Obama announced that he has directed his economic team to formulate an Economic Recovery Plan — a two-year, nationwide initiative that will strengthen our economy and put millions of Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing our schools, and securing our clean energy future.

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For more information, visit change.gov.

A recent speech to American Constitution Society offers a peek into the mind of the President-elect’s pick for Attorney General, Eric Holder:

“Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘War on Terror’ have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe. For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reports on Obama’s selection to head the Justice Department:

President-elect Obama has decided to tap Eric Holder as his attorney general, putting the veteran Washington lawyer in place to become the first African-American to head the Justice Department, according to two legal sources close to the presidential transition.

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A New York City native who graduated from Columbia University and Columbia Law School, Holder spent years as a federal prosecutor—a job in which he earned a reputation as tough and aggressive foe of public corruption. After serving in the pubic integrity section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and later a District of Columbia Superior Court judge, Holder was named by President Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. He became deputy attorney general in 1997 under Janet Reno and was viewed as a centrist on most law enforcement issues, though he has sharply criticized the secrecy and the expansive views of executive power advanced by the Bush Justice Department.

From change.gov:

For the first time, the weekly Democratic address has been released as a web video. It will also continue to air on the radio.

President-elect Obama plans to to publish these weekly updates through the Transition and then from the White House.

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Josh Marshall has uncovered the president-elect’s radical agenda:

As you may know the Obama’s transition has now set up change.gov as the new transition website. And as TPM Reader SB points out there’s already signs of the radicalism McCain and Palin warned the country about.

I’ve clipped out this section of their organization chart of the US government, which you can find linked on this page.

And as you can see, not only has the president been demoted to a position under the constitution. But the vice-president (as shown by the red arrow) has had his own fourth branch revoked and been reassigned to the executive branch …

From Obama’s speech last night:

… our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.