The Chutzpah of John Edwards

Emerging from the Democratic Party witness protection program, the former perpetual candidate is slouching toward redemption tonight for a discussion of last week's elections at Indiana University and next week to debate Karl Rove, his Republican counterpart in shamelessness, at an American Bankers Association meeting in San Francisco (paying them with taxpayer bailout money, no doubt).

There used to a timeline for public rehabilitation, but it has been erased, first by Rove's instant reincarnation from Bush's smear-master as a political pundit and now by John Edwards' popping up in public only three months after a weasel-worded admission of adultery for being caught red-handed by a tabloid.

If it were not for the presidential campaign, Edwards' attempt to regain political respectability might have started even sooner as the concept of shame disappears completely in national politics.

The next thing you know, we will see a convicted felon reelected to the Senate and a vice-presidential candidate who wrecked her party's campaign strutting and spouting off on network TV.

Michelle Obama's Transition

In the White House, she will be both a working wife and a stay-at-home mom, trying to give her daughters as normal a childhood as they can have living with the eyes of the world always on them.

Even their new pet won't have a dog's life. In a 1963 interview, JFK told me with bemusement, "We got more letters about the puppies born here than the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."

Michelle Obama has always been "a working mom," her friend Valerie Jarrett said on Meet the Press Sunday. "She knows how hard it is to manage being a mom, a spouse, have a professional job...Her first priority as she comes to Washington and moves into the White House are those two darling girls, making sure that they are OK, getting them in school, getting them comfortable. Her mom, Mary Robinson, is coming with them, and so she'll have her hands full."

Beyond that, according to Jarrett, "her interests will be work-life balance, volunteerism, military spouses. And she'll go from there. But having a seat at, at the table and being a co-president is not something that she's interested in doing."

In the light of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama's decision to stay out of policy-making will no doubt draw a lot of attention, even more than did leaving her job to spend full-time on her husband's campaign.

As she pursues her "work-life balance" in the White House, the new First Lady will need all her abundant equanimity to keep family life as private as possible. In yesterday's visit, she got some advice from Laura Bush, who managed to do it very well in a time of turmoil.

The Bailout as Bay of Pigs

It took JFK three months to stumble over the no-win Cuban invasion he inherited in 1961, but Barack Obama is in a deeper mess as he makes his first visit to the Oval Office more than two months before taking over.

The Bush Administration is fumbling the financial bailout in ways that make CIA planning for the Bay of Pigs look brilliant, and this time the new president won't have the option of pulling back and starting all over.

First results from takeovers of Fannie Mae and AIG show huge losses, reflecting a failure to stop the bleeding, and according to the Washington Post, "underscore the government's difficulty in intervening in private markets in a way that both protects taxpayers and ensures that the rescue efforts succeed...a cautionary tale at a time when Washington is debating whether to extend the federal umbrella to Detroit automakers and other beleaguered firms."

After interest rates on the original handouts proved too high to keep AIG from drowning in debt, the government agreed yesterday to offer a stronger lifeline with a new $152 billion loan on easier terms.

Fannie Mae executives are warning that their bailout funds "may prove insufficient" to allow the company to pay off loans or "continue to fulfill our mission of providing liquidity to the mortgage market at appropriate levels."

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News is suing under the Freedom of Information Act to force the Federal Reserve to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers and the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Even before he takes office, President Obama may find himself asking the question that plagued Casey Stengel when he took over the hapless New York Mets, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

Brief Reign of the Boomers

Another first in Barack Obama's presidency is change from the generation born when millions came back from World War II and began to beget--Baby Boomers, the first of whom are now eligible for early Social Security benefits.

For a noisy cohort, the Boomers produced only two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This year, they and the rest of us ended up with a choice of two men whose times of birth bracketed their own. For the best-educated, wealthiest generation in American history, this is a meager presidential output.

How so? The conventional wisdom about Boomer self-absorption doesn't explain everything. This is, after all, the generation of the 1960s' college idealists acting out passionate new ideas about sex, gender, race, war and politics.

They held the media spotlight briefly but never cohered into a political force. In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama disdains “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation--a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”

Did, after all that turmoil, Boomers terrify the Silent Majority into the Reagan Revolution and then retreat to fuel the "greed is good" decades that led to Wall Street bubbles and today's crippled economy?

That might, in part, explain the political transition from Clinton's slipperiness to the retro Contract With America and finally Bush II's Neo-Con radical hubris.

But in writing the Boomers' political obituary, there should be some nostalgic credit for rearing the Generation O children who comprised the under-30 demographic that helped put Obama into the White House.

Will their iPhone, text-messaging, blog-reading, Facebook idealism last longer and accomplish more? Stay tuned.

Lieberman Limbo Dance

In his two-step with the former Democrat turned Independent (by his own party's outraged voters) and, most recently, inseparable McCain sidekick and Obama basher, Harry Reid is showing all the resolution and skill that have marked his tenure as Senate Majority Leader.

"Joe Lieberman is not some right-wing nutcase," Reid said today. "Joe Lieberman is one of the most progressive people ever to come from the state of Connecticut."

He is also playing Reid like a cheap violin in the moves over stripping him of chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, as Democrats in and out of the Senate have been calling for the Majority Leader to do.

Apparently Lieberman is refusing to accept a less critical assignment and making eyes at Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a threat to switch allegiances once again.

Reid, who used to be a boxer, seems unable to recognize a feint when he sees one and call the bluff. Back here in Connecticut, voters have revised an old folk saying, "When you have Joe Lieberman for a friend, you don't need an enemy."

Obama: Balancing Heart and Mind

At his press conference Friday, the President-Elect said he was rereading Lincoln for "inspiration," but he may also want to take another look at David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest."

Like JFK, Barack Obama values brains, but Halberstam's book might inspire him to be wary of the hubris that can blindside academic brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior, as it did with Kennedy's overachievers who went on to bring down LBJ with their tunnel vision of the Vietnam war.

Obama has shown the self-awareness and empathy--some call it "emotional intelligence"--needed for leadership but, in overturning all the clichés about "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," the real test will come in creating and managing a government with all those qualities.

"The second most remarkable thing about his election," Nicholas Kristof writes, "is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual...

"Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse—a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance—doesn’t get very far either."

But, Kristof adds, "It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas."

The 1972 look back at Vietnam took its scathing "Best and Brightest" title from Kennedy's so-called "whiz kids," thinkers from industry and academia such as Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers, whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in the Vietnam quagmire.

(For his pains, a new report shows Halberstam was closely tracked by the FBI for two decades, another sign that too much thinking of any kind is suspect in American politics.)

Obama's Illinois predecessor, Adlai Stevenson, who lost the presidency twice half a century ago being labeled an unworldly "egghead," observed, “The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”

The President-Elect has cleared that hurdle and now faces the higher leap into governing with a winning balance of heart and mind.

Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader?

Obama passed on her as vice president but can still put Hillary Clinton on the team by backing her for Senate Majority Leader.

In that role, Harry Reid has been ineffectual in rallying Democrats to curtail Bush's excesses or even effectively articulate an opposition view. Now, with a Senate reshuffling that includes the stepping-down of Robert Byrd and the throwing-out of Joe Lieberman, "change" could be served by bringing Clinton to the forefront.

With a clear electoral mandate and wide margin in Congress, before reaching out to Republicans as he has promised to do, the President-Elect can solidify his own ranks by recruiting the faction of his own party he narrowly defeated to win the nomination.

By naming Rahm Emanuel chief of staff, Obama has shown he was no qualms about relying on former Clinton loyalists. Choosing the former First Lady as a legislative partner would be a logical next step.

During the primaries, there were insistent rumors that Reid himself was offering his position to Sen. Clinton as an inducement to concede the nomination. He denied them, but the idea now won't come as a shock.

Clinton's ascension would be a powerful metaphor for cracking the glass-ceiling with women in the leadership positions of both houses of Congress, and her passion on domestic issues would nicely compliment Joe Biden's strength on foreign policy as surrogates for the new Administration's views.

The efforts of both Clintons during the campaign and the logic of a Hillary run in 2012 as a natural heir to a successful Obama Administration are strong arguments against any worries about possible subversion.

In his reaching out for bipartisan consensus, the President-Elect could start with unifying his own party.

John Leonard

The writer-critic-editor who died today was a gifted man who never seemed to fit into categories. It started when he was a teenager and applied for a job as a Disneyland guide. "I failed the physical," he recalled. "I wasn't blond enough."

He went from being an "apostate" intern at William F. Buckley's National Review to editor of the New York Times Book Review, where he breathed life into a staid journal until 1970 when he devoted an entire issue to books against the war in Vietnam and lost his job for not being "centrist" enough.

From then on, he devoted himself to writing, in his words, "sorting the signals of an overheated publicity culture, manufacturing opinions instead of widgets" and earned a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle for seeing into the heart of every form of expression from serious literature to sitcoms.

In my working lifetime among writers, there were few I admired as much.

Walking the President-in-Waiting Walk

With all the demurrals about one president at a time, what Barack Obama said and didn't say today will be closely parsed by markets, publics and political leaders everywhere.

His appearance, flanked by a team of economic advisors, was meant to show a nervous world that he is on the case, ready to move on January 20th and as involved as he can be in the role of President-Elect.

"(A)s we monitor and address these immediate economic challenges," he said, "we will be moving forward in laying out a set of policies that will grow our middle class and strengthen our economy in the long term. We cannot afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, health care, education, and tax relief for middle-class families.

"My transition team will be working on each of these priorities in the weeks ahead, and I intend to reconvene this advisory board to discuss the best ideas for responding to these immediate problems."

But Obama made it clear he favors "a stimulus package passed, either before or after inauguration...sooner rather than later,” if not in the lame-duck Congressional session, as soon as he takes office, and he called for an extension of unemployment benefits.

In the minuet between now and then, the President-in-Waiting is deferring to the one in the White House but making it clear he is ready to take new steps on his own. A worried world clearly would like to see the dance speeded up.

Iraq End Game

The bargaining in Baghdad is getting serious as Iraqis pressure the Bush Administration for last-minute concessions on a status-of-forces agreement to sanction US presence beyond the end of the year.

But the American election and Bush's imminent departure have changed the game. Gone is the McCain mantra of "victory with honor," a prescription for open-ended American presence, and what's left is only haggling over details about the pace of troop withdrawal and how much control Iraqis will assume over security efforts in the meantime.

Iraqi leaders, while openly welcoming Barack Obama's timetable, are losing the luxury of factional jockeying in their own parliament and facing a timetable to resolve Shiite-Sunni differences about the future of their country.

The only questions left are when and how, not if, the loss of American lives and the expenditure of $10 billion a month finally come to an end.

"Faith Over Fear": The Movie

There has to be a Spike Lee script in this:

Ann Nixon Cooper, the 106-year-old woman Barack Obama invoked in his Tuesday night speech, is now a centenarian celebrity, giving interviews and repeating what she told CNN last month: "I ain't got time to die 'cause I've got to see a black president," now adding that it was a "victory of faith over fear."

The widow of an Atlanta dentist, Mrs. Cooper knew Martin Luther King Jr. as a boy and years later a Morehouse College student named Spike Lee, who hoped to become a filmmaker.

In his Grant Park speech, Obama cited her vote as symbolic of the meaning of his election:

"She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons--because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

"And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America--the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

"At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

"When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

"When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

"She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that 'We Shall Overcome.' Yes we can.

"A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

"And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change."

Now Mrs. Cooper herself has written the final scene for the movie. "I would be very proud," she says, "if I could just meet him and shake his hand."

Lights, camera, action.

Obama Mandate: Post-Partisanship

On Election Day, Barack Obama canceled a fireworks display for the Grant Park rally that night, a sign he wants to leave the long campaign behind and start governing, something the Bush-Cheney-Rove Administration neglected to do for eight years.

Governing, but how? Tuesday's victory margins clearly were a mandate to change the bitter two-year stalemate of tenuous Congressional control by Democrats and a stubborn, veto-wielding White House.

"Obama's ability," Dan Balz notes in the Washington Post, "to manage relationships with Democratic congressional leaders, with Republicans and with impatient liberal constituencies with agendas of their own will have a lasting impact on his presidency. Can he, for example, fulfill his promise to govern in a unifying and inclusive way yet also push an ambitious progressive agenda?"

That may be the wrong question. "Ambitious progressive agenda" still sees the American crisis through the left-right lens of eight years that led to abysmal approval ratings and voter revolt against Washington politics.

In the afterglow of his historic breakthrough, the President-Elect has an opportunity to test his consensus approach to governing by bringing the decimated Republican opposition into a process that goes beyond scoring political points for the next election cycle and attacks problems in some semblance of bipartisanship.

He has the chance to demonstrate the difference between consensus and caution by showing that leadership can go beyond "agendas" and begin to find solutions.

If that sounds naïve, so be it. Obama has rehearsed overcoming that charge in two tough years of campaigning. Let's see what he can do with it in the real world.

Transition and Tone

President-Elect Obama has little time to savor his historic victory and has to start addressing the challenges he stressed last night with a swift and sure transition from the paralyzed government now in place.

The names will be important, but decisiveness without delay would help lay to rest the doubts raised about his inexperience during the campaign and reassure an American public on the edge of panic about the economy.

Leon Panetta, the former White House chief of staff who has been advising his transition team, says, "You better damn well do the tough stuff up front, because if you think you can delay the tough decisions and tiptoe past the graveyard, you’re in for a lot of trouble. Make the decisions that involve pain and sacrifice up front.”

The rumors are that Obama will start by naming Rep. Rahm Emanuel, with experience in the Clinton White House as his chief of staff this week and will go on quickly to appoint future cabinet members.

In today's political climate, a new Treasury Secretary will be as critical as the choices for State and Defense, and whoever it is and the President-Elect will have to get involved in the financial crisis long before Obama raises his hand and takes the oath on January 20th.

Half-Baked Alaska

In that alternate reality Up North, Gov. Sarah Palin is back home with her new fame and wardrobe, while Ted Stevens seems to have won reelection to his Senate seat.

The careers of Alaska's two media stars have been intertwined since before Palin emerged and ran for the state house in 2006, and the conjunction will clearly continue.

Senate Republicans, anxious to escape the past and look to the future, would undoubtedly pressure the 84-year-old convicted felon to step aside to let Palin run for the seat in a special election early next year.

That would pose a slight problem for John McCain's running mate, who attained national stature without showing any knowledge whatsoever about substantive issues. As a senator, she would be a politician, to quote her convention speech, "with actual responsibilities" to know what's involved in proposed legislation and cast votes.

But her admirers at the National Review and Weekly Standard would be happy to supply tutelage, and it would be hard for Palin to resist the spotlight and remain frozen in Juneau.

As she told Rush Limbaugh, she is not bothered by the pesky attentions of the mainstream media: "Well, yeah, I guess that message is they do want me to sit down and shut up. But that's not going to happen. I care too much about this great country."

In his concession speech last night, McCain called Palin "an impressive new voice in our party for reform and the principles that have always been our greatest strength" and in Washington she would have much more occasion to wear the designer clothes that Republican contributors bought for her.

American Turning Point

"Yes we can!" changed from a defiant campaign mantra into a soft-spoken promise from the nation's new voice as President-Elect Barack Obama rallied Americans, not to celebrate his victory but join him in meeting "the challenges that tomorrow will bring...the greatest of our lifetime--two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century."

In his graceful concession, John McCain became again the admirable man he once was, congratulating Obama for "inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president" and wishing "Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president."

The sea of faces in Chicago's Grant Park said what Obama did not dwell on, that the face America now presents to the world will for the first time confirm the promises of our democracy.

Their joyful tears were a reminder of those shed by Vietnam war protesters, I among them, 40 years ago being tear-gassed in that place for exercising the right of free speech only a few months after Martin Luther King was killed for championing the right of African-Americans to vote in some of the states that helped Obama win the presidency today.

The irony in all this is that George W. Bush and his followers, who hate government, damaged it enough in eight years to make the country ready for a new generation and a new approach to using it wisely and well rather than trying to destroy it.

Tomorrow will be the time to start thinking about the challenges the President-Elect talked about tonight, but for the moment, savoring this historic turning point in American history is an emotional challenge in itself.

Climate change is coming to American politics, and it will take a while to adjust to a new environment in Washington and learn how to make the most of it.

Election Luddites, Unite!

The machines are breaking down in Virginia and (of course) Florida, leading to a cry of the heart against electronic gizmos and for a return to pieces of paper and thick pencils at the ballot box.

Digital democracy has a nice ring to it, but at what price and for how long until the nerds get it right? If we need technology, why not supermarket scanners to count the pieces of paper that human beings have marking for centuries? If the results look fishy, scan them again or count by hand.

As it is, we're in for a day of breakdowns, long lines and who-knows-what glitches in the counting, leading to paranoia on all sides. Is it worth it?

Voting and Waiting

The first time was 1948. I was 24 and had fought in a war, but the voting age was 21 then, and I cast my first ballot for Harry Truman, a centrist choice between Republican Thomas E. Dewey ("the little man on the wedding cake," Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice had dubbed him) and the liberal Henry Wallace, who had been Truman's vice president before being dumped from the ticket.

Clare Boothe Luce had pronounced Truman a "gone goose," but the man from Missouri ran a "Give 'em hell, Harry" campaign and won the White House after serving more than three years there in the wake of FDR's death in 1945.

All this ancient history comes back to mind today after my sixteenth vote for a president (more often for a loser than not, thanks to the Bushes) and recalls the range of emotions on Election Days for someone who believes politics really matters.

The two Eisenhower victories were days of resignation, even though I had been a volunteer speech writer for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. In the next decade, to my surprise, I learned to "like Ike" very much.

In the nail-biter between JFK and Nixon in 1960, I went to an afternoon movie to make the time pass but, even so, had to stay up all night to get the final result. It was worth it.

But in 1968, after working for Eugene McCarthy to try to end the war in Vietnam and being tear-gassed at the Democratic convention, I voted but refused to campaign for Hubert Humphrey and regretted my "purism" when Nixon won by less than one percent and went on to give us Watergate.

Since then, Election Days and Nights blur together except for 2000, and the less said and thought about that the better.

Today will be long and hard, but age has taught me to be patient, even in the face of an historic moment I never believed I would live to see. But, as in 1960, the waiting will be worth it.

Last Days of the Starbucks Life

On a day when Americans are keenly aware of economic hardships ahead, those symbols of Baby Boomer excess--Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, Ben and Jerry's--are giving voters free stuff, to promote their products, of course, but unintentionally taunting them with little luxuries they may soon not be able to afford.

Assuming a victory by Obama and his post-Boomer generation, David Brooks foresees "the irony...that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity."

After decades of self-indulgence, Americans are suddenly facing the fact that what looked like a perpetual free ride to prosperity has a toll bridge up ahead, and once the election euphoria wears off, the hints that Obama has been tossing off about shared sacrifice during the campaign will become a central reality of our new political life.

In setting priorities for recovery, the incoming government will have to make hard and unpopular decisions.

"In the next few years," Brooks writes about the new reality, "the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future."

When all the Election Night celebration is over, America is facing one hell of a morning-after.

No-Show on the Campaign Trail

At his final rallies, Barack Obama is gleefully telling crowds that Dick Cheney's endorsement this weekend of John McCain was well-earned. George W. Bush is offering no such target by staying completely out of sight, but he did rate a mention in Pennsylvania yesterday, albeit as an afterthought.

“I think," John McCain said, "that Tom Ridge--and President Bush--deserve some credit for the fact there’s not been another attack on the United States of America since 9/11.’

Aside from that, it's been all silence since McCain proclaimed "I am not President Bush' in the final debate.

The actual president, according to press secretary Dana Perino, is "pretty focused" on "getting this economy back in order" in seclusion at Camp David.

He will come out of hiding the weekend after next for a meeting of world leaders in Washington to discuss the global financial crisis but may have even less clout there than in the presidential campaign

His problem, according to a New York Times editorial, is "utter lack of credibility when it comes to the central question of how to regulate national and global financial markets to ensure that this disaster never happens again. Eight years and a huge financial crash later, and Mr. Bush is still extolling the corrective powers of unrestrained markets."

Bush's final days in power are making King Lear look like a party animal.

Palin's Pluses

As new polling shows her costing him more votes than she might win, John McCain's running mate is, in her own way, doing a number of services for the Republican Party and the nation as a whole.

For one, Sarah Palin is proving that gender doesn't count in bringing ignorance (pace Dan Quayle) and mean-spiritedness (shades of Spiro Agnew) to a national ticket as she promises a balanced budget after four years of a McCain Administration and keeps repeating blatant lies about Barack Obama's tax proposals. Feminists can rest easy now that she and Hillary Clinton have shown women to be the equals of men in both venality and statesmanship.

Perhaps even more valuable is Palin's demonstration, by her meteoric rise and downfall, that media exposure cuts both ways in politics as well as show business (i.e., Britney Spears and Paris Hilton). Her handlers have learned that in presidential politics, as Muhammad Ali said about the prize ring, you can run but you can't hide.

Palin's most important contribution may be yet to come. When the extremists who finessed McCain into choosing her for VP start pushing Palin for the top spot in 2012, traditional Republican may finally rise up and take back their party and restore responsible two-party politics to the national dialogue.

If and when that happens, Palin can go back to governing Alaska with a sense of accomplishment and a nifty new wardrobe.