Presidential Pillow Talk

In tonight's confrontation with Congress, Barack Obama will not be sweet-talking Republicans, who are locked into a long-term temper tantrum, but the Democrats and independents who embraced him last November and expected to live happily ever after.

Maureen Dowd, as usual, puts it in quasi-sexual terms, complaining that she "always knew he was going to be trouble...He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you were deflated and exasperated and time was running out, ensorcelled you again with some sparkly fairy dust."

This kind of couples-therapy talk masks a deeper problem for the President who moved into the White House on a wave of romantic promises about new politics and change, only to find the honeymoon cottage falling apart and that his hopes of working together to fix it were unrealistic.

Comparing Obama's dilemma with one-party autocracy in China, Thomas Friedman says, "Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying 'no.' Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions."

Two years ago, Dowd foreshadowed the current crisis by asking candidate Obama, "Do you worry that you might be putting yourself on a pedestal too much? Because people also want to see you mix it up a little.”

“When I get into a tussle,” he had answered, “I want it to be over something real, not something manufactured. If someone wants to get in an argument with me, let’s argue about how we’re going to fix the health care system...”

Tonight Obama will show us how well he can "mix it up a little" in the tussle of his presidency.

No Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

On the eve of our annual day of excess, we are all suffering from the heartburn of years of greed and over-consumption that a ton of antacids won't cure.

In today's Times, Tom Friedman catalogues the gluttons: "People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so."

In the traditional celebration of plenty, Americans will be forced to give some thought to how much is enough as an outgoing government keeps pouring money into who-knows-where and to what effect while the incoming crew chafes at the bit with "new thinking" from some of the same people who championed the old.

As Americans sit down to turkeys with all the trimmings in Norman Rockwell settings, they are not living in that 20th century world of bounty and won't be for the foreseeable future.

The President-Elect managed to reassure the stock markets into gains this week, but our government may have to provide more than $7.76 trillion to rescue the financial system after guaranteeing $306 billion to Citigroup--as much as half the value of everything produced in the nation last year.

That's a lot turkey, yams and pumpkin pie.

Can Obama Stop the Panic?

The Lame Duck has laid an egg on the economy, and nothing better can hatch until he gets out of the nest.

Tomorrow the President-in-Waiting-Who-Can't-Afford-to-Wait will announce his financial dream team and game plan as panic buttons are being pushed all over the world.

*On Meet the Press, Bush family Consiglere James Baker, who muscled W. into office in 2000, now suggests he vacate early by sitting down with Obama now "to see if there isn't something that they could do jointly, together, over the next 58 to 60 days that would help us make sure that the financial system is stabilized and secure," warning that "this thing is even, believe it or not, going to get worse...(S)itting down together and seeing if there's not one thing that they could come together on would do a lot to restore confidence and remove the anxiety and fear that's out there."

*Senior advisor David Axelrod says Obama "wants a plan big enough to deal with the large challenges we face. And I think there's a growing consensus across the spectrum among economists that we're going to have to do something big,"

*The International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist predicts "The worst is yet to come" in the universal liquidity crisis.

*The usually sunny Thomas Friedman quotes a Yale professor of international finance questioning whether "we are staring at a deep hole that the entire world could fall into” and, if so, declaring " we need a huge catalyst of confidence and capital to turn this thing around. Only the new president and his team, synchronizing with the world’s other big economies, can provide it.

“The biggest mistake Obama could make is thinking this problem is smaller than it is."

Tomorrow at midday, the President-Elect takes the stage to do what he can to stop the panic. By late afternoon, the stock market will have given us a first reading on how well he has managed to do it.

Iraq: Three-Dimensional Chess in the Dark

Our future in Iraq is being settled, but no one there or here knows all the details or approves of what they do know.

The status of forces agreement (SOFA) will establish principles for a continued US military presence in Iraq beyond the expiration of the UN mandate at the end of this year, but as a July deadline approaches, the end game is as murky and confused as the start of it all.

"We have reached an impasse," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said last weekend, "because when we opened these negotiations we did not realize that the US demands would so deeply affect Iraqi sovereignty and this is something we can never accept."

Back here, Congressman Bill Delahut, Chairman of a key House Subcommittee, is complaining that “Congress has received, to be polite, minimal information from the Bush administration on the agreement.”

Last summer Andrew Cordesman described Iraq as 'three-dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you." Now the shooting has subsided somewhat, but no one has turned the lights on.

One of the fascinating side shows is reflected in an OpEd in yesterday's New York Times: "With only perfunctory debate, the Bush administration is pressuring a divided Iraqi government to approve a security agreement that could haunt Washington’s relations with Baghdad for years to come.

"The 'strategic alliance' that President Bush is proposing eerily resembles, in spirit and in letter, a failed 1930 treaty between Britain and Iraq that prompted a nationalist eruption in Baghdad, a pro-Nazi military coup and a pogrom that foreshadowed the elimination of Baghdad’s ancient Jewish community."

This conclusion is based on the arguments of Ayad Allawi, the first prime minister after our occupation, backed by the CIA and now in exile agitating against al-Maliki with the help of very expensive Republican lobbyists in Washington

Today Thomas Friedman observes that the reconciliation process "has not reached a point where Iraq’s stability is self-sustaining. And Tuesday’s bombing in Baghdad, which killed more than 50 people at a bus stop in a Shiite neighborhood, only underscores that. The U.S. military is still needed as referee. It still is not clear that Iraq is a country that can be held together by anything other than an iron fist. It’s still not clear that its government is anything more than a collection of sectarian fiefs."

In fact, nothing about Iraq is clear other than it was huge blunder for the US to get in and it will be an unholy mess getting out.

Salad Dressing Secrets and Our Own

Sometimes American culture looks like one of those circus riders straddling two horses pulling in different directions.

Today’s equestrianism is about individuality. Under one foot is the report that a New York restaurateur is suing a former employee for theft of intellectual property by copying elements of her establishment from the décor to the menu.

Going in another direction is Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column titled “The Whole World Is Watching,” which says:

“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer--and each of us so much more transparent.”

There are echoes here of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where “everybody belongs to everybody else,” and you don’t have to be Ayn Rand to find some of the implications troubling, even while cheering on the kind of open society that people like Dick Cheney hate.

Chef Rebecca Charles will likely not have much luck with legal remedies for claims about appropriation of her recipe for Caesar Salad dressing and touches like little packets of oyster crackers at each place setting, but her sense of feeling violated is understandable.

We may not live in a Brave New World--yet--but it makes sense to be thinking about where all this transparency is taking us while we can still rein in the horses.