As someone posted over at OpenLeft earlier today. The Republicans listen to their base too much, the Democrats don’t listen to their base at all.

bmaz,
I can’t disagree, but since he won’t even be sworn in for another 60 days, do you think we might be just a tad premature in this judgment?

Obama has demonstrated a good sense of strategic thinking. I’d bet that he has a 2 year plan (to get through the next Congress), a 4 year plan (to be ready to run for a second term in 2012), and a six year plan (to maintain Congressional support for the remainder of his term).

Here at FDL, we’ve made the same mistakes as most of Obama’s adversaries: we tend to think in terms of tactics, without a long-range strategy; He tends to think in terms of the whole “game.” Remember, Obama used to be a basketball player. He got to learn there that very few games are won in the first quarter: You’ve got to play the whole game to win. Obama’s thinking about the whole game, I’ll bet.

In fact, a presidential term is potentially a lot like a basketball game, with 2 year “quarters”.

Think about it.

Bob in HI

I think that there has been consistent group bias from almost everyone along the political spectrum in viewing the actions of the primary actors in the named political parties. In reality, the parties have morphed into very different animals from their conventional mission and values. Progressives and independents are the de facto opposition party, and it would behoove them to create a formal organization and party apparatus.

I wrote about what I believe is the actual parties membership, missions, values, constituencies and leaders. When viewed through this lens, the actions and decisions of the major actors become predictable and consistent.

Reaction and response to further develop this notion would be welcome.

Resumes don’t govern. If the laws that pass and executive orders that are made and the foreign policy that is conducted in an Obama administration turn out good then I don’t care if he’s got Torquemada and/or Dick Cheney on his team.

I think at worst you can chalk up Holder’s problems to the amorality of working at a corporate firm (the Rich thing is Bill Clinton’s fault, full stop). Lieberman is the beneficiary of the very unity message from Obama that Lieberman called naive. That’s just dumb luck (and the dumb Senate culture). FISA was a done deal the moment that Harry Reid picked the Intelligence bill as the controlling bill and not the Judiciary bill. Obama didn’t cover himself in glory by using the almost meaningless certification provision in the final bill as an out but the provision is actually in the bill. Rahm is Rahm. Who do you want as Chief of Staff? Mac McLarty? The universe of people with Rahm’s experience in the White House and Congress who are long time friends of Obama is…Rahm.

I’m all for accountability but the Obama government hasn’t DONE anything yet. I think Obama deserves the benefit of the doubt on all on his personnel choices. I’m not sure why any political leaders would want to work with people who are plinking them with arrows before they’ve even taken office. Good faith has to have some component of resiliency or it’s not good faith at all. I just think this sentiment’s in this post are too brittle, too black and white. I don’t think there is or will be enough information out there to make ANY judgement on the Obama administration until March ‘09 at the earliest. Rome wasn’t built in a day and a lot of the people who built it were assholes. Let’s wait until the team takes the field and plays before we kill Obama for assembling this roster.

bmaz, I have not yet given up hope on your Clinton to State? Is Mid-East Peace Back On The Table?

In that scenario JoLie’s chair of the Homeland Security Governmental Affairs Committee may depend on him carrying a lot of water about the two-state solution.

Let’s not forget that the Democratic nominee for President won with 53% of the vote.

Putting your shrill polemic to the side for a moment, I’m wondering when the left (card-carrying member here) is going to put itself in a position where it can no longer be ignored by the Democratic leadership.

A poke in the eye with a pointed stick…

I got an early personal experience with the short arm. When I went to the Obama booth at Netroots Nation to complain about Obama’s switch on FISA, I was told in very snotty terms: What’s your alternative. Netroots Nation! and she treated me like that. I got the picture back then & almost all evidence since then has confirmed it.

I left this comment over at Tbogg’s place:

“Bags has a fascinating photo and post on Lieberman’s future existence within the democratic party, the conclusion being that Obama pwned Lieberman.

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/20…..f-war.html

And commenter thirdeye pushpin points out: “Joe’s seeming slap on the wrist was his dismissal from the committe that will be creating legialation [sic] on global warming.

In Obama’s administration which committe will get more progressive focus. They removed Joe not from where the action was, but from where it will be.”

“The Art of War,” indeed. I understand the urge for revenge, retribution, whatever, but I prefer to take the long view and wait for Obama’s administration to actually get sworn in before passing judgement.

(sits back, waits for flaming)

I have been thinking along the lines that puravida put out above, that perhaps Lieberman is “under my thumb” AFA Obama is concerned. Maybe the “big” committee turns out to be the “small” one, so he is sidelined but can’t see it yet. Maybe they have something in writing that holds Lieberman to certain voting behaviors.

There seem to be an array of views on Holder. I’ll have to wait to see what he does. So far, what I have heard him say sounds good to me.

“if elected I refuse to serve”!

WT Sherman

Obama’s lobbying for Joe Lieberman to keep his committee chairs is worrying. Sure, Joe hasn’t lifted a finger to inquire into Homeland Security’s operating incompetence, its wasting of public funds and invading of the public’s privacy. Joe won’t do that now, except to jam a stick into Obama’s bicycle spokes when he’s racing downhill. So, too, is the fantasy-schmantasy that this support will keep Joe’s nose or his money inside the Democratic tent. Washingtonians probably snicker that it will keep his nether end inside it. My concern is that they like it for reasons we’ll never know about.

Of more concern is what that support says about Obama. I think it illustrates his principal political tactic: take away the enemy’s battlefield. He will make peace so that his opponents have nothing to hit, no platforms from which to amass and launch campaigns against him. It takes away false issues and avoids too thinly dispersing his own forces. I don’t think that style reflects a lack of courage; just the opposite. As the Canadians already knew, and as our generals in Iraq now know, peacekeeping is dangerous as hell.

The cost of that style is that it cedes much of the political ground to Obama’s opponents. He may have campaigned on Change You Can Believe In. He’ll govern based on Change He Believes In. Which is not much. He he will carefully pick and choose his ground. Unlike Bush and Cheney, he understands that power has limits and that restraint is sometimes more powerful than overt force.

Obama is not a Roman senator bemoaning the loss of the Republic. He’s a realist. He’ll work with imperial tools, employ the Visigoths as generals and troops if need be and he has no better choices. Unlike Bush, he accepts that good and evil are linked, that a quixotic attempt to eradicate evil will take good with it, a home truth Iraqi civilians know too well.

All that would make Obama conservative, with a small “c”, an endangered species since Gingrich, Rove, DeLay and Cheney came to town. His Change will be an absence of Bush’s worst excesses, a good thing, but it will prohibit undoing many of them.

Quite a lot of tranition nomination vetting to do, still. Barack Obama has to think about the sequel to exSCSI chair’s legacy in the intell community; link to AGoodman interview of Ratner and some other folks.

On the Fisa problem, I was referencing some of that while reading LauraR’s rhetorical question in a recent article she penned concerning wiretapping in IT, she asked whether all IT telephones are recorded for posterity, as she mentioned some international conversations introduced at evidence, with one interlocutor being in IT, the other in FR; I was going to write her that, yes, FranceTelecom purchased TelecomItaly in a mismanagement scandal some years ago.

I am glad Barack Obama is showing a predilection for some spice in nominees, look for the restaurant with the decal in the plateglass window: ‘Cooked without msg’.

BO says USA dont torcha. And Leahy kibbitzes the remark, that US courts are not going to pursue people who Did torcha.

On the environment, BO made a video for presentation to governors yesterday, averring it is better to inject coal burning fumes under the earth than to let smokestack emissions continue, and to implement this soon is important. I wonder who will oversee that; the article only stenographs without suggesting precisely Who.

In May 2005 in his first year of service in the Senate, BO made a pretty urgent speech about watchdogging the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. It adds in retrospect a sense of what portion of the global international product the nation he will serve as leader represents. Got that link from wayback as there seemed to be some access problem with the exSenator’s website, perhaps momentary.

I’m late to the party here, and it looks like it’s been a rock-em, sock-em thread!

Back in the day, I lived in a housing co-op that had been the original off-campus home of the school football team, before they got a dorm under the stands of the new football stadium. The provider of the home – a humongous mansion – was Georgia Seagle, and after the football team moved out, she created the trust that made the place a housing co-op for 55 guys (the guys-only clause was in the by-laws.)

Anyway, by the time I walked in off the street as a sophomore who had escaped dorm life, Georgia Seagle Hall was full of Vietnam Vets, a Vietnamese refugee, two guys from Nigeria, Ramon and two other Latinos, two brothers who were working as managers at a Piggly-Wiggly, black guys, white guys, guys with cars, guys with nothing, and a group of audiophiles.

Breakfast was cooked to order by Willie Mae, dinner was at 6:30 every night, and if you left her a note the evening before, she’d fix your favorite bagged lunch, too. We liked Willie Mae so much, she was in all of our house pictures, right in the front middle.

The Chief Justice of the house was the guy who had been there the longest – Butler had been there 7 years when I arrived, which was amazing, because you had to be an enrolled student to live there. If there was a dispute, both sides aired it out in front of him, and then he decided. There were no appeals, but he would declare mis-trials if new evidence were discovered

The lounge of this house was a small theater with rows of fold-down seats, originally the team’s film room – now it had one television up on a shelf. Channel selection was done by majority vote.

Not all the rooms in the house were the same size. In fact, there was a great disparity between them – so much so, that the succession of rooms, from small doubles (like the one I shared) to cavernous singles, was closely watched according to seniority. I saw some amazing deals go down on room-jockeying.

Each evening, I would go hang-out with the audiophiles; we all enjoyed a smoke after dinner. A couple of the audiophiles had been there long enough that their rooms not only contained some of the finest amps, tapes, platters, and speakers ever known, but they also had aquariums, coffee tables, couches for 8, small refrigerators and air conditioners, too.

We’d fire-up the music and settle-in to solving the world’s problems – problems like ’Were Johnny Winter’s eyes really pink?’ and ’Should the French loss at Dien Bien Phu in ’54 have told us that we were destined to lose in Vietnam, too?’

We mostly had very spirited discussions on meaningful, emotion-laden topics, just like in bmaz’s thread here, usually over the course of months. People’s positions would morph over time, as a preponderance of information and persuasion moved the discussion along, and on most of the issues we worked our way through to clear understandings: Johnny Winter’s eyes are pink, and we fucked-up in Vietnam by not learning from the French.

In order to speak-up in opposition to the point being made by somone else, we had only one rule – the Party Rule we called it – if you spoke-up, you had to propose a supportable alternative to the other person’s point. You couldn’t just say, ’That’ll never work!’ or ’Fuck no, they’re not pink!’

You had to pony-up something tangible if you wanted to object – ’It’s not the same, we were air-mobile and the French were fixed in place,’ or ’Well, his eyes look mighty brown to me on the cover of ’Saints and Sinners.’’ You can move those objections forward in the discussion.

So, that’s my long-winded way of saying that this Blog, emptywheel, was before housed at TNH, and it has a legacy tradition of spirited debate on meaningful, emotion-laden issues. If you want to object – please go right ahead – but please, put something tangible on the table.

I’ll do my part – What does ’Give Obama 200 days’ have to do with the point of bmaz’ article? Change We can believe in is Principled Change – There is no honeymoon on that! The passion you are hearing from him, and me, is a Wail that, since the election, Obama has Changed his Tune from Principled to Unprincipled.

We voted for the Rule of Law! That’s not a ’sometime’ thing – without accountability, the Rule of Law is Meaningless to Justice for All.

We don’t Torture – except under Bush, and now he gets a Pass. Do you see? Principled to Unprincipled – Torture As Policy is Wrong, no matter what the DTA or MCA may say.

The AG is the Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the Nation – he or she ought to be held in high-esteem by the Department of Justice – he or she should radiate stirling Honor. Compared to lhp’s and bmaz’ proposed candidates, Holder is an Ambulance Chaser. Principled to Unprincipled.

Lieberman is a Traitor to the Dems, he should be unceremoniously kicked to the curb – except under Obama, Joe should go unpunished. Do you see? Principled to Unprincipled.

So, please, take your sentimental, sensitive feelings somewhere else, or try to come up with a better objection than Obama deserves a Principle-free honeymoon.

That’s not the Change We voted for – in fact, that’s exactly what Bush has had for the last 8 years.