I like to think of myself as PASSIONATE about certain VERY IMPORTANT POLITICAL ISSUES, rather than angry, and as a Liberal/Progressive (and even Conservative on a few things) Activist, I want to give our very intelligent President-Elect Obama a chance to get organized, but I deeply believe that all of us need to stay vigilant and give him our input. I, personally, contributed great time and money to his campaign because the WAR ISSUE & the NUCLEAR WEAPONS ISSUE are of paramount importance to me and the future of my children and Grandchildren. I think that we need to let him know that the Old Republican Party Neo-Conservative Hawks have NO business in his administration. I voted for CHANGE, and do expect President Obama to deliver, so as a MoveOn member I will be participating in a national petition to remind our new president to keep his promises to the American people. Inclusive, but not Divisive is important, but NO Robert Gates or John McCain, please!

Oh, and speaking of interesting characters, wasn’t it Holder that helped Clinton with his mulitple and questionable pardons, including the ‘character without a country’ Mark Rich, who was able to return to ours by paying for in in cold hard cash to Billary?

Bill and Hill are two of the worst characters, and their joint Secretary of State positions will cost us dearly. Alot more than Bills underwear tax write-off.

And she on him. When you’re in the tank, there is no lemon Obama can throw at you you won’t eat…..and witihout making so much as a face. LOL.

This is an observation that has nothing to do with the man’s politics or policies: Henry Waxman looks like the villain in an action comedy. That is, not the formidable, scary kind of villain but the villain who is made to look ridiculous.

Talk about a sign of the times in the journalism industry. Staffers at the Longmont Times-Call recently received an internal e-mail inviting them to work as valets at a private Christmas party for the Lehman family, who own the paper. The party honors Ed Lehman, who’s currently in his 51st year as the Times-Call’s publisher, and his wife Connie….

We don’t know anything yet about what’s going to happen. It might be a dismal Clinton 2 fart. It might be something far more interesting, and reformist. The simple fact is we do not know, and trying to read on the basis of current appointments is seven shades of silly.

The appointment-prediction cottage industry makes a big mistake: it just erases Obama from the picture. It’s a reasonable bet, based on what we’ve seen, that he will exert strong control over the direction of the administration. But I’ll repeat: It’s Nov. 19th and he doesn’t take office for two more months, so this is all so much bunk.

This doesn’t sound very “tranformative” to me nor does it seem to represent the kind of generational driven redefinition of the political map away from the Reagan, Clinton and Bush years that Marc has been talking about.

Still, I believe that Obama is choosing who he is choosing because he recognizes how much the world is relying on the US getting on the right track NOW. He is going to be investing in the ability of the mainstream political and financial leaders to get things done, under his leadership. We’ll see.

As for Lieberman’s utility, another point is that when the right starts attacking Obama for being soft on al Qaeda or Russia or Burma or the Boy Scouts, and talks about how much safer we were under Bush (I predict that will become a mantra), he can just point to Lieberman and say, “so whom do you know in the Democratic Party that I should have supported?”

This is the line of argument which says something like this, “i know that he looks like he enjoys hanging out with them, but deep down he loves me”. I have some serious doubts about this. It’s starting to look, to me, at least, that it’s the Marc, Balter and others may harbour seriously overblown hopes about Obama. While Obama has indeed articulated a kind of rhetoric grounded in a “bottoms up” idea of social change- itself a product of his own experience organising the black poor in Chicago– his own politics do not widly diverge from Clintonism, which if anything moved towards redifining liberalism as conservatism. He promises return to normal imperialism away from the mad dog imperialims of Bush. The Albrights and Dennis Ross’ of the word may be better, in some ways, than Rumsfleds and Cheneys but the difference here is one of degress. Yes, the election of Obama was in many ways a defining moment, but there’s broader problem with seeing it the way Marc and others tend to be inclined to . I think Adolph Reed makes alot of sense when he says the following

“And it’s crucially important for those who identify with the left to recognize that there is no designated moment at which the crisis becomes intolerable and “the People” either “wake up” or “rise.” That is simply not the way politics works. Absent concerted, organized intervention, it could go on indefinitely, with all kinds of inventive scapegoating available to stigmatize the previous rounds of losers and provide desperate reassurances to the next. And that would be a political situation and social order likely to grow ever uglier and more dangerous.”

Maybe a bailout?

“I couldn’t care less what their policy views are. I only care which directives they are given by Obama and how well they execute them.”

Agree with much of what you are arguing — politically it’s got to be smart for Obama to calm the constituencies he’s going to need first and foremost. (Notice he hasn’t nominated a treasury secretary yet, despite all predictions that he’d start there – he’s taking care of his political business first.)

I also like his approach based on either Lincoln, if you believe that, or the Arabic proverb “hold your friends close but your enemies closer”. (A variant I love comes from the French tragedian Racine — “I embrace my enemy, all the better to stifle him.”)

But but but… here’s my concern. It’s only a question at this point, because we don’t have all the information, or all the appointments. Doesn’t the point come though when a foreign policy team built on the likes of Hillary, Joe Biden, maybe Holbrooke, Dennis Ross etc etc makes one wonder — how can a group of people who got it so wrong on Iraq, starting during the Clinton era when they had access to all the intelligence, be expected to shift course in both a different direction and also the RIGHT direction now?