LINK | Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff | November 26, 2008
WASHINGTON - Harvard Medical School invited Peter Orszag, then director of the Congressional Budget Office, to give its prestigious annual Seidman lecture in October because it wanted a speaker who would be influential on medical policy. As head of the agency offering fiscal expertise to the House and Senate, Orszag was primed to play a crucial role in determining the price of any new healthcare legislation.
When Orszag's PowerPoint slides began snapping, faculty members were surprised to see that he had far more to offer than a look at the federal ledger sheets. Offering suggestions on how to cut healthcare costs, Orszag presented bar graphs measuring the relative placebo effects of antidepressants and showing how a Michigan hospital's introduction of a five-step checklist for doctors catheterizing patients reduced rates of infection.
"The thing that I was impressed with is how he is able to pick up clinical medicine for someone who is an economist and not a doctor," said Barbara McNeil, a radiologist who heads the medical school's Department of Health Care Policy, which organized the lecture. "For someone who had as wide a portfolio as he had at CBO to have that understanding of health is unusual."
Orszag, who was named yesterday to run the Obama administration's Office of Management and Budget, has a wide intellectual range and a bloggy instinct - relentlessly curious, allusive, drawn to unlikely connections - rare within the green-eyeshade set. A year ago, he launched his own blog, the first on his agency's website, that has touched on everything from avian flu vaccines to the Navy's shipbuilding program.
Obama's savvy coalition-building broke all the rules about how to run for president. If he can take the same approach in the White House, he will be a towering success.
LINK | MARK SCHMITT | The American Prospect | November 17, 2008
A single tactical choice early in Barack Obama's quest for the presidency set the course for all the events that followed -- Obama's securing of the Democratic nomination and surprisingly smooth path to resounding victory in the general election. After Sen. Hillary Clinton defeated him in the New Hampshire primary, rather than pouring resources into the very next primary states, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe looked weeks into the future. He deployed staff to states that wouldn't vote for another month and implemented a long, patient strategy of assembling a majority of delegates, one at a time, in friendly and unfriendly states alike.
The move broke all the rules for an insurgent candidate, which is what Obama was at the time. There is a tried-and-true strategy for insurgents -- what President George H.W. Bush in 1980 called "Big Mo" -- momentum. Only a wave of victories in early states can overcome the superior nationwide organization of an establishment candidate like Clinton, the theory goes. Insurgents can't waste time thinking about the months ahead. Momentum is a rapidly depleted resource.
Plouffe's choice was not the last time that the Obama campaign would gamble on patience and the long view, despite admonitions from those with more experience that he was blowing the moment. Only six weeks before Election Day, William Galston, a political theorist and Democratic campaign brain since the 1970s, led a chorus of public criticism, warning Obama, "You are in danger of squandering an election most of us thought was unlosable," as John McCain seemed to "win the news cycle" on too many days. Then the financial crisis broke, and while McCain was frantically trying to seize the role of bipartisan broker on an issue he knew nothing about, it was Obama's calm clarity that lured a wave of moderates, independents, centrists, and prominent Republicans into the ever-widening circle of his coalition.
Obama will need a full reservoir of that same patience in the White House, because he'll face similar frantic pressure and second-guessing. He will be surrounded by a crippling crowd of people and groups convinced that if their own No. 1 cause isn't enacted in the first 100 days, it will never happen. The conventional wisdom about the presidency is very much the same as the advice Obama was given in the primaries: Move quickly. Overwhelm the forces of the establishment. Use the momentum of the election to achieve the biggest things possible. You'll never be more powerful than on Jan. 21.
If Obama ignores this conventional wisdom, he will not do so because he's crazy or lazy but because he's taking the same approach to governing as he took to the election. It will mean he's taking the long view, gambling on patience, and carefully putting into place the pieces that win lasting majorities for progressive policies, just as he won a majority of delegates and a majority of votes in the election.
LINK | Peter G. Gosselin | LA Times | November 25, 2008Reporting from Washington — The economic team that President-elect Barack Obama unveiled Monday, led by Lawrence Summers, Timothy F. Geithner and Christina D. Romer, comprises widely respected, centrist economists who until recently advocated cautious, sensible-shoe policies to do such things as boost savings, reduce deficits and allow markets maximum feasible rein.But the assignment that Obama has given them is anything but cautious and sensible-shoe. It is to make Washington the consumer of last resort in an economy in which consumption is plunging. It is to devise industrial-policy-like programs to salvage a collapsing auto industry and turn green an energy industry almost wholly focused on fossil fuels. It is to dip more deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans -- especially those with housing troubles -- than the government has done in generations. But so much has gone so wrong during the last 15 months that what would have been beyond the political pale as recently as a few years ago is quickly becoming the consensus."These are not moderate, centrist times, so economists who in normal times are moderate and centrist aren't going to act that way now," said J. Bradford DeLong, a UC Berkeley economic historian and prolific economic blogger. "The wild-eyed radicals are looking pretty sensible."
President-elect Barack Obama has now made three things clear about his plans to bring the economy back: He wants his actions to be big and bold. He sees economic recovery as intimately linked with economic and social reform. And he is bringing in a gifted brain trust to get the job done.
Just three weeks after Election Day, Obama has already expanded his authority by seizing on "an economic crisis of historic proportions," as he described it yesterday, to call for a stimulus package that will dwarf anything ever attempted by the federal government.
But Obama is also using the crisis to make the case for larger structural reforms in health care, energy and education -- "to lay the groundwork for long-term, sustained economic growth," as he put it. Obama clearly views the economic downturn not as an impediment to the broadly progressive program he outlined during the campaign but as an opportunity for a round of unprecedented social legislation.
LINK | Jake Tapper | ABC | Nov. 24
ABC News has learned that President-elect Obama had tappedUniversity of California--Berkeley economics professor Christina Romer to be the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, an office within the Executive Office of the President.Romer, a widely respected economist with an expertise on the U.S. economy, will be one of the key economic advisers whom Mr. Obama will introduce to the nation this morning, along with New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner, tapped to be Obama's nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who will serve as the director of the National Economic Council.Romer and her husband David, also an economist at Berkeley, are members of the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, which decides when a recession has officially started or ended.
One highly relevant area of their expertise -- how tax cuts can help stimulate economic growth.The Council of Economic Advisers is charged with analyzing and interpreting economic developments, appraising programs and activities of the Government, and formulating and recommending national economic policy to promote employment, production, and purchasing power.
Previous chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers include Ben Bernanke, Greg Mankiw, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, and Alan Greenspan.
By BETH FOUHY | Associated Press Writer | Nov. 24
NEW YORK (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama has chosen New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to be commerce secretary, adding a prominent Hispanic and one-time Democratic rival to his expanding Cabinet.
Obama planned to announce the nomination after Thanksgiving, according to a Democratic official familiar with the discussions. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations and did so on condition of anonymity.
Richardson, 61, had a distinguished and visible career in Washington before returning to New Mexico, where he was elected governor in 2002. Richardson served as U.N. ambassador under President Bill Clinton and later as energy secretary. He was in the House from 1983 to 1997.
Obama harnessed the grass-roots power of the Web to get elected. How will he use that power now?
Barack Obama is the first major politician who really "gets" the Internet. Sure, Howard Dean used the Web to raise money. But Obama used it to build an army. And now, that army of digital kids expects to stick around and help him govern. Crowd-sourced online brainstorming sessions? Web sites where regular folks hash out policy ideas and vote yea or nay online? A new government computer infrastructure that lets people get a look into the workings of Washington, including where the money flows and how decisions get made? Yes to all those and more. "This was not just an election—this was a social movement," says Don Tapscott, author of "Grown Up Digital," which chronicles the lives of 20-somethings raised on computers and the Web. "I'm convinced," Tapscott says, "that we're in the early days of fundamental change in the nature of democracy itself."
Call it Government 2.0. Instead of a one-way system in which government hands down laws and provides services to citizens, why not use the Internet to let citizens, corporations and civil organizations work together with elected officials to develop solutions? That kind of open-source collaboration is second nature to the Net-gen kids who supported Obama and to technologists from Silicon Valley who are advising him. "An open system means more voices; more voices mean more discussion, which leads to a better decision," Google CEO and Obama adviser Eric Schmidt told a roomful of policy thinkers in Washington last week, gathered for a discussion on the role technology will play in government. "A community will always make a better decision than an individual."
Before his Inaugural, FDR craftily dodged attempts to saddle him with Hoover's crisis. What Obama can learn.
Americans are scared and eager for change. They elect the Democratic presidential candidate by a healthy margin, in part because they prefer his temperament. But the outcome is, to most, largely a rejection of the brutal status quo. Every day brings more depressing economic news, with banks teetering and foreclosures skyrocketing. During the transition, the outgoing president tries to rope the new man into the crisis—but the president-elect keeps his distance. The country has only one president at a time, he says, telling aides that he doesn't want responsibility without authority.
Abraham Lincoln is Barack Obama's favorite president, but it's no wonder he's reading up on Franklin D. Roosevelt. The similarities between 1932–33 and 2008–09 are eerie. And the basic questions during the transition are the same today as they were 76 years ago: How low will the economy sink? Is it better for the incoming president to pitch in with the outgoing administration to forestall disaster—or hang loose? What's the best way to plan for the early weeks after the Inauguration?
LINK
Jake Tapper | ABC | Nov. 24
ABC News has learned that Dr. Susan Rice has emerged as the leading candidate to be President-elect Obama's nominee as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Neither Dr. Rice nor the Obama Transition Team had any comment. The usual caveats apply -- nothing is yet a done deal, nothing has been officially offered or accepted, national security team announcements will not come until after Thanksgiving.
Dr. Rice, a member of President Bill Clinton's National Security Council and a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was involved in President-elect Obama's campaign as a senior foreign policy adviser.
The former Rhodes Scholar in 2000 received the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Memorial Award for distinguished contributions to the formation of peaceful, cooperative relationships between nations, and U.S. security policy for global peace.
LINK | Mathew Yglesias | Think Progress | Nov. 24
My ThinkProgress colleagues are reporting that Melody Barnes, who was at CAP before I got on board, will head the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House. The DPC is in charge of interagency coordination and policy formation for such topics as education, immigration, criminal justice, and health care — in short, domestic policy. This hasn’t been a very high-profile role under the Bush administration since Bush doesn’t really believe in domestic policy aside from tax cuts, but for an administration that’s trying to play a constructive role in American life it’s a very important job. Here’s some YouTube: VIDEO
Barnes has some of the liberal credentials that people have seen lacking in some other Obama appointments. She served as Chief Counsel to Ted Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2003, was CAP’s Executive Vice President for Policy, and then left to join Obama’s campaign as policy director.
LINK | Lois Romano | Washington Post Staff Writer | Monday, November 24, 2008; C01
Desirée Rogers, a prominent Chicago businesswoman and Harvard MBA, will be named the first African American White House social secretary, sources in the presidential transition office said yesterday.
Rogers, 49, is a friend of Michelle and President-elect Barack Obama's, and a leader in Chicago corporate and civic circles; her appointment signals that the first couple consider the job crucial to how they introduce themselves to the country and the globe. She was a major fundraiser for Obama.
"This appointment sends a strong message that the Obamas want to use the White House strategically, to maximize its use in a way that is consistent with their philosophy -- [to] open it to a broader range of people, " said Valerie Jarrett, an Obama intimate and friend of Rogers's who also will work in the White House. "Desirée is a heavy hitter -- she comes with her own range of contacts from around the country. She's close to Michelle and she knows everyone who will be working in the West Wing, so she will be able to create a synergy."
LINK | Maria Glod | Washington Post Staff Writer | Monday, November 24, 2008; A02
President-elect Barack Obama has made big promises to educators, parents and the nation's nearly 50 million public school students. He vowed to recruit an "army of new teachers," create better tests and give public schools more funding. He also said he would make college more affordable.
As the new administration prepares to take over the Education Department, school experts say one of Obama's first -- and toughest -- jobs must be restoring the broad bipartisan support it took to pass the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which aims to boost the achievement of poor children. That consensus has splintered, with people on both sides of the aisle souring on the law as it is overdue for reauthorization in Congress.
"Forget the details of No Child Left Behind. The big challenge there is having to rebuild that bipartisan coalition," said Gary Huggins, director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, an independent effort of the Aspen Institute. "On the Democratic side you have people walking away from it because of union pushback. On the GOP side you have people walking away because this is too large a federal footprint."
Helping ensure college access is likely to be the next president's most pressing education priority. The financial downturn has raised concerns about the continuing availability of student loans. On Thursday, the Education Department announced plans to expand purchases of the loans it backs, the most recent of several steps to help avert a student loan crisis.
"The most immediate issue is just the question of stability within the student loan programs," said Alexa Marrero, spokeswoman for Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee. "If we realize there's a problem, it will be too late."
But it is Obama's vision of refining the federal role in America's classrooms that may be the biggest political and policy challenge. He inherits an agency -- and a law -- that is seen by some local schools and union leaders as focusing more on sanctions and policing than on helping build better schools.
SPEAKING of The Economist, our official assessment of Barack Obama's Treasury secretary nominee, New York Fed president Timothy Geithner, is up:
Assuming he is nominated Mr Geithner brings two crucial qualities. First, he represents continuity. From the first days of the crisis last year, he has worked hand in glove with Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Mr Paulson. He can continue to do so while awaiting confirmation. If Citigroup, for example, needs federal help, Mr Geithner will be involved. An unknown when he joined the New York Fed in 2003, he is now a familiar face to the most senior executives on Wall Street and to central bankers and finance ministers overseas.Second, he represents competence. He has spent more time on financial crises, from Mexico and Thailand to Brazil and Argentina, than probably any other policymaker in office today. Mr Geithner understands better than almost anyone that in crises you throw out the forecast and focus on avoiding low probability events with catastrophic consequences. Such judgments are excruciating: do too little, and you undermine confidence and generate a bigger crisis that needs even bigger policy action. Do too much, and you look panicked and invite blowback from Wall Street, Congress and the press. At times during the crisis Mr Geithner would counsel Mr Bernanke on the importance of the right “ratio of drama to effectiveness”.
Assuming he is nominated Mr Geithner brings two crucial qualities. First, he represents continuity. From the first days of the crisis last year, he has worked hand in glove with Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, and Mr Paulson. He can continue to do so while awaiting confirmation. If Citigroup, for example, needs federal help, Mr Geithner will be involved. An unknown when he joined the New York Fed in 2003, he is now a familiar face to the most senior executives on Wall Street and to central bankers and finance ministers overseas.
Second, he represents competence. He has spent more time on financial crises, from Mexico and Thailand to Brazil and Argentina, than probably any other policymaker in office today. Mr Geithner understands better than almost anyone that in crises you throw out the forecast and focus on avoiding low probability events with catastrophic consequences. Such judgments are excruciating: do too little, and you undermine confidence and generate a bigger crisis that needs even bigger policy action. Do too much, and you look panicked and invite blowback from Wall Street, Congress and the press. At times during the crisis Mr Geithner would counsel Mr Bernanke on the importance of the right “ratio of drama to effectiveness”.
Ah, glorious, glorious competence. How we've missed you.
Barack Obama’s presidential victory permeates this month’s list of best-selling political books, with both of his own works returning to the top and several by others landing among the 15 most popular.
President-elect Obama’s “Audacity Of Hope,” a former mainstay since the inception of the Caucus’s Poli-Book list, returns at No. 1, and his earlier memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” lands at No. 2.
An overwhelming focus continues on the 44th president-elect in pictorials and essays: “The American Journey Of Barack Obama” by the editors of Life magazine is No. 4; “The Rise Of Barack Obama” by Pete Souza is No. 8; “Obama” by Deborah Willis and Kevin Merida is No. 15. And “Michelle” by Liza Mundy falls at No. 13, as the first book on First Lady Michelle Obama to grace the list.
Also new this month is “American Lion” by Jon Meacham at No. 6. The controversial seventh president, founder of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, made a radical stir in the political hierarchy, with lasting effects to date, by shifting from government concerns to giving more power to ordinary citizens.... LINK
LINK | Edmund Sanders | LA Times | November 22, 2008
Reporting from Nyangoma-Kogelo, Kenya — For about 400 people in western Kenya who can call the next U.S. president "part of the family," the business of being an Obama has a whole new meaning.The modest family compound here has been inundated by hordes of visitors, varying from reporters and local politicians to ordinary Kenyans looking for help in getting U.S. visas, scholarships, jobs or cash. Family matriarch Sarah Onyango, step-grandmother of President-elect Barack Obama, is treated like a rock star wherever she goes.The Kenyan government, which once ostracized Obama's father, is falling over itself to attend to the family. There's a new road, 24-hour police security and an electricity line -- the first in the village. It was installed hours after the U.S. election results were announced, bypassing neighbors who have been waiting years for a connection."Dealing with all this," Said Obama, the president-elect's uncle, said with a sigh, "it's been like a full-time job."
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama will name Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to be his Treasury secretary, moving to fill a key post at a moment when the quavering financial markets are looking for reassurance about the direction of economic policy, people briefed about the decision said Friday.
In picking Mr. Geithner, who has been at the center of efforts to contain thefinancial crisis, Mr. Obama passed over Lawrence H. Summers, who was Treasury secretary in the final year and a half of the Clinton administration. The president-elect might name Mr. Summers, a highly regarded economist and a former president of Harvard University, as a senior White House adviser, people involved in the transition said.
Word of Mr. Geithner’s selection helped drive stocks sharply higher on Friday afternoon as investors concluded that Mr. Obama was taking steps to fill a leadership vacuum at a time when the economy and financial markets are showing new signs of strain. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 494 points, a 6.5 percent gain after days of dizzying declines.
***Meet the designer of the "O" logo.***
LINK | STEVEN HELLER | NY Times | Nov. 20
At the end of 2006, Mode, a motion design studio in Chicago, approached Sol Sender, a graphic designer, to create a logo for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The resulting “O” became one of the most recognizable political logos in recent history. I spoke with Mr. Sender a few days after the election to discuss the evolution of his design.
Steven Heller: How did you get the job of designing the Obama logo?
Sol Sender: We got the job through Mode. Steve Juras, a classmate of mine from graduate school is the creative director there. They have a long-standing relationship with AKP&D Message and Media, a campaign consulting firm led by David Axelrod and David Plouffe among others.
While the nation's capital obsesses over Barack Obama's next Cabinet pick, the president-elect's lieutenants are engaged with what may be a more important long-term issue: What will become of Obama's vast grass-roots network?
Electoral campaigns, like circus tents, quickly disappear after the show is over. But Obama is our first community-organizer president, and he sees the way he got elected as being almost as crucial as the fact that he won. Because of the emphasis he put on organizing, barackobama.com might fairly be seen as the most successful high-tech startup of the past two years.
Over and over, Obama has spoken of change coming from "the bottom up," and the organization he built down to the precinct and neighborhood level could be an agent of that change. But how?
President elect delivers taped address to IOC members
ISTANBUL - It didn't take long for Barack Obama to start playing a significant role in promoting Chicago's bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.About 15 minutes into Chicago's Friday presentation of its bid plans to the general assembly of the European Olympic Committees, the president elect gave an 85-second videotaped address to an audience that included some two dozen International Olympic Committee members.That Obama found the time to tape the address in the midst of his hectic schedule after the election clearly showed his willingness to push Chicago's bid in a four-city race including Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Madrid. It was the first time Obama has shown that support in a formal presentation to the IOC.Obama delivered a message dear to the ears of the IOC: that the United States and Chicago would be honored to host the Games, both as a way to serve the Olympic movement and as an opportunity for the country to ``to reach out, welcome the world to our shores and strengthen our friendships across the globe."
LINK | Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY | Nov. 21
Through innovative use of online social networks, the Obama campaign ended up with more than 2 million registered users on its MyBarackObama.com website. That database, plus the millions more e-mail addresses the campaign collected through events and fundraising, could be a valuable resource for the Obama administration.
The Obama transition team and the remaining campaign organization are keeping in touch with volunteers online, soliciting their opinions about their campaign experiences, asking volunteers to share war stories, and inviting them to write about their "vision" for the country. The campaign and transition websites this week asked visitors to click on a link to donate to victims of California wildfires — resulting in more than 100,000 hits.
Campaign manager David Plouffe this week sent an e-mail survey to those registered with the campaign website, asking how people want to remain involved and what issues they care about. Keeping Obama supporters engaged and active through the Obama transition website change.gov is "our first priority," transition spokesperson Jen Psaki says.
In both groups, teams are developing new online efforts to keep Obama supporters active. Legal firewalls between government and political campaigns mean the volunteer database can't be handed over wholesale to the Obama White House.
