http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/52030/Let the Infighting Begin
He won by being No Drama Obama. Should he now stir some up?
* By John Heilemann
* Published Nov 9, 2008
Illustration by André Carrilho
The mau-mauing of Barack Obama officially began less than 24 hours after he won the White House, when National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy piped up about the possibility of Obama picking Larry Summers as his Treasury secretary. Gandy told the Huffington Post she had “mixed feelings” about Summers, saying he “doesn’t seem to get” the economic implications of gender-based wage disparities. She cited Summers’s incendiary comments as president of Harvard about women’s intrinsic inaptitude for math and science—the ones that helped get him booted—as a cause for concern. And she expressed some displeasure that no female economists are being mentioned as contenders for the Treasury job. “We’re gonna be forwarding some names to the Obama transition team,” Gandy said. “It’s important that in this new administration women’s voices are heard and heeded.”
The next day, the HuffPo ran another anti-Summers story, this time revisiting a controversial memo on the economic logic of exporting pollution to the developing world that he wrote (or at least signed his name to) in 1991 at the World Bank—and also suggesting that his having once dated wingnut Laura Ingraham “could become a source of political embarrassment” to Obama. Soon enough, Summers’s inflammatory tendencies were being invoked all over cable news; in a post whose headline called Summers a “fat, hated burnout,” Wonkette declared, “Want change, a fresh start? Hire a notorious ex-Clintonite who masturbates to NAFTA!”
That Obama’s appointments, potential or actual, would inspire caterwauling on the right has always been a given. But judging by the anti-Summers preemptive strike and the murmurs of discontent over Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, the agita on the left is shaping up to be just as fierce. Traditional liberal interest groups worry that Obama will be too centrist. Newfangled Obamaphiles fear that he’ll succumb to old politics. Both fret that his administration will wind up looking—horrors!—like Clinton III.
snip//
The problems with complaining about the supposed Clintonification of the Obama administration are many. The first and more glaring is that it reflects a woefully inadequate grasp of history and of what’s required to build a presidency from scratch. For the better part of two decades, the Democratic Party, like it or not, was Clinton’s party. A generation of policy and political people earned their stripes in WJC’s administration, and without them, Obama would be at a great disadvantage, if not completely doomed, in trying to enact an agenda of any ambition whatsoever. His own inner circle is startlingly small and his time on the national stage far too brief to have amassed a substantial coterie of seasoned advisers.
Moreover, it’s already evident that Obama has every intention of balancing the Clinton holdovers with his own homegrown true believers. Emanuel is as much an Obama person as a Clinton one—the two men are tight. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, appears to be headed for a senior position in the White House; so does his communications czar, Robert Gibbs. And everyone in Obama-land assumes that the president-elect will be taking along with him an assortment of members of his Chicago mafia, people like housing-developer Valerie Jarrett and parking-lot magnate Marty Nesbitt, who are among his closest consiglieres and dearest friends. They also expect significant roles for major Washington players, such as former senator Tom Daschle, whom no one in his right mind would describe as Clintonites.
What’s easy to forget is that, in building his administration, the audience that Obama is—or should be—playing to isn’t hard-core, stone-cold Democrats. It’s the broader electorate, much of which has invested great hope in Obama but continues to watch him closely, waiting for proof that his promise of fundamental change isn’t, well, just words. What that audience would regard as more of the same wouldn’t be a handful of Clintonites in high positions but the sight of Obama’s capitulating to the hoary interest-group posse that’s just begun to rear its head, or to the demands of the extant congressional party Establishment. To a striking degree, and by design, Obama’s victory was won independently of these forces. He owes them precious little. And that gives him the freedom to build a government on the singular criteria of its capacity to get shit done.
The heartening thing is that, so far, Obama seems to get this deeply. It’s early days, of course, but both the Emanuel and Podesta appointments reflect clarity of purpose, maturity, and cold-eyed calculation in roughly equal measure. The choice of Summers would demonstrate all these things, too—along with a bracing lack of concern for what the carpers and ankle-biters think. For Obama, the trick will be remembering that change does indeed require change agents, but that agents of change can be found in the unlikeliest of places: the Clinton camp, Old Washington, and even the GOP. In 1992, Clinton promised an administration that looked like America. Obama is promising something much more lofty—transcendence, transfiguration, a new frontier. But a government that actually, you know, works would be a fine place to start.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
