A Question I keep getting asked: What do you think of Obama?

President-elect Barack Obama As an American living abroad, very few people ever asked me what I thought of President Bush. They all have their opinions, it seems. And while few Swiss generally share their opinions with me, they are very intrigued about my own opinion of the incoming president. To this question, I’ve developed a pretty stock answer: “I don’t know. Ask me in a few years.”

President-elect Obama has demonstrated thoughtfulness in the few times I have heard him speak extemporaneuously. He also seems to have assembled a very competent cabinet with vast amounts of political experience. This can be put another way- it’s the same old faces we’ve come to know. Another young president did his best to put together a superstar team, and it led us to the war in Vietnam. All this says is that brain power isn’t everything.

President Carter is perhaps one of the smartest men in the world, and yet his presidency is generally views as a failure. It took President Bush to eclipse him in that department, showing that failure is not limited to one party or another.

Given the choice between having brain power and experience and not having it, clearly I’d rather have it. But something more is required: wisdom. While it’s easy to demonstrate a lack of wisdom, I’m not sure how easy it is to demonstrate that one has it. Again, the thoughtfulness that he has applied to complex issues leads me to hope, but that’s the best I can do for now.

Obama’s team, thus far

President-elect Obama has selected key members of his cabinet to be nominated. Here is the list of which I am aware, in order of succession.

Secretary of State: Hilary Clinton
Secretary of the Treasury: Timothy Geithner
Secretary of Defense: Robert Gates
Attorney General: Eric Holder
Secretary of Commerce: Bill Richardson
Secretary of Homeland Security: Janet Nepalitano

Here are some key members of his staff he has named:

Director of OMB: Lawrence Summers
National Security Advisor: James Jones
Press Secretary: Robert Gibbs
Ellen Moran

These choices do not reflect a radical shift from the Clinton era but rather a subtle change. This is probably a good thing, since Clinton seemed to have gotten it mostly right. The most provocative choices, of course, are Senator Clinton and Ellen Moran.

Ellen Moran, coming from Emily’s List sends a strong message that the issues that group holds dear will be front and center in an Obama administration. The right will certainly not be pleased with such a choice.

And it’s not clear who should be pleased with Mrs Clinton as a choice for Secretary of State, aside from perhaps President Clinton, as she has very limited foreign policy experience, and clearly does not see eye to eye with the President-elect regarding Iraq. Worse, she has her hands dirty with her vote to go to war, having perhaps lost a primary over that very issue.

In the meantime, the President-elect is very busily cleaning out southwester governors’ mansions with the choices of Janet Nepolitano and Bill Richardson. Perhaps he will name Arnold Schwarzenegger back to his old job as head of the President’s Council on Health and Fitness.

Vetting Bill Clinton?

Here is the most bizarre story I’ve heard in a while. Apparently President-elect Obama is considering Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. While I wonder whether this is a good choice alone on its merits, what really gets me is how people in the press seem to believe that Bill Clinton, a former president who received millions of votes twice, somehow needs to be vetted. It’s not as if the media has cut him a break.

The reason behind all of this might be best put as the calm before the storm. Right now there is no news, and so a vacuum must be filled. With names being bantered about like Clinton and Richardson, who knows who the real nominee will be?

Obama Wins: Another Barrier Broken

In 1861 a group of rogue states went to war with the Union based on the election of Abraham Lincoln, a man who believed that slavery was wrong. Some argue that it all boiled down to economics, as in “who will tend our fields, if not slaves?” Whatever the case may be, it wasn’t until 1865 and over 600,000 deaths later that the war was won by the north. Days after the end of the war, Lincoln lost his life, and racism raged in the United States for one hundred years or more.

Yesterday America elected another man from the Land of Lincoln, Barack Obama, to put another nail in the coffin of America’s tragec era. While it would take great effort for him to be as awful as his predecessor, it will take even greater effort for him to get us out of all of the messes that have been left for him. We live in a divided country, as Mr. McCain received approximately 47% of the vote. One can hope that of that 47% only a small handful were racists.

We have a huge ballooning deficit that will cripple our ability to address great problems of the day. We have troops at war in two – four countries, depending on how you count, and we have an economy that is in a recession that many experts believe will last from three to five years. If it lasts even three years, President-elect Obama will have great difficulty being re-elected. In the process of fixing all of the above, he might be able to deal with education, healthcare, and national infrastructure.

One thing he has already done has been to shatter the image that a black person cannot lead the country. Maybe next time it will be a hispanic or jewish woman. One could only imagine the day when our president is a muslim.

Electoral Differences between McCain and Bush

Why is it that John McCain picked Sarah Palin? The answer lies in how George W. Bush won the presidency. President Bush jumped on a wave of conservative ire aimed at the Democratic Party and President Clinton on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. By driving a convincing message that he would realize the conservative agenda, Bush energized the huge electoral machine of right wing moralists. This shifted the field to the right, and required VP Gore to play a more moderate game than he would have otherwise played, and it just did not ring true to anyone. Bush didn’t really play to the moderates, except to be some sort of compassionate conservative.

McCain argues that he is a moderate, and so he should have played to them. Instead, he tried to play President Bush’s game of driving to the right after the primary was won. The New York Times recently had an article that compares the campaigns to the faux campaigns found in the last two seasons of West Wing. In that series, at one point it is argued that the Republican candidate (Vinick) could wiin ALL fifty states by expanding the moderate base of his party. This is what McCain could have tried to do, but it is not what he did. Instead, he attempted to play to both bases, and he argued neither convincingly. By bringing in Sarah Palin he alienated the center. And it wasn’t enough to sooth the right.

There was no way that George Bush’s strategy would work for John McCain. McCain is also the victim of bad timing, with regard to the economy, an issue about which the public as blamed the Republicans nearly exclusively. Barack Obama, merely has to mention the economy and McCain’s ratings drop. That is vaguely reminiscient of President Clinton’s old slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Were it only the economy, perhaps McCain could have survived. However, the War on Terror also looms like an albatross around the neck of Republicans. People are sick of it. Finally.

And so, before Democrats start to crow too loudly, one should point out that neither of these two problems, the economy or our current geopolitical environment, are simple problems, and both will require serious consideration and absense of hubris to repair.