President-elect Obama's biggest fan club has now been well and truly outed: it is not the pinko media, it is W's staff, stupid!
The W posse are fawning over the O team with the kind of attention a spaniel lavishes on another spaniel's bottom.
What could they be after - presidential pardons? (Only kidding)
This is the latest evidence and evidence as well of the fact that Dick Cheney has a future as a stand-up comic.
President Bush's former chief of staff Andy Card - also at that meeting - told me recently that this transition is the best ever!
Ever!
Too cosy already...
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Back on the Blagojevich saga, I see gunsandreligion offers the captivating suggestion that Rahm Emanuel might become the new Oliver North.
Steady now. But I have to say I am beginning to detect - in spite of my claim that it all adds up to nothing - that the Obama team is running out of sympathy slightly faster than is wise on this issue.
Behind the scenes, he is keeping to the strategy of being the moderate can-do, work-with-anyone man, but in front of the cameras (and the men and women with the pens and notebooks) his refusal to open up is frustrating to some.
Seems to me that the oddest subject for him to duck is the special election for the senate seat which the Republicans want and the Democrats seem not to - out of fear presumably that they might lose.
It would cost the state quite a bit to put it on, but it would cost Mr Obama nothing to call for it - and genuinely to want it - as by far the most democratic and un-corrupt solution to the problem, a point noted by some of the local press.
The fact is, though, that they are frightened of Republican Congressman Mark Kirk getting his party's nomination and winning the seat.
Mr Kirk is a moderate with liberal social views (full disclosure - we were at college together) and would re-energise not only the Republicans of Ilinois but also, I suspect, the mainstream of the wider party who would see non-Palin routes to victory.
That is why the special election (by-elections we call them in the UK) is unlikely to happen.
As I said the other day - and as a president said before me - the business of America is Business.
I must say I have a hard time seeing what the fuss is about with Blago and Obo - even when set out ever so clearly as here.
A lot of it seems to be the juicy thought that Rahm Emmanuel might have used bad words in a wire tapped call. So what?
All will be published at midnight on Christmas Eve in time-honoured tradition.
The press conference here in Chicago was mostly dominated by the issues the Obama team wanted to talk about!
That seems to suggest to me that interest is subsiding...
"The business of America is business," said President Calvin Coolidge and every American - even those who have never heard of the 30th president - almost instinctively know that's true. Vast areas of America are set aside for nothing but buying and selling - strip malls they call them, though they are less exciting than they sound. Amongst this orgy of trade, noted by Coolidge but noted as well by almost everyone who has ever had anything to say about America, live the brands that America has made and sold to itself and to the world.
In a nation where trade is so important and so much a part of the psyche the great American brands really do stand as icons: smash them and you play with the mental health of generations who seek stability and meaning in the malls.
So this week has been doubly tough. It began with the news that the company that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune - two of the great newspapers of record here - is filing for bankruptcy. the Tribune was the one Harry Truman held aloft when it announced - wrongly, but famously - Dewey Defeats Truman, in the 1948 election. The papers are not imminently in danger of closing but young reporters hoping for Woodward/Bernstein-like careers will probably be looking elsewhere. And that of course is what the papers' readers have been doing for sometime - the brands are still big, but the readership isn't.
The same is the case of the car giants. Ford and General Motors and Chrysler signs are everywhere -- you can walk around areas of the outer suburbs of some cities and wonder what would be left if they went - but the readers, as it were, the riders, have been deserting them for years.
This leads some to wonder at the crisis of the American brand. I must say I think such rumination is unnecessary. These are psychologically painful times for America. But who would bet against the brands of tomorrow being just as prominent here and just as homegrown? You don't even have to mention Google or Apple - they're old hat. The whole point of America is that stuff is popularised here - not created often, but crated and sold and branded. I saw a picture this week of a flexible paper like computer display - made entirely of plastic. It's tomorrow's technology and, perhaps, tomorrow's brand. And it's been made at the University of Arizona. American brands are dying this week - and being born .....
The car deal is in trouble again and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is being asked to commit hara-kiri in order to let it pass the Senate.
This line is from one of the Republican party talking points being circulated in Washington:
"This is the Democrats' first opportunity to pay off organised labour after the election. This is a precursor to card-check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organised labour, instead of taking their first blow from it."
The memo avoids addressing the millions of jobs the UAW (and the companies) say will be lost if the money is not forthcoming - but the union is in the spotlight now and things are not going to be pretty.
Meanwhile, this is fascinating and just a bit depressing, surely?
And anyone wondering what the serious questions are would do well to consider this pointed, yet reasonable, piece.
Is Obama damaged by the Blagojevich affair?
I suspect not - most Americans are not minded to think ill of a new president, particularly this president, particularly when there is no evidence of any kind suggesting that they should.
Efforts to link him with Mr Blagojevich will look cheap: the time is not right for Republican hopefuls to get any traction.
Though having said that, some sympathetic commentators were a little disappointed with Team Obama's initial handling of the news
This piece from earlier in the year is a nice overview of the President-elect's political life in Chicago.
A friend of mine told me once of being in a room with Mr Obama after he had done some business with some local wheeler-deelers and he joked that he wanted to wash his hands.
Looks to me that he did wash his hands rather thoroughly; and such an action - careful, forward thinking, unsentimental - would be in keeping with what we know to be his political character.
This is going to be fun and not just for Republicans. One of the great weaknesses of the American system of government is the role of family connections and patronage: Clintons and Bushs and Doles hanging around Washington and governors having the right to appoint politicians. How can anyone seriously think that in this hugely democratic nation it is somehow OK for a governor to have the right to appoint a senator under any circumstances? That's the real scandal, that and the governor's haircut...
Sorry to go on and on about infrastructure, but there is nothing more important - this piece cogently sets out the opposing view that the Obama New Deal will not work.
It seems to me that it misses the point though, which is that the spending he envisages will not just be spending for the sake of it, but will be investment in future productivity gains, and thus the abiilty of the US to pay itself (or the Chinese) back.
Paul Volker (who choked off the last big inflation in the early 80s) will be on hand to advise on how to damp things down when the time comes, but crucially when the time comes the bridges will not be falling down and broadband will be available everywhere and you will be able to get from Washington's main airport into town on a train, as you can at virtually every other industrial world capital city...
This is the point. No-one else seems quite to get it. Obama's infrastructure plans - if they come off - are of Eisenhower proportions (he built the roads - well the big ones). They entail a new mindset that builds America and doesn't object to paying for it. It's a mindset that could lead to change American children can believe in. I am not suggesting that the jobs side of infrastructure improvement is unimportant - plainly it is hugely important. But the long term benefits could re-shape the nation.
Like most of you, I begin each day with an assessment of the situation in Canada and troubling it is to those who follow constitutional issues north of the border.
(For anyone who has not been concentrating, the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, battling to stay in power, has persuaded the country's acting head of state to suspend Parliament so he can avoid being ousted by opposition parties next week. There is talk of coups and separatist plots.)
Although the Canadian detail is fascinating almost to the point of ecstasy, the thing that caught my eye was the last line of this piece, which gives an indication of the trap that awaits all western democratic leaders and electors in the coming years.
It is the Obama trap - the approach that looks at the panting, sated Americans and says, "boy I'd like some of what they've had!"
Barack Obama is unique and uniquely American - those British MPs I was talking to the other day understood that, but electorates might not.
One of the effects of the Obama phenomenon might be a reduction in respect for the institutions (for instance parliaments and parliamentary government) and for the dullness that is perfectly respectable in political life in the free world.
I am told the Obama team is working to find administration positions for its paid (former) campaign staffers, and one of the ideas it has hit on is community organizing.
In the coming weeks, the transition team will launch a nationwide community organizing initiative, using the Obama infrastructure/office space from the campaign.
The idea is that the staff and volunteers who worked on the campaign establish a permanent nationwide network.
For instance, if you want your local public school bus route changed, or want to run for city council, or want to take up any communuity issue, you go to the Organizing Office (in the same space where an Obama Campaign for Change Office used to be) and the staff help you launch your idea and support the project.
It is going to start in Chicago in days and it is coming to you - yes you - in Virgin, Utah soon.
Too much? I can see why they are doing it. FDR had the unions, Reagan had the conservative eggheads.
Obama needs someone - he needs a permanent movement of some sort, organising and cajoling... and just being there.
Just going back to the point I made in Taxing Issues (that adding tax on is a better way than including it). I was interested to read vagueofgodalming and naleksander and others who feel the British way is better.
I must say I spent the first few years I lived in the US annoyed by never knowing what something was going to cost but I changed my mind in time. In fact it annoys me now when I don't see it separated out - as OldSouth points out you cannot do it at gas stations, either in the US or the UK. Why not?
And on the subject of gas stations, why oh why does Britain persist, almost alone in the advanced world, in refusing to allow people to pay for petrol with a card at the pump?
My goodness, even in Belgium this convenience is offered! But in the early morning drizzle on the way to Heathrow I found myself having to queue behind people buying porn mags and milk and industrial quantities of diesel...
We should make a list of US and UK small-but-important changes that can improve life and arrange for them to be circulated.
The headline says it all. The problem with the Clinton choice is not highfalutin and policy driven - it is as this piece suggests, visceral and centred on what goes on when things go wrong. Meanwhile, I wonder if all the short people in the Obama camp end up ganging up on him in revenge for this.
On another subject (prompted by listening to a busker in London) I read recently that Obama's favourite classical music is Bach's Cello Suites. I know next to nothing about music but anyone who knows these sublime works, disciplined, ambitious, yet achingly beautiful, will know that a presidential candidate who loves them will almost certainly win. Wish I had known it last year.
The decision to reduce VAT in the UK - and the allegations that it might have risen as well - highlight for me the sensible American practice of selling goods and services (mostly) for an amount that is the genuine price and then adding the sales tax afterwards so that you clearly see how much (or how little) it is. Inclusive prices are convenient but obscure the tax issue.
Odd if the UK becomes a high tax society again in the next few years - will Obama go down the same route? Printing money and cutting spending are the only other choices and neither seems like a long term winner for him. The fuss over Hillary (to be confirmed today) will be as nothing when the immediate crisis is over and the books need to be balanced...
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