[Vision2020] Why History Can't Wait

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of Time Magazine at:

http://tinyurl.com/5gstkt
 
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Why History Can't Wait
By David Von Drehle

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced 
or heard a pitch about life insurance. There's a table, some off-brand 
mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together 
with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish. 

To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by 
quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just 
leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely 
familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and 
nondescriptitude. You can't quite put your finger on it ... 

"It's like the set of The Office," someone offers. 

Bingo. 

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December 
day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some 
new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the 
United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office 
are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-
elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who 
raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest 
first year since Franklin Roosevelt's — might merit a leather chair. Maybe 
a credenza? A hutch? 

But he doesn't seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors 
around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer 
Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with 
the University of North Carolina hoops team. ("They are so big and so fast 
and so strong, you know.") Then, since those two items basically exhaust 
the room's décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches 
into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It's a mind-boggling journey, 
although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the 
increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all 
accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely 
understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin 
turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus 
a jolt of existential risk.

---------------

See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack 
Obama. 

http://tinyurl.com/5awmfb
 
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"It is not clear that the economy's bottomed out," he begins, 
understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment 
spike in more than 30 years.) "And so even if we take a whole host of the 
right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have 
fully recovered." That worries him. Also Afghanistan: "We're going to have 
to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully 
enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between 
India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out 
militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an 
enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the 
world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation. 

"And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of 
nuclear proliferation," Obama continues, sailing on through the 
horribles. "And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is 
climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than 
even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years 
ago." 

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an 
impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes 
and the whimper of environmental collapse. That's just for starters; we'll 
hear the unabridged version shortly. 

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with 
why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. 
It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He 
has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars 
belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him 
two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure 
Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American 
scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of 
conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. 
Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big 
and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic 
line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, 
for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one 
about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it. 

See pictures of Obama's nation of hope.
http://tinyurl.com/4fh9b7
 
See pictures of Obama's college years.
http://tinyurl.com/5qpoxf
 
But crisis has a way of ushering even great events into the past. As Obama 
has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would 
bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded 
into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on 
the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the 
opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is 
a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That's why 
he's here and why he doesn't care about the furniture. We've heard fine 
speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We've 
observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just 
the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a 
talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that 
was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of 
his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, 
Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the 
imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and 
others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity. (See 
pictures of Obama's nation of hope.) 

The real story of Obama's year is the steady march of seemingly impossible 
accomplishments: beating the Clinton machine, organizing previously 
marginal voters, harnessing the new technologies of democratic engagement, 
shattering fundraising records, turning previously red states blue — and 
then waking up the day after his victory to reinvent the presidential-
transition process in the face of a potentially dangerous vacuum of 
leadership. "We always did our best up on the high wire," says his 
campaign manager, David Plouffe. 

Obama's competence fills him with a genuine self-confidence. "I've got a 
pretty healthy ego," he allows. That's clear when he offers a checklist 
for voters to use in judging his performance two years from now. It's 
quite an agenda. Listen: "Have we helped this economy recover from what is 
the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Have we instituted 
financial regulations and rules of the road that assure this kind of 
crisis doesn't occur again? Have we created jobs that pay well and allow 
families to support themselves? Have we made significant progress on 
reducing the cost of health care and expanding coverage? Have we begun 
what will probably be a decade-long project to shift America to a new 
energy economy? Have we begun what may be an even longer project of 
revitalizing our public-school systems?" 

There's more: "Have we closed down Guantánamo in a responsible way, put a 
clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our 
security and our Constitution? Have we rebuilt alliances around the world 
effectively? Have I drawn down U.S. troops out of Iraq, and have we 
strengthened our approach in Afghanistan — not just militarily but also 
diplomatically and in terms of development? And have we been able to 
reinvigorate international institutions to deal with transnational 
threats, like climate change, that we can't solve on our own?" 

And: "Outside of specific policy measures, two years from now, I want the 
American people to be able to say, 'Government's not perfect; there are 
some things Obama does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel 
like the government's working for me. I feel like it's accountable. I feel 
like it's transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what 
government actions are being taken. I feel that this is a President and an 
Administration that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new 
information.'" 

Can he really achieve all that? Plenty of voters will be happy if he aces 
only Item 1 on his list. But the essence of both Obama's strength and his 
promise is that, according to a recent poll, a strong majority of 
Americans believe he will accomplish most of what he aims to do. For 
having the confidence to sketch that kind of future in this gloomy hour 
and for showing the competence that makes Americans hopeful that he will 
pull it off, Barack Obama is Time's Person of the Year for 2008. 

I. Simple Competence

In some tellings, Obama's journey to the white house started with his 
little-noticed but carefully nuanced speech against the Iraq war in 2002. 
In other versions, it began with his electrifying address to the 
Democratic Convention in 2004. Those moments blazed with potential, true, 
but something more was necessary: a certain appetite among the electorate. 
The country had to be hungry for the menu he offered, and in that sense, 
his path's true beginning lay in the drowned precincts of New Orleans in 
the sweltering, desperate late summer of 2005. 

Hurricane Katrina blew away the last gauzy veil from an ugly specter of 
executive incompetence in American politics. When the people of New 
Orleans needed leadership, the Republican Administration in Washington 
proved useless. The Democratic governor and mayor were pitiful. At long 
last, our government was united — but under an appalling banner of 
fecklessness. The moral bankruptcy of the spin doctors was laid bare: no 
soul remained gullible enough to believe that Brownie was doing a heckuva 
job. 

After Katrina, demand collapsed for the very qualities that Obama lacked 
as a candidate: empty boasts, finger-pointing, backstabbing and years of 
experience inside a government that couldn't deliver bottled water to the 
stranded citizens of a major U.S. city. Spare us the dead-or-alive 
bravado, the gates-of-hell bluster, the melodrama of the 3 a.m. phone 
call. A door swung open for a candidate who would merely stand and 
deliver. Simple competence — although there's nothing simple about it, not 
in today's intricate, interdependent, interwoven, intensely dangerous 
world. 

See pictures of Barack Obama's campaign behind the scenes.
http://tinyurl.com/4b9pzs
 
See pictures of Obama on Flickr.
http://tinyurl.com/64z6dg
 
His official theme was change, but a specific kind of change: the nuts-and-
bolts kind you can see and measure. Voters were invited to believe because 
Obama kept delivering the goods. Certainly he made mistakes and gave up on 
some ideas while doubling back on others — his promise to stick to the 
existing campaign-finance system, for example. On the whole, though, he 
was a doer. Obama told people that a black man could win white votes. In 
Iowa he proved it. He said a broad-gauge campaign could win in GOP 
strongholds; along came Indiana and Virginia and North Carolina. He 
declared that a new approach to politics would topple the old Clinton-Bush 
seesaw, and topple it he did. He sank the three-pointer with the cameras 
rolling. Made a speech in a football stadium feel intimate. Some might say 
these are not exactly Churchillian achievements, but in the land of the 
hapless, the competent man is king. In the end, his campaign e-mail list 
numbered some 13 million people, of whom more than 3.5 million put actual 
skin in the game — money, volunteer hours or both. Obama's most formidable 
opponent, Hillary Clinton, tried to convince voters that he was all talk 
and no action, a vessel empty but for intoxicating fumes. Yet he was the 
one whose campaign ran like clockwork, while hers was a fratricidal mess. 
And by Nov. 4, the strongest party in the U.S. was no longer the 
Republican Party or the Democratic Party; it was the Obama Party. 

II. Filling the Vacuum

"A presidential campaign is like an MRI of the soul," says David Axelrod, 
Obama's chief strategist. "And one of the great revelations of this 
process, certainly the most thrilling revelation to me, was to learn what 
a great manager this guy is. We had no way of knowing that when we 
started. When he decided to run, we had no political infrastructure at 
all. There was just a handful of us, and we were setting off to challenge 
the greatest political operation in the Democratic Party." 

Keep in mind that Obama, as Rudy Giuliani put it at the Republican 
Convention in September, had "never led anything, nothing, nada" — 
certainly not a sprawling organization spread from coast to coast. But he 
did have a philosophy of leadership, which he explains like this: "I don't 
think there's some magic trick here. I think I've got a good nose for 
talent, so I hire really good people. And I've got a pretty healthy ego, 
so I'm not scared of hiring the smartest people, even when they're smarter 
than me. And I have a low tolerance of nonsense and turf battles and game-
playing, and I send that message very clearly. And so over time, I think, 
people start trusting each other, and they stay focused on mission, as 
opposed to personal ambition or grievance. If you've got really smart 
people who are all focused on the same mission, then usually you can get 
some things done." 

Stop and look back at those last few words, because they are a telltale 
sign of Obama's pragmatism. A persistent question during the campaign — it 
became the heart of John McCain's message in the closing weeks — was 
whether Obama was some kind of radical, a terrorist-befriending socialist 
masquerading as Steady Freddy. As he builds his Administration, though, he 
is emerging as a leader who just wants to "get some things done."

Read "The New Liberal Order."
http://tinyurl.com/NewLiberalOrder
 
Obama is a businesslike boss. He prefers briefing papers tightly written 
and shows up for meetings fully prepared. He expects people to challenge 
him when they think he is wrong and to back up their ideas with facts. 
He's not a shouter — "Hollering at people isn't usually that effective," 
he explains — but if he thinks you've let him down, you'll know it. "What 
was always effective with me as a kid — and Michelle and I find it 
effective with our kids — is just making people feel really guilty," he 
says. "Like 'Boy, I am disappointed in you. I expected so much more.' And 
I think people generally want to do the right thing, and if you're clear 
to them about what that right thing is, and if they see you doing the 
right thing, then that gives you some leverage." 

Again, take a second to reread, this time the bit where he says "people 
generally want to do the right thing." Trust of this kind has been in 
short supply for many years in American politics, where the dominant 
attitude is that every disagreement is a sign of bad faith and every 
opponent is assumed to be malevolent. Obama's attitude was ridiculed as 
kumbaya naiveté during the campaign, but trust proved to be essential to 
his victory. His campaign entrusted millions of volunteers with 
unprecedented authority to download information about prospective voters, 
to assign themselves to make phone calls and canvass their own 
neighborhoods and apartment buildings, and to keep the campaign abreast of 
their progress. A typical presidential effort is top-down, intensely 
protective of its data and strategies. Obama's approach seemed to court 
mischief or even chaos. "There was a lot of snickering among the political 
pros," says Plouffe. "They couldn't believe that we were giving people we 
didn't know access to our data and trusting them to handle it honestly. 
But it was enormously important because it made people feel that much more 
accountable: 'These are my three blocks, and everyone's counting on me.'" 

Yes, Obama could talk — like nobody's business — but talk didn't win the 
election. According to the daily tracking polls, the tumblers clicked into 
place precisely at the moment the financial hurricane hit, when the 
wizards of Wall Street proved as incompetent as Oz and neither the 
President nor the leaders of Congress nor the Treasury boss nor Senator 
McCain could deliver a rescue package. When this group failure provoked a 
stock-market crash in early October, Americans asked, "Can't anybody here 
play this game?" Astounding as it would have seemed scant months before, 
their gaze fell on the one fixed point in the widening gyre: a guy named 
Barack Hussein Obama. 

See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.
http://tinyurl.com/4syhhu
 
III. Fear Itself

As White House Chief of Staff during the final years of the Clinton 
Administration, John Podesta became accustomed to short nights and 
emotional roller coasters. Still, he found it a bit strange to be headed 
to the airport in the predawn darkness of Nov. 5 — just a few hours after 
the election of a Democratic President. Was Obama really going to chair a 
major strategy session the morning after winning the longest and most 
grueling campaign on record? How about a day off? 

Long before Election Day, Obama decided that an ordinary transition 
wouldn't do. Given the shaky economy and two wars, he knew that the winner 
of the election — whoever it turned out to be — would face instant and 
daunting challenges. He wanted to be ready. "What I was absolutely 
convinced of was that, whether it was me or John McCain, the next 
President-elect was going to have to move swiftly," Obama recalls. He 
deployed Podesta in midsummer to lead an unusually elaborate preparation 
for a possible Obama presidency. McCain accused him of overconfidence and 
vanity, of measuring the Oval Office drapes. To Obama, it was simply a 
matter of prudence. 

See pictures from the historic Election Day.
http://tinyurl.com/VotingDay
 
Podesta had long been planning the return of a Democrat to the White 
House, and his think tank, the Center for American Progress, was already 
preparing detailed briefings on conditions in the various departments of 
government. As the financial system went into free fall in September, 
Podesta's team pressed the FBI to work overtime on security screenings of 
potential Obama nominees. Now, as he boarded a 6 a.m. flight to Chicago, 
Podesta carried a list of more than 100 candidates who had passed their 
background investigations and were ready for confirmation on Day One. 
Instead of taking a day off, the new President-elect celebrated his 
victory with a five-hour meeting. 

Obama had been pondering whether he should step to center stage or wait in 
the wings as the turbulent last months of the Bush Administration played 
out. His aides were all over the map. Some advised him to go quietly about 
his business in Chicago and insist that America has just one President at 
a time. For Obama to succeed, they argued, the country needed to see his 
Inauguration as a clean break, a new sunrise. Others floated the idea of 
immediately starting the First Hundred Days, perhaps asking George W. Bush 
to appoint Obama's choices to key offices so that they could get to work 
by late November. 

Obama was leery of appearing to shoulder responsibility for problems 
before he had any real authority to fix them. Bush's bank of political 
capital was busted, and Obama wasn't about to take ownership of the toxic 
assets. On the other hand, he didn't want to repeat the dysfunctional 
transition of power from Herbert Hoover to Roosevelt in the dark hours of 
the Great Depression. F.D.R.'s silence between his election and his 
Inauguration may have deepened the crisis. By 5 p.m. on Nov. 5, when 
Podesta walked out of that meeting — not 24 hours after the polls closed — 
Obama was far ahead of the normal transition process, having homed in on 
finalists for many of his key staff and Cabinet positions. But he hadn't 
yet decided how public to be about it. 

Within two days, however, events forced his hand. On Friday, Nov. 7, Obama 
convened a meeting of his economic advisers in Chicago, and the tone of 
their comments was chilling. The stock market was plunging; credit 
remained tight; fresh unemployment numbers were shocking. "There was just 
a very dramatic deterioration" in the days after the election, says 
Timothy Geithner, Obama's choice for Treasury Secretary. On previous 
occasions when the group had gathered, someone could always be counted on 
to find potential upsides in dismal forecasts, while Paul Volcker, the 81-
year-old former chairman of the Federal Reserve, reliably closed each 
meeting with a gloomy soliloquy. On this day, though, there was no 
positive scenario for Volcker to deflate. Everyone in the room was grim. 

Obama opened the meeting by reflecting on his dilemma: act now or wait 
until January? By the end of the session, he had concluded that, like it 
or not, he must "accelerate all of our timetables," as he put it, "in 
appointments not just on the Cabinet but also our White House team, in 
structuring economic plans so that we can start getting them to Congress 
and hopefully begin work — even before I'm sworn in — on some of our key 
priorities around the economy, on laying the groundwork for a national-
security team that can take the baton in a wartime transition." There was 
no time for the "traditional postelection holiday." Vacations would have 
to wait until Christmas. 

Transition is such a gentle word. We make the transition from youth to 
adulthood or from the dinner table to the den. For Obama, though, the 
concept was freighted with danger. "He was very focused on the basic 
perils of the gap between the election and the Inauguration, at a time 
when the economy was clearly deteriorating and the markets were very 
fragile," Geithner explains. In certain powerful respects, Obama felt 
compelled to begin his presidency immediately. Markets needed to size up 
his economic team and hear what he planned to do. Congressional leaders, 
contemplating a colossal economic-stimulus package, needed to know where 
he was headed. Military leaders, key allies and opportunistic enemies were 
all keen to know just how dovish the anti-Iraq-war President intended to 
be. Obama concluded that hanging back would create a dangerous leadership 
void in the short-term and compound his troubles come January. And nothing 
that has happened since that Nov. 7 decision — the crisis at Citigroup, 
the drama of the automakers or the assault on Mumbai — has made the 
transfer of power look any less perilous. 

He could not have predicted when he set out to become President that he 
would face such circumstances. The distance from the birth of his campaign 
to these first days of his fledgling presidency could be counted in months 
but measured in light-years. When he announced his candidacy on a frigid 
morning in Springfield, Ill., in 2007, Iraq was a disaster, and the Dow 
was still headed upward past 14,000. So this moment was a test not only of 
his speed but also of his flexibility. Obama proved lithe, indeed, 
persuading Robert Gates, Bush's Secretary of Defense, to remain in his 
post and asking Clinton, a constant critic of Obama's foreign policy views 
during their primary battle, to be his Secretary of State. Priority 1 was 
the economic team, however. There his task was to find a mix of people 
familiar enough to signal stability but fresh enough to promise change, 
and to design a stimulus strategy dramatic enough to inspire markets to 
swallow their panic. 

See pictures of Obama's White House team.
http://tinyurl.com/3hbha5
 
In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Obama delivered. Having promised 
to govern from the middle, he rolled out a bright purple team of economic 
advisers, neither red nor blue. Geithner had served in various posts under 
both Bush and Bill Clinton. As president of the New York Fed, he was well 
known to Wall Street but relatively unknown on Main Street — just the 
blend of experience and newness that Obama was seeking. His budget 
director, Peter Orszag, had fans across the political spectrum, and his in-
house oracle, Volcker, was a Democrat who fought inflation alongside 
Ronald Reagan. Larry Summers, named to run the economics team from the 
White House, was a Clinton stalwart. 

Unveiling these and other picks at a series of daily press conferences, 
Obama assured the public that he wanted to move fast, so fast that 
trainloads of money might be ready for him to dispatch across the country 
with a stroke of his pen on Inauguration Day. The idea of another wave of 
spending horrifies America's surviving conservatives, but most economists 
support it — some with enthusiasm, some with resignation. Obama realized 
that the stimulus package could be a vehicle for launching his broad 
domestic agenda. His ambitious campaign promises — to reform health care, 
cut taxes for low- and moderate-income earners and steer the U.S. toward a 
new energy economy — had seemed doomed by the yawning budget deficit (some 
$200 billion a month, according to the latest projections). But call these 
projects "stimulus," and suddenly a ship headed for the reef of economic 
disaster might sail through Congress flying the flag of economic recovery. 
With even Republican economists talking about hundreds of billions in new 
spending, the sky's the limit. A dream of health-care reformers — 
electronic medical records — is now economic stimulus because Obama will 
pour money into hospitals for computers and clerical workers. His tax cut 
is stimulus because it puts spending money in the pockets of working 
Americans. His pledge to repair the nation's infrastructure is a stimulus 
plan for construction workers, while his energy strategy is stimulus for 
the people who will modernize government buildings, update public schools 
and improve the electrical grid. 

Of course, the bullet points are easy to list; far harder is the task of 
spending vast sums — perhaps $1 trillion over two years — efficiently, 
effectively and quickly enough to spur the economy. Washington's three 
goblins — waste, fraud and abuse — are watching with hungry eyes. Obama 
has cast Orszag as a flinty keeper of the purse strings, but he has no 
intention of letting his opportunity go by. "I don't think that Americans 
want hubris from their next President," Obama says, noting that McCain 
received nearly 47% of the vote last month. However, "I do think that we 
received a strong mandate for change. And I know that people have 
said, 'Well, what does this change word mean? You know that it's sort of 
ill defined.' Actually, we defined it pretty precisely during the 
campaign, and I'm trying to define it further for people during this 
transition," he says. "It means a government that is not ideologically 
driven. It means a government that is competent. It means a government, 
most importantly, that is focused day in, day out on the needs and 
struggles, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people." 

IV. Into the Breach

More than 75 years ago, a new president took the oath of office amid 
economic catastrophe and admonished the nation that "the only thing we 
have to fear is fear itself." Today generations of Americans are 
experiencing a harsh tutorial in the true meaning of that resonant 
diagnosis. Fear is kryptonite to the economy, which cannot operate 
efficiently without broad and well-founded confidence — that wise 
investments will gain value, that balance sheets mean what they say, that 
contracts will be honored and bills paid. 

The events of the past autumn produced the sharpest drop in consumer 
confidence ever recorded, and a similar wave of fear cratered credit 
markets. Obama notes the very real structural flaws in the economy, but he 
is also aware of the role that fear plays. "Nobody trusts other people's 
books anymore. And people decide, 'Well, I'm just going to hold on to my 
cash for a while,'" he explains. "And that compounds the crisis. And all 
that results in a contraction in lending, in consumer spending, which then 
has a real impact on Main Street. And so what starts off as psychological 
is now very real." 

Just like our banks and our carmakers, America's shattered confidence is 
in serious need of a bailout. And the thing about competence is that it 
nourishes fresh confidence. "Yes, we can" is both an affirmation of 
optimism and the essential claim of the competent. When the slogan is 
rooted in a record of accomplishment — when tomorrow's yes-we-can is 
backed up by yesterday's yes-we-did — confidence and competence begin to 
feed on each other. This virtuous cycle of possibility isn't the whole of 
leadership, but it is an important part and perhaps the element most 
needed in today's sea of troubles.

After the election, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart convened one 
last focus group to ask Virginia voters why a state that gave Bush an 8-
point victory four years ago chose Obama by 6 points this time. Their 
responses clustered around the crucial connection between competence and 
confidence. They told Hart they were drawn to Obama's self-assured and 
calming personality. They felt he was "honest," a "straight shooter" — in 
other words, a person who does what he says he will do. Their confidence 
in Obama wasn't starry-eyed; they hadn't been swept away by his stadium 
speeches. They saw a man who can get some things done, at a time when so 
many of their leaders, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street, cannot. He 
made moderates feel hopeful, and even among many core Republicans who did 
not ultimately vote for him, Obama inspired admiration. Viewing these 
comments through the results of his national surveys, Hart discerned a 
surge of good feeling that he had not seen in a generation: "a sense of 
real hope," he says, "and the kind of broad bipartisan support that has 
not been in evidence since the 1980 Reagan election." 

Obama has begun to turn his thoughts to his Inaugural Address. According 
to strategist Axelrod, he is looking for the right mixture of bracing and 
boost in a speech that will be "both sober and hopeful." He may signal a 
new day by announcing a plan to stem the foreclosure crisis, which aides 
say is in the works. As the gray Chicago sky frowns outside his conference-
room window, Obama rehearses his message. Americans "should anticipate 
that 2009 is going to be a tough year," he says. Then he adds, "If we make 
some good choices, I'm confident that we can limit some of the damage in 
2009. And that in 2010 we can start seeing an upward trajectory on the 
economy." 

A few days after this interview, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich 
reminded the country that some aspects of politics will never change. 
Government is a human enterprise, after all, and Obama, like everyone 
else, is bound by its limits and subject to human frailty. Nevertheless, 
if he has shown anything this year, Obama has made it clear that he knows 
how to write new playbooks and do things in new ways. Which is a 
compelling quality right now. His arrival on the scene feels like a step 
into the next century — his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his 
world is networked, and his spirit is democratic. Perhaps it takes a new 
face to see the promise in a future that now looks dark. What's in store 
for Obama's America? "I don't have a crystal ball," he says. But the 
measure of his success in menacing times can be found in the number and 
variety of people who consider the question with eagerness alongside their 
dread.

------------------------------------------------------------

Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

Barack the House!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNle_402RY0






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