SmartRemarks

President Obama has the useful political skill of being a chameleon of sorts, looking different depending on context and, especially, the eye of the beholder. By and large this has worked for him; he and his programs are more popular now than when he was elected. All the same, there’s been a great deal of media attention lately to a backlash of sorts against the Obama administration. Most of it comes from the usual suspects, fire-breathers like Rush Limbaugh and his CPAC cohorts. They charge that Obama is doing exactly what he promised (horrors!) and it’s even worse than they expected, and isn’t it terrible how this rush toward Euro-style socialism will be the ruin of this country? We can easily enough dismiss these types as right-wingers who never supported him and never would under any circumstances, and who are too busy right now presiding over the self-destruction of the Republican party to do any great harm.

Some of the criticism is a little more temperate, though… and comes from factions of the right who did at least conditionally support Obama. They’re now arguing that he isn’t what they took him to be, since they thought he was A Moderate Like Them, when in fact he’s A Radical Ideologue. The most prominent invocation of this argument recently showed up in a piece by David Brooks, one of the New York Times‘ pet conservative columnists. He starts by drawing conclusions pretty much the diametrical opposite of my own (and most other analysts’) about Obama’s proposed budget, and veers off wildly from there: Read the rest of this entry »

For those of us who are less than thrilled by the prospect that Hillary Clinton might get the nod as Obama’s Secretary of State (IMHO she represents the compromised politics of the ’90s… and the endorsement by Henry Kissinger certainly didn’t make her any more appealing), it appears that there might be more obstacles to the appointment than just the process of vetting Bill Clinton. Read the rest of this entry »

So, who will Barack Obama appoint to the cabinet and other key positions in his incoming administration?

To stipulate something up front: nobody really knows. When Obama and his transition team are ready to make announcements, they’ll announce them. All we can do at this point is speculate.

So, let’s speculate!

Read the rest of this entry »