Joe Conason

When the journalistic pack bites into a tasty cliché they often refuse to let go, lazily chewing and regurgitating a phrase like “team of rivals” long after the flavor is gone. Derived from the Doris Kearns Goodwin book on Lincoln’s cabinet, that morsel had scant relevance to the cabinet being assembled by Barack Obama, as the president-elect bravely tried to explain when he introduced his national security team.

But as Mr. Obama learned many months ago, our leading media minds tend to be far less interested in real ideas and policies than in a fixed narrative about personalities. So his decision to nominate primary rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, with all the friction that would supposedly generate, became the focus of the news.  read more »

The Gates debate is over, but Barack Obama's decision to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates upset many of the president-elect's progressive supporters -- including Chris Bowers of Open Left, usually a very astute analyst, and my friend Greg Sargent at TPM. But their objections seem to be based on a misunderstanding of both Gates himself and of the Defense Secretary's likely role in an Obama administration. As I noted earlier, Gates represents anything but a reprise of the awful neoconservative policies of the Bush years and his reappointment doesn't signify Bush's third term. On questions of military action and defense spending, he will carry out the wishes of the commander in chief -- on issues that they have presumably discussed already as well as others yet to arise -- or else he will resign.  read more »

While Barack Obama introduced the first members of his economic team, a wailing noise could be heard somewhere in the background. That was the sound of complaining liberals, who worry that the president-elect is already surrendering the progressive moment to centrists—the kind of post-election disappointment with which they are all too familiar.

Looking over the names of the new Obama appointees to important positions in the Treasury and the White House, critics on the left have dismissed them as “Clintonite retreads” or worse. According to this gloomy analysis, the incoming administration is poised to repeat the mistakes of the past rather than create new policy for the future, by staffing itself with economists wedded to old ideologies of deregulation and budget-balancing, rather than government intervention and public investment.  read more »

When the children of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy came to the family dinner table every evening, they were expected to know a poem by heart. So it was fitting when his daughter Kerry recited a classic poem of Langston Hughes this morning, at the marvelous ceremony rededicating the former Triborough Bridge in her father's name.

That poem concludes ''Let America be America again''—and there was a powerful sense of that possibility in the remarks delivered by Kerry, her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former President Bill Clinton, and M.T.A. chairman Lee Sander.

Especially moving were the comments of Gov.  read more »

As Barack Obama makes his way through the transition to power, he is learning the steps of an old dance. Having promised change, he now surrounds himself with experience. Having poured scorn not only on the Bush administration but at times on the Clinton administration as well, he now welcomes those who served his Democratic predecessor, including the former first lady who ran against him. And having roundly denounced current foreign and military policies, he may very well ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in place.

While Mr. Obama displays both confidence and maturity in embracing his former adversaries, he must expect cries of outrage and disappointment from his own supporters.  read more »

Why would Barack Obama invite Hillary Clinton into a serious discussion of her potential appointment as secretary of state without reaching his own conclusions about the risks and benefits of that possibility? That seems frivolous and foolish, neither of which describe the manner in which the president-elect is conducting the transition. Unless he has made his first big mistake, the likelihood is that he and his team were prepared to make the offer before they contacted her.

Certainly Mr. Obama has had plenty of time to mull over the issues surrounding that appointment, including the role of the former president who happens to be married to Senator Clinton.  read more »

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story—touted as one of the year’s very best political documentaries when it played at the Democratic and Republican conventions earlier this year—aired on PBS Frontline last night. Yes, I ought to have mentioned that before airtime rather than a day late, especially because most readers surely missed its theatrical run. But happily PBS will air the film again this week. In New York it will appear on WNET again next Saturday and on WLIW throughout the week. For airtimes on all local stations, check the Frontline page on the PBS website, which includes a handy zipcode widget.  read more »

While the ultimate occupants of three United States Senate seats are yet to be determined in Alaska, Georgia, and Minnesota, chances seem small that Democrats will increase their new majority to 60 seats – the supermajority that insures against a successful filibuster. So the same Republicans who once complained about the use of that legislative weapon by the opposition now brandish it in warning to President-elect Barack Obama.

Nobody can doubt that the Republican remnant in the Senate will obstruct as soon as that seems politically safe. Right-wing pundits, from Rush Limbaugh to the Wall Street Journal editorial page are already egging them on furiously.  read more »

Today’s Salon column examines the pretensions of the Rove generation of conservative activists – and how the “emerging Democratic majority” predicted six years ago brought those great expectations to grief.

What have our dear wingers learned from this sobering experience? There’s a deep lesson for them in the public rejection of Sarah Palin, but they don’t seem to be getting it.  read more »

The best single essay on the conservative betrayal of their own intellectual tradition -- and its ultimate expression in the Palin fiasco -- appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition. Singling out the editors of the Weekly Standard and the National Review, Mark Lilla

The New York Times features an exhaustive report today on the feuding between the McCain and Palin camps, but it is best savored while listening to Carl Cameron of Fox News Channel, who finally spills what he has been hearing for months from McCain insiders or "folks" as he calls them. This quote proves that Cameron has an unappreciated talent for understatement:

We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – that being Canada, the US and Mexico. And we’re told she didn’t understand that Africa is a continent rather than just a country just in itself – a whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability.  read more »

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