As some of you guessed, I am in San Diego. I just got done attending a few panels, and since all I had for breakfast was some yogurt and a coffee, and I have a party with finger food to attend at eight, thought I would have a late lunch ocean side. I ended up having ceviche tostada, a half-dozen raw oysters, and two mojito’s. It was, without question, excellent. I have some pictures, but for whatever reason, I can not resize them. I also took some photos of the Midway.
The panels I went to were amusing- they examined the rhetoric of the election, and especially after having just finished Bacevich’s book (review coming, I swear) and having my eyes opened to how well and truly screwed the nation is, and at a fundamental level, I snorted several times when the panelists referred to Obama as a tranformative figure and decidedly liberal. I swear to God the only people on the planet who have figured out that Obama is a rather mainstream moderate, center-left on some issues, center-right on others, but definitely not a wildly transformative character, are me and Daniel Larison. I seriously am beginning to think, reading some of the lefty blogs lately, that the only people who thought Obama was a radical liberal were the National Journal, a few talk radio hosts, and the progressive wing of the party. Obama has never once showed any inclination to up-end the establishment, he has consistently worked through the establishment. Harvard Law Review, anyone? Con. Law prof at the University of Chicago? This is not Ward Churchill we are talking about, folks.
Look at his picks for his cabinet. Thirty years ago when the country had not been near destroyed by three decades of brutal beatings from the Overton window, Obama might possibly have run as a Republican. As I had hoped, he is going to move slowly on gays in the military, so that he can build a consensus, which is good for a number of reasons. First, going about this methodically will not create an anti-gay backlash, leading to all sorts of shenanigans. It will let the folks most inclined to oppose the overturning of the rule become the actual change agents. Finally, the reversal will stand, as it was not just something the flaming liberal new President overturned just because he could, and future Republican administrations will not feel the need to change it back on the first day of their administration.
Say what you want about the way his election was run, because that truly was transformative. Elections will never be the same after the campaign Team Obama ran. But if you really think Obama is a screeching liberal, you haven’t been paying attention and are going to be really upset. They guy is a technocratic pragmatist, he is cool and calculating and calm, and he shrewdly picks his battles. Folks like Larison, and, most definitely Bacevich, worry he is entirely too establishment. I think he is the best we have, so we go with him
A Different Matt
Hey! I’m in San Diego! We should hang out!
You got cable in your hotel room?
JPL
Also in San Diego.
And yeah, you’re right, Obama could have run as a Republican. The thing that gets me down about Lieberman and worried about Obama not acting to restore our civil liberties soon is that I wish I could have voted for a Democrat this election.
Penny Lane
You should contact photo maestro and super hottie Al Rodgers over at DKos for your picture problems.
JL
John said
IMO Obama would be a master chess player.
randiego
Hmm, a ceviche tostada near the Midway. Were you at Anthony’s or Fish Market? You can do SO MUCH better…
Which hotel? If you’re in the Gaslamp, go to The Local at 1045 4th Ave. Authentic lobster and fish tacos, and great local beers on tap.
Ugh
Nooooooooooooo!!
TEH ONE IZ TOO BEEZ DEELIVERING MEES THE HEADZ OF TEH CAPITALEESTS!!
pout
cybergal619
Welcome to our great city!
Penny Lane
Grand Master
Semanticleo
Obama has apparently taken Doris Kearns Goodwins book
"team of Rivals" as a blueprint Abrahamic transformation.
On the lighter side, this ‘wisdom of crowds’ theoretician
has taken leave of his heuristic senses…….
Read and enjoy…………
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/11/barack-obama-and-wisdom-of-crowds.html
Semanticleo
Comments with links go to moderation, A newbie asks….?
Tattoosydney
Does this mean we won’t be getting our ponies?
JC
You should go see this band called Pocket @ Portugalia in O.B. They absolutely kill the acid jazz and it’s only $5
I film and record them (FOR FREE) every chance I get cause they kill it. All instrumental with an even mix of originals and covers.
Start on track 7 of the first set and if they don’t completely mesmerize you in a couple of tracks then they aren’t for you.
If they are it’s a cheap cab ride from downtown and O.B. is a little hippy community by the beach.
Enjoy your trip regardless.
Brain Hertz
"Screeching liberal"? Well, no. But at this stage of the game, merely selecting competent people for cabinet posts is pretty transformative. I’m ok with that…
Steve
If you get a chance, there’s a little Mexican restaurant here that I still miss seven years after leaving San Diego.
JGabriel
John Cole:
I was going to say something snarky about that, but then I realized I was just jealous. Glad you’re enjoying yourself.
You can’t be the only ones. Hell, I initially supported Clinton over Obama exactly because I thought he was even more centrist than she was – and I’m not the only one who felt that way. (And, yes, I had changed my support by the end of the primaries and was glad Obama won.)
As for the continuing perception by many people that Obama is some sort of far-left socialist or liberal, I guess that just goes to prove the power of right wing rhetoric and memes to keep shifting the Overton Window.
Matt
They will figure it out sooner or later. I predict the traffic on this post will spike again sometime in the next two or three years… meaning later.
burnspbesq
San Diegans,
Does Kansas City Barbeque (the place where the bar scenes in Top Gun were shot) still exist? That place was fun.
Tiparillo
Wait I thought he was a Marxist, Leninist socialist? A radical leftist?
But seriously, if he can deliver on healthcare and energy policy he will be transformational – maybe not in the way that people you mean it in the post – but see how the political landscape is transformed if these changes happen.
JGabriel
Hep me, I’ve been modereratered!
(No idea why. As far as I can tell, the post in question is completly free of any fucking cuss words or pharmaceutical references.)
.
Brachiator
Of course, part of the fun here is that some of the people who feel this way have not presented any detailed or coherent vision of exactly what a "transformed" America might look like. They assume that there everybody agrees what a lefty president would look like and how such a lefty candidate would govern, but aside from cloudy fantasies of the land of the magical unity pony and maybe the hope of universal health care, there is not much consensus about a legislative agenda.
In addition to this, I get the distinct impression that the they lefties looking for a "transformative figure" live in a fantasy land in which the country and the world is not spiraling towards a depression.
Please, someone, buy these jokers a clue.
kay
Obama was always right out there with what he is. I have no idea why anyone who followed the primary thought he was a committed Lefty.
My father voted for him, in both the primary and the general, because he liked his temperament.
My father thinks "steady" is a rare thing, and maybe it is.
Remember when the media finally got it? Something that millions of primary voters had picked up all by themselves?
It took until the Wall Street debacle. The media then discovered!!!! that Obama had a fine, even temperament, although they’d been following him around for 20 months.
Not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Tattoosydney
Welcome to my world. While I hate to keep banging on about Australia, it’s what I know best, and it means I don’t have to make relatively uninformed statements about the US…
We are just coming up to the first anniversary of our election of a new Labor government, after 11 years of "Liberal" (read: conservative) government.
John Howard’s government was anti gay, hardline "ship them back where they came from" on immigration, tried to eviscerate employee rights and spent the last decade with its nose attached to a particularly unpleasant part of George W. Bush’s anatomy.
Finally, 12 months ago, the Australian population said "enough", and kicked the bums out.
Kevin Rudd, our current prime minister, is pragmatic and calm and not driven by any discernable ideology. He certainly doesn’t fit the liberal leftie mold. I’d much prefer a Prime Minister who had swept into office and implemented all those good lefty policies that I support. However, after 11 years of corrupt, nasty, soulless, entirely self interested right wing government, it’s enough that there is a competent person in charge who wants to make things better.
I look at Kevin Rudd, and think "Not John Howard", and that’s more than enough.
Obama is your "Not George W. Bush". He’s a lot more talented a politician than our Kevin, and so I suspect he will be more than just that, but that’s a pretty good start…
Genine
I think Obama is progressive in that his methods and policies actually make progress.
I am extremely liberal and progressive but, at the same time, I am very practical. Splintering the country into us vs. them isn’t a good way to go and isn’t sustainable for change. Like you said, he could overturn DADT and then the next Republican administration will quickly overturn it.
Building consensus is the key to making true progress. Because if we run over conservatives any victories will be short-lived as the other side will seethe, plot their revenge and make things go more extreme the other way when they get into power.
The polarizing needs to end. You’re going to have douchebags on both side, but the rest of us can move ahead. The combination of a disasters of this current administration and the deft skills of Team Obama has moved the center of the country a little to the left.
That’s change I can believe in.
Mike
You mean there are people who haven’t figured out that Obama had relationships with Ayers and Wright precisely because both of those guys were important members of the Chicago establishment?
Tiparillo
I have no idea why anyone who followed the primary thought he was a committed Lefty.
Because "I was against the Iraq war from the beginning" = "Committed Lefty" to many
evie
Of course he’s a cool pragmatist. But he is also an unabashed progressive. It always cracked me up to hear people talk about how Clinton was a "liberal" (in the way people use it as a pejorative), but Obama was not.
He is a liberal. He believes in health care for everyone, justice meted out fairly, helping people to lift themselves up. He believes in government that works for the people. (The list goes on and on… he is against "dumb wars," is for women’s reproductive rights and believes we should have common-sense gun laws.) Those — and many, many other similar ones — are liberal all beliefs and he holds them dear. Just because he has a gift of being able to talk about those beliefs in ways that are non-threatening to non-liberals, does not mean he is not a liberal. He is.
When I first moved to Chicago from California five years ago, one of the first things I did was look at the field of Democrats running for the Senate in this state. I was a complete transplant and hadn’t heard of any of them. I was sold on Obama before the primary because of things like what he did to get videotaped interrogations in capital cases. Understand, that’s a decidedly liberal topic, and he managed to get peace officers to rally around it with him. It’s almost unheard of. That’s what he does — he brings people around to a "common sense" point of view. After doing my research, I picked Obama, volunteered for him during the primaries (where his campaign emailed me spreadsheets of names and addresses), and never looked back.
Will he disappoint me? Of course. I’ve been preparing for it for a long time. Probably my first major disappointment was when he fired Power. I still, in fact, dislike how quickly he cuts people loose. I hate his position on gay marriage (which is totally political), disagree about FISA and wildly disagree about what he said after the death penalty for child molesters SCOTUS ruling. But you know what? I trust him to do the right thing more often than not and know that at his core, he is a true progressive.
The laugh is going to be when conservatives embrace his positions because they are "common sense." Not liberal.
Geoduck
I also agree about Obama, which is why I think, despite his many gifts, he isn’t going to get much accomplished. He’s gonna try and methodically plaster his carefully-crafted band-aids over a collection of gaping stab-wounds. (He would have been a great choice back in 2000..)
Josh Hueco
14,000 posts!
Brachiator
@Geoduck:
What is it that you want done or would like to see accomplished?
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
That was, of course before the dixiecrats took over the Republican party. The Eisenhower administration would have been far preferable to Bush II.
Comrade Stuck
@kay:
The one and only thing he has said or shown to this point, is a commitment to results. It is what he has repeated ad infinitum throughout his campaign and so far shown in his appointments. His entire focus has been laser like for what’s best for the middle class and a decent treatment of the poor. It is core democratic values. Not necessarily out of liberal ideology but with the constant measuring stick of what is best for the country to work for the long term. Sometimes his proposed and hinted at policies fit into liberal doctrine and sometimes not. It’s going to piss off both the left and right and I suspect he is going to go all out to install his major proposals early on. If those polices actually work , then the large and largely silent middle will sustain him. Stay tuned.
maxbaer (not the original)
Bacevich’s book is one of many good ones put out by the American Empire Project. Also good are the Chalmers Johnson trilogy, Robert Dreyfuss’ "Devil’s Game" and Greg Grandin’s "Empire’s Workshop."
Hopefully, the powers that be are listening to people like Johnson and Bacevich. These are guys who have come in from the cold. They were part of the MI complex. They’re not as easy to ignore as the DFH’s like Chomsky and Zinn.
BombIranForChrist
Yeah, my eyes opened with the FISA vote.
He flagrantly flipflopped on this issue, choosing the moderate to center-right position over the progressive left position. He did this in the middle of a heated election, and he rightfully decided that he could turn his back on the progressives and they would still vote for him. He was right.
And he will continue to make this same decision, because he knows the Progressive Left will still support him.
So, if you are a member of the progressive left, prepare to have your feelings hurt … a lot. He’s not your man. He never was.
Melinda
Evie: WTF? Look at where he stands on healthcare, labor, energy, …, and even the right to choose, since you mention it (he’s slapped great big caveats all over his "support"). Obama’s not particularly progressive nor particularly liberal, but he’s a heck of a politician.
My sense of what happened here is that a bunch of not-very-liberal people are calling themselves "progressive" when they aren’t so much, and they see things in Obama that they like a lot and slap the "progressive" label on him, too. So you’ve got a bunch of people who are in basic agreement under the rubric "progressive" while if you look at their positions on the issues they’re basically against the Iraq war but otherwise pretty middle-of-the-road. I’m not too crazy about seeing the label "progressive" co-opted by a movement I see as DLC-aligned on nearly everything except Iraq, but what’s done is done.
Incertus
Yet another way in which Barack Obama was foreshadowed by Howard Dean. I’m starting to think that pragmatism is really liberalism in disguise.
AnneLaurie
San Diego? You gonna spend some time with Tom B, or are you too embarrassed to explain why tbogg isn’t on your blogroll even though you link to it semi-regularly?
ninerdave
@BombIranForChrist:
Yup that was my clue too, not like I thought he was a raging liberal from reading his policies. It will be mildly amusing to watch the hardcore lefties discover that Obama’s not their savior.
Comrade The Other Steve
The only way you can change the establishment is from within. Fighting from the outside just makes your head hurt as you beat against the wall.
Every good super villian muslim extremist knows that.
randiego
Negative – it burned down under questionable circumstances during the summer.
John Cole
WTF. TBOGG was on the links at one point.
This entire conversation in this thread reminds me of the “Your Mumia SweatShirt Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” post, which is still one of the greatest posts ever.
evie
Melinda — you call me not a "real" liberal and I’ll call you a purist enforcer, and then where are we?
If you take a scorecard and check-off all of his positions, he’s a liberal. Because he does not take liberal positions on every single issue out there does not negate the fact of who he is.
slag
Strawman much? Which progressives thought Obama was a radical liberal? Examples required.
Comrade The Other Steve
If you are in San Diego, you must go to what they call Old Town. There is a Mexican restaurant there with outdoor seating that is really good.
But I can’t remember the name. :-)
Comrade The Other Steve
Other than John McCain and Sarah Paling I can’t think of any.
After all, according to the Naderites there’s no difference between a Democrat and a Republican.
Steve
@Comrade The Other Steve:
Old Town Mexican Cafe, probably – they have a pretty big outdoor seating section. Their homemade tortillas are excellent, and their huevos rancheros might be the best hangover food I’ve ever eaten.
Comrade The Other Steve
The term progressive came into vogue in 2001 when everyone thought liberal was a bad word and they didn’t want to be called liberal. so they started calling themselves progressive because they thought people might like them better.
Geoduck
At this point I’ll be happy if we manage to stave off a second Great Depression.
Comrade The Other Steve
I think that’s it! They were excellent!
But then you have to consider the quality of our mexican food here in minnesota. We invented Chi-Chi’s.
Comrade Stuck
@Comrade Stuck:
Actually, there is the number one proposal that will change the entire political pair-a-dine, and that is National Healthcare. Obama’s plan is more incremental than most dems, but it is still going to be the battle Royale between left and right. Once it becomes the law of the land, the last nail in the Conservative Movement coffin will be driven in. It will redraw the political playing field in favor of dems, and change our economic model forever. With businesses, especially small ones, no longer having to worry about this albatross around their necks, it will cause a boon in small businesses across the board, and also help big corporations. At least in the beginning. Later on, paying for it will mean more taxes likely and other problems of delivery and facilitation. Wingnuts will be reduced to braying about socialism and chipping away around the edges. The edges of the voters life and death access to health care.
Litlebritdifrnt
As far as I am concerned if he gets Universal Health Care passed I am happy. There is NOTHING more important IMHO, this country is dying (literally), it behooves the most powerful country in the world to take care of its sick. Anything else is gravy.
JGabriel
Brachiator:
Er, no. I have my doubts as to whether Obama will end up being the "transformative figure" everyone is hoping for, but you’ve the pre-conditions ass-backwards.
A transformative figure can only come along when things are going badly. No one wants to transform things that are working well.
.
Bill H
I live in San Diego. If you get a chance to go to the Old Town Mexican Cafe (yeah, it’s in Old Town) and have carnitas, do not pass that up. You will have to wait for a table, but no matter how long the wait it will be worth it. You can watch the ladies making tortillas, and they, the tortillas not the ladies, are worth the trip.
Screamin' Demon
Perhaps you should keep in mind that the "progressive left" is a fairly small minority.
Look, LBJ was the last liberal president this country’s gonna have for a long goddamn time. Liberalism reached its zenith in 1965, came crashing down to earth less than three years later (thanks to Vietnam), and hasn’t yet recovered four decades later. Idealism is an admirable quality, but it needs to be tempered with a whole lot of patience. We live in an instant society, where everyone wants everything, and they want it now. Obama’s not going to please the "progressive left." He’s not going to introduce a bill mandating same-sex marriage in all fifty states. He’s not going to combat global warming by outlawing the internal combustion engine (and he shouldn’t); hell, he won’t even move fast enough on climate change to make a lot of difference. Change comes gradually, or it doesn’t come at all. I’ve been so dispirited these last eight years that I actually think having a president who can speak in complete sentences is a pretty goddamned liberal concept, and a good place to begin. I can finally watch a presidential speech without feeling embarrassed for my country.
Melinda
Evie, it’s not about purity, exactly. Being a pragmatist doesn’t change the fact (and it is a fact) that Obama isn’t particularly liberal. Now, you may think that being a liberal isn’t a very good idea for a variety of reasons, including reduced ability to get things done (although I’m unclear, exactly, on why I ought to value getting things done that I think are bad ideas or just bad things), but that makes you less liberal, not more.
Comrade Jake
Agreed, but I also think that in the end, he’s going to have done some pretty goddamned progressive things. And 20 years from now, the GOP is still going to be trying to figure out what bus ran them over.
Incertus
@Comrade The Other Steve: It wasn’t that we thought liberal was a bad word so much as we figured that Limbaugh et al had poisoned the well pretty much over the previous twenty years.
Vincent
I would like to point out that progressive or liberal or whatever is not the same as whatever the ‘far Left’ wants. I consider myself a liberal even if I’m probably more toward the moderate part of the political spectrum. I guess that makes me a center-leftist to the purists out there and therefore not a real liberal. But aren’t I still on the left side of that divide?
I guess my point is there’s no objective criterion here. A liberal Texan is probably going to be more conservative than a liberal Californian but that doesn’t mean they don’t share a set of common values or way of looking at the world even if they disagree on other ones.
Labels are rather meaningless when you get right down to it. You know the ‘progress’ in ‘progressive’? Slow progress is still progress. As long as we’re moving away from Bush’s policies and into a realm of empirical, rational decision-making I don’t care if Obama considers himself a progressive, a libertarian, or a Martian. I just want him to get things done for the people and uphold the values of the Constitution the best he can.
Tymannosourus
Absitively. There will need to be a lot of hand-holding on this… gay or straight hand-holding. Whichever you prefer.
"Don’t ask, don’t tell" has been a band-aid fix on the problem since jump street, and hopefully this will eventually get the real attention it deserves.
The Moar You Know
You should have said where you were going. Us locals could set you up, foodwise, WAY better than the swill you’ll be getting downtown – although it is better than the swill in most of this country.
Sparkletts Water Show
Cheers, Sweetie Darling — Pacific Ocean Cheers — and all that…
But if you are in SD, why is Tunch alone, at home, and not with his
realfoster family for such a long trip away from home?You are nearly Palinesque in your apathy insofar as creatures in your shadow that be suffering.
Be sure to visit the seals at Sea World. They are kyoooooot.
Dennis - SGMM
@Tymannosourus:
Obama aides have already been in consultation with the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which is dedicated to providing legal assistance to service people affected by don’t ask, don’t tell. It isn’t as though he’s forgotten. My guess is that Obama will push it through as a part of a package in Congress designed to increase manpower, retention and readiness. Repealing DADT by executive order would let us in for several years of "Obama hates the troops: he’s making them serve with the homos."
Brick Oven Bill
I think you are reading Barack Obama wrong John. I agree that Obama is a technocratic pragmatist, that he is cool and calculating and calm, and that he shrewdly picks his battles. The thing that I notice is the lack of a paper trail, for a man who should have had a paper trail.
In judging a man, you can tell a lot by his associations. I cannot think of a close professional associate that was willing to speak to Barack’s character, other than those ladies at the shelter who thought he was too skinny, and the Reverend. His past associates avoided the press.
Given his brother, his Aunt, his treatment of Trinity United, the current state of the neighborhoods in which he worked, and his land dealings, my eye sees a pragmatic opportunist crossed with a charismatic demagogue.
In either case, we’ll probably get a chance to see.
Cheer up on the state of the US. The future is very bright.
Hyperion
The problem is that things are so fucked up that he will have to spend a lot of time and effort getting stuff back to where it was in 2001. Like the justice department. And the military. And Afghanistan. And repairing our relations abroad. He’ll hardly have time to do progressive things.
And I don’t like his health plan.
passerby
Echo that Litlebritdifrnt. And the gravy I’m hoping for is to stem the flow of tax money into the Military Industrial Complex and spend it in the US on infrastructure and green energy.
But I agree with Obama that health care is a right and I hope that we get Change that we can believe in on that front…and I’ll go ahead and call it what it would be: Socialized Medicine. (Hell, the bank bailouts amount to Socialized Financing, why not health care ?)
That would place Obama clearly in the "Progressive" column.
kommrade reproductive vigor
In the math of the easily excited 3 black people = A Riot, ergo 1 black person = A Screeching Liberal.
Dennis - SGMM
It will be interesting to see the Republicans tie themselves in knots explaining how socialized finance is good but socialized medicine is bad.
bago
Wow. Wright and Rezko. What a surprise. Highly relevant, also.
Freemark
People just assume because Obama is extremely intelligent and competent he must be liberal.
TheAssInTheHatOnMyCat(Formerly Comrade Tax Analyst)
That’s very well put, so there’s no point in me posting a lengthy spiel here (I think I hear sighs of relief). Just change "extremely liberal" to "fairly liberal" and I’m in complete accord with Genine.
Comrade Reverend Stuck
This comment has been In Moderation for three hours so I’m a gonna repost it.
Actually, there is the number one proposal that will change the entire political pair-a-dine, and that is National Healthcare. Obama’s plan is more incremental than most dems, but it is still going to be the battle Royale between left and right. Once it becomes the law of the land, the last nail in the Conservative Movement coffin will be driven in. It will redraw the political playing field in favor of dems, and change our economic model forever. With businesses, especially small ones, no longer having to worry about this albatross around their necks, it will cause a boon in small businesses across the board, and also help big corporations. At least in the beginning. Later on, paying for it will mean more taxes likely and other problems of delivery and facilitation. Wingnuts will be reduced to braying about socialism and chipping away around the edges. The edges of the voters life and death access to health care.
mclaren
Insightful post, and exactly right. Obama is a coolly pragmatic centrist. Who’d people think we was going to pick for his administration? Bill Clinton ran one of the best-adminstered White Houses in history, with the exception of the health care debacle (he chose Hillary to carry his water on domestic policy — a fatal mistake) and the loathsomely incompetent Louis Freeh, who still deserves to get indicted for murder.
Hillary as Secretary of State makes all kinds of sense. Don’t you folks see what’s going on here? This is so sharp. Okay, I’ll lay for ya…Obama is gonna play good-cop-bad-cop with foreign leaders.
SCENE: INTERROGATION CELL
[Hillary storms in, red-faced with hysteria and pounds her fists on the table]
HILLARY: "I’m gonna nail you to the wall! We’ll bomb your ass! They almost elected me PRESIDENT! I mean it, don’t FUCK WITH ME!"
[OBAMA ENTERS, PUTS HIS HAND ON HILLARY’S SHOULDER]
OBAMA: "Go outside and take a breather, will you?"
[HILLARY STORMS OUT]
OBAMA: "Listen, Ahmadinejad, my partner is crazy. She’s a psycho. I saw her kill one guy with her bare hands, right here in ths room. But if you work with me, I think I can keep her under control. But it’s going to be tough. You’ll need to help me out here… Say, would you like a cigarette? How about a Pepsi?"
[FADE TO BLACK]
Other good reasons for HIllary as Secretary of State come to mind. First, this is probably the price Obama had to pay to get her to swing her supporters his way prior to the Democratic convetion. Well, that’s reasonable, not a bad price to pay at all. After all, no secretary of state has made actually foreign policy since Kissinger. Nowadays policy is made by the NSC and the Prez, so it doesn’t really matter who’s SecState.
Plus, there’s the issue of Hillary as permahawk. Better to have a hard right foreign policy hawk like that inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in. This way, with two of the biggest permahawks in the Democratic party inside Obama’s adminsitration (Biden and Hillary), Obama has ’em both on a leash. If they were both outside his administration, they’d be free to push him much farther toward military solutions than Obama probably wants to go. But this way, with both his superhawks inside the West Wing, he can have his aides muzzle ’em if they get too far out of line in calling for war.
Obama is sharp. I really think he’s got this covered. Didn’t anyone notice how Obama handled the sociopaths currently in the White House when they were making noises about invading Iran 4 months ago? Obama sent Kucinich out to threaten impeachment, and then introduce actual articles of impeachment, as a warning to Cheney and the drunk-driving C student in the Oval Office. Those creeps were trying to make threatening noises about Iran as a way of distracting the Democrats from Cheney & company’s last-minute frenzy of theft and paper-shredding. But Obama outsmarted ’em by using the threat of impeachment to chemakte ’em. Same deal there, good-cop-bad-cop (Kucinich with his impeachment resolutionw as the bad cop in that case, Obama was the good cop).
I’m surprised no one seems to have noticed this stuff. This is the way I’d play it too. Stick and carrot: Hillary comes in and blusters to some foreign leader, then Obama soothes their ruffled feathers. It’s the oldest game in the world…but it works. Plus, like the Godfather, Obama would be well advised to keep his friends close but his enemies on the permahawk end of the Democratic party (like HIllary) closer.
Brick Oven Bill
I’ve employed good cop-bad cop. It is a very effective game plan.
But the two cops need to be on the same team for it to work.
Ha ha.
Bill H
But it is being rebuilt it its original configuration and at the original spot. It may, in fact, be open as we speak.
The house where he boinked Kelly McGillis is still standing. It’s in Oceanside, north of San Diego almost to the Marine base at Camp Pendleton. It’s abandoned and really shabby, but still recognizable.
Ming
Lincoln is rightly famous for the Emancipation Proclamation, but if you look at his positions on slavery prior to that time, he was actually not all that progressive. There were bigger figures in politics in his day that took much stronger anti-slavery stances.
I think Obama is a lot like Lincoln and not at all like Kucinich (bless K’s heart) — he may disappoint a lot of progressives with his willingness to compromise, but he will read and shape the political landscape with a fine eye, achieving lasting, real change. At the same time it’s clear from his stance on the Iraq war, and the way he handles Q&A with specific interest groups, that he’s got the political courage to tell people things they don’t want to hear when that seems best for the country.
John, if you get a chance, take the ferry ride out to Coronado. Not so much to see the island, but just for the ride itself. Preferably at sunset.
teak111+5
old town, good for wandering but not eating. I don’t get the impression you are an exersizer, but if you want a great swim, hit the la jolla cove sat morning. Pretty sure tbogg can show you a good time down in on and he is a good designated driver. Also, apparently sd is the home of extreme beer. Enjoy our little town, john.
Indylib
Excellent suggestion, the view back over downtown SanDog is beautiful from the harbor at night, especially if it’s clear.
If you get the chance, go to Point Loma and see the Cabrillo National Monument, Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery and the Point Loma Light House. The view of the Pacific from there is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.
And John, I know you’re former military, but I don’t know if you still have access to get on base. If you do go check out the aircraft carriers at Coronado. The new ones make the Midway look like a midget and if you can snag an invite on one you can experience something the museum ships cannot offer. The constant hum and vibration of a bazillion pounds of metal and an smell found nowhere else on earth.
Frank
I agree with Brain Hertz. Competence will be transformational.
I would add that moderation and good judgment will be transformational.
So too will be lawful behavior and a sense of justice.
T.Scheisskopf
John, I might like to add that SD is one of the best cities in the world for Sushi. The fish is so fresh there that you can feel it jumping in your stomach.
Mnemosyne
Oh Jesus. Yes, clearly a man with a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood is a secret pro-lifer who’s going to sell us all down the river.
Glidwrith
Welcome to San Diego! I didn’t read most of the comments, but one thing to keep in mind is that "liberal" has been completely conflated with people that want justice, no torture, habeus corpus, clean air and water – in other words anyone who stands in opposition to Bush and the piss poor job he’s done. I don’t know if anyone would recognize a genuine liberal nowadays – we’ve been pushed so far-right that an honest-to-God moderate looks flaming liberal.