I posted a bit ago about our president-elect and the seeming continuity in foreign policy with “Bush-McCain” policies… and was roundly rejected by one of my closer friends for intimating that maybe, just maybe, Obama’s talk of change was ringing hollow. Perhaps I went overboard? Perhaps I was grasping for something to write about? Ah, but there’s more evidence that the “change” some of us have sought from “politics as usual” is not actually coming. But let me backtrack a bit.

One of the things (IMO) that got the press enamored with Obama — just as it had years before with McCain, prior to his campaign’s drastic leash-tightening — was his seeming penchant to speak at length about whatever was asked. Sure, he sidestepped some things, but Obama generally gave much more detailed, thoughtful answers than his competitors in a soundbite, CYA atmosphere. He also vowed greater transparency in government, and often urged the Bush White House to come clean with the American people about the topic of the day. (Note, please, that I think those sentiments a fine idea, part of the most attractive aspect of Obama ‘08.)

In the face of the scandal involving his governor and his Senate seat, however, Obama is not giving me much hope for the transparency I’ve been waiting for. From Politico:

Obama refused to answer questions about his staff’s involvement with Gov. Rod Blagojevich over filling the vacated Senate seat and whether his successor should now be chosen by appointment or special election.

Obama, speaking to reporters after a news conference announcing his secretary of education, said the internal review he had ordered of his staff’s contacts with Blagojevich was complete but cited the request of the U.S. attorney’s office to hold off on disclosing the results until next week. … Obama flashed some irritation at the line of questioning, cutting off McCormick before he could finish his initial query. [bold mine-R]

This is the oldest trick in the book, and not a very convincing one. How many times in the past eight years has some White House spokesman refused to answer a legitimate question, citing the need for a “full investigation” or “findings to be disclosed” or some such thing? Journalists will write it, yes, but we don’t buy it for a second; it’s a hollow non-answer, and 99-to-1 a pretty blatant lie. Obama has been sidestepping (or refusing to answer) the Blago questions for more than a week now, despite the repeated assertion that Obama had no role in it and did nothing wrong. Truth be told, even most Republicans don’t think Obama was in the middle of Rod’s insane shenanigans, but it portends “more of the same” to hear Obama using the “we need to wait until the investigation is complete” line.

The state of education: Obama’s pick for Education Secretary needs to watch his pronouns:

“I want to thank our mutual friend John Rogers who has been a mentor and friend to me since I was ten years old. He gave my sister and I the opportunity to start a great school in the South side of Chicago…”

Do you see what I see?

Dick Cavett is still awesome: He writes an occasional blog for the Times; this installment is on the Senate Seat Salesman himself:

The question overhanging this sordid mess, you might agree, is, “How did such a specimen ever get elected?”

It’s as if a soldier, tested for his fitness as potential combat leader, passed his physical despite scurvy, pyorrhea, Jake leg, leprosy, the quinsy, contagious influenza and at least two trick knees.

(We all know from childhood that it’s not nice to make fun of people’s appearance. So I will confine myself to merely observing that whatever covers the governor’s head looks to me like a bowling-ball cozy.)

(Hat tip to my wife for the clever title of this post.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8GOrc0-Ygg[/youtube]

Obama and his team of rivals, proving that blue is the new black.

Though you probably figured it out already, I cast my presidential vote for Barack Obama. I didn’t get too caught up in the hype, but was mainly voting for a.) a change in the demeanor of politics in general (a man who doesn’t answer debate questions with soundbites wins? Whoda thunk it?) and b.) a “change” in our nation’s approach to foreign policy.

Well, it looks like I can chalk that second one up to buyer’s remorse.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Obama’s temperament and (seeming) interest in reasoned discourse instead of steadfast ideology is going to serve us much better than McCain’s hard-nosed, “We must always WIN” attitude. But based on Obama’s newly named foreign policy team, I think that (where foreign policy is concerned) we were sold a decidedly false bill of goods. Consider:

Robert Gates, current secretary of defense, who will stick around, despite his earlier saying that he probably wouldn’t.

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Oh, how I wish I had been fortunate enough to have a presidential candidate walk into my front yard. And have it taped by the media. And have my named mentioned 20 times during a debate. If it had been me, maybe I could have “secured my dream.”

As it stands, it’s not me — it’s Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber. I’d already heard he’d secured an agent in Nashville for a country music career; turns out, that’s not the half of it. Over at SecureOurDream.com, Joe’s not only blogging, but shilling a book that he won’t be writing a word of hasn’t written yet, AND a $14.95 subscription to the Joe the Plumber fan club.

The design is awful (though it’s noted that “SECUREOURDREAM.COM VERSION-2 [why the hyphen?] COMING SOON”), and the blog post too innocuous to really get rabid pro-plumber conservatives on their feet:

Congratulations to Barack Obama. The American electorate has decided that he will be our next president. As I have stated, I will honor and support my president, but there will be no free ride. When President-Elect Obama takes office in January, his term of service to the American people begins. We wish our new president blessings of wisdom and good judgment, and we pray he hearkens to our voice if ever we feel our American Dream is being threatened. It will be a loud voice, so good luck trying to ignore it.

None of the links go anywhere, really, except to “coming soon” or more ads for the book. My friend Adam notes that this is probably about a month too late… who really cares about Joe the Plumber at this point? I do think, however, that he might make a good sitcom star — the straight-laced, hard-luck husband whose wife is always getting into shenanigans and whose friends are always looking to him for advice. He’d definitely be as good as Jeff Foxworthy, right?

Doing things in reverse today, first the punchline: The always pointed Daniel Larison (of The American Conservative) explains Palinonics — the method of decoding the governor’s record-breaking run-on sentences.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

“Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.”

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely … Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.

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Another trip to Louisville, another visit with my sister-in-law. She’s really awesome, and of some importance in the GOP of that quite large metropolitan city. She has no problem talking about the faults and flaws of her GOP colleagues locally, and even on a statewide level. However, she’s still under the illusion that Sarah Palin was unfairly “railroaded” by the media. So, as a member (albeit a lowly one) of “the media,” I feel compelled to explain that while “media bias” exists, it’s not really equivalent to what Republican propaganda has long made it out to be.

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This weekend was the fifth anniversary of my marriage to the most all-around awesome woman I’ve ever met. To celebrate, we left the kids with her parents and headed to Cincinnati for a trip to the Gap Clearance Center (jeans for as little as $5?!), Ikea, the Apple Store (where I walked out with a brand new computer — at no cost — as a replacement for mine, which didn’t make it through drowning, as I thought it had and mentioned in the previous post) and more. Before we headed to Ohio, though, I got into a telling conversation with her dad.

I was never sure if he’d seen my Obama bumper sticker, which I’d placed on my car a couple months ago after deciding he was such a better choice for president that I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Anyway, out of the blue he asked me how much Obama’s tax plans would hurt my business (I own a coffeeshop, for those of you who don’t know). I told him it wouldn’t affect me at all, and he looked at me in some disbelief. 

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First off, apologies for the delay in writing about the election. When it was all said and done, I found myself at first paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the moment, and since then so full of thoughts that it was impossible to make much sense of them. I still feel a bit like that, but I’m going to attempt a cohesive thread.

The Obamas: Putting the "first" into the First Family

That Barack Obama won so handily came as no surprise to me (though the electoral numbers ended up even a bit bigger than the most positive polling suggested), given his message and the real wants and needs of mainstream America — not to mention the audacious atrocity that was the McCain campaign. For months, however, the actual narrative of Obama’s journey has been lost in the details (of attack ads and policy pronouncements, gotchas and gaffes, pitbulls and plumbers). It reared its head again on Tuesday as soon as the first results starting coming in, and it is this: Americans have elected a black man as president, and (in modern terms, at least) by a landslide. But a sad truth is that the epochal nature of this moment hasn’t hit everyone — in fact, I’ve talked to a number of people here in southcentral Kentucky who either don’t recognize what a moment this is or who cynically dismiss it as being of little real importance.

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From Rupert “Fox News” Murdoch’s New York Post, with full story, at 9:50 p.m.:

I’ll be doing that here. Check in early and often, and look for the headlines that begin with “SPIN ROOM,” because those are mine.

First, let’s note that John McCain could win. It doesn’t look likely, and if the polls are correct it’s 98 percent impossible. But he could, and if he does, I’ll be as surprised as anyone and be thrust into rethinking a lot of assumptions I’m now carrying around. And with that out of the way, my thoughts on Election Eve.

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