Will one of President-elect Barack Obama’s New Year’s resolutions be to quit smoking once and for all?
His good-humored waffling in various interviews about smoking made it plain that Mr. Obama, like many who have vowed to quit at this time of year, had not truly done so.
He told Tom Brokaw of NBC several weeks ago, for example, that he “had stopped” but that “there are times where I’ve fallen off the wagon.” He promised to obey the no-smoking rules in the White House, but whether that meant he would be ducking out the back door for a smoke is not known. His transition team declined to answer any questions about his smoking, past or present, or his efforts to quit.
Antismoking activists would love to see him use his bully pulpit to inspire others to join him in trying to kick the habit, but he has not yet taken up their cause.
The last president to smoke more than occasionally was Gerald R. Ford, who was quite fond of his pipes. Jimmy Carter and both Presidents George Bush were reportedly abstainers, but Bill Clinton liked cigars from time to time, though he may have chewed more than he smoked.
Mr. Obama’s heaviest smoking was seven or eight cigarettes a day, but three was more typical, according to an interview published in the November issue of Men’s Health magazine. In a letter given to reporters before the election, Mr. Obama’s doctor described his smoking history as “intermittent,” and said he had quit several times and was using Nicorette gum, a form of nicotine replacement, “with success.” Mr. Obama was often seen chewing gum during the campaign.
His pattern matches that of millions of other people who have resolved but stumbled in their efforts to give up cigarettes. Today, 21 percent of Americans smoke, down from 28 percent in 1988. Off-again-on-again smoking and serial quitting are common, as is the long-term use of nicotine gum and patches.
“It takes the average smoker 8 to 10 times before he is able to quit successfully,” said Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, director of the Smoking Cessation Leadership Center at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Schroeder said that counseling was helpful, and that if Mr. Obama were his patient, he would urge him to try it, even if only by telephone, toll free at 1-800-QUITNOW (1-800-784-8669). With nicotine replacements and counseling, quit rates at one year are 15 percent to 30 percent, Dr. Schroeder said, about twice that of those who try without help.
But Mr. Obama has apparently been chewing nicotine gum for quite a while. Is it safe? Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, another expert on nicotine addiction from the University of California, San Francisco, said that long-term use of the gum or patches, “if it keeps you off cigarettes, is O.K.”
He said people had the best chances of quitting if they used more than one type of nicotine replacement at the same time — like wearing a patch every day, but also using the gum when cravings took hold.
Studies have found that 5 percent to 10 percent of people who try nicotine replacements were still using them a year later, and nicotine itself appears not to be harmful, except possibly during pregnancy and for people at risk for diabetes, Dr. Benowitz said. The risks of cancer, other lung disease and heart problems come from other chemicals in tobacco smoke.
“If nicotine is harmful, it is a minuscule risk compared to cigarette smoking,” he said. “If people want to continue using gum or patches, and not cigarettes, their health will be enhanced.”
Nicotine can speed up the heart rate somewhat, he said, and it may raise blood pressure slightly. More important, it can reduce the body’s sensitivity to insulin and may aggravate diabetes or prediabetic conditions. It also constricts blood vessels in the skin and may interfere with wound healing.
But still, Dr. Benowitz emphasized, “if the choice is between taking nicotine or smoking, nicotine is far, far better.”
Falling off the wagon is typical. Three months, six months and a year are major milestones, and most people who can quit for a year will be able to stay off cigarettes for good, Dr. Benowitz said. But about 10 percent relapse even after a year or more.
“It’s generally prompted by a stressful situation, when they’re fatigued and they need to concentrate and focus,” Dr. Benowitz said. “Obama talked about that. People are used to having a cigarette in that situation.”
Nicotine is strongly addictive for many people, and withdrawal can leave them irritable, restless, sleepless, depressed and struggling to concentrate. Some experts say it is harder to give up than cocaine or heroin.
“Then there is something called hedonic dysregulation,” Dr. Benowitz said. “It involves pleasure. Nicotine involves dopamine release, which is key in signaling pleasure. When people quit smoking, they don’t experience things they used to like as pleasure. Things are not as much fun as they used to be. It’s something you get over in time.”
People become hooked on nicotine in part because, like alcohol and other addicting drugs, it alters the brain. Some of the changes are long-lasting, and the younger people are when they take up smoking, the stronger their addiction.
“There is increasing evidence that you lay down new neural circuits related to smoking, sort of memory tracks,” Dr. Benowitz said. “Nicotine does it, and other aspects of smoke do, too. Your brain is forever changed.”
Those memory tracks could be hindering Mr. Obama’s efforts to quit. Dr. Schroeder also noted that for someone who smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes a day, as Mr. Obama reportedly did, nicotine replacements may be less helpful because the addiction may be more to the habit than to nicotine.
One of the best things that President-elect Obama has going for him is that he is a jogger.
“There is increasing evidence that if you can exercise, it’s often helpful” in quitting, Dr. Benowitz said. “I hope Obama can still find time to play basketball on a regular basis.”
WASHINGTON — When President-elect Barack Obama went to Israel in July — to the very town, in fact, whose repeated shelling culminated in this weekend’s new fighting in Gaza — he all but endorsed the punishing Israeli attacks now unfolding.
“If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” he told reporters in Sderot, a small city on the edge of Gaza that has been hit repeatedly by rocket fire. “And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”
Now, Mr. Obama’s presidency will begin facing the consequences of just such a counterattack, one of Israel’s deadliest against Palestinians in decades, presenting him with yet another foreign crisis to deal with the moment he steps into the White House on Jan. 20, even as he and his advisers have struggled mightily to focus on the country’s economic problems.
Since his election, Mr. Obama has said little specific about his foreign policy — in contrast to more expansive remarks about the economy. He and his advisers have deferred questions — critics could say, ducked them — by saying that until Jan. 20, only President Bush would speak for the nation as president and commander in chief. “The fact is that there is only one president at a time,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, reiterating a phrase that has become a mantra of the transition. “And that president now is George Bush.”
Mr. Obama, vacationing in Hawaii, talked to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Saturday. “But the Bush administration has to speak for America now,” Mr. Axelrod said. “And it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to opine on these matters.” As the fighting in Gaza shows, however, events in the world do not necessarily wait for Inauguration Day in the United States.
Even before the conflict flared again, India and Pakistan announced troop movements that have raised fears of a military confrontation following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. North Korea scuttled a final agreement on verifying its nuclear dismantlement earlier this month, while Iran continues to stall the international effort to stop its nuclear programs. And there are still two American wars churning in Iraq and Afghanistan. All demand his immediate attention.
Mr. Obama’s election has raised expectations, among allies and enemies alike, that new American policies are forthcoming, putting more pressure on him to signal more quickly what he intends to do. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Mr. Obama has not suggested he has any better ideas than President Bush had to resolve the existential conflict between the Israelis and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza.
“What this does is present the incoming administration with the urgency of a crisis without the capacity to do much about it,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington and author of “The Much Too Promised Land,” a history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. “That’s the worst outcome of what’s happening right now.”
The renewed fighting — and the international condemnation of the scope of Israel’s response — has dashed already limited hopes for quick progress on the peace process that Mr. Bush began in Annapolis, Md., in November 2007. The omission of Hamas from any talks between the Israelis and President Mahmoud Abbas, who controls only the West Bank, had always been a landmine that risked blowing up a difficult and delicate peace process, but so have Israel’s own internal political divisions.
Mr. Obama might have little to gain from setting out an ambitious agenda for an issue as intractable as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But the conflict in Gaza, like the building tensions between India and Pakistan, suggests that he may have no choice. “You can ignore it, you can put it on the back burner, but it will always come up to bite you,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian peace negotiator.
For Mr. Obama, the conundrum is particularly intense since he won election in part on promises of restoring America’s image around the world. He will assume office with high expectations, particularly among Muslims around the world, that he will make an effort at dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Early on as a candidate, Mr. Obama suggested that he did not necessarily oppose negotiations with groups like Hamas, though he spent much of the campaign retreating from that position under fire from critics.
By the time he arrived in Israel in July, he suggested he would not even consider talks without a fundamental shift in Hamas and its behavior, effectively moving his policy much closer to President Bush’s. “In terms of negotiations with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation-state, does not recognize your right to exist, has consistently used terror as a weapon, and is deeply influenced by other countries,” he said then.
Mr. Obama received an intelligence briefing on Sunday and planned to talk late on Sunday to his nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and his choice as national security adviser, James L. Jones, according to a spokeswoman, Brooke Anderson.
One option would be for an Obama administration to respond much more harshly to Israel’s policies, from settlements to strikes like those this weekend, as many in the Arab world and beyond have long urged. On Sunday, though, Mr. Axelrod said the president-elect stood by the remarks he made in the summer and, when asked, noted the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel.
Otherwise, Mr. Obama could try to pressure surrogates to lean on Hamas, including Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza. He can try to build international pressure on Hamas to stop the rocket attacks into Israel. He can try to nurture a peace between Israel and Mr. Abbas on the West Bank, hoping that somehow it spreads to Hamas. All have been tried, and all have failed to avoid new fighting.
“The reality is, what options do we have?” Mr. Miller said.
Obama bristles as the bubble closes inHONOLULU – The media glare, the constant security appendage and the sheer production that has become a morning jog or a hankering for an ice cream cone – it’s been closing in on Barack Obama for some time.
Now the president-elect appears increasingly conscious of the confines of his new position, bristling at the routine demands of press coverage and beginning to chafe at boundaries that are only going to get smaller.
Obama even took the unusual step Friday morning of leaving behind the pool of reporters assigned to follow him, taking his daughters to a nearby water park without them. It was a breach of longstanding protocol between presidents (or presidents-elect) and the media, that a gaggle of reporters representing television, print and wire services is with his motorcade at all times.
Then when reporters finally caught up with Obama at Koko Marina Paradise Deli and he acknowledged them for one of few times since arriving in Hawaii last Saturday, he sounded resigned.
After ordering a tuna melt on 12-grain bread, Obama approached reporters and placed his hand on the shoulder of pool reporter Philip Rucker of The Washington Post, who was scribbling away in his notebook.
“You don't really need to write all that down,” Obama said.
All presidents and would-be presidents struggle with “the bubble” – the security detail and the always-there reporters that impose barriers to any spontaneous interaction with the outside world.
But Obama seems to be struggling particularly hard, particularly early.
As rapid as Obama’s political rise has been, so too has his family’s introduction to the bubble.
Four years ago Obama was an Illinois state senator who was on his way to the U.S. Senate. Next month, he will become one of only a handful of modern presidents who has not endured a similar bubble as a governor or top U.S. official before taking office.
Already, Obama no longer gets out for an impromptu lunch or a haircut. The barber he’s gone to for 15 years now comes to him, and he mostly orders out. Soon Obama likely will be forced to give up the BlackBerry he often kept attached to his hip during the campaign.
“There's still some things we're not adjusted to," Obama said in a “60 Minutes” interview after the election. “You know, the small routines of life that keep you connected, I think some of those are being lost.”
Bill Clinton grew frustrated that he couldn’t go out any time he wanted, and once went Christmas shopping without the pool. After he became president, George W. Bush stopped sending e-mails to his daughters because he didn't want the personal notes to become public one day.
“It’s just hard to know that there’s somebody with you all the time,” said Steve Elmendorf, who was deputy campaign manager for John Kerry in 2004. “Being able to get up and go biking or go for a walk, or hold hands with your wife — everything you do is not just under the scrutiny of the press or the pool.”
For Obama, who received a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate since the practice began, the scrutiny is much more intense.
The glare on his family is shaping up to be unprecedented, both because Obama assumes the presidency amid a 24-hour, Web-dominated media age where many traditional boundaries don’t exist and because of what he represents. He’s the first African-American to be elected president. At 47, he’s a young guy – as presidents go. He also has a youthful, attractive family that is social and active.
During the first week in Hawaii, Obama has had to deal with paparazzi waiting in the distance, photographing him shirtless outside his beachfront vacation home and later while spreading his grandmother’s ashes at the Pacific coast.
And even though the pool photographers remained out of sight and without an image of these private moments, Obama seems to be tiring of the journalists who have followed him daily since the campaign.
“OK, guys, come on," Obama said last Sunday, looking toward photographers clicking away as he warmed up before a round of golf. “How many shots do you need?”
It’s been a progression. And Obama’s frustration shows in waves.
On Halloween, Obama grew testy with a Polish media crew as he took his daughter Sasha to a party at his campaign treasurer Marty Nesbitt’s Chicago home.
"All right guys. That's enough. You've got a shot. Leave us alone. Come on guys. Get back on the bus,” Obama said before breaking into a trot with Sasha still holding his hand.
The day before Thanksgiving, a sixth grader at a Chicago school asked Obama about his new life.
“You don't have a lot of privacy," Obama told some 200 children, adding that going to Walgreen's and riding a bicycle are now far more involved than before.
Those close to the Obamas have spoken to the media less and less since the election. Calls and e-mails to close friends and associates of the Obamas were not returned.
“My husband and I have been asked not to speak with the press about the Obamas,” one of them wrote in an e-mail. “They would prefer that we stay out of the papers for now.”
It seems the narrower the gap between transition and reality gets, the more private Obama has tried to become.
“You can see how he chafes at it,” Elmendorf said. “It’s hard for people who like to do outdoors things. It’s also hard for people with young kids. … You decide at 9 in the morning, I’m not going out anymore, then at 2 p.m. you decide, ‘Hey let’s get some ice cream.’”
“Normal people can do that. The president or president-elect can’t do that,” he said.
Friday was only the second time since the election that Obama has traveled without the press pool. Reporters also were left behind in Chicago once when they couldn’t gather fast enough after Obama decided to return home from his transition office.
Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt issued a statement Friday saying that because the president-elect had no further events scheduled as of 9:30 a.m., aides sent reporters back to their Waikiki Beach hotel 30 minutes away from his vacation home. But then Obama changed his mind.
“The president-elect decided to take the girls to a water park and we assembled the pool as quickly as possible,” the statement said.
Later, when paying attention to his press pool and ordering treats for his daughters and their friends at Kokonuts Shave Ice & Snacks, Obama went so far as to offer reporters some shave ice.
“Guys, here's your chance," Obama said. “No? I'm telling you, this is really good.”
“I don't think this is against policy,” he continued. “You want one, I can tell."
Reporters declined the president-elect's offer. But, perhaps in a sign of defiance, Obama made it while standing in one of his hometown spots with his BlackBerry clipped to his hip.
IN his first press conference after his re-election in 2004, President Bush memorably declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” We all know how that turned out.
Barack Obama has little in common with George W. Bush, thank God, his obsessive workouts and message control notwithstanding. At a time when very few Americans feel very good about very much, Obama is generating huge hopes even before he takes office. So much so that his name and face, affixed to any product, may be the last commodity left in the marketplace that can still move Americans to shop.
I share these high hopes. But for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month.
As we saw during primary season, our president-elect is not free of his own brand of hubris and arrogance, and sometimes it comes before a fall: “You’re likable enough, Hillary” was the prelude to his defeat in New Hampshire. He has hit this same note again by assigning the invocation at his inauguration to the Rev. Rick Warren, the Orange County, Calif., megachurch preacher who has likened committed gay relationships to incest, polygamy and “an older guy marrying a child.” Bestowing this honor on Warren was a conscious — and glib — decision by Obama to spend political capital. It was made with the certitude that a leader with a mandate can do no wrong.
In this case, the capital spent is small change. Most Americans who have an opinion about Warren like him and his best-selling self-help tome, “The Purpose Driven Life.” His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change. He is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama. Unlike such family-values ayatollahs as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, Warren is not obsessed with homosexuality and abortion. He was vociferously attacked by the Phyllis Schlafly gang when he invited Obama to speak about AIDS at his Saddleback Church two years ago.
There’s no reason why Obama shouldn’t return the favor by inviting him to Washington. But there’s a difference between including Warren among the cacophony of voices weighing in on policy and anointing him as the inaugural’s de facto pope. You can’t blame V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an early Obama booster, for feeling as if he’d been slapped in the face. “I’m all for Rick Warren being at the table,” he told The Times, but “we’re talking about putting someone up front and center at what will be the most-watched inauguration in history, and asking his blessing on the nation. And the God that he’s praying to is not the God that I know.”
Warren, whose ego is no less than Obama’s, likes to advertise his “commitment to model civility in America.” But as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reminded her audience, “comparing gay relationships to child abuse” is a “strange model of civility.” Less strange but equally hard to take is Warren’s defensive insistence that some of his best friends are the gays: His boasts of having “eaten dinner in gay homes” and loving Melissa Etheridge records will not protect any gay families’ civil rights.
Equally lame is the argument mounted by an Obama spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, who talks of how Warren has fought for “people who have H.I.V./AIDS.” Shouldn’t that be the default position of any religious leader? Fighting AIDS is not a get-out-of-homophobia-free card. That Bush finally joined Bono in doing the right thing about AIDS in Africa does not mitigate the gay-baiting of his 2004 campaign, let alone his silence and utter inaction when the epidemic was killing Texans by the thousands, many of them gay men, during his term as governor.
Unlike Bush, Obama has been the vocal advocate of gay civil rights he claims to be. It is over the top to assert, as a gay writer at Time did, that the president-elect is “a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot.” Much more to the point is the astute criticism leveled by the gay Democratic congressman Barney Frank, who, in dissenting from the Warren choice, said of Obama, “I think he overestimates his ability to get people to put aside fundamental differences.” That’s a polite way of describing the Obama cockiness. It will take more than the force of the new president’s personality and eloquence to turn our nation into the United States of America he and we all want it to be.
Obama may not only overestimate his ability to bridge some of our fundamental differences but also underestimate how persistent some of those differences are. The exhilaration of his decisive election victory and the deserved applause that has greeted his mostly glitch-free transition can’t entirely mask the tensions underneath. Before there is profound social change, there is always high anxiety.
The success of Proposition 8 in California was a serious shock to gay Americans and to all the rest of us who believe that all marriages should be equal under the law. The roles played by African-Americans (who voted 70 percent in favor of Proposition 8) and by white Mormons (who were accused of bankrolling the anti-same-sex-marriage campaign) only added to the morning-after recriminations. And that was in blue California. In Arkansas, voters went so far as to approve a measure forbidding gay couples to adopt.
There is comparable anger and fear on the right. David Brody, a political correspondent with the Christian Broadcasting Network, was flooded with e-mails from religious conservatives chastising Warren for accepting the invitation to the inaugural. They vilified Obama as “pro-death” and worse because of his support for abortion rights.
Stoking this rage, no doubt, is the dawning realization that the old religious right is crumbling — in part because Warren’s new generation of leaders departs from the Falwell-Robertson brand of zealots who have had a stranglehold on the G.O.P. It’s a sign of the old establishment’s panic that the Rev. Richard Cizik, known for his leadership in addressing global warming, was pushed out of his executive post at the National Association of Evangelicals this month. Cizik’s sin was to tell Terry Gross of NPR that he was starting to shift in favor of civil unions for gay couples.
Cizik’s ouster won’t halt the new wave he represents. As he also told Gross, young evangelicals care less and less about the old wedge issues and aren’t as likely to base their votes on them. On gay rights in particular, polls show that young evangelicals are moving in Cizik’s (and the country’s) direction and away from what John McCain once rightly called “the agents of intolerance.” It’s not a coincidence that Dobson’s Focus on the Family, which spent more than $500,000 promoting Proposition 8, has now had to lay off 20 percent of its work force in Colorado Springs.
But we’re not there yet. Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.
It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words.
By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.
Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve.
After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”
McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.”
Amen. Here’s to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change awaiting us in the New Year.
The party isn’t laughing.
In his campaign for chairman of the Republican National Committee, Chip Saltsman, a Tennessee political operative, distributed a song to potential supporters this week called “Barack the Magic Negro,” a parody that questions President-elect’s Barack Obama’s racial authenticity.
The song, by the political satirist Paul Shanklin, was first broadcast last year on the Rush Limbaugh radio show, and Mr. Limbaugh defended it then against accusations of racism. But after an election in which Republicans lost badly among minorities — spurring vows of new efforts to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate — party leaders were not amused.
“I am shocked and appalled,” said Mike Duncan, the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is seeking re-election.
And former Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an e-mail message, “This is so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it.”
But commenting to The Hill, which on Friday disclosed the distribution of the CD containing the song, Mr. Saltsman defended it as “light-hearted” and said committee members would receive it with “good humor.”
As criticism intensified on Saturday, Mr. Saltsman could not be reached.
The song is sung to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon” by a character meant to be Al Sharpton, the civil rights advocate and sometime politician. In it, the Sharpton character criticizes Mr. Obama for being insufficiently black, and mocks his white supporters for embracing him to assuage guilty feelings about racial injustice. It was distributed as part of a collection of Mr. Shanklin’s parodies.
Saul Anuzis, a Michigan candidate for Republican chairman, called the song “in bad taste.”
“Just as important,” he added, “anything that paints the G.O.P. as being motivated in our criticism of President-elect Obama by anything other than a difference in philosophy does a disservice to our party.”
Mr. Saltsman, who was aide to former Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, was campaign manager for former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas during his 2008 presidential bid. He is also a former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
Filed at 8:11 a.m. ET
HONOLULU (AP) -- The island of Oahu lost power during heavy rain and lightning, blacking out the population of some 800,000 people and thousands of tourists including vacationing President-elect Barack Obama.
Residents were advised by the power company and civil authorities to stay home after the Friday evening outage and to conserve water. Several radio stations broadcast emergency information.
Gov. Linda Lingle said Hawaiian Electric Co. was taking an emergency generator to the compound on the east side of the island where Obama has been staying. Lingle said she had asked the utility to notify her when it had been delivered.
Lingle said she expected power to be restored during the morning. Hawaiian Electric had restored power to about 30,000 customers by 2:40 a.m., spokesman Jan Loose told The Honolulu Advertiser.
Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann told KSSK radio that Obama is in one of the ''most secure places, so he'll be OK.'' The mayor said he talked to Obama at 9:30 p.m., and that Obama said he was fine and planned to go to bed and sleep through the blackout, The Honolulu Advertiser reported on its Web site.
The cause of the outage was still being investigated.
Honolulu International Airport operated on an emergency generator, but Lingle said most outgoing mainland flights were postponed until daylight as airport officials struggled to process incoming flights. Some incoming flights were diverted to other Hawaiian islands, which have separate power grids.
Hawaiian Electric spokesman Peter Rosegg said the initial power outage hit at 6:45 p.m., affecting most of the island. The rest of Oahu lost power two hours later when a second generator failed.
Lingle said the utility asked the state to provide a helicopter at daylight so it can inspect power lines on a mountain ridge that it suspects were damaged.
The telephone provider Hawaiian Telcom had most of its system still in service on generator and battery backup, spokeswoman Ann Nishida told the Advertiser.
The newspaper said it was unable to put out its printed editions because of the outage.
Although the outage occurred during a thunderstorm, the weather cleared up quickly over most of the island.
The outage closed stores at major retail outlets just after sunset, halting post-Christmas shopping a couple of hours early.
Highways were clogged as everyone tried to get home at once without stoplights to control traffic.
''I would advise ... everyone to just go to sleep,'' Lingle said in a radio interview late Friday.
Several Christmas weekend events were scuttled by the blackout, including a show at the Blaisdell Concert Hall by comedian Howie Mandel.
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Associated Press writer Audrey McAvoy contributed to this report.
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(CNN) -- A candidate for the Republican National Committee chairmanship said Friday the CD he sent committee members for Christmas -- which included a song titled "Barack the Magic Negro" -- was clearly intended as a joke.
The title of the song about President-elect Barack Obama was drawn from a Los Angeles Times column.
"I think most people recognize political satire when they see it," Tennessee Republican Chip Saltsman told CNN. "I think RNC members understand that."
The song, set to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," was first played on conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh's radio show in 2007.
Its title was drawn from a Los Angeles Times column that suggested President-elect Barack Obama appealed to those who feel guilty about the nation's history of mistreatment of African-Americans. Saltsman said the song, penned by his longtime friend Paul Shanklin, should be easily recognized as satire directed at the Times.
The CD sent to RNC members, first reported by The Hill on Friday, is titled "We Hate the USA" and also includes songs referencing former presidential candidate John Edwards and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, among other targets.
According to The Hill, other song titles, some of which were in bold font, were: "John Edwards' Poverty Tour," "Wright place, wrong pastor," "Love Client #9," "Ivory and Ebony" and "The Star Spanglish Banner."
Saltsman was national campaign manager for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's presidential bid in 2007 and 2008. Before that, he held a variety of posts, including a number of positions under former Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee.
Photo: Andrew Romero
KAILUA, Hawaii — Even at the end of his long journey to win the White House, one question about Barack Obama came up again and again: How did he appear to stay even-tempered and levelheaded while traveling such a grueling road?
At least part of the answer can be found here on the island of Oahu.
As Mr. Obama walks along the beaches while on vacation, returning to the place of his birth and his adolescence, he is relaxing after the most trying year of his life and recharging for the responsibilities that await. In both cases, friends say, he is doing it with an unexcitable steadiness that is a product of his Hawaiian upbringing.
The mood of Mr. Obama, to many observers here in Hawaii, embodies the Aloha Spirit, a peaceful state of mind and a friendly attitude of acceptance of a variety of ideas and cultures. More than simply a laid-back vibe, many Hawaiians believe in a divine and spiritual power that provides a sustaining life energy.
“When Obama gets on television, the national pulse goes down about 10 points,” said Representative Neil Abercrombie, Democrat of Hawaii, who was close friends with Mr. Obama’s parents. “He has this incredibly calming effect. There’s no question in my mind it comes from Hawaii.”
Mr. Abercrombie, who has known the president-elect since he was born, said Mr. Obama’s tranquil, even-keeled mannerisms resembled those of his grandfather, Stanley Dunham. As a child, Mr. Obama would follow Mr. Dunham everywhere, walking through the neighborhoods of Honolulu and beyond.
“He gives off a little oasis of calm,” said Mr. Abercrombie, who is spending the Christmas holidays in Hawaii. “He is peaceful water in the maelstrom, which will serve him very well in these circumstances when there happens to be a crisis.”
Only a year ago, many of his admirers fretted that Mr. Obama was too passive in his battle against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Later, some Democrats worried whether he had the tenacity to fight Senator John McCain and the Republican establishment.
It was only as the economic crisis deepened and a full-on recession was declared that Mr. Obama’s hard-to-ruffle demeanor came into focus as a valuable attribute — not only as a candidate but, presumably, as a president-elect.
Mr. Obama is spending Christmas secluded in a compound of rental houses that he and his family are sharing with a group of friends from Chicago along the handsome beaches of Kailua, on the windward coast of Oahu. It seems a world away from the hustle of Honolulu, which is the face of Hawaii for many residents of the continental United States who have never traveled to this part of the world.
For Mr. Obama, it is his first trip back since his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died in the hours before the election. He and his half-sister, who lives on the island, and other family members held a private memorial service on Tuesday at First Unitarian Church in Nuuanu for the woman who helped raise him.
“In recent weeks, I have had an opportunity to mourn our grandmother’s passing. However, Barack has not,” Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s half-sister, said in a statement to reporters in Honolulu. “I also hope that Barack has an opportunity to wash off his stress in saltwater and re-energize for the long road ahead.”
As he traveled across the United States mainland during the presidential race, campaigning on a promise of a different kind of politics, Mr. Obama was repeatedly asked by voters and reporters whether he had the stomach to win the contest. His standard answer? He learned how — and when — to use his sharp elbows from navigating the thorny terrain of Chicago politics.
Left unsaid was that he learned his composure from Hawaii.
“He has more Hawaii in him than Chicago; he’s laid-back, cool and collected,” said Neil Kent, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who has lived on the island for three decades. “It’s hard to express anger here. It’s a very small, enclosed environment in which you have to live with other people.”
Mr. Kent, who traveled to Ohio to volunteer for the Obama campaign in the final weeks of the presidential contest, said that as he watched Mr. Obama deliver speeches at rallies, there was an unmistakable air of Hawaii in his mannerisms and demeanor.
That is not to say, of course, that Mr. Obama did not occasionally grow agitated at his advisers, grimace when he was asked to sign one more autograph or openly scowl at reporters who sought to ask him questions during the campaign.
Even on the first full day of his Hawaiian vacation, as he walked onto a golf course in Waimanalo, he turned to a group of photographers and declared: “O.K. guys, come on. How many shots do you need?” The next day, aides said he was furious when paparazzi took a shot with a long zoom lens, showing the president-elect’s buff pectorals.
There is, of course, little expectation of privacy for Mr. Obama and his family. But friends say he has no plans to discontinue vacations, to Hawaii and elsewhere, after he becomes president.
This summer, as Mr. Obama visited in London with David Cameron, the head of the British Conservative Party, he was overheard talking about how leaders need to take time away to think. Without downtime, Mr. Obama said, “you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture.”
So Mr. Obama intends to be here until Jan. 1, recharging the Aloha Spirit.
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| Obama's five rules of scandal response | |
| Tuesday's report from the transition, detailing contacts between members of Obama's inner circle and embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and concluding that "nothing at all inappropriate" was discussed, won't be the final word on the subject—but it did provide some telling insight into the way the White House's new occupant will operate. But after announcing the review, his team declined to reveal who would conduct it, who would be interviewed or whether the resulting release would include any transition e-mails or records to support its conclusions. The review itself answered just one of those questions — we now know that White House Counsel Greg Craig led the review, which didn't include any documentation of what materials it went over — but it raised others, among them: Why did Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett communicate with Craig through her lawyer, whom the report does not name; how many conversations did incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have with Blagojevich; and why was Obama himself interviewed by prosecutors? See AlsoEqually unclear is what exactly was reviewed in the report that concludes that nothing inappropriate occurs, and whether there were any transition e-mails or other records covering the Senate seat selection process.
"We asked each individual who we thought might have had some contact or some communication that would be meaningful" to reconstruct "any contacts or communications, and that would include checking cell phone records or e-mails, and we inquired about that," Craig said. He added that "we've got the information that is required," and said he didn't know of any written communications. 3 - No freelancing To the extent that the report succeeds in its goal of establishing the distance between Obama and Blagojevich, it necessarily raises the question: Why was the president-elect and leader of the Democratic party playing no role in a key appointment to national office being made in his home state, and by a Democratic governor? |
Should Bush and Blair be forgiven?
'Tis the night before Christmas and the season of goodwill. The mood is forgiving. Our faces warm with mulled wine, our tummies full, we're meant to slump in the armchair, look back on the year just gone and count our blessings - woozily agreeing to put our troubles behind us.
As in families, so in the realm of public and international affairs. And this December that feels especially true. The "war on terror" that dominated much of the decade seems to be heading towards a kind of conclusion. George Bush will leave office in a matter of weeks and British troops will leave Iraq a few months later. The first, defining phase of the conflict that began on 9/11 - the war of Bush, Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden - is about to slip from the present to the past tense. Bush and Blair will be gone, with only Bin Laden still in post. The urge to move on is palpable.
You can sense it in the valedictory interviews Bush and Dick Cheney are conducting on their way out. They're looking to the verdict of history now, Cheney telling the Washington Times last week: "I myself am personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road." The once raging arguments of the current era are about to fade, the lead US protagonists heading off to their respective ranches in the west, the rights and wrongs of their decisions in office to be weighed not in the hot arena of politics, but in the cool seminar rooms of the academy.
Not so fast.
Yes, the new year would get off to a more soothing start if we could all agree to draw a line and move on. But it would be wrong. First, because we cannot hope to avoid repeating the errors of the last eight years unless they are subject to a full accounting. (It is for that reason Britain needs its own full, unconstrained inquiry into the Iraq war.) Second, because a crucial principle, one that goes to the very heart of the American creed, is at stake. And third, because this is not solely about the judgment of history. It may be about the judgment of the courts - specifically those charged with punishing war crimes.
Less than a fortnight ago, in the news graveyard of a Friday afternoon, the armed services committee of the US Senate released a bipartisan report - with none other than John McCain as its co-author - into the American use of torture against those held in the war on terror. It dismissed entirely the notion that the horrors of Abu Ghraib could be put down to "a few bad apples". Instead it laid bare, in forensic detail, the trail of memos and instructions that led directly to the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
The report was the fruit of 18 months of work, involving some 70 interviews. Most of it is classified, but even the 29-page published summary makes horrifying reading. It shows how the most senior figures in the Bush administration discussed, and sought legal fig leaves for, practices that plainly amounted to torture. They were techniques devised in a training programme known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape or SERE, that aimed to teach elite American soldiers how to endure torture should they fall into the hands of pitiless enemies. The SERE techniques were partly modelled on the brutal methods used by the Chinese against US prisoners during the Korean war. Yet Rumsfeld ruled that these same techniques should be "reverse engineered", so that Americans would learn not how to endure them - but how to inflict them. Which they then did, at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and beyond.
The Senate report cites the memorandums requesting permission to use "stress positions, exploitation of detainee fears (such as fear of dogs), removal of clothing, hooding, deprivation of light and sound, and the so-called wet towel treatment or the waterboard". We read of Mohamed al Kahtani - against whom all charges were dropped earlier this year - who was "deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks". Approval for this kind of torture, hidden under the euphemism of "enhanced interrogation", was sought from and granted at the highest level.
And that doesn't mean Rumsfeld. The report's first conclusion is that, on "7 February 2002, President George W Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al-Qaida or Taliban detainees". The result, it says, is that Bush "opened the door" to the use of a raft of techniques that the US had once branded barbaric and beyond the realm of human decency.
For this Bush should surely be held to account. And yet there is no sign that he will, and precious little agitation that he should. A still smiling Cheney denies the Bush administration did anything wrong. Note this breathtaking exchange with Fox News at the weekend. He was asked: "If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?" Cheney's answer: "General proposition, I'd say yes."
It takes a few seconds for the full horror of that remark to sink in. And then you remember where you last heard something like it. It was the now immortalised interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon. The disgraced ex-president was asked whether there were certain situations where the president can do something illegal, if he deems it in the national interest. Nixon's reply: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
It is no coincidence that Cheney began his career in the Nixon White House. He has the same Nixonian disregard for the US constitution, the same belief that executive power is absolute and unlimited - that those who wield it are above the law, domestic and international. It is the logic of dictatorship.
But Nixon was forced from office, his vision of an unrestrained presidency rejected. If Bush and Cheney are allowed to retire quietly, America will have failed to reassert that bedrock principle of the republic: the rule of law.
This is why there must be a reckoning. Bush will do all he can to avoid it: and it is wholly possible that one of his last acts as president will be to cover himself, his vice-president and all his henchmen with a blanket pardon. Even if that does not happen, Barack Obama is unlikely to want to spend precious capital pursuing his predecessor for war crimes.
But other prosecutors elsewhere in the world should weigh their responsibilities. In the end, it was a lone Spanish magistrate, not a Chilean court, who ensured the arrest of Augusto Pinochet. A pleasing, if uncharitable, thought this Christmas, is that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush will hesitate before making plans to travel abroad in 2009. Or indeed at any time - ever again.
freedland@guardian.co.uk
FROM the moment it was clear that Barack Obama was going to be president, people who have dedicated their lives to changing how America eats thought they had found their St. Nicholas.
It wasn’t long before the letters to Santa began piling up.
Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine, wants a new high-profile White House chef who cooks delicious local food. Wayne Pacelle, head of the Humane Society of the United States, wants policies requiring better treatment for farm animals.
Parents want better public-school lunches. Consumer groups are dreaming of a new, stronger food safety system. Nutrition reformers want prisoners to be fed less soy. And a farmer in Maine is asking the president-elect to plow under an acre of White House lawn for an organic vegetable garden.
Although Mr. Obama has proposed changes in the nation’s farm and rural policies and emphasizes the connection between diet and health, there is nothing to indicate he has a special interest in a radical makeover of the way food is grown and sold.
Still, the dream endures. To advocates who have watched scattered calls for changes in food policy gather political and popular momentum, Mr. Obama looks like their kind of president.
Not only does he seem to possess a more-sophisticated palate than some of his recent predecessors, but he will also take office in an age when organic food is mainstream, cooking competitions are among the top-rated TV shows and books calling for an overhaul in the American food system are best sellers.
“People are so interested in a massive change in food and agriculture that they are dining out on hope now. That is like the main ingredient,” said Eddie Gehman Kohan, a blogger from Los Angeles who started Obamafoodorama.com to document just about any conceivable link between Mr. Obama and food, whether it is a debate on agriculture policy or an image of Mr. Obama rendered in tiny cupcakes.
“He is the first president who might actually have eaten organic food, or at least eats out at great restaurants,” Ms. Gehman Kohan said.
Still, no one is sure just how serious Mr. Obama really is about the politics of food. So like mystery buffs studying the book jacket of “The Da Vinci Code,” interested eaters dissect every aspect of his life as it relates to the plate.
They look for clues in the lunch menus at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, where his two daughters will be eating items like herbes de Provence pita, local pears and organic chopped salad, served with unbleached napkins in a cafeteria with a serious recycling program. They point out that when Mr. Obama was a child, his family used food stamps and that in interviews he has referred to his appreciation of the philosophy put forth by Michael Pollan, the reform-minded food writer.
They note with approval that Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, belongs to a synagogue that runs a community supported agriculture program and that his social secretary, Desirée Rogers, is from the food-obsessed city of New Orleans. They also see promising signs in Mr. Obama’s fondness for some of Chicago’s better restaurants, like Spiaggia and Topolobampo.
As for Michelle Obama, she has said in interviews that she tries to buy organic food and watches the amount of high-fructose corn syrup in her family’s diet. And, as she confided on “The View” on ABC, “We’re bacon people.”
Add it all up and Mr. Obama looks like the first foodie president since Thomas Jefferson. For more recent comparisons, one could look at President Bush, who is a fitness buff but who aligned himself with large agricultural companies like Cargill and Monsanto that some advocates for sustainable agriculture and organic food fight against.
President Bill Clinton certainly seemed to love food, but in his White House years his tastes ran more toward Big Macs than grass-fed beef. Only after his presidency, and serious health problems, did he turn his attention to issues of obesity and diet.
The Obamas are a different kind of first family, said David Kamp, who traced the history of the modern gourmet-food movement in his book, “The United States of Arugula” (Broadway, 2006). “This time we have a Democrat in office that seems to live the dream and speak the language of both food progressivism and personal fitness,” Mr. Kamp said.
For many food activists, a shiny new secretary of agriculture was high on the Christmas wish list.
One of the first names to come up was Mr. Pollan, who in October wrote an open letter to the future president in The New York Times Magazine, explaining the ways in which he believes the food system needs fixing.
Even after Mr. Pollan repeatedly pointed out that he was unqualified and uninterested in the job of overseeing a $97-billion budget and more than 100,000 employees, his supporters kept pushing with more fanaticism than Clay Aiken’s Claymates.
A couple of longtime Iowans, the celebrity pig farmer Paul Willis and his neighbor Dave Murphy, started a more serious drive. They compiled a list of six candidates who they thought would have the best interests of farm-based rural America and sustainable agriculture at heart. More than 50,000 people signed their petition, the restaurateur Alice Waters and the writer Wendell Berry among them.
But Santa had other plans. Last week, Mr. Obama appointed Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, which grows much of the nation’s corn and soybeans. Mr. Vilsack has talked about reducing subsidies to some megafarms, supports better treatment of farm animals and wants healthier food in schools. But his selection drew criticism because he is a big fan of alternative fuels like corn-based ethanol and is a supporter of biotechnology, both anathema to people who want to shift government support from large-scale agricultural interests to smaller farms growing food that takes a more direct path to the table.
“Americans were promised ‘change,’ not just another shill for Monsanto and corporate agribusiness,” wrote Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, which has promised to fight the confirmation of Mr. Vilsack. Mr. Willis and Mr. Murphy immediately shook off the blow and sent out a new petition to have someone more like-minded placed as undersecretary.
Food advocates aren’t the only ones whose hopes for the new administration received a quick kick to the curb. A coalition of more than 140 environmental groups and scientists sent letters supporting one candidate to lead the Department of the Interior. Mr. Obama chose someone else.
Multiply that by every special interest and it becomes clear that just because changing the food system is the first priority for some, it isn’t so for everyone. The pragmatists among the food reformers understand.
“This president is taking over when the economy is the worst it has been in our lifetime and we are in the middle of wars,” said Ann Cooper, the chef who transformed the school food program for the Berkeley Unified School District in California and is about to do the same in Boulder, Colo. “I think it’s somewhere between naïve and fairy tale to think his No. 1 focus is going to be on food.”
Still, she has her own little wish, which is that the new president will move responsibility for school food programs to the Department of Education or the Department of Health and Human Services from the Department of Agriculture. That way, the focus might shift away from the commodity foods that are the backbone of most school lunches and toward menus tailored to the health and development of children.
Some food-system reformers may have a better chance of getting what they want than others do. A coalition of community-based groups called the U.S. Working Group on the Food Crisis wrote to Mr. Obama asking him to make hunger and the global food crisis a top priority. Their optimism is based on Mr. Obama’s promise to abolish childhood hunger by 2015.
They are also banking on his desire to tackle climate change and overhaul energy and health care policies.
“If he’s serious about doing this, then he’ll have to address the current problems of our food system, which are inextricably linked to these other problems,” said Christina Schiavoni of World Hunger Year, which is part of the coalition. “There’s no getting around it.”
In her view and others’, diets filled with healthier food produced by less intrusive farming practices can reduce medical problems like obesity and diabetes and be easier on the environment.
And even if Mr. Obama can’t or won’t deliver the changes some are hoping for, maybe he’ll just leave a little something in their stockings.
A new White House chef, maybe? Cristeta Comerford, the first woman to hold the executive chef job, has been in the position since 2005, not long by White House standards. Still, some people think it’s time for a change. “What the president eats could have a major impact on everyone in the country,” said Ms. Reichl, who along with Ms. Waters and Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, sent a letter to Mr. Obama offering to help him select someone to head the White House kitchen.
A chef who cooks local and organic food and picks some of it from a presidential garden could change things faster than any cabinet appointment, Ms. Reichl said.
“It’s like the hat manufacturers being furious because J. F. K. didn’t wear a hat, and suddenly everyone in America stopped wearing hats,” she said. “It’s that simple.”
Play Video AP – Obama aide had multiple talks with Blagojevich 
AP – In this Dec. 22, 2003, file photo, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., right, answers a question as Illinois Gov. … WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama has said all along that neither he nor his team was involved in any eye-popping dealmaking over filling his vacated Senate seat. Obama's hand-picked investigator agreed.
"Everybody behaved appropriately," declared Greg Craig, Obama's incoming White House counsel and the person asked to conduct the internal inquiry into contacts between the transition team and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Prosecutors have said Obama is not implicated in the case against Blagojevich, accused of trying to sell Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder. But the corruption scandal has drained precious energy from Obama's preparations to take over the White House.
In addition to the time Craig devoted to the internal review that Obama requested, the topic also has surfaced at news conferences intended to highlight key appointments and policy priorities. And Obama himself had to sit down last week in Chicago for an interview by federal investigators, Craig's report revealed. Accompanying him was lawyer Robert Bauer, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Federal investigators last week also interviewed two top Obama aides, incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. Though Craig completed his review more than a week ago, Obama delayed making it public until those interviews were finished and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald gave his team the go-ahead to put it out.
The inquiry was released Tuesday in Washington while Obama was vacationing in Hawaii. Though Obama has taken questions on the matter on five occasions since Blagojevich's Dec. 9 arrest, the president-elect did not make himself available Tuesday to talk about it.
Their body language speaks volumes!WASHINGTON — It’s not so easy being the loyal opposition these days.
Two months after Barack Obama’s election, Republicans are struggling to figure out how — or even whether — to challenge or criticize him as he prepares to assume the presidency.
The president-elect is proving to be an elusive and frustrating target. He has defied attempts to be framed ideologically. His cabinet picks have won wide praise. An effort by the Republican National Committee to link Mr. Obama to the unfolding scandal involving Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois and the accusations that he tried to sell Mr. Obama’s Senate seat was dismissed by no less a figure than Senator John McCain, the Republican whom Mr. Obama beat for the presidency.
The toughest criticism of Mr. Obama during this period — in fact, the real only criticism of Mr. Obama during this period — has come not from the right but from the left, primarily over his selection of Rick Warren, a leading opponent of gay marriage, to deliver the invocation on Inauguration Day.
There are plenty of battles ahead that may provide Republicans an opportunity to find their footing. They will no doubt find arguments to use against Mr. Obama when he starts to lay out the details of his economic stimulus plans, or signals how aggressively he wants to fulfill a pledge to labor to back a bill that would take away employers’ right to demand a secret ballot-election to determine if workers wanted to unionize. And Mr. Obama is the beneficiary of the kind of post-election honeymoon Washington hasn’t seen in 16 years. (Bill Clinton, considering his own rocky introduction to Washington in 1992, might argue it has in fact been even longer than that).
Still, this image of Republican uncertainty is a testimony to the political skills of the incoming president, and a reminder of just how difficult a situation the Republican Party is in. More than that, though, Republicans and Democrats say, it is evidence of the unusual place the country is in now: buoyed by prospect of an inauguration while at the same time deeply worried about the country’s future. It is going to be complicated making a case against Mr. Obama, many Republicans said, in an environment where people simply want him to succeed and may not have much of an appetite for partisan politics.
“I think at a time like this, at a time of crisis, a lot of people would like to see people try to work together, especially with Obama not even being sworn in yet,” said Saul Anuzis, the Michigan Republican chairman and a leading candidate in the fight to be the next Republican National Committee leader. “What you don’t want to be is the party that’s always attacking or being negative with no alternatives.”
And in his blog, Mr. Anuzis wrote: "Where necessary, we should stand for what is right and forcefully be the loyal opposition. But partisan politics in times like these for the sake of politics is not healthy. "
The situation Republican leaders find themselves in is reminiscent of the frustration displayed by Senator McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton in the presidential contest. First as a candidate and now as president-elect, Mr. Obama has proved deft at skirting ideological definitions; that has become even more clear as he has put together his cabinet and left open his options on issues like repealing tax cuts for the wealthy. The campaign clearly taught him how to avoid political mistakes and how to clean them up quickly; when at his first news conference he made an unkind remark about Nancy Reagan — a joke about her holding séances in the White House — he called her and apologized before the evening news.
Beyond that, the historic nature of his presidency — of being the first African-American president, and all the interest that has generated here and abroad — has complicated things even more for the opposition party.
The Republican National Committee, which is in the midst of an internal battle over who will be its next chairman, appears to be having particular trouble in finding the right tone. Since Election Day, it has continued with the daily patter of attacks on Mr. Obama that it offered right through the general election campaign, a strategy pushed by the chairman, Mike Duncan, but one that clearly does not have universal support.
Its attempt to link Mr. Obama to the ongoing corruption scandal in Illinois drew criticism not only from Mr. McCain but also Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.
“I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over seventy years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative, attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles,” Mr. Gingrich wrote in a letter to Mr. Duncan.
For his part, Mr. Duncan, who is seeking re-election as chairman when Republicans gather here in January — a fight that is providing a backdrop to the party’s ongoing debate — said he thought there was a role for his party to act as “the loyal opposition: to ask questions, agree where you can, but ask questions all the time.”
Mr. Duncan acknowledged that this was not an easy task, particularly now, however, though he suggested it will get easier after Mr. Obama takes office and has to deal with the problems and fulfill his campaign promises.
“We’re in a honeymoon stage right now and everybody wants to se him succeed,” he said, though he quickly added that he was not frustrated.
“It’s too early,” Mr. Duncan said .”We’re still in this honeymoon phase and we will hold him accountable. We will work with him and try to make sure he keeps his promises.”
Katon Dawson, the South Carolina Republican chairman who is another candidate to lead the party, said that the task for Republicans was clear. “If I were the national chairman, I would hold the administration accountable for doing what it said it was going to do,” Mr. Dawson said.
How and when to do that, he said, was another matter. “It matters in the tenor and the tone and the substance,” Mr. Dawson said. “Right now there isn’t a public policy yet. So it’s probably premature.”
View source articleElizabeth Alexander, who teaches at Yale, was plucked last week from the relatively obscure recesses of contemporary poetry for a moment on the world stage. President-elect Barack Obama has commissioned her to compose and read a poem for his inauguration, making her only the fourth poet in American history to read at one and elevating the art to unaccustomed prominence in the national psyche, at least for a day.
Mr. Obama’s inauguration, on Jan. 20, calls for an “occasional poem,” written to commemorate a specific event. This is not precisely what Ms. Alexander does, but she is preparing for the challenge.
“Writing an occasional poem has to attend to the moment itself,” she said in an interview, “but what you hope for, as an artist, is to create something that has integrity and life that goes beyond the moment.”
To prepare, she has delved into W. H. Auden, particularly his “Musée des Beaux Arts” (“About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters”), and the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for poetry. Auden, she said, “asked very large questions about how we stand in history.” And Brooks has had a major influence on her work.
“She should have been the one, were she living, for this,” Ms. Alexander said of the honor bestowed by Mr. Obama. “The Bard of the South Side. She wrote from Obama’s neighborhood for so many years.” Here she recited Brooks’s familiar line: “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
“Language like that,” Ms. Alexander said, “has eternal life.”
Ms. Alexander, 46, is the incoming chairwoman of the African-American studies department at Yale and the mother of two sons, 9 and 10. She writes often of race, gender and class, in both poetry and prose, nurtures young black poets through Cave Canem, a poetry workshop, and has been a friend of Mr. Obama for more than a decade.
Asked if she thought that the friendship played a role in her being picked for the inauguration, she said no. The Obamas have many friends and know other poets, she said.
“One of the things we’ve seen with every choice he’s made is that it’s based on what he perceives as excellence,” Ms. Alexander said. “I don’t think you would let friendship determine who you chose to do something like this. You can do lots of things to be nice to your friends — you can invite them to an inaugural ball. But I don’t think friends have to do each other this kind of favor.”
Ms. Alexander was born in Harlem, where her father’s family was rooted, but grew up in Washington, where she attended Georgetown Day School and Sidwell Friends, then Yale. Politics, she said, was “in the drinking water in my house.” Her father, Clifford, was a civil rights adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. He was the first black to be named secretary of the Army and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Her mother, Adele, teaches African-American women’s history at George Washington University. Her brother, Mark, teaches at Seton Hall Law School and served as policy director to Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign in 2000. An expert in campaign finance, he was a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign and is a member of his transition team.
Ms. Alexander has been on the faculty of several universities, including the University of Chicago, where she taught creative writing and African-American literature and won the Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. It is there in the 1990s that she met Barack and Michelle Obama.
“We’re of the exact same generation,” she said. “They are people with whom I have a lot in common.”
There was some question about whether Mr. Obama would include a poet at all in his inaugural program. There have been only three: Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993 and Miller Williams in 1997.
Mr. Obama has not said publicly why he wanted a poet or why he chose Ms. Alexander. But Emmett Beliveau, the executive director of Mr. Obama’s inaugural committee, said that having a poet shows “the important role that the arts and literature can play in helping to bring our country together” and that Ms. Alexander “is an incredibly accomplished author and academic.”
Paul Muldoon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who teaches at Princeton and is poetry editor of The New Yorker, said he guessed that Ms. Alexander was chosen on “literary merit.” He said her work “addresses a wide range of issues with terrific complexity.”
And Ms. Angelou said that when she heard of Ms. Alexander’s selection, she smiled. “She seems much like Walt Whitman,” she said. “She sings the American song.”
Ms. Alexander said she believes her poetry “attends to history,” including “sometimes thorny and difficult American history,” even as it speaks in contemporary moments and landscapes.
And she said Mr. Obama is attuned to the value of poetry. “He has said the precise and distilled and mindful language of poetry is perhaps something that can create a moment of meditation for us,” she said.
After examining previous inaugural poems, she has decided that hers will be brief. “This is one small piece of many pieces and we know what the centerpiece is,” she said, referring to Mr. Obama’s inaugural address.
“President-elect Obama is extremely efficient with language,” she added. “It is tremendously rich and tremendously precise but also never excessive. I really, really admire that. That’s a poet’s sensibility. I’m going to follow his lead.”
(CNN) -- Before he accepted Barack Obama's offer to join his presidential ticket, Joe Biden got a promise from Obama: that he would be there for "every critical decision," Biden said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden will chair a new task force aimed at helping working families.
Speaking to ABC's "This Week," Biden said he believes the vice president's role is to provide "the best, sagest, most accurate, most insightful advice and recommendations he or she can make to a president to help them make some of the very, very important decisions that have to be made."
When Obama talked to him about the vice-presidential slot, Biden recalled, "I said, 'I don't want to be picked unless you're picking me for my judgment. I don't want to be the guy that goes out and has a specific assignment. ... I want a commitment from you that in every important decision you'll make, every critical decision, economic and political, as well as foreign policy, I'll get to be in the room.'"
Biden said President-elect Obama has kept the promise, having Biden in the room for all of his decisions about who will fill key posts in the administration.
Biden will have a specific assignment as the new administration gets under way, however. Come Inauguration Day, he will be the working families czar, so to speak.
On Sunday, Obama's transition team announced the new "White House Task Force on Working Families" -- a major initiative targeted at "raising the living standards of middle-class, working families in America."
The initiative will be chaired by Biden.
Other members of the task force will include the secretaries of labor, health and human services, and commerce, as well as the directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Domestic Policy Counsel, and the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.
In an interview with ABC's "This Week," Biden said it's a "discrete job that's going to last only for a certain period of time."
"The one thing that we use as a yardstick of economic success of our administration: Is the middle class growing? Is the middle class getting better? Is the middle class no longer being left behind? And we'll look at everything from college affordability to after-school programs, the things that affect people's daily lives. I will be the guy honchoing that policy," he said.
Biden said he will have the authority to get a consensus among the task force -- but will use his relationship with the president if a consensus isn't reached.
"If in fact there is no consensus, [I'd] go to the president of the United States and say, 'Mr. President, I think we should be doing this, cabinet member so-and-so thinks that. You're going to have to resolve what it is we think we should do.' "
Obama has set up several key goals for the task force, including expanding education and training; improving work and family balance; a focus on labor standards, including workplace safety; and protecting working-family incomes and retirement security.
So what power will the new task force have in shaping policy?
According to the transition team, Biden and other members "will expedite administrative reforms, propose Executive orders, and develop legislative and public policy proposals that can be of special importance to working families."
"My administration will be absolutely committed to the future of America's middle-class and working families. They will be front and center every day in our work in the White House," said Obama in a statement. "And this Task Force will be one vehicle we will use to ensure that we never forget that commitment."
And in line with the Obama team's pledge of full transparency, the task force will issue annual reports, available online to the public.
Anna Burger, chairwoman of Change To Win -- a group made up of seven unions -- hailed the announcement.
"[It] shows that President-elect Obama is committed to middle class families and change truly is coming to Washington. Working people finally have an administration that is willing and eager to take action to address their needs," she said in a statement. "The White House Task Force on Working Families is a vital first step toward restoring our economy and making government work for working people again."
In what ABC billed as Biden's first interview as vice president-elect, Biden also discussed the role he played in helping Sen. Hillary Clinton decide to accept Obama's offer to serve as his secretary of state.
"She's one of my close friends. And when this came forward, I did talk to her. She sought me out. I sought her out as well, to assure her that this was real," he said, adding that "there was a lot swirling around" at the time.
Biden said he does not know whether he played a "key" role in helping Clinton make her decision. "It wasn't so much convincing, but I -- they wanted to know my perspective, and I gave my perspective."
Biden also said that the nation's economy "is in much worse shape than we thought it was in," and the immediate goal is to pass another stimulus package to prevent it from "absolutely tanking."
"There is going to be real significant investment," Biden said. "Whether it's $600 billion or more, or $700 billion, the clear notion is, it's a number no one thought about a year ago.
"... The single most important thing we have to do as a new administration -- to be able to have impact on all of the other things we want to do, from foreign policy to domestic policy -- is we've got to begin to stem this bleeding here and begin to stop the loss of jobs in the creation of jobs," said Biden, who also said he had spoken with members of Congress from both parties about a new stimulus.
Obama, meanwhile, has decided to increase his goal for creating new jobs after receiving economic forecasts that suggest the economy is in worse shape than had been predicted, two Democratic officials told CNN Saturday. 
Watch what Obama has to say about the economy »
Over the next few weeks, the Opinion section will publish a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the challenges facing Barack Obama Barack Obama when he takes office. Military reform and potential foreign policy pitfalls is the focus of today’s articles.
In the latest weekly address, President-elect Barack Obama took a bold stand for making decisions based on science and facts rather than ideology as he introduced leading members of his science and technology team.
“The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry,” President-elect Obama said. “It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States—and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.”
President-elect Obama announced his appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). He also announced Dr. Harold Varmus and Dr. Eric Lander as the other co-chairs of PCAST, which the President-elect said he hopes will be “a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy priorities.” Addtionally, he named Dr. Jane Lubchenco as his choice to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I am confident that if we recommit ourselves to discovery,” President-elect Obama said,” if we support science education to create the next generation of scientists and engineers right here in America; if we have the vision to believe and invest in things unseen, then we can lead the world into a new future of peace and prosperity.”
Watch the weekly address and read the text below.
Over the past few weeks, Vice President-Elect Biden and I have announced some of the leaders who will advise us as we seek to meet America’s twenty-first century challenges, from strengthening our security, to rebuilding our economy, to preserving our planet for our children and grandchildren. Today, I am pleased to announce members of my science and technology team whose work will be critical to these efforts.
Whether it’s the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create twenty-first century jobs—today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It is time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.
Right now, in labs, classrooms and companies across America, our leading minds are hard at work chasing the next big idea, on the cusp of breakthroughs that could revolutionize our lives. But history tells us that they cannot do it alone. From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.
Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States—and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.
Dr. John Holdren has agreed to serve as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. John is a professor and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as well as President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center. A physicist renowned for his work on climate and energy, he’s received numerous honors and awards for his contributions and has been one of the most passionate and persistent voices of our time about the growing threat of climate change. I look forward to his wise counsel in the years ahead.
John will also serve as a Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—or PCAST—as will Dr. Harold Varmus and Dr. Eric Lander. Together, they will work to remake PCAST into a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy priorities.
Dr. Varmus is no stranger to this work. He is not just a path-breaking scientist, having won a Nobel Prize for his research on the causes of cancer—he also served as Director of the National Institutes of Health during the Clinton Administration. I am grateful he has answered the call to serve once again.
Dr. Eric Lander is the Founding Director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard and was one of the driving forces behind mapping the human genome—one of the greatest scientific achievements in history. I know he will be a powerful voice in my Administration as we seek to find the causes and cures of our most devastating diseases.
Finally, Dr. Jane Lubchenco has accepted my nomination as the Administrator of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is devoted to conserving our marine and coastal resources and monitoring our weather. An internationally known environmental scientist and ecologist and former President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jane has advised the President and Congress on scientific matters, and I am confident she will provide passionate and dedicated leadership at NOAA.
Working with these leaders, we will seek to draw on the power of science to both meet our challenges across the globe and revitalize our economy here at home. And I’ll be speaking more after the New Year about how my Administration will engage leaders in the technology community and harness technology and innovation to create jobs, enhance America’s competitiveness and advance our national priorities.
I am confident that if we recommit ourselves to discovery; if we support science education to create the next generation of scientists and engineers right here in America; if we have the vision to believe and invest in things unseen, then we can lead the world into a new future of peace and prosperity.
Thank you.
Congresswoman Hilda Solis will be named labor secretary by Obama.by: Jesse J. Holland, The Associated Press
Washington - President-elect Barack Obama's choice to be labor secretary, Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis of California, is expected to advocate greater union influence in the workplace and more "green" jobs.
Solis, the 51-year-old daughter of a Mexican union shop steward and a Nicaraguan assembly line worker, is in line to be the third Hispanic nominee in Obama's Cabinet. Obama planned to announce her nomination on Friday, said a labor official who spoke on condition of anonymity because an announcement had not been made yet.
The lone member of Congress of Central American descent, Solis would replace Elaine Chao, the only original member of President George W. Bush's Cabinet still in office.
Chao said her successor "will inherit a strong legacy on behalf of America's workers, which includes record low fatality, illness and injury rates, record achievements in enforcement recoveries, and
Unions, which contributed heavily to Obama and Democrats this year, expect Solis to be an advocate for them and for workers. They expect her to press for legislation that would force businesses to recognize union representation once more than 50 percent of a company's eligible work force signs union cards, instead of waiting for secret-ballot elections.
Unions claim mangers coerce and intimidate workers into rejecting unions in secret ballots at work. Employers say workers often are coerced themselves by their peers to sign union cards and that a secret-ballot election is the only way to determine their true wishes.
"Unions are vital to the health and strength of our communities, and our workers are the bedrock of our economy," Solis said in 2007 while advocating for the Employee Free Choice Act. "In this day and age when the number of women and new immigrants is increasing in the work force, it is important that they become a part of the American fabric and one of the ways is to be a member of a union."
Solis' father was a Teamsters shop steward in Mexico.
"We're confident that she will return to the Labor Department one of its core missions - to defend workers' basic rights in our nation's workplaces," said John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor organization.
Solis in 1994 was the first Latina elected to the California Senate, where she led the battle to increase the state's minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.75 an hour in 1996.
Andy Stern, president of the 1.9-million member Service Employees International Union, recalled marching with her in Los Angeles - well before she was elected to Congress - to seek higher wages and benefits for janitors.
Environmental groups noted that while in Congress, Solis wrote a measure that authorized $125 million for work force training programs in areas such as energy efficiency retrofitting and "green building" construction.
"We can think of no better person to help President-elect Obama implement his plans for an economic recovery fueled by the creation of millions of new green jobs," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., will be in charge of Solis' confirmation as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He said she will be "an invaluable asset to President Obama in protecting workers' rights and restoring economic opportunity."
Business groups, ready to assume a more defensive posture during Obama's administration, responded cautiously to the news about Solis.
"There's a new sheriff in town, but they'll still have to deal with the business community and they know it," said Randy Johnson, vice president for labor issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "We would hope she will continue to support programs that help educate employers about voluntary compliance with the law rather than pursue heavy-handed enforcement," he said.
A call to Solis' office was not immediately returned Thursday.
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Associated Press writers Sam Hananel and Erica Werner contributed to this report.
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John McCain sideswiped the Republican National Committee on Sunday for the intense focus it has placed on Barack Obama's relationship (however thin) to Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Saying he was confident that information would be made public regarding the president-elect's contacts with the embattled Illinois governor -- who is accused of putting up Obama's vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder -- McCain urged his Republican colleagues to keep their political priorities in order.
"I think that the Obama campaign should and will give all information necessary," said the Arizona Republican. "You know, in all due respect to the Republican National Committee and anybody -- right now, I think we should try to be working constructively together, not only on an issue such as this, but on the economy stimulus package, reforms that are necessary. And so, I don't know all the details of the relationship between President-elect Obama's campaign or his people and the governor of Illinois, but I have some confidence that all the information will come out. It always does, it seems to me."
McCain's remarks, delivered during an interview on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, come amidst a blitz of statements, press releases and web videos from the Republican Party on the Blaojevich subject.
On Sunday alone, the Illinois GOP launched a web site that would reportedly link 12 different state Democrats with the scandal-plagued governor. The RNC, meanwhile, released a web video titled, "Questions Remain," highlighting Obama's "evolving explanations" regarding the Blagojevich affair. Last week, RNC Chairman Mike Duncan said Obama was undermining his pledges for transparency and the "moderate-type" campaign that he ran on, by not being forthcoming about his contacts with the Illinois Governor.
For all of this, the complaint issued in the Blagojevich case indicates that Obama had no direct ties to the governor's pay-for-play scheme. The president-elect has said as much. Moreover, Blagojevich is heard in wiretaps repeatedly cursing Obama and complaining that the transition team was offering only "appreciation."
McCain, who has almost never been popular within deeply partisan Republican circles, seemed to acknowledge the notion that this is, at its heart, a tale of a corrupt Illinois pol, not some massive entanglement involving Obama that the RNC is insinuating.
Hat-tip: England for Obama
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – What struck the Brazilian woman most forcibly as she watched U.S. election returns on television was seeing Barack Obama's two young daughters.
"I can't believe those two little girls with hair like mine will be in the White House," said 31-year-old Carolina Iootty Dias, putting her hand to her head, tears in her eyes as she watched the screen.
Black Brazilians such as Dias, a human rights worker, celebrated Obama's election as giving hope worldwide. But the country that prides itself on racial mixing and tolerance is also being forced to take a reality check.
Though half of Brazil's 190 million people are black — the world's largest black population outside Nigeria — power remains firmly in the hands of whites. The country has few blacks in top political positions, and government studies consistently show blacks in Brazil earn half as much as whites.
"This Brazilian hypocrisy that says racism does not exist is one of the things that keeps the nation from advancing," said Stepan Nercessian, an actor and Rio de Janeiro city councilman, who is white.
Latin America's largest country has long looked down its nose at the racial discord in the U.S. — segregation laws, civil rights battles and a strained social dialogue that continues today.
But Obama's election is making Brazilians look inward, with some arguing that an American-style struggle is exactly what Brazil is missing.
"I think it is important for young black Brazilians to know how the civil rights movement progressed in the U.S. and how it produced not just Obama, but blacks at the highest levels of American businesses," said Edson Santos, Brazil's minister of racial equality, who is black. "It is important that they have contact with this reality."
Glaucia Carvalho Oliveira is one of those young people.
"All of a sudden, Obama has arrived and taken us to the next level," she said, sweat glistening on her face as she assembled her snack stand on Rio's Copacabana beach. "We black Brazilians need him as much as the Americans do."
Brazil and the U.S. were two of the largest slave-owning societies in the Americas — some 4 million shipped to Brazil and 500,000 to the U.S. — and the two countries that benefited most from the slave trade.
Brazil freed its blacks in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so. In that year it abolished all its race laws, while American blacks had to fight for more than 100 years after they were freed to gain full rights as citizens.
Black and white Brazilians mix easily in both marriage and social venues, from soccer matches to samba clubs. Beyond the half of the population that is black, most Brazilians are of mixed ancestry and have a census category, "parda."
No such category exists in the U.S. census. Obama, who is half white and identifies as black, could call himself parda if he were Brazilian.
Despite Brazil's social ease around race, many argue that its blacks simply moved from the slave quarters to the slums.
They are only 3 percent of Brazil's college graduates. Only one senator among 81 is black, which mirrors the U.S. breakdown, except that blacks are only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Twelve of Brazil's lower house's 513 members are black, compared with 46 out of 435 U.S. house members.
With Brazil's history of authoritarian governments and extreme poverty, blacks only started organizing in the last 40 years, said Reginaldo Lima, who is black and directs AfroReggae, which works on race and violence issues in Rio's slums.
Six years ago the country elected its first blue-collar president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a white man who enjoys huge support among blacks. But only two of his 28 government ministers are black.
In 2003 Brazil appointed its first black Supreme Court justice, Joaquim Barbosa, whom some consider a future presidential candidate. Barbosa traveled to Washington to watch the U.S. elections.
Many whites play down the level of prejudice in Brazil, saying the inequalities are economic, not racial.
"We see people not as black or white. We don't look at a black person and think they are not as capable as whites," said medical secretary Liliane Lyra, 43. "It is more a social problem that separates the races here, a lack of opportunity for the poor."
But Alannah Xavier, 26, says her black skin, not her economic status, keeps her from getting work as a model in Brazil.
"You know where I work the most? In Germany ... a nation that is supposedly so racist with its Nazi past," said Xavier. "Here in Brazil they only have work for blondes. Crazy, no?"
Since Silva took office, there have been positive changes, notably affirmative action in the university system, said Jose Vicente, director of Ciudadana Zumbi dos Palmares University, who is black.
Lima says Obama's election will help that struggle.
"Barack Obama represents what every black person in the world has been hoping for: that the fight of the dream for racial equality in North America can spread to the entire world," he said.
Others doubt there will be an "Obama effect."
"This is a very racially mixed country, but all the elites are white. Things have been so bad for so long, I think people just accept it," said Carlos Eduardo Antones, 21, a waiter and part-time student who is black.
Either way, Emmanuel Miranda is happy to savor the moment.
The 53-year-old Rio de Janeiro policeman, who is black, sipped an espresso in a cafe off Copacabana beach, lit his first cigarette of the day, and declared a new era.
"The U.S. is a country to dream about, and for us black Brazilians it is even easier to do so now," he said. "God bless you and your beautiful country."
___
Associated Press writer Marco Sibaja in Brasilia and APTN producer Flora Charner in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.
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 Barack Obama is to be inaugurated as president on 20 January |
The US defence secretary has warned opponents of the US against trying to "test" Barack Obama with a crisis in the early days of his presidency.
Robert Gates said the new president's security team was ready to defend US national interests from the moment he takes office next month.
Mr Gates, who is staying in his post, said Middle East and Gulf security would remain a key issue for the US.
He was speaking at a regional security forum in the Gulf state of Bahrain.
On Iran, Mr Gates denied that the US was seeking regime change, but wanted to see "a change in policies and a change in behaviour".
He also repeated calls for Sunni Arab countries to back Iraq with full diplomatic ties.
The conference in Manama, organised by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, is being attended by representatives of 25 states.
'Sorely mistaken'
Mr Gates, a former CIA director, told delegates he brought a "message of continuity and commitment to our friends and partners in the region".
 Robert Gates has been in post since 2006 |
"Anyone who thought that the upcoming months might present opportunities to test the new administration would be sorely mistaken.
"President Obama and his national security team, myself included, will be ready to defend the interests of the United States and our friends and allies from the moment he takes office on January 20th."
Mr Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden, warned during the election campaign that there would be an attempt to test Mr Obama's mettle with an international crisis early on - in the same way that President John F. Kennedy had been tested during the Cuba missile crisis.
Since becoming defence secretary in 2006, Mr Gates has won plaudits from Democrats and Republicans for his handling of the troop surge in Iraq, and has also been given credit for the decline in violence in the country.
He visited Afghanistan on Thursday, and promised more troops and resources as the US cuts back its presence in Iraq.
I’m mad, and I’m not going to take it any more.
I used to rather like Richard Wolffe, Newsweek Washington correspondent and Countdown talking head. But he’s increasingly annoyed me over the Obama/Blagojevich story. Here he was on Thursday night:
Linking Obama to Blagojevich? Acting like this is some kind of serious reflection on the President-elect? This is bull****. (The stars stand for ‘crap’, by the way.)
No-one mentioned - not ever, and believe me, I watched this election like a bloody hawk - Barack Obama’s link to the ‘tainted’ and ‘corrupt’ state of Illinois until the Blagoyadoodah story broke. Or rather: they didn’t mention his link to the state of Illinois in those terms. Up to now, it’s always been a plus-point, that Obama worked in Illinois, and was the Senator for the vital, huge and typically American city of Chicago. No, siree. Nobody mentioned any possible handicap or dodgy dealings scenario until this eejit Blagojevich reared his ugly head (topped off with ’80s hairdo) and ruined it all. The same man who referred to Obama as a “mother******” (the stars stand for “crapper”, by the way) - as you do, when talking about someone you’re in cahoots with.
It’s not an unthinking devotion to Barack Obama that makes me trust him; it’s a little thing called ‘his track record’. He truly seems to be one of those politicians with an unblemished record because - shock, horror! - he actually went into politics for honorable reasons, and - shock, horror! - has nothing to hide as a result.
It’s a sad indictment on our modern view of politicians that we automatically assume them to be corrupt; or at least find it difficult to believe that they are beyond corruption. Shame on you, Richard Wolffe. Or maybe you’ve just become a little too jaded, following Washington all these years? Perhaps you’d like to become Newsweek’s arts correspondent?
"To succeed in cricket, you need to understand the different approaches of the various cricketing nations.... [T]he cricketing world contains multitudes: an emerging great power, India; awkward powers such as Pakistan and rogue regimes such as Zimbabwe; fading imperial powers like the UK and regional metropoles such as South Africa. Rich countries such as Australia play cricket but so do poor countries such as Bangladesh. It is even played in Kenya, Mr Obama’s ancestral homeland. The International Cricket Council is located in the cockpit of geopolitics, the Persian Gulf."
The first lesson derives from the fact that, like foreign policy, cricket is played outside the US. It is followed by perhaps one or two billion people. Unlike baseball’s World Series, cricket’s World Cup actually involves the world.... Mr Obama needs to be deaf to the siren songs of protectionism and isolationism and alert to the voices (both the cheers and the jeers) of the world.
[A]s Americans often complain, cricket is a long game. A Test match often takes five days – and ends in a draw. Things are opaque in cricket, as in life: sometimes a draw can be a win. Cricket requires patience and discipline, which are not virtues we normally associate with the US. They were, however, on display during Mr Obama’s impressive campaign and they are exactly the qualities his administration will need in order to prevail in the war in Afghanistan.
[I]n the game of cricket, the condition of the pitch is critical. The ball usually bounces before it reaches the batsman, which introduces extra unpredictability into the contest. The ball does not just swing in the air, it turns off the seam. It can come at your head, not just your chest. In foreign policy, too, the decision-making environment is fast and fluid. It is difficult to see the choices before you, let alone make the right ones.
[I]n foreign policy as in cricket, you cannot win a match with a single swing, regardless of the beauty of your cover drive.
[T]he captain’s role is crucial. He sets the strategy and places the field. But he has to work through his players: he cannot deliver every ball and score every run. The captain is not the decider: he is first among equals. So it is with foreign policy, too. America’s allies and partners are tired of American unilateralism – but they are ready for American leadership.
[T]oughness has its place. Very few cricket matches are won through sweet reason alone. It is commendable that Mr Obama has cast aside Mr Bush’s prejudice against talking to America’s adversaries, but he needs to ensure those adversaries do not mistake his reasonableness for weakness. On the other hand, assertiveness comes in different forms – spin bowling as well as pace, forceful diplomacy as well as force.
Mr. Obama used leverage that he had seldom employed — publicly, anyway — and strongly urged Mr. Jones to bypass Mr. Blagojevich and approve the ethics bill, banning the so-called pay-for-play system of influence peddling in Illinois. When asked at the time how Mr. Obama had come to be involved, Mr. Jones replied, “He’s a friend.”
In a sequence of events that neatly captures the contradictions of Barack Obama’s rise through Illinois politics, a phone call he made three months ago to urge passage of a state ethics bill indirectly contributed to the downfall of a fellow Democrat he twice supported, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.
Mr. Obama placed the call to his political mentor, Emil Jones Jr., president of the Illinois Senate. Mr. Jones was a critic of the legislation, which sought to curb the influence of money in politics, as was Mr. Blagojevich, who had vetoed it. But after the call from Mr. Obama, the Senate overrode the veto, prompting the governor to press state contractors for campaign contributions before the law’s restrictions could take effect on Jan. 1, prosecutors say.
Tipped off to Mr. Blagojevich’s efforts, federal agents obtained wiretaps for his phones and eventually overheard what they say was scheming by the governor to profit from his appointment of a successor to the United States Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Obama. One official whose name has long been mentioned in Chicago political circles as a potential successor is Mr. Jones, a machine politician who was viewed as a roadblock to ethics reform but is friendly with Mr. Obama.
Beyond the irony of its outcome, Mr. Obama’s unusual decision to inject himself into a statewide issue during the height of his presidential campaign was a reminder that despite his historic ascendancy to the White House, he has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics. It is a world he has long navigated, to the consternation of his critics, by engaging in a kind of realpolitik, Chicago-style, which allowed him to draw strength from his relationships with important players without becoming compromised by their many weaknesses.
By the time Mr. Obama intervened on the ethics measure, his relationship with Mr. Blagojevich, always defined more by political proximity than by personal chemistry, had cooled as the governor became increasingly engulfed in legal troubles. There is nothing in the criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday to indicate that Mr. Obama knew anything about plans to seek money and favors in exchange for his Senate seat; he has never been implicated in any other “pay to play” cases that have emerged from the long-running investigation of the Blagojevich administration.
But like those previous cases, this latest one features political characters who figure in various stages of Mr. Obama’s climb from little-known state senator to presidential candidate, and who have since become politically radioactive because of corruption scandals. Some of those relationships posed a threat to Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign, forcing him to return tens of thousands of dollars in tainted campaign contributions and providing fodder for attack ads by rival candidates.
Though extreme examples, they were emblematic of the path cut by Mr. Obama through Chicago politics, where he became known for making alliances of convenience with personalities that seemed antithetical to his self-image as a progressive reformer. His political roots were in the left-leaning neighborhood of Hyde Park, but at key moments in his career he did not hesitate to form relationships with politicians who were fixtures of the Democratic machine.
When he ran for the United States Senate in 2004, he aggressively courted Mr. Jones, a sewer inspector turned legislator who had clawed his way up through ward politics and was viewed as something of a kingmaker in the Illinois Democratic Party. He also formed a good working relationship with Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, a symbol of establishment politics with whom Mr. Obama had never been close.
Mr. Obama was an adviser to Mr. Blagojevich’s first campaign for governor, in 2002, and endorsed him again in 2006, even though by that time questions had been raised about the possible selling of state jobs. Mr. Obama has also credited one of Mr. Blagojevich’s closest confidants, Antoin Rezko, a businessman who was convicted of corruption charges this year, with helping him get his own start in politics.
Mr. Rezko was among the first to contribute to Mr. Obama’s earliest State Senate race, in 1995, and later became a major fund-raiser for his campaign for the United States Senate. Mr. Rezko was known around Chicago as a collector of politicians, and he did not hesitate to make the most of his high-level contacts. The New York Times reported last year that when he was entertaining Middle Eastern financiers at a Four Seasons hotel in Chicago, he arranged for Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Obama to drop by, separately and on different occasions, to impress his guests.
Mr. Rezko derived his political influence mainly from his close relationship with Mr. Blagojevich, who relied on him to recommend loyal campaign contributors for state appointments to boards and commissions, according to the complaint unsealed on Tuesday. But as Mr. Rezko’s legal troubles escalated, Illinois politicians who had previously found him useful, including Mr. Obama, disavowed him and started returning his campaign donations.
Mr. Obama’s relationship with Mr. Blagojevich was not much better when he made the decision to call Mr. Jones in September about the stalled ethics bill. For Mr. Obama, the move marked an unusual return to Illinois politics, turf from which he had studiously worked to distance himself throughout the presidential race. At the time, one week before the first presidential debate of the general election campaign, Republicans were trying to tarnish him in the eyes of voters by attempting to link him to Chicago’s history of corrupt politics.
Mr. Obama used leverage that he had seldom employed — publicly, anyway — and strongly urged Mr. Jones to bypass Mr. Blagojevich and approve the ethics bill, banning the so-called pay-for-play system of influence peddling in Illinois. When asked at the time how Mr. Obama had come to be involved, Mr. Jones replied, “He’s a friend.”
When the Illinois Senate passed the measure by 55 to 0 on Sept. 22, with Mr. Jones reversing his position, Mr. Obama praised the move as one creating “a tougher ethics law that will reduce the influence of money over our state’s political process.” Mr. Obama’s intervention deepened a rift between him and Mr. Blagojevich that had been growing for some time.
When Mr. Blagojevich left Congress in 2002, he talked openly about the notion of running for president one day. After he was elected governor, and after Senator John Kerry lost the presidential race in 2004, he began eyeing a potential run in 2008.
It was short-lived. The federal corruption investigation that eventually led to Mr. Rezko’s indictment, and Tuesday’s charges against Mr. Blagojevich, had already begun to taint the governor’s administration. And by 2006, Mr. Obama had eclipsed the governor as a plausible national candidate, dashing his presidential aspirations.
The criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday underscored the acrimony between the two men. Recorded telephone calls showed Mr. Blagojevich being far less than respectful when discussing the president-elect and voicing frustration at his inability to advance beyond the governor’s office.
“If I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself,” the governor said, according to the criminal complaint. Later, he said the Senate seat was a “valuable thing — you just don’t give it away for nothing.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Blagojevich was busily trying to shake loose up to $2.5 million in campaign donations, much of it from contributors with business before the state, according to federal prosecutors. The governor’s goal was to bring in the money before the end of the year, the complaint said, “before a new state ethics law goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2009.”
Go to original NY Times articleWhether Barack Obama knows it yet or not, the best — the only — place for a Hawaii-born President to be on Inauguration Night will be the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington.
That is where the Hui Moku’aina O Hawai’i Ma Wakinekona, Moku’aina O Kolumepia (that is, the Hawaii State Society of Washington, D.C.) will be having its inaugural ball.
Will Mr. Obama show up? Nobody knows. The ball has not been sanctioned by the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Official status would put the Hawaii Society on Mr. Obama’s list for sure, but even if the ball stays unofficial, Micah Kohono Mossman, its chairman, is hoping that the new President drops by anyway, being a native son and all.
In Hawaii, the suspense is thick.
Will he show? Will he kick off his shoes, don an orchid lei and dance?
Will he gorge on pupus, grow misty and sway to the strains of “Hawaii Aloha,” and hug all his old Punahou classmates?
Depends on how much of a homesick Hawaiian he is. That point is open to question.
On the one hand, Mr. Obama left Hawaii for good many years ago and, as everyone knows, put down deep Chicago roots. In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he reminisces about being taken as a boy on a night spearfishing trip to Kailua Bay, where he watched a diver haul in “a large fish, iridescent and flopping.” He said it was a humuhumunukunukuapuaa, which is a problem, because as any Hawaiian schoolchild knows, the humuhumunukunukuapuaa is a reef fish that is usually about five or six inches long (roughly the length of its name).
Barack Obama body surfed at Sandy Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 14, 2008. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)But on the other hand, Mr. Obama bodysurfs at Sandy’s, a notoriously dangerous, necksnapping beach on Oahu. This is perhaps his most underappreciated skill. He also wears rubber slippers and eats shave ice. Those habits mark him as a true local at heart.
Mr. Mossman said there could be a downside to having an officially sanctioned party: the rules you have to follow about food, drinks and entertainment. He said he had been to an official ball before, where the food was nonexistent, the cash bar was expensive and the music was lame. That’s a bad sign, because the main ingredients of a good Hawaii party are food, drinks and music, not necessarily in that order, but in large, loving quantities.
Mr. Obama should go to Hawaii’s bash, if only for the musical lineup, which is flying in from Honolulu and is awesome: Big names like Eddie Kamae and Raiatea Helm, and the Aunty Genoa Ohana Ensemble, musicians who played with the legendary Aunty Genoa Keawe, a national treasure who died in February.
Sounds like it’s going to be the best party in town. Too bad it’s sold out.
I’ve heard it from my aunt Evangelina about a thousand times “he looks like a Baiano.” It’s true. If you look at Barack Obama closely he does have a very Brazilian look about him. His mixed racial background makes it easy for us to see ourselves in him. My aunt has adopted Barack Obama as her personal president. We laugh on the phone constantly. When I ask what she is up to, she tells me she is lighting candles for Obama. Oi Tia!
Here in the States we’ve gone through one of the most emotional presidential races in recent history. We have our first African-American president. Back home, Brazil was taken with the entire process. It was as if they themselves were voting. When Barack Obama finally won, family members were calling Brazil where folks were already celebrating in the streets.
Although the air is heavy with joy we also realize the enormity of Obama’s win on our culture. Four million slaves were shipped to Brazil and we still have the largest population of blacks outside of Nigeria. We were the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. Obama’s win resonates with many because it reminds us that there are still issues of race we must face. Brazilians are talking about it.
Brazil is a fascinating place. We are populated by people from all ethnic and racial backgrounds. We mix freely across racial lines but there are still issues we need to address. We’ve made some advances especially in higher education with affirmative action, but more needs to be done. As Brazilians both black, white and mixed we have been taught to internalize the belief that our country is a racial democracy. Unfortunately it has fallen short and we must work to make sure that all our people are treated equally across racial lines. So while the task at hand for our beloved Brazil may be difficult, it is by no means impossible.
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