Chewing over the Presidential campaign

Plouffe and Axelrod, last summer

A forum at Harvard put the big guns from the recent engrossing political season -- David Axelrod and David Plouffe for Obama; Rick Davis and final chief pollster Bill McInturff for McCain -- on stage last night to mull over how they did it. The usual pundits are passing out tidbits. Because they lost so badly, the Republicans offer the interesting morsels. Here are some from several sources:

[Why the McCain campaign never ran ads tying Obama to some of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's more inflammatory pronouncements]
"I said 'Look, if we do win we'll win with about 273 electoral votes and we'll lose the popular vote by 3 million,'" recalled McInturff of the internal discussions about cutting attack ads with Wright. "If [McCain] had used that issue that way, you'd already be delegitimized as a president. You couldn't function as government."

McInturff also said that McCain's burden in the final days was to close the gap with young voters and Latino voters.

"John [barred Wright attacks] for instinctively all the right reasons," McInturff said. "But anybody who believed that this issue would have affected the groups we were losing by those margins had never talked to anybody in any of those subgroups about how they felt about those issues."

Ben Smith,
Politico

I think it is worth highlighting that this is a Republican pollster rejecting inflaming racial fears for reasons that were not only pragmatic, but also, at least marginally, ethical in a utilitarian sense. They couldn't have governed after a victory based on stirring up hate, he says. This quite evidently didn't apply if the hate being stirred were religious/cultural, as was evident in the choice of Sarah Palin as the running mate, something Davis and McIntruff still defend.

McInturff admitted that he mispolled the Southwest. "We missed the Southwest. According to the exit polls, the Latino vote in New Mexico went from 34 to 41. That's extraordinary if it's true. And there was extraordinary turnout in Nevada."

Marc Ambinder,
The Atlantic

With the Northeast, upper Midwest, and Far West increasingly nailed down for the Democrats and the deep South nailed down for the Republicans, the Mountain West and Southwest seem to be the only swing regions -- and the Latino vote will matter more and more. Fifteen years ago, pollsters were not very good at sizing up the Latino vote in California, but they've learned. Now they have learn how to measure yet another region.

The Republican pundits blame McCain's defeat first and foremost on public revulsion with the Iraq War. His stumbles on the economy only dug him deeper into a pit the war had already made for him. Peace movement stalwarts need to listen up.

"John McCain essentially became the Bush spokesperson and the administration spokesperson on Iraq," [Bill] McInturff said. "In typical John McCain fashion we had managed to alienate every side of our political party."

"The emergence of the economy as the dominant issue for voters made things go from bad to worse for us," Davis said. "Because there's only one other thing I think that the American public held the Bush administration responsible for aside from Iraq, that they disliked so much, and that was the worst economy in a lifetime."

Bloomberg News

Bloomberg further describes what, for such highly competitive men, must have been an agony.

[ McInturff:] "I don't think there's anyone in our campaign who said, ‘oh my gosh we're just a few days short.' I think we're happy it was over."

[Davis:] "Around the 15th of September, it would have been fine to just call it quits at that point," he said.

These are a couple of guys who are even more relieved than most of the electorate to move on to other concerns!

Approaching the solstice

At 4:50 today here at latitude 37° 46' 29" the sunset was bright and very red -- too intense to be captured by the iPhone camera with which I snapped this.

When I turned around, an enormous moon was already high in the sky.


Apparently I am not alone in seeing this as the largest full moon of the year.

Illinois speculations

The "pay to play" scandal in which Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich apparently sought to sell off Barack Obama's Senate seat for personal profit throws a distressing light over this December 9 AP story.

Blagojevich hires 208 guards with no prison to guard
SPRINGFIELD ‹ Just weeks after Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced hundreds of layoffs because of state budget woes, his administration hired 208 prison guards who don't have a prison to guard.

The Department of Corrections hired the employees for the Thomson Correctional Center in October at a cost of $10.8 million for their first year of work, according to a review of state records. They were supposed to provide security at the prison in northwestern Illinois for inmates being transferred from the Pontiac prison, which Blagojevich has said he'd close to save $4 million a year, a corrections spokesman said Monday.

But the Pontiac prison still is open because of a lawsuit filed by union officials on behalf of employees. And the Pontiac mayor says his city was "duped" because corrections officials promised jobs for most of the displaced workers.

Without new inmates at Thomson, 89 of the new hires will be reassigned to Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet starting Wednesday, meaning $9,000 a week in housing costs, spokesman Derek Schnapp said.

So -- do we figure that Thomson city authorities perhaps failed to pay up as anticipated? And that Pontiac leaders refused the governor's winks and nods? Or that the guards' union missed a fundraiser where they were expected to kick in? Or was there a developer in Joliet with underused buildings who needed tenants and made a nice contribution to the chief executive?

All irresponsible speculation, not based by any facts. But given what was released in the tapes showing Blagojevich's understanding of the perks of his position, it's hard not to wonder.

When I grow up, I want to be an old woman ...

I can't say I love the monster corporation from which I get my health insurance, but seeing this on TV made my day!

An evening march for "Day without a Gay"

The corner of 24th and Mission is my home turf -- and one of San Francisco's launch pads for many a protest march. Tonight it served as the rallying point for people marking the National Day without a Gay. Mission district stalwarts Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and immigrant rights advocate Renee Saucedo both spoke to the crowd of several hundred before taking up the lead banner.


Back in the late 1970s, gays and lesbians used to sometimes say that maybe the hetero-world would learn to appreciate us if we all turned purple. After all, we are everywhere. Unhappily, in the 1980s far too many gay men did suddenly find themselves turned purple -- "outed" -- involuntarily as the AIDS epidemic ripped through the community. These days, another set of activists is demonstrating its presence in response to California voters eliminating our right to marry by passing Prop. 8.


December 10 is international human rights day; marchers think we need equal rights like everyone else.


It's hard to organize a large walkout. But folks care a lot about seeing their equality denied.


For jaded old queers like me, it is good to be reminded that marching still requires bravery for some.


It was cold and dark, but folks seemed both cheerful and determined.


This message seems too simple for some to understand.

They must be very afraid...

Michael Mukasey seems to live partly on the dark side.

Department of Justice staff are apparently refusing to let the Obama transition team see the Bush era legal opinions that support National Security Agency (spying, probably on all of us) and CIA (torture and rendition) operations. According to Law.com, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is taking the position that the opinions from the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel are somehow the private property of the agencies that solicited them to cover their asses.

The Justice official said the department was reluctant to provide the opinions to Obama's team without permission from the two intelligence agencies whose activities they address. At the roundtable, Mukasey said OLC opinions are issued at the request of other agencies with their "own equity or interest in the information."

"And so what we try to do is determine whether, and to what extent, we can clear that information and try to do it as quickly as we can so as to get it to the transition team so that they're aware of all the things that they need when they take over on the 21st," Mukasey said, according to a transcript provided by the department.

Sure seems like the spooks are used to calling the shots. Can the new boss rein them in -- or will they co-opt his people?

H/t ProPublica.

Bowl racial dishonor roll

The Arizona Wildcats have the lowest graduation rate for Black athletes in the study.

Tis the season -- of the college football bowl games. And so it is also the season when the annual survey of graduation rates among players from leading college teams by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida gives us the bad news.

As usual, the study highlights how many fewer African-American athletes at the NFL's farm team schools get out with a college degree than do white athletes. The news is not good.

Richard Lapchick, the Director of TIDES noted: "Overall at the 120 [bowl division] schools, 76 percent of white football student athletes graduated versus 59 percent of African-American football student athletes. The 17 percent gap is actually larger than the 14 percent (64 vs. 50 percent) gap reported in the 2007 study. While the gap is larger, it is certainly countered by the good news that it resulted from a 12 percent improvement for whites and a nine percent improvement for African Americans.

"However, it must be noted that African American and white football players graduate at a higher rate than their male non-athletic peers in the student body. The graduation rate for African-American male students as a whole is only 38 percent, in comparison to the 61 percent graduation rate for white male students -- a disgraceful 23 percent gap."

Those are not pretty figures, for the football players or for how Black students fare in general.

Five of the upcoming bowls will feature pairings in which both participants graduate less than 50 percent of African-American players. Here's the dishonor roll (percentage of African American graduates in parentheses).

• Sugar Bowl -- Utah (45) vs. Alabama (48)

• Fiesta Bowl -- Ohio State (41) vs. Texas (38)

• Capital One Bowl -- Georgia (38) vs. Michigan State (43)

• Chick-fil-A Bowl -- LSU (44) vs. Georgia Tech (36)

• Insight Bowl -- Kansas (47) vs. Minnesota (40)

Nine bowl schools that graduate less than 50 percent of African-American football players are matched with opponents that do better than that low standard. Will this be an advantage or a disadvantage? Here's that list in descending order of Black graduation percentage: Houston (47), South Florida (46), Oklahoma (45), Boise State (44), Fresno State (43), Oregon (42), Hawaii (40), Nevada (34), and bringing up the rear, Arizona (29).

I greatly enjoy watching college football; I happily consume the entertaining product football bowls offer. But there are lies about education and the opportunities the sport offers to its players deeply embedded in the system. Those lies have a clear racial dimension.

Iraq war is so over -- there and here

While many of us in this United States were enjoying our turkey and trimmings, Iraqis were debating/celebrating/denouncing the new "status of forces agreement" (SOFA) with the United States that will set the rules under which the U.S. is in Iraq -- until we are not. The agreement replaces the U.N. mandate Bush has been running the war under since he coerced the international body into giving him a fig leaf after invading without any plausible legal pretext.

It took a lot of arm twisting to get the Iraqi parliament to pass the agreement and it still faces a referendum vote by the Iraqi people. My favorite source for news of what Iraqis are thinking, McClatchy's Iraqi reporters, conducted a range of "man in the street" interviews:

November 27, 2008:
A Pact to End U.S. Occupation Today is a historic day. Our parliament approved a pact that will put an end of the foreign troops on the Iraqi land.

***
I feel good. We should get rid of the (United Nations mandate). We shouldn't be under that anymore. In fact, we should have a coalition with a real strong country. This is the
best thing we can have. I'm not satisfied with it but I have to accept that this is the best choice.

Ammar al Samurrai, 37, an unemployed man in Baghdad

***
I am with this agreement, especially that this agreement will block the way of those who call themselves a resistance to the occupiers because we will have this agreement and the troops won’t stay in Iraq. We’ll have the same situation as many Arab states do, as they have bases for the Americans.

Ghasan Mohammed, Dihok, 26

***
Signing the agreement is better than not signing it because it will free us and we’ll get rid of (the United Nations mandate), and it will let the American troops be out of Iraq. We’ll achieve the sovereignty, which was put away from Iraqis. This is a happy thing, even though it will have some negative things in this agreement, like the immunity for the American troops. If we have it, it will be better than if we don’t.

Bassim Mohammed Sharif, Najaf, 32

These people aren't exactly jumping for joy, but they are convinced they are seeing the beginning of the end of U.S. occupation. I have to say I enjoy contemplating the humiliation it must have been for the conquering Bushies to have to negotiate their way out of their self-inflicted quagmire.

So what's all this mean on the homefront? I stand by my belief that the SOFA is nice -- and won't mean much concretely in the long run. The antiwar group Code Pink has the right slogan -- for most people in the U.S., "THE WAR IS SO OVER!" The incoming administration has a host of real problems and will want to get out as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

Of course our delusional apostles of empire will try to delay the inevitable. We have trashed the country, smashed not only its infrastructure but also whatever social cohesion it once had, so we are not likely to be happy with the result. Gary Kamiya, in Salon, hazards some predictions. He is not a Pollyanna.

In a best-case scenario, Iraq will end up a fairly unstable state more or less closely aligned with Iran, with unequal oil revenue distribution and aggrieved Sunni and Kurdish minorities, but at least still unified, not plagued by major sectarian violence and not a declared enemy of the U.S. In a worst-case scenario, the country would become a failed state, descend again into violence on the scale of the civil war of 2006-2007 or worse and be a haven for jihadists and an open sore in the Middle East.

President-elect Obama is under increasing pressure to abandon his pledge to remove most U.S. troops in 16 months. [So far, he hasn't backtracked.] ... If we stay in Iraq, we are essentially acting as a referee, mediating between clashing sides and, if necessary, attacking them in an attempt to control the outcome of the game. ...

The crucial test Obama will face in Iraq is what he does when violence inevitably flares. If he continues to withdraw U.S. troops, he will be heavily attacked by the establishment, including some of his own national security advisors, for "losing" Iraq. But if Obama keeps the U.S. troops in place, he will simply be giving radicals an incentive to keep attacking them and creating chaos in Iraq.

The peace movement needs to

• celebrate the inevitability of U.S. departure (as Code Pink does),

• encourage any willingness we can find among our rulers to cut their losses in the light of domestic penury,

• urge reparations to Iraqis because to do so is just,

• and, above all, combat the "he lost Iraq" meme we can count on the right to try to hang on Obama if he really pulls out.

It's odd to imagine having the back of a sitting President, but that's our best case scenario.

This is a more complex program than "Bush lied; people died" but some of us need to be able to agitate for a higher standard.

This is madness ...

The New York Times informs us that

Federal Customs and Border Protection authorities are preparing to launch unmanned aircraft patrols from [North Dakota], the first time such monitoring will occur along the nation’s northern border.

A Predator B aircraft, delivered to Grand Forks on Saturday, will make runs along the northern edge of North Dakota using sensors that can provide video and detect heat and changes to landscape, Customs and Border Protection officials said.

The $10 million drones will protect us -- from what, I have to ask? The head of "air security operations" was asked whether there was a significant problem with unauthorized border crossings or illegal drug shipments. He admitted he wasn't sure.

"We hope to actually use this aircraft to measure that," he said. "You don't know what you don't know."

Apparently a guy out of the Donald Rumsfeld school of explanatory prose.

It seems our rulers want to turn us into paranoid lunatics while bankrupting us so their cronies can sell the government high tech surveillance equipment. Can we change this? I remember being proud of living near "the world's longest undefended border" with Canada.

Milk on celluloid

We almost floated out of the Castro Theatre, holding hands and prancing down the sidewalk last week. The biopic Milk transported these two aging, long-partnered, lesbians back to our youth when being gay was about wanting to get laid, not about getting married. If you have a chance, do go see it and share the joy and terror that was the emerging gay movement of the 1970s.

The film and its times recalled for me a line from the murdered Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton:

"All together we have more death than they,
But all together we have more life than they."

Isn't that always the case when people are coming into the struggle for their freedom?
***
Of course I've got commentary. Hopefully most viewers of the movie will notice an absence. Aside from Anne Kronenburg, there are NO women in this story. That's true to the period. Lesbians in that time were more often fighting alongside other women still barely winning the rudiments of equality in employment, getting credit, raising children, etc. Gays might have been emerging, but the Equal Rights Amendment was going down to defeat and we cared.

I lived no more than a mile and half from the scenes in Milk, but in my little local political world, the struggle was about whether Latinos would finally elect a Latino to the Board of Supervisors from the Mission neighborhood (didn't happen) -- and how those of us who were lesbian and gay should relate to Latino fears that we were changing their turf.

Many San Francisco lesbians of the period were glad those boys in the Castro were there, but their world was not ours. Of necessity, we were more about survival and sobriety. Women did not get deeply integrated into LGBT struggles until the male leadership of the 1970s was decimated by AIDS in the 1980s.

The film makes me want to go back and restudy the campaign that defeated the Briggs initiative, the 1978 measure that would have fired gay teachers, and anyone who spoke up for them. We won that one, 65-35. Certainly the role Harvey Milk played, vividly portrayed in the film, demanding that gays "come out" and debating homophobes was a part of the victory. My ground level recollection of the campaign has several features:

• the Briggs was the first time I remember hip and groovy straight people incorporating the struggle for gay rights as part of their self-understanding of liberal identity;

• and, contrary to received dogma about how you win elections, the anti-Briggs forces never came close to achieving unity of message and organization. There were at least three major anti-Briggs campaigns that I can remember; affiliates of each thought the others were going to ruin us.

I'll have to do that research from where I sit now and try to understand why we won. Certainly one factor was that we had outspoken support against Briggs from both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

But that wasn't Harvey's game. He was about speaking out and standing up for ourselves. You have to love Sean Penn's portrayal of the guy as the Pied Piper of Gay Liberation. See the film if you can.

Flavors of change

Josh Marshall observes this morning:

HOLY COW: Obama's actually going to be president.

The fact remains a little breath taking.

And apparently Obama is really going to try to keep some portion of his mobilized base together, ready to have his back. A couple of days ago, campaign volunteers got an email over the signature of campaign guru David Plouffe, urging us to host or attend local "Change is Coming" house meetings on December 13 and 14. Want to find one? Sign up here.

That's ambitious and certainly a good idea, but where this got interesting was the choice of local house meetings I found available when I followed the link. All flavors of activists are jumping on the idea. Some examples [the descriptions in bold text are my additions]:

[An issue specific meeting:] Prisons are overflowing. The US incarcerates more prople than Russia. Join Change We Need volunteers to discuss proposed changes in the criminal justice system, particularly expanding the use of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE within prisons. We will consider all views.

***
[A post-partisan meeting:] Many of you have already submitted your feedback through the online survey. The team in Chicago is reviewing an impressive number of detailed responses, and your input will help guide the future of this grassroots movement. ... Now is the time to put aside partisanship and politics, find common ground, and work together. Please forward this invitation to those who might not have been involved in the campaign, even those who might have supported our opponent.
***
[A disappointed left-leaning meeting] When is Obama going to appoint someone who reflects the progressive base that brought him to the White House?

He won the crucial votes on the strength of his anti-Iraq War stance, and many progressive peace and justice activists worked hard for him against John McCain.

So why in the world is he choosing Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State when she was one of the loudest hawks on Iraq and threatened to obliterate 75 million Iranians?

And it's not just Hillary.

Obama's OMB pick, Peter Orzag, is a Clintonite disciple of Robert Rubin.

Obama's AG pick, Eric Holder, is a Clintonite who represented Chiquita Bananas. ...
***
[An ambitious institutional organizing meeting] For the last 22 months, progressive activists across California organized their communities in response to Barack Obama's call for change. Together we built a powerful volunteer-based campaign organization and helped deliver many key battleground states on November 4. Now many of us are asking "what's next?".

California's Field Director Mary Jane Stevenson and other campaign staff are working to launch CommunityOrganize.com - a new statewide progressive organizing network. In conjunction with Barack Obama's "Change is Coming" house parties, we will hold two organizing meetings, one in Southern California and one in Northern California. Help us brainstorm on how best to keep California's new-found political energy alive, build on what we learned campaigning for Obama, and support community organizers across the state.

You can find your local variants through Change is Coming. Will anything come of any of this? On the one hand, this process seems a recipe for chaos, pulling and hauling in all directions. On the other, the most organized campaign in modern experience -- now attached in some way to the office of the President -- is behind it, so maybe some of this goes somewhere.

Hard to know, but I guess I should go to some of these meetings! I have choices.

Genteel racism never goes out of style

When the President-elect does something New York Times columnist David Brooks approves of he dares write:

Obama had not gone native.

I can just see the unctuous Mr. Brooks basking on the porch of the manse while a liveried black servant brings him a mint julep.

Clean coal? No such thing.

General Electric really thinks they can sell us anything with sexy models. Are we up for buying soot and black lung?

Are we really that dumb?

Check out this from folks who style themselves Reality.

"Clean coal" is non-existent, an industry advertising scam.

Learn more here.

Meanwhile I was heartened to see these in southern Wyoming, a state I think of as being entirely devoted to environmentally devastating resource extraction, such as coalbed methane mining for natural gas. These ranchers have found themselves another resource.

What's wrong with Hillary Clinton?

Mostly I'm watching the Obama cabinet choices with resignation, knowing I'm not going to like them a lot. He's not a lefty -- he's a cautious centrist. He'll put similar people in office, at least at first. Since he's a pragmatist, we may get better ones if these don't work out.

In particular, I'm not much worried by Hillary Clinton at the State Department. Her foreign policy instincts seem far more bellicose than Obama's (and my foreign policy instincts are always to restrain our rulers), but she grew during her Presidential bid and he'll call the shots. That's what Presidents (functional ones) do. She's smart and able to absorb difficult, unfamiliar realities. That's to the good.

What worries me about Clinton at State is that we have no reason to believe that she can manage a large institution. If she could, she'd probably be President right now. The chief thing we learned from her campaign was that she could not manage a complex enterprise, despite enjoying vast early advantages. So I'm interested in who gets put in at State to do the day to day running of the department. Her success will depend on getting the right managerial talent under her.

Today's post is elsewhere...

I've got a "Gay and Gray" column up today over at Time Goes By. As I usually do in these posts, I try to share how our experience of our histories might look different to elders who've lived their lives within an LGBT identity. Click on over to take a look.

Debt, credit contraction and consequences

According to a report in Wednesday's New York Times, the cost of a college education is rapidly escalating beyond the reach of an ever larger percentage of the U.S. population.

... college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education. ...

Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000. ...

While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations.

That is, the states, which can't just print more money like the Feds, can't afford to subsidize their public institutions. And since colleges are easier to cut than prisons, they get axed.

So students borrow more and more to get the education that is a ticket to get into or stay in the shrinking middle class.

This hits close to home. My partner teaches at a private university where students need to take loans to pay substantial tuition. And loans are becoming harder to come by in the credit crunch. And at her school, according to its President, 95 percent of operating cash comes from tuition payments. Many students who were enrolled in the fall semester now have "holds" on their spring enrollment because they are not fully paid up. Fewer paid up students means fewer class offerings. So my partner will probably lose one of the classes she expected to teach -- and get paid for.

The illustration at the head of this article comes from a contest the Consumers Union is currently running among student cartoonists illustrating the consequences of debt expansion. Through December 5, you can vote for the cartoon that best expresses your sense of what debt is doing to us at this site. The winner gets $1000 and undoubtedly needs it!

Tom Ammiano is my new assemblymember

This picture of Tom Ammiano at his swearing-in as a member of the California State Assembly was spread across the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle today.

I bet he hated it. This is not how he likes to be seen, I suspect -- but his delight is unfeigned.

If anyone ever put in the time to get ready to be a state legislator, Tom is it. He's been a county supervisor since 1994 -- fourteen hard years of trying to make something of City government. We got city-mandated universal health care out of that long slog, among other policy accomplishments. Before that Tom was on the elected School Board from 1990-2. Before that he was a third grade teacher -- and a gay comedian, a vocational byway that has served him well in public life.

I think of Tom as the last California politician who dates from that first brave and creative generation of LGBT activists who dared to imagine we could simply be normal. Like many of these people, who have by now mostly left the pubic arena, he cut his teeth on fighting the Briggs Initiative in 1977 -- that ballot measure would have fired all gay and gay-positive teachers. We won that one.

Tom is simply a good guy with a commitment to justice, not only for his own gay community, but for all the unglamorous ordinary people of this sometimes pretentious city -- renters, low wage workers, bus riders, teachers and nurses.

I took this picture of him a few years ago at a rally to save St. Luke's Hospital, a threatened community-serving fixture of his neighborhood. I think he likes looking like this a little better.



Full disclosure: I was heavily involved in Tom's 1999 mayoral campaign.

S.L.I.M.E. indeed

Back in September when the "bailout" of the failing financial sector was first being pushed at Congress by Treasury Secretary Paulson, my financially literate friend labeled the exercise the the S.L.I.M.E. Act, the "Successful Looting and Investment Manager Employment Act."

The Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress, said today she was right to be worried. According to the Washington Post,

... the Treasury Department has yet to impose necessary internal controls or decide how to determine if the bailout program is achieving its goals.

A billion here, a billion there -- a vacation home for a banker somewhere -- pretty soon you can go through a lot of billions.

The Treasury official charged with administering the program, Interim Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari, responds with the typical whine of faltering management: we're trying...we work really hard.

"We believe that Treasury has made significant efforts to ensure transparency and good communication," Neel Kashkari, the head of the department's bailout program, said in a letter, "but more can and will be done in these areas."

This guy may end up being glad his appointment is a short term one.

TPM Muckraker is going over the report, page by page. They point to nuggets like

• Reporting procedure? The Treasury Department does not know how, or whether, it will require banks receiving bailout cash to report what they do with the money.

• Plan for controls? Nope.

• Monitoring conflicts of interest? Not that either.

• Limits to executive pay? Not on this Treasury's watch.

• Preventing conflicts of interest among contractors hired for the bailout? Too much to ask.

It sounds pretty slimey to me.

Do I have to hate Obama yet?

In 1992, joyous San Franciscans sang "Ding, dong the witch is dead!" in the streets when Bill Clinton was elected to replace George Bush the First. For several months, friends who had spent the 1980s working to support peasant revolutions in Central America and pushing back against Reagan's cuts to safety net programs at home waxed lyrical about what Bill would do for us. I was skeptical.

This time around, many progressives seem ready to look at Barack Obama's Cabinet appointments and conclude the guy conned us. Eight years of Bush-Cheney lies have left us instinctively suspicious of leaders. I'm willing to wait and see. This time I'll urge my friends to calm down and watch with some hope.

My hope that Obama will govern predominantly from the progressive side of things doesn't derive from believing he's a person of the left. He's not. He's a fairly conventional Democratic Party centrist and he never claimed anything else. He touts "bipartisanship" to a degree that seems almost foolish in light of the irrational right wing wreck the Republicans have become. A life of having to convince white people that a Black man need not be a raving revolutionary has marked Obama. He's cautious. I've asked since the Iowa primary whether we could believe that Obama knows there are irreconcilable sides when it comes to the distribution of the goodies of this wealthy society. He certainly tries to act as if sides could always be reconciled.

But I'm not terribly worried that he'll govern from the right, even as he appoints Larry Summers to advise him on the economy, Hillary Clinton to State, and Robert Gates to the Defense (War) slot. His good fortune and ours is that he arrives at a moment when the problems that matter to a centrist -- maintaining U.S. global power and its economic system -- require governing at least mildly progressively.

• I believe Obama will get the U.S. out of Iraq, probably more rapidly and completely than he'd like. The Iraqis are reaching the end of their patience; the U.S. people know that war is a goner and we can't afford it. Bush's "status of forces agreement" will blow away with the administration that framed it. Only God knows what will happen to the Iraqis, but the U.S. will leave.
  

• I won't be half-surprised if the Afghanistan war also gets wrapped up pretty quickly. It too is an irretrievable policy failure in a small place very far away. "Out" is going to look good as other problems loom.

• The awful potential of asymmetrical warfare, as Mumbai events illustrated this week, means that the last thing any of us need is more failed states -- yet knocking over fragile governments and leaving trashed societies in their wake is all that U.S. military force seems able to accomplish. That reality will drive an Obama administration that cares about U.S. power to look for other forms of influence, less violent ones.

• The other problems that loom are include China, loose nukes, and climate change. All require brains not brawn, even if the goal remains cementing U.S. dominance. Pragmatic necessity is going to force some multilateralism that the right could never accept.

• Getting the economy going will require government intervention, re-regulation and a certain amount of circumscribing the unfettered grasping of the rich. It is also what an Obama administration will be judged on. He's the best politician of his generation -- he'll get something done there that helps more people than it hurts because he has to.

• Some move toward universal healthcare is an economic necessity -- something mildly progressive thus is a political necessity.

• Simply using the government to loot for the rich has become incompatible with maintaining the system. Look for some managerial competence in government because Obama needs that much to attain his goals.

This is not a radical progressive agenda, but it is an agenda that contains hope for most of us.

Let's get ready to mobilize to put pressure on him to do the stuff that doesn't fit so easily into his centrist agenda. On that score, worry a lot about whether he is willing to rein in the encroaching surveillance state and limit executive power enough to begin to restore the rule of law. Get ready to push the guy on the divisive stuff: on "don't ask, don't tell", on delivering the Employee Free Choice Act so workers have a better chance to unionize, on passing immigration "reform" that provides a real path to legalization for our undocumented working class. On those things, the Obama administration is going to need a good kick in the pants.

But Obama finds himself in a situation in which completely disappointing the progressive inclinations of his base won't serve either the country's interests as he seems to understand them -- or his own. So let's wait until he does something that materially injures our aspirations before we give up on him. With our pressure, there's a chance he'll come through on some of what we need and hope for. Do we dare to win a few?

In election campaigns, there's no private space (except in the ballot box)

Someone named Richard Raddon who worked as director of the Los Angeles Film Festival gave $1500 to the campaign to pass Prop. 8, the state constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Not surprisingly, a lot of people thought robbing others of their rights was rotten behavior and said so, forcefully, both to his employer, Film Independent, and to Mr. Raddon. After some pulling and hauling, Mr. Raddon has resigned from his job.

He is distressed that people thought his contribution to the initiative campaign should expose him to public criticism. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, he issued what strikes me as a very naïve statement:

I have always held the belief that all people, no matter race, religion or sexual orientation, are entitled to equal rights. As many know, I consider myself a devout and faithful Mormon. I prefer to keep the details around my contribution through my church a private matter. ...

The first sentence is simply nonsense -- he contributed to legally mandating inequality; he can't, except as dissimulation, to claim otherwise. The second sentence raises additional issues about how we have chosen to preserve democratic rights in campaigns.

What got Mr. Raddon in trouble was campaign finance law that forces disclosure of who gives money to election campaigns. This is a profoundly progressive legal concept, though its implementation can be cumbersome. If rich people could throw money at campaigns without any disclosure, we'd have no idea which interests were buying a megaphone. If Raddon had wanted to finance private education courses for Mormons and others about the evils he apparently thinks arise from same-sex marriage, very likely nobody would have been the wiser and therefore, nobody would have complained. But he chose to intervene with a non-trivial sum in a fight over public policy in the arena of electoral democracy. I'm inclined to feel, if he can't take the heat, he should have stayed out of the kitchen.

But he and his supporters don't see it that way. One of the board members of film festival complained:

"Someone has lost his job and possibly his livelihood because of privately held religious beliefs. I think the organization was ready to tough this out, but Rich ultimately decided it wasn't worth the cost. ..."

Again, that first statement is literally untrue, though the speaker doesn't seem to realize it. Giving money to a political campaign is a public act. Enlisting the state to enforce one's "privately held religious beliefs" is a public act. You may be able to do it, but don't expect to walk away without having the people on the wrong end of your new law mad at you. You have engaged in public conduct and may have to weather public disapproval.

I also note Mr. Raddon describes his donation to the "yes on 8" forces as being given "through my church." This may be a figure of speech - or it may be literal. His church is also subject to campaign disclosure law. According to the New York Times, the Mormons are being investigated about whether they disclosed their participation in the campaign properly. Note -- there was nothing wrong with their participating -- but California law requires churches as well as individuals to take public responsibility for what they do with money to influence elections. Churches have every right to advocate in the public sphere for what they believe in -- and, if they choose to try to enforce their values beyond the voluntary circle of their membership, face the wrath of those who don't share their values.

Mr. Raddon found himself particularly vulnerable to pressure from those hurt by what he chose to do with his money because he worked in the public cultural sphere. For a lot of people, public culture functions as various churches, with various beliefs, function for their members: as the arena where deep values and commitments are explored. I'm a little surprised Raddon didn't know that people around him might have serious conflicts with his values. Thinking that he could weather the likely storm seems almost willfully deaf to the probable consequences of his action in his environment.