A Different Kind of White House

The Undoing

Second on Time Magazine writer Michael Grunwald's list of five ways Obama could get America back on track is: "Repeal Bush.

"Obama can't undo the last eight years, but he can serve notice on Day One that the Bush Administration is really, really over. He could start by reversing Bush's regulatory efforts to weaken federal oversight of mining, housing, drilling, finance and other favored industries. He could offer the middle class much needed relief by proposing quickly to restore Clinton-era upper-income tax rates and reduce the tax burden for everyone else. He could drop Bush's legal battles to block California from enhancing its environmental protections. The End of the National Nightmare Executive Order could also include: No more torture. No more 'threat levels' designed to make people freak out about unnamed dangers. No more 'signing statements' declaring executive prerogative to ignore laws the President doesn't like. No more firing prosecutors for failing to go along with a political agenda. And while he's at it: No more timber lobbyists running the Forest Service, oil lobbyists editing climate reports, Wall Street lobbyists running the sec or Arabian-horse commissioners running anything. (Sorry, Brownie.)"

But as Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg write in the New York Times: "President-elect Barack Obama has begun an effort to tamp down what his aides fear are unusually high expectations among his supporters, and will remind Americans regularly throughout the transition that the nation's challenges are substantial and will take time to address. . . .

"[A]ides said they were looking to temper hopes that he would be able to solve the nation's problems or fully reverse Bush administration policies quickly and easily, especially given the prospect of a deep and long-lasting recession.

"'We have talked about this,' said Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. 'It's important that everybody understands that this is not going to happen overnight. There has to be a realistic expectation of what can happen and how quickly. . . .

"'The flip side of this -- and I want to make sure this is also clear -- we also believe that it is paramount to begin doing everything we said we would do in the campaign,' Mr. Gibbs said. 'We know expectations are high. But disappointment if we didn't try to do the things that we said we were going to do would be far, far greater than anything else. People went to the polls and elected Barack Obama because they believed the fact not only that he could do what he said, but that he would try to do what he said.'"

Some Immediate Challenges

Abdul Waheed Wafa and Mark McDonald write in the New York Times: "An airstrike by United States-led forces killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others at a wedding party in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. The casualties included women and children, the officials said. . . .

"The reports of the strike, in a region that has become a renewed front line in the battle against the Taliban, showed the raw tensions between the United States and Afghanistan over the toll suffered by civilians in the war. . . .

"The reports recall an assault in August in western Afghanistan that was initially disputed by the United States, in which an American gunship killed at least 30 civilians. On Wednesday, at a news conference called to congratulate Mr. Obama, President Hamid Karzai said his first request to Mr. Obama would be 'to end the civilian casualties.'"

Ellen Barry and Sophia Kishkovsky write in the New York Times: "President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia greeted his future American counterpart, Senator Barack Obama, with bristling language on Wednesday, promising to place short-range missiles on Russia's western border if Washington proceeded with its planned missile defense system in Eastern Europe."

Opinion Watch

Timothy Egan blogs for the New York Times: "This was the first real 21st century election -- rejecting the incompetence of the Bush years, the race-baiting of Karl Rove's majority strategy and the poison of media-driven wedge politics. As a nation, we rejoin the world community. As a sustaining narrative, we found our story again. . . .

"See the trend: new, emerging, growing, tomorrow, young. Dormant for the darkest years of the Bush presidency, the oldest strain of American DNA is evident again. . . .

"One of the better lines in Obama's election night speech was a slap to the rejectionist politics of Bush. Rove always insisted a president only needed 50 percent plus one to win. And Bush governed that way, permanently angering half the population.

"On Tuesday night, Obama reached out to the other half. For those who did not vote for him, he said, 'I will be your president, too.'

"What an idea -- simple and obvious. But like so much American common sense, it's been missing for too long."

Maureen Dowd writes in her New York Times opinion column that Obama "has the chance to make the White House pristine again."

Washington's monuments "have lost their luminescence in recent years," Dowd writes.

"How could the White House be inspiring when W. and Cheney were inside making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry?

"How could the Lincoln Memorial -- 'With malice toward none; with charity for all' -- be as moving if the black neighborhoods of a charming American city were left to drown while the president mountain-biked?

"How can the National Archives, home of the Constitution, be as momentous if the president and vice president spend their days redacting the Constitution?

"How can the black marble V of the Vietnam Memorial have power when those in power repeat the mistake of Vietnam?"

Roger Cohen writes in his New York Times opinion column: "Beyond Iraq, beyond the economy, beyond health care, there was something even more fundamental at stake in this U.S. election won by Barack Obama: the self-respect of the American people.

"For almost eight years, Americans have seen words stripped of meaning, lives sacrificed to confront nonexistent Iraqi weapons and other existences ravaged by serial incompetence on an epic scale. . . .

"You can't proclaim freedom as you torture. You can't promote democracy as you disappear people. You can't stand for the rule of law and strip prisoners of basic rights. You can't dispense with the transparency and regulation essential to modern capital markets and hope still to be the beacon of free enterprise.

"Or rather, you can do all these things, but then you find yourself alone.

"Obama will reinvest words with meaning. That is the basis of everything. And an American leader able to improvise a grammatical, even a moving, English sentence is no bad thing. Americans, in the inevitable recession ahead, will have a leader who can summon their better natures rather than speak, as Bush has, to their spite."

Economy Watch

Martin Crutsinger writes for the Associated Press: "At a time when most administrations are slowing down, the Bush White House appears to be speeding up -- at least when it comes to getting the $700 billion financial rescue program up and running.

"Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, President Bush's point man on the gigantic program, is pushing his staff to do everything possible to show markets that the government is getting the money out the door to bolster the financial system and get banks to resume more normal lending."

Jeannine Aversa writes for the Associated Press: "The Bush administration is hopeful that world leaders, at a summit in Washington next week, will adopt an action plan singling out some short-term steps that could be taken to deal with the current financial crisis as well as prevent similar problems from happening again. . . .

"Europeans -- led by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- are seeking ambitious regulatory reforms coordinated among countries to prevent a repeat of similar housing, credit and financial debacles that are now imperiling the economies of the United States and the world."

But as Aversa writes: "While the White House . . . believes leaders will be able to find some common ground . . . there is little appetite in the waning days of the administration for overhauling financial regulations."

Lori Montgomery writes in The Washington Post: "When Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) moves into the White House in January, he will inherit a stratospheric budget deficit, a collapsing financial system and the gloomiest economic outlook since the Great Depression. The silver lining? For a few months, at least, he will have a license to spend money."

Rove's Dream Dashed

Alec MacGillis and Jon Cohen write in The Washington Post: "After President Bush's reelection in 2004, top strategist Karl Rove proclaimed the arrival of a permanent Republican majority. Just four years later, the results from Sen. Barack Obama's definitive victory suggest that the opposite may be underway.

"The Democrats appear to have built a majority across a wide, and expanding, share of the electorate -- young voters, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities, and highly educated whites in growing metropolitan areas. The Republicans appear at the moment to be marginalized, hanging on to a coalition that may shrink with time -- older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia. . . .

"'It is a problem for Republicans. As they continue to cater to their culturally conservative rural base, they continue to alienate educated voters,' said Rep. Tom Davis, who is retiring and whose Fairfax County district was taken over by the Democrats on Tuesday."

WHAS-TV in Louisville interviewed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who himself was only barely reelected Tuesday. He blamed the bad night on Bush: "I think anytime you lose an election you go back and analyze it and figure out what happened. I think it's pretty clear that having a very unpopular president is not helpful in an election. I think we can stipulate that."

Exodus Watch

In his remarks to White House staffers this morning, Bush joked lamely: "As January 20th draws near, some of you may be anxious about finding a new job or a new place to live. I know how you feel."

Then he reminded them: "But between now and then we must keep our attention on the task at hand, because the American people expect no less."

But as it happens, Tim Reid writes for the Times of London: "Many of President Bush's 3,000 political appointees are struggling to find jobs as they leave office because of the ailing economy and a lack of desire among some employees to hire people from an administration with a reputation for incompetence and cronyism.

"Mr Bush himself is fine."

So are: Condoleezza Rice, his Secretary of State, who "is set to become a political science professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution think-tank, run by Stanford University, where she was Provost before joining the Bush administration.

"Dick Cheney, after 40 years in Washington, hinted earlier this year that he might write a book after leaving the vice-presidency. He is expected to go into semi-retirement, and spend more time with his fly-fishing rod. He is a passionate angler.

"Yet many lower-level members of the Administration are finding the job market tough. Traditionally, the legions of outgoing troops from a departing government flock to Wall Street, or into Washington think-tanks or lobbying firms. Members of Bill Clinton's team had little difficulty landing post-government employment."

Book Watch

Bush is expected to rake in piles of money giving speeches. But his memoirs may not be worth much yet.

Hillel Italie writes for the Associated Press: "In less than three months, President-elect Barack Obama will take office and the Bush administration will belong to history. With the president reportedly interested in writing about his White House years, publishers have a suggestion:

"Take your time.

"'If I were advising President Bush, given how the public feels about him right now, I think patience would probably be something that I would encourage,' says Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf, which in 2004 released Bill Clinton's million-selling 'My Life.'

"'Certainly the longer he waits, the better,' says Marji Ross, president and publisher of the conservative Regnery Publishing, which is more likely to take on anti-Obama books in the next few years than any praises of Bush.

"'There's a pent-up frustration among conservatives that will focus their attention on a Barack Obama presidency and lead them to buy a lot of books about Barack Obama. But that's not the kind of emotion that anyone is going to use to turn to reading a memoir by a conservative president.'

"In a poor economy, it's not a great time for anyone to shop a book, and certainly not for a deeply unpopular president."

Cartoon Watch

Pat Bagley on the Bush gag, Tony Auth on an impatient nation, Mike Keefe on Bush's housewarming gift, Signe Wilkinson on passing the torch, Tom Stiglich on history, and Mike Luckovich on Day One.