Marbury

grey area

The Independent's John Rentoul captures the following exchange at Davos:

Manouchechr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, said of Tony Blair: "During his time in office his hair was not so grey. It shows that his stance on the Middle East is serious."

Unexpectedly complimentary. Blair laughed, and said that he wanted to hear Mottaki accept a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine if he weren't to lose the "remaining hairs that aren't grey". He said: "If people heard you accept in principle two states, it would keep my hair brown."

Mottaki declined to answer the question, saying: "We do not have the right to make decisions on behalf of the Palestinians."

running into larry summers

From a profile of the president's chief economic adviser in Time:

"To have an argument with Larry Summers is a little like being run over by a tank with a Lotus engine and to find the experience educational," says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution.

obama gets mad

Obama has denounced the $20 billion in end-of-year bonuses that Wall St just awarded itself as "shameful."

You can see from the video that he seems genuinely annoyed - and apparently his statement came about in spontaneous response to a Wall Street Journal news story he'd read that morning.

As ever with Obama, this intervention stems from a mixture of genuine feeling and cool calculation. He really does believe that at a time he's asking everyone in the nation to pull together, the bankers aren't keeping their end of the deal. But he also knows that as he tries to get the stimulus bill - still closely associated in the public's mind with the bailout - through the Senate, he can't afford for voters to think he's condoning this kind of behaviour.

It's also a measure of his confidence. He's not concerned, as some other Democrats might be, about being called "anti-business", and - despite being ten days into the job - he's happy to take moral as well as political leadership of the country.

charge it to my heart

OK, more Blagorama. Here's a doozy of a quote, noted by Time's David Von Drehle:

He recalled the sacrifices of a sainted parent, recounted the struggles of the humble voters for whom he worked night and day, acknowledged and apologized for his ultimate offense — the crime of caring too much. "Charge it to my heart," he said, adding at another point, "Sometimes I get too frustrated. Sometimes maybe I get too impatient with the process."

And don't miss this sketch of Blago's last hours as governor by the NYT's Monica Davey, who was allowed to shadow him for the day. It contains the seeds of a new defense - it was Chicago made me do it:

“I come out of the alleys of Chicago politics,” said Mr. Blagojevich, 52, who entered Democratic politics in 1992, first as a state representative, then a United States representative. “That’s a tough place. The politics there is not motivated by idealism or high purpose. It’s nuts and bolts, and you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I came up that way."

credit where it's due

Amidst his usual bombast, Charles Krauthammer has a point when he says that America, and yes, George Bush, needn't be overly defensive about their treatment of Muslims since 9/11:

As in Obama's grand admonition: "We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name." Have "we" been doing that, smearing Islam because of a small minority? George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the fires of Ground Zero were still smoldering, to declare "Islam is peace," to extend fellowship and friendship to Muslims, to insist that Americans treat them with respect and generosity of spirit. And America listened. In these seven years since Sept. 11 -- seven years during which thousands of Muslims rioted all over the world (resulting in the death of more than 100) to avenge a bunch of cartoons -- there's not been a single anti-Muslim riot in the United States to avenge the massacre of 3,000 innocents.

Bush's little-remembered trip to the Islamic Center might have been the finest moment of his presidency.

pic of the day

Hillary and Joe the Biden at a signing ceremony in the White House yesterday
WSJ/Bloomberg/Landov

get the kids, get the kids

This is brilliant. It's like a scene from a movie. But then perhaps that's not surprising - Blago seems to think he's in a movie, albeit one that isn't being shot according to his script. The kids don't jump into frame, a grateful public don't shower him in acclaim...

bye bye blago

By 59-0, Illinois state senators have voted to oust their governor, despite his delivery of an impassioned plea from the senate floor. What were they thinking? Blago's knack for enlivening our public discourse with the judiciously chosen irrelevance will be sorely missed:

Mr. Blagojevich told a strange anecdote about John Warner, the former senator from Virginia, who it seems once mistook Mr. Blagojevich, then a freshman Congressman, for a staff member and told him to fetch coffee. Mr. Warner was married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time, and Mr. Blagojevich told the State Senate, “that’s all I could think about.” It was not quite clear how all that was supposed to help his case.

Still, he went down fighting, displaying his mastery of the non-apology:

“I want to apologise to you for what happened,” he said, looking earnest and speaking as if he felt pretty badly about it all. “But I can’t. Because I did nothing wrong.”

Most Blago-esque single line of the day:

"I did a lot of things that were mostly right."

obama is watching you

This made me chuckle, possibly because I suspect whoever's behind it would agree with me about this.

the johnson treatment

A commenter on my post about Obama's touchy-feely style mentions Lyndon Johnson - which gives me an excuse to post this famous series of photographs of LBJ persuading, cajoling and intimidating a senator called Theodore Green:

how to dress for the white house

Each administration has its own culture, its own set of informal working practices. The tone is set, intentionally or otherwise, by the president. It is also usually influenced by the preceding administration. The Clinton White House was highly informal compared to its predecessor, partly because they wanted to send a signal that the younger, baby boom generation had come to power after the old-school starchiness of Bush 41 - and partly because Bill Clinton just liked it that way. Bush 43 and his team, horrified by the perceived laxness of Clinton's style - epitomised, of course, by the Lewinsky affair - emphasised formality. Everyone wore suits. Nobody was allowed in the Oval Office without a jacket and tie. Punctuality was fiercely adhered to. The Obama era is just over a week old but already a new style has emerged, skilfully sketched in this NYT report.

If Mr. Obama’s clock is looser than Mr. Bush’s, so too are his sartorial standards. Over the weekend, Mr. Obama’s first in office, his aides did not quite know how to dress. Some showed up in jeans (another no-no under Mr. Bush), some in coats and ties. So the president issued an informal edict for “business casual” on weekends — and set his own example. He showed up Saturday for a briefing with his chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, dressed in slacks and a gray sweater over a white buttoned-down shirt. Veterans of the Bush White House are shocked.

I suspect that the new informality is less a reaction to Bush than it is simply an expression of the already-mature culture of Obama and his team, forged in the unprecedentedly intense heat of that two year election campaign. It's the culture of a Silicon Valley start-up: informal but intense, optimistic but driven. Slacks are OK, slacking is not.

obama's palmartouch

Politico reports on how the president likes to touch people up. On the arm, or the shoulder, or the back - to make a connection, express warmth, but also to control and even  - very subtly - intimidate:

During his visit to the White House press room last week, Obama responded to a Politico reporter’s unwanted question with a verbal rebuke — and a series of shoulder pats so emphatic as to be audible. Although Obama was clearly annoyed, Navarro (a body language expert) adds, the gesture was conciliatory, rather than aggressive. “You didn’t see a closed fist or a pointed finger,” he says. “It was what we call full palmartouch.”

A scribe who personally received a hand-on-shoulder talking-to from the then-senator on the campaign trail says that the message was mixed. He says he knew Obama was irritated but that the Touch felt “confidential” and that he also had the sense that Obama was trying to connect with him.

The contact, he said, “seemed to have a twofold purpose — to express his annoyance and also to convince you that you were wrong.”

one down, one to go

Obama's stimulus bill has passed in the House, with precisely zero Republican votes.

GOP congressmen has no immediate incentives to support the bill. The Limbaugh-fired base is screaming red murder about what they see as an outrageous expansion of government spending, and at some of the Dem pork that's packed around the edges. Congressmen also know that if it succeeds, Obama and the Dems will get the credit anyway.

The president's team won't be unduly worried by the lack of bipartisan support. If the bill comes to be seen as a failure the Republicans can play I-told-you-so. But then, if the bill comes to be seen as a failure Obama is screwed anyway. And in the meantime, he can suggest that the opposition is playing politics in America's hour of need. In the longer term, if the bill succeeds then the Republican Party's brand may come to be even more tarnished that it already is.

Next up: the Senate, where there's likely to be more play-nice.

If you needed any reminder of how much money is at stake here, it's more than the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

today is christmas day...

...for us Blago fans, anyway.

after the decider: the presider

As president, George Bush liked to refer to himself as "the decider". In this brilliant post Andrew Sullivan argues that Bush's conception of the presidency was based on a monarchical model: he had a "tendency to declare things, as if merely saying them as president could make them so."

Now look at Obama. What the critics misread in his Inaugural was its classical structure. He was not running any more. He was presiding. His job was not to rally vast crowds, but to set the scene for the broader constitutional tableau to come to life. Hence the obvious shock of some Republican Congressman at debating with a president who seemed interested in actual conversation, aas opposed to pure politics. Last Tuesday, there were none of the bold declarative predictions of the Second Bush Inaugural - and none of the slightly creepy Decider idolatry. Yes, Obama set some very clear directional goals, but the key difference is what came next: a window of invitation. The invitation is to the other co-equal branches of government to play their part; and for the citizenry to play its. This is an understanding of the president as one node in a constitutional order - not a near-dictator outside and superior to other branches of government. It is a return to traditional constitutional order. And it is rooted in a traditional, small-c conservative understanding of the presidency.

If Bush was about the presidency as power, Obama is about the presidency as authority.