"Don't tell anybody, but Obama is actually a progressive"

Melody Barnes (photo above)

Jed Report-- "Greg Sargent captures an important dynamic":

This is probably too obvious to point out, but the game here is that Obama is working to frame GOP obstructionism in advance. By simultaneously claiming a mandate while approaching Republicans with "humility" and a request for their help, Obama is boxing out Republican opponents in advance, laying the groundwork to cast them as partisan and hostile to the people's will.

That's why it's still lost on yours truly why people are seeing Obama as "centrist" based on his bipartisan gestures and tone or his "pragmatic" staff pickes. This stuff is just about positioning in advance, and the real tell will lie in his actual policies.

For years, decades in fact, bipartisanship has meant that Democrats should do what the GOP wants. Now, Obama is turning that on its head. Bipartisanship now means that Republicans have every right to get out of the way and help the new government -- which happens to be a Democratic one -- do the business that they were elected to do.

E.J. Dionne-- "Obama's Brain Trust":

President-elect Barack Obama has now made three things clear about his plans to bring the economy back: He wants his actions to be big and bold. He sees economic recovery as intimately linked with economic and social reform. And he is bringing in a gifted brain trust to get the job done.

Just three weeks after Election Day, Obama has already expanded his authority by seizing on "an economic crisis of historic proportions," as he described it yesterday, to call for a stimulus package that will dwarf anything ever attempted by the federal government.

But Obama is also using the crisis to make the case for larger structural reforms in health care, energy and education -- "to lay the groundwork for long-term, sustained economic growth," as he put it. Obama clearly views the economic downturn not as an impediment to the broadly progressive program he outlined during the campaign but as an opportunity for a round of unprecedented social legislation.

"He feels very strongly that this is not just a short-term fix but a long-term retooling of the American economy," said one of Obama's closest advisers. "Obama has a holistic view of the economy. Health care is going to be part of it," the lieutenant told me, and so will green energy investments, education reform and a new approach to regulating financial markets.

Obama further underscored his decision to tether social and economic policy by linking his announcement of Melody Barnes as the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council to the unveiling of his economic team.

Getting Timothy Geithner and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers working in harness is Obama's single biggest post-election victory.

Some who know Summers, a man with a large personality, were surprised that he would take the job as inside-the-White-House economic adviser and accept the appointment of Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary.

But Obama's aides are making clear that Summers is being assigned a large role in shaping the administration's overall economic policy, and his White House post will free him from the day-to-day responsibilities of running the Treasury Department -- duties well suited for Geithner, widely seen as a good manager and also as an economic diplomat likely to broker international cooperation in stemming the downturn. The fact that Summers and Geithner have a long history of working together should ease potential conflicts.

The senior Obama adviser said the president-elect benefited from Summers's desire to be at the center of the action during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. "If ever there was a time to want to be involved, it's now," said the adviser, who added that Obama, in turn, sees Summers as "brilliant."

Obama got to know Geithner "during the final weeks of the campaign," said the senior Obama aide, and the two hit it off immediately. Like Obama, Geithner had partly grown up abroad, and this gave the two an immediate connection. It led to "an ease in conversation," and the two discovered they "also share a common temperament," including a calm demeanor and a curiosity about the thinking of others.

"When Obama emerged from the first meeting, he was very effusive," said the senior aide. "He said, 'I feel good about him as a person; he inspires confidence.' " Geithner did not campaign for the job, which only sent his stock higher in the Obama circle. "He suggested that others might be better, that he might be more useful where he is," said the Obama lieutenant. "That was impressive as well."

Obama's selection of a team of highly skilled pragmatists has already been described as a move to the political center, but Obama advisers and longtime acquaintances say that this is a misreading of the incoming president and his approach. They describe it as combining a practicality about means with an overriding concern about the corrosive effects of growing economic inequalities.

Aides say that Obama was drawn to Summers in part because the former Harvard president shares the president-elect's passion for a more equitable distribution of economic benefits. Obama was impressed during campaign policy discussions that Summers would often pull the conversation away from general talk about economic growth to a concern with the living standards of families with average incomes.

Washington often divides the Democratic policy world between progressives and pragmatists. With Obama, as yesterday's news conference showed, it will have to become accustomed to a president who is both.

Al Giordano-- "Melody! Obama Taps a Progressive and Nobody in the Media Knew It":

The most interesting news out of the press conference just concluded by President-elect Obama was the appointment of an unabashed progressive, Melody Barnes (in the photo, above), to head the Domestic Policy Council. Barnes will coordinate the mega-board of the Cabinet secretaries of Health and Human Services, Justice, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Energy, Treasury, Agriculture, Transportation, Interior and Veterans Affairs. Basically, she'll be domestic policy czar.

The other announcements were interesting, too.

Remember just a week or two ago when the conventional wisdom screeched in the language of "done deals" that President-elect Obama would nominate Lawrence Summers to the newly all-powerful role of Treasury Secretary?

It was only late last week that signals were sent that Tim Geithner - who, we learned this morning, speaks Chinese and Japanese, in addition to English - would get the nod instead. Interestingly, Geithner has never worked on Wall Street. His career has been mainly devoted to public service and not private profit. That's encouraging (and makes him quite distinct from the Robert Rubin looter-and-pillager mold that the media drones on about today).

Summers has instead been nominated to head the National Economic Council. But more interesting about today's press conference was that Obama also nominated two women to the other top economic posts that until earlier this morning nobody, but absolutely nobody, had predicted.

Melody Barnes, Domestic Policy Council served as chief counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee from 1985 to 1993. Want to get an idea of how progressive she is? Read this: In January of 2007, prior to President Bush's state of the union address, Barnes wrote this essay for the Washington Post, What a Progressive President Might Say:

Here at home there is urgent work to do to fight the historically high -- and growing -- gap between our richest and poorest citizens. While the mean income of households on the low end of the income spectrum -- the bottom 20 percent -- is just $10,655 a year, the income of the top twenty percent of households averages almost $160,000. That's 15 times as much. At the same time, according to the latest census figures, the middle class, beset with stagnant wages and mountainous debts, is shrinking. The sad fact is that one of our most cherished values as a society, namely equality of opportunity, is fading as a reality for far too many people...

No news agency predicted it or broke the story until two hours ago this morning when the Think Progress blog became the first - beating all commercial media at their own game - to do so.

Likewise, the nomination to head the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, went un-predicted and without leaks until just three hours before today's press conference when Politico broke the story.

Note: All the great mentioners claim that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson will become the next Commerce Secretary (clearly, that post will be part of the economic team). And that might still become so. But Richardson was not at the press conference today, nor was any such announcement made.

The lesson: When it comes to upcoming appointments, don't believe the spin. Half the appointees announced today went totally unmentioned by the rocket scientists of the political press corps until just hours before the press conference. And the guy that almost all of them claimed, at first, would get the big job at Treasury didn't get it.

Basically, until last Friday, Obama head-faked everybody (just as he did so many times during the campaign), allowing many to claim that Summers was going to be Treasury Secretary without any pushback at all until three days prior (and really, officially, until yesterday when David Axelrod basically confirmed it on ABC's This Week).

And it's still a week (or more) to go before the national security team, including Secretary of State, is announced.

Think there will be no surprises then? Think again.

Barack Obama