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                           HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!

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A good place to start would be stopping the use of the f-word when talking to or about people. Tends to alienate most folks...

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"In the days before volcanoes were invented, lava had to be hand carried down from the mountains and poured on the sleeping villagers.
This took a great deal of time." 

----- Original Message -----
From: Dzigbodi Akyea <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2010 5:11 pm
Subject: Re: A fearsome foursome
To: [log in to unmask]


> ********************************************************
> 
>                            HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!
> 
> ********************************************************
> 
> What have I been saying?  Fire Rahm. Will it solve the whole problem?  
> Probably not but it's a start.  "I wake up some mornings hating me 
> too"- Rahm Emmanuel. Well, Rahm now it's a whole bunch of 
> people.   All I know is that he's a brilliant guy and a hardworker but 
> I think he's too "corporate".  I might be naive but we the people 
> voted for Obama, ......and corporations too.  Right?
> 
> dzigbodi       
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Aggo Akyea <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Thu, February 11, 2010 4:24:16 PM
> Subject: A fearsome foursome
> 
> ******************************************************** 
> HAPPY NEW YEAR !!! 
> ******************************************************** 
> America:  A fearsome foursome
>  
> By Edward Luce 
> The Financial Times
> February 3 2010 
> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b6b4700a-10fb-11df-9a9e-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1
>  
>  
> At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack 
> Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he 
> ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation 
> healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”
>  
> Just over a year into his tenure, America ’s 44th president governs a 
> bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an 
> America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington ’s 
> ways. What went wrong?
>  
> Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a 
> smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr. Obama’s decision to devote his first 
> year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to 
> convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent 
> ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed 
> to the quandary in which Mr. Obama finds himself. But those around him 
> have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its 
> uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather 
> than governing, they say.
>  
> In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in 
> Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect 
> their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president 
> draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of 
> just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David 
> Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, 
> his communications chief.
>  
> Two, Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Axelrod, have box-like offices within 
> spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first 
> to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national 
> security, without some or all of them present.
>  
> With the exception of Mr. Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the 
> House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr. Obama’s 
> brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr. Gibbs, who is from 
> Alabama , all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard 
> Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been 
> so dominated by such a small inner circle.
>  
> “It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who 
> has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This 
> is a kind of ‘we few’ group ... that achieved the improbable in the 
> most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, 
> unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”
>  
> John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of 
> the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in 
> Mr. Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr. Obama does 
> hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise 
> from the narrow composition of the group itself.
>  
> Among the broader circle that Mr. Obama also consults are the 
> self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in 
> his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of 
> staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter 
> Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis 
> McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the 
> inner circle.
>  
> “Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election 
> campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says 
> Mr. Podesta, who managed Mr. Obama’s widely praised post-election 
> transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its 
> advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of 
> other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”
>  
> This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and 
> unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr... Emanuel 
> managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, 
> say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – 
> not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived 
> the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr. Obama 
> would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and 
> with it would have become a historic president.
>  
> But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The 
> Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised 
> voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the 
> one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling 
> bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their 
> votes with precisely that motivation in mind.
>  
> “Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best 
> communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative 
> in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they 
> had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim 
> Morone, America ’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. 
> “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able 
> to master.”
>  
> Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in 
> Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop 
> surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr. Axelrod 
> or Mr. Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. 
> “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no 
> one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” 
> says an exasperated outside adviser. 
>  
> Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, 
> Mr. Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas , almost 
> never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from 
> devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, 
> the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet 
> Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former 
> governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.
>  
> Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr. Emanuel treats 
> cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises 
> how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much 
> trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential 
> advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want 
> people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”
> In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the 
> administration, Mr. Emanuel has alienated many of Mr. Obama’s closest 
> outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr. 
> Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested 
> they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.
>  
> “We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large 
> organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama’s campaign. 
> “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, 
> please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises 
> that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for 
> the president.”
>  
> The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr. Obama’s November 
> trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning 
> Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr. 
> Gibbs, Mr. Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.
>  
> The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly 
> negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr. Obama’s “G2” visit to 
> China . But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr. Obama’s 
> inner circle had any background in China . “We were about 40 vans down 
> in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a 
> senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like 
> the Obama campaign was visiting China .”
>  
> Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, 
> devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a 
> source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage 
> it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach 
> is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would 
> create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then 
> financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr. Obama. “But what 
> happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”
>  
> Insiders attribute Mr. Obama’s waning enthusiasmfor the Arab-Israeli 
> peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers 
> whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his 
> Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was 
> running into serious difficulties.
>  
> The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on 
> terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention 
> centrewithin a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.
>  
> “Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are 
> trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the 
> Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian 
> geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval 
> Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of 
> Guantánamo. 
>  
> An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could 
> launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals 
> that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done 
> better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them 
> at the same time?”
>  
> Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the 
> campaign-like nucleus around Mr. Obama in which all things are 
> possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing 
> victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and 
> again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. 
> “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents 
> need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the 
> stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”
>  
> The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr. Obama 
> needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he 
> should find a new chief of staff. Mr. Emanuel has hinted that he might 
> not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running 
> for mayor of Chicago . Others say Mr. Obama should bring in fresh 
> blood. They point to Mr. Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a 
> veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president 
> ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the 
> Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried 
> over from his campaign.
> But Mr. Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and 
> commenting for CNN, Mr. Gergen says members of the inner circle meet 
> two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr. Obama trusts 
> them. “These are important attributes,” Mr. Gergen says. His biggest 
> doubt is whether Mr. Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.
>  
> “There is an old joke,” says Mr. Gergen. “How many psychiatrists does 
> it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want 
> to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”
>  
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