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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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