It's over...so now what???

rogue49 · Nov 8, 2012

I realize that many of you are burnt out on the politics...

But just like Romney needs to figure out what to do with his life
and Obama needs to leap right back in...

Politics never stops

So what's next?
The "fiscal cliff"?
What will Obama do for his next 4?
Who will he have as his Secretaries? (Clinton is leaving, Geitner is leaving...)

In the meantime...I'll leave you a good plot summary of with great insider moments.
It's always interesting to get a little "fly on the wall" time.

How a Race in the Balance Went to Obama
By ADAM NAGOURNEY, ASHLEY PARKER, JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY - November 7, 2012

Seven minutes into the first presidential debate, the mood turned from tense to grim inside the room at the University of Denver where Obama staff members were following the encounter. Top aides monitoring focus groups — voters who registered their minute-by-minute reactions with the turn of a dial — watched as enthusiasm for Mitt Romney spiked. “We are getting bombed on Twitter,” announced Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager, while tracking the early postings by political analysts and journalists whom the Obama campaign viewed as critical in setting debate perceptions.

By the time President Obama had waded through a convoluted answer about health care — “He’s not mentioning voucher-care?” someone called out — a pall had fallen over the room. When the president closed by declaring, “This was a terrific debate,” his re-election team grimaced. There was the obligatory huddle to discuss how to explain his performance to the nation, and then a moment of paralysis: No one wanted to go to the spin room and speak with reporters.

Mr. Romney’s advisers monitored the debate up the hall from the Obama team, as well as at campaign headquarters in Boston. Giddy smiles flashed across their faces as their focus groups showed the same results.

“Boy, the president is off tonight,” said Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney strategist, sounding mystified, according to aides in the room. Russ Schriefer, a senior adviser, immediately began planning television spots based entirely on clips from the debate. As it drew to a close, Gail Gitcho, Mr. Romney’s communications director in Boston, warned surrogates heading out to television studios: “No chest thumping.”

The Oct. 3 debate sharply exposed Mr. Obama’s vulnerabilities and forced the president and his advisers to work to reclaim the campaign over a grueling 30 days, ending with his triumph on Tuesday. After a summer of growing confidence, Mr. Obama suddenly confronted the possibility of a loss that would diminish his legacy and threaten his signature achievement, the health care law. He emerged newly combative, newly contrite and newly willing to recognize how his disdain for Mr. Romney had blinded him to his opponent’s strengths and ability to inflict damage.

After watching a videotape of his debate performance, Mr. Obama began calling panicked donors and supporters to reassure them he would do better. “This is on me,” the president said, again and again.

Mr. Obama, who had dismissed warnings about being caught off guard in the debate, told his advisers that he would now accept and deploy the prewritten attack lines that he had sniffed at earlier. “If I give up a couple of points of likability and come across as snarky, so be it,” Mr. Obama told his staff.

As his campaign began an all-out assault on Mr. Romney’s credibility and conservative views, the president soon was denouncing Mr. Romney’s budget proposals as a “sketchy deal” and charging that the Republican nominee was not telling Americans the truth.

Mr. Obama recognized that to a certain extent, he had walked into a trap that Mr. Romney’s advisers had anticipated: His antipathy toward Mr. Romney — which advisers described as deeper than what Mr. Obama had felt for John McCain in 2008 — led the incumbent to underestimate his opponent as he began moving to the center before the debate audience of millions of television viewers.

But as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign, its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.

That was just one of several ways that Mr. Obama’s campaign operations, some unnoticed by Mr. Romney’s aides in Boston, helped save the president’s candidacy. In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.

That allowed the Obama campaign not only to alter the very nature of the electorate, making it younger and less white, but also to create a portrait of shifting voter allegiances. The power of this operation stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola County, Fla. “It’s one thing to say you are going to do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it,” said Brian Jones, a senior adviser.

In the last days of the campaign, Mr. Romney cast himself as the candidate that he may have wanted to be all along: moderate in tone, an agent of change who promised to bring bipartisan cooperation back to Washington, sounding very much like Barack Obama in 2008.

But he could never overcome the harm that Mr. Obama’s advertising had done over the summer or the weight of the ideological baggage he carried from the primary. On Tuesday night, a crestfallen Mr. Romney and his family watched as the television networks showed him losing all but one battleground state.

Even as the networks declared Mr. Obama the winner, Mr. Romney, who had earlier told reporters he had written only a victory speech, paused before the walk downstairs from his hotel room in Boston. It was 11:30 p.m., and Romney field teams in Ohio, Virginia and Florida called in, saying the race was too close for the candidate to give up. At least four planes were ready to go, and aides had bags packed for recount battles in narrowly divided states. Bob White, a close Romney friend and adviser, was prepared to tell the waiting crowd that Mr. Romney would not yet concede.

But then, Mr. Romney quietly decided it was over. “It’s not going to happen,” he said.

As Ann Romney cried softly, he headed down to deliver his speech, ending his second, and presumably last, bid for the White House. Four decades earlier, his father and inspiration, George Romney, a former Michigan governor failed in his own such quest.

By the end of the 30 days, after Air Force One carried Mr. Obama on an almost round-the-clock series of rallies, the president had reverted back to the agent of change battling the forces of the status quo, drawing contrasts between himself and Mr. Romney with an urgency that had been absent earlier in the race. Mr. Obama had returned, if not to the candidate that he was in 2008, as a man hungry for four more years to pursue his agenda in the White House.

A Difficult September

As the summer came to a close, the Romney campaign was stuck in a tense debate over how to rescue a struggling candidacy. On some nights, it did not even bother with the daily tracking poll. Why waste money on more bad news? Mr. Obama’s attack on Mr. Romney’s role at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, was in full swing, the Democratic convention had been an unequivocal boost for the president, and a videotape had surfaced that caught Mr. Romney at a private fund-raiser saying that 47 percent of the nation did not pay taxes, a line that reinforced Democrats’ efforts to portray him as an out-of-touch elitist.

“We had struggled pretty dramatically in September,” said Neil Newhouse, Mr. Romney’s pollster. “The 47 percent remark came out, and that was on top of the bounce that Obama got from his convention, so needless to say September was not our best month. It showed in our data. It was grim.”

There was, advisers decided, one last opportunity on the horizon: the presidential debate in Denver.

Mr. Stevens argued that Mr. Obama’s dislike of Mr. Romney would lead the president to underestimate him. “They think there’s something intellectually inferior there,” he said later. Mr. Romney’s advisers also believed that Mr. Obama had demonized Mr. Romney to such an extent that their candidate would benefit when judged against the caricature.

In August, Mr. Romney began testing out one-liners on friends flying with him on his campaign plane. On issue after issue, Mr. Romney led discussions on how to frame his answers, to move away from the conservative tone of his primary contests in front of the largest audience he would have as a candidate.

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio was recruited to play Mr. Obama, and he embraced the role, even anticipating how the president would open his first debate, which fell on his wedding anniversary. “I’ve got to tell you, tonight’s a really special night,” Mr. Portman said, playing Mr. Obama. “I see my sweetie out there, boy, 20 years ago.”

(Mr. Romney’s advisers broke out in laughter when the real Mr. Obama opened with a similar line, and nodded approvingly when a very prepared Mr. Romney countered with a gracious response that even Democrats said put Mr. Obama off balance.)

Nothing had been left to chance: Mr. Romney put on full makeup and did his final practice in a room set up to replicate, down to the lighting and temperature, the hall where he would meet Mr. Obama.

On the Sunday before the debate, a group of top advisers and elected Republican officials from across the country, calling themselves the War Council, gathered in Boston to reassure Mr. Romney after his rough month — essentially saying “this is a place in the race, but it isn’t a destiny” as Beth Myers, a senior adviser, put it — and to boost his confidence. George W. Bush phoned Mr. Romney, too. Pointing to his own history, he predicted that Mr. Obama would fumble, according to aides.

Democrats advising Mr. Obama saw the same peril for the president in the first debate that Mr. Romney’s aides did. Ronald A. Klain, a Democratic strategist who has overseen debate preparation for presidential candidates for nearly 20 years, warned Mr. Obama at his very first debate session, a PowerPoint presentation in the Roosevelt Room on a sweltering day in mid-July, that incumbent presidents almost invariably lose their first debate.

“It’s easier for a candidate to schedule the time to prepare; it’s easy for the challenger to get away; the president has competing needs,” Mr. Klain told Mr. Obama, according to aides who witnessed the exchange.

Ken Mehlman, who had managed Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, ran into one of Mr. Obama’s advisers at a party, and warned him that presidents are not used to being challenged, and unlike candidates, are out of practice at verbal jousting. Mr. Romney had gone through 20 debates over the past year.

Mr. Obama showed no interest in watching the Republican debates. But his aides studied them closely, and concluded that Mr. Romney was a powerful debater, hard to intimidate and fast to throw out assertions that would later prove wrong or exaggerated. At one debate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas criticized Mr. Romney for having praised Arne Duncan, the education secretary, days earlier. Mr. Romney flatly denied it, leaving Mr. Perry speechless.

At the White House, Mr. Obama’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, took note of that moment, intending to mention it to Mr. Obama. He would later fault himself for failing to fully understand “the magnitude of the challenge” Mr. Romney’s debate style presented.

Mr. Obama displayed little concern. When he went to a resort outside Las Vegas for several days of debate preparation in September, his impatience with the exercise was evident when he escaped for an excursion to the Hoover Dam.

Mr. Klain and David Axelrod, a senior strategist, told Mr. Obama that he seemed distracted, but he shrugged them off. “I’ll be there on game day,” he said. “I’m a game day player.”

Shortly after the debate began, Mr. Obama’s aides realized they had made their own mistakes in advising Mr. Obama to avoid combative exchanges that might sacrifice the good will many Americans felt toward him. In Mr. Obama’s mock debates with Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, Mr. Kerry drew Mr. Obama into a series of intense exchanges, and Mr. Axelrod decided that they were damaging to the president.

In 90 minutes, Mr. Obama crystallized what had been gnawing concerns among many Americans about the president. He came across, as Mr. Obama’s advisers told him over the next few days, as professorial, arrogant, entitled and detached from the turmoil tearing the nation. He appeared to be disdainful not only of his opponent but also of the political process itself. Mr. Obama showed no passion for the job, and allowed Mr. Romney to explode the characterization of him as a wealthy, job-destroying venture capitalist that the Obama campaign had spent months creating.

The voter-analysis database back in Chicago noted a precipitous drop in perceptions of Mr. Obama among independent voters, starting that night and lasting for four days, long before the public polls picked it up. Voters who had begun turning to Mr. Obama were newly willing to give Mr. Romney another look.

What was arguably the most dismal night of Mr. Obama’s political career could hardly have come at a worse time: Early voting was already under way in some states. Absentee ballots were on voters’ coffee tables that very night.

After the debate, Mr. Obama called Mr. Axelrod on his way back to the hotel room. He had read the early reviews on his iPad.

“I guess the consensus is that we didn’t have a very good night,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Axelrod.

“That is the consensus,” Mr. Axelrod said.

For the next 30 days, Mr. Romney and his advisers tried to capitalize on Mr. Obama’s mistakes. And Mr. Romney continued his drift toward the center, softening his language on abortion and immigration from the positions that had defined him during the Republican primaries. It was something that the White House had expected he would do. Perhaps most important, the debate gave him a swagger, confidence and presidential bearing that had been absent.

Mr. Romney soon recognized the scope of his accomplishment. He flew from Denver to Virginia for a rally the next day, and as the motorcade headed toward the event, there was so much traffic that Mr. Romney and his top advisers thought there must have been an accident. In fact, the roads were jammed with people on their way to see him.

A Storm’s Effect

It was clear that Hurricane Sandy was going to upend Mr. Obama’s final week of campaigning, but aides in Chicago were determined to squeeze in one more visit to Florida. It almost became a calamity.

To get ahead of the storm, the president flew to Orlando on Oct. 28, the evening before a morning event. But overnight, the storm intensified and accelerated. Well before dawn, the Air Force One crew told the president’s advisers that if he was going to beat the storm back to Washington, he had to leave at once. His aides blanched at the image of Mr. Obama stuck in sunny Florida as the storm roared up the Eastern Seaboard.

The White House announced the change of plans at 6:45 a.m. The president returned to the White House at 11:07 a.m. and went directly into the Situation Room, canceling his political events. The decision was costly to a campaign so dependent on organization: Mr. Obama used his rallies to collect supporters’ telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Once the storm struck, it was more of a problem for Mr. Romney. It put him in the position of struggling to explain the skepticism he had expressed during the Republican primaries about a federal role in disaster relief. Even worse, the hurricane pushed him off the stage at a crucial time.

In Boston, Mr. Romney’s aides broke out in a chorus of groans as they watched on television as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey offered effusive praise of the president’s handling of the disaster. They viewed it as a self-serving act of disloyalty from a man whom they had expected to deploy that very weekend on Mr. Romney’s behalf. The praise of Mr. Obama from a Republican governor came at the same time Mr. Romney had been portraying Mr. Obama as partisan and polarizing.

The same week, the president’s campaign released an advertisement in which another Republican, Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, endorsed Mr. Obama. The ad, Mr. Obama’s aides said, produced a spike of support from independent voters. (Mr. Obama’s aides grabbed the clip from a television interview with Mr. Powell, deciding not to chance asking him for permission).

Mr. Romney was finding Ohio, a state central to his victory, a stubborn target, as Mr. Obama benefited from the auto industry rescue he championed and that Mr. Romney had opposed. The Romney campaign sought to undermine Mr. Obama with an advertisement misleadingly implying that Jeep was moving jobs from Ohio to China. By every measure, the ad backfired, drawing attacks by leaders of auto companies that employed many of the blue-collar voters that Mr. Romney was trying to reach.

The futility of that effort was apparent outside the sprawling Jeep assembly plant in Toledo, which had just had a $500 million renovation for production of a new line of vehicles, a project requiring 1,100 new workers.

“Everyone here knows someone who works at Jeep,” Jim Wessel, a supply representative making a sales visit. He said no one would believe the ad. Speaking of Mr. Obama’s efforts to rescue the auto industry, he said,“I can just tell you I’m glad he did it.”

Mr. Romney was running out of states. He made an impulsive run on Pennsylvania, chasing what his aides said were tightening polls there. Mr. Romney had spent little time or money there before roaring in during the campaign’s final hours.

On the last weekend of the race, Mr. Romney scheduled a rally in Bucks County. Supporters began arriving at 2 p.m. But his plane was delayed, and as the hours rolled on — and the temperatures dropped — dozens of people were temporarily blocked by the Secret Service as they sought to leave. Mr. Romney arrived to an unpleasant scene: clusters of angry, cold supporters.

That Tuesday, Mr. Romney lost the state by 5 percentage points and watched Mr. Obama hold a 50,000-vote lead in Florida — a state that he had once been confident of winning.
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rogue49 · Nov 8, 2012

An Invigorated Second Term
November 7, 2012

Early Wednesday morning, as sleep-deprived supporters rallied for a final cheer, President Obama concluded his re-election campaign with a promising glimpse at what the fight was all about: a second-term agenda that can make real progress on issues neglected in the first.

Without question, the president intends to build on and improve the significant accomplishments of the last four years, particularly the full implementation of health care reform and the use of government policy to keep the economy growing. But the president went beyond that in his victory speech and added some less familiar words to his policy vocabulary.

Children should live in a world that is not burdened by debt or weakened by inequality, he said, but also one “that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” That suggests he knows he has an opportunity to address climate change with more vigor, going beyond auto-mileage standards and renewable-energy jobs to possibly advocating tougher carbon emissions standards.

The president also said he was looking forward to working with Republicans to fix the immigration system, giving him a chance to do more than promote the Dream Act for young immigrants. He could lead the way to comprehensive reform that combines strong enforcement with a path to citizenship for immigrants already here. He also hinted that combating poverty might move higher on his priority list.

And he spoke of tax reform, an issue that will immediately begin to grow louder with the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at year’s end. Mr. Obama won re-election on an unambiguous promise not to renew those cuts for incomes of $250,000 or more, and his supporters expect him to stick to that vow. In coming months, after he persuades Congress to keep taxes from rising on the middle class, he should push to restore a fair estate tax and raise the low capital gains rate to the level of ordinary income.

He even mentioned the need to fix a balloting system that left thousands of people standing in long lines to vote this week, a tantalizing hint that electoral reform might become a priority.

All these agenda items require the same ingredient: ending his standoffish attitude toward Congress and working closely with any leader or lawmaker willing to make real progress. That may be easier now that Senate Democrats (and their independent allies) have expanded their majority by two seats to 55, many of them filled with newcomers more liberal and feisty than their predecessors, most notably Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The new Democratic caucus’s first order of business should be a reform of the filibuster that prevents its routine abuse by Republicans, and the majority leader, Harry Reid, suggested Wednesday that he supported some modest changes. The newcomers, along with the White House, should forcefully advocate that he go as far as possible.

A newly energized Obama administration and Senate could have the effect of isolating the supply-side dead-enders in the House. John Boehner, the House speaker, announced Wednesday that nothing had changed; he and his caucus still oppose higher tax rates for the rich and still want to pursue Mr. Romney’s defeated goal of raising revenue by lowering rates and cutting unspecified loopholes. Standing up to Republican recalcitrance on this and many other issues will require bringing to bear political pressure from the coalition that gave Mr. Obama a commanding victory in the Electoral College on Tuesday.

The president’s victory was decisive, and many who didn’t support him nonetheless told pollsters that they agreed with his positions on taxes, health care and immigration. He now needs to use the power that voters have given to him to enhance and broaden his agenda.
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ASU2003 · Nov 8, 2012

Obama does need to reach out to Romney and work on some ideas that would be beneficial to the business community. Obama didn't do that with McCain and I think it hurt him. And by the time Rush and friends were re-organizing the defeated and broken Republicans in Feb 2009, it was too late.

The first thing Obama needs to do is to go up to NY and NJ to show that he wasn't just using the storm and suffering as a political move.

Eventually, Obama, Clinton, Gore, and other Democratic leaders will need to come together to see how they can get better unity within the party. The union members might not care so much about gay rights, the environmentalists don't care too much about women's rights, the Latinos aren't too concerned about the Occupy Wall Street issues, and the black voters aren't too concerned with the anti-war crowd. (And "don't care" might be a bit strong, but they aren't writing their congressmen, protesting, or helping the other groups too much to get their issues passed) While the leaders might not care since they can win elections getting the single-issue voters, the Democrats need to work a little better within their own party on issues that matter to other Democratic constituents.

Baraka_Guru · Nov 8, 2012

Rachel Maddow's summary of the election is a good launching point in terms of what Republicans need to do. Congress isn't working, and it's due in large part to the devastating shift the right has made into their all-or-nothing ideology.

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMLcbTTdBGQ

rogue49 · Nov 8, 2012

Now this is facinating to me...because it's more important than most people pay attention to or give credit.

Each really does change the tone of each department that they are in.
Where things go, what things get done...what gets funded.
What gets pushed...and repressed.

The "new" dream team for the Obama adminstration...
Who will it be?
Who should they TRY??

Barack Obama's second-term Cabinet
By: Edward-Isaac Dovere - November 7, 2012 05:53 PM EST

President Barack Obama plans an extensive shuffle of his West Wing and Cabinet, with White House chief of staff Jack Lew most likely headed to Treasury and former Sen. Chuck Hagel, a moderate Republican, under consideration for secretary of defense, administration insiders said.

Planning for a second term has been under way for months, with Lew and Pete Rouse, the counselor to the president and Obama’s internal management guru, preparing lists of possible promotions and nominations. The staff process has been gossiped about by the staff, but details have been kept secret, even from insiders.

“They haven’t even made calls. People haven’t been asked,” said a Democrat familiar with the situation. “They’re more targets than they are potential nominees.”

Now, officials will start to cement their departure dates, and aides will sound out colleagues about possible new roles. Among the top current officials expected to go: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood might not be far behind — or may even beat them out the door.

There’s also a growing list of people the administration is looking to find spots for: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick most of all, as well as former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and outgoing North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad.

Obama has overseen one of the most stable cabinets in history — the only departures have been Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Gary Locke and John Bryson from Commerce. But what’s about to happen amounts to an almost full-scale second transition:

Treasury

If not for the upcoming fiscal cliff negotiations, Geithner might have been ready to hand Obama his resignation letter as the president walked off stage at the McCormick Place Tuesday night. But once the negotiations are done — or done enough — he’s still expected to be the first to go.

The post is going to be crucial for Obama’s second-term challenges — job growth, a massive restructuring of the budget and, of course, the teetering of the eurozone. There’s a comfort that Obama feels with Geithner, a security just from having the treasury secretary swing through the Oval Office. That’s going to be hard to replicate, and a big part of why discussions are focused increasingly around one person: Lew.

“Increasingly in the last week, it’s his name and only his name,” said one Democratic insider who’s in touch with the Obama circle. “They like Jack, they can get Jack. Jack can do the job. I’d be shocked if it were anyone other than Jack.”

There’s some chatter about Erskine Bowles, but he’s not trusted by the inner circle and hasn’t helped his cause since the end of the Bowles-Simpson Commission. Roger Altman, who was a deputy at Treasury under Clinton, is also seen as a possibility.

Much of Rouse’s attention has been focused on trying to find a Fortune 500 CEO to recruit, such as Larry Fink of BlackRock, Tony James of the Blackstone Group and David Cote of Honeywell or even Eric Schmidt of Google. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s name comes up — Obama clearly likes her, and she served as chief of staff at the department under Larry Summers. She would also be the first woman to run Treasury after an election in which middle-class women provided a crucial margin for the president. But despite the recent uptick in the stock price, her company still has a lot of work ahead.

Commerce

There’s also the possibility that one of them lands at commerce, which has been run by an acting secretary since Bryson resigned, but Wall Street tends to see that as a second-string prize that might not be enough to lure titans from their big compensation packages. Other possibilities here include U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Export-Import Bank President Fred Hochberg, who would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary.

State

Given the celebrity of Clinton and the two top contenders to replace her, there’s little question that this could quickly become the most interesting Cabinet battle. In one corner, there’s Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador with strong connections to Obama and other senior staffers. In the other, there’s John Kerry, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman who picked Obama to give his career-making 2004 keynote address, endorsed him early in the 2008 primaries and worked with the White House throughout Obama’s first term. Whatever Clinton is thinking about for 2016, she’s expected to be gone before much of 2013 has passed — though she may extend her initial time frame to see the Benghazi fallout through.

This one’s heavy with political ironies. If Obama picks Rice, Republicans would hammer her with Benghazi questions. Her prospects were damaged because she was a team player, going on the Sunday shows to carry the administration’s initial message that the riot over an anti-Muhammad video seemed to be responsible, in part, for Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death. If Obama picks Kerry, he’d open up a Senate seat, in a state where Republican Sen. Scott Brown is now looking for a job. The Massachusetts Legislature changed the appointment law in 2004 to stop then-Gov. Mitt Romney from appointing then-presumed President-elect Kerry’s replacement, and it was under that special election provision that Brown won in the first place. Patrick, the governor, would be a Democratic candidate for that race, but he’s also a potential Cabinet member.

Patrick waited about an hour after the election was called for Obama to talk up Kerry’s prospects, which were helped by the Democratic gains in the Senate that made the majority more secure. But opinions are torn about how this decision will fall.

“They think it’s going to be Susan Rice,” said one Democratic insider in touch with the Obama circle. “If Obama wants to make her secretary, he’ll get her in.”

“Kerry was a very close second the first time around. He wanted it; he had several interviews. There was an assumption that he would get it if Hillary said no,” said another Democrat familiar with the circumstances. “Now that Hillary’s no longer a question and he still wants it, and because he’s been such a great team player and worked so hard in the debate prep, I think he has the inside track.”

Then there’s the dark horse: National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who’s always wanted the job but wouldn’t have the same weight of personality that Rice or Kerry would bring. He has Obama’s trust — though that’s exactly the argument for having him take over for Lew as chief of staff.

NSA

Wherever Donilon goes, if he does, the smart money’s on his deputy, Denis McDonough, to move up — or on former Defense Undersecretary Michèle Flournoy, who’s known to want to come back. Tony Blinken, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, is also a possibility to move over.

Chief of Staff

Donilon could have some competition for chief of staff, including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, who hit it off with Obama during debate prep and other campaign strategy meetings. Klain could be headed to a senior adviser position, though. Tom Nides, a current deputy secretary of state, is also a possibility for chief of staff. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s name has come up a few times recently — he knows the Hill, and this job wouldn’t require Senate confirmation — but the time he’s spent out of the game might be a reason for both him and the president to consider other options.

Defense

Panetta is expected to stay only as long as he’s needed to oversee the first round of post-fiscal cliff budget cuts before deciding he’s had enough weekend-only trips to his California home.

That might point to Ash Carter, Panetta’s deputy. As a physicist, he’s seen as a guy with the right mind-set for restructuring and rethinking a slimmer military. Flournoy is interested in the job, which could let Obama appoint the first female head of the Pentagon. And Richard Danzig, Clinton’s former secretary of the Navy and a 2008 Obama adviser, would allow Obama to have someone from his circle in charge of an agency that’s often been the source of presidential heartburn.

But as Obama continues to wind down the wars, a veteran might have some appeal. Outsiders’ fantasy bingo sometimes lands on CIA Director David Petraeus or outgoing Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, though few believe Obama would go with Webb, who takes pride in being hard to control.

There’s a lot of attention here on Hagel, an old favorite for the job who — other than making a last-minute cross-aisle endorsement of Bob Kerrey for Senate this year — has largely pulled out of public life since leaving the Senate four years ago. A Vietnam veteran and moderate, Hagel could provide the president with a high-profile bipartisan pick.

There’s also Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army Ranger, who’s name perennially comes up for the job. Reed presents another Senate appointment problem — Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee endorsed Obama and spoke at the Democratic Convention, but he’s still a political independent who can be hard to predict.

“You want to get your new team established as quickly as possible and make that transition,” said former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, comparing the situation to Bill Clinton’s second term switch to Madeleine Albright at State, William Cohen at Defense and Sandy Berger as his national security adviser. “You could stagger that, but there’s also a compelling argument to ‘Form your new team and keep things going.’”

Attorney General

The uncertainty about Chafee might also impact a possible pick for attorney general, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). Holder is sure to go at some point, but so far, he hasn’t been clear about how quickly he’ll leave. The past few years have been exhausting and the politicization is more than what Holder wants. But they’ve also been liberating — after all, he’s already been held in contempt of Congress and been able to go right on with his job, so there’s not much more that can be held over his head.

The main buzz here is for Patrick, an assistant attorney general under Clinton before being elected in Massachusetts. Between his work as a surrogate, the record he’s continued to build at the statehouse and the personal relationship he’s expanded with the president himself, there are few people whose stock has risen as much as Patrick’s in the past year.

There’s been occasional mention of Preet Bharara, the head of the country’s most prominent U.S. Attorney’s office in New York’s Southern District — he’s young and Indian-American, but he might be more suited for deputy this time to set him up for the top job in the next Democratic administration.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is interested in the job, but she’s also interested in John McCain’s Senate seat in 2016 — and the White House is interested in her as a possible Supreme Court nominee. Granholm — who, like Napolitano, is a former state attorney general — is also seen as a possible fit here.

Homeland Security

Judge Merrick Garland, currently serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, is seen as a potential contender for Holder’s job but also could replace Napolitano. Matt Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is seen as a DHS contender as well.

Health and Human Services

One contentious figure who’s expected to stay in place is Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. She’s steeped in Obama’s health care law, and with the amount of work needed to prepare for most of its provisions to take effect in 2014, making a switch now could complicate things.

Since confirmation hearings for a new nominee would inevitably become an Obamacare retrial, the argument to keep her gets even stronger. There aren’t many replacement options for Sebelius if she goes. As a woman who was elected twice as a Democratic governor of Kansas, she once seemed like a natural Senate candidate back home, but her involvement with Obamacare would likely prove a fatal taint.

Labor, Education, Agriculture, HUD

There’s not much discussion about Hilda Solis — who did not play a significant campaign role despite being a Latino woman with deep connections to unions. Labor isn’t seen as a department that’s likely to face a change soon, nor is Education, where Arne Duncan is clearly enjoying his job and can focus on the policy issues he loves while keeping his spot in Obama’s regular pick-up basketball games. If he does go, former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee and Gov. Jack Markell are two possible contenders. HUD’s Shaun Donovan has taken an increasingly strong role within the administration, and there’s no sense he’s going anywhere — there’s thinking that he might be headed for the chief of staff’s office, but not quite yet. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s plans will most likely hinge in part on the plans of his wife, who lost her Iowa House race Tuesday.

Interior

Salazar has indicated to friends and other Democrats that he’s on his way out at Interior for a private-sector job back in Colorado, where he has a granddaughter with autism whom he and his wife care for. That could leave the job open for his deputy, David Hayes, but given that the bulk of Interior jurisdiction land is out West, the department’s a natural home for a Westerner former elected official. Among the options: former North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, former Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal and soon-to-be former Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Energy

Chu is probably the Cabinet secretary the White House wants to see go the most. Nobel Prize cachet aside, the Solyndra debacle has been a disaster, and the Hill is unhappy too. Possibilities here include Cathy Zoi, a former CEO of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and Kathleen McGinty, the Clinton-era chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. This could be a private- sector draw too — there’s talk of Lewis Hay of NextEra Energy and Jim Rogers, the head of Duke Energy who was co-chairman of the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

EPA

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has been eyeing a departure for a potential political run where she used to work in New Jersey or back in her native New Orleans. Her successors could be current deputy EPA Administrator Robert Perciasepe, current top EPA air pollution official Gina McCarthy or former Clinton White House aide Ian Bowles, who ran the energy and environmental department in Massachusetts.

The question for all of these picks comes down to a simple question, one former administration official said.

“What’s the narrative?” the official said. “What’s the legacy they want to create, and who are the people they want to do that with?”

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC
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rogue49 · Nov 12, 2012

I have a conflict of interest in this.
I'm very justice oriented...I want the people who fucked up locked up...or give entities more than just a hand-slap.

But I'm also very aware of over-doing it, scaring Wall Street so their butt-cheeks clench and they climb in their cowardly holes.
It's like herding a bunch of sketchy cats who also have their pointed claws in your crotch...trying to make them be productive.

I'm hoping that the supportive hands-off tone keeps to a certain extent from the first term,
but have laser-precision focus on the zits that need to be popped...turn up the heat on the laser "just a notch"

Unfortunately, government is not known for being subtle.
But from what I've seen so far...there has been some discretion.

An Obama Economic Team to Sweep Wall Street Clean
By William D. Cohan - Nov 11, 2012

When U.S. voters elected Barack Obama president in November 2008, many of us were convinced he would make a top priority of reforming Wall Street, which had just almost succeeded in bringing down our way of life through greed and lack of accountability.

Despite the fact that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. (C) were among Obama’s top 10 financial backers in 2008, we were hopeful we would see a change in the system whereby bankers, traders and executives were rewarded every day to take huge, asynchronous risks with other people’s money.

We also believed that Obama wouldn’t succumb to the backroom maneuverings of the plutocrats and behind-the-scenes money men -- such as former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Deputy Secretary Roger Altman -- who were busy advocating a quick return to the status quo and looking to move their friends into positions of great importance in Obama’s Cabinet.

It turned out we were either naive or stupid to think that when candidate Obama spoke about “change you can believe in,” he was including Wall Street.

In ways we may never fully understand, Rubin quickly cast his spell on Obama. Before long, Rubin proteges were appointed to the three most important economic positions in the new administration: Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers as national economic adviser and Peter Orszag as director of the Office of Management and Budget. For good measure, the administration named Mary Schapiro, the head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s dysfunctional self-regulatory organization, as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Rubin’s Proteges

Summers has gone back to Harvard University, and Orszag is now at Citigroup (and writes a column for Bloomberg View). Geithner and Schapiro will be leaving Washington shortly. Yet other Rubin acolytes -- Gene Sperling, now the national economic adviser; Jack Lew, Obama’s chief of staff; and Michael Froman, the president’s top international economics adviser -- are still very much in residence at the White House.

What did these men and women collectively achieve during Obama’s first term? A remarkably Wall Street-friendly set of policies. To recap, the big banks continued to be bailed out; the weak Dodd-Frank financial reform act continues to get watered down as its specific rules are hammered out; not one Wall Street trader, banker or executive has been held criminally liable for actions leading up to the financial crisis; and the Standard & Poor’s 500 (SPX) has doubled since its nadir in March 2009. The Federal Reserve also did its part: pumping trillions of dollars into the capital markets to keep interest rates at rock- bottom levels (a gift to Wall Street and a tax on savers).

A pretty amazing list of favors, if you think about it. Yet Wall Street clearly thinks it is owed even more. The antipathy between the financial sector and Obama has never been greater. Eight of Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s 10 top donors in the election were Wall Street firms. (Meanwhile, the markets responded to Obama’s re-election with a 400-plus point drop.)

So, President Obama, the time has come for you to do in your second term what many people hoped you would do in the first: Institute meaningful reform on Wall Street. An essential first step is to sweep out the remaining vestiges of the Rubin- Altman nexus. Bring in a new group of people who not only understand how Wall Street really works but also have dedicated much of their lives to changing it.

Treasury Pick

Who might some of those people be? For Treasury secretary, the best choice is Erskine Bowles, who has distinguished himself as co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Although it is true that Bowles was chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and thus rubbed elbows with Rubin and Altman, he isn’t in that Rubin orbit. He understands Wall Street -- he founded a small eponymous investment bank and a private-equity firm, Carousel Capital, and was a partner at private-equity giant Forstmann Little & Co. -- and did a fine job serving as president of the sprawling University of North Carolina system.

More important, he has spent the past year shaping his commission’s report -- despite Obama’s having ignored it -- into legislation that Congress can take up immediately to try to resolve the budget deficit and the looming fiscal cliff, the more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for next year. He has a proven record of bipartisanship, working well with Alan Simpson and the other Republicans on the commission. Appointing Bowles to Treasury would show that Obama is serious about getting the country’s fiscal house in order and finding a more productive relationship with Wall Street.

To address the vacuum of accountability on Wall Street, Obama should appoint former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as the new chairman of the SEC. I’m not joking. Having prosecuted Wall Street misdeeds as New York attorney general a decade ago, he knows where the bodies are buried and won’t be afraid to dig them up. As a cable-television host, he has proved to be the news media’s most aggressive and informed critic of Wall Street. The question, of course, is whether the president would nominate him and the Senate would confirm him given his humiliating fall from grace in a prostitution scandal. My reply: Is only Bill Clinton entitled to political resurrection?

To replace Sperling, who has had more lives in Washington than a Persian shorthair, Obama should recruit Carmen Reinhart, a highly respected Harvard economist with an up-from-nothing personal history that rivals the president’s own (her family fled Castro’s Cuba with little more than the clothes on their backs). That she has a keen understanding of how economies get into financial difficulty and how they get out of them -- she is the co-author, with Kenneth Rogoff, of the best-seller “This Time Is Different” -- is a huge plus. And she calls things as she sees them: Although usually considered to be on the right of the political spectrum, she was a strong detractor of Romney’s mathematically illiterate tax plan.

In his victory speech, Obama said, “You voted for action, not politics as usual.” It was similar to the refrain he used four years ago, before disappointing us with politics as usual. By choosing Bowles, Spitzer and Reinhart as the anchors of his new economic team, he could start proving that this time really is different.

®2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Speed_Gibson · Jul 3, 2014

I was sincerely hoping that Obama would lose this election (even more than the last one), but unfortunately the GOP options were just poor as in my opinion. At this point it is getting difficult to find a candidate any given Presidential election that stands any chance of winning that would actually give me a reason to cast a vote.

OtherSyde · Aug 3, 2014

Speed_Gibson said: ↑

I was sincerely hoping that Obama would lose this election (even more than the last one), but unfortunately the GOP options were just poor as in my opinion. At this point it is getting difficult to find a candidate any given Presidential election that stands any chance of winning that would actually give me a reason to cast a vote.
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Yeah... Yeah. *Sigh*

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ASU2003 Very Tilted

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Speed_Gibson Hacking the Gibson

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