Entries for January 2007

Hillary Clinton, in her Web announcement of a presidential exploratory committee (it's all the rage to do it that way), said she wanted to start a conversation with the American people. Fair enough. So she trekked off to chilly Iowa and started shaking hands, meeting with folks in town halls, answering unscripted questions–always a very tricky business for a new presidential candidate. Buy, hey, Hillary isn't new to this business: She's an accomplished senator and a former first lady. And, of course, she learned politics at the heels of the master: husband Bill.

Sure, the trial of Scooter Libby is a hopelessly complex Washington story about alleged lying and not about whether someone knowingly leaked the name of a covert CIA agent to the press, which was what it was supposed to be about in the first place. Whew. But here's something about it that's not complex: The folks in the West Wing seemingly suffer the same petty jealousies and problems we all have at the office. And they spend an awful lot of time figuring out how to play the press. (As in: Leak things on Fridays because, as ex-veep press secretary Cathie Martin says, "Fewer people pay attention to it late on Friday. Fewer people pay attention when it's reported on Saturday.")

In a way, we were watching a very different president and Congress last night: a more subdued president, reaching out on a few domestic policy issues he knows may actually be doable (like immigration reform and energy conservation). And a president who clearly understands that the public and the Congress are not with him on his Iraq war plan and instead just asked the public to please give him some more time for it to work. Pretty please.

A funny thing seems to be happening in Washington these days: Elected officials are wising up. In its much ballyhooed 100-hour agenda, the House passed a serious ethics reform measure ... and the Senate last night followed suit, passing a measure to reform lobbying and gift rules, with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Here's one piece of unsolicited advice for Barack Obama: It will never get any better than this. Right now, you're the rock star, the guy who could possibly give Hillary Rodham Clinton a run for her (big) money, maybe even the first African-American president. And if elected president, there's one more first: the first president to be born after the inauguration of JFK, which was in 1961. Obama is 45 years old.

It was really an astonishing thing to watch. The president had just given his much-ballyhooed prime-time speech on Iraq, recommending an additional 20,000 or so troops, trying to reignite support for his Iraq policy. Instead, he sparked a bipartisan rebellion on Capitol Hill that hasn't been seen in a very long while.

It always happens this way in Washington: A policy gets hatched, it fails, then the leaders look for the best way to fix it. And that kind of change can be a good thing.