The Administration

We are no longer in an election year — which makes this the perfect time to take action on election reform. 

Politicians are famously reluctant to make commitments — especially about the future, as Yogi might say.

If terms like “continuing resolution” or “debt ceiling” seem like déjà vu, there’s a good reason. 

This could be the decisive and historic year the federal government swerves away from bankruptcy. But progress will require the president and his party to exercise previously unseen political courage on entitlement reform.

During his second inaugural speech, the president proclaimed that "[o]ur journey is complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.” Powerful words, indeed. The problem is that, coming from him, they ring hollow.
 
The president loves to pontificate about immigration, but the reality is that since his administration began, he hasn’t done anything to advance the discussion of immigration and help forge the bipartisan consensus necessary to address this important issue. He’s only made promises that he hasn’t kept.

As President Obama begins his second term, and his agenda for the next four years begins to unfold, the men and women who make up his cabinet will have the unenviable task of running a massive agency in the face of falling budgets, and increased Congressional scrutiny.
 
Given the president’s performance and inability to work with Republicans, it is not surprising that controversy will befall some of his bigger decisions.  However, the continuing drama over the nomination of Chuck Hagel to replace Secretary Panetta as Defense Secretary represents an unjustifiable opposition based less on fact, and more on personality.
 
Since news of the nomination, lawmakers from both parties were quick to weigh in and air their objections.

Chuck Hagel has long been an outspoken critic of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Since President Obama nominated him to serve as Pentagon chief, hardline defenders of the status-quo have been quick to accuse the former Senator from Nebraska of supporting legislation that would allegedly provide a lifeline to the Castro leadership. One of them, pro-embargo lobbyist Mauricio Claver-Carone, even serves on the board of an outside group named Americans for Strong Defense, whose aim is to thwart Hagel’s nomination through paid TV attack ads.
 
However, as the Senate prepares to question Hagel on his position on Cuba, it should be aware of an incredible irony: Hagel has been accused of being
“soft on Castro” for espousing views that are almost entirely in sync with those of the Island’s leading pro-democracy advocates.

A concerted conservative campaign against Chuck Hagel, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, practically guarantees that his confirmation hearing this week will receive the lion’s share of the media attention regarding Obama’s proposed national security team.

But the back and forth about Hagel’s positions, including his perceived independence from Israel, has obscured a more important question: What signals do Obama’s new foreign policy picks send about the kind of America the rest of the world, and particularly the Middle East, can expect? At present, depending on where you sit, the implications of the Obama nominations could arouse fear (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen,) interest (Iran,) or indifference (the Palestinians.)

The conventionally wise have weighed in and declared — with equal parts delight and dismay — that the president’s second inaugural address was a robust defense of contemporary liberalism that heartened the left and caused the right to issue a resigned “We told you so”: Barack Obama the progressive finally emerged on Inauguration Day.
 
With the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson — once a George W. Bush speechwriter — calling Obama’s speech a “a raging bonfire of straw men” and the Post’s Dana Milbank describing the president as preaching to the choir with “a leftover campaign speech combined with an early draft of the State of the Union address,” you’d think that Obama had served up a point-by-point defense of his discretionary spending prerogatives while challenging Republican House Speaker John Boehner to a winner-take-all hand of head’s-up Texas hold ‘em to settle the federal budget.
 
But they’re both wrong.

The narrative of President Obama’s second inaugural address is clear and directed, when in the first moments of his speech he declared: “We affirm the promise of democracy.”

What does that mean to a man whose chosen adult identity is as a community organizer? It means democracy is a process -- a movement -- to harmoniously reconcile what ought to be, what is, and what can be. President Obama announced the movement by saying, “We continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the reality of our times.”