Beyond the Dome

You know the old saying about how you can’t kill off a government program, even after it has outlived its usefulness? Well, you can certainly do that to a blog. And, in fact, you probably should.

Back in April, we launched Beyond the Dome to follow the adventures of the ultimate reality show: three senators competing for the highest office in the land. Now, of course, Barack Obama has won the prize, Hillary Rodham Clinton is back in the Senate, and John McCain is heading back there as well.

So the reality show is finished. Do you keep watching The Apprentice after the apprentice has been picked? Of course not. You move on to the next thing.

And so will we. Now, this blog is being replaced by a new one that will cover the transition from President Bush to President Obama over the next two months. And in January, I’ll be back with a new blog with Adriel Bettelheim, CQ’s new White House correspondent, that will focus on the relationship between the Obama administration and Congress.

Until then, thanks for reading.

President-elect Obama has announced the leaders of his transition team, and it’s a mix of longtime Senate aides, Obama friends, and top officials at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank that has been a major influence on Obama’s policy proposals.

The team will be co-chaired by John Podesta, the center’s president and CEO and a former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton; Pete Rouse, Obama’s Senate chief of staff and previously a top aide to former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle; and Valerie Jarrett, one of the Obamas’ closest friends and president and chief executive officer of the Habitat Co., a real estate development firm.

The executive director will be Chris Lu, Obama’s Senate legislative director, while the director of congressional relations will be Phil Schiliro, a former top aide to Rep. Henry Waxman who also served as the Obama campaign’s congressional liaison.

Other top figures include Cassandra Butts, the general counsel, a former Center for American Progress official and a longtime Obama friend; Michael Strautmanis, the director of public liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs, who was the chief counsel and deputy chief of staff in Obama’s Senate office; communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who also served in that role on the campaign; Stephanie Cutter, the chief spokesperson, a veteran of John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s office.

There will also be an advisory board full of prominent figures in Democratic politics, including Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano; William Daley, Clinton’s former Commerce secretary; Carol Browner, Clinton’s former Environmental Protection Agency administrator; Federico Peña, Clinton’s former Transportation and Energy secretary; and Susan Rice, one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers during the campaign.

The next wave of announcements could include the selection of Obama’s White House chief of staff, which could in turn lead to changes in the Democratic leadership. Obama reportedly wants House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel, his Illinois colleague, to take the job, though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she hasn’t heard anything from Emanuel about such a move and Democratic congressional sources say they don’t believe he’s decided whether to take the job.

The full list is as follows:

Transition Senior Staff
Chris Lu - Executive Director
Dan Pfeiffer - Communications Director
Stephanie Cutter - Chief Spokesperson
Cassandra Butts - General Counsel
Jim Messina - Personnel Director
Patrick Gaspard - Associate Personnel Director
Christine Varney - Personnel Counsel
Melody Barnes - Co-Director of Agency Review
Lisa Brown - Co-Director of Agency Review
Phil Schiliro - Director of Congressional Relations
Michael Strautmanis - Director of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs
Katy Kale - Director of Operations
Brad Kiley - Director of Operations

Advisory board:
Carol Browner
William Daley
Christopher Edley
Michael Froman
Julius Genachowski
Donald Gips
Governor Janet Napolitano
Federico Peña
Susan Rice
Sonal Shah
Mark Gitenstein
Ted Kaufman

The road ahead for President-elect Obama can be summed up pretty easily by the disconnect between the way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sees his mandate and the way liberal group sees it.

At a press conference at the Capitol this afternoon, Pelosi, who used to be the Republicans’ favorite caricature of a San Francisco liberal, declared that “the country must be governed from the middle” and that “you have to bring people together to reach consensus on solutions that are sustainable and acceptable to the American people.”

“Each side of the spectrum can hope to influence the decision, but the fact is, is that a new president coming in, in my view, must take the country down the middle, solve the problems, to gain the confidence to take us more strongly in a new direction,” Pelosi said.

An hour after she finished speaking, Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal advocacy group, held its own conference call in which they declared the election a mandate for their priorities. “It really marks the end of the conservative philosophy that has dominated for three decades and the beginning of a new era of progressive reform,” said Robert L. Borosage, the group’s co-director.

They released a report that says most of the the 25 Democrats who won House seats previously held by Republicans supported most or all of six progressive economic priorities: universal health care, easier rules for union organizing, higher taxes for the wealthy, opposition to trade agreements like NAFTA, opposition to private savings accounts for Social Security, and development of clean energy sources.

“If Obama is to be a successful president, he needs to be a transformative one,” said Borosage. “What voters expect after last night is an era of bold new reform and bold action to get this economy back on track.”

Pelosi often took heat from the liberal base of the Democratic Party over the last two years for not pushing harder for their priorities, such as ending the war with Iraq. She always said she could only push so hard without alienating the constituents of Democrats in Republican-leaning districts, without whom her party would not be in the majority.

Now, with a Democratic president and wider majorities in the House and Senate, liberals believe they’ve won the argument with conservatives. That view is likely to make Pelosi’s job harder if they think she’s still being too cautious. But, most of all, it could make Obama’s job very difficult if he can’t live up to their expectations.

To understand the magnitude of what has just happened, you need to see it through the eyes of a House leader who feels vindicated for the risks he took nearly 50 years ago.

As a young civil rights demonstrator in South Carolina, James E. Clyburn — now the House majority whip, the third-ranking Democratic leader in that chamber — never dared to guess how long it might be before he’d see the election of the first African-American president.

“No one at that time ever thought it was possible,” Clyburn recalls now. Instead, he mostly just wondered whether he and his fellow demonstrators were accomplishing anything at all.

In March 1960, Clyburn was arrested in a march that protested a ban on demonstrations in the business district of Orangeburg, S.C. He testified in defense of a smaller group of protesters that was convicted of “breach of the peace.” The transcript of the trial drips with the condescension civil rights protesters in the South faced in that era. At one point, the prosecutor told the 19-year-old Clyburn, then a pre-law student at South Carolina State College, that “you are a good lawyer already.”

The next year, Clyburn spent three nights in jail as part of a march at the state Capitol in March 1961. The Supreme Court later overturned the convictions, once again for “breach of the peace.”

But as he sat in the jail cell, Clyburn recalls, he wondered whether he and his fellow civil rights protesters were just wasting their time. “That was when I was questioning whether any of this made any sense,” Clyburn said.

Earlier this year, in a speech to the NAACP, Barack Obama paid tribute to the civil rights leaders who blazed the trail that made his presidential candidacy possible. Clyburn wasn’t one of the famous names Obama mentioned that day. His sacrifices came not in the pivotal civil rights demonstrations that are immortalized in the history books, but in some of the many, smaller protests of that era that are barely remembered today.

But it was clear that Obama had people like Clyburn in mind that day in July, when he acknowledged his debt to “all those whose names never made it into the history books — those men and women, young and old, black, brown and white, clear-eyed and straight-backed, who refused to settle for the world as it is; who had the courage to remake the world as it should be.”

There were times when other civil rights veterans had their tensions with Obama, a biracial candidate from a younger generation who didn’t go through the same struggles and mostly treated race as an afterthought in his campaign. Clyburn, however, is at peace with Obama winning the ultimate political prize. He notes that Obama is about the same age as his daughter, Mignon, which is all the reason he needs to celebrate the achievements of the next generation

“What kind of fool would I be if I required my daughter to do what I did to be successful?” Clyburn asked. “I did it so she wouldn’t have to.”

Tonight, it’s clear that those nights in the jail cell weren’t a waste of time at all.

Tonight, a United States senator will be elected president for the first time since John F. Kennedy in 1960. The curse that usually keeps them out of the White House - the long records of votes and speeches that can be used against them, the lapses into Senate-speak that can alienate voters on the campaign trail — will be broken.

But did the voters get a true picture of the Barack Obama and John McCain we’ve seen in the Senate? Not really — and not just because voters have been asked to believe Obama is a closet socialist and McCain is President Bush’s identical twin.

The deeper problem is that their own campaigns distort their personalities. Once they go out on the road, presidential candidates become the equivalent of businesses, with all of the employees’ fortunes riding on their success. And in this case, the employees are political operatives who, by their nature, can’t rise above politics as usual.

In the Senate, and in Springfield before that, Obama has been a politician with a generally liberal record but a moderate temperament. Yes, he almost always voted with Senate Democrats on measures that divided the parties - 97 percent of the time in 2005, 96 percent of the time in 2006, and 97 percent of the time again last year. But he also gained a reputation as a good listener, a quick study and a diligent worker (until he started running for president).

And anyone who can form friendships and working partnerships with Republicans like Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, as Obama did, is probably capable of genuine bipartisanship, and on bigger issues than Obama tackled in the Senate.

Yet you’d hardly know that from watching Obama on the campaign trail. Yes, we’ve seen signs of the intellect, maturity and good sportsmanship his colleagues have seen from him at an early age. But even as Obama has vowed to challenge “the smallness of our politics,” his campaign has blasted out e-mails every day that thrive in that smallness of politics — pouncing on McCain’s smallest slips of the tongue, chasing the distraction of the day, bragging about the size of Obama’s crowds compared to McCain’s.

And Obama’s claim that McCain’s health care plan would require $882 billion in cuts to Medicare, based on nothing more than a liberal think tank’s guess, bore almost no resemblance to the high standards the real Obama has usually set for public policy debates. The only conclusion one can draw is that the operatives were calling the shots on that one.

The McCain of the Senate, meanwhile, has gotten such a complete makeover in this campaign that he might as well be someone else.

The real McCain has always been conservative at his core, but with enough of an independent streak to constantly rethink issues and challenge his party not to be afraid of working with the other side. That makes him a genuinely complicated character, one who would be a real challenge to capture accurately in any campaign narrative.

But instead of trying, the McCain team, chock-full of standard Republican operatives, has spent most of the campaign trying to make him look like a generic Republican. Everything that was unique about him — the open-mindedness, the rebelliousness, the candor, the casual banter with the press, the senatorial courtesy to his political opponents — got swept aside, one by one. About all that was left of the real McCain was the combative side, and that rarely charms anybody who doesn’t already agree with you.

Sure, McCain talked about his record of bipartisan work, which is real and covers more significant issues than Obama’s. So why didn’t that resonate more with voters? Maybe because a candidate who spends so much time depicting his opponent as a socialist doesn’t sound like a bipartisan guy. All along, McCain’s challenge was to figure out how to throw out all the red meat the conservative base demands while also preserving his independence. He appears to have found the answer: You can’t.

If Obama wins tonight, he’ll have much more freedom to rise above “the smallness of our politics” and realize the potential he has demonstrated in the Senate. The same is true of McCain, if he pulls off a major political upset. But it will only happen if the next president tells his operatives: You had your turn running the show. Now it’s my turn.

He hasn’t been elected, but Barack Obama already appears to be trying out one favorite leadership tactic of the powerful officeholder: trying to lower the expectations of his most ardent supporters — in this case, liberals keen to push him beyond his centrist comfort zone.

If he wins the White House tomorrow and the Democrats come out with fatter majorities in Congress, there will be a natural tension between the most progressive Democrats, who will want to push all of the spending and policy priorities they think got a cursory hearing at best during the Bush years, and centrist Democrats, who will want to stop running up the national debt. And Obama will be under pressure to prove that all of his talk about working with Republicans wasn’t just talk.

So in the final days of the election, Obama has been playing up his concern for the needs of centrist Democrats and his determination to listen to Republicans on the most divisive issues.

In an interview last week with NBC’s Brian Williams, Obama noted that many of the Democrats who are likely to be elected to Congress tomorrow night will be “centrist Democrats who are running in traditionally Republican districts, and they’re going to have a lot of interest in common-sense solutions out there.”

Obama also conceded that Democrats “squandered a lot of opportunities” during the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency — the last time they controlled the White House and Congress — and said Republicans overreached in their years in the majority under President Bush.

“I think there have been some pretty good lessons over the last 15, 20 years to say that the only way we’re going to solve big problems, like energy, the financial crisis, health care, is if we got an approach that reaches out to the other side and comes up with pragmatic, common-sense, non-ideological solutions,” Obama said.

More significant, perhaps, was his interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in which Obama seemed to warn Maddow — and by extension, her mostly liberal audience — not to declare ideological victory over the Republicans if there’s a Democratic sweep tomorrow.

At one point, when Maddow noted that Obama hasn’t taken “the opportunity to say, conservatism has been bad for America,” Obama brushed her back a bit: “I know you’ve been cruising for a bruising for a while here, looking for a fight out there. But I just think people are tired of that kind of back and forth, tit-for-tat, ideological approach to the problems.”

Besides, Obama said he was trying to create a “working majority for change,” so it would be self-defeating to alienate the entire Republican Party. “If I start off with the premise that it’s only self-identified Democrats who I’m speaking to, then I’m not going to get to where we need to go,” Obama said. “If I can describe it as not a blanket indictment of the Republican Party, but instead describe it as the Republican Party having been kidnapped by an incompetent, highly ideological subset of the Republican Party, then that means that I can still reach out to a whole bunch of Republican moderates who I think are hungry for change, as well.”

One could argue, of course, that Obama already has issued the blanket indictment by calling the economic crisis a verdict on the “failed philosophy” of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. And he may be overstating the number of Republican moderates who will actually be left after this election.

What’s important, though, is that Obama seems to be sending a message to the Democratic base that he’s about to walk back from the red-meat rhetoric — and that his supporters shouldn’t be surprised if a President Obama doesn’t do everything they want.

John McCain hasn’t dropped as many hints about his first priorities in the White House as Barack Obama, partly because he’s more reluctant to talk about them before the election and partly because he hasn’t been asked as often. But his interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC News yesterday came close enough to give at least a general sense of what McCain is thinking.

His first priority, he said, would be to “ensure America’s security,” while the second would be to “get the economy out of the ditch and moving again and create jobs.” That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that McCain has signed on to the need for a second stimulus package, as Obama and Democratic leaders have been proposing. He was noncommittal about the idea, saying only that he would “talk with the members of Congress and find out exactly what’s needed.”

That’s a signal of the first fight he’d be likely to have with the Democratic leadership, since the only uncertainty at this point is how much larger their House and Senate majorities will be.

Democrats have been talking about a scenario in which, if Congress doesn’t approve a second stimulus package during a lame-duck session or President Bush vetoes it, they might come back early next year and pass it so a President Obama could sign it as soon as he takes office. So if it’s President McCain instead, they’d have to give up on that scenario and be prepared to negotiate.

McCain also signalled an early fight over any earmarks in a stimulus package, saying he would “lay down the law. No more pork … We’d take that on right away.” That’s consistent with McCain’s constant pledges on the campaign trail, but it’s likely to make his relationship with Congress lousy from the start.

One of the reasons President Jimmy Carter had so much trouble with Congress, congressional historians say, is that he picked fights in his first year over spending projects in members’ districts. And Carter had a Congress controlled by his own party. McCain wouldn’t even have that.

McCain doesn’t seem to think he’ll have too much trouble with a Democratic majority. “I think I have a long record of working with these people. I have a long record of reaching across the aisle. And I have a long record of accomplishment,” he told Gibson. “Look, there are some people on the other side of the aisle and maybe a couple on my side of the aisle that are not personally close to me. But they respect me. And that’s what it’s got to be all about.”

Of course, that was before the nasty campaign that has unfolded in the past few months, and before McCain started bashing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the campaign trail. Democrats also aren’t likely to be thrilled with McCain’s other suggestions, such as his declaration to Gibson that he’ll rely on Henry Kissinger for foreign policy advice. And no one thinks the Democrats will get over their disappointment easily if Obama loses on Tuesday after seeming to build up such a large lead in the polls.

So if McCain thinks he’ll be facing the same Democrats who worked with him on campaign finance, immigration and the “Gang of 14,” he’s likely to be in for a big surprise.

Barack Obama is starting to narrow down the top priorities he’d send to Congress if he wins on Tuesday. And, as many on Capitol Hill have suspected, he’s saying everything else on his agenda takes a backseat to jump-starting the economy.

In an interview this afternoon with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Obama said his top priority would be an economic stimulus bill, possibly including the middle-class tax cuts he has proposed. “That may be the first bill that I’ll introduce,” Obama said. (Presidents can’t technically introduce bills, but we’ll let that one go.)

After that, Obama said his next priority would be to ask Congress to pass his energy plan, followed by an overhaul of the health care system, a rewrite of the tax code, and restructuring the education system.

It was a unique look at the timing Obama has in mind for his major initiatives, because adapting to the economic crisis — and not giving Congress more than it can handle at any one time — would be critical to his success if he wins the White House.

For example, some veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration believe his 1994 health care overhaul effort failed because he waited until the second year of his presidency, too late to push such a major initiative. At the same time, though, top congressional Democrats believe Obama wouldn’t get very far with his health care plan if he tried to lead off with it, given the budgetary constraints created by the economic crisis.

His rankings could also be an indicator that the tax code and education rewrites are less likely to get done soon. If they slip until after the first year, Congress will already be in re-election mode, which might make lawmakers less likely to want to work on anything too ambitious.

Still, Obama seems to be in agreement with Democratic leaders that “none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system and financial system,” as he told Blitzer. “So that’s priority number one — making sure the plumbing works.”

You realize what that makes him, right? Barack the Plumber. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Barack Obama’s 30-minute network ad tonight did a skillful job of weaving dry policy proposals into a series of compelling personal stories. But he left out a significant piece of his health care plan, an omission that raises question of how hard he’d really push for it.

The way Obama described his health care plan, it sounded remarkably painless. “Every American has a right to affordable health care,” he said, and then noted that many hospitals are cutting costs through technology and computerized records.

“That’s why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions, and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year, and you can keep your same coverage and your same doctor,” Obama said, as little captions hit the high points of his plan.

Sounds great, right? So what’s the catch? It might be the part where large businesses have to cover their workers or pay into a new public health plan. That’s the part that’s often called “pay or play,” and it includes the “fine” that John McCain has talked so much about (actually, a percentage of payroll that would help fund the national plan).

It’s exactly the kind of requirement that could face resistance from the business community, which, of course, helped kill the Clintons’ health care overhaul effort in 1994. That’s especially true in such a tough economic climate. And yet, if Obama can’t get that provision through Congress, his health care plan can’t make as much of a dent in the number of uninsured Americans.

Business groups, it must be said, are more worried about John McCain’s health care plan, which they fear would unravel the employer-based health care system by making the benefits taxable to employees. But the benefits managers at large companies aren’t crazy about Obama’s plan, either.

So it probably wouldn’t have helped Obama’s sales pitch to mention that part of his health care plan. But in doing so, he missed a big opportunity to educate voters about how his plan would actually work — and create a mandate, if he wins on Tuesday, that he can use to help overcome the lobbying Congress is sure to face.

Here’s a scenario to ponder: What if Sarah Palin did become such an activist vice president — if she gets the chance — that she could accurately be called “in charge of the Senate”?

Palin took a lot of heat for that remark to a Colorado television station last week, but some experts on the Senate now argue that she wasn’t necessarily off base. True, modern vice presidents almost never show up to preside over the Senate unless they’re breaking a tie vote. But that doesn’t mean the next vice president couldn’t revive the practice, and in fact, some conservatives think it might be good for a Republican vice president to get more involved if the Democrats expand their majority next week.

Brian Darling, the director of U.S. Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, argues that early vice presidents actually spent a fair amount of time on their duties as Senate president, and that Palin would be within her rights to do so if she and John McCain win the election.

The main reason to preside over the Senate more actively, he said, would be to stop Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada from “filling the amendment tree” so often to prevent Republicans from trying to amend legislation. That’s a procedural manuever in which the majority leader offers enough amendments to fill all the slots that are available to change the bill.

But the tactic only works because the majority leader is traditionally recognized first, and if Palin actually presided over the Senate on a regular basis, she could simply refuse to recognize Reid first — and turn to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky instead if it became clear that Reid was about to “fill the tree,” Darling said.

It seems like a risky move, to say the least. Leaving aside the fact that nobody in the Senate really knows Palin — except for the two Alaska senators, one of whom may not be back next year — the Senate could easily erupt in protests if Palin appeared to yank the steering wheel away from the Democratic majority too often.

But while Palin would have to choose her battles carefully, Darling said she and McCain could make the case that if they win the election, it’s because the voters want Republicans to have a voice in the process and not get shut out.

“She could come in and sit in the Senate and not just break tie votes, but make sure the agenda doesn’t go in a direction the administration didn’t want it to go,” he said.

Could Palin actually do that? Technically, yes, according to Robert B. Dove, who served as the Senate parliamentarian for many years. It’s not very likely, though, Dove said, given that recognizing the majority leader first has been a Senate tradition since the 1930s.

“The Senate is much more governed by tradition than rules,” he said.

In general, though, Palin wasn’t wrong to suggest that the vice president could take an active role in presiding over the Senate, Dove said. Both Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller spent a lot of time in the chamber, largely because Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford shut them out of the workings of the White House. It was only when Walter Mondale expanded the access and influence of the vice presidency, Dove said, that vice presidents stopped spending so much time in the Senate — because they had better things to do.

The subject could be academic unless McCain and Palin turn their poll numbers around, of course. But if they do manage to pull an upset next week, don’t be surprised if Palin means what she says about hanging around the Senate more often.