CQ Politics' Web Picks

Washington Post: Much to His Chagrin, ‘Plain Old Barack Is Gone’

Obama’s home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood has become a compound guarded ever more closely by bomb-sniffing dogs and Secret Service agents who peer through binoculars at neighboring rooftops. When he travels around the city, it is in an armored limousine and 20-car motorcade, so he has mainly stayed bunkered at home or a downtown transition office. Last week, Obama told one friend that he felt “a little boxed in.”

New York Times: An Old Hometown Mentor, Still at Obama’s Side

If someone were to rank the long list of people who helped Barack and Michelle Obama get where they are today, Ms. Jarrett would be close to the top. Nearly two decades ago, Valerie Jarrett swept the young lawyers under her wing, introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own, and eventually secured contacts and money essential to Mr. Obama’s long-shot Senate victory.

Daily Beast: Obama Gives Wall Street the Cold Shoulder

By tapping Geithner and Summers to drive economic policy, Obama breaks a long chain of Wall Street bankers running government. This surely drives home the point that one of Obama’s definitions of change is to not allow Wall Street its traditional role in running things.

Wall Street Journal: Duo Has Proved More Pragmatic Than Ideological

President-elect Barack Obama, in choosing Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers to lead his economic team, is betting on a student-and-mentor pair who forged a partnership while battling the world’s last serious financial crisis when collapse of the Thai currency roiled Asian markets. The records of Messrs. Geithner and Summers suggest views more pragmatic than ideological, on a range of issues that they will likely confront after Mr. Obama takes office in January.

Stateline.org: Depressed Economy Wallops States

Staggered by turbulent financial markets and anxious about a rapidly slumping economy, many state governments are slashing their budgets, frantically trying to stay afloat.

Slate: Why Obama Should Keep his BlackBerry

Now, you’re preparing to enter the White House, and your BlackBerry is about to be ripped from your clutches because of privacy and security concerns. Savor the irony: You captured the Oval Office by making technological history, only to find that you’re now required to govern like in the 19th century. Echoes of Lincoln, indeed.

New Yorker: What Mike Huckabee Thought of the Elections

Lately he has been morphing from nice guy to Party meanie. In “Do the Right Thing,” he takes a poke at Mitt Romney. Neither was he quite so unperturbed by the Palin pick: “I was scratching my head, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. She’s wonderful, but the only difference was she looks better in stilettos than I do, and she has better hair.’” It wasn’t that the fuzzy, affable Huckabee had vanished; there was just a little more mustard on his honey-oat bread.

American Conservative: Clinton Cabinet

So ascendant are the Clintonistas that it’s hard to believe Hillary lost. Far from generating a panic, however, their restoration has drawn sighs of relief from certain quarters. The new commander in chief—at least for now—seems more interested in massaging the status quo than in remaking the town in his own, still murky image.

Los Angeles Times: Clinton’s Potential Pitfalls Seen in FDR’s Secretary of State

Cordell Hull was a veteran lawmaker with a worldwide reputation when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him secretary of State in 1933, in part to win needed support from Hull’s army of Democratic admirers. But the dignified Tennessean was never close to FDR. As time passed, he was “muscled out by others in the administration,” said Michael Hunt, a diplomatic historian at the University of North Carolina.

Chicago Tribune: America’s Secret War in Somalia

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants. Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration.