Vice-president Joe Biden is determined to follow in the footsteps of Al Gore and Dick Cheney, who have sharply raised the profile of the job. Biden says that Obama is on board. "The agreement he and I have is that I would be available for every single major decision that he makes," he told ABC's This Week. "I'm the last person in the room." And as former chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, Biden sees himself as Team Obama's foreign policy expert. His speech at the Wehrkunde security conference in Munich in February was the administration's biggest foreign policy statement so far. Biden announced "a new tone": that America would listen to its allies, adopt a more conciliatory approach towards Russia and a new readiness to deal with Iran. Indeed, in a little noticed speech during the election campaign, Biden said that the greatest error of the Bush administration was its failure "to face the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China and India as great powers. The Obama-Biden administration will repair those criminal mistakes."
Where now for the Clintons?
The Clintons aren't happy. First Bill was sounded out over the prospect of becoming special envoy to India, with a special role in brokering a deal over Kashmir. The big dog, as he is called, was interested, but the Indians lobbied hard to stop it. Then they went ballistic when they heard that Dick Holbrooke's Afghan-Pakistan portfolio might also include India. For New Delhi, not only is Kashmir non-negotiable and off-limits, but it also reacts badly to being hyphenated as an India-Pakistan problem. There was also talk of Bill being a special envoy to the Kremlin—until the Pentagon reminded the White House that Vladimir Putin sees Clinton as the cunning devil who bamboozled a drunken Boris Yeltsin into swallowing the expansion of Nato into eastern Europe and the Baltic states.?
Meanwhile, Hillary is wondering what's left for her to do. Former Marine General James Jones is expanding the reach of the national security council to embrace trade, homeland security, cyber-warfare, energy and climate change. He, and Bob Gates at the Pentagon, did the heavy lifting on the deal to bring the French back into Nato's military committee. Then there is a special presidential representative for the middle east, as well as Afghanistan-Pakistan, and Biden is turning on the charm for the Europeans. Tim Geithner at the Treasury does not want to give up the strategic dialogue with China that his predecessor launched. So that leaves Hillary with Africa, Latin America and Japan—not quite what she expected.
A rocky start
Newt Gingrich is circulating a cruelly apt jibe about Obama going from walking on water to be being dead in the water in the course of a week. In terms of lost cabinet appointees, Obama's start has been bumpier than Clinton's. Bill Richardson pulled out of the commerce job because of a corruption inquiry. The loss of Nancy Killefer as the White House's star performance chaser because of unpaid taxes will have hurt Obama; even more embarrassing, though, was the withdrawal of health reform czar Tom Daschle (again, over unpaid taxes). That Daschle was forced to bow out seemed to be the worst public blow to Obama's new team, until his second commerce secretary nominee, Republican Senator Judd Gregg, pulled out after an apparent change of heart over Obama's economic policy. So much for the dream of a bipartisan "government of all the talents."
Obama the loony leftie
Sarah Palin's campaign attacks painting Obama as a "socialist" may be forgotten. But socialism, like patriotism, can be a matter of judicious timing. In November 2008 the only socialist in Congress, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, offered his "Stop the Greed on Wall Street" act. It required a maximum pay cap of $400,000 a year and it was widely dismissed as one of his trademark loony-leftie bills. Now Obama is proposing the same thing, capped at a slightly more generous $500,000 and it looks as though it will become law. As the free marketeers at the Cato Institute commented "Sorry guys, you asked for it."
Ice-cream wisdom
Apart from a brief holiday job serving Baskin-Robbins ice cream in Honolulu, Obama's first job after college was writing newsletters on global trade for Business International Corporation, now owned by the Economist group. As protectionist pressures grow, it may be worth scouring back issues to see what the future president thought about free trade, particularly since his 1983 college thesis seems to have disappeared from Columbia University library. (Its topic was: "Trade and the New International Economic order.")?But the ice-cream job may have had a more lasting impact, as Obama recalled during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania in April: "I was making maybe a $100 a week and they were still taking all this money out. I thought, man, that's the payroll tax. So it's already regressive. I don't want to raise the income tax on people who are not making a lot of money already."
