Anderson@Large

The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For?

I am a policy wonk so on Saturday, I attended a daylong conference on building bridges between African American and immigrant communities.

As I walked past the Princeton Club, I thought about New York Times columnist David Brooks lauding President-elect Barack Obama for assembling a Cabinet of Washington insiders and members of the club:

If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

Truth be told, a lot of black folks already feel screwed. There is growing concern among black women leaders about whether a black woman will have a seat at the table.

It bears repeating that sisters had President-elect Obama's back from the South Carolina primary to Election Day.

Erica Williams, Study Director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said:African American women in particular played a large role in this election, especially in several key battleground. More African American women voted in this presidential election than in any other.

I shared black women leaders' concerns with Ron Hayduk, a keen political observer and longtime democracy reform activist. Ron teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which is about as far from the rarified air of the Ivy League as one can get.

Ron told me:

He’s being very cautious to his detriment and to ours because he needs black women…A working class agenda has to have women of color for that to happen. What’s he going to do? Do it later if he gets around to it? How long do black woman have to wait. It’s nothing new.

What’s new is that we were expecting something different. People are fired up, black women especially are mobilized…It’s their time. It’s the people’s time. It’s going to be an opportunity lost. A chance missed. He’s going to go down if he doesn’t do it, and he’s going to take us with him.

Ron also noticed the Princeton Club on his way to the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, where the conference was held. He observed:

Those appointments don’t reflect the electoral coalition. It doesn’t look like the electoral coalition will be a part of the governing coalition…It’s more of the same. Maybe not the same old but it’s the same monied interests. Some are just retreads from the Clinton administration.

Ron’s observations were echoed by Bill Fletcher Jr. who, BTW, is a Harvard grad:

It’s up to us to realize our job is to shape Obama and not the other way around. He’s constructing a center-right administration. We’ve got to get organized, shape the discussion, and help the man be who he has to be for this moment.

For President-elect Obama’s three million donors and hundreds of thousands of campaign volunteers that would be "change we can believe in."

Clinton-Obama Drama, Act III

February will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Great Emancipator, but Abraham Lincoln is already the rage. From Newsweek to President-elect Barack Obama’s alma mater and transition team, people are talking.

President-elect Obama reportedly is considering appointing a “team of rivals” that would include Hillary Clinton. The reports have reprised the drama of their epic nomination battle.

Gerard Baker, Washington-based editor of the Times of London, writes:

But with his election as president, Mr. Obama surely demonstrated that the victory was his and his alone, and that the country would be spared the prospect of yet another chapter in the Clinton saga that has dominated American politics for the best part of two decades.

And yet, here we are, a couple of weeks after that historic election, and once again all we are talking about is - the Clintons.

It would be an understatement to say that the sudden and unexpected emergence of Senator Clinton's name as the President-elect's apparent choice to be his secretary of state has caused consternation among some of Mr. Obama's most loyal followers.

They are aghast that, as they see it, having wisely steered clear of giving her the vice-presidency, their man has supposedly offered her what is, in all but the constitutional succession stakes, a much bigger job. The State Department is a vast bureaucracy that supports a Cabinet member who is the most frequently seen face of America in the world. One can only guess, by the way, what Joe Biden, the man who got the vice-presidential slot over Senator Clinton, in large part because of his foreign policy credentials, now thinks about the idea of sitting quietly in his vice-presidential office suite watching Mrs. Clinton strut her global stuff on television.

While Obama loyalists may be “aghast,” a new Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans want Clinton to hold court at Foggy Bottom. Nearly 80 percent of Democrats think it would be a good play.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (The more things change, the more they remain the same).

A Cabinet that Looks Like America?

This weekend, President-elect Barack Obama announced a number of White House appointments. Mona Sutphen will be deputy chief of staff and Valerie Jarrett will serve as a senior adviser and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison.

Jarrett will be Obama’s eyes and ears to constituent groups, which is the role that Alexis Herman played during Bill Clinton’s first term.

Yesterday on ABC News’ “This Week,” Sam Donaldson said Obama’s personnel picks lacked diversity. With the exception of Jarrett and Sutphen, the new bosses look a lot like the old bosses. 

Donaldson wondered whether Obama will assemble a Cabinet that “looks like America.”

Cokie Roberts said she expected Obama’s appointments will be as diverse as Clinton’s.

During his two terms, Clinton appointed seven black Cabinet members. BTW, President Bush, who garnered less than 10 percent black support, appointed four blacks to his Cabinet.

According to a preliminary analysis by Dr. David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, blacks represent nearly 24 percent of Obama’s vote total. And black women account for 60 percent of the black vote.

Let’s be clear: Diversity is not about mindless bean counting. It’s about influencing public policy and having presidential appointees in departments and agencies who get what's happening to African American families, homeowners, small businesses and communities.

But while black folks are glorying in the President-Elect, women and Latinos are making demands. NOW President Kim Gandy told Politico:

The transition team is going to take the time to look at and vet the people they don’t know. Because frankly, the people who are already well-known in Washington tend to be men and tend to be white.

And 2000 community organizers will gather in DC to press Obama to deliver on his promise to meet with them during the transition to help “shape the agenda.”

Obama Administration Job Search

I’m in Florida so I missed the annual meeting of the Trotter Group. I especially wanted to be there when Valerie Jarrettt, co-chair of the Presidential Transition Team, met with my colleagues.

If I had been present, I would have asked whether President-elect Barack Obama’s commitment to diversity extended beyond the Oval Office.

Fortunately, George Curry said what’s on black folks’ minds:

Now that Barack Obama has won the White House, will he be so eager to govern from the center that he will forget about his obligations to Blacks?

George writes:

On the question of Obama’s commitment to diversity, Jarrett was unequivocal.

“President-elect Obama, as should be no surprise to anyone in this room, would like his cabinet to be diverse – both in terms of race, in terms of perspectives, in terms of party, in terms of geography,” she said. “So he is looking to have a cross-section of America. Spending the amount of time with him as I do, I can assure you this is something front and center of his mind. Not because it’s the politically expedient thing to do, but because he would make better decisions by having diversity. He really believes in that.”

That's good news.

The bad news is that tens of thousands of Obama supporters will be competing for roughly 7,000 presidential appointments. To throw your name in the mix, go here.

Truth be told, getting a job offer may be easier than completing the seven-page background questionnaire. By contrast, the application for a federal bailout is two pages.

As the New York Times reports:

The questionnaire includes 63 requests for personal and professional records, some covering applicants’ spouses and grown children as well, that are forcing job-seekers to rummage from basements to attics, in shoe boxes, diaries and computer archives to document both their achievements and missteps.

Only the smallest details are excluded; traffic tickets carrying fines of less than $50 need not be reported, the application says. Applicants are asked whether they or anyone in their family owns a gun. They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

The application also asks applicants to “please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet.”

The Times adds:

For those who clear all the hurdles, the reward could be the job they wanted. But first there will be more forms, for security and ethics clearances from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Government Ethics.

For more info, you may want to attend a discussion about the presidential appointment process organized by the National Bar Association and the National Congress of Black Women. The event will be held on Monday, Nov. 17, in the DC office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.

You can download the flyer here.