Monday Buzz: Obama's Army, Big Three Bailout, More

NDN's thinking about how Obama will reinvent the presidency (see Simon's last video blog on the subject here) was featured this week on NPR and in the Guardian, the Washington Monthly, the Globe and Mail, and PopMatters. From Michael Tomasky's piece in the Guardian about how Obama will use new tools to pass healthcare reform:

The Washington Post reports today that the Obama transition team is trying "to harness its vast and sophisticated grassroots network to shape public policy" – specifically, major healthcare overhaul.

Tom Daschle, the former senator whom Obama has nominated to be his health department secretary and his healthcare reform czar, has been having lots of meetings, and other members of the team are reaching out to the nationwide network of some 13 million Americans who signed up during the campaign for email action alerts.

Very little is new under the sun. But this, friends, is new. No one has ever done it like this before. Simon Rosenberg, a sharp Democratic insider known for his enthusiasms, is dead-on accurate in describing the healthcare effort to the Post in these terms: "This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be. This will reinvent the relationship of the president to the American people in a way we probably haven't seen since FDR's use of radio in the 1930s."

Healthcare reform always fails. But it fails not because majorities of regular people are against it. Majorities of regular people consistently support the major features of healthcare overhaul, and why wouldn't they, given that the system in America is such a disastrous muddle.

Rob's commentary on bailouts was featured in the Associated Press, the Hill, and the San Francisco Chronicle. From the AP article by Tom Raum:

Rob Shapiro, a top Commerce Department official in the administration of former President Bill Clinton who is on Obama's team of transition advisers, said that if these were good economic times, his view would be to let the automakers fail.

“But demand for everything has collapsed because we're in a deep recession. The movement of the auto industry from dire conditions to near-terminal conditions has been driven by the financial crisis,” said Shapiro, now an official with NDN, a think tank formerly known as the New Democratic Network.

Rob also made appearances in Carbon Tax Center and MarketWatch.   

Finally, Michael's essay about the need for an emergency board for the stimulus was featured in Grist.