Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices. Obama has reversed pledges to immediately repeal tax cuts for the wealthy and take on Big Oil. He’s hedged his call for a quick drawdown in Iraq. And he’s stocking his White House with anything but stalwarts of the left. Now some are shedding a reluctance to puncture the liberal euphoria at being rid of President George W. Bush to say, in effect, that the new boss looks like the old boss. “He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet. But we do hope that before it's all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America. OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn't there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?” Even supporters make clear they’re on the lookout for backsliding. “There’s a concern that he keep his basic promises and people are going to watch him,” said Roger Hickey, a co-founder of Campaign for America’s Future.

1. The successful economy can be explained by President Obama's adherence to liberal principles
2. The flailing economy can be explained by President Obama abandoning real liberalism and engaging in politically expedient policies. 

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today.  November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised.  Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.

Men are losing jobs at far greater rates than women as the industries they dominate, such as manufacturing, construction, and investment services, are hardest hit by the downturn. Some 1.1 million fewer men are working in the United States than there were a year ago, according to the Labor Department. By contrast, 12,000 more women are working. This gender gap is the product of both the nature of the current recession and the long-term shift in the US economy from making goods, traditionally the province of men, to providing services, in which women play much larger roles, economists said. For example, men account for 70 percent of workers in manufacturing, which shed more than 500,000 jobs over the past year. Healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women, added more than 400,000 jobs. "As the recession broadens, the gap between men and women is going to close somewhat," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "But right now, the sectors that are really getting pounded are intensely male." The divide is far starker than it was in last recession, when the technology crash battered professional and technical sectors in which women now hold more than 40 percent of jobs. From the beginning of 2001 to the beginning of 2002, the number of employed men declined by about 900,000, while the population of women with jobs fell by about 700,000.

If you are bright and are contemplating a potential career in American politics, you go to a top law school--not a public policy school.  This does not seem to have changed much in recent decades despite everything [Harvard's Kennedy School of Government] has done to make itself visible and relevant.

1. A top policymaking job requires three key attributes:  leadership, discipline, and policy expertise
2. Policy expertise can be earned from various sources -- a public policy degree is one avenue, but hardly the only one
3. A public policy degree, on the other hand, is much more fun to earn than a law degree.  Which means it requires less discipline.
4. By getting a law degree, aspirants to top policymaking jobs are signaling to observers that they can grind their way through a serious amount of drudgery.  
5. Ergo, lawyers with significant policymaking experience are more likely to have the discipline necessary to be good at their jobs.

Of the first 15 cabinet and White House appointments announced by president-elect Barack Obama... three earned degrees from the nondescript buildings off the Strand that house the London School of Economics. The selections of Peter Orszag as budget director and Pete Rouse and Mona Sutphen to the senior White House staff means the LSE only has two less graduates than Harvard in team Obama. LSE currently has one more than traditional American powerhouse universities Princeton (Michelle Obama’s alma mater); Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Michigan Law School. Mighty Yale can boast only one graduate, Gregory Craig, the next presidential legal counsel, though Hillary Clinton and James Steinberg will triple the score if they end up at the state department.

[O]ne could forgive Geithner right now if his head swelled just a little bit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up five hundred points on Friday as word of his appointment leaked. The Dow jumped close to another four hundred points yesterday after Obama officially introduced him. One has to wonder if, sometime this week, when Geithner’s wife asks him to do the dishes, he will be tempted to respond, “Have you caused the Dow to jump by more than ten percent? I didn’t think so!”

Some progressive Obama supporters think the arrival of Clinton at the State Dept. will mean they’ll be frozen out. That would have implications for their advancement in subsequent Democratic administrations. “Basically, you have all of these young, next-generation and mid-career people who took a chance on Obama” during the primaries, said one Democratic foreign-policy expert included in that cohort. “They were many times the ones who were courageous enough to stand up early against Iraq, which is why many of them supported Obama in the first place. And many of them would likely get shut out of the mid-career and assistant-secretary type jobs that you need, so that they can one day be the top people running a future Democratic administration.” In the foreign-policy bureaucracy, these middle-tier jobs — assistant secretary and principal-deputy-assistant and deputy-assistant — are stepping stones to bigger, more important jobs, because they’re where much of the actual policy-making is hashed out. Those positions flesh out strategic decisions made by the president and cabinet secretaries; implement those policies; and use their expertise to both inform decisions and propose targeted or specific solutions to particular crises. The responsibility conferred on those offices, and the expertise developed and deepened by their occupants, shape the future luminaries of U.S. foreign policy. Susan Rice, for example, served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton’s second term and is now a leading contender for a top job in the Obama administration. “These are your foreign-policy change agents,” said the Democratic foreign-policy expert.

Among the Hillary people you can imagine going with her to the State Department are old-guard types such as Richard Holbrooke, Jamie Rubin, and Michael O'Hanlon. While some of Obama's foreign policy advisers had served under Bill Clinton, Obama had plenty of fresher faces, such as Samantha Power, who during the campaign strongly condemned the Hillary "conventional wisdom" foreign policy mindset that might dominate should she be elected president.... The question is whether Hillary people at State will muddle what is arguably Obama's overarching foreign policy ambition: Fundamental change in the way national security is discussed in this country and a true and enduring transformation of our own views of what constitutes just and practical uses of our military power abroad. The dynamic bears watching.

If President-elect Barack Obama taps Senator Hillary Clinton to be his secretary of state, he would be giving her oversight of an area where the two former rivals diverged sharply during their prolonged primary battle: foreign policy. From their first clashes in the summer of 2007 through spring this year, Obama and Clinton fought bitterly over who had a deeper understanding of the world, exchanging sharp words over their international experience and their views on diplomacy, military strikes against terrorists, the right approach toward Iran, and the genesis of the Iraq war. It is the one arena in which Obama and Clinton articulated significantly different visions. On a host of other issues - taxes, healthcare, jobs, free trade, investments in renewable energy - their positions were often indistinguishable.

Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, however, disputes the notion that Obama and Clinton differed significantly during the primary race on foreign affairs, arguing that on issues such as diplomacy, their heated rhetoric belied a broad similarity in approach. "A lot of the foreign policy skirmishes between the two were more about style than anything else," he said.

1. Because of her rock star quality, I suspect she would be a diplomatic force multiplier.  Countries will be more appreciative of a visit by Hillary Clinton than they would if Richard Holbrooke, Bill Richardson or John Kerry were coming to town. 
2. Based on her management abilities to date, I fear for the denizens of Foggy Bottom.  The State Department is a whopper of a bureaucracy, and I don't know how well she'll do at managing it. 

During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President... [Adam] Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”

Summers's brilliance made him simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting to work for--a whirlwind of intellectual energy fueled by an endless supply of Diet Coke. "I remember once giving him a memo that was three pages long," recalls Steve Radelet, a onetime Harvard economist who worked for both Summers and Geithner. "I'd worked on it for days and days. He read it in a minute and a half. He looked at me, saying, 'I don't agree with your argument. But, if I were making your argument, I could have made it better. Here's how.' "

1. I said that the concession speech was going to be my favorite part of the evening, and John McCain did not disappoint.  He turned his audience's boos at the mention of Barack Obama to relatively warm applause (though click here as well).  UPDATE:  I agree with Jonathan Martin that President Bush hit the right grace notes in his morning address as well. 
2. Obama's acceptance speech was equally gracious.  Mickey Kaus notes the things that weren't mentioned.  What I found interesting was the fact that he explicitly addressed non-Americans. 
3. Stepping back, the election night does not appear to have been as strong for the Democrats as some had hoped.  They're not going to get to 60 seats in the Senate -- though that was always an outside shot at best.  The House gains also appear to be smaller than expected.  Given the gains they had two years ago, this is not terribly surprising, but it is worthy of note. 
4. So much for the Bradley Effect. 
5. Now comes the fun part for the policy wonks -- who gets what job, and who gets snubbed!!  Based on Obama's organization to date, I expect the transition to be pretty quick. 
6. I'm hopeful that after this week, the names Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko will never be uttered on news shows ever again. 
7. 45 years ago, in his "I have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King Jr. said that, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  Obama was two years old when King said that.  It's a testament to King's vision that, in 2008, Obama ran a campaign that asked Americans to do just that. 
8. I'm sensing from my readers that they would like to see some more Salma Hayek posts.  While not involving the lovely and charming Ms. Hayek, I hereby link to the World's Most Awesome Commercial Ever.   

• Electoral College:  368-170 for Obama
• Popular Vote:  53-45 for Obama
• Senate:  +8 for Democrats

Pretty clearly, the Obamacon phenomenon is on the whole not really an endorsement of Obama or anything he proposes to do, which is why most of the endorsements coming from the right cannot withstand much scrutiny.  That’s the whole point: the Republican ticket is so unappealing to these people that they will vote for its defeat in full knowledge that there is little or nothing to say on behalf of the man they’re electing.  

[T]hings like pesonality and leadership style are relevant to voting decisions (and are tough to capture in suveys). A candidate’s policy positions are not the only thing that matter. The way in which the candidate will try to implement these policies matters too. I wouldn’t vote for a candidate who shared my precise policy positions but decided to implement them by constitutionally questionable methods, for example. Process matters just as much as substance.

Apparently Gen. David Petraeus does not agree with the Bush administration that the road to Damascus is a dead end. ABC News has learned, Petraeus proposed visiting Syria shortly after taking over as the top U.S. commander for the Middle East. The idea was swiftly rejected by Bush administration officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon. Petraeus, who becomes the commander of U.S. Central Command (Centcom) Friday, had hoped to meet in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Petraeus proposed the trip, and senior officials objected, before the covert U.S. strike earlier this week on a target inside Syria's border with Iraq. Officials familiar with Petraeus' thinking on the subject say he wants to engage Syria in part because he believes that U.S. diplomacy can be used to drive a wedge between Syria and Iran. He plans to continue pushing the idea. "When the timing is right, we ought to go in there and have a good discussion with the Syrians," said a Defense Department official close to Petraeus. "It's a meaningful dialogue to have." Petraeus would likely find a more receptive audience for his approach in an Obama administration, given Barack Obama's views on the need to engage America's enemies.

Not only is Petraeus at odds with Bush, but people close to him are leaking this information just a few days before the presidential election. What's more, it reinforces the dynamic that's been apparent for a while -- when it comes to a national security strategy predicated on diplomacy, Obama and Petraeus are on one side, while McCain and Bush are on the other.