Nice Newsweek Article On Obama - How He Might Govern; Consistent With Separate WaPo Article

[Median Democrat]

Many of us might have read the recent WaPo article discussing how Obama handled the meeting at the White House with the President and John McCain. Pelosi and Reid deferred to him. Obama did not lecture or grandstand. He just put on the House GOP on the spot by asking Paulson if he heard the plan, and what did Paulson think of it. Paulson then shot it down. Obama then put McCain on the spot by asking McCain which plan did he support. McCain did not answer, and stayed silent, thus undermining both President Bush and any chances for a quick resolution of the bailout legislation.

Well, based on this recent article in Newsweek, the White House meeting was not an aberration. Obama does not grandstand or demand attention. However, he is clearly prepared and has a goal, but he is willing to rely on experts to be ready to provide their input, but he wants to make sure that he understands, rather than taking what the expert is selling on faith (like McCain and Gramm). Even if I did not agree with Obama's positions (I do), I would still appreciate his leadership style. He delegates without being disconnected. He also has the necessary intellect to understand the complexity of the issues facing our nation, rather than insisting that the issues be forced into some pre-existing idealogical framework.

Hope for the sake of our country that he wins.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/163456

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Barack Obama was in "governing mode," says one of his aides. In a small room next to A basketball arena at the University of Miami, Fla., the Democratic nominee had convened an emergency session of his new economic brain trust. It was a remarkable gathering for a candidate who, during the primaries, had relied largely on an obscure, baby-faced University of Chicago economist named Austan Goolsbee. With Obama in the room were Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, both Clinton-era Treasury secretaries credited with lifting global financial markets out of the "Asian contagion" of 1997; Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; Laura Tyson, Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers chair; Gene Sperling, Clinton's national economic adviser; and Dan Tarullo, also a key Clinton go-to man on trade and G8 issues.

Piped in on a conference phone were legendary investor Warren Buffett, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz and Obama's would-be veep, Joe Biden. The topic at hand: what to make of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's $700 billion rescue plan, which was to be announced later that day (Sept. 19). "There's a comfort level in having someone able to say, 'This is a little like what we faced 10 years ago'," says the aide, who would divulge details about the session only on condition of anonymity. "But Obama was running the show. Twice he cut some people off when they started to talk about what message he should deliver . He said, 'Hold it, we'll do that later. You guys are here to help me figure out what we should be doing' " to solve the crisis.

In a phone call that day, Paulson had pleaded for time to sell his plan. Obama obliged by saying only that he supported giving Treasury and the Fed broad authority. Even though, behind closed doors, he was going into detail about his own possible solutions—mulling the virtues of the Depression-era Home Owners Loan Corporation and the response to the S&L crisis of the '80s—Obama supplied few specifics on his thinking. Nor has he revealed much more three weeks later, other than to talk about "protecting the taxpayer." While no one at the meeting would confirm they had advised the candidate to keep to generalities, Obama's approach did conform to the old Rubin-Summers philosophy from the '90s: loose talk by politicians just makes things worse, aggravating markets and upsetting negotiations. "The way McCain has made a fool of himself shows why," says another aide, who asked not to be named discussing campaign strategy. What the adviser didn't say is that this approach also gives Obama political cover: it allows him to avoid being too closely linked to a GOP-led bail-out while not appearing to undermine it.

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