| Why try to guess what Obama's governing style will be based on his staffing picks when you can find a far more specific and information picture of his policy priorities on his transition website?
Here are some explicitly-stated policy initiatives Obama lays out on his site, all just randomly chosen by me as reasonably illustrative:
Combat Employment Discrimination: Obama and Biden will work to overturn the Supreme Court's recent ruling that curtails racial minorities' and women's ability to challenge pay discrimination. They will also pass the Fair Pay Act, to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. [...]
Expand Use of Drug Courts: Obama and Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior. [...]
Ensure 10 percent of Our Electricity Comes from Renewable Sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025. [...]
Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050. [...]
Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions so all Americans regardless of their health status or history can get comprehensive benefits at fair and stable premiums. [...]
Establish a National Health Insurance Exchange with a range of private insurance options as well as a new public plan based on benefits available to members of Congress that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage.
Ensure everyone who needs it will receive a tax credit for their premiums. [...]
Improve Transportation Access to Jobs: As president, Obama will work to ensure that low-income Americans have transportation access to jobs. Obama will double funding for the federal Jobs Access and Reverse Commute program to ensure that additional federal public transportation dollars flow to the highest-need communities and that urban planning initiatives take this aspect of transportation policy into account.
Raise the Minimum Wage to $9.50 an Hour by 2011: Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that people who work full-time should not live in poverty. Even though the minimum wage will rise to $7.25 an hour by 2009, the minimum wage's real purchasing power will still be below what it was in 1968. As president, Obama will further raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing -- things so many people take for granted.
Overturning Ledbetter v. Goodyear, getting non-violent drug offenders out of prison and into treatment, putting the country on a path towards reliance on renewable energy, implementing cap-and-trade, implementing a politically viable form of affordable universal heath care, increasing funding for transportation for low-income workers, raising the minium wage... these all sound pretty damn progressive to me. Of course, you can dig through the site and find some very centrist proposals, and even some conservative proposals. But it's stuff we already knew about Obama from the campaign, like his support for "clean coal", a non-existant technology waiting to be brought to America by coal fairies.
The picture I see painted on the Agenda page of Change.gov is of a man who will govern in a manner that is eons more progressive than George W. Bush's reign, but which of course is conspicuously less progressive and Leftist than the ideology of people like Bowers. Which is exactly what everyone with any connection to reality expected when they went to the polls on November 4th.
Obama is a pragmatist, not a zealous ideologue. He will work to implement policies which are widely beneficial for the lower and middle classes, but he will not achieve any miracles. A European-style single payer health care system is not politically possible at this time. But Obama will get us one step closer than we are right now. A total end to the inane federal drug war would be nice, but probably not feasible in the next few years. But getting a large number of non-violent drug offenders out of our overcrowded prison system would be a good step. A complete break with hawkish foreign policy would be amazing, but we all know Obama is no pacifist. Simply having a President willing to honor a fixed time table for withdrawal of troops from Iraq is a massive improvement over what we've endured for the past five years. And one who is willing to have diplomatic talks with regimes Dubya branded as members of the "Axis of Evil" will also be a big change for the better.
I think a rather detailed picture of what we can expect from an Obama administration is already at our fingertips, and it doesn't require any psychic powers or wading through conspiracy theories. |
