There’s no question that the single most dramatic step taken by Barack Obama since his inauguration on Tuesday was the series of executive orders banning use of torture by federal agencies (including the CIA), eliminating the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and setting into motion the eliimination of the Gitmo prison and the legal limbo it represents.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a good summary of the orders at Newsweek, along with an account of the internal debate that led up to it. And Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic explains some of the “hard cases”–particularly Yemeni and Chinese prisoners–that will complicate the closure of Gitmo.
If you actually want to read the four executive orders involved, Salon has usefully posted them here.

In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. It’s a valuable law which preserves all manner of official communication for posterity.
But it was written at a time when people still delivered interoffice memos in those funny manila envelopes that get closed with a piece of string.
Email had been invented seven years earlier in a project funded by the Department of Defense, but it’s hard to imagine that the authors of the Presidential Records Act could have foreseen a government which put instant, electronic communication into widespread use. To ask anyone at the time to imagine the sprawling, interconnected world of the Internet as it is today would have been laughable.
And yet this 1978 law still dictates how the executive branch does business.
During the election, the Obama campaign was deeply immersed in the world of the Internet, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the brilliance of the external online strategy. But much less has been made of how well Obama for America as an organization used the Web internally.
Staffers used online tools to share documents, built wikis to train volunteers, used Facebook to build get to know each other. And throughout it all, the staff — from David Axlerod on down — maintained a continuous conversation through instant messenger.
It now looks, however, like that practice will be put to an end.
Citing both the requirements of the Presidential Records Act and security concerns, lawyers for the incoming administration have told staffers that they will not be able to use instant messenger in the White House. They will forgo the use of an official Facebook account as a tool to communicate with supporters. They won’t be allowed to bring in USB drives to take work home. Access to many websites will be restricted. And in many cases, the computers at their desks will be dated and running old Windows software.
The end result of these regulations and hurdles is a bubble that separates the White House staff from the outside world — they’ll get less input from critics and allies both — and the loss of these tools makes those who have come to rely on them less efficient and less flexible. By making it difficult to adopt new technology, our laws will serve to stifle creativity in government, where right now we need it most.
But there’s hope. President Obama gets to keep his Blackberry.
He asked for it, the Transition team bought into the idea, the NSA approved a model, and then the lawyers came around.
Obama needs a Blackberry for the same reasons his staff needs IM, and the White House found a way to make it work.
Now, someone should stand up to make the same argument for updating the rest of government’s communication tools. And once that’s done, Congress should be lobbied to rewrite the Presidential Records Act to reflect the reality of how professionals do business in 2009.
Governing is hard enough without asking those who commit to it to forgo anything that makes them better at their jobs.

The one sure thing about Barack Obama’s inaugural address is that it increased tensions within the progressive coalition about his taste for “bipartisanship” (or “post-partisanship,” if you prefer). Despite passages in the speech that were a very direct repudiation of the Bush administration, and a few strikingly progressive flourishes (e.g., the shout-out to religious “unbelievers”), the overall tenor continued his long rhetorical preoccupation with embracing values usually considered conservative as well as liberal, and deriding the partisan fights in Washington (this time in the Pauline phrase “childish things”).
As has almost always been the case with Obama, observers have reached very different conclusions when listening to him in the inaugural speech and in other recent utterances. Some conservatives profess themselves as pleased or even charmed by his invocation of “conservative” values like hard work, personal and mutual responsibility, sacrifice and discipline, even as they (typically) warn he may not really believe in them. Some progressives continue to be alarmed by his post-partisan talk, and even more (notably both Marie Coco and Michael Crowley in separate pieces today) suggest it’s a habit that will soon expire in the partisan exigencies of Washington. A few have divined somewhat less conventional ideological leanings in Obama; both Alan Wolfe and E.J. Dionne have noted the communitarian vein that runs deep through Obama’s rhetoric.
My own take is based on my ten-plus-years of facilitating a leadership training program for elected officials called “Values-Based Messaging” under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council. Unlike some of the other elements of the DLC’s agenda over the years, this training was never controversial, and has been very popular with a wide array of state and local Democrats from across the ideological spectrum, often as a party unity exercise in state legislative caucuses. To make a long story short, its central insight is that progressives in politics and government can and should build the largest possible audience for our more partisan policy goals and individual programs by embracing broadly-shared values that we often take for granted, but don’t articulate, making us vulnerable to the kinds of conservative stereotypes that have been so effective in the past.
This larger audience may begin to shrink once bold policy goals and detailed programs are advanced. But it definitely helps, and just as importantly, roots progressive programs in values and goals the public understands, while subtly undermining the invidious belief that Democrats represent government, rather than bending government to the popular will. It’s a simple way to occupy the political high ground and expose the narrow values base of the Right.
Whatever you think of this or that speech, Barack Obama is clearly a master of values-based messaging. And the inaugural address did not simply embrace broadly shared values beyond those usually emphasized by progressives; he went out of his way to argue that values often placed in opposition to each other are both reconcilable and essential (e.g., liberty and security, and public-sector activism and “free” markets). This may sound dangerously like Third Wayism to many progressives, but if reflects the fact that big majorities of the American people do in fact embrace such “contradictory” values, and do not want to see them vanquished or ignored.
This is probably why the public gave very positive ratings to the inaugural address and the accompanying events, even as most pundits panned it. And more generally, it is why Obama’s speechifying–so often criticized as “vague” or “abstract” by the punditocracy– resonates well with the public. There’s a time for ten-point platforms in political communications, but it’s essential to open the door to listeners by convincing them you live in the same “vague” and “abstract” moral universe that they inhabit.
Obama’s inaugural address, like all his speeches, did move into the territory of big policy goals as well as values, and on this front, he has some enormous advantages. Recent events have made reviving the economy an overriding policy goal for virtually all Americans, which is why Obama’s “ideas” for a stimulus package are gaining such strong popular support even as the details remain hazy to most people. But the inevitable drop-off of public support for those details will likely be smaller than would otherwise be the case thanks to Obama’s determination to set the table so carefully with communications about values and big goals.
Moreover, Obama’s second-order policy goals–such as achieving universal health coverage and radically changing the energy system–are very popular with the public across party lines, and the fact that many, and probably a majority, of Republican politicians and conservative gabbers don’t support those goals creates a tremendous partisan opportunity for Obama and Democrats moving forward. Indeed, the past Democratic tendency to talk about, say, health care, in terms of specific proposals like a Patient’s Bill of Rights and a prescription drug benefit has long enabled Republicans to blur partisan differences and disguise their own reactionary radicalism on health care.
Even the big policy goal that Obama occasionally mentions to the consternation of many progressives–“entitlement reform”–has, at the abstract level–a lot of public support. And the common assumption that Obama is playing on conservative turf by mentioning the subject probably sells him short, and reflects the age-old Democratic habit of conceding whole areas of public policy to the opposition. If, say, he can make Social Security more progressive, while folding Medicare into a universal health system, he will have taken away a common conservtive talking point without conceding anything.
This is why I’ve argued that Obama’s meta-political strategy, and the underpinning of his rhetoric about partisanship, represents “grassroots bipartisanship”–an effort to build public support for a progressive agenda beyond the current ranks of the Democratic rank-and-file, crafted as a thoroughgoing reform of Washington, not simply as a expulsion of the hated GOP. You can call it “pragmatism” or “centrism” or “post-partisanship” if you like, but it mainly represents a sensible approach to the preeminently appropriate task of tearing down the old partisan paradigm and rebuilding a new one that can command an enduring majority in support of a progressive agenda. It should at least be given a fighting chance.

In the process of discussing the collapse of prices in Europe’s carbon emissions permit market, and how that phenomenon illustrates some of the advantages of a cap-and-trade system over a straightforward carbon tax, Bradford Plumer at TNR notes one of the underpublicized upsides of the economic crisis: we’ll see less pollution.
Getting back to the EU, Plumer explains:

Back in 2005, prices dropped to zero because the EU set the cap too loosely and handed out more permits than companies even needed—that was a real flaw, and it got patched up. But this time around, permit prices are plummeting because a global recession has scuppered economic activity across Europe, and companies are polluting less. They’re also using more natural gas and less coal. None of that is a concern per se. Carbon emissions are, after all, going down. In fact, this might be one advantage of having a cap-and-trade regime instead of a carbon tax. During recessions, emitting carbon becomes cheaper under a cap (because fewer people are doing it), so companies can postpone decarbonization projects until the economy starts booming again and they can spare the extra funds to do so.

None of this is terribly surprising if you think about it for a few minutes. But it does underscore a political problem with carbon emissions limits specifically, and with action on global climate change generally, that has at least temporarily abated: the ancient argument that the economy (in either developed or developing countries) can’t afford to Go Green. That’s particularly true if, as Plumer suggests, governments aggressively promote (and subsidize) alternative energy sources and efficiency measures that further reduce the price of shifting away from fossil fuels.
This is not to say, of course, that opponents of action on carbon emissions won’t make the same old arguments with even greater force, claiming that it’s no time to “burden” industries with ambitious “green” goals. But at the moment, the same old arguments make even less real sense.

State of the Union speeches are too often glorified laundry lists, topped off with sober warnings and peppered with soaring riffs of inspiration. The best of them offer a coherent vision, JFK’s inaugural address being a frequently-cited example. Obama’s first inaugural address, however, breaks the mold a little, according to the interpretation of various columnists and writers
Peggy Noonan’s column, “Meet President Obama” in today’s Wall St. Journal, for example, says Obama “used language with which traditional Republicans would be thoroughly at home.” Noonan called it “Low-key and sober” and “not an especially-rousing speech.” But she adds “This is not all bad. When a speech is so calm and cool that you have to read it to absorb it fully, the speech just may get read.”

This was not the sound of candidate Barack Obama but President Obama, not the sound of the man who appealed to the left wing of his party but one attempting to appeal to the center of the nation. It was not a joyous, audacious document, not a call to arms, but a reasoned statement by a Young Sobersides.

Noonan’s most interesting observation is the contrast between Reagan, Clinton and Obama on the role of government: Reagan’s “government is not the answer, government is the problem,” Bill Clinton’s statement that the “the era of big government is over” vs. Obama’s “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”
Noonan spins this as further evidence of Obama’s centrism. I’d say it was a convincing and long-overdue knell for the era of knee-jerk government-bashing. As Harold Meyerson put it in his WaPo column,

We measure the merit of government, he added, not by how wide a berth it gives the market but by “whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”…
With those words, the age of Reagan was ceremoniously but unambiguously interred. For 30 years, the widely shared prosperity created and then enjoyed by the Greatest Generation has been eroding. Obama’s speech was the first presidential inaugural to address the narrowing of American prosperity and to announce the intention to broaden it again.

In his contribution to a New York Times round-up of various presidential speechwriters’ analysis of Obama’s address, another Republican, William Safire expresses a view similar to Noonan, calling Obama’s address “solid, respectable, uplifting, suitably short, superbly delivered” and generally themeless, but it “fell short of the anticipated immortality.” In the same round-up Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol called it “a display of strength (his) and a summoning of strength (ours)” and saw a clear strategy emerge from the address: “He long ago proved that he could make people weep. Today he seemed determined to make them think and, more important, to act.”
WaPo‘s George Will also detected in his column a note of “cultural traditionalism” and a “theme of responsibility” in Obama’s inaugural address, but Will is more worried than Republican colleagues Noonan and safire about the return of Big Government:

…More than any predecessor except the first, the 44th president enters office with the scope of its powers barely circumscribed by law, and even less by public opinion…Obama’s unprecedented power derives from the astonishing events of the past four months that have made indistinct the line between public and private sectors. Neither the public as currently alarmed, nor Congress as currently constituted, nor the Constitution as currently construed is an impediment to hitherto unimagined executive discretion in allocating vast portions of the nation’s wealth.

The L.A. Times‘ Susan Salter Reynolds had one of the more interesting round-up articles, featuring short comments by a dozen writers on Obama’s address, including this from author Ron Calrson:

What courage to use a complex sentence talking to a million people! By expecting the best of us, he just might get it.

And memoirist Patricia Hampl had this to say about Obama’s choice of words:

I was glad, that he denied himself rhetorical flourishes and gave a speech as refined and restrained in its power so that political language itself was restored to its greatest value — saying what the speaker means.

The American Prospect‘s Mark Schmitt’s “A Farewell to Words” explains Obama’s oration as part of a deliberate shift from the rhetoric of inspiration to the unveiling of a practical agenda:

And yet, the president has moved on. Through the course of the campaign, his words slowly came down to earth, from inspiring and cocky to the mundane and practical. As the “gathering clouds” of the economic crisis became too dark to ignore, he accelerated his move from inspiration to work. His words no longer serve the purpose of pulling us up but of naming and giving order to the work to be done: roads, the electric grid, ending torture, restoring America’s place in the world.

I would say that Obama’s first presidential address was more moderate in style than in the substance of reforms he is advocating — which indicate a very sharp and most welcome departure from the failed policies of his predecessor. President Obama is clearly preparing the nation for a rocky ride in the months ahead, and laying the groundwork for an ambitious reform agenda to return America to peace and prosperity.

It’s always interesting when, oh, a billion or so people watch or listen to a speech and come away with very different impressions. From the published reviews of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, that may have been the case yesterday.
One of the more positive takes was by John Heilemann of New York magazine, who thought the speech demonstrated Obama’s “strategic mastery.” John Judis of The New Republic, on the other hand, was disappointed, calling the speech “a hodgepodge of themes, injunctions and applause lines.” At the same site, Noam Scheiber thought the speech was actually quite coherent thematically, but stylistically uneven, ranging from high rhetoric to wonkery.
Virtually everyone thought the speech’s somber tone was appropriate, albeit a contrast to the upbeat Obama speeches everyone remembers from the campaign.
The one big negative to the Inaugural (perhaps inevitable in a highly secured event for 2 million people) according to many accounts was a serious logisitcal snafu that kept thousands of ticketed guests from getting anywhere near to the event. If you want to read an especially unhappy account of that problem, Greg Levine of Firedoglake has served one up.

Those who watched the Obama inauguration, up close in Washington or at home, will have their own particular impressions and memories. Mine include a wheelchair-bound Dick Cheney looking for all the world like Lionel Barrymore as Mr. Potter; Joe Biden looking like the happiest man on earth; the Chief Justice bungling the administration of the Oath of Office; and Joe Lowery delivering a most entertaining benediction (“when the red man can get ahead, man…when the brown man can stick around, man”).
Obama’s address had a lot of interesting moments: his strong rebuke to his predecessor’s foreign policy; his shout-out, during the obligatory passage on religious diversity, to “nonbelievers;” his reminder that his father probably couldn’t have been served lunch in various parts of the country he was being sworn in to lead. The overall tone was obviously somber, part of an expectations-setting exercise that we can expect to continue for a while. There wasn’t a lot of “yes we can” rhetoric. There was plenty of talk about common purpose and sacrifice.
The vast, chilly crowd didn’t seem to care whether Obama delivered a barnburner of an address; the historic nature of the event was enough.
But for me, the big moment (other than watching Bush 43 walk up the steps to Marine One and leave the premises) was actually after the address, when I clicked on whitehouse.gov, and was greeted with a very large photo of President Barack Obama under the legend: “Change Has Come to America.” Yes, indeed, it has.

For one who can remember what America felt like the day before and the day after JFK was assassinated, this day is a long time coming. Although I was a little too young to have much understanding of the politics of 1963, growing up in Washington, D.C., I did have clear sense just before the assassination that hope and idealism were the order of the day. There was this young attractive couple in the white house challenging the younger generation, along with the rising hopes of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of the Birmingham demonstrations and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Then boom, it was gone.
LBJ’s leadership secured substantive domestic reforms, but he got bogged down in the Vietnam quagmire, and the idealism of the young generation was soon replaced by growing rage and alienation. Legions of white youth went Hippie, many, but not all apolitical. The more heroic Black freedom struggle began to spilnter away from the nonviolent consensus forged by MLK. Chicago, Nixon, Watergate, withering idealism and growing cynicism. A brief lift with Carter’s election, then a dozen Reagan and Bush years of unrelenting political bummage. Another lift with Clinton’s election, but despite the good economic times likened to “the golden age of Pericles,” Clinton did not recapture youth idealism on the same scale that JFK generated, even though he was as brilliant a politician as JFK.
Today we conclude 8 years of what more than a few historians consider the worst ever presidency, a low bar indeed. President Obama won’t have to accomplish much to do better than his predecessor, but if he doesn’t do enough, he won’t be re-elected, given the dimensions of the current economic crisis.
The high hopes that attend the inauguration of our 44th President run especially deep for African Americans, the Democrats’ most reliable and alert constituency. While most Black voters realize that Obama’s election is not the fulfillment of MLK’s Dream, it is a powerful step forward and an affirmation that the dream of a multiracial democracy, in which brotherhood can take root, can be realized. In this context, the greatest patriotic poem ever written, “Let America be America Again” penned in 1938 by Langston Hughes fits perfectly on this day:

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed– Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek– And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean– Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become. O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home– For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay– Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again– The land that never has been yet– And yet must be–the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME– Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose– The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath– America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain– All, all the stretch of these great green states– And make America again!

Today President-elect Obama will be inaugurated on the crest of a great wave of youth idealism, on a scale not seen since the days of JFK. And tonight a very attractive young couple with two young children will once again take up residence in the white house. No one expects a return to Camelot — we’ve been through too much for that. But something beautiful for America begins anew today. My personal barometer is my two previously apolitical but now rabidly Obamaphile young people. I trust that the inevitable compromises President Obama will have to make won’t diminish their idealism too much. Hope is back in young America and it feels good.

In case you are wondering, this is the timetable set out by the Washington Post for today’s inaugural festivities:
4 a.m. — Metro opens (at rush-hour service and fare levels).
4 a.m. — Monday extended alcohol service for bars and nightclubs ends; they can remain open 24 hours through Jan. 21.
8 a.m. — Security gates open for ticketed guests
9 a.m. — Ceremony gates open.
10 a.m. — Musical prelude. See the full schedule.
Noon — Ceremony ends, followed by the inaugural address, luncheon, departure of President Bush and parade.
2 p.m. — Approximate start time for parade
7 p.m. — Official balls start
9 p.m. — Rush-hour Metro service levels end.
2 a.m. — Metro closes.
4 a.m. — Tuesday extended alcohol service for bars and nightclubs ends.
In other words, there will be a lot of public transporation provided and hooching allowed, and that’s a good combination.

There will be a natural tendency this year to conflate the annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Without question, Obama’s election represented a milestone in the racial saga of the United States, and had he lived until now, no one would have been more pleased, and perhaps astonished, by this development than King himself. (It is a bit startling to realize that Martin Luther King was born just 80 years ago, and might today still be an active and respected voice–perhaps an Inaugural prayer-leader?–had he been permitted to live).
But it’s important to maintain the integrity of King’s legacy, which was reflected in Obama’s election, but hardly fulfilled.
King represented, after all, a perpetual challenge to the people of the United States that is always necessary, but can never be fully met: to live up completely to the civic and religious values nearly all of us claim to cherish.
He held up a mirror to the Americans of his time, and demanded they take a close look at themselves according to their own professed standards. Many refused, and some never forgave him for the audacity of the demand itself. But although Jim Crow finally died, and we now have an African-American president, the demand remains as provocative and essential as ever.
So take some time today, if you can, to read or re-read Letter From a Birmingham Jail, or, if you are a Christian, Paul’s Letter to American Christians. They haven’t lost their power despite the passage of years. And they still serve as a reminder of the fundamental radicalism of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gospels.
All too many people think of MLK as merely a historical figure, and of his commemorative day as a tribute to the Civil Rights movement that culminated before King’s death. For such people, the inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow will become just another reason to consign King and his mission to the history books. But if you actually read him or listen to him, it becomes clear that his message is as fresh and relevant–and radical–as ever.