Why History Can't Wait

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There's a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.

To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can't quite put your finger on it ...

"It's like the set of The Office," someone offers.

Bingo.

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt's — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch?

But he doesn't seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. ("They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.") Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room's décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It's a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk. (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)

"It is not clear that the economy's bottomed out," he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) "And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered." That worries him. Also Afghanistan: "We're going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.

"And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation," Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. "And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago."

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That's just for starters; we'll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

Why History Can't Wait

You probably sat in a fancier conference room the last time you refinanced or heard a pitch about life insurance. There's a table, some off-brand mesh office chairs, a bookcase that looks as if it had been put together with an Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish.

To reach this room, you pass through a cubicle farm lightly populated by quiet young people. Either they have just arrived or they are just leaving, because their desks are almost bare. The place has a vaguely familiar feel to it, this air of transient shabbiness and nondescriptitude. You can't quite put your finger on it ...

"It's like the set of The Office," someone offers.

Bingo.

It is here that we find Barack Obama one soul-freezingly cold December day, mentally unpacking the crate of crushing problems — some old, some new, all ugly — that he is about to inherit as the 44th President of the United States. Most of his hours inside the presidential-transition office are spent in this bland and bare-bones room. You would think the President-elect — a guy who draws 100,000 people to a speech in St. Louis, Mo., who raises three-quarters of a billion dollars, who is facing the toughest first year since Franklin Roosevelt's — might merit a leather chair. Maybe a credenza? A hutch?

But he doesn't seem to notice. Obama is cheerfully showing his visitors around, gripping the souvenir basketball he received from Hall of Famer Lenny Wilkens, explaining a snapshot taken the day he played pickup with the University of North Carolina hoops team. ("They are so big and so fast and so strong, you know.") Then, since those two items basically exhaust the room's décor, Obama sits down on one of the mesh chairs and launches into a spoken tour of his world of woes. It's a mind-boggling journey, although he shows no signs of being boggled — unless you count the increasingly prevalent salt in his salt-and-pepper hair. By now we are all accustomed to that Obi-Wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it. In a soothing monotone, he highlights the scariest hairpin turns on his itinerary, the ones that combine difficulty with danger plus a jolt of existential risk. (See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.)

"It is not clear that the economy's bottomed out," he begins, understatedly. (The morning newspaper trumpets the worst unemployment spike in more than 30 years.) "And so even if we take a whole host of the right steps in terms of the economy, two years from now it may not have fully recovered." That worries him. Also Afghanistan: "We're going to have to make a series of not just military but also diplomatic moves that fully enlist Pakistan as an ally in that region, that lessen tensions between India and Pakistan, and then get everybody focused on rooting out militancy in a terrain, a territory, that is very tough — and in an enormous country that is one of the poorest and least developed in the world. So that, I think, is going to be a very tough situation.

"And then the third thing that keeps me up at night is the issue of nuclear proliferation," Obama continues, sailing on through the horribles. "And then the final thing, just to round out my Happy List, is climate change. All the indicators are that this is happening faster than even the most pessimistic scientists were anticipating a couple of years ago."

Score that as follows: one imploding economy, one deteriorating war in an impossible region and two versions of Armageddon — the bang of loose nukes and the whimper of environmental collapse. That's just for starters; we'll hear the unabridged version shortly.

But first, there is a bit of business to be dealt with, having to do with why you are reading this story in this magazine at this time of the year. It's unlikely that you were surprised to see Obama's face on the cover. He has come to dominate the public sphere so completely that it beggars belief to recall that half the people in America had never heard of him two years ago — that even his campaign manager, at the outset, wasn't sure Obama had what it would take to win the election. He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. Understandably, you may be thinking Obama is on the cover for these big and flashy reasons: for ushering the country across a momentous symbolic line, for infusing our democracy with a new intensity of participation, for showing the world and ourselves that our most cherished myth — the one about boundless opportunity — has plenty of juice left in it.

Obama Urges Congress To Pass Jobs Bill For Military Veterans In Weekly Address

CORONADO, Calif. -- President Barack Obama says veterans of conflicts overseas should not struggle to find work once they return home, and he's urging the House to follow the Senate's lead and do something to help them.

"We ask these men and women to leave their families and their jobs and risk their lives to fight for our country. The last thing they should have to do is fight for a job when they get home," the president said in his weekly radio and Internet address. He recorded the message Friday, Veteran's Day, on board the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier anchored off the coast of San Diego, where Obama stopped en route to an Asia-Pacific economic summit that he was hosting beginning Saturday in Hawaii.

"Standing up for our veterans isn't a Democratic responsibility or a Republican responsibility – it's an American responsibility. It's one that all of us have an obligation to meet," Obama said. "And the House should pass this bill as soon as possible so I can sign it into law."

Obama's beginning a nine-day trip through Hawaii, Australia and Indonesia aimed at strengthening ties and boosting economic opportunity back at home.

Before he left Washington, the Senate acted in unusual bipartisan accord to pass a small portion of the president's jobs bill, voting overwhelmingly to approve legislation to award tax credits of up to $9,600 to companies that hire disabled veterans who have been job-hunting for at least half a year, and strengthen employment counseling and training programs for vets and troops about to leave the military.

The House is expected to approve the bill next week, which would send it to Obama. The president's signature would make the veterans tax credits the first fragment of his $447 billion jobs package to be enacted – although it will accomplish little to boost the sagging economy, or solve the deficit problems that a congressional supercommittee is struggling with. Those problems are sure to await Obama when he returns to Washington on Nov. 20, days ahead of a deadline for a proposal from the supercommittee.

Republicans also devoted their weekly media address to veterans, with Nevada Rep. Joe Heck, an Army reservist, calling for leadership from Obama to do more for veterans and support House-passed legislation to help them.

"We owe it to our veterans to ensure they come home to a strong economy, so they can transition into civilian life and support their family with a good paying job," Heck said.

"With unemployment still much too high, we just can't wait to take bipartisan action that will help put Americans back to work," he said.

On Payroll Tax Cut, Obama Administration Plotting Year-End Showdown

WASHINGTON -- Top officials in the Obama administration on Thursday outlined a major end-of-the-year push to pass an extension of the payroll tax cut, pledging to make Republicans take a political hit for inaction.

In a background briefing with reporters, two senior administration officials repeatedly warned they would make an example of GOP lawmakers adjourning in December without acting on that major component of the president's job package.

"I think it is going to be very dramatic as we count down towards the end of the year and the clock is ticking on whether the average person's taxes are going to go up $1,000 next year," said one official. "It is going to be certainly an organizing principle and a focusing principle for this debate, and we are going to make the argument as clearly as we can. ... Congress cannot leave town and on their way out of town wave to the American people and say, 'We just raised your taxes $1,000.'"

"I do think making sure that the public understands that Congress ought to do something before they leave town, I think we can zero in some attention on that," the official added.

With the payroll tax cut set to expire at the end of 2011, the White House is increasingly looking to the lead-up to the year-end holiday recess as the make-or-break moment for the policy's future. While the Senate's adjournment date is not yet determined, the House of Representatives is eyeing a Dec. 8 end to the legislative calendar. Both adjournments will likely be pushed back as lawmakers weigh a host of other legislative matters before heading back to their districts.

"I find it hard to believe that these members of Congress are going to go to National Airport on December 23 and go home, and basically tell their constituents your taxes are going up $1,000 next year and we didn't do anything to help the economy," said one administration official.

The simpler legislative route for the White House may be to make a big push on the payroll tax cut prior to the Thanksgiving break. In previous briefings, administration officials have argued as much. On Nov. 23, the deficit-reduction super committee is supposed to offer its set of recommendations. The president and his staff have made little secret of their desire to see the super committee tuck the payroll tax cut extension (along with other elements of the president's jobs package) into that proposal. Democratic aides on Capitol Hill have largely agreed.

But there remain obstacles. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a member of the Republican leadership, has said he opposes extending the payroll tax cut on the grounds that it's undermining the solvency of Social Security's trust fund. Other GOP lawmakers have objected to Democratic efforts to put a surtax on millionaires as a means of offsetting the extension, which is projected to cost $145 billion. Still others have argued that, rather than extending the tax cut for an additional year or so, the White House and Congress should work to make it permanent.

Asked about the latter argument, a senior administration official said any discussion of making the tax cut permanent would likely have to take place in the context of negotiations on broader tax reform. And with the Bush-era income tax cuts set to expire at the end of 2012, those talks are about a year away.

As for the offset for the payroll tax cut, the senior officials were pressed by reporters as to why there needed to be an offset at all. The payroll tax cut was originally passed without corresponding revenue savings elsewhere. Although deficit reduction hysteria has since taken over Capitol Hill, there is some economic merit (it would prove more stimulative to the economy) to doing that again.

"It is too early to begin to speculate about [dropping the millionaire's surtax]," the official said. "But I will say that every element of our jobs bill can be paid for."

Obama Administration And Allies Congratulate Voters For Overturning John Kasich's SB 5

WASHINGTON -- The extent to which Ohio Gov. John Kasich's collective bargaining measure has been a national issue has always been a bit murky. But with Mitt Romney getting drawn into endorsing SB 5 and with the White House subsequently backing its repeal, the threads to the presidential campaign became clear.

With Tuesday night's vote overturning the measure, the Obama administration and its allies were quick to offer statements of solidarity and support, and in one case, a bit of partisan taunting.

Jay Carney, the president's press secretary, offered the following remark shortly after the Associated Press reported that Ohio voters rejected Issue 2, the ballot referendum on SB 5 that would restrict collective bargaining rights for more than than 360,000 public employees.

The President congratulates the people of Ohio for standing up for workers and defeating efforts to strip away collective bargaining rights, and commends the teachers, firefighters, nurses, police officers and other workers who took a stand to defend those rights.

Vice President Joe Biden offered similar congratulations in a statement Tuesday night.

Tonight the people of Ohio delivered a gigantic victory for the middle class with their overwhelming rejection of a Republican attempt to strip away collective bargaining rights. Fundamental fairness has prevailed. By standing with teachers and firefighters and cops, Ohio has sent a loud and clear message that will be heard all across the country: The middle class will no longer be trampled on. The people of Ohio are to be congratulated.

Others were less reserved. Bill Burton, the former deputy press secretary for the president and now a senior strategist for Priorities USA Action -- a campaign-allied group -- blasted out a statement under the title "Ohio Rejects Mitt Romney's America."

"Tonight, Ohio voters rejected the Republican vision for America that rewards big corporations and the wealthiest at the expense of middle class families," the statement read. "John Kasich's agenda in Ohio is a mirror of Mitt Romney's vision for America: Cutting education, health care and public safety to finance more tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthiest. In 2012, voters will not have to guess what Mitt Romney's America looks like because they have seen and rejected it in Ohio."

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, did not immediately issue a statement. But campaign manager Jim Messina tweeted his congratulations.

"Congrats to my brothers and sisters in labor. Big win in Ohio tonight!"