SEAT COMPANY
Future White House chief of staff and current Rep. Rahm
Emanuel is not discussing with senior transition-team
members his contacts with Illinois Gov. Rod
Blagojevich dealing with filling President-elect
Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat.
“We don’t expect him to,” says one transition team member. “We
know the two of them had a much more complex relationship than
Obama had with Blagojevich.”
In fact, by most accounts, Obama wanted little to nothing to do
with Blagojevich, and was actually drawn into in his
gubernatorial race by Emanuel, a more avid supporter.
The missing name from the discussion of who did what with whom in
the Blagojevich scandal, say some Chicago political insiders, is
David Axelrod, the mastermind behind the Obama
campaign, and a longtime adviser to Blagojevich, who was involved
in a number of his political races, but did not run Blagojevich’s
run for governor.
“They still talked quite a bit,” says one longstanding Chicago
Democratic political consultant. “And I’d be surprised if
Blagojevich didn’t reach out to Axelrod before anyone else to
discuss the Senate seat situation.”
One point about the scandal that several transition team members
agree on is that Valerie Jarrett, a longstanding
Obama friend and well-known political hack going back to her days
working for the Daley machine, was not in the running for the
Senate seat.
“Obama and Jarrett seemed to know early on that it would be
difficult for her to be placed in a job that required a high
level of transparency,” says one transition team member. “As a
senior White House aide, she will have to disclose a great deal
of financial and personal information, but not to the degree that
she would for a Senate seat or a Senate-confirmable position. She
didn’t want that, and Obama didn’t want that.” Jarrett is
credited with hiring Michelle Obama to a
high-paying job and drawing the Obamas more closely into the
Chicago political machine.
LEFT RIGHTS
Senior Obama transition team members have signed off on a
recommendation that would have President Obama signing an
executive order to bring back an Interagency Working Group on
Human Rights, similar to an order signed by President Bill
Clinton in 1998. This order, say the transition team members,
would be the prelude to legislation renaming and expanding the
role of the current U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
“It’s an idea that an advisory group at the American Constitution Society came
up with a few months ago, and it appeals to a lot of us working
on the issue,” says one transition team member working on the
Justice Department transition project. “The basic idea is that we
are no longer a nation that respects human rights here at home or
abroad, and we need to send a clear message to our friends around
the world that we will return to being a nation of laws human
rights.”
Under the plan, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights would be
renamed the U.S. Commission on Civil and Human Rights, with a
focus on a range of domestic policy issues, including homosexual
marriage and the “rights” of illegal aliens.
“The goal is to create institutions that give all Americans a
venue to get greater protection of their civil rights and to
expand America’s influence on such issues around the world,” says
a State Department transition team member, who resigned his
career position at State a month ago, but intends to return as a
political appointee there in the area of international human
rights. “The more critical component of the recommendations is
the re-creation of the interagency working group.”
This group would identify and coordinate any and all human rights
treaties that the U.S. might consider entering into, as well as
coordinating the negotiations through the State and Justice
Departments, among others. Staff on the new U.S. Commission would
be given a role those negotiations to ensure domestic human
rights issues are addressed.
The recommendations in the area of human rights are the first
that give a look inside the Obama administration’s plans to use
the federal regulatory and advisory bureaucracy to put in place
more radical and leftist policies in a more subtle manner than
through controversial and attraction-getting major pieces of
Congressional legislation.
