A Bumpy Start

The rhythms of January are all wrong: too much time before the main events, which engenders needless, destructive name-calling. Look at the ridiculously long run-up to the national championship college football game. Players from the universities of Oklahoma and Florida have had way too much time on their hands, nearly a month since the end of the season. They have spent it dissing each other. Bad form.

Far more serious is what's going on in Washington. The world is falling apart, and we're still waiting for the dawn of Barack Obama. It seems to be taking an eternity. President George Bush is doing his best to "stretch," as they say in TV studios, filling his schedule with meaningless events, protecting vast stretches of distant seabeds, rebonding with deposed foreign leaders who were part of his now defunct Spread Democracy club. He even invited in the former presidents, including his own father, for a lunch with Obama.

You can imagine Ol' H.W. glancing at his wristwatch.

They all offered advice to Obama. Word is that the president-elect listened carefully, and promised to call them often—which would, in a way, make him a more dutiful son of Bush the elder than Bush the younger ever was. If the latter had asked the former in the fall of 2002 about invading Iraq, Dad would have said, "Son, don't do it. It wouldn't be prudent. Brent tells me it'll be an unholy mess if we go in."

And history would be different.

But we have the history we have, and rather than give Obama a clean, quick coronation to try to begin writing a new and better chapter, Washington (and especially his own party) seems intent on giving the president-elect as much trouble as possible while waiting for him to take the oath of office on Jan. 20.

You might expect Republicans to be uncooperative. But, except for refusing to accept the advent of Al Franken as a senator from Minnesota, they have been relatively quiet—knowing, perhaps, that it is folly to attack a guy who won on "HOPE" and who enjoys sky-high approval ratings and the good wishes of the world.

No, it is the Democrats who are giving Obama pre-inaugural fits. And that is not surprising, of course, for they are Democrats. And it must be said that Obama himself hasn't played his January hand all that well.

Obama's new year began with the news that Gov. Bill Richardson was un-nominating himself for Commerce Secretary. Turned out he needed the time to deal with a federal investigation of his administration's contracting practices in New Mexico—an investigation Obama's team should have known about, and been concerned about, from reading the local newspapers. Now Hispanic Democrats are jockeying over who among them should be tapped to take the post.