Coleman Lawyers Up

By Ari Berman

Last week the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that the FBI had begun investigating whether a top donor to Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman had steered money to the senator or his wife through a Texas energy company.

Coleman claimed that he was not a subject of the investigation and had not been contacted by the FBI. But the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports today that Coleman has retained a high-profile former federal prosecutor as his lawyer. (That lawyer, Doug Kelley, also represents Tom Petters, a Minnesota businessman accused by the FBI of running a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme.) UPDATED--SEE CORRECTION BELOW.

At issue, in lawsuits filed in Texas and Delaware, are allegations that businessman Nasser Kazeminy, a close friend of Coleman, sent $75,000 to Coleman's wife, at an insurance firm where she is nominally employed, through an energy exploration company in Houston which Kazeminy controls. Kazeminy's reason for the payments, according the one of the lawsuits: "We have to get some money to Senator Coleman" because the senator "needs the money" and "US senators don't make shit."

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December 16, 2008

Obama Transition Answers First Web Press Conference

By Ari Melber

In another Internet milestone, Barack Obama's transition team responded to some of the most pressing questions on Americans' minds on Monday evening, at least according to the twenty thousand citizens who participated in the first user-generated press conference of the new administration.

Transition staff posted answers to the top five most popular questions, based on a transparent process that enabled visitors to vote for or against questions submitted by fellow visitors to Change.gov. The 10,300 submitted questions drew about 978,000 votes, with the leading queries focused on marijuana legalization, restoring Constitutional protections, avoiding waste in the financial bailout, Stem Cell research and education.

Some more controversial questions, however, did not make the cut. As Politico's Ben Smith first reported last week, visitors to the site abused the option of flagging "inappropriate" questions to hide perfectly appropriate inquiries about the corruption complaint against Gov. Blagojevich. Transition staff also avoided a popular but more pointed question on restoring the Constitution. With over 4,000 votes, the sixth most popular question was posed by netroots activist Bob Fertik, pressing specifically on whether Obama will appoint a Special Prosecutor "to independently investigate" torture and warrantless spying conducted during the Bush administration.

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December 15, 2008

The Roots of Obama's Victory

By Ari Berman

If you haven't seen it yet, go read Obama campaign manager David Plouffe's lengthy interview with Portfolio magazine.

It's often gone unnoticed, in the great annals of our post-election recaps, that Obama was able to build such an incredible campaign organization essentially from scratch. He didn't have the connections, relationships and contacts in places like Iowa and New Hampshire that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards did. He wasn't on a first-name basis with a lot of influential Democratic donors. Many Americans had no idea who he was when he started the campaign. And most of his top brain trust, including Plouffe, previously worked for former Congressional leaders Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, neither of whom were particularly known for their trailblazing campaigns.

Plouffe reflects on the campaign's early days:

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December 15, 2008

Succession Conversation: Emanuel & Blago's Office

By John Nichols

President-elect Barack Obama's first transition-team pick was Chicago Congressman Rahm Emanuel.

Even before Emanuel was selected, however, he was talking with the office of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich about who would replace Obama in the Senate.

On the weekend before Illinois senator was elected president, according to Chicago Tribune reports, Emanuel contacted Blagojevich's chief of staff, John Harris, to provide a list of potential appointees who, supposedly, were acceptable to Obama. (Harris was arrested along with the governor on charges that they schemed to trade Obama's seat for financial or political benefits to the governor.)

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December 14, 2008

Hybrid Hope

By Laura Flanders

"If the UAW goes down all unions go down," so said auto worker Bishop Charles Ellis III, seen here praying with hybrid SUVs at The Greater Grace Temple. Hearing these guys talk, it's hard not to curse Senate Republicans who approved $750 billion for Wall Street but balked at $14 billion for Detroit.

James Theisen is a truck driver for Chrysler. If he loses this job, he loses his pension, healthcare and house.... Again we ask, what's going to happen to the workers?

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December 13, 2008

Obama Supporters Watch YouTube at House Parties

By Ari Melber

Obama supporters are gathering at house meetings across the country this weekend to energize their local networks, discuss ways to help the incoming administration, and plan community service projects.

Obama aides released a new video on the campaign's old YouTube channel to address the meetings. The campaign channel has about five times as many subscribers as the transition team's portal on YouTube.

The official emphasis on community service, rather than political action like campaigning or lobbying, may be a necessity at this point. The lists and sprawling supporter networks from during the campaign have not been transferred to a post-campaign entity, such as the DNC or a new organization, and Obama's team wants to avoid promoting any activity that could be construed as electioneering.

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December 13, 2008

Norm Coleman's Florida Strategy

By John Nichols

Joe Stalin couldn't have done a better rewrite of history.

Saying that they want to avoid a "Florida situation" -- a reference to the 2000 recount battle between the presidential campaigns of Republican George Bush and Democrat Al Gore for the Sunshine State's electoral votes -- lawyers for Republican Senator Norm Coleman are suing to get the courts to force an end to the recounting of ballots in his too-close-to-call Minnesota U.S. Senate race with Democrat Al Franken.

Warning about the "chaos" that might result from a thorough recount of all ballots that Minnesota voters cast in the race, Coleman's lawyers filed suit in the state Supreme Court asking justices to halt the ongoing recount -- unless, of course, restrictions that favor the incumbent are implemented.

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December 12, 2008

Obama Should Hire Joan Claybrook

By John Nichols

One of the ablest administrators in Washington -- make that America -- is stepping down from her current position. And if Barack Obama is as smart as many of us think he is, the president-elect will move to make this veteran public servant a member of his administration.

Joan Claybrook, the veteran public-interest advocate who served as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before serving 27 years as president of Public Citizen, will step down in January as the nation's most ardent champion of consumer protection and the common good. That means that Obama will have an opportunity to do what former President Jimmy Carter did at the beginning of his tenure in the White House, when he plucked Claybrook from the activist community to serve as his point-person on transportation-safety issues.

Claybrook decision to leave Public Citizen, the watchdog and advocacy organization that expanded dramatically under her watch, is itself an embrace on her part of the transition moment.

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December 10, 2008

Bush's Ranch Dressing

By Leslie Savan

So it's official: George W. Bush is not a cowboy. We pretty much suspected he wasn't when we learned that, for all his bow-legged strutting, the man's afraid of horses. But last week, Bush let the other Lucchese boot drop: He and Laura bought a $2 million, fancy-pants house in Dallas's toniest neighborhood and will soon be high-tailin' it out of that eight-year-old stage set of a "ranch" in Crawford. Any uncleared brush can go clear itself.

Oh, the couple will undoubtedly drop by the old chuckwagon, do some weekends maybe (and it could well become the safe-house George retreats to when, and if, the long pent-up Furies finally claim his mind). But the move to Dallas is a 180 from what Laura told USA Today during a ranch tour in April, 2001, that she and George "want to grow old here."

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December 10, 2008

At Harvard, Obama Staff Envision Their Movement’s Future

By Ari Melber

Cambridge, MA – Two top organizers behind Barack Obama's campaign huddled with political techies on Wednesday, discussing the future of the Obama movement at a Harvard summit on web politics.

Marshall Ganz, a veteran labor organizer who advised the campaign from his perch at Harvard, emphasized that the transition team needs more time to study how Obama's supporter movement can move beyond campaign mode. Ganz had previously called on Obama's aides to create more "public space" to transparently debate these issues, but he struck a different note today. "I think I was impatient," he said, "the process of learning that's going on is very important."

Jeremy Bird, who ran the campaign's field programs in several states, outlined three big planks in that process, ranging in scale and transparency. First, aides are already reviewing half a million responses to an extensive survey that was emailed to every Obama supporter after the election. Second, several hundred field organized gathered in Chicago last weekend for a private debates. Finally, in what may be the largest post-election campaign gathering besides inaugurals, tens of thousands of supporters are gathering in coordinated house parties across the country next week. (Meanwhile, today the transition team launched a new feature, "Open for Questions," encouraging citizens to post governance questions on Change.gov.)

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December 10, 2008