390 replies to this topic

[Bhickman]

Axelrod seems like a really strong choice for a part of the administration and I guess Senior Adviser is basically what he was for the campaign, so I can't wait to see what happens. I've never been so eager to see what happens in government before. Ever.

[MattW]

What wiped my skepticism about him was reading about Axelrod and Plouffe, the kinds of people he surrounded his campaign with. And since I'm of the mind that you're not voting for a person or a personality, rather the people the candidate will choose to whisper in his/her ear and get in his/her face when they're being an idiot. Screw the speeches and whatever ideology, we're going to have the best and the brightest in the Oval Office at 7 am. I wouldn't mind a Republican if I had confidence that he'd deliver on this expectation I have for every president. I'm quite certain Obama will.

[feisty]

I am totally in love with Rahm. This is great news. Had I known a vote for Obama was a vote for this crazy/beautiful former Chicago machinist, IDF volunteer and ballet dancer I would have never dallied with Hillary in the first place.

[Tracy Jacks]

Poker Returns to the White House
by Anthony Holden <> November 6, 2008 | 9:02am

Barack Obama's hidden talent: He's a top-notch poker player. Thank goodness—he’ll need it.

Among the countless blessings conferred by the election of Barack Obama is the energizing fact—until now little-known—that poker will be back in the White House for the first time in 35 years. Not since Richard Nixon has the United States had a dedicated player of its historic national game in the Oval Office.

Throughout the campaign, Obama’s media minders have been far from keen for you to know this. Asked early on by the Press Association to name a "hidden talent," Obama rashly revealed that he considers himself "a pretty good poker-player." Subsequent investigations were hampered by a blanket shutdown on the subject from said minders. But it was already on the record that, after a cool reception from fellow legislators in 1997, when he first took his seat in the Illinois state senate, Obama won over colleagues of all parties with his charm and expertise at the green baize.

In a short New Yorker piece last February, Obama’s friend James McManus, Chicago-based author of the poker classic Positively Fifth Street and the forthcoming The Story of Poker, reported that the rookie senator had co-hosted a regular game for which there was soon a waiting-list including Republicans as well as fellow-Democrats. "When it turned out that I could sit down and have a beer and go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going," Obama once told the Chicago Tribune, "I probably confounded some of their expectations." Poker, concluded McManus, was the secret of Obama’s transformation among "the Chicago machine pols and downstate soybean farmers" from "overeducated bleeding-heart and greenhorn" to regular kinda guy.

It was not a big game—on a bad night, a player could lose 200 bucks—but Obama declined to discuss it as his hopes of the Democratic nomination rose. "American Puritanism," as my gagged friend McManus complained to me last spring, "has turned playing poker for tiny stakes into radioactive information."

In May, when Obama had the candidacy sewn up, I took all this a step further in the Observer of London, concluding: "From what I'm told by intimates, Obama's poker skills bode well for a potential leader of the free world. He is versatile, but shuns unnecessary risks; he wants to be holding premium cards before he even thinks of getting involved; the only gambles he takes are very closely calculated. America would be mad to pass up a potential leader of such acumen. In a world so fraught with danger, a leader of such visionary powers will surely restore his country's tarnished reputation."

This moved Time magazine to reveal two months later that John McCain is, by contrast, a manic craps player. I was in Las Vegas at the time, for the 2008 World Series of Poker; reached by London’s Sunday Telegraph for comment, I ventured: "We poker players don't call poker gambling. It’s a game of skill. Craps is an absurd game of luck...only madmen play craps."

As this comment bobbed all over cyberspace, I stuck doggedly to my theme: Which would you rather have as president? A skilful, calculating poker-player taking highly calibrated risks, or a craps obsessive content to let the dice fall where they may (viz. the Palin pick)? Well, quite. I rest my case.
Expertise at poker used to be an unwritten job requirement for all would-be U.S. presidents. Proficient White House poker-players have ranged from Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Warren Harding to FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon. As I noted in my 1990 book Big Deal, Truman played the game with the White House press corps while pondering whether to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan; Nixon financed his first political race in California on his wartime poker winnings in the Navy; Johnson used his poker know-how to forge early political alliances in Texas.

In recent years, however, this great American tradition seems to have fallen out of fashion: Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr—not a cardsharp among them (beyond, of course, W.’s party days at Yale). Or is it just that America’s "new puritanism" has all candidates of whatever party zipping their lips about their enthusiasm for anything remotely to do with gambling?

Obama may just have higher priorities than exempting poker from Bush Jr.’s Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, the opportunist legislation tacked on to the 2006 Safe Port Act, which has crippled the online game in the U.S. by making it illegal to transfer funds to a gaming site from a bank, credit card or any other financial institution. But he seems more likely to grant an audience to former New York senator Alfonse D’Amato—who, as chairman of the Poker Players Alliance, has been lobbying for the cause.

What does seem certain is that regular poker nights will soon return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time in a generation. So let’s hear it for one early sign of Obamanian "change": White House poker games played, like Harry Truman’s, with chips embossed with the presidential seal.


Anthony Holden is the author of the poker classics Big Deal (1990) and Bigger Deal (2007). His strategy manual, Holden on Hold’em, is published this week by Little, Brown.

URL: http://www.thedailyb...hark-in-chief/p

I now expect that the first program he puts forward in office is the legalization of online poker. Anything else will leave me dissatisfied.

[cerebralcaustic]

The Official website of The Obama Administration:

http://change.gov/


God DAMN do I love this guy and his use of technology.

Wow. I'm blown away by this. He promised a more open government, and this is a fantastic first step.

I never bothered to look: Did/does Bush have something similar to this?

[Bleep Blop]

I think I'm going to try to go to the Inauguration. Seems like there's a pretty good group that has buses from across the country going there. It's all a matter of getting tickets to the events/finding how if there's a good way to view them for free.

[M_Rots]

still waiting for my phone call. C'mon.... America needs a new Porn Czar, and I need a job.

[wakingrufus]

dizzee rascal is hilarious. also change.gov seems like a really good idea. I was never a huge obama fan, but that site is a step in the right direction for government openess

[Rob Gordon]

Anyone else heard the rumor of Colin Powell heading up education?

[crease]

Anyone else heard the rumor of Colin Powell heading up education?

i hope that's not true. that's underemployment, right there.

[Rob Gordon]

Anyone else heard the rumor of Colin Powell heading up education?

i hope that's not true. that's underemployment, right there.

I disagree. Someone like him could have quite an impact on a pillar of Obama's agenda. The position shouldn't be as low level as it has been.

[crease]

Anyone else heard the rumor of Colin Powell heading up education?

i hope that's not true. that's underemployment, right there.

I disagree. Someone like him could have quite an impact on a pillar of Obama's agenda. The position shouldn't be as low level as it has been.

i'm just seeing education for what it is--something that's managed at the local level. perhaps they view transformation of education, engineered from on high, as a priority. then maybe. but if it's the same mandate as before, i don't see how it befits someone of powell's talent/pedigree.

[longhairedfreak]

Anyone else heard the rumor of Colin Powell heading up education?

"He will have a role as one of my advisers," Barack Obama said on NBC's "Today" in an interview aired Monday, a day after Powell, a four-star general and President Bush's former secretary of state, endorsed him.

"Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether that's a good fit for him, is something we'd have to discuss," Obama said.

CNN was reporting him heading up education as well as Caroline Kennedy UN Ambassador, and RFK Head of the EPA.

[wakingrufus]

it continues: http://xkcd.com/496/

[Tracy Jacks]

Anyone else heard the rumor of Colin Powell heading up education?

i hope that's not true. that's underemployment, right there.

I disagree. Someone like him could have quite an impact on a pillar of Obama's agenda. The position shouldn't be as low level as it has been.

i'm just seeing education for what it is--something that's managed at the local level. perhaps they view transformation of education, engineered from on high, as a priority. then maybe. but if it's the same mandate as before, i don't see how it befits someone of powell's talent/pedigree.

I had a view that was VERY unpopular when I went to Education school to get my Graduate Degree. (By the way, in case you didn't know, Education schools are slightly liberal in their thinking). My view that one of the few organizations in the country that has had the longest and strongest track record of success in Education, particularly the education of minorities and people with lower economic backgrounds, is the US Armed Forces.

I can't think of a better Education Secretary than Colin Powell. If Obama selected Powell for this role, wow, that would be an amazing statement regarding the direction the Obama administration would take towards education.

[Stan Gable]

Press conference coming up in 30 minutes.

[Agrimorfee]

Press conference coming up in 30 minutes.

Clue me in on who's streaming audio or broadcasting on radio...

[M_Rots]

Press conference coming up in 30 minutes.

Clue me in on who's streaming audio or broadcasting on radio...

npr.org - click on link at top of page.

[Agrimorfee]

dude is late as usual...

[Stan Gable]

CNN Video stream