The shape of the table

I wasn't wild about Obama's choice of Rick Warren but I have to say that, after I had some time to reflect, I wasn't surprised.

Obama has always, always been driven more by the desire to bring everyone to the table - regardless of whether they share his ideology - than he's been to fill the seats with those who share his world view. What seems to matter most is the willingness and ability of opposites to work together at the table toward a pragmatic and realistic end.

When he was elected to head the Harvard Law Review many African-American students who had placed their hopes in him to bring more African-American students onto the editorial committee were disappointed when he instead put together a committee comprised of some of the most outspoken conservatives on campus. The thing he wanted to achieve, he said, was a Law Review of the highest caliber. (For more about this, watch Frontline's piece on Obama, aired before the election.)

He's done this before during his time as an elected official. Some of those who helped him in Chicago have felt left behind because he offered no quid pro quo. (The July 21st issue of the New Yorker discusses this at some length.)

Obama, to my view, is not the lefty many believe him to be. Instead, his core is pragmatism. The change he brings is that the seats at the table will filled by those who share pragmatism - but not necessarily ideology.

I think Obama made a miscalculation by elevating Warren at this time. I don't think Warren deserves the honor he was given. It really is like a bucket of tarnish was dumped over the glow of his election.

I also think that we will see, in the not too distant future, the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' (a gift to us from the Clinton administration), and recognition of civil rights. That's because Obama has a track record of pragmatically moving toward inclusion to achieve outcomes that we support.

He has no track record of throwing us under the bus.

I'm willing to wait and see what his actual outcomes are before I make a decision about the weight and proportion that Warren leaves behind on January 21.

Insidious

It's like being a figure in an O'Henry story: Tiny, tiny particles of ice falling and falling. If you are out in it for a minute or two you hardly notice it. If the particles land on something warm, something that's alive, they melt immediately. But if they fall on something inert, like pavement or windshield or wood pile or porch it freezes and becomes another tiny, tiny particle in a layer that builds and builds and takes on weight and form. A sheen gathers on everything.

During the big ice storm of whatever year that was I was living in California in the Bay Area. The place that personified The Idea of California. Our storms, then, consisted of wind and rain that inspired me to wonder if my car could be randomly flung through the spaces between the Bay Bridge supports. To wonder if I and my 1965 VW Bug, which could be repaired with a screw driver, would land in the deadly waters of San Francisco Bay. Many scary commutes on that bridge that winter. But I had faith in the bridge. It had, after all, been put back together after our earthquake and had, somewhere on the structure, at least one protective gargoyle installed by the welders of 1989.

Anyway, The Ice Storm. My experience of it consisted of listening to NPR broadcasts from The Bluebird Restaurant in Machias - where they had a generator. And getting updates from my mother and her husband who kept their wood stove going and who urged the repair people, on the 9th day, to go help someone else because - after they got two hours of electricity - they were getting along fine. And second-hand reports of my father and his wife who were living off the grid and who were vaguely aware that the rest of Maine was having a really hard time.

This is no Ice Storm. (The Bluebird Restaurant now has a sandwich named after The Ice Storm. It's a comfort food classic: real turkey and lots of gravy on top of white bread plus cranberry sauce and a roll or two. It's a meal to warm the needy heart of any local Calvinist. I don't eat out much now but this sandwich is what I order when I'm at The Bluebird these days. It's predictable.)

But the way the particles fall and fall from the sky, slowly building up, while my lights are on and I'm listening to music and talking with my community on the internet...it's insidious.