Tag Archives: presidential transition

national news, political news

When guys like Frank are sweating it …

My friend Frank doesn’t get rattled too easily.

He’s in his early 60s. Frank has been around. He told me he has witnessed a lot of presidential transitions. None of them prior to what’s about to occur has him as concerned — even a bit frightened — as the one that’s coming up.

Barack H. Obama is going to hand the presidency over to Donald J. Trump.

Frank is deeply concerned. As am I.

We chatted for a bit and we agreed on at least one fundamental point: It’s that Trump’s absolute lack of public service experience has left him woefully ill-prepared for becoming president of the United States of America.

I reminded Frank that we’ve had a number of dramatic transitions in our respective lifetimes. I mentioned Ronald Reagan taking over from Jimmy Carter in 1981. Sure, some folks considered Reagan little more than a B-movie actor who starred in those films with a chimpanzee named Bonzo.

But as I told Frank, even Reagan had government experience. He had administrative experience at that, as a successful two-term California governor.

Trump? He has spent his entire adult life in pursuit of a single goal: personal enrichment. He got a head start with a healthy inheritance from his wealthy father and then parlayed that nest egg into a vast fortune.

Public service? None. Zero.

Frank wondered, “What kind of thing is he going to do? What in the world does he stand for?” I told him that we don’t know. The president-elect campaigned for this office espousing zero core values. He didn’t articulate an ideology. Instead, he boasted at seemingly every campaign stop about how rich he is and how he intended to use his business acumen to “Make America Great Again.”

We did agree on this point, too. We both want Trump to succeed. We’re hoping for the best. Failure, we reminded each other, is going to cost all Americans dearly. Therefore, neither Frank nor I will wish the kind of failure for Trump that many of Barack Obama’s foes wished for him when he became president eight years ago.

Frank has another thing quite right: Now is the time to pray real hard for our country.

I’m with him on that, too.

local news

Troubled times — and thunder — recall memory of old friends

My mind has this way of wandering vast distances at the strangest times.

Today it did that. I thought of two old friends as I was pondering the state of political play in this country, and the presidential transition we’re all about to witness.

Their names are Buddy Seewald and Virgil Van Camp. They died within days of each other in September 2013 here in the Texas Panhandle. They came to my mind for two vastly different reasons.

One of them is the hostility that exists between individuals and groups of opposing points of view. I’ll get to the second reason momentarily.

Buddy and Virgil were total opposites politically. Buddy was a flaming liberal political activist; Virgil was a staunch conservative who wasn’t politically active, but who had strong views on the world … as did Buddy.

They were partners in a feature we used to publish at the Amarillo Globe-News. We called it Point/Counterpoint. They would argue opposing points of view on subjects we would select in advance.

They also were friends. They harbored no ill will toward each other. We’d meet for lunch every few weeks to discuss upcoming topics. They got along famously.

I think of them as I compare that relationship with the non-relationships that exist these days between liberals and conservatives. I think of them when I hear politicians on one side refer to those on the side as the “enemy.”

Buddy and Virgil would rise up out of their respective graves — if only they could.

I wrote about them in an earlier blog post, paying tribute to their civility and their collegiality. I wish they were around today to share that sense of decency with you all.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2013/09/there-goes-another-good-man/

Near the end of that earlier blog post, I mentioned something else that makes me think of them today.

We heard lots of thunder around here over the weekend. My thought in this Sept 17, 2013 post was that I would think of Buddy and Virgil the next time I heard a clap of thunder, as it likely signaled an argument between them from on high.

I recalled that earlier observation as I listened to the thunder roll across the High Plains.

That had to be Buddy and Virgil arguing — without a doubt — about the pros and cons of the upcoming presidential administration.

I am absolutely certain they threw their arms around each other when the storm passed.

I still miss these two friends terribly.

national news, political news

This prank won’t happen, however …

This tweet showed up on my Facebook news feed a little while ago. It speaks to a prank that someone believes President Obama should pull on his successor, Donald J. Trump.

It cracks me up. It’s damn funny. The prospect of someone putting something like this over on Mr. Insult/Innuendo/Showman/Reality TV Celebrity strikes me as seriously hilarious.

It won’t happen. You see, the current — for the next four days — president of the United States is far too classy, too gracious, too mindful of political consequence to even consider anything so sophomoric.

The president has pledged a smooth transition with Trump’s team. The two men — Obama and Trump — disagree on virtually every single policy issue one can imagine. The president clearly is dismayed that his candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost the presidential election to someone who’d never before sought a public office of any kind, at any level.

I don’t for a minute doubt that Barack Obama has been faithful to his pledge to seek a smooth transition. My concern, though, rests with the Trump team’s willingness to ask the right questions, seek the correct counsel, dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s required to understand all the nitty-gritty of running a government.

This all speaks to the absolute abandoning of tradition that Trump has demonstrated from the very moment he declared his presidential candidacy.

President Obama, though, believes in tradition and has committed to ensuring a smooth hand-off at noon Friday.

There’s something, though, sinisterly tempting about the notion of the president quitting his office on Thursday just to mess things up for the merchandising geniuses peddling Trump’s presidency.

national news

Bush girls show class and grace in letter to Obama girls

The media have become consumed of late with all the anger, bitterness and sheer crap associated with the transition from one presidential administration to another.

Now we have a profound and beautiful demonstration of class from two young women toward two other young women.

Barbara Bush and Jenna Hager have been at ringside at an earlier transition. They took some time to share their own experiences and to offer congratulations and good wishes to Malia and Sasha Obama.

The daughters of President and Mrs. George W. Bush wrote a lovely note to the daughters of President and Mrs. Barack Obama. The Obama girls are about to enter “civilian life” after eight years in the White House. The Bush girls know what they experienced and felt compelled to offer them good wishes as they, too, look back on the years they spent living in the People’s House.

http://time.com/4632036/bush-sisters-obama-sisters/?xid=homepage

Take a few minutes to read the letter the Bush girls have written to their fellow soon-to-be-former first children.

I trust it will remind you, as it reminded me, of the inherent goodness that can be found even in this contentious and occasionally angry time.

You’ll feel better after you read it. Honestly!

national news

Trump is ‘botching’ transition? Oh, brother!

trump

Donald J. Trump boasted about his immense success in business, suggesting his business acumen was all he needed to take the reins of the federal government.

The president-elect might be learning that transitioning from private to public life is, um, quite a bit more complicated than he ever imagined.

Politico and other news outlets are reporting that Trump’s transition has turned into a “knife fight” among those closest to the president-elect.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-cabinet-transition-battles-231442

Some questions have arisen about potential conflicts of interests involving his son-in-law Jaret Kushner, as well as his daughter Ivanka. He has hired a man believed to be a white supremacist as his chief political adviser.

Trump only today received his first full-scale national security briefing from the National Security Council.

The fellow he picked as his transition chief, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has been pushed aside.

Rudy Giuliani, reported to be Trump’s top choice to become secretary of state, is now under investigation over work he did as a paid consultant for foreign governments, posing a tremendous potential conflict of interest. John Bolton — the neo-con who wanted to bomb Iran five years ago — is another possible secretary of state candidate who has drawn a threat from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to filibuster his nomination if it comes to pass.

Oh, boy.

Some government experience ought to be considered an essential qualification for the president. Trump brought none of it into his winning campaign. He cited his business experience as Reason No. 1 to elect him.

I thought earlier today about another president who took office after having never been elected to another public position. I came up with Dwight Eisenhower. All he did, of course, was command Allied forces in the fight against the Nazis during World War II, which I surmise suffices as enough government experience to prepare him for the role of commander in chief.

The next president is now embarking on the steepest, most arduous learning curve imaginable as he prepares for this enormous challenge.

He’d better start figuring this out. In a major hurry.

national news, political news

Smooth transition under way

President Obama met the man who will succeed him in the Oval Office and said something I found most interesting — and revealing.

The president turned to Donald J. Trump and offered his full support during the transition. “If you succeed, the country succeeds,” the president said.

Imagine that. The man who called Trump “unfit to be president” now is wishing him success as he prepares to seize the levers of power.

Holy cow, man!

Why is that worthy of comment? Consider the kind of things that many conservatives said in 2009 as Barack Obama succeeded George W. Bush as president.

A lot of them — namely many of them talk-radio blowhards — were actually urging failure for the president. They didn’t care about the consequences of failure. They failed to connect the nation’s fate with the president’s performance. They didn’t understand — or refused willfully to understand — that the nation suffers if the president fails.

The Senate’s Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, declared that his No. 1 priority was to make Obama a one-term president. How does he do that? By ensuring failure at every step.

President Obama deserves high praise for insisting that Donald Trump’s success bodes well for the nation.