Word: agenda
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Hawaii's first Constitutional Convention was organized in 1968 to correct problems with state legislative voting districts - and ended up giving public workers the right to strike. Ten years later, the islands' second ConCon began with no particular agenda, just a feeling in the post-Watergate era that Hawaii's government needed to be more accountable to its people. Nevertheless, it resulted in 34 separate amendments - more than 1,000 individual changes to Hawaii's state constitution - that included the addition of the untranslated phrase, "Ua mau ke ea o ka 'aina i ka pono" in the constitution's preamble...
Still, no matter what the agenda may be, conventions have a way of running away from the people who conceive them. Anne Feder Lee, an expert on the state constitution who opposes a ConCon, says it's impossible to predict what will happen if voters decide to have one. Feder Lee, a retired University of Hawaii West Oahu political science professor, says the original delegates to the 1968 ConCon had no idea what would result from their inaugural convention. They were supposed to fix a problem with reapportionment districts that dated to statehood in 1959. But they did not stop...
Well-funded liberal interest groups will compete to rush their pet causes to the top of this agenda, while conservative groups will use these issues to rebuild their battered bases. Both presidential candidates have promised to lance the boil of partisan demagoguery in Washington, but for many of these interest groups, comity is bad for business. The fracturing of the media into a thousand voices - many of them strident - will further complicate the new President's efforts to deliver on the promise of a more civil way of doing the nation's business...
...forget the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the rise of China, the bluster of boom-and-bust Russia, the murky threat of Iran and the accelerating decay of Pakistan. Between the economic crisis at home and the geopolitical cauldron abroad, the new President's agenda will be largely predetermined. He might wish he could shrug off this dismal inheritance and devote himself to the shiny projects cataloged on his campaign website - but that's beyond his power...
...while there is a place in Washington for 50-chapter briefing books, the more important text for Obama could fit on a note card: Clear priorities. Everyone in the capital has a plan for a new President. Unless he sets his own agenda, others will eagerly set it for him. Obama has a lot to choose from. Recently, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, no fan of his, compiled a catalog of promises and programs Obama has made during the campaign. Including documentary quotations, the list ran 85 pages. Obama recently told Time's Joe Klein that...