Word: axelrod
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Dick Cheney's displeasure and Nancy Pelosi's discomfiture may have revived the idea of setting up a "truth commission" to look into the Bush-era counterterrorism policies, but President Barack Obama still wants no part of it. According to David Axelrod, the President's senior adviser, Obama remains convinced that looking forward rather than back "is best for the country...
...Axelrod, however, argues the opposite. "I would say the last three weeks have demonstrated the perils of such a thing," he told TIME this week, "because what you have seen is Cheney and the authors of the old policy trying desperately to justify what they did, and then you have seen people who are enraged by Cheney and the old policies who want to relitigate the whole matter. And all of a sudden you are in the old time machine headed backwards. And that's not useful." (Read a story about how the waterboarding controversy is drowning Pelosi...
...Axelrod points out that the Obama Administration has no vested interest in holding back an inquiry. "Obviously this is a look-back that doesn't relate to stuff that we did but stuff that the last Administration did. So it's not a self-interested decision to say we want to look forward and not back. But it really is ... what the President thinks is best for the country." (See pictures of Pelosi throughout her career...
That doesn't mean there won't be a truth commission, however. "We don't govern by fiat over here," says Axelrod. "If Congress wants to move forward, they will move forward... we are prepared for whatever...
...says, Obama is content to let Congress do its work. "The mistake you can make here is to be so wedded to an approach that you destroy your opportunity for a consensus," Axelrod says. "That's just not something we are going to do. This is too important." On health-care reform as in medicine, Obama is convinced that the right bedside manner can make all the difference in the world...