Word: pols
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...plucking his Transportation Secretary from the ranks of the GOP, Barack Obama wasn't breaking tradition but extending it. In 2000, George W. Bush tapped Democrat Norman Mineta for the post-the lone cross-aisle appointment of his Administration. There's reason to believe LaHood - a veteran Illinois pol who counts Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as a close friend - will play far more than a token role in the incoming Democratic regime. At Transportation, LaHood will shepherd the massive public works program Obama announced on Dec. 6 as the centerpiece of a plan to jumpstart the economy...
...Quinn is far from the only Illinois pol who carefully kept his distance from the governor as it became clear that the feds were investigating his administration. But for Quinn, who turns 60 on Tuesday, it may not have been simply a political calculation...
...Blagojevich scandal will prove to be a distraction for Obama, a Chicago pol made good who was hoping to put old-fashioned Chicago politics in his rearview mirror. The criminal complaint produced no evidence that Obama or his aides have done anything wrong. Blagojevich was, in fact, recorded complaining that Obama's people were "not willing to give me anything except appreciation." Obama himself maintains that he never talked to Blagojevich about the Senate seat, and during the recent campaign, the two men kept their distance from each other...
...than what he did in office. And for that, many Democrats hated him. The Vietnam War lasted longer under him than under Johnson; indeed, by the time of the fall of Saigon, he was out of office. The incursions into Cambodia and Laos cost thousands of lives - millions, when Pol Pot turned Cambodia into a nationwide graveyard. His CIA bore responsibility for the killing of Chile's socialist leader Salvador Allende, on Sept. 11, 1973. And his hounding of political opponents like Daniel Ellsberg was, at the least, ingracious. (See pictures...
...attack also missed because it was hard to square with Obama himself. The description "old Chicago pol" conjures a stout machine boss wearing a porkpie hat and chomping on a stogie - not a whip-thin black guy trying to quit smoking. Nor was the Chicago machine an ingredient in Obama's political rise. "He didn't rely on the machine for his success," says David Moberg, who has covered Chicago politics closely as a longtime writer for alternative magazine In These Times. "When he ran for the state senate, Congress and the U.S. Senate, he was opposed by the party...