This report should have been fairly innocuous this week, but it touched off a flurry of far-right criticism.
With less than six months to go before he would be sworn in as the nation’s 44th president, Sen. Barack Obama has directed his aides to begin planning for the transition.
“Barack is well aware of the complexity and the organizational challenge involved in the transition process and he has tasked s small group to begin thinking through the process,” a senior campaign adviser said. “Barack has made his expectations clear about what he wants from such a process, how he wants it to move forward, and the establishment and execution of his timeline is proceeding apace.”
Last month, the Post’s Shalaigh Murray reported that campaign advisers were sounding out John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and currently the president of the Center for American Progress, for his advice.
An aide confirms that Podesta will probably be asked to head the transition team, which would take over from the campaign if Obama wins in November, and would be tasked with ensuring a smooth handover of power…. A campaign spokesperson confirmed that transition planning had begun but would provide no further details. An adviser said that the campaign wants to keep the process as low profile as possible in order to minimize distractions.
It didn’t take too long before Republicans everywhere started shouting about Obama planning a transition months before the election even took place. How presumptuous, they said.
Indeed, the McCain campaign, after initially saying it would not comment on this, issued a statement saying, “Before they’ve even crossed the 50-yard line the Obama campaign is already dancing in the end zone with a new White House transition team.”
Fox News reported that organizing a transition team before an election has “never been done before,” and many news outlets ran the McCain campaign’s attack without analysis.
The problem, of course, is that the criticism is completely wrong.
Media Matters set the record straight.
On Fox News, David Asman falsely claimed of Sen. Barack Obama’s reported plans for a White House transition months before the November election: “It’s never been done before.” Similarly, on MSNBC Live, U.S. News & World Report’s Kenneth Walsh asserted that Obama is preparing for taking office “very early, and it plays into this notion that the Republicans are talking about, about Obama being too arrogant, that he has sort of a sense of inevitability that has set in there.” However, a Media Matters review confirms that Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter all planned for a White House transition months before the election.
Indeed, this is all pretty normal. Center for American Progress Action Fund Director of Homeland Security P.J. Crowley explained that this is a practical necessity for presidential candidates.
Attempted attacks have become a staple of groups like al Qaeda. Given this heightened risk, one of our earliest conclusions was that the two candidates cannot wait until November to focus on this challenge. Advance work will be necessary to have an effective leadership team ready, establish relationships with key stakeholders across the country, prepare the public for what lies ahead and outline concrete priorities for the first 100 days and first year in office.
This is not being presumptuous. Actually, it is being presidential.
Jonathan Cohn added:
If Obama wins, on the morning of November 5th he will wake up with less than eleven weeks to prepare for grappling with two wars and a severely troubled economy. People will likely be clamoring for help with falling housing values and increasingly scarce jobs, making it tough, among other things, to pay high gas prices. If it’s Obama, he’ll have been elected to slow skyrocketing medical costs and enact universal health care, something the country desperately needs but that will likely require speedy legislative action (plus some difficult budget arithmetic) to accomplish. And that’s not to mention climate change, for which every day of delayed action worsens the crisis.
Oh, and he’ll inherit a government full of politically appointed positions to fill and a bureaucratic infrastructure in desperate need of repair, thanks to eight years in which the Bush Administration systematically gutted key agencies and made a shambles of oversight.
I guess the real question here is, why is John McCain opposed to candidates putting together transition teams?