John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama's transition co-chair, talks about how the Democratic leadership in the Congress, and the Obama administration, need to lead more. From ThinkProgress:
PODESTA: [W]e should put pressure on the members of their caucus to push back on their leadership. You just cannot settle for “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got one outlier who won’t vote for cloture.” We’ve got to both put pressure on the members who are not supporting a progressive agenda, but we’ve also have to put pressure on the leadership to come up with a strategy to find the votes to kind of get these things and move them forward. And we just can’t settle for less than that....I just talked to Joe about this, and he said it's like the head of the Heritage Foundation in 2001 implicitly criticizing George Bush and the Republican Congress. It would take a lot for that to happen. And yes, Podesta's group was putatively for Hillary Clinton (at least that was the conventional wisdom in town), but then he was chosen as the co-chair of Obama's transition. This is a very interesting development. Time will tell if more Democratic leaders speak out or not.
[T]here are places where I think [President Obama has] fallen short of the mark. We’ve been pushing, at CAP, for him to use his executive authority to stop separating service men and women who are gay or lesbian under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. We think he’s got that authority; there’s some question in the White House whether he does or he doesn’t. I won’t make Daniella offer a legal opinion here on that question. But we think he can go further on that. He can push hard and sort of get in front, and not wait for a political consensus on Capitol Hill to resolve this question.
He says in order to do it he needs permanent legislation, but we think that he’s got a lot of executive authority which he can move the ball forward.
