Well, it took just two weeks to get our first broken promise from President-elect Obama. After campaigning on the promise that “no lobbyists will find a job in my administration”, President-elect Obama appears to be having a change of heart. While he and his staff have laid down rules to keep lobbyists from working in their lobby field, we find this to be an attempt to get around the campaign promise since those rules were not disclosed before the election.- Campaign-Promises Staff

Obama softens ban on hiring lobbyists

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | November 12, 2008

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama, who vowed during his campaign that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” said through a spokesman yesterday that he would allow lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs.

Obama’s transition chief laid out ethics rules – which also bar transition staff from lobbying the administration for one year if they become lobbyists later – and portrayed them as the strictest ever for a transfer of presidential power.

But independent analysts said yesterday that the move is less than the wholesale removal of lobbyists that he suggested during the campaign – and shows how difficult it will be to lessen the pervasive influence of more than 40,000 registered lobbyists.

“That is a step back and there is no other way of seeing it,” said Craig Holman, who lobbies on governmental affairs for the watchdog group Public Citizen. Nonetheless, he said, Obama is still making “a very concrete effort to avoid what I consider a potentially corrupting situation.”

Obama, who promised to change how business gets done in Washington, railed against lobbyists in the upper ranks of rival John McCain’s campaign.

The Democrat also refused to take money from federal lobbyists, and lobbyists will be banned from donating to the transition, which is expected to involve 450 employees and cost about $12 million, $5.2 million of that from taxpayers. The remainder is to be raised privately, with a $5,000-per-person contribution limit and a ban on donations from corporations and political action committees, as well as lobbyists.

“Barack Obama has pledged to change the way Washington works and to curb the influence of lobbyists,” John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team, told reporters. “We are announcing rules that are the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.”

To reinforce that point, Obama’s camp office also issued statements from two Washington think tanks often at ideological odds, which praised the rules as tough and bold. Podesta said staff members who lobbied in the last year won’t be allowed to work in their field in the transition and will have to cease all lobbying while they are part of the transition team. He said he would have “more to say” later regarding details about rules for lobbyists in the administration, apparently including whether such people could be hired immediately to work in areas on which they have not lobbied.

During his campaign, Obama declared: “I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race. I don’t take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House.”

That left unclear whether he was referring to the relatively small number of staff members in the West Wing or to the hundreds of political appointees throughout an administration. Obama’s campaign website said a lobbyist could join the administration as long as he or she didn’t work on “regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” He also proposed that political appointees be prohibited from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of the administration, if they left government.

During the campaign, Obama’s anti-lobbyist rules weren’t ironclad. His staff included some lobbyists, though his aides said they stopped all such activities once they joined the campaign full time. He accepted fund-raising help from lobbyists registered with states and took money from associates and family members of federal lobbyists.

Brian Pallasch, president of the American League of Lobbyists, said yesterday that members of his organization grew weary of being pummeled by both presidential candidates. Invoking the right to present their case to lawmakers, thousands of lobbyists represent millions of Americans, Pallasch said.

The change of administration and the prospect of dividing up billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street firms and to stimulate the economy are bound to create more business for lobbyists, he said.

Pallasch said that many lobbyists have expertise on an issue that would prove helpful in improving the efficiency of the large and complex federal government. “They can use that knowledge to make the government better,” he said. “I don’t think that should necessarily be seen as a negative thing.”

Podesta said yesterday that he has heard complaints that Obama’s policy would leave “all the people who know everything out in the cold.”

“So be it,” he said. The American public expects Obama to carry through on his campaign pledges “so that the undue influence of Washington lobbyists and the revolving door of Washington ceases to exist,” said Podesta, who was President Clinton’s chief of staff in the final two years of that administration.

Podesta, in a wide-ranging update on the transition 70 days from the inauguration, said that Obama would like to begin naming Cabinet nominees as soon as possible, but would take the time needed to make the right choices.

He reiterated that Obama wants to provide aid to the troubled auto industry, but said no decisions have been made. Congress may meet next week in a lame-duck session and consider whether to approve an economic stimulus package and more aid to automakers, but it is unclear whether Republicans will support the measures. If Republicans balk, the matter will be held over until after Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration, when Democrats will have a larger majority in Congress.

Podesta also said that Obama has no plans to meet with foreign leaders at a global economic summit in Washington this weekend, hosted by President Bush. “We have one president at a time, and it’s important that the president can speak for the United States at the summit,” Podesta said.

Material from the Associated Press was also used in this report.

Popularity: 100% [?]

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama wants to renew the U.S. commitment to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to his national security advisers.

The Obama team believes the Bush administration has downplayed the importance of catching the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist because it has not been able to find him.

“We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority,” Obama said during the presidential debate on October 7.

But tracking down bin Laden won’t be easy.

In May, al Qaeda released an audiotape featuring bin Laden. But U.S. intelligence officials say they haven’t had a solid lead on the terrorist mastermind’s whereabouts since late 2001, when he was nearly captured in a battle with U.S. forces near Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, told CNN he’s talked to “a dozen CIA guys who’ve been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don’t know.” Watch the hunt for bin Laden ¬ª

Intelligence officials believe bin Laden is hiding in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, a remote and primitive region with mountain peaks as tall as 14,000 feet (4,270 meters) that make the terrain difficult to navigate.

“If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie ‘Deliverance,’ multiplied by a factor of 10, that’s really what you’re focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,” said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan.

The region is divided up by tribes, some of them warring. Developing human sources in the area has been extremely difficult. See a timeline of bin Laden’s terror messages ¬ª

“What you literally need to have is an army of individual informants, hopefully focused on the areas that you think bin Laden is most likely to be hiding in,” said Grenier, now a security consultant with Kroll.

“But again, you need to have a whole lot of them because one individual who may have access to the families and the clans in a particular valley, if he goes to the valley next door and starts asking questions, he’s probably gonna end up dead pretty quickly.”

The U.S. government is offering a $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture, but officials who have worked in the region say the people living there would consider it dishonorable to take the money.

The United States has had some success killing al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan using unmanned drones equipped with Hellfire missiles, but those attacks have killed innocent civilians as well, complicating the political situation between the two countries.

Obama plans to send more troops into Afghanistan to push back the growing Taliban insurgency, but experts warn there could be severe consequences.

“The president is going to inherit the problem the Soviets had roughly 15 years ago during the Soviet jihad. You cannot tame the people in the North-West Frontier Province and on the border in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Dalton Fury, the commander of special operations at Tora Bora.

“The only army that has been successful has been Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde. They cut off heads and killed everyone in the villages, and since we have self-imposed rules of warfare, we are not going to do what they did.”

Cooperation from Pakistan’s military has been touchy, and most experts agree finding bin Laden is just not a priority for Pakistan’s troops.

Fury says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden. Intelligence officials do not believe he is playing an operational role and so has no reason to move around or communicate.

“I think it’s important to understand that bin Laden had his chance at martyrdom. He was in the mountains of Tora Bora, he ran away. In my opinion, I think we ought to promote this,” Fury said.

He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he’s relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him.

Despite the challenges, many experts agree it is important to capture bin Laden.

“I don’t think the American people will accept him surviving and us leaving. We will be the laughingstock of the world,” Fury said.

Popularity: 62% [?]

WASHINGTON ‚Äì In one of the economy’s darkest hours in decades, it looks as if people are taking Barack Obama up on his exhortations for hope and change. Seven in 10, or 72 percent, voice confidence the president-elect will make the changes needed to revive the stalling economy, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday.

Underscoring how widely the public is counting on its new leader, 44 percent of Republicans joined nearly all Democrats and most independents in expressing that belief.

The poll shows trust in Obama’s ability to succeed is even broader, at least for now. Sixty-eight percent said they think when he takes office in January, the new president will be able to enact the policies he pushed during his presidential campaign.

“I don’t think one person, the president or otherwise, can fix the problems,” said Ryan Anderson, 31, a Democrat from Bloomington, Minn. “But I have strong faith that he’ll assemble the right group of individuals to address the problems. I think that’s going to be a benchmark of Obama’s presidency.”

People signaled a willingness to wait on one of the keynotes of his agenda — tax cuts. Only 36 percent said they wanted Obama to make income-tax cuts a top priority when he takes office, and even fewer wanted higher taxes on the rich to be a primary goal.

Instead, 84 percent said strengthening the economy and 80 percent named creating jobs as top-tier priorities. Democrats were a bit likelier than Republicans to say each should be a No. 1 goal.

With Obama ending the GOP’s eight-year hold on the White House under President Bush and about to become the first black president, the AP-GfK poll showed three quarters saying the election made them feel hopeful, six in 10 proud and half expressing excitement. Newly elected presidents often embark on a honeymoon period in which the public has highly positive feelings about them.

Democrats were far likelier to feel upbeat, yet such feelings were not limited to them. Half of Republicans said they were hopeful, a third proud and nearly a fifth excited about the election results. Another quarter in the GOP said they were depressed.

“I feel let down by the American people that they were so blind to many things I’ve seen in him,” said Shelli Pierson, 38, a Republican from Elmira, Ore. Pierson she doubts Obama, a four-year senator from Illinois, has enough experience for the presidency and said she still questions his patriotism.

Nine in 10 said Obama’s race would have no impact on his ability to get things done.

Though Republicans were more negative about the election results, they were consistently more upbeat than Democrats were in 2004 when their candidate, John Kerry, failed to unseat Bush. Forty-four percent of Democrats said they were angry and half said they were depressed in a November 2004 AP-Ipsos poll, double the GOP’s rates this year.

Highlighting anew how the Iraq war has faded as a paramount public concern, only half in Tuesday’s AP-GfK poll said they wanted Obama to make a U.S. troop withdrawal a top focus.

The survey also spotlighted the enduring partisan split over the war. Two-thirds of Democrats want a troop withdrawal to be a top Obama priority, compared with just three in 10 Republicans.

In a November 2004 poll before the economy crashed, Iraq and terrorism were most mentioned as the issues they wanted Bush to make his top priority. Until the weakening economy overtook Iraq as the No. 1 problem on the public’s mind nearly a year ago, Obama’s pledge to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from the war was his highest-profile issue.

Six in 10 cited stabilizing financial institutions and reducing budget deficits as top goals in the AP-GfK survey.

Half said they wanted national health care coverage — another Obama priority — to be a No. 1 concern, with few Republicans agreeing it should be a top goal. Permitting offshore oil drilling, a major GOP campaign issue, drew support as a top priority from just over one-third, mostly Republicans.

Nearly three-quarters ‚Äî including most Democrats ‚Äî said they’d like Obama to name some Republicans in his Cabinet, as the Democrat has said he would do.

Most also expressed no problem with the lock Democrats will have on Washington beginning next year. Four in 10 said Democratic control of the White House and Congress will be good for the country while another 2 in 10 said it would make no difference.

Thirty-six percent said the country is moving in the right direction, about double the 17 percent who said so in last month’s AP-GfK poll. Reflecting the election results, half of Democrats now see things heading the right way ‚Äî quadruple their number who said so in October.

Bush and Congress remained mired in awful ratings, with 28 percent approving of the job Bush is doing and 21 percent approving of Congress.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Nov. 6-10 and involved cell and landline telephone interviews with 1,001 adults. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

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AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

Popularity: 64% [?]

An excerpt from President-Elect Barack Obama

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Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.

Now they’re gone.

The “agenda” Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a “comprehensive and detailed agenda” that will “bring about the kind of change America needs,” with the individual pages deleted entirely.

A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft’s Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet “a strategic asset,” and establish a $2 billion fund to “counter al-Qaeda propaganda.” Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site.

I’ve posted mirror images of the vanished homeland security section, the technology section, and the newsroom section listing the different topics on the right side of the page.

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: “That section of the Web site is being retooled.”

This isn’t the first time that vanishing or altered documents on a presidential Web site have been noticed: President Bush got some unwelcome attention for this last year. The White House’s Web team also rewrote the May 2003 caption showing Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier after the Iraq occupation proved more problematic than expected (see before and after).

The ephemeral nature of Web publishing does raise some serious issues: if a president-elect circulates a physical press release promising to do something, and then changes his mind, there’s a paper trail. That doesn’t exist when files are added to a Web site and then quietly removed over a weekend.

The Library of Congress and other institutions, including the California Digital Library and the Government Printing Office, are trying to remedy this by doing an “end of term” crawl. That means they’re regularly crawling and archiving all .gov domains that are considered “government sites,” including Change.gov. The crawl started in September and will continue through February 2009.

The project has a varying crawl schedule, so it may not have collected the agenda pages on Change.gov, Abbie Grotke, a digital media project coordinator on the Web capture team in the Library of Congress’ office of strategic initiatives, said on Monday.

The Change.gov site has been added to the list of sites to be crawled as part of the Library’s Election Archives project–a separate effort. Gina Jones, also part of the Library’s office of strategic initiatives, said that since it’s a new site, it hasn’t been collected yet.

CNET News’ Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.

Popularity: 75% [?]

WASHINGTON ‚Äì Over and over, Barack Obama told voters if they stuck with him “we will change this country and change the world.” They did, and now their expectations for him to deliver are firmly planted on his shoulders. Many supporters greeted his victory with euphoria.

Impatient for a new American era and overcome by a black man’s historic ascension to the White House, they took his achievement for their own ‚Äî weeping, dancing in the streets, blaring happy horns into Wednesday morning.

But campaign rhetoric soon collides with the gritty duties of governing, and hard realities stand in Obama’s way.

The youthful president-elect appears to know this. His victory speech emphasized humility far more than his fabled confidence, with remarks heavily leavened by references to the difficulties before the nation.

He declared “change has come to America” and closed with his “yes we can” campaign slogan, but not before speaking of the certainty of setbacks. “The road ahead will be long,” Obama warned. “We may not get there in one year or even one term.”

Atop Obama’s challenge list is the global and domestic turmoil that he inherits. None of it is his own making, but it will shape his presidency before he lifts one finger.

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Two wars in unstable, hostile lands. Other foreign hot spots such as Pakistan and Congo, nuclear standoffs with North Korea and Iran. A warming planet.

Then there are high health care and energy costs, sunken home values, wiped-out retirement and investment accounts. A federal deficit that is exploding as the nation throws money at its economic problems, sure to crimp Obama’s ability to spend his way to solutions.

He also faces challenging political realities.

Obama has a largely liberal voting record and owes a debt to the left wing of the Democratic Party, which mobilized millions on his behalf. These folks embraced his promises to end the Iraq war, move toward universal health care coverage and address harsh terrorist interrogation practices.

But Obama also appealed to the broader electorate as a pragmatist who pledged virtually party-blind government. He will have to decide whether it is better to disappoint the more liberal troops out of the gate or wait until later.

“A lot of people are not going to be happy in the first two years,” said Democratic strategist Joe Trippi.

Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way said that Obama is for centrist ideas such as middle-class tax cuts and seems likely to wait on contentious goals such as overhauling the U.S. health care system.

“We do believe him when he says he’s a moderate,” Bennett said. “We think that’s how he’s going to govern.”

Once the changeover happens, those who believed his “change we can believe in” slogan will want things to move quickly.

How might he go about it?

Even after nearly two years in the spotlight, little is understood about the 47-year-old first-term senator’s approach to leadership. His resume: community organizer, eight years as state legislator, and less than four as U.S. senator.

As a lawmaker, he has displayed a knack for working with Republicans on a handful of favorite issues. But he has devoted most of his time in the Senate to running for president. Unlike the past seven presidents, he was never a governor or vice president. And unlike John F. Kennedy, the last senator to move directly to the presidency, Obama has not commanded troops in wartime.

Personally, he’s a bit of an enigma, too.

He did lead his campaign, a huge, nearly billion-dollar operation. Throughout, he showed himself to have a detached, cerebral decision-making style that can sometimes seems out of sync with his natural charisma.

He also showed himself to be a highly disciplined, CEO-style manager. The leak-proof, tightly managed and orderly Obama operation mimics the Bush White House, and flows from “No Drama Obama” himself ‚Äî a man so focused that he didn’t give himself a day off from working out, even the morning after winning the presidency.

In keeping with his measured demeanor, Obama did nothing flashy his first day as president-elect, keeping to breakfast with his family and a thank-you visit to campaign workers.

All that said, he’s got plenty of things in his favor.

First and foremost, he was elected exactly the way he wanted to be — in an electoral landslide. He took not only traditionally Democratic states, but once-solid Republican territory too. That allows him to claim, credibly, a broad mandate for his ideas.

So the Democrats who run Capitol Hill, for all their savvy in the ways of Washington and potential disagreements with their president, might think twice about clashing too aggressively with him. On a more practical level, they will not want to risk missing out during the midterm election cycle two years from now on Obama’s eye-popping fundraising skills.

Further, the much-vaunted technological side of Obama’s campaign means he could appeal directly to voters around recalcitrant lawmakers, using e-mail, text messages, Facebook and other tools.

Said Trippi, “I would not like to be a member of Congress standing in the way of passing his energy bill.”

Still, Obama’s honeymoon with the public ‚Äî both anxious and hopeful ‚Äî could be fragile.

One of the many revelers who spontaneously flocked to the White House after Obama’s win, chanting, screaming and waving signs like, “Why Wait? Evict Bush Now,” summed it up.

“I came down here to make a prayer … that we’ll be able to change the nation and the world,” said Hollis Gentry.

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Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Charles Babington contributed to this story.

Popularity: 62% [?]

President-Elect Barack Obama in Chicago

Popularity: 33% [?]