Apparently, they haven't taken it away from him yet. This morning's second pool report tells us:

President-elect Obama left Regents Park apartments at 9:06 am. He was wearing a dark jacket and pants and a White Sox baseball cap. He carried a folded copy of The New York Times in his left hand and what appeared to be a BlackBerry in his right hand.

Our cover this week features a superb story by Amanda Ripley on the fascinating, controversial 37-year-old woman who has been brought in to save the troubled public school system in the nation's capital.:

Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run. She is attempting to do this through a relentless focus on finding--and rewarding--strong teachers, purging incompetent ones and weakening the tenure system that keeps bad teachers in the classroom. This fall, Rhee was asked to meet with both presidential campaigns to discuss school reform. In the last debate, each candidate tried to claim her as his own, with Barack Obama calling her a "wonderful new superintendent."

Amanda also looks at where the President-elect stands on education. (The subject of what should happen to No Child Left Behind sparked a terrific and thoughtful conversation among our commenters earlier this week, led by commenter Suzie in MD.)

Amidst all the bad news from India, there is good news this morning from Baghdad, where the Iraqi parliament has approved the Status of Forces Agreement, which represents the beginning of the end of the U.S. military presence there. All troops are to be withdrawn by 2012, but more significantly, all U.S. troops will be pulled from Iraq's cities and situated to base camps by next June. I don't know that this can be construed as victory--the war was a needless waste from the start, and we don't know yet what sort of Iraqi government will emerge from this--but it certainly is a tribute to the remarkable work done by the U.S. military. Hope the turkey tastes great today in the mess halls at Camps Liberty and Victory, and at the forward operating bases in places like Ramadi, Baqubah and Yusufiah...and in all our military facilities throughout the world. 

I'll be heading to Afghanistan just after Thanksgiving, so light blogging from me for the next few weeks.

Enjoy your holidays.

Matt Yglesias thinks that the Obama transition has a different book from Doris Goodwin's Team of Rivals as its blueprint. Maybe so, but Obama sure does talk a lot about Lincoln (and Goodwin). In any case, after one of the best run campaigns I've covered, this is now one of the best-run transitions. Especially notable is the fact that Obama broke with the FDR precedent of lying low and letting Hoover stew in the Depression, which a lot of talking heads were advising him to do: he's taken an active, public role in attempting to reassure the markets. So far as I can tell, there have been no false steps yet.

Building on my post below about the new Obama national security team, Aaron David Miller has a smart column in the Washington Post today about another area in which the Obama foreign policy is likely to differ from that of Bush--and also from what McCain was proposing. He believes that the first step toward a middle east peace is for the U.S. to support the negotiations between Israel and Syria, which the Bush Administration tried to thwart for the past two years in deference to the neoconservative radicals. 

I'm not sure that Syria can be brought fully into the community of sane nations, but Bashar Assad--an Alawite who presides over a predominantly Shi'ite (Ooops, I meant Sunni) country--certainly can't feel too comfortable in his current alliance with Iran. Assad once told me that his father, Hafez Assad,  came very close to making peace with Yitzhak Rabin and that he'd be willing to pick up where they left off. We'll see. Certainly, this is a more promising track than attempting a deal with the divided, dazed and confused Palestinians at this point (although every effort should be made to move that along).

And the first step Obama should take is to send our Ambassador, Margaret Scobie--or another foreign service professional--back to Damascus. Pulling Scobie out after the assassination of Rafik Hariri was the sort of witless, petulant thing action that made Bush such a weak diplomatic President.

You have to laugh about the denizens of the political right who are shocked at Barack Obama's moderation: who were they expecting for Secretary of Defense, Louis Farrakhan? Jeremiah Wright at State? Much of this is a result of the right drinking its own koolaid: the mythology of Obama being some sort of crypto-lefty, "associated" with people like William Ayres and Wright, rather than the moderate realist who sent signals throughout the campaign that he was looking to people like Gates and Jones to join his team.

And now we have Max Boot "gobsmacked" by the excellent Obama security choices, which Boot sees as a sign that Obama is going to have a foreign policy not so distant from, well, neoconservatism:

This all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign. His appointments suggest that, if anything, his administration will have a Reapolitiker, rather than a liberal, bent, although Clinton and Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for “neo-liberalism” which is not so different in many respects from “neo-conservativism”.

There are several problems with this. First of all, a 16-month withdrawal timetable would get you somewhere into the middle of 2010, well within the ballpark of the Iraqi government's own timetable--but then, Obama never said that 16 months was rock solid. He always said it was flexible, dependent upon events on the ground. Right now, the open question is how backloaded the withdrawal will be. Some--like General Jack Kean, security expert Ken Pollack and others--would like to see the bulk of the troops withdrawn only after the Iraqis have their regional and national elections in 2009. Others want a steady withdrawal, starting in January, with enough troops withdrawn and their replacements sent to Afghanistan in order to secure the crucial Afghan elections in September 2009. My guess is the a compromise will be worked out between the two groups, with two or three combat brigade in Afghanistan by late spring...and that we'll be down to a residual force in Iraq months before 2011 rolls around. (By the way, if my guess is accurate, the Army should have those brigades training right now for mountains rather than deserts. I've spoken with several senior military officers who are quite concerned that this hasn't yet happened. )

Second, the notion of having immediate summits with our enemies--especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-- was another right-wing distortion of Obama's actual position, which was to initiate lower level talks and gradually build to summits that would not have crippling preconditions (such as the Bush Administration's insistence that the Iranians stop creating nuclear fuel). Obama's campaign position still stands.

Finally, a more careful look at the new team will indicate that people like Clinton, Jones and Gates have never supported the sort of bellicose foreign policy that John McCain and his neoconservative staff was offering. Gates was quietly opposed to permanent bases in Iraq and supportive of increased contact with Iran and a new emphasis on the situation in Afghanistan. Gates' new Obama-approved staff--people like Richard Danzig and Michele Flournoy--are big fans of counterinsurgency warfare a la Petraeus, but like Petraeus (and unlike McCain) will be careful not to over-apply the "lessons" of Iraq in a very different theater. Jones was so opposed to the war in Iraq that he refused to serve as Centcom Commander and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when asked by Bush. He was brutally honest about the difficulties of nation-building in Iraq and the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. He signed an international petition against the Bush Administration's use of torture.

What Boot and the neocons will have to come to terms with now is that they were wrong and they have lost. There is a new national security alliance between multilateralist Democrats and realist Republicans--an alliance that precludes the witless bellicosity of the neoconservative right and the small strain of pacifist idealists on the left. The policy of the new administration will favor diplomacy over the use of force. That is not to say that Obama will never use force--but when he does, the chances are he'll likely known the difference between the local Shi'ites and Sunnis, Tajiks and Pashtuns. And so will his team.

And furthermore: Fred Kaplan on why Gates is an excellent choice.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!

This one, from Time.com's Thanksgiving Essentials photo essay, seems like it is just begging for a caption. Commenters?

At Barack Obama's news conference this morning, he declared: "At this defining moment for our nation, the old ways of thinking and acting just won't do. We are called to seek fresh thinking and bold new ideas." So it was striking to see that the person standing next to him was 81-year-old Paul Volcker, a figure from the Carter and Reagan eras. (It was also striking to see anyone tall enough to tower over Obama the way Volcker did.)

The President-elect stressed important Volcker's counsel was in helping him get elected: "Paul has been by my side throughout this campaign, providing a deep understanding of financial markets, extensive experience managing economic crises, and keen insight into the global nature of this particular crisis." As for the significance of Obama's appointing the former Fed chief to head his new Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Justin Fox suggests:

Given Volcker's history, it is awfully interesting.

In 1979, inflation was running in double digits and bond investors had lost all confidence in Washington's ability to get it under control. By grudgingly appointing Volcker, then the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (the job that Treasury-Secretary-in-waiting Tim Geithner holds now), Carter reassured markets and, it turned out, put monetary policy in the hands of somebody who was willing to sacrifice just about anything--including Carter's job and those of millions of other Americans--to get inflation under control. In Greider's telling, it was the beginning of an era where Wall Street called all the shots.

That era now seems to have come to an end in another period of "political panic and financial distress," and yet here is Paul Volcker again. He's been advising Obama for months. There was even talk that he might get the post of Treasury Secretary. What does his presence in the Obama camp mean?

Obviously the appointment is meant partly, just as it was in 1979, to reassure markets. Somebody investors trust is, if not in charge, at least standing at the President's side.

But I'd like to think there is more to it than that. Volcker is not an economist, but he seems to have internalized far better than most economics Ph.Ds the lesson that there is no free lunch. That's my interpretation--a more generous one than Greider's--of Volcker's brutal stand against inflation from 1979 through 1981. In the 1960s many economists had come to believe that inflating the currency was a simple and relatively safe way to keep the unemployment rate down--that is, a free lunch. Volcker put an end to that failed experiment.

Back in 2003, three rich families--Soros, Lewis, Sandler--decided to spend a few million dollars to create a new think tank in Washington. (They also recruited their friends.) It wasn't a lot of money. With a budget of $10 million or so when it started, the annual budget of the Center for American Progress now hovers around $25 million. Compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to run a campaign, or the tens of millions corporations and interest groups spend on lobbyists, this is chump change. But in terms of political power, the return on investment has been astronomical. There is no group in Washington with more influence at this moment in history. I have a story up on Time.com explaining the power of the group called CAP and its leader John Podesta.

[N]ot since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway. Just as candidate Obama depended on CAP during the campaign for opposition research and talking points, President-elect Obama has effectively contracted out the management of his own government's formation to Podesta. . . . Podesta himself is leading Obama's transition effort, holding press conferences to speak for the President-elect, with an operation beneath him filled with CAP alum. The transition's operations director, the general counsel and the co-director all have come over from similar jobs at the think tank. At least six other CAP alums or board members, including Daschle and former EPA Commissioner Carol Browner, continue to advise the transition or campaign on matters of policy; Daschle looks likely to become a part of Obama's cabinet as Secretary of Health and Human Services, in part because he wrote a book about health policy, with funding from CAP.

On the last days of President Bush.