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Passing time playing pin some tales on donkeys

Wednesday, November 26, 2008 10:40 AM EST

Barack Obama graced the cover of Time magazine six consecutive weeks before Dec. 1's "The Sorry State of American Health."

If he can't save the banking or auto industries, he's been a one-man media stimulus package.

Hillary for Secretary of State?: Would Obama really offer the most prestigious job in his Cabinet to a woman whose foreign policy experience he once dismissed as consisting of having tea with ambassadors?

And would Sen. Clinton accept a job offer from a man whose national-security credentials, she once said, started and ended with "a speech he made in 2002?"

Nowhere did the two candidates clash more last spring than on the 3 a.m. crisis calls to handle international relations in our dangerous world.

Would this decision mean Obama's serious about his declared intention to follow another Illinois President's model of assembling a "team of rivals" to run his government?

"I've been spending a lot of time reading Lincoln," Obama told Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes" - the highest-rated episode of any TV show this season because it also covered the first daughters' school prospects, a White House puppy and Obama's diplomatic relations with his mother-in-law.

"There is a humility about his approach to government, even before he was President, that I just find very helpful," the Democrat Obama said of the Republican Lincoln.

Sen. Clinton could repair the U.S.'s battered image overseas while he focuses on the economy.

She proved herself an able team player down the homestretch.

Cynics wonder, however, whether such a decision might not better illustrate his understanding of old-school politics.

Bring her into the fold and sideline a potential 2012 foe while putting her globe-galloping husband on a leash.

When Clinton said his wife would make a really great Secretary of State, he was giving a paid speech to the National Bank of Kuwait.

He earned more than $10 million last year speaking.

It got pretty awkward when Hillary led the effort to block the Dubai deal for six U.S. port terminals as an "unacceptable risk" to national security, then it came out her husband had been advising the other side.

This would come on top of the Clinton reunion already in progress, from Eric Holder as Attorney General to Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff.

Ed Lowe wouldn't be happy: Gov. Jennifer Granholm is on Obama's advisory team, but the Kitty Litter creator would be clamoring for inclusion of job-creating entrepreneurs among all the economic eggheads.

This is change?: Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle from South Dakota, who lost his seat to a Republican four years ago, is rewarded for his early public support of President-elect Obama with Health and Human Services Secretary.

His wife, a transportation lobbyist, served as acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration in the 1990s.

Daschle stayed on in Washington with the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and the Bipartisan Policy Center with Democrat George Mitchell of Maine and Republicans Bob Dole of Kansas and Howard Baker of Tennessee.

Daschle wrote a book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis."

Jeff Emanuel, legislative specialist on health care at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News, says Daschle's selection sends a "very disappointing signal about what direction his administration will go in terms of health care policy and 'reform.'

"Since leaving the Senate, Mr. Daschle has agitated for a total overhaul of the U.S. health care system, calling for the implementation of a 'private system within a federal framework,' which would be overseen by a health care equivalent of the Federal Reserve, which utilizes the power of the government to 'insure harmonization' within American health care.

"Further, Mr. Daschle has pointed to the U.K.'s national health service, with its waiting lists, rationing of care and nonsensical drug and benefit policies, as a model to which the U.S. system should aspire."

A Colbert Christmas: Stephen Colbert shucks his suit for a cardigan sweater, red turtleneck and furry boats and holes up in a mountain cabin to make like Bing Crosby and Andy Williams (what? He couldn't get David Bowie?) on Comedy Central.

Elvis Costello, that Avril Lavigne for old people, shows a softer side as the protopunk is devoured by - what else? - a bear.

Watching it will make you feel like you mixed egg nog with fruit cake.

John Eby is editor of the Dowagiac Daily News. Email him at: john.eby@leaderpub.com

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