Ethics

Obama's First Big Missteps

By Ed Brayton

Obama has made his first two serious missteps as president-elect, which are: A) his mishandling of the Blagojevich situation and B) his invitation to Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural. Neither will be a big deal in the long run, but they're causing unnecessary difficulties for the campaign and they amount to unforced errors that only give his enemies ammunition against him.

The big mistake in regard to Blagojevich was in claiming, almost off the cuff during a press conference, to have had "no contact with the governor or his office" in regard to who should fill his Senate seat. Now reports are coming out that Obama did have contact with him through Rahm Emanuel and they did discuss who the president-elect would like to have replace him. But that seemed obvious to me long before those reports came out.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 23, 2008 (boomark / email).