The Baumgarten Report

Next secretary of state?

Perhaps she sees her presidential hopes now dashed forever. Perhaps she’d consider the appointment.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, who the Obama campaign didn’t even vet as a possible running mate, is now, according to the Associated Press, being considered by the transition team as the president-elect’s secretary of state.

The selection of Clinton would certainly put a mark on the new president’s foreign policy goals. Like her husband, the former president, Clinton’s face is well recognized on the international diplomatic scene. She would come into the job as a known quantity. She already has relationships with many world leaders.

It’s interesting that her name has leaked out because, during the campaign, Obama managed to keep a tight lid on things. This could be a precursor to how this administration might not be so very much different from others once it takes office. Beltway media leaks are the rule, rather than the exception these days.

Two other former Democratic presidential candidates, John Kerry and Bill Richardson, are among those whose names have also been mentioned as possible choices for secretary of state.

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brentdanley/2174928201/

Murphy

Of all the problems, domestic and foreign, that face President-elect Obama, none is more perennially critical than the quest for peace in the Middle East.

Joining us to talk about the prospects for a solution to that quagmire on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com Monday November 10 will be former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy.

Murphy spent 34 years as a career foreign service officer. After service in the U.S. Army he joined the foreign service of the State Department and from 1955-68 served in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

In 1971, President Nixon nominated him as ambassador to Mauritania and in 1974 he became ambassador to Syria. He then served as ambassador to the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. From 1983-1989 he served as assistant secretary of state under President Reagan. During that period he was. particularly active in the Israeli-Arab peace process.

Murphy has received the president’s Distinguished Service Award three times and the State Department’s Superior Honor Award twice. In 1985 he was named career ambassador, a title held by only five officers serving at any given time.

Retiring from government service in 1989, Murphy joined the Council on Foreign Relations in New York as senior fellow for the Middle East and has continued to visit that region several times a year.

Murphy is a frequent commentator for NPR, CNN, BBC and FOX News. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, The International Herald Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a trustee of the American University of Beirut, on the Board of the Near East Foundation and former chairman of the Middle East Institute in Washington.

To talk to Murphy at 5 PM New York time Monday November 10 CLICK HERE. There is no charge.

Paltalk is the largest multimedia interactive program on the Internet with more than 4 million unique users.

News Talk Online is also syndicated by CRN Digital Talk Radio to an additional 12 million households.

In this era of fractured partisan politics it was heartening to hear a Republican and a Democratic strategist agree over why the John McCain presidential campaign failed.

Democrat Hank Sheinkopf and Republican Steve Goldberg both believe McCain lacked a simple, direct message to present to the American people. While Barack Obama was clear, concise and consistent.

Both agree that McCain allowed the party to dictate how he conducted himself and that hurt him in the long run. The race, Goldberg suggests, might have been closer had McCain been permitted to be himself.

The two were my guests today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com.

Goldberg says McCain failed to define himself. Sheinkopf said Obama told the truth to the American people, while McCain, he believes, “didn’t want to tell the truth.”

Veracity, they agreed, is what a voting public, dissatisfied with the current administration and even more discontented over the performance of Congress, sought.

Both believe Obama faces immense obstacles. But both believe that and failing he has in delivering promises can be attributed for a long time to the state of the nation when President Bush left office.

All he has to do, says Sheinkopf, is be successful in several key areas to be considered an effective president.

The Hamas terror group believes the election of Barack Obama is an “historic victory” for the world and an opportunity to change U.S. foreign policy toward engagement with America’s foes.

Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’ chief political adviser in the Gaza Strip, made those comments in an interview with World Net Daily’s Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.

Yousef, speaking to Klein by cell phone from Gaza, said Hamas is drafting a letter of congratulations to be sent tomorrow directly to Obama. He disclosed the current draft of the letter praises the president-elect as “another John F. Kennedy, or great Roosevelt.”

“We want to be one of the first to congratulate him,” Yousef said. “This is an historic day, a turning point. I think this is the very first time in history that one country’s election concerned everyone everywhere all over world,” said Yousef.

“Everybody is looking forward to Obama’s change, for a change in the U.S. policy, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian equation, which is the mother of all conflicts.” Yousef told Klein he believes an Obama administration will be more willing to engage in dialogue with Hamas.

Today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com, Elizabeth Bagley, who served as special assistant to Ambassador Sol Linowitz for the Camp David Accords, said she believed Obama would make as one of his first priorities re-engaging in peace talks in the Middle East.

Obama has named as chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), who was born in Israel and whose father was a member of the Irgun.

Once again, the Catholic vote proved to be representative of how the rest of the nation voted in the presidential election.

Fifty-four percent of voting Catholics cast their ballots for Barack Obama.

Elizabeth Bagley, who was responsible for getting out the Catholic vote for Obama, says, around the world, people are celebrating his election. Because they feel he represents a return to diplomacy by the United States.

Bagley, who served in the diplomatic corps in both the Clinton and Carter administrations, believes the Bush administration repeatedly squandered opportunities to diplomatically solve some of the most serious problems of the world. A former U.S. ambassador to Portugal, Bailey, during an appearance on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com, said Clinton left office having brought the Israelis and the Palestinians close to resolution. Yet the Bush administration refused to build on those efforts, against the wishes of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

She believes one of Obama’s first orders of business will be to attempt to help broker a lasting peace in the Middle East. She also believes Obama will try to initiate diplomatic efforts with Iran.

Bagley

An official of the Barack Obama campaign will be my guest on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com Wednesday November 5 at 5 PM New York time.

Elizabeth Frawley Bagley will discuss how the campaign was so successful in resonating with voters and what President-elect Obama now faces as he looks forward to at least four years in the White House.

Bagley was senior advisor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright from 1997-2001. Prior to this appointment, she served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1994-1997.

An attorney specializing in trade and international law, Bagley was adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington until January 1993. She served as diplomatic liaison for the Clinton-Gore Presidential campaign. She was the State Department’s congressional liaison officer during the Carter administration and served as special assistant to Ambassador Sol Linowitz for the Camp David Accords.

To talk to Bagley on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com at 5 PM New York time Wednesday November 5 CLICK HERE. There is no charge.

Paltalk is the largest multimedia interactive program on the Internet with more than 4 million unique users.

News Talk Online is also syndicated by CRN Digital Talk Radio to an additional 12 million households.

The following is an e-mail sent by a friend of mine to family and friends that addresses health care costs and how a diagnosis of cancer in her teen aged son while they were vacationing in Italy impacted them far beyond what they’d ever imagined.

Char cites her family’s experience as reason to vote for Barack Obama. She is graciously permitting me to post it. Please take the time to read it and, if so motivated, comment.

Dear friends and family,

Our 15-year-old son went through a grueling regimen of chemotherapy just one year ago this week for a rare type of lymphoma. He’s now thriving and healthy. But our economy and our personal finances are not.

We need health care cost reform.

Jake was treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, less than an hour from our house (in good traffic). We thought we had a good health insurance plan, but unfortunately we were “out-of-network.”

Since Jake had a very rare form of lymphoma, Burkitt’s, and only a handful of cases are seen each year even at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, home to probably THE best pediatric cancer treatment center in the world, we weren’t about to take him to a local hospital that was in-network.

After the insurance payments, we owed more than $110,000 to the hospital and physician’s group. Some payments seemed arbitrary; the insurance company got to set the amount they would pay which they considered “usual and customary” costs for each procedure and chemo drug. We owed the remainder. We filed many many appeals and even won a few. Ultimately we played let’s make a deal with the hospital and they cut our bill in about half so we owe about $57,000.

Being healthy is, of course, priceless. But is it fair that we happen to be out-of-network because we have a certain type of insurance and not another?

Bill’s last job had Blue Cross Blue Shield. That company was in-network and our bill would have been zero. Is it fair that the health insurance company itself sets the rate at which it will pay?

Certain reimbursements have dropped dramatically in the last three years such as for CAT and PET scans. Jake has had many. Only once was a treatment held up because the insurance company wouldn’t pay, but many patients face that reality every day.

We believe that Obama’s plan would cover many more families and children than McCain’s. McCain’s plan of giving $5000 to every family to offset health care plan costs would be a drop in the bucket to what we needed. We pay more than $300 a month for the policy and pay $1000 deductible for each of us. McCain’s plan ultimately encourages companies to drop their employees’ insurance plans which will make health care for some employees and for those who have been ill, like Jake, pay far more.

Obama is committed to insuring that no one will ever be denied health care insurance coverage due to pre-existing conditions (something Jake will face all his life now) and that the health plan is as good as the one that covers the families of people in Congress.

If for no other reason (and there are many other good reasons) we encourage you to vote for Barack Obama and vote for health care reform!

No one ever thinks a catastrophic illness will happen to them, we didn’t either.

Jake received excellent care in Italy under its national health care program for 24 nights. The cost of the care was less than one night at Memorial Sloan Kettering. And he received fabulous health care at MSKCC, but the cost and stress on families is way too high.

Please go to vote and please consider our story and vote for Barack Obama. Please feel free to forward this to friends.

And, again, thanks to all of you for your prayers, food, support, love and blood, in the last year! We love you all and, even if you vote for the other side, we hope you will think about the changes that are needed to insure that all children, and adults have access to adequate health care in this country.

Best,

Char

Bad news for those challenging Barack Obama’s qualification to run for president of the United States. It seems he was born in Hawaii after all.

Three judges have tossed out lawsuits challenging Obama’s citizenship. Now the state of Hawaii has chimed in, in an attempt to further dispel the concern raised by some that the Democratic presidential candidate may have been born in Kenya, disqualifying him from running for president.

It seems that the state of Hawaii holds Obama’s original birth certificate. You know, the one that his detractors say doesn’t exist.

The state won’t release the document, however, citing a law that prohibits releasing it to anyone other than the person or someone else with a legal “tangible interest.” But the state’s health director says the original is on file.

Of course, there are those who will say, if the certificate exists why doesn’t Obama release the original? What is he hiding? But the fact is, anyone who continues to pursue this avenue of debate wasn’t about to consider voting for him anyway. So why would the campaign bother accommodating them?

Those individuals need not worry. They still have two days to argue that Obama, who for two decades attended and was married in a Christian church that they feel was anti-American, is really a Muslim.

All this noise about citizenship and religion (and sadly, in some cases, race) has served to distract some voters from the issues. So let me raise one about campaign “promises.”

They are pretty much meaningless because you can’t really promise something you know you may not be able to deliver.

In our system of government, the president is not an autocrat. He can’t just, for example, impose a new health care system on his own. He actually needs to convince the Congress to do that.

So many people I know are excited, as well they should be, about voting for president because they feel strongly for or against one candidate or the other. But many of them haven’t a clue about the policies or voting records of those running for Congress. And remember, as low as President Bush’s approval ratings are, Congress suffers even more so.

Then there are those running for local positions in our various municipalities. You know, the people making the decisions that really affect each of us directly. Like how often the garbage will be picked up. Whether there are enough cops on patrol to protect us. And whether the fire department has the proper equipment to put out a blaze in our homes.

Many of my friends and colleagues who are so engaged in the presidential campaign acknowledge they haven’t a clue who is running for Congress or for their city or town councils.

I encourage all of us to take the time today and tomorrow to at least brush up on those candidates as well. So we know who else we’re voting for on Tuesday. And why.

During Friday’s News Talk Online on Paltalk.com with guests Mary Walter from Fox News Talk and WACK News Director Rus Jeffrey there was mention by the latter of a study which showed that MSNBC’s news coverage is biased against John McCain.

The report by the Pew Research Center’s Project For Excellence In Journalism is linked HERE. It’s an important study, and helps us sort whether it’s a question of viewer bias clouding perception or reality.

The findings clearly are an indictment of MSNBC’s coverage. But, interestingly, they find no such political leanings by the cable network’s sister network NBC. In fact, the study finds that at NBC, ABC and CBS, reporting tends to be “more neutral.”

CNN, it found, was “somewhere in the middle of the cable spectrum” but “generally more negative (toward McCain) than the press overall.”

While many viewers find that unsurprising, equally expected were the findings with regard to Fox, which the Pew report concludes has been “more negative than the norm” toward Barack Obama.

McConnell

There are those who argue that the United States will be less secure if Barack Obama is elected president of the United States because our enemies will view him as weak and vulnerable and exploit that.

Others argue that the possibility of renewed terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is minimized with an Obama presidency because he understands diplomacy and will take steps to lower the anger level against the United States around the world. They say that John McCain is more likely to provoke a terrorist attack.

Then there are those who believe that, despite his other failings and his low approval ratings, one thing Pres. Bush has done for us is keep the fight “over there.” There have been no additional terrorist attacks (though some plots have been thwarted) they argue since September 11, 2001. Whoever is the next president, they say, needs to continue that policy of taking the fight to the terrorists.

But the nation’s intel chief says, it doesn’t really matter who the next president of the United States is. He is going to be tested by terrorists. Tested, very likely, on home soil.

In a Nashville speech, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell projects the next president, whether he be Barack Obama or John McCain, faces a volatile future. Sounding a bit like Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, McConnell, noted that the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. came early in the George W. Bush administration. He predicts whoever is elected on Tuesday will face an early surprise. During what he calls a “period of most vulnerability.”