from Harper's:

News in Review: Uh-oh

Mr. Emanuel is undoubtedly a partisan, but with centrist instincts. In his previous White House job, he oversaw President Bill Clinton’s effort to win passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement; he was a voice for pursuing issues such as welfare reform and co-authored a 2006 book, The Plan, with his former White House colleague Bruce Reed of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. The leftward precincts of the party may have more reason to be discomfited by Mr. Emanuel’s selection than Republicans do.

Washington Post story:

But Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the minority whip, who announced his retirement from leadership yesterday, cautioned Republicans against presuming that Democrats will “overreach” with a liberal agenda. Blunt said Obama ran his campaign carefully enough to suggest that he will not fall into the Capitol Hill traps that snared President Bill Clinton in 1993.

San Francisco Chronicle story:

During their campaigns for the White House and Congress, Democrats played up their ambitious plans to cool a warming planet, revive the economy and fix a broken health care system. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her first news conference since the party’s big election victory, warned Wednesday that Democrats might have to scale back the size of their proposals as tax revenues slow and federal budget deficits soar because of a sluggish economy. “I think it’s important for the American people to know that many of our options have been diminished because of the downturn in the economy,” Pelosi said. “We have a lot less money to draw upon.”

New York Times story:

President-elect Barack Obama has begun an effort to tamp down what his aides fear are unusually high expectations among his supporters, and will remind Americans regularly throughout the transition that the nation’s challenges are substantial and will take time to address. Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were startled, if gratified, by the jubilation that greeted the news of Mr. Obama’s victory in much of the United States and abroad. But while the energy of his supporters could be a tremendous political asset as Mr. Obama works to enact his agenda after taking office in January, his aides said they were looking to temper hopes that he would be able to solve the nation’s problems or fully reverse Bush Administration policies quickly and easily, especially given the prospect of a deep and long-lasting recession..Mr. Obama’s advisers said that the tone of his victory speech on Tuesday night—sober and devoid of the arm-pumping that would typically be in an address of that sort—reflected his awareness of these circumstances. Mr. Obama warned that the promises that led Americans to embrace his candidacy—be they as specific as expanding health care or as broad as changing the tone of Washington—might take as long a term to carry out.

Politico story:

The day after Barack Obama won the presidency, BGR Holding, once one of Washington’s dominant Republican-only lobbying shops, announced it had acquired a Democratic firm with close ties to the incoming administration. BGR’s acquisition of Westin Rinehart illustrates a broad restructuring on K Street that’s accelerating now that Democrats are poised to control both Congress and the White House. Republican heads of business trade groups are bracing for pink slips, and some corporate offices are giving Democratic lobbyists promotions to co-chair their shops and help open more doors on Capitol Hill and in the new administration… Westin Rinehart was founded by Morris L. Reid, a former senior adviser in the Clinton administration’s Commerce and Housing departments. He was in Chicago on Tuesday night when Obama was declared the winner of the White House.

With control of Legislative and Executive branches, the Democrats have a chance to prove to the American people that they are about real change. But will they? In many ways, the win for Obama is a huge step for American politics. But there is an even taller hurdle which must be cleared if there is to be any substantial change. There must be a shift in Washington from corporate interests to that of the citizens. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. Let us not rest easy just yet. We need real health care reform. We must be rid of the industrial military complex. We need real clean energy (clean coal? safe nuclear energy? oxymorons). We need NAFTA dramatically altered if not repealed completely. We need higher wages for the working poor. "Poor," that's a word we haven't heard much of all campaign. We need giant, greedy corporations to be regulated and held accountable for their abuses. We need to abandon No Child Left Behind and put money and resources into schools rather than tests mandated by a few large for-profit companies. Obama is better than Bush, but that is hardly enough. This is no time for complacency. Lets make sure we get real change, not slightly better. Let's hold them to their word.

Here's some evidence of a little too much corporate control of the newly Democratic Washington:
From OpenSecrets.org
as of a few days ago, top contributors to Obama campaign:
University of California $909,283
Goldman Sachs $874,207
Harvard University $717,230
Microsoft Corp $714,108
Google Inc $701,099
JPMorgan Chase & Co $581,460
Citigroup Inc $581,216
National Amusements Inc $543,859
Time Warner $508,148
Sidley Austin LLP $492,445
Stanford University $481,199
Skadden, Arps et al $473,424
Wilmerhale Llp $466,679
UBS AG $454,795
Latham & Watkins $426,924
Columbia University $426,516
Morgan Stanley $425,102
IBM Corp $415,196
University of Chicago $414,555
US Government $400,819

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from Harper's:

News in Review: Uh-oh

Democrats