White House finds Bush’s hidden $2.7T deficit.

President Obama has eliminated the stupid accounting tricks by the Bush administration and found the nation to be $2.7 trilliion more in debt over the next decade, Jackie Calmes writes in the New York Times. A Republican trashes the budget and leaves a Democrat to clean up the mess…shades of Jim Gilmore?

Will your core beliefs switch with the presidency?

We’ve just wrapped up the most awful eight years in at least a generation—probably more, but I’m not old enough to know for sure. Everything that could go wrong, did. Everything that President Bush could mangle, he did. It was planned incompetence, a looting of government by corrupt contractors, a gleeful demolition of the public …

“Nevermind that unitary executive thing.”

John Bolton and John Yoo aren’t so sure about this unitary executive thing, now that Barack Obama is going to be president. Let’s see who gets themselves twisted up more: Democrats who come to embrace the Bush/Yoo philosophy of President as King, or Republicans who suddenly don’t think it’s such a hot idea. My bet …

This weekend’s Obama moments.

As the reality of Obama-as-president gradually sinks in, I’ve had a few whoa moments this weekend. The first was his planned overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure, creating 2.5M jobs, as Mike Shear writes about in today’s Post. Infrastructure isn’t real exciting stuff, but the problem we have is that much of our nation’s infrastructure is …

Obama’s and Democrats’ victory.

We’ll all be chewing over tonight’s election results in the months ahead. I’m something close to numb at the moment, so accustomed am I to losing elections. But I do feel the beginnings of the scales falling from my eyes, a nascent understanding of what today means. As I watch spontaneous celebrations break out in …

A steady hand: Why voters are breaking for Obama.

Over at the Times, Stanley Fish offers a deft narrative of how the Barack Obama has managed to create and maintain such a solid lead: The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; …