Tom Hayden: "Can Podesta Craft a Transition to a New Progressive Era?" (Posted by Keith) by Keith

Tom Hayden wrote an interesting article over at HuffingtonPost.com on John Podesta, the chief of the transition team for the incoming Obama administration. It's worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

"Leaders of presidential transition teams are expected to be discreet, tight-lipped, button-down,
servants of power, but not quite so in the case of John Podesta. The senior member of the team setting up the new administration, Podesta also heads a progressive think tank and has authored his own book on progressive politics, which includes a draft inaugural speech.

Podesta's 2008 book The Power of Progress will be scanned by pundits seeking clues to the new administration's thinking, but that could be a false trail. Podesta has expressed specific views distinctly different from Obama's, especially on Iraq, where he has long favored a one-year pullout of all American troops. The value of Podesta's book is as a guide to where a progressive master of politics -- Podesta was chief of staff under Bill Clinton -- wants to see American policies evolve in the future.

Podesta is more than a technician of power. It should be of interest on the Left and Right that he grounds himself in the tradition of social movements, many of them radical in their time, which produced the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the civil rights revolution. He is well-read in these histories, and is a direct Chicago descendant of the white immigrant [Italian] working class that benefited so greatly from labor and social legislation. In addition, he has an intense awareness of the racist legacies that left so many blacks and Latinos excluded from the gains of those eras, "an important lesson that should chasten progressives to this day," he writes. It was during the populist and progressive eras, for example, that African-Americans were massively disenfranchised in the South, while white women were on the path to suffrage."

Read the rest here.