She had at least a touch of the magic--and a sense of when and how to use it.

Now, after a decade of writing and editing books, raising money for public schools in New York City and leading a mostly private life, Ms. Kennedy is seeking the Senate seat that will be left vacant by Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the culture of celebrity, the media have instantly deemed her a leading candidate, much to the frustration of elected officials who feel they have earned a chance to win what she would merely take.

The arguments advanced on her behalf by many of her supposed friends have ranged from sentimental to crass. For more than half a century, the United States Senate has been the center of the Kennedy family's public service. Her late father was a senator before he ran for president. Her uncle Robert F. Kennedy occupied that same seat until his untimely death in 1968. Her uncle Ted Kennedy, a towering figure in that body, is gravely ill with brain cancer. And while there are other members of the family who could plausibly seek a Senate seat, most notably the environmental leader Robert Jr. and human rights activist Kerry, they have stepped aside in favor of their cousin.

Aside from her candidacy's romantic appeal, there is also the money. Democratic leaders say they believe that Ms. Kennedy is uniquely equipped to raise the estimated $70 million or more needed to hold the seat through a special election in 2010 and the regularly scheduled contest two years later. She is not without resources of her own, and she has demonstrated considerable prowess in raising funds for education, ballet and other causes. Perhaps that ought not be a major factor in selecting a Senate candidate, but of course it is.

Aside from money, celebrity and tradition, what else does Ms. Kennedy need to propel her candidacy? New York Governor David Paterson, who will actually make the interim appointment, may have asked himself that question when she called to inform him of her interest. As he told reporters, "She'd like at some point to sit down and tell me what she thinks her qualifications are."

In the governor's remark, there is an edge that expresses what many politicians may be thinking. Unlike members of Congress who want the promotion, Ms. Kennedy, a nonpracticing attorney, has little familiarity with the legislative process. Unlike them, she has never tested herself in the brutal arena of electoral politics. And unlike many of them, she has lived in a world of privilege quite remote from the concerns of most voters.

It is not hard to imagine the difficulties Ms. Kennedy might confront in a race against someone like Representative Peter King, the first Republican to declare his intention to run for the Senate seat no matter whom the governor appoints. How would the soft-spoken lady from the Upper East Side hold up in a debate against a self-styled populist from Long Island?

Rod Blagojevich has lined himself up to be the fourth Chief Executive of the Land of Lincoln since 1974 to be offered a long- term residency at the Gray Bar Hotel. That Springfield Capitol building must be quite a feat of social engineering. It seems to work like a halfway house in reverse. He has single handedly smashed all doubts that Chicago is to corruption what Santaland is to elves. What Los Angeles is to plastic surgery stitching. Upper Michigan and deer ticks. The list goes on. Seattle and mildew. See.

The list of alleged infractions are heinous enough that had Spiro Agnew lived through this, his little head would have spun right off his neck like a power assisted drill bit. On top of giving a bad name to people with bad names, Blago is also accused of putting his appointment of President- Elect Barack Obama's successor in the US Senate up for sale to the highest bidder. Which is bad in a comic book villain sort of way. But then you think... "Jeez, selling a Senate seat. Hmm. Bet we could put a serious dent into something like an auto bailout that way. Besides, how much worse could it get?" But that discussion is best left for another time.

Asked to comment on his home state compadre, the soon to be Prez attempted to maintain a proper distance, which you know if he had his way, would consist of an additional 5,000 miles, 3 languages and a parallel universe or two. He even pretended to have trouble pronouncing the Gov's name. Tough love, perhaps. But with friends like this, who needs rabid back stabbing turkey vultures with poisonous talons?

While the Governor remains as cluelessly defiant as his hair, calls are being made from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party for Blagojevich to resign. Calls are also being made for Blagojevich to contract a bout of flesh eating bacteria. To climb under an igneous rock. To curl up and die. Evaporate. Disappear. Implode. Take a midwinter nocturnal swim in Lake Michigan wearing cement overshoes, leaving behind a note declaring himself to be a closeted Republican.

Like any survey that asks people to answer simply yes or no, however, the polling on the auto bailout reveals little or nothing about the information (or misinformation) behind the negative response. As they prepare to vote, the legislators should also consider how voters will feel when the nation suffers the full consequences of a cratering auto industry--and find out that the facts were not quite what they seemed to be.

Media coverage of the auto crisis has been powerfully biased against assistance to the industry, in part because reporters, editors and TV producers--not to mention the corporate owners--have yet to shed the outdated free-market fundamentalism that has shaped American journalism for so many years. The worst example in recent weeks has been the constant repetition of skewed statistics on auto worker compensation, which was said to exceed $70 per hour.

Such stories were meant to emphasize the supposed greed of the unionized workforce. Yet that $70-plus figure, which actually includes pensions and health benefits to retirees, grossly distorted what Detroit's assembly mechanics receive in their weekly paychecks. And it most certainly stoked hostility to those workers and the industry among Americans who listened to the crude propaganda.

Then there was the incessantly repeated story of the stupid auto executives who flew to Washington for Congressional hearings on their private jets. That was true and deplorable, of course, but scarcely of great relevance to the issue of whether America should preserve its manufacturing base and a million jobs in auto and related industries.

What Americans may not know about the problems of the automotive business seems at least as pertinent as what they have been told so far. The chances are that voters outraged over those mythical $70-an-hour wages have no idea how heavily the livelihood of auto workers in competing countries is subsidized by their governments--starting with health care and moving on to child care, pensions and a host of other benefits that American workers have not begun to imagine.

Such comparisons tend to be absent from most mainstream analysis of the auto crisis. Equally relevant and usually missing, too, is the news that competitor nations are preparing to provide many billions in aid to their car companies. Right now, the European Union is considering a loan package to the continent's auto industries that may exceed $50 billion.

Washington's first $15 billion loan to the Big Three will likewise come from a Department of Energy program to encourage new green technology. So what is the difference? In Europe, there is far less controversy over preserving critical jobs and the industrial base. And in Europe, there is broad recognition of a basic fact: The precipitous drop in sales confronted by the automakers has been caused by economic conditions beyond the control of those companies. As credit dried up, so did car sales.

None of this is meant to suggest that the management of GM. Ford and Chrysler--or the United Auto Workers, for that matter--shouldn't pay a high price for their failure to restructure in years past and their resistance to modernizing their products and processes. Taxpayers must be protected, just as they were when the government loaned billions to Chrysler.

But it is ironic to think that the Bush administration and Congress would swiftly appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to save the same firms whose stupidity and criminality drove the economy down--while begrudging a far smaller amount to a major industry brought to ruin by the financial crash.

But the meaning of the Shinseki appointment goes well beyond any retroactive criticism of the war (although Obama supporters troubled by the seemingly hawkish character of the new national security cabinet will surely appreciate that aspect).

By selecting a nonpartisan flag officer who clashed directly with the Bush White House over his concern for the troops -- a Vietnam veteran who returned to duty despite a partial amputation injury - Barack Obama paid tribute to every soldier, sailor and marine, retired or active, officer or enlisted, who spoke up against the abuse of the military and its traditions by the departing administration. The first Asian-American four-star is "held in high regard" by his comrades, as Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America noted in welcoming the appointment.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Of course, it turned out that Rush was being his old cynical self. He wasn't praising Hillary's talent, but Obama's cunning at keeping his enemy close.

So it went with much of the analysis before and after Clinton was chosen for the premier Cabinet post. The political story line asked if she would be a "teammate" or a "rival" in the "Team of Rivals" metaphor du jour. And was she close enough to the president to be his international right hand?

The psychological story line asked, however, whether we were getting yet another new Hillary. A National Review blogger described her as an "enigma who is best seen in stages; as a series of parts, not a whole."

A series of parts? Not a whole? Hillary, lawyer, wife, mother, first lady, senator, presidential candidate, secretary of state. I was reminded of Mary Catherine Bateson's classic book, "Composing a Life," which describes life as the art of improvisation.

Life is not a straight and narrow march of achievement, but a quilt made of many parts. Reading the trajectory of many women's lives with their interruptions and conflicts, twists and turns, Bateson saw creativity, not confusion. "These are not lives without commitment, but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined."

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president and lost. But one of the lifelong commitments she will bring to her new role is to improve the rights and everyday lives of the world's women. These issues will not be the "women's page" in her portfolio, but integral to the way she views the world and, perhaps, to the way America can exercise its power.

Says Melanne Verveer, who traveled with first lady Hillary Clinton through more than 80 countries as her chief of staff, "she didn't just drop by the palace." She was always engaged in the struggles of women. In 1995, Clinton led the U.S. delegation to a U.N. conference on women's rights in Beijing. There, she electrified the delegates and challenged the hosts, saying "If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all."

Thirteen years later those words are still radical in parts of the world. We have learned from the Taliban and others that the enemies of American values take their first shots at the freedom of women. But the Beijing conference jump-started change. The world understands that rape is not a byproduct of war but a war crime. The U.N. now defines violations of women's rights as an international security issue, and nearly 90 countries have passed laws against domestic violence.

Still, the new secretary of state will be operating in a world in which three-fifths of the world's poorest people are women and girls.
Seventy percent of the children not in school are girls. Half a million women die every year in childbirth. One in three women will suffer from the pandemic of violence -- rape, honor killings, genital mutilation. But only
16 percent of legislators are women, and less than 3 percent of the people at the table when peace treaties are signed are female.

"What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish," Clinton said in Beijing. "If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well."

Obama, whose own mother worked in microcredit loans for Third World women, gets it. Joe Biden, who co-sponsored the International Violence Against Women Act, gets it. But international activists are also looking to be guided by Hillary's star power.

Part of a life? Or a whole life composed and recomposed? Well, Hillary regarded Eleanor Roosevelt as a role model. Mrs. Roosevelt's second or third or perhaps fourth act was to get the world to agree to the first Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was adopted exactly 60 years ago this month. Now it's Hillary Clinton's improvisational turn.

Of course, it turned out that Rush was being his old cynical self. He wasn't praising Hillary's talent, but Obama's cunning at keeping his enemy close.

So it went with much of the analysis before and after Clinton was chosen for the premier Cabinet post. The political story line asked if she would be a "teammate" or a "rival" in the "Team of Rivals" metaphor du jour. And was she close enough to the president to be his international right hand?

The psychological story line asked, however, whether we were getting yet another new Hillary. A National Review blogger described her as an "enigma who is best seen in stages; as a series of parts, not a whole."

A series of parts? Not a whole? Hillary, lawyer, wife, mother, first lady, senator, presidential candidate, secretary of state. I was reminded of Mary Catherine Bateson's classic book, "Composing a Life," which describes life as the art of improvisation.

Life is not a straight and narrow march of achievement, but a quilt made of many parts. Reading the trajectory of many women's lives with their interruptions and conflicts, twists and turns, Bateson saw creativity, not confusion. "These are not lives without commitment, but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined."

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president and lost. But one of the lifelong commitments she will bring to her new role is to improve the rights and everyday lives of the world's women. These issues will not be the "women's page" in her portfolio, but integral to the way she views the world and, perhaps, to the way America can exercise its power.

Says Melanne Verveer, who traveled with first lady Hillary Clinton through more than 80 countries as her chief of staff, "she didn't just drop by the palace." She was always engaged in the struggles of women. In 1995, Clinton led the U.S. delegation to a U.N. conference on women's rights in Beijing. There, she electrified the delegates and challenged the hosts, saying "If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all."

Thirteen years later those words are still radical in parts of the world. We have learned from the Taliban and others that the enemies of American values take their first shots at the freedom of women. But the Beijing conference jump-started change. The world understands that rape is not a byproduct of war but a war crime. The U.N. now defines violations of women's rights as an international security issue, and nearly 90 countries have passed laws against domestic violence.

Still, the new secretary of state will be operating in a world in which three-fifths of the world's poorest people are women and girls.
Seventy percent of the children not in school are girls. Half a million women die every year in childbirth. One in three women will suffer from the pandemic of violence -- rape, honor killings, genital mutilation. But only
16 percent of legislators are women, and less than 3 percent of the people at the table when peace treaties are signed are female.

"What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish," Clinton said in Beijing. "If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well."

Obama, whose own mother worked in microcredit loans for Third World women, gets it. Joe Biden, who co-sponsored the International Violence Against Women Act, gets it. But international activists are also looking to be guided by Hillary's star power.

Yet, it all does hang on him. Yes, him. Obama. The man. The superstar, and not that supporting cast of retreads from a failed past that have popped up in his administration in the making. Now that we have the list of his top economic and foreign policy picks -- mostly a collection of folks who wouldn't know change if it slapped them upside the head -- we've got to hope that it's Obama who is using them, and not the other way around.

Maybe he picked a bunch of Wall Street insiders to send a comforting message to the financial community that Obama was turning to folks just like them to get us out of the mess that they created. So far, Wall Street hasn't done anything to pay back the taxpayers for the upward of a trillion dollars wasted on that bailout. The credit markets remain frozen, and indeed these banking grinches are stealing Christmas by further cutting individuals' credit lines.

If there is a grand arc to Obama's appointments strategy, it seems aimed at providing the appearance of continuity on the part of a leader who still promises to be very different. Clearly that was the case in retaining Robert Gates as secretary of defense and Marine Gen. Jim Jones as his White House national security adviser. Both choices could have been far worse. Jones has been involved in the exercise of "soft power" initiatives and seems like an otherwise sensible fellow. Gates has been a vast improvement over Donald Rumsfeld in grasping the limits of military power.

Gates also dared challenge the military-industrial complex over egregious military spending on projects such as the $65 billion F-22 stealth fighter plane that was designed to penetrate Soviet air defenses that were never built and has yet to fly a combat sortie in either the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. That's a start on cutting military spending, which under President Bush grew to be higher than at any time since World War II, exceeding the levels of both the Korean and Vietnam wars. Thanks to Bush, the United States now spends as much as all of the rest of the world's nations combined to defeat an enemy armed with a weapons arsenal that, in the case of the 9-11 attacks, could have been purchased for a couple hundred bucks at Home Depot.

Unfortunately, on Monday Obama stuck with the absurd "war on terror" language he inherited from Bush in describing the attacks in Mumbai conducted by 10 lightly armed fanatics who should have been quickly dispatched by a well-functioning local paramilitary force. These terrorists did not, as available evidence would indicate, have anything to do with the Taliban or al-Qaida based in Afghanistan, where the United States continues to wage the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq, that Obama invoked during the presidential campaign: "Afghanistan is where the war on terror began and where it must end."

Both wars are bad in representing exactly the wrong way to deal with "terror," which should properly be thought of as representing pathology to be excised with surgical precision rather than bludgeoned with conventional warfare, which only recruits new fanatics through the killing of innocent civilians.

Finally, the appointment of Hillary Rodham Clinton seems a good one. To paraphrase Obama's remark during the primary debates, Hillary is peaceable enough and also has the smarts to make a fine secretary of state. Her more hawkish rhetorical side will be muted by the position's obligation to emphasize diplomacy. My prediction is that she will leave her mark by exploiting her pro-Israel creds to complete President Bill Clinton's once promising Mideast peace initiatives to finally provide the Palestinians, and Israelis, with viable states.

But how else is one to respond to Barack Obama's picking the very folks who helped get us into this financial mess to now lead us out of it? Watching the president-elect's Monday introduction of his economic team, my brother-in-law Pete said, "You can see the feathers coming out of their mouths," as the foxes were once again put in charge of the henhouse.

He didn't have time to expound on his point, having to get ready to go sort mail in his job at the post office, but he showed me a statement from Citigroup showing that the interest rate on Pete the Postal Worker's credit card was 28.9 percent, an amount that all major religions would justly condemn as usurious.

Moments earlier, Obama had put his seal of approval on the Citigroup bailout, which his new economic team, led by proteges of Citigroup Executive Committee Chairman Robert Rubin, enthusiastically endorsed. A bailout that brings to $45 billion the taxpayer money thrown at Citigroup and the guarantee of $306 billion for the bank's "toxic securities" that would have been illegal if not for changes in the law that Citigroup secured with the decisive help of Rubin and Lawrence Summers, the man who replaced him as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration.

As Summers stayed on to ensure passage of deregulatory laws that enabled enormous banking greed, Rubin was rewarded with a $15-million-a-year executive position at Citigroup, a job that only got more lucrative as the bank went from one disaster, beginning with its involvement with Enron in which Rubin played an active role, to its huge role in the mortgage debacle. It is widely acknowledged that Citigroup fell victim to a merger mania, which Rubin and Summers made legal during their tenure at Treasury.

Yet despite that dismal record of dismantling sound regulation, Summers has been picked by Obama to be the top White House economic adviser, and another Rubin disciple, Timothy Geithner, is the new treasury secretary. Geithner, thanks in part to the strong recommendation of Rubin, had been appointed chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank after working for Rubin and Summers during the Clinton years. Once at the New York Fed, he was the main government official charged with regulating Citigroup, a task at which he obviously failed. Yet over the weekend, it was Geithner who hammered out the Citigroup bailout deal with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and a very actively involved Rubin.

As The Washington Post reported, Paulson had indicated last week that no further bailouts were planned before the new administration took office until "Rubin, an old colleague from Goldman Sachs, told Paulson in phone calls that the government had to act." Rubin conceded in an interview with the Post that he had played a key role in the politics of the bailout.

This outrageous conflict of interest in which Rubin gets to exploit his ties to both the outgoing and incoming administrations was best described by Washington Post writer Steven Pearlstein: "The ultimate irony, of course, is that just as Rubin and Co. at Citi were being bailed out by the Bush administration, President-elect Barack Obama was getting set to announce a new economic team drawn almost entirely from Rubin acolytes."

As opposed to the far tougher deal negotiated on the bailout of AIG, the arrangement with Citigroup leaves the executives, including Rubin, who brought Citigroup to the brink of ruin, still in charge. Nor is there any guarantee of the value of the mortgage bundles that taxpayers will be guaranteeing. That is because, as candidate Obama clearly stated in his major economics address back in March, the deregulation pushed though during the Clinton years ended transparency in banking.

Looking over the names of the new Obama appointees to important positions in the Treasury and the White House, critics on the left have dismissed them as "Clintonite retreads" or worse. According to this gloomy analysis, the incoming administration is poised to repeat the mistakes of the past rather than create new policy for the future, by staffing itself with economists wedded to old ideologies of deregulation and budget-balancing, rather than government intervention and public investment.

If résumés represented destiny, then there would certainly be cause for concern.

After all, most of Mr. Obama's top advisers--notably including Tim Geithner, the new Treasury secretary, and Larry Summers, the new director of the National Economic Council--either served in the Clinton administration or have some other connection to Robert Rubin, the man responsible for "Rubinomics" when he oversaw the Treasury during those years. The combination of fiscal discipline and deregulation that bear his name, once lauded as the foundation of an unprecedented boom, seem not only irrelevant but wrongheaded. His reputation has been badly damaged, meanwhile, by the fall of Citigroup, where he oversaw a ruinous and seemingly reckless investment strategy.

Long gone are the days when a smiling Rubin appeared on the covers of the newsmagazines alongside Alan Greenspan, whose record as Federal Reserve chairman and avatar of laissez-faire economics is equally discredited. By now it would be natural for Mr. Summers--who succeeded Mr. Rubin at Treasury--to wish that everyone would forget his was the third face on those same magazine covers.

But when liberals point to Mr. Summers and other members of the Obama team, crying betrayal, they misunderstand the strategy behind those appointments. The most important thing to remember about the president-elect as he prepares to govern is that he takes the long view--and that he knows how to make a reasonable case for radical change. He has not taken one step back from the commitments he articulated during his campaign.

Indeed, Mr. Obama has steadfastly refused to scale back his platform of spending initiatives, from infrastructure to health care, despite all the tut-tutting commentary. Instead, even as he rolled out his team, he pledged a very substantial spending increase during the first two years of his term as the only means to prevent the recession from plunging into something far worse.

And his appointees will implement the Obama program, not only because that is what he tells them to do but because that is what they have come to believe is best for the country. Whatever Mr. Summers or Mr. Geithner or any of the other centrists on the new team may once have said or thought, they will pursue a course of major counter-cyclical spending, public investment and strong new regulation.

Several of the significant figures chosen by Mr. Obama, such as budget chief Peter Orszag and advisor Jason Furman, have defended liberal priorities throughout their careers. The economists who have influenced them include not just Mr. Rubin but also Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning progressive.

But even Mr. Rubin--who once came to symbolize the Democratic Party's submission to market fundamentalism--has endorsed a new progressive direction. The Washington think tank associated with Mr. Rubin, known as the Hamilton Project, promotes public investment and a refurbished social safety net.

This is the usual post-election nonsense from the Braindead Megaphone, as author George Saunders famously calls our political and media noise machine. When George W. Bush wins by 3 million votes, the megaphone blares announcements about a conservative mandate that Democrats must respect. When Obama wins by twice as much, the same megaphone roars about Democrats having no mandate to do anything other than appease conservatives.

It's confusing, isn't it? We hazily recall backing Obama and his progressive platform. Yet, the megaphone's re-educative shock treatment aims to wipe away that memory and conjure eternal conservatism from our spotless minds.

Luckily, we have polling to maintain our sanity. Public opinion surveys show most Obama voters knew the Illinois senator is a progressive when they cast their ballots - and those votes for him weren't just anti-Bush protests, they were ideological. According to a post-election poll by my colleagues at the Campaign for America's Future, 70 percent of Americans say they want conservatives to help this progressive president enact his decidedly progressive agenda.

Sensing the enormity of these numbers, Obama seems ready to back a "big bang" of far-reaching initiatives. "We can't afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign," he said in his first radio address as president-elect.

Based on advertisements, Obama identified no more important priority than guaranteeing health care for all citizens. As the Campaign Media Analysis Group reported, he devoted more than two-thirds of his total television budget to ads that included health care themes. Consequently, a Pew poll found 77 percent of Americans said health care would be a decisive concern in their presidential vote.

The moral case for universal health care is obvious. In the world's richest country - in a country that builds lavish sports stadiums and showers Wall Street with trillion-dollar bailouts - 18,000 people die each year because they lack health insurance. We permit this annual massacre while our wasteful system exacerbates our debt and saps our economic competitiveness by forcing us to spend more money per capita on health care than any other nation. That said, if morality alone prompted solutions, this problem would have been addressed long ago. Overcoming inertia on such a thorny issue requires budget pressure - which Obama definitely faces. While some claim the deficit should preclude bold health care legislation, it's the other way around. The Congressional Budget Office says America's fiscal gap is "driven primarily by rising health care costs," meaning a fix is an imperative. "People ask whether (Obama) has the fiscal breathing room to push health-care reform," economist Jared Bernstein told the Washington Post. "He doesn't have the fiscal breathing room not to do health-care reform."

Additionally, as with everything in Washington, a political motive is needed for action - and even conservatives acknowledge Democrats have such a motive when it comes to health care.

Fifteen years ago, Republican strategist William Kristol warned that the Clinton administration's universal health care proposals represented "a serious political threat to the Republican Party" because, if passed, they "will revive the reputation" of Democrats as "the generous protector of middle-class interests."

As we all remember, Democrats failed to capitalize on the health care opportunity. But Kristol's prophecy was correct then, as it is now. With huge Democratic majorities in Congress come 2009, only the Braindead Megaphone is in Obama's way.

David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network - both nonpartisan organizations. To comment, go to his blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

I don't say this snidely, although I was charmed at Inouye's hope that he was "sufficiently prepared to succeed my mentor." The rite of passage reminded me a little bit of Prince Charles, who just turned 60 as king-in-waiting. Waiting, that is, for his 82-year-old mother to pass the crown.

But I say it, rather, because this year, the air has been filled with talk of generational change. Ted Kennedy, the ailing elder of Democratic politics, set the tone when he took his brother's torch and passed it verbally to Barack Obama. Since then, torches have illuminated the conversation.

In 1961, the transition from 70-year-old Ike to 43-year-old JFK symbolized the arrival of the postwar, post-Depression New Frontier. Now the election of Obama is alternately described as the arrival of the Twitter age, the Jon Stewart era, or the ascendancy of the post-racial and post-partisan generation.

Of course, Obama took that mantle of change on his own shoulders last year when he addressed his civil rights elders at the 42nd anniversary of the Selma march. Expressing gratitude to the "Moses generation," he identified himself as part of the "Joshua generation." If Moses led the people through the desert years, Joshua was anointed to lead them into the promised land. Obama both praised and put the "Moses generation" in its
place: history.

Generational change was not without its tension this year. In the black community, Jesse Jackson bristled at his minor role. The man who had stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and won more than a dozen presidential primaries was heard on an open mike slamming the new kid on his turf. In turn, 67-year-old Jesse Sr. was upbraided by his 42-year-old son, Jesse Jr., for his "ugly rhetoric." Yet on election night, one of the most emotional images was of the tears trailing down the senior Jackson's face.

There was generational tension as well among women during the primary when many second-wave feminist mothers supporting Hillary split with daughters supporting Obama. Mothers felt daughters had "sold out."Daughters bristled at mothers patronizing or, should I say, matronizing them. It was, perversely, their joint opposition to Sarah Palin that healed this rift.

Still, it does seem odd that the imagery of generational change would be in the forefront right now when the most profound social change may be from something else: longevity.

When the torch was passed to JFK, the average life expectancy was 74.
As Obama becomes president, it is 78. Today, there are 16 million Americans in their 70s, 9 million in their 80s.

We are not just living longer, but also healthier. Age itself is undergoing a vast transition like those magazine covers that boast: 60 is the new 50 or even the new 40. Twenty years ago, one in 10 seniors worked; now it's one in six. About 70 percent of boomers expect to work after 65.
Even before the economic meltdown, older workers were postponing retirement. At 55 and 65, many are thinking more about renewing than retiring.

Indeed in the real world of politics, the torch of vice president has been passed to Joe Biden, age 66. Hillary Clinton is being considered as the new secretary of state at age 61. In the Senate, the average age is 62 and there are three times as many senators in their 70s as in their 40s.

There are, to be sure, still fault lines along the old generational borders. Aging baby boomers are blamed if they stay at work, blocking access to the next rung up the ladder. Boomers are also blamed if they retire, devouring the incomes of their children, who are paying for Medicare and Social Security.

Yet Rubin and Summers are highly visible in the Obama transition team, with Summers widely touted as Obama's pick for secretary of the treasury. New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, who also worked in the treasury department under Rubin and Summers, is the other leading candidate. But it was Summers who most vehemently pushed for congressional passage of that drastic deregulation measure, the Financial Services Modernization Act, which eliminated the New Deal barriers against mergers of commercial and investment banks, as well as insurance companies and stock brokers. Standing at his side as President Bill Clinton signed the legislation, Summers heralded it as "a major step forward to the 21st century" -- and what a wonderful century it's proving to be.

It was also Summers who worked in cahoots with Enron and banking lobbyists, and who backed Republican Sen. Phil Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned any effective government regulation of the newly unleashed derivatives market. The result was not only a temporary boon to Enron, which soon collapsed under its unbridled greed, but also to the entire Wall Street financial community.

The only opposition from within the Clinton administration came from Brooksley E. Born, who as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, dared defy Summers and Rubin, as well as Greenspan. In frequent appearances before Congress, she warned that the burgeoning derivatives trading "threatens our economy without any federal agency knowing about it."

In reward for her prescience, Born, a highly regarded legal expert on derivatives, was treated to scornful attacks from the old boys' network, led (again) by Rubin, Greenspan and Summers, who questioned her competency and insisted it was she who threatened the stability of the market.

That sexism, as well as stupidity and greed, might have played a role in the dismissal of Born's concerns has been raised by some of Summers' critics, who were still smarting even after his subsequent forced departure from the presidency of Harvard University after disparaging women's innate ability to grasp mathematics and science.

"It was Larry Summers who called her up and screamed at her," Amy Siskind, co-founder of the New Agenda, a women's rights group that grew out of the Hilary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, told the Boston Globe to support her view that Summers is a "known misogynist."

Whatever the motives, Born was painfully right in her warnings and Summers was totally wrong in overseeing the passage of legislation that summarily prevented any government regulation of the debt instruments that have proved so disastrous. I don't know if Born, now retired at 68, would be interested in the treasury secretary position, but she is certainly far more qualified than thee other candidates under consideration.

Barring that possibility, why not go with Sheila Bair, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), who has distinguished herself by proposing a sterling alternative example of how to deal with the banking collapse? It is Bair who has most forcefully advanced the goal, advocated by Obama in his recent "60 Minutes" interview, of putting homeowners before banks. Under her leadership, the FDIC has made sure that the insured banks, which it supervises and occasionally takes over, act to prevent foreclosures rather than using government handouts to finance new bank mergers.

While Mr. Obama displays both confidence and maturity in embracing his former adversaries, he must expect cries of outrage and disappointment from his own supporters. If the prospect of appointing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state irritates the Obama base, what will they make of keeping the man who has executed President Bush's policies at the Pentagon?

First it is important to recall that the president-elect vowed to bring change to politics as well as policy. The Obama administration would foster bipartisan cooperation wherever possible, he said, especially in matters of foreign policy and national security. If those are his objectives then retaining Mr. Gates makes considerable sense--at least for the time being.

Of all the possible holdover appointees, the defense secretary has the highest reputation for effectiveness and the lowest potential for conflict with the new president. Unlike the previous occupant, he is respected in Congress and among the military's general staff. Based on his personal history, Mr. Gates seems to have a stronger basis for agreement with Mr. Obama than with his current boss on the salient issues of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

Remember that during the months before President Bush asked him to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, Mr. Gates was serving on the Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton. The study group's best-selling report, released only weeks after Mr. Gates resigned to accept the Bush appointment, was strongly critical of the president's failed policies in Iraq.

Contrary to policies favored by President Bush at the time, the report urged immediate diplomatic contacts with all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria, in an effort to achieve stability, as well as negotiations with the Sunni insurgents that would lead to amnesty. The aim of those efforts was to achieve an orderly withdrawal of American troops from Iraq sooner rather than later. The report expressed deep worry that the Iraq war had diverted military and diplomatic resources away from the conflict in Afghanistan.

The Iraq Study Group's recommendations and concerns sound familiar because they reflect the views expressed repeatedly by Mr. Obama ever since he announced his presidential candidacy. When President Bush largely rejected the ISG findings, his new secretary of defense felt obliged to distance himself from them as well. But according to the panel's other members, it was Mr. Gates who had in fact written much of the report, and he concurred fully with its views.

Upon assuming control of the Pentagon, Mr. Gates did his best to subordinate his own opinions to administration policy, working hard to make the best of the troop escalation in Iraq despite personal doubts about the long-term wisdom of the "surge." But he never echoed the Bush administration's official hostility to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq--and in fact at one point praised the debate over timetables in Washington as a means of increasing pressure on the Iraqis to achieve reconciliation and security on their own.

That should sound familiar, too, because it is so close to Mr. Obama's stated policy.

When Mr. Gates was first nominated to serve as defense secretary, many unanswered questions lingered from his years at the C.I.A., and in particular regarding his role in the Iran-Contra affair. But the Democrats have already forfeited their opportunity to revive that scandal. There are many more urgent matters for them to address in the constitutional depredations of the past eight years--none of which bear the imprimatur of Mr. Gates.