FW: my desire to help

podesta-emails 2,047 words email

D6 P17 V11 P19 P22

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Valerie - Larry Tribe sent me a copy of the email he sent you, with his idea for a White House position focusing on restoring constitutional governance - essentially undoing the Bush/Cheney damage. Sending to you in case you missed his original email in the flood I'm sure you're getting. Larry's a long-time enthusiastic supporter, as I'm sure you know... Julius From: Larry Tribe [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 10:50 AM To: Julius Genachowski Subject: my desire to help Importance: High Hi Julius: Wow! Wow!! How's that for articulateness? As you'll see from my message below to Valerie, I've run out of language to describe my thrill at Barack's historic victory. I want to send the same message to you, hoping that you can help me help Barack. I know you have your hands full during the transition, but I think the need I've identified is a real one, that I'm well suited to fill it, that my doing so would probably appeal to Barack, and that this shouldn't get put on a back-burner lest it get lost altogether. I hope you agree and can do something to help make this happen. With boundless congratulations and warm wishes, Larry From: Larry Tribe Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2008 10:18 AM To: 'Valerie Jarrett' Cc: [email protected] Subject: how I can help Importance: High Good morning, Valerie: The word "congratulations" is much too banal. The thrill hasn't remotely begun to wear off. I've never felt more hopeful about our political future. I want to dedicate all my talents and energies to helping Barack seize the arc of history. Nothing matters to me more. After this message, I've pasted in a short piece I published in Forbes.com (which appeared yesterday as the first item on www.realclearpolitics.com<http://www.realclearpolitics.com>) that puts in personal terms how I felt yesterday. When I saw Barack and Michelle briefly in the "surrogates" tent after Barack delivered his remarkable speech, he told me he had read my email (of several days earlier) offering to assist with legal/constitutional issues in whatever role he wanted me to play, and he indicated he'd want to take me up on that offer in some way. I don't know, of course, whether Barack was just being sweet or whether he had something serious in mind. Given all the things on his plate at the moment, I can't expect him to focus personally on how I in particular could be most useful, so I'm reaching out to you (and am copying Tree) so that my interest and availability can be put on the relevant radar screens while the transition proceeds. To cope with the challenge of restoring constitutional governance in light of all the damage the Bush/Chaney administration has done to the separation of powers and the rule of law, and to do so while his administration necessarily focuses its energies on such urgent matters as the economic crisis, Iraq, and Afghanistan/Pakistan, I think President Obama will need more than simply a White House Counsel's Office, which of necessity focuses on the President and his conduct of the chief executive's position, and more than simply an OLC in the Justice Department, which of necessity focuses on the Attorney General's direction of DOJ. To cope with the cross-cutting matters this challenge entails, I think the administration could benefit from a tightly-knit White House advisory apparatus touching on both domestic and international issues and overlapping the jurisdictions of DOJ and DOD, among other executive departments and agencies. The group charged with this legal mission would address such related matters as the Bush/Chaney administration's abusive employment of "signing statements" predicated on bloated views of executive authority and improperly narrow views of congressional power; the difficult issues posed by the need to close the legal black hole at Guantanamo and figuring out what to do with the detainees there; deciding how to allocate responsibility between the civilian justice system and the military justice system in coping with terror-related offenses; considering various officials' possible accountability for torture and other violations committed in the recent past; replacing current uses of "enhanced interrogation" techniques with approaches more respectful of human rights; coping with the tradeoffs between security and liberty involved in electronic surveillance and other preventive techniques; rooting out the improper use of partisan considerations in the appointments process throughout the government; and otherwise rebuilding the constitutional framework. It seems evident that many of these matters overlap the responsibilities of, for example, DOJ and DOD. One of the ways I think I might be most useful would be as an Assistant to the President heading up such a White House group, whose work might well be concluded within a year or two but might need to extend throughout the first term. Of course I'd also be prepared to take on any other and longer mission that Barack might want to assign to me and would certainly be willing to take as long a leave from Harvard as such a mission would demand. Among other things, I'd be honored to serve as Barack's White House Counsel or even to take on a role requiring Senate confirmation, such as Solicitor General or Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, but I've been assuming that Barack already has others in mind for those more conventional posts, and I don't feel any need for the glitter that accompanies them or any eagerness to go through the confirmation process that they entail. The main point I want to underscore is my eagerness to serve. Should it be helpful to talk in person, I'm still in Chicago following the events in Grant Park and will be here through Saturday evening. I have a couple of speaking engagements here relating to my latest book, one on Friday night and one on Saturday night. I can be reached by email or on my cell, 617-512-7018. I'll be returning to Boston on Sunday morning. Good luck in all that the transition involves. Larry Tribe ________________________________ Laurence H. Tribe Carl M. Loeb University Professor Harvard Law School Hauser Hall 420 1575 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 617-495-4621 Here's what appeared in Forbes.com yesterday: I am watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan in the land of Lincoln on this new day in America. This is the morning after a great divide in the biography of the United States. As a nation, we have come of age. I flew to Chicago Tuesday afternoon to witness history as the United States of America went to the polls on Election Day, 2008. Hours later, as President-elect Barack Obama spoke in Grant Park to claim his victory before a great throng of supporters and an eagerly listening world last night, almost exactly forty years after the chaos of 1968, I felt myself in the flow of time, a minor participant in a great saga punctuated by events that shaped my life as it shaped the lives of so many others. The year 1968 was, for me and most of my friends, a time of tragedy and disillusion. Through the years that followed, years punctuated by Watergate and Vietnam and by decades of political polarization and paralysis, politics was the game that disappointed. Yesterday it was the game that delivered. The work of governing lies ahead, but the sun is rising and the challenges we face - in reconstructing a broken economy, restoring a threatened Constitution, ending a misguided war and waging a necessary one, starting to heal a wounded planet - look from here like opportunities to be seized, not obstacles to be feared. How different this feels from the crazy election of 2000, brought to an abrupt and puzzling end by the Supreme Court's ill-starred decision to stop counting the ballots, when another new President was installed to preside over a nearly dysfunctional country. Having served as counsel before the Court to the losing candidate during that sad chapter in our democratic trajectory, I returned to ordinary life but wondered when, if ever, I could fully believe in the process again. As the decade progressed, the most impressive student I had ever taught was quietly pursuing his own political trajectory. In 1989 I had met Barack Obama and hired him as my research assistant while he was still just a first-year Harvard law student. His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter with the future President. I thought about that encounter as he and his wife Michelle each gave me a hug in one of the off-stage tents in Grant Park last night. I recalled it as I found myself unable to express in words my sense of gratitude and of possibility. The President-elect and the First Lady-designate both thanked me for the part I had played in Barack Obama's education and his rise to power, but it was I, of course, who owed thanks to them, thanks for the journey on which they had embarked to reclaim America for all who dare to hope. There will be countless efforts to dissect their improbable path from that cold winter morning in Springfield nearly two years ago - when a still-new Senator from Illinois announced his candidacy for the highest office in the land - to the unseasonably warm evening in Chicago when that quest reached its climax and when those who had led it confronted the daunting challenges of actually governing. This is not another attempt at such dissection. Nor is this another post-mortem on the failed efforts of President-elect Obama's more than formidable foes. It is simply a personal note to commemorate a milestone in a great nation's history. As an immigrant to the United States, born in Shanghai to Russian Jewish parents who brought me with them when they settled in California in 1947, I have always felt great pride both in that ancestry and in the gift of citizenship conferred on me by the nation that went on to provide me with such extraordinary opportunities to thrive and to give something back for all that I have been given. My pride in that citizenship has never been greater than it is today. Truth to tell, I find myself unable to stop smiling, just as last night I found it difficult to stop crying. Barack Obama's unique ability to explain and to motivate, coupled with his signature ability to listen and to learn and linked with the calm that marked his nearly flawless campaign, will serve him - and all of us - well as we grapple with as daunting a set of problems as the nation has faced in three-quarters of a century. It is of course true that only time will tell just how successful this brave, brilliant, and caring man will be in charting a new course for the country, something that will depend only partly on decisions that Obama will make as President. But one thing is already certain: The very fact of Barack Obama's election at this defining moment - quite apart from the programs he pursues and the ways in which he pursues them - already speaks volumes to everyone on the planet. His election in and of itself displays how dramatically America has moved to transcend the divisions of its past and bids fair to give us a new lease on life in a world that had come, and not without reason, to see us in an awful light - a world that will now give this nation a fresh look and a second chance. The sun is now high over Lake Michigan. It is a new day in America. We can do this. Yes, we can.