Chicago, Athens, and Jerusalem

Earlier today, President Obama signed the Weapons System Acquisition Reforms Act, which overhauls the military procurement process to prevent waste and reduce cost overruns.  As the president acknowledged in his remarks, the individual who most strongly advocated for this new law was his election opponent, Senator John McCain. McCain has worked to reduce waste in military spending for virtually all of his 22-year senatorial career, and he found agreement from Obama when he raised the issue during the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Obama estimates that procurement reform will “save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars”. Calling the reforms “long overdue”, the president argued that outdated and inadequate military spending rules would be replaced without compromising national security.

After signing the bill, Obama traveled to Annapolis, where he delivered the commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy’s Class of 2009 graduation. Senator McCain was a member of the 30,000-person audience, as his son John Sidney McCain IV (known as “Jack”) was one of the graduates. Jack McCain received a Bachelor’s of Science and a commission as an ensign in the United States Navy, becoming the fourth McCain to graduate from the Naval Academy. Like all of the other graduates, the younger McCain shook hands with the president during the ceremony.

Yesterday, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America.

Congratulations to President-elect Obama, to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden, and to their campaign staff and volunteers on their victory, and for running the most disciplined, organized, and efficient political campaign in national history.

Congratulations as well to John McCain for persevering in this hard-fought contest, which featured a remarkable comeback in the primary elections, and a difficult campaign trail where McCain was often at odds with his own supporters.

As the eyes of the world turned to America last night, our country was admirably represented by McCain and Obama as they delivered, respectively, the best concession speech and the best victory speech of the modern era.

For better or for worse, we will soon close the book on the era of President George W. Bush. The people of the United States, be they Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, or None-of-the-Aboves, will be judged by our peers abroad (and by our descendants) not for the vagaries of the campaign, but for what is accomplished from this day forward. As former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr. said in a rare joint charity appearance, “No one can change what happened. But we can all change what happens next.” Now the real work begins.

As linked in the previous post, Israel is currently in the midst of a(nother) political upheaval. Over the summer, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was forced to tender his resignation due to corruption investigations. Primary elections for his Kadima party, which currently heads a shaky coalition government, resulted in a victory for Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who was given a fixed amount of time to re-organize a governing coalition with herself as Prime Minister. The negotiations went down to the wire, but they have ended in deadlock. The centrist Kadima party reached tentative agreements with the center-left parties Labor and Meretz, but Kadima leaders were unable to gain enough parties to constitute a majority in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Livni has acknowledged this, putting the country on track for elections in early 2009. Olmert will continue to serve as Prime Minister until a new government is formed after the elections.

Although the coalition negotiations were complex, Livni’s failure to form a government ultimately rested on the unwillingness of two religious-affiliated parties that tenuously supported Olmert, Shas and United Torah Judaism, to join Livni’s new coalition. From my perspective, the key to their intransigence was opposition to the concessions accompanying further peace negotiations:

“…[Shas Chairman] Yishai was told as soon as the negotiations started that Livni would not accept a coalition agreement that excluded Jerusalem from the political talks with the Palestinians…”

Unfortunately, the revitalized Kadima led by the diplomatically-inclined Livni–who possesses the desire and wherewithal to press ahead with major negotiations that could complete the outlines of a two-state solution–may never get the chance to lead Israel. Elections could benefit the center-right (currently opposition) Likud party, led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as easily as the informal Kadima-Labor-Meretz alliance. Likud is known to favor a reversal of the current Kadima government’s policies of removing Jewish settlers from the Palestinian Territories and offering land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Israeli annexations. While an increased Knesset margin for Kadima and/or Labor could put peace talks back on track after the election (by March?), a Likud victory would almost certainly shut down negotiations, possibly causing military retrenchment by both Israelis and Palestinians.