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There's a lot of interesting stuff in this Joe Klein interview with Obama, and I'll probably post on a couple of the sections. But this comment seemed potentially powerful as insight into how Obama is viewing the space for policy construction:
And one of the things that I have become more and more convinced of during the course of this campaign is that in an environment like this one where people are really paying attention because they are worried and they are scared good policy will end up being good politics—more than I think might have been true during boom times in the nineties when people were just feeling like it was sport, it was a game.That could just be political pabulum, but the recognition of the policy environment in the 90s suggests that it's actually not. And it raises the question of what Obama means by good policy. Obama suggests this is a recent insight built off similarly recent events. His campaign policy, in large part, was constructed more than a year ago. How much of it does he believe to be genuinely good policy, and how much does he consider documents more fit for an election cycle? Where does Obama believe the Overton window to be?
