Wylie Aitken, chairman of the Democratic Foundation of Orange County, said he expects to see the partisan bitterness of the campaign eased by Barack Obama.
“If you sit back and look at his campaign and how he’s handled himself, he’s done nothing divisive,” said Aitken, whose group is a major fundraising organization. “You hear a lot about reaching across party lines. He doesn’t need to just reach across party lines. He needs to reach the people he represents. And everything we’ve seen and heard from him indicates that’s what he’ll do.”
I spoke with Aitken while he was driving from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s party - in one of the presidential suites at the Beverly Hilton Hotel - to the O.C. Democratic Party celebration at Costa Mesa’s Sutra Lounge, where 2,500 were expected tonight.
I asked Aitken how Democrats could best take advantage of their new dominance in Washington, and whether they could win over the rest of the country.
“This is a unique moment, and a unique opportunity for America,” he said. “Either we’re going to prove that we are the party that can run the government or whether we’re going to fall on our face.
“Nothing matters unless you can change the culture in Washington, and we have a chance to change that culture.
“Other than the incredible pressure of the economic crisis, we need to see if in his first days in office he can begin to change the culture of Washington. The first 100 days will be very important.”
One of the first thing Aitken hopes to see is a crackdown on pork barrel spending, and self-serving congressman specials tagged on to legislation. And Obama’s cabinet picks will be key.
“Who is he going to surround himself with? Is it going to be Cheney or Rumsfeld? Or is it going to be the best and the brightest, like we saw from (John) Kennedy? We’ve certainly seen some indications from how he picked his campaign team.”
Aitken was reluctant to offer any names of people he’d like to see picked, but he again offered Kennedy as an example of the type of decisions that he’d like to see made.
“I don’t think anybody thought when Kennedy was elected that we would see people like Robert McNamara and Bobby Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson and what those people became.”
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no, its impossible to united a country when he wants to unfairly tax more than half of it, because they choose to work hard, save hard and spend. He will NEVER unite this country.
Hey, Obama, you can have my 401K when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Of course you want my retirement money. The dems have done so well with the social security money. Some great society.