Sarah Palin

George Bush isn’t the only one who’s been a lame duck for the last couple of months of 2008. I have, too. I think all Americans have been lame ducks. We’ve been in limbo. We’ve been waiting to see how the financial crisis will be resolved, waiting to see what’s going to happen with the automakers, and waiting to see how things will be under President Obama. Like a lame duck, we’ve been treading water. And time doesn’t fly when you’re treading water. I can’t be the only person who feels that the end of 2008 has dragged on and on.

WASHINGTON — Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government’s poor handling of the natural disaster. “Katrina to me was the tipping point,” said Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. “The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public.

This may seem a strange time to discuss the future of secularism, since we have just concluded a faith-saturated presidential election campaign. From the start, from Barack Obama’s 2006 Keynote Address to the Sojourners Call to Renewal Conference to the over-the-top faith confessions by Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, the Democrats were determined to run as a faith-friendly Party. On the Republican side, though John McCain was pretty easy-going about religion, the religious right finally got to celebrate with the vice-presidential nomination of the ostentatiously religious Sarah Palin.

Before it was clear that Barack Obama would be elected, John Podesta, the current co-chair of the White House transition team, laid out an agenda for the next president that was aggressive, assertive but politically practical. In excerpts of a book being released in January, “Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint For The 44th President,” Podesta describes the need for a chief executive that scores quick and decisive victories while exhibiting respect for Congress and some independence from the early demands of political interest groups.

Sarah Palin the defeated Republican vicepresidential candidate resumed her job as governor of Alaska amid speculation that she might use the scandal surrounding Senator Ted Stevens's reelection bid as a path to Washington.