With Thanksgiving behind us, the nation's interest-groups are now front and center with their holiday wish lists and New Year's resolutions for the incoming Obama administration.
Unions want a new bill to make it easier to organize. Gays and lesbians want more protections against discrimination. Environmentalists want to "hit the reset button" on Bush-era regulations.
And a partridge in a pear tree.
"Every interest group, every group in the party, has a list," Democratic strategist Steve Elmendord told the LA Times, and you gotta bet someone will end up with a lump of (not-so-clean) coal.
Huffington Post reporter Thomas B. Edsall says that largely depends on who will win out from an internal Democratic Party debate now raging on whether America is a center-right or center-left country.
If Obama is perceived as governing too liberally, he could suffer set-backs that would exile Democratic interest groups to political Siberia. But if America is a center-left nation "the adoption of major public works programs, comprehensive health care, and aggressive tax and spending programs to reduce income and wealth inequality may help forge a durable majority for Obama and the Democratic Party."
He concludes both sides can reasonably make their case.
U.S. & World
But as Obama's team of rivals charts its ideological course, it must also contend with its own worst enemy: his administration's team of giant egos.