Tales from the Trail

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state to former President George W. Bush, returns to the White House this afternoon for a chat with the man who succeeded her boss, President Barack Obama.

It’s not totally unheard of for presidents to chat with predecessors’ Cabinet members. And the one-on-one in the Oval Office is probably just a show of respect for a former U.S. foreign policy leader.

But the private meeting was at least worth raising even  half an eyebrow, although observers didn’t quite know what to make of it. (Obama does like to cast a wide net for advice on foreign policy, economics and other issues).

Rice is on a tour for her just published book about her childhood — “Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me” – and has been giving media interviews to promote it.

CNN reports that before the White House meeting, Rice said in an interview that the invitation from a sitting president to a former Cabinet member is “not that unusual” and that they would discuss a range of foreign policy issues.  ”It’s whatever the president wants to talk about,” she told CNN.

The  normally buzzing White House press gallery came to a halt on Tuesday as film star George Clooney visited in hopes that his megawatt star power would draw mainstream media attention to  Sudan,  and help prompt President Barack Obama and other world leaders to use “robust diplomacy” to prevent violence in the African nation before a crucial election on Jan. 9.

“Right now, at this moment there’s an opportunity here to negotiate this, to negotiate a peace treaty,” Clooney told reporters at the White House after meeting with President Barack Obama. “It’s complicated and it’s difficult and it means negotiating with people who you don’t necessarily like and you don’t necessarily get along with. This administration seems committed to it and we have to focus on that right now.”

Clooney said activists would like to see the global community pressure the government in Khartoum before the election three months from now.  “We’d like to see the international community stiffen up the sanctions that we’ve been using… There’s a lot of money out there that those guys are holding.”

Michelle Obama is the most powerful woman in the world. So says Forbes magazine.

Does it mean she can leap tall buildings in a single bound? We’re not sure. But she did jump over women with a decade more experience (an assumption based on age) in the top 5 – Kraft Foods Chief Executive Irene Rosenfeld, talk show host Oprah Winfrey,  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Has the designation changed anything in her household, given that her husband is the leader of the free world? We asked her office, but they wouldn’t bite.

But no one at the White House is disputing the title (we assume they wouldn’t dare).

Could Hillary replace Joe as Barack’s main squeeze in 2012? That’s the juicy bit of palace intrigue enlivening today’s U.S. political melodrama.

It started when author Bob Woodward told CNN that the idea of a Clinton-Biden switch was “on the table” — at least among some Clinton advisers. A switch would mean Hillary becoming President Obama’s vice presidential running mate and Joe taking up her State Department chores.

“President Obama needs some of the women, Latinos, retirees that she did so well with during the 2008 primaries. And so they switch jobs,” explained the veteran journalist whose new book, “Obama’s Wars,”  offers an inside look at the administration. 

President Barack Obama adds a new item to his first-term to-do list: energize his most loyal supporters in a national get-out-the-vote campaign for the November congressional midterm elections.

That’s the message Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett delivered on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where she predicted a robust White House campaign to encourage voters including blacks and Hispanics to get to the polls next month.

Obama has already been out trying to stir up enthusiasm among the younger voters. But that was just for starters.

What do you get a guy who’s leaving the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago?

White House colleagues presented Rahm Emanuel with a dead Asian carp wrapped in Chicago newspapers at the morning meeting on his last day.

It was a symbol of two of the many political battles fought by the man who became President Barack Obama’s chief of staff — he once sent a dead fish to a pollster as a message of displeasure, and the other was his fight against the Asian carp threatening to invade the Great Lakes.

The performance was worthy of “Dancing with the Stars.”

Watching White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs waltz around the question  of whether White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had decided to leave and run for mayor of Chicago was quite breathtaking.

Speculation was rife all week that President Barack Obama’s top enforcer would announce that he would leave by the weekend to run for Chicago Mayor, a job he’d always said he wanted.

All that remained was confirmation.

So when anonymous sources told reporters today that Rahm had made the decision and he was leaving, all anybody wanted was confirmation at the White House press briefing.

Nearly a decade after his presidency ended in scandal and disgrace, Bill Clinton has emerged as the most popular figure in the U.S. political firmament, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.   Except he’s not running for office.

Fifty-five percent of the 1,000 adults who responded to the survey reported having positive feelings about the Arkansas Democrat, vs. only 23 percent who harbored negative feelings. (When he left office in early 2001, his ratings were 34 percent positive and 52 percent negative.)

The poll, which has a 3.1 percentage point margin of error, comes at a time when many voters are angry about the country’s economic straits, including high unemployement and an exploding fiscal deficit. Clinton’s two-term presidency was marked not only by impeachment and the Monica Lewinsky scandal but also by buoyant growth and a balanced budget.

Who could possibly replace Larry Summers as director of the White House National Economic Council?

The former Treasury secretary and former Harvard University president offered his own thoughts on that very question at a National Journal forum on the workplace.

It was a valedictory appearance of sorts for Summers. National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein, a longtime political writer, saved the best question for last – Did Summers agree with the view gaining traction in Washington that Obama should name a businessperson to take over his job as director of the NEC when Summers leaves to return to his teaching job at Harvard?

Even presidents don’t escape to-do lists. Granted they include more weighty items than mundane reminders to pick up groceries after work.

President Barack Obama, it turns out, keeps one in his pocket.

“I keep in my pocket a checklist of the promises I made during the campaign, and here I am, halfway through my first term, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do,” Obama says in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine (yes, the same publication that did a profile of General Stanley McChrystal which led  to his firing).

“I’ve got two years left to finish the rest of the list, at minimum. So I think that it is very important for Democrats to take pride in what we’ve accomplished,” Obama says.