A guard talks to a detainee at Guantanamo earlier this year.

Lindsey Graham and John McCain
For The Wall Street Journal

When President Barack Obama declassified and released legal memoranda from the Department of Justice, he opened the door to a drawn-out battle over the Bush administration’s use of coercive interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. We believe that any subsequent attempts to subject those who provided such legal advice to prosecutions are a mistake. They will have a chilling effect on the candor with which future government officials provide their best counsel.

The country must move on from debates about the past, because pressing questions about U.S. detention policy in the war on terror requires us to make difficult choices — and to make them soon.

In January, the president announced via executive order that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay will close within a year. The announcement was easy — but it left unanswered the hardest questions about detainee policy for the future.

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John McCain and Joseph Lieberman
The Washington Post

Later this month, the Obama administration will unveil a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. This comes as most important indicators in Afghanistan are pointing in the wrong direction. President Obama’s decision last month to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops was an important step in the right direction, but a comprehensive overhaul of our war plan is needed, and quickly.

As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a “minimalist” approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a “graveyard of empires” and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more “realistic” goals there — for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favor of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists.

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David Rogers
Politico.com

After a losing presidential campaign in 2000, John McCain came back to the Senate and established himself as a force no White House could ignore. Eight years later, he’s home from defeat again, facing a very different landscape dominated by President Barack Obama and the collapsing American economy.

From Afghanistan and Iraq to military procurement reform, McCain tells POLITICO he is already working with Obama. Last week alone, he had breakfast with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, appeared with the president at a White House press event and took a phone call from Vice President Joe Biden soliciting McCain’s input on how to crack down on pork barrel spending.

“These are terrible, perilous times, so I will seek ways to work with the president of the United States,” McCain says in an interview. “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.”

But there’s the rub: On the central issue of the economy, the two men are so far apart it is difficult to see them collaborating effectively.

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Roger Simon
Politico.com

The Columbia Journalism Review revealed this week that the “high command” of the John McCain campaign hired a blogger “to attack” and engage in “bullying” the press during the last six months of the presidential campaign.

Gee, how did that work out? Help much?

And why did the campaign need to hire outside help for that? I thought it had been doing a pretty good job of not liking the press on its own.

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CNN’s John Roberts speaks to Meghan McCain about her father, President Obama, and Sarah Palin.

Dana Bash | BIO
CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent

Bump into John McCain in a Capitol hallway these days, and you’re lucky if you get anything beyond a polite hello. Ask him a question on any policy or political issue, and he will almost always decline comment, and keep moving.

But the former Republican presidential nominee is not planning to keep a low profile for long.

CNN has learned that McCain may get seats on an unusually high number of key senate committees, so that he can engage on a wide range of high profile issues before congress, and his formal rival in the White House.

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Jonathan Soros
Wall Street Journal

In his election-night victory speech, Barack Obama said he would be a president for all Americans, not just those who voted for him. But as a candidate he didn’t campaign with equal vigor for every vote. Instead, he and John McCain devoted more than 98% of their television ad spending and campaign events to just 15 states which together make up about a third of the U.S. population.

Today, as the Electoral College votes are cast and counted state-by-state, we will be reminded why. It is the peculiar mechanics of that institution, designed for a different age, that leave us divided into red states, blue states and swing states. That needs to change.

The Electoral College was created in 1787 by a constitutional convention whose delegates were unconvinced that the election of the president could be entrusted to an unfiltered vote of the people, and were concerned about the division of power among the 13 states. It was antidemocratic by design.

Under the system, each state receives votes equal to the number of representatives it has in the House plus one for each of its senators. Less populated states are thus overrepresented. While this formula hasn’t changed, it no longer makes a difference for the majority of states. Wyoming, with its three electoral votes, has no more influence over the selection of the president or on the positions taken by candidates than it would with one vote.

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Editor’s Note: Leslie Sanchez is a former adviser to President Bush and CEO of Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients.

Leslie Sanchez | Bio
CNN Political Contributor
Republican Strategist

Ever since John McCain and Howard Dean in 2000 showed the Internet’s potential for fundraising, the question was always whether the Web could be effective at “GOTV,” or getting-out-the-vote.

Among young voters at least, Barack Obama has proven that it can — and, in the process, he’s uncovered a major flaw that cuts to the core of the Republicans’ approach to party organization and discipline.

Obama poured many of his campaign’s millions into his social networking operations on the Web, which his campaign rightly saw as critical to building grassroots support and enthusiasm.

A community organizer by training, occupation and nature, Obama saw his databases for the potential they represented — an army of supportive voices, a legion of potential volunteers, and a division of precinct captains.

Such is the world not just of Chicago ward organizations, but of politics everywhere.

The McCain campaign, reflecting the broader skepticism I’ve seen in the GOP about the Web, doubted whether the Internet could get voters out of their Barcaloungers (or, in the case of younger voters, off their futons) and into the polling booth.

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Tim Lister
CNN Executive Editor

Why all this fuss about ‘redistribution?’ In the waning days of the election campaign, Senator McCain combined the word with socialism to condemn [now] President-elect Obama’s tax policies. It was always a crowd-pleaser with the faithful. The line of attack sprang from Obama’s legendary encounter with Joe the Plumber, when he said: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

My friends and acquaintances back in Europe found it intriguing that a remark like this should be cause for controversy. Many a party and political career in Europe has been built on the principle of redistributing wealth. In Britain, the Labour Party’s constitution includes this vision of society: “a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.” And that’s the party of Blair and Brown, not exactly socialist firebrands. Even parties of the center-right in Europe embrace redistribution through progressive tax policies.

The English philosopher and godfather of the free market, Adam Smith, wrote in ‘The Wealth of Nations”: “It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion.” The year Smith finished his famous book, the American colonists mutinied against the British government’s plan to impose taxes on them, in effect a plan to redistribute their wealth to His Majesty’s Treasury. Maybe that’s the source of the very different attitudes toward redistribution.

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A new voter registers at a Democratic Party booth in September in Denver, Colorado.

Marisa Trevino
Latina Lista

The importance of the Latino vote is now an irrefutable fact. Not because Barack Obama was able to garner 67 percent of the Latino vote versus Sen. McCain’s 31 percent, but because Latinos turned out in record numbers in key battleground states turning the electoral college tide in Obama’s favor….

Since this is politics, the kind of support Latino voters gave the Democratic Party did come with strings attached. The big question is does that payback come in the form of a key Cabinet position going to a Latino/a or can it be satisfied with the Obama Administration addressing in his first 100 days an issue that was among the top three for Latino voters…

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