Today, President Obama nominated Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary, adding “yet another intense political battle with Republicans to an already busy season for the White House.” Ryan Lizza considers whether the nomination will hurt Obama’s second term agenda:http://nyr.kr/13ee3me, and our Double Take blog revisits Connie Bruck’s 2008 profile of Hagel: http://nyr.kr/UCiFCu

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty.

Listen to the podcast of “No More Magical Thinking,” David Remnick’s Comment about the climate-change challenge President Obama faces in his second term.

What Will Obama Do?

That attitude, if it persists, cedes a great deal of ground to Obama’s adversaries, not only Mitt Romney. Just because a plan can’t pass tomorrow (or next year) doesn’t mean that it’s not worth fighting for. Does the President still believe that climate change is a major problem? Is even raising the subject too risky for the smokestack-heavy swing states in the Midwest? Are unions such politically toxic allies that their causes, like card-check labor-law reform, can no longer be mentioned? Has the Supreme Court of Citizens United (and, potentially, of health-care reform) failed to persuade the President that he must speak out on his competing conception of the Constitution? He’s not saying.

To be sure, Obama is not running for reëlection to score debating points and lay out his political philosophy. He is running to accumulate two hundred and seventy electoral votes—period. He may well do so by exclusively running on his record and attacking his opponent. But, as Obama knows better than anyone, campaigns are about the future as much as the past. In other words, he may well win another term and come next January, and it would be a good idea for him, not to mention the rest of us, to have some idea of what he’s going to do.

(Source: newyorker.com)