All of this is offered as context for the Department of Education portions of Title VIII of the stimulus bill, in which I have been mired for a couple of weeks now, because it is dense with "down payments" on transformational policy projects, but which is mercifully drawing to an end.
"We've seen big structural changes and a huge shift in consumer behaviour and this needs to be matched by bold, transformational policy to support a completely different landscape," he said.
Over a number of decades, governments reacted with a package of transformational policies.
So an important question for the Obama presidency is this: Will his transformational style eventually lead to transformational policies, or will his conventional policies eventually force him to shelve his transformational style?
At every opportunity, the Obama Administration has reaffirmed its commitment to pursue transformational policies in each of these fields – and the president pointedly reiterated his intentions this week, even after he had endured intense criticism that his interest in such ambitious domestic policy-making had distracted him from the economic crisis.
At every opportunity, the Obama Administration has reaffirmed its commitment to pursue transformational policies in each of these fields - and the president pointedly reiterated his intentions this week, even after he had endured intense criticism that his interest in such ambitious domestic policy-making had distracted him from the economic crisis.
In the six months before world leaders gather in this city to seek a deal on climate change, President Obama will face a true test of presidential grit as he tries to deliver on his call for transformational policies on energy and the environment.
Which leads on to the DA's other main challenge - the sense that, while it may no longer be a "white" party, it remains committed to the orthodoxies of global capitalism and the imperatives of economic growth, rather than the more transformational policies that many South Africans appear to favour.
Instead of using his political capital, public support, congressional majorities, and a demand for change to adopt real transformational policies, Obama failed to build the future coalitions and politics needed to sustain his legacy.
"There is little evidence to support the general assumptions of leadership theory and public discourse that transformational foreign policy leaders are better in either ethics or effectiveness," he writes.
The reality is that the most transformational education policy arises at the state level, but even as federal employees, the two former city school superintendents still have a chance to put action to their sweeping rhetoric by supporting the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP).
