Kautzman's AP GO PO Blog

February 8, 2010
By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Sunday that he would convene a half-day bipartisan health care session at the White House to be televised live this month, a high-profile gambit that will allow Americans to watch as Democrats and Republicans try to break their political impasse.

Mr. Obama made the announcement in an interview on CBS during the Super Bowl pre-game show, capitalizing on a vast television audience. He set out a plan that would put Republicans on the spot to offer their own ideas on health care and show whether both sides are willing to work together.

“I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats, to go through systematically all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward,” Mr. Obama said in the interview from the White House Library.

Mr. Obama challenged Republicans to attend the meeting with their plans for lowering the cost of health insurance and expanding coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans. Republican leaders said they welcomed the opportunity and called on Democrats to start the debate from scratch, which the president said he would not do.

The move by Mr. Obama comes after weeks in which the administration has appeared uncertain about how to proceed on his top domestic priority since Republicans captured the Senate seat previously held by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. House and Senate Democrats had been increasingly at odds over what the bill should say, how to move ahead tactically and, in some cases, whether to continue at all.

The idea for the bipartisan meeting, set for Feb. 25, was reached in recent weeks, aides said, as part of the White House strategy to intensify its push to engage Congressional Republicans in policy negotiations, share the burden of governing and put more scrutiny on Republican initiatives.

Mr. Obama’s announcement came after he surprised his rivals in late January by requesting that a session with House Republicans be open to cameras. That meeting produced a spirited 90-minute question-and-answer session with the president that many in the White House viewed as a critical success for Mr. Obama.

In making the gesture on Sunday, Mr. Obama is in effect calling the hand of Republicans who had chastised him for not honoring a campaign pledge to hold health care deliberations in the open, broadcast by C-Span, and for not allowing Republicans at the bargaining table.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, the director of the White House Office for Health Reform, briefed Democratic Congressional staff members in a conference call ahead of the interview, with Katie Couric.

Separately, some Congressional staff members expressed concern that Mr. Obama’s meeting would simply prolong an already tortuous process. And Democrats still face steep challenges in reconciling the differences between the House and Senate bills.

Some House Democrats are firmly opposed to a proposed tax on high-cost employer-sponsored insurance policies, which they think will hit some middle-class workers and violate Mr. Obama’s campaign promise not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000 a year.

The president offered a number of questions that his party would have for the Republicans.

“How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance market so that people with pre-existing conditions, for example, can get health care?” he said. “How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don’t have health insurance can get it? What are your ideas specifically?”

The question for Mr. Obama is how much — if at all — he is willing to give on some of the concepts Democrats have already agreed on, or if he is using the meeting to lay the groundwork for another effort by Democrats to push the legislation through without Republican votes.

Mr. Obama did not indicate what he was willing to give up in the negotiations, nor did he chart a specific legislative strategy for moving a bill through Congress. Democrats in the House and Senate were hoping to resolve their differences in the bill, aides said, and present a unified health care plan in time for the meeting.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a statement that he welcomed the bipartisan meeting on health care and called on the president to begin the dialogue “by shelving the current health spending bill.”

“The fact is Senate Republicans held hundreds of town halls and met with their constituents across the country last year on the need for health care reform, outlining ideas for the step-by-step approach that Americans have asked for,” Mr. McConnell said. “And we know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf.”

When asked by Ms. Couric if he would agree to discard the bill and start over, the president said he would not. The starting point, aides said, would be with the proposals that passed the House and Senate.

It remained an open question whether the meeting could lead to real consensus on health care, or whether it would serve only to allow Democrats to frame a political argument against the Republicans going into the midterm campaign.

Republicans were involved in the health care discussions for months last year in the Senate Finance Committee, but differences with Democrats were never resolved.

The bipartisan meeting on health care could give Mr. Obama an opportunity to display the command on health care issues he showed at the meeting with Republicans. The administration believes that the public is supportive of many of the provisions in the bill — particularly taking away the insurance bans for pre-existing conditions — but that the debate was overshadowed by a messy legislative process.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said he was looking forward to the bipartisan discussion. But he joined Mr. McConnell in calling for a fresh start to the health care debate.

“The problem with the Democrats’ health care bills is not that the American people don’t understand them — the American people do understand them, and they don’t like them,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement. “The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access.”

In the interview on Sunday, Mr. Obama said he did not regret pursuing health care in the first year of his presidency, even though he intends to place a higher priority on job creation this year.

“It was the right thing to do then,” Mr. Obama. “It continues to be the right thing.”

David Herszenhorn contributed reporting.

February 3, 2010

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top two defense officials called Tuesday for an end to the 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time.

“No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

As a murmur swept through a hearing room packed with gay rights leaders, Admiral Mullen said it was his personal belief that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

He is the first sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to support a repeal of the policy, and his forceful expression of his views seemed to catch not only gay rights leaders but also Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is the committee’s chairman, by surprise.

Mr. Levin, who has long supported ending the law, told Admiral Mullen that his testimony was “eloquent” and praised him for leading on the issue.

In 1993, Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, opposed allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly but supported a compromise, which was the “don’t ask, don’t tell” bill passed by Congress. Under the policy, gay men and lesbians may serve as long as they keep their sexual orientation secret.

In contrast to Admiral Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was more cautious, even as he acknowledged that the question was not whether the law would be repealed but how the Pentagon might best prepare for the change.

Early in his testimony, Mr. Gates made clear that he was acting at the behest of President Obama, who reaffirmed his opposition to the existing law in his State of the Union address last week. Mr. Gates then threw the final decision back to the legislative branch.

“We have received our orders from the commander in chief, and we are moving out accordingly,” Mr. Gates told the committee. “However, we can also take this process only so far, as the ultimate decision rests with you, the Congress.”

Any change in the policy would not come any time soon, the two officials made clear. Both Admiral Mullen and Mr. Gates told the committee that there would be a Pentagon review, taking up to a year, to study how to implement any change before they expected Congress to act on a repeal.

Passage of repeal is far from assured, judging from the negative reaction from some Republicans on the committee, most notably Senator John McCain of Arizona, who pronounced himself “deeply disappointed” in Mr. Gates.

Mr. McCain said Mr. Gates’s testimony was “clearly biased” because of his not-if-but-when comments. He added that while the law was not perfect, its repeal was too much to ask of a military that is already under stress fighting two wars.

Gay rights leaders pointed soon afterward to comments Mr. McCain made in 2006 on “Hardball” on MSNBC about his willingness to change the policy if Pentagon leaders called for repeal. “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it,’ ” he said then.

To explain the apparent discrepancy, Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said that the senator thought Admiral Mullen was speaking personally, not on behalf of the Joint Chiefs, and that once a Pentagon review was complete, Mr. McCain would listen to military leaders as a whole.

To lead the review, Mr. Gates appointed a civilian and a military officer: Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon’s top legal counsel, and Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Army in Europe.

In the interim, Mr. Gates announced that the military was moving toward enforcing the existing policy “in a fairer manner” — a reference to the possibility that the Pentagon would no longer take action to discharge service members whose sexual orientation is revealed by third parties or jilted partners, one of the most onerous aspects of the law.

Mr. Gates said that he had asked the Pentagon to make a recommendation on the matter within 45 days, but that “we believe that we have a degree of latitude within the existing law to change our internal procedures in a manner that is more appropriate and fair to our men and women in uniform.”

Mr. Levin said he was considering introducing an amendment to this year’s defense authorization bill that would call for a moratorium on discharges under the existing law.

Mr. Gates said the review would examine changes that might have to be made to Pentagon policies on benefits, base housing, fraternization and misconduct, and would also study the potential effect on unit cohesion, recruiting and retention.

For further information, Mr. Gates said he would ask the RAND Corporation to update a 1993 study on the effects of allowing openly gay men and lesbians to serve. That study concluded they could do so if the policy was given strong support from the military’s senior leaders.

On one thing, Mr. Gates, Admiral Mullen and Republicans on the committee agreed: many gay men and lesbians are serving honorably and effectively in the military today, despite a policy that has led to more than 13,000 discharges, including those of much-needed Arabic translators.

“I have served with homosexuals since 1968,” Admiral Mullen told the committee. He added, “Everybody in the military has, and we understand that.”

Gay rights groups embraced the comments from Admiral Mullen and Mr. Gates, even as they criticized the Pentagon review as moving too slowly.

Polls now show that a majority of Americans support openly gay service — a majority did not in 1993 — but there have been no recent, broad surveys of the 1.4 million active-duty personnel.

General Ham, an Iraq veteran, is unusual among top military officers for speaking out about his struggles with post-traumatic stress after witnessing the devastation when a suicide bomber blew up a mess tent on an American base near Mosul, killing 22 people, including 14 United States service members. Mr. Johnson, a former assistant United States attorney, previously worked for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

By Scott Wilson and Ed O’Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 5, 2010; 12:24 PM

The White House ramped up its criticism of Republican senators blocking presidential appointments Friday after the leader of the Senate complained that an Alabama member has placed a blanket hold on more than 70 administration nominees in order to secure funding for home-state projects.

“If that’s not the poster child for how this town needs to change the way it works, I fear there won’t be a greater example of silliness throughout the entire year of 2010,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. “It boggles the mind to hold up qualified nominees for positions that are needed to perform functions in a government because you didn’t get two earmarks.”

Sen. Richard Shelby’s office said his concerns are rooted in the future of the KC-135 Air Force tanker fleet, a project that could generate thousands of jobs in Alabama.

“Nearly 10 years after the U.S. Air Force announced plans to replace the aging tanker fleet, we still do not have a transparent and fair acquisition process to move forward,” said Shelby spokesman Jonathan Graffeo.

Shelby is also concerned with the administration’s proposed budget cuts for the FBI’s Terrorist Explosives Devices Analytical Center, which go against the wishes of FBI and military leadership, Graffeo said.

Shelby has placed holds on “several pending nominees,” Graffeo said, declining to specify the number. The senator has made the White House aware of his concerns “and is willing to discuss them at any time,” the spokesman added.

The White House criticism comes days after President Obama blasted Republican efforts to stall the nomination process, during a Wednesday question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer continued the criticism Thursday in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post on “Needless Delays and Filibusters Run Amok.”

“Regardless of his concern, Shelby shouldn’t have a hold on 70-plus nominees because of a parochial issue,” said Regan Lachapelle, a spokeswoman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Asked whether the White House would consider filling the positions through recess appointments, as Reid has recommended, Gibbs said, “The president will certainly look at all his options.”

Democratic senators, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, held up nominations put forward by the Bush administration, but Gibbs suggested that opposition had been based on concerns about nominees’ records, rather than an attempt to gain leverage for earmarks. As for the current situation, he highlighted the nomination of Martha N. Johnson, who was confirmed Thursday as head of the General Services Administration, nearly 10 months after Obama first put her name forward.

Although unanimously approved by the Senate Homeland Security Committee in early 2009, Johnson’s nomination was held up by Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), who wanted a $175 million federal building project approved for his state.

Gibbs noted that 88 senators voted to send her nomination to the Senate floor for final consideration once Bond lifted his hold. Her nomination was endorsed there by a large margin.

“If 88 senators vote for cloture, what’s the point” of holding it up to begin with, Gibbs said. “If 60 is the new 50, what’s 88?”

Senators can place a hold on nominees at any time for any reason, creating a powerful tool for influencing the executive branch. Such moves are often made anonymously, making them difficult to track.

February 2, 2010

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.

Or, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask before he entered government a year ago, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

The Chinese leadership, which is lending much of the money to finance the American government’s spending, and which asked pointed questions about Mr. Obama’s budget when members visited Washington last summer, says it thinks the long-term answer to Mr. Summers’s question is self-evident. The Europeans will also tell you that this is a big worry about the next decade.

Mr. Obama himself hinted at his own concern when he announced in early December that he planned to send 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, but insisted that the United States could not afford to stay for long.

“Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power,” he told cadets at West Point. “It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry.”

And then he explained why even a “war of necessity,” as he called Afghanistan last summer, could not last for long.

“That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended,” he said then, “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

Mr. Obama’s budget deserves credit for its candor. It does not sugarcoat, at least excessively, the potential magnitude of the problem. President George W. Bush kept claiming, until near the end of his presidency, that he would leave office with a balanced budget. He never got close; in fact, the deficits soared in his last years.

Mr. Obama has published the 10-year numbers in part, it seems, to make the point that the political gridlock of the past few years, in which most Republicans refuse to talk about tax increases and Democrats refuse to talk about cutting entitlement programs, is unsustainable. His prescription is that the problem has to be made worse, with intense deficit spending to lower the unemployment rate, before the deficits can come down.

Mr. Summers, in an interview on Monday afternoon, said, “The budget recognizes the imperatives of job creation and growth in the short run, and takes significant measures to increase confidence in the medium term.”

He was referring to the freeze on domestic, non-national-security-related spending, the troubled effort to cut health care costs, and the decision to let expire Bush-era tax cuts for corporations and families earning more than $250,000.

But Mr. Summers said that “through the budget and fiscal commission, the president has sought to provide maximum room for making further adjustments as necessary before any kind of crisis arrives.”

Turning that thought into political action, however, has proved harder and harder for the Washington establishment. Republicans stayed largely silent about the debt during the Bush years. Democrats have described it as a necessary evil during the economic crisis that defined Mr. Obama’s first year. Interest in a long-term solution seems limited. Or, as Isabel V. Sawhill of the Brookings Institution put it Monday on MSNBC, “The problem here is not honesty, but political will.”

One source of that absence of will is that the political warnings are contradicted by the market signals. The Treasury has borrowed money to finance the government’s deficits at remarkably low rates, the strongest indicator that the markets believe they will be paid back on time and in full.

The absence of political will is also facilitated by the fact that, as Prof. James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas puts it, “Forecasts 10 years out have no credibility.”

He is right. In the early years of the Clinton administration, government projections indicated huge deficits — over the “sustainable” level of 3 percent — by 2000. But by then, Mr. Clinton was running a modest surplus of about $200 billion, a point Mr. Obama made Monday as he tried anew to remind the country that the moment was squandered when “the previous administration and previous Congresses created an expensive new drug program, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and funded two wars without paying for any of it.”

But with this budget, Mr. Obama now owns this deficit. And as Mr. Galbraith pointed out, it is possible that the gloomy projections for 2020 are equally flawed.

Simply projecting that health care costs will rise unabated is dangerous business.

“Much may depend on whether we put in place the financial reforms that can rebuild a functional financial system,” Mr. Galbraith said, to finance growth in the private sector — the kind of growth that ultimately saved Mr. Clinton from his own deficit projections.

His greatest hope, Mr. Galbraith said, was Stein’s law, named for Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Stein’s law has been recited in many different versions. But all have a common theme: If a trend cannot continue, it will stop.

By Lori Montgomery and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 1, 2010; 2:11 PM

The $3.8 trillion budget blueprint President Obama sent to Congress Monday calls for billions of dollars in new spending to combat persistently high unemployment and bolster a battered middle class. But it also would slash funding for hundreds of programs and raise taxes on banks and the wealthy to help rein in soaring budget deficits.

“We will continue . . . to do what it takes to create jobs,” Obama said Monday.

To put people back to work, Obama proposes to spend about $100 billion immediately on a jobs bill that would include tax cuts for small businesses, social-safety-net programs, and aid to state and local governments. To reduce deficits, he would impose new fees on some of the nation’s largest banks and permit a range of tax cuts to expire for families earning more than $250,000 a year, in addition to freezing non-security spending for three years.

Despite those efforts, the White House expects the annual gap between spending and revenue to approach a record $1.6 trillion this year as the government continues to dig out from the worst recession in more than a generation, according to budget documents released Sunday by the White House. The red ink would recede to $1.3 trillion in 2011 but remain persistently high for years to come under Obama’s policies.

“We won’t be able to bring down this deficit overnight, given that the recovery is still taking hold and families across the country still need help,” Obama said in defense of his budget. He told reporters at the White House that some of his proposed spending cuts were “just common sense” but that other cuts “are more painful.” He asked Democrats and Republicans alike to “take a fresh look” at programs they supported in the past and to cut back accordingly.

“We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences, as if waste doesn’t matter, as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money, as if we can ignore this challenge for another generation,” he said. “We can’t.” He said he would welcome any idea from either party to meet this challenge.

“What I will not welcome — what I reject — is the same old grandstanding when the cameras are on and the same irresponsible budget policies when the cameras are off. . . . It’s time to save what we can, spend what we must and live within our means once again.”

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele promptly denounced the budget proposal, charging that it sets the stage for “economic stagnation” and uses gimmicks to hide “binge spending.”

In a statement Monday, Steele said Obama’s budget “will double down on his liberal agenda, growing the deficit by record proportions and killing jobs by raising taxes on small businesses.” He said the GOP would “present a common-sense budget that will reduce the deficit, grow the economy and create jobs, giving voters yet another reason to vote Republican this November and return balance and sanity to Washington.”

Obama’s budget projects that the deficit will increase by $8.5 trillion over the next decade, a slight improvement over the $9 trillion, 10-year increase that the White House projected in August. Still, the deficit spending would drive borrowing from private sources to more than 68 percent of the economy by the end of next year, and to 77 percent of the economy by 2020.

In a news briefing Monday, White House budget director Peter R. Orszag said Obama’s plan to allow the Bush administration’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire would reduce the deficit by nearly $700 billion over the next decade. He said eliminating fossil fuel subsidies would trim the deficit by $40 billion over that period and that freezing discretionary federal spending would reduce it by $250 billion. Orszag noted that the proposed freeze would not be “across the board” and that spending on education, for example would rise.

Christina Romer, who chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said budget assumptions are based in part on forecasts of 3 percent growth in real gross domestic product in 2010, followed by 4.3 percent growth in both 2011 and 2012.

For a more comprehensive deficit-reduction plan, Obama will rely on a bipartisan task force of lawmakers and budget experts, who will be asked to draft a package of tax hikes and spending cuts to slash deficits and stabilize government borrowing by 2015, administration officials said.

Among the gainers in the fiscal 2011 budget proposal are the Education Department, which gets a 9.7 percent increase in discretionary funding, and the Defense Department, which gets a 3.4 percent boost to its regular budget, plus supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Justice Department’s budget stands to rise by more than 6 percent from this year, with the FBI receiving an additional $145 million for its national security efforts. The State Department gets a 3 percent increase under the budget proposal, with international development assistance jumping 18 percent to $2.9 billion.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) would get a small increase (1.5 percent) to $19 billion under the budget plan, but Obama’s proposal would kill a $100 billion Bush administration program to send astronauts back to the moon.

The budget blueprint, the second of Obama’s presidency, comes as Republicans emboldened by recent election victories are fanning public outrage over government spending, and nervous Democrats are clamoring for more money to reduce a 10 percent unemployment rate. As both parties gear up for the November election, Obama’s spending plan is designed to steer a middle course between those opposing goals and to reassure angry voters.

“This is a budget that makes tough choices while investing in initiatives to create jobs and help reduce the economic pressures facing the middle class,” White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said in a briefing for reporters.

In addition to new spending on the economy, the plan calls for $250 million to be set aside for the purchase of an Illinois prison that had been identified as a possible home for detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Orszag said. But that doesn’t mean the prison would be used for that purpose, Orszag said, noting that the federal prison system needs new maximum-security beds.

The budget also calls for an additional $33 billion in war funding this year and a total budget of $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year. It recommends slashing or eliminating 126 programs, including agriculture subsidies for wealthy farmers and the advance earned income tax credit, a version of the tax break for the working poor that has been a frequent target of tax cheats. Total savings; $23 billion in 2011 alone.

The budget blueprint repeats many of Obama’s grandest ambitions from his first budget, including an expensive overhaul of the nation’s health-care system, an expansion of the federal student loan program that would make Pell grants an entitlement, and far-reaching climate-change legislation. But with Obama’s standing in the polls badly damaged by a bruising year-long battle over health care, all three of those initiatives are stalled in Congress with no clear path forward.

The budget includes $1.4 trillion in new taxes over the next decade, including the expiration of Bush administration tax breaks that benefit families making more than $250,000 a year. The budget would also increase taxes on international corporations by more than $120 billion over the next decade, impose $90 billion in new fees on large financial institutions that benefited from the federal bank bailout, and collect another $60 billion by changing rules for taxing inventory. But those ideas, too, have gone nowhere in Congress and may be even less appealing in an election year.

The lack of cash, meanwhile, has constrained Obama’s ability to roll out new initiatives to reframe his presidency. In recent days, for example, the administration has touted a $3 billion increase for education programs, a $5 billion campaign to combat nuclear proliferation and a $4 billion “infrastructure innovation and finance fund” — sums that pale in comparison to Obama’s original $600 billion-plus health-care plan.

The proposed budget calls for spending more than $280 billion on economic recovery initiatives over the next three years, including $100 billion for tax cuts and other measures in an immediate jobs bill. Obama projects spending another $150 billion in 2011 and $34 billion in 2012, on top of existing spending from last year’s economic stimulus package.

The new cash would be devoted to extending Obama’s signature “Making Work Pay” tax credit, worth $400 a year to individuals and $800 to families. It would also provide states with $25 billion in Medicaid assistance, in addition to extending unemployment and COBRA benefits for people who are out of work.

During last week’s State of the Union address, Obama asked Congress to put the jobs bill “on my desk without delay.” Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs urged Republicans to set aside their differences with Democrats and coalesce around the legislation.

“I think that would be a powerful signal to send to the American people,” Gibbs said.

But Republicans are more likely to highlight the fact that a jobs bill would drive this year’s budget deficit even higher than the record $1.4 trillion recorded in 2009. Republicans quickly attacked the blueprint Monday, arguing that it fails to live up to Obama’s recent calls for a return to fiscal responsibility.

“Over the past few weeks, President Obama has sounded ready to moderate his agenda — and has trumped his ostensible plans for fiscal discipline,” said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the senior Republican on the House budget committee. “Regrettably, the budget the administration today submitted to Congress is nothing more than a plan for more of the same — a very aggressive agenda of more government spending, more taxes, more deficits, and more debt — with just a few cosmetic budget maneuvers to give the illusion of restraint.”

On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called on Democrats instead to focus solely on cutting taxes, including extending tax cuts for the wealthy enacted during the Bush administration, and abandon the health-care bill.

“If you’re in business now and you’re trying to figure out what the future is, you’re looking at health-care taxes, you’re looking at capital gains taxes going up, dividend taxes going up,” McConnell said on CNN. “So, is that a great environment in which to expand employment? I think the answer is no.”

Republicans have also resisted calls to help Democrats dig the nation out of a budget hole that is driving accumulated debt to dangerous levels that could damage the dollar and undermine the United States’ international standing. On Sunday, Orszag said Obama could be blamed for only a small part of that problem, which he said has been driven primarily by GOP refusal to pay for tax cuts and an expensive Medicare prescription drug benefit, as well as automatic spending to stabilize the economy that occurred “even before we took office.”

To stabilize the debt, many economists say, the government should run annual deficits of no more than 3 percent of the overall economy, a target the White House has told key lawmakers it hopes to hit by 2015. But under Obama’s new budget blueprint, deficits would sink no lower than 3.9 percent of the economy and begin to rise again by 2020.

Getting to Obama’s target will not be easy and is likely to require trillions of dollars in tax hikes, as well as cuts to popular entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Last week, the Senate rejected a plan to create a deficit-reduction task force by law after seven Republicans switched positions and voted against it. Obama has vowed to create the task force by executive order, though officials declined Sunday to say when that would happen.

Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) said he would encourage his colleagues to drop their opposition to the panel, calling GOP claims that it would be stacked in favor of tax increases “disingenuous.”

“We had a chance to do something that would have been constructive. We could have made that happen . . . and we blew it,” Voinovich said, adding that the president’s panel is now the best option. “If it’s a legitimate effort of people who are respected, then I think we have an obligation to participate.”

Pfeiffer added: “This is only going to be solved in a bipartisan way . . . and we hope [Republicans] will accept that responsibility.”

February 1, 2010

By SAM DILLON

The Obama administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, and will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing, as well as for the elimination of the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every American child to academic proficiency.

Educators who have been briefed by administration officials said the proposals for changes in the main law governing the federal role in public schools would eliminate or rework many of the provisions that teachers’ unions, associations of principals, school boards and other groups have found most objectionable.

Yet the administration is not planning to abandon the law’s commitments to closing the achievement gap between minority and white students and to encouraging teacher quality.

Significantly, said those who have been briefed, the White House wants to change federal financing formulas so that a portion of the money is awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students. The well-worn formulas for distributing tens of billions of dollars in federal aid have, for decades, been a mainstay of the annual budgeting process in the nation’s 14,000 school districts.

Peter Cunningham, a Department of Education spokesman, acknowledged that the administration was planning to ask Congress for broad changes to the education law, but declined to describe the changes specifically.

He said that although the administration had developed various proposals, it would solicit input from Congressional leaders of both parties in coming weeks to create legislative language that can attract bipartisan support. Some details of the president’s proposals are expected to be made public on Monday, when the president outlines his $3.8 trillion budget for the 2011 fiscal year.

The changes would have to be approved by Congress, which has been at a stalemate for years over how to change the policy.

Currently the education law requires the nation’s 98,000 public schools to make “adequate yearly progress” as measured by student test scores. Schools that miss their targets in reading and math must offer students the opportunity to transfer to other schools and free after-school tutoring. Schools that repeatedly miss targets face harsher sanctions, which can include staff dismissals and closings. All students are required to be proficient by 2014.

Educators have complained loudly in the eight years since the law was signed that it was branding tens of thousands of schools as failing but not forcing them to change.

The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.

“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.

The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.

A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career.

The new standards will also define what students need to learn in earlier grades to advance successfully toward high school graduation.

The administration has already made its mark on education through Race to the Top, a federal grant program in which 40 states are competing for $4 billion in education money included in last year’s federal stimulus bill. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama hailed the results so far of that competition, which has persuaded states from Rhode Island to California to make changes in their education laws. States that prohibit the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, for example, are not eligible for the funds. The competition has also encouraged states to open the door to more charter schools, which receive public money but are run by independent groups.

Now the administration hopes to apply similar conditions to the distribution of the billions of dollars that the Department of Education hands out to states and districts as part of its annual budget.

“They want to recast the law so that it is as close to Race to the Top as they can get it, making the money conditional on districts’ taking action to improve schools,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, who attended a recent meeting at which administration officials outlined their plans in broad strokes. “Right now most federal money goes out in formulas, so schools know how much they’ll get, and then use it to provide services for poor children. The department thinks that’s become too much of an entitlement. They want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money.”

One section of the current Bush-era law has required states to certify that all teachers are highly qualified, based on their college coursework and state-issued credentials. In the Race to the Top competition, the administration has required participating states to develop the capability to evaluate teachers based on student test data, at least in part, and on whether teachers are successful in raising student achievement.

Educators who have talked to the administration said the officials appeared to be considering inserting similar provisions into the main education law, by requiring the use of student data in teacher evaluation systems as a condition for receiving federal education money. Mr. Duncan has publicly endorsed such an approach, Mr. Cunningham said.

The education law has been praised for focusing attention on achievement gaps, but it has also generated tremendous opposition, especially from educators, who contend that it sets impossible goals for students and schools and humiliates students and educators when they fall short. The law has, to date, labeled some 30,000 schools as “in need of improvement,” a euphemism for failing, but states and districts have done little to change them.

The last serious attempt to rewrite the law was in 2007. That effort collapsed, partly because teachers’ unions and other educator groups opposed an effort to incorporate merit pay provisions into a rewritten law. Earlier this month, Mr. Duncan and more than a dozen other administration officials took steps toward organizing a new rewrite, meeting with the Democratic chairmen and ranking Republican members of the education committees in both houses of Congress.

From The Sunday Times
January 31, 2010

Obama’s state of the union address is a clear signal to critics on both the left and right

We should know the pattern by now. Barack Obama has a way of seeming to let things drift, even dangerously so. His supporters start to panic; his enemies start to sniff confidence like a junkie out of a brown paper bag. Scott Brown’s remarkable victory in Massachusetts provided the glue, and the Republicans and the media almost passed out with the rush — and still the president remained somewhat aloof; distant.

As health insurance reform looked dead in the water, Obama seemed equally inert. The mood on the liberal blogs went from depression to panic. His presidency was over! Liberalism’s revival was a mirage! The atmosphere — and I wasn’t entirely immune to it myself — reminded me of the autumn of 2007, as Obama remained mired 30 points behind Hillary Clinton and seemed to be drifting back into obscurity; or when in 2008, after his stunning victory in Iowa, he lost New Hampshire and allowed the race to drag on for months. Or how healthcare reform seemed massacred by last summer’s town hall meetings, or how he chose to stay removed from the Iranian revolution last June.

And then there’s the comeback. This time, the setup was almost perfect: an already scheduled grand political speech playing to all of Obama’s strengths. And yet what was striking about the speech was how unlike Obama it was. It was conversational, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, intermittently aggressive, occasionally moving, conciliatory in tone. But what struck me most was not the delivery but the reception. I’ve listened to dozens of state-of-the-union speeches and I have rarely heard such a quiet talk meet such silence. It was the kind of silence that greets the truth.

The truth is that America’s problems have not been this grave since the 1970s. The long-term fiscal outlook is not grim; it’s catastrophic. The healthcare system fails to insure 40m people and offers stratospheric increases in costs for everyone else. Most Americans live with a gnawing anxiety that they are one serious illness away from bankruptcy. US hospitals provide some of the best medical care in the world — but the system makes the NHS look efficient. Slowly it is strangling the US economy and government.

The country, for good measure, is fighting two wars; one of them is unwinnable and the other is coming to an end with the probable result of Iraq imploding again into sectarian conflict. For 30 years American presidents have vowed to end the dependency on foreign oil, and the problem is as profound as ever. The economy is reeling from a recession deeper than any since the 1930s.

And yet if you look at the state of American politics, you see Democrats refusing to restrain some of their worst spendthrift instincts and unable to pass an important bill even with the biggest majorities in both houses in years. And you see Republicans who have no economic proposals except cutting more taxes and have actually now begun — like the hapless Tories in the late 1990s — to defend the most expensive parts of the welfare state. Worse, the Republicans have decided to use the grave financial crisis to play pure oppositionism, using any tool available to block, stop, decry and demonise virtually everything Obama campaigned on. They gave zero votes to a modest stimulus package that no serious economist believes was unnecessary. The media seem increasingly polarised, with one right-wing propaganda machine — Fox News — competing with rivals on the left to be the most vituperative about the other side. The vilification of Obama’s centrist course, too, has been as vicious on the left as on the right.

Call it the audacity of nihilism. You begin to wonder if the centre of America truly can hold, or if the passionate intensity of the worst of both extremes is combining to kill it off once and for all. Part of this is a result of the fatal shift of the political parties in the 1970s: the new divide somewhat scarily replicates the civil war faultline, with the south and the rural heartland seceding ever so swiftly into a kind of sullen, angry non-compliance, and the rest becoming more and more like a western European multicultural democracy. Part too is a debilitating ideological calcification, in which every policy is examined in terms of “left” and “right”, regardless of the circumstances.

Just as liberals refused to believe in the 1970s that their approach to government had become outdated, so today conservatives proclaim the almost theological need to return to a parody of Reaganism instead of adjusting their ideas to new realities. And the purists are growing on both sides.

On Tuesday night Obama stood between them all, like a teacher entering a classroom with spit balls flying and desks crashing. He cannot discipline; he does not have the constitutional power to dictate to Congress what it must do, and he is also determined to reverse the imperial style of presidency that has corroded the constitutional balance in the past few decades and especially the past few years. There is no headmaster to send the children to — just an argument that certain things simply have to be done: a bill to curtail the soaring costs and horrible inequity of the healthcare system; a way to fight terrorism without abandoning core western values; re-regulation of the banking industry; a serious attempt to resolve the long-term fiscal crisis with big entitlement cuts and tax hikes; and yet another shot at moving the economy off its fossil-fuel habit.

I do not know if Americans will respond to Obama’s reasoning, or if the short-term political posturing will dissipate. In the depressed economic climate, where tempers are high and anxiety is endemic, the odds of Obama succeeding seem remote. But what came through last Wednesday night, past the gentle conversational tone, was a determination to stay the course he set out in the campaign. “We don’t quit. I don’t quit” was his version of “the lady’s not for turning”. On Thursday Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, gave a similar pep talk: “You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get healthcare reform passed for the American people.”

With unemployment at 10%, who knows whether health reform can get passed, and whether Obama can build on that momentum for serious financial reform? What we do know is that he has not caved in or radically altered his agenda or lost his touch. He has done what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did at similar points in their first terms: dug in deep, with the same themes and same character he ran for office on. His poll ratings are almost identical to Reagan’s at this point, a moment when the entire political class wrote Reagan off.

We know how that story ended; we have no idea how this one will. But those who think this presidency is over are missing something. It is not just about Obama. It is about America at this particular moment in time. There’s a reason he was elected; and I have a feeling he reminded people of it last week. For all their legitimate anxiety, anger and bolshiness, my bet is they will not forget who is the only one acknowledging the depth of the crisis and proposing a way forward.

andrewsullivan.com

Barack Obama’s no Bill Clinton.
BY Fred Barnes
February 8, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 20

President Obama’s greatest need is to escape the ideological grip of congressional Democrats and the liberal base of the Democratic party (they’re one and the same). But he either doesn’t recognize this or, as a conventional liberal himself, isn’t so inclined. This self-inflicted difficulty has put Obama in worse political straits than President Clinton faced after the Republican landslide of 1994.

Certainly there was nothing in Obama’s State of the Union address last week to indicate he understands the fix he’s in or has devised a credible way to get out of it. His message, though he didn’t put it in quite these words, was that he’d rather fight for unpopular liberal policies than switch to broadly appealing centrist ones.

A bad omen for Obama and Democrats was the pleased-as-punch response of Capitol Hill’s top Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “It makes my job a little easier than if he were moving to the middle and picking up people,” McConnell says. “I naïvely thought he was going to do a course correction.”

McConnell characterizes the Obama strategy as: “Ignore the public, we know what’s best, full speed ahead.” The practical effect is to yield the political high ground to Republicans. “He can call us the party of no till he’s blue in the face,” McConnell says. “It depends on what you’re saying no to.”

When the president had lunch with television anchors at the White House the day of the speech, he minimized his political distress. Were the rate of unemployment two points lower, he’d be in fine shape, Obama suggested. That’s probably true. And if pigs had wings they could fly.

Since the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts on January 19 and the collapse of Obama’s domestic agenda, the parallels between Obama now and Clinton in 1994 have come into sharp focus. The president, by the way, told the anchors Republican Scott Brown won because he was the better candidate, not because he made opposition to Obama’s policies the centerpiece of his campaign.

To save his presidency after his stiff rebuff in the midterm elections, Clinton lurched to the political center. He adopted a strategy of “triangulation” that involved painful compromises with Republicans, who had captured the House and Senate. It worked. Clinton glided to reelection in 1996, defeating Republican Bob Dole by 7 points.

Though it’s rarely acknowledged, Clinton’s most significant successes in the White House were all in conjunction with Republicans: the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, and balanced budget legislation in 1997 that included a cut in the capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent that spurred the financial boom and budget surplus of his second term.

For Clinton, creating daylight between his presidency and liberal Democrats was easy. They hadn’t been responsible for his election in 1992, nor was he ideologically tethered to them. In Obama’s case, separating himself would be hard. The liberal base was instrumental in his election, controls both houses of Congress, and may retain its majority after the 2010 midterms as well. As a politician, Obama is a creature of modern liberalism.

Even if Obama wanted to, it would be awkward for him to negotiate legislative deals with Republicans while liberal Democrats control Congress. And it would be regarded as a betrayal if he vetoed a Democratic bill. I can’t recall a recent example of a president vetoing a measure passed by his own party. Obama’s veto threats in the State of the Union weren’t taken seriously by Democrats or Republicans.

At the core of Obama’s trouble is a misreading of the 2008 election. He and Democratic liberals interpreted it as a mandate for an era of liberal lawmaking and governance in a newly minted center-left America. And they set out to create that era with sweeping initiatives on health care, energy and the environment, and the economy.

They were wrong, as everyone but the most unswerving or fogbound liberal now understands. America is a center-right country politically and has been for decades. Pushing a liberal agenda for a year has cost Obama dearly. His public approval has fallen at a record rate (for a first-year president), and so has support for his policies.

He is clinging to the one advantage his party retains, its strength in Congress. “To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills,” Obama declared in the speech. Sorry, Mr. President, but dozens of Democrats in Republican-leaning districts or red states are already in full flight, either deciding to retire or abandoning your agenda.

Obama is giving aid and comfort to the Republican counterstrategy. As in 1994, Republicans say they’re ready to cooperate with the president when they can, oppose him when they can’t. So McConnell, for one, is willing to go along with Obama’s puny budget freeze. But Obama has offered Republicans much else that might be risky to oppose.

To salvage Obamacare, Democrats buttonholed several Republican senators last week with schemes for tweaking the bill. The senators declined to negotiate, telling the Democrats, “Call McConnell.” Under McConnell’s leadership, Senate Republicans are united in preferring to start over, from scratch, on health care reform. So far, McConnell hasn’t gotten a call from the White House or any Democrat.

To boost his recovery after the Republican landslide of 1994, Clinton found a useful foil, the new House speaker, Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich overreached, Clinton was the beneficiary. Obama desperately needs a foil, but his attempts to turn McConnell and Republicans into one have failed. Instead, he’s become their foil.

Let’s give Obama credit for intellectual honesty. He believes in his agenda. Speaking at a House Republican retreat in Baltimore last week, Obama insisted, “I am not an ideologue.” But he sure can pass for one. And despite his travails, Obama brims with self-confidence. He told Democrat Marion Berry of Arkansas, a seven-term House member, that Democrats today have a unique advantage they lacked in 1994—“me.” Berry doesn’t agree. He’s retiring.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

by David S. Broder
The Spokesman-Review

The sober, sprawling State of the Union address President Barack Obama delivered last week was marked by one extraordinary moment. It came when the president looked down at six robed members of the Supreme Court, seated directly in front of him, and criticized their recent 5-4 decision that he said “will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”

While Democrats stood applauding his call on Congress to pass legislation narrowing the impact of the ruling, the TV cameras caught Justice Samuel Alito, one of the two George W. Bush appointees who made the reversal of precedent possible, apparently mouthing the words “Not true.”

Such direct confrontations between the branches of the federal government are almost unprecedented, and they set the stage for what ought to be a serious debate.

The day after, much of the discussion was focused narrowly on the question of whether Obama was correct in saying that foreign corporations would be unleashed on American elections by the justices’ decision.

The dissenting opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens had put the proposition more carefully. It said that the reasoning behind the majority opinion, barring restrictions on corporate-financed political ads, “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”

But the majority opinion specifically said it was not deciding that question because no foreign-controlled entity was involved in this case. Lawyers differ in their speculation on how the court would rule if that question is presented.

But Obama does not want Congress to wait for possible further damage to campaign finance regulation by the conservative wing of the court. Democrats are ready to attempt legislative steps to reduce the impact of the ruling that the First Amendment invalidates all past efforts to limit domestic corporations using their own funds to support or oppose candidates.

Indeed, as soon as the court signaled last year its interest in reviewing that fundamental constitutional question, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, and members of Obama’s White House counsel’s office began meeting quietly to prepare a strategy in case the ruling went against them – as it did.

Several senators and representatives have already introduced bills that would – if found constitutional – keep intact the existing ban on ads financed by foreign or foreign-controlled corporations.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will convene to canvass ideas for going further in order to limit the newly proclaimed rights of domestic corporations and unions to finance campaign ads from their own treasuries.

One option, a Schumer aide told me, might be an attempt to preserve the ban for corporations that employ Washington lobbyists, or enjoy government contracts or receive government bailouts or other substantial subsidies. Another idea is to require the CEO of a company to appear at the end of its political ad, just as candidates already have to do.

Another notion is to require the main funders to be identified by name or by corporate logo in their ads. Or, some suggest, a law might require stockholder approval for any corporate political message.

With the 2010 campaign season about to begin in Illinois, which has a primary Tuesday, congressional Democrats are understandably eager to shut down the corporate spigot as much as they still can and as fast as they can.

Van Hollen told me that his goal is to have a bill ready to introduce within the next two weeks and to secure hearings soon thereafter.

It is no coincidence that Schumer and Van Hollen, the two prime movers designated by the Democratic leadership of the Senate and House, are also the men who played key roles in the Democratic takeover of both sides of the Capitol.

Some political observers speculate that companies will be slow to take advantage of the new political freedom the court has given them, holding back rather than risking a high profile that might cost them customers.

But the Democrats do not want to take that chance.

Some, like Van Hollen, even think that if Republicans try to block a measure to re-lock the door against foreign corporations playing in American politics, “it could become a public issue” in the fall campaign.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

Town hall part of GOP House members’ retreat

by James Oliphant
Tribune Washington bureau

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, flanked by House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, left, and Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., listens as President Barack Obama takes questions from Republican lawmakers at the GOP House Issues Conference in Baltimore on Friday.

BALTIMORE – In an unprecedented town hall meeting, President Barack Obama went toe-to-toe Friday with some of his fiercest critics – a ballroom-full of House Republicans – accusing them of derailing his health care overhaul while they complained about being shut out of the political process.

The president’s appearance at the annual retreat for House Republicans was intended to be a gesture of bipartisanship. Instead, it devolved into a respectful, but still surprisingly blunt exercise in political finger-pointing, defensiveness and gamesmanship.

Obama repeatedly defended his policies and accused Republicans of distorting his positions for political gain. He was especially critical of the GOP’s efforts to derail the massive health care overhaul bill in Congress.

“You’d think this was some Bolshevik plot,” Obama said. “That’s how some of you guys presented this.”

And he argued that constant political attacks on his agenda had almost robbed the GOP of any opportunity to contribute.

“What happens is that you guys don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me,” Obama said. “The fact of the matter is, many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable with your own base, with your own party, because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, ‘This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.’ ”

The event was notable for its departure from the norms of the American political process, resembling more the British tradition of a leader taking fire from members of the opposition party – and for the fact that it was broadcast nationally.

Like the audience on a daytime talk show, the GOP members held microphones and questioned Obama. The president answered from behind a lectern, his image displayed on large TV screens. The exchange went for 90 minutes – longer than scheduled.

“I’m having fun,” Obama said at one point.

For the most part, the Republicans held their tongues and praised the president for listening to their concerns. But when Obama maintained that “I am not an ideologue,” murmurs of dissent could be heard throughout the room.

“I’m not,” he repeated.

House Republicans, who have little political power because of the large Democratic majority in the chamber, were determined to use the occasion to rebut skeptics who argue that the party offers few ideas and opposes legislation out of political convenience, not principle. They handed Obama a thick document containing Republican policy proposals when he was introduced.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, part of the GOP leadership in the House, said before the session that his party needed to show voters that “we’re ready to govern again” in advance of congressional elections this fall.

The president began by urging bipartisanship and cooperation in a manner similar to his State of the Union address Wednesday night. “I don’t believe the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security,” Obama said to a loud ovation.

Soon, however, bolstered by Friday’s news of a large spike in the nation’s gross domestic product, Obama took the audience to task for opposing his economic stimulus plan a year ago, arguing that it contained the kind of tax breaks that the GOP typically advocates. And he accused lawmakers who opposed the stimulus of taking credit in their home districts for projects that benefited from the stimulus money.

“Let’s face it,” he said, “some of you have been at the ribbon-cuttings of some of these important projects in your communities.”

He was pressed by freshman Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah to explain why he had not followed through on his pledge that negotiations over the health care bill would be broadcast on television. Obama argued that most of the debate had in fact been aired, except for some talks close to the Senate vote.

“That was a messy process,” Obama said. “I take responsibility.”

Near the end of the session, the president pushed back firmly at Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling’s insistence that the administration had dramatically inflated the nation’s budget deficit, cutting off Hensarling in mid-sentence. “That whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign,” Obama charged.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama vowed Wednesday night not to give up on his ambitious legislative agenda, using his first State of the Union address to chastise Republicans for working in lock-step against him and to warn Democrats to stiffen their political spines.

Mr. Obama appealed for an end to the “tired old battles” that have divided the country and stalled his efforts on Capitol Hill. He promised to focus intently on the issue of most immediate concern to the nation, jobs. And with his top priority, a health care overhaul, delayed in the wake of the recent Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts, he offered a pointed message to both parties.

“To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills,” Mr. Obama said in his nationally televised speech. “And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. underscored that criticism, and the emotion behind it, on Thursday. He said that both he and the president were frustrated by “the obstructionist ways of the United States Senate on the part of the Republicans requiring 60 votes, a supermajority, for virtually every single solitary initiative we’ve had.”

“You just can’t continue to say no,” he said on NBC’s “Today” show. “What are you for?”

The speech, Mr. Obama’s third to a joint session of Congress, comes at a particularly rocky point in his presidency, with many Americans — including some fellow Democrats — complaining that the president has lost sight of the priorities of ordinary people. And Mr. Obama acknowledged their doubts, conceding that some of his political setbacks “were deserved,” a striking admission for any president.

His tone was colloquial, even relaxed; at one point he joked that the bank bailout was “about as popular as root canal.” But at the same time Mr. Obama struck a defensive note, reminding the nation yet again that he inherited a mountain of problems and insisting that, one year after he took office, “the worst of the storm has passed.”

At a time when many Americans are concerned, even angry, about the economy and about the performance of government more generally, Mr. Obama sought to restore public confidence in his administration and to persuade Americans that he is directing his attention more fully to the economy. While he did not offer any sweeping new agenda or far-reaching legislative program, he put forth a handful of new initiatives, including plans to provide small businesses with tax breaks and better access to bank loans.

After refusing to set a timetable for the repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military’s policy barring openly gay men and lesbians from serving, he vowed to work with Congress this year to repeal it. He called for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, his predecessor’s signature education law. In a nod to the growing political and economic pressure to begin reining in the budget deficit, he proposed a freeze on a portion of the domestic budget.

Mr. Obama campaigned on a promise to change the culture of Washington and to make government transparent. But on Wednesday night, he suggested that he believed he had not done enough, and spoke of a “credibility gap” that must be closed by curbing the outsized influence of lobbyists. “We have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now,” he said.

Reprising a line he used in last year’s address to Congress, he said, “We face a deficit of trust — deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.”

He called for new rules requiring lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with Congress or with his administration. And, in a rare flash of open confrontation between the White House and the Supreme Court, Mr. Obama declared that a recent court ruling would “open the floodgates for special interests,” and perhaps foreign companies, to exert more influence in political campaigns. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., breaking with decorum at such events, shook his head and appeared to mouth the words, “No, it’s not true.”

Republicans said they welcomed the president’s partial freeze on domestic spending. But they warned against what they regard as the president’s big government agenda. In delivering his party’s response, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell of Virginia, a newly elected Republican, declared, “The circumstances of our time demand that we reconsider and restore the proper, limited role of government at every level.”

But rather than retreat from his ambitious agenda, Mr. Obama sought Wednesday to repackage it, by explaining how his top priorities — the health measure, tough new regulations on banks, energy legislation — fit into his broader initiative to put the economy on sounder footing for the long run.

On health care, Mr. Obama did not chart a specific path forward for Congress. Rather, he appealed to lawmakers to “take another look at the plan we’ve proposed” once temperatures cool after the Republican win in the Massachusetts Senate race. He added, “Do not walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let’s find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people.”

Still, after a year of working to get health care passed, Mr. Obama said his No. 1 issue is now the economy and jobs. “Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010,” Mr. Obama said, adding “People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help.”

To that end, the president renewed his call for Congress to pass a jobs bill that would spur investment in green jobs and clean energy, though he did not offer specifics of what it would cost. He proposed investment tax cuts that would put more cash in the pockets of small business owners and a new program that would take $30 billion from the fund used to bail out troubled banks and automakers, and redirect it toward an initiative to encourage community banks to lend to small businesses.

He set a goal of doubling exports over the next five years — an increase that he said would support two million jobs. And, as he pledged to do earlier in the week, Mr. Obama also outlined a series of proposals intended to help the middle class, including new tax credits for child care and a cap on student loan payments for recent graduates.

And Mr. Obama offered a very public show of confidence in one of the architects of his economic plan: Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, whose close identification with Wall Street has made him a focus of some of the populist anger directed at the White House. When Mr. Obama strode into the chamber of the House of Representatives to deliver the address, he stopped to face Mr. Geithner, who had just spent the day getting grilled on Capitol Hill and put both hands encouragingly on the secretary’s shoulders.

Strikingly, for a president who is prosecuting two wars and trying to protect the country against the threat of a terrorist attack, Mr. Obama spent only nine minutes in an address that lasted more than an hour on foreign policy. He renewed one of the most popular promises of his campaign for election, to bring the troops home from Iraq, saying “Make no mistake — this war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.”

But he devoted only one paragraph to a far less popular decision, escalating the troop levels in Afghanistan. “There will be difficult days ahead,” Mr. Obama said. “But I am confident we will succeed.”

As have presidents before him, Mr. Obama grappled with how to describe the state of the union. In the end, he settled on the formulation that many of his predecessors have used, with a twist: “Despite our hardships, our union is strong.”

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official that if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election.

“We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you — whichever one you want,’ ” a lobbyist can tell lawmakers, said Lawrence M. Noble, a lawyer at Skadden Arps in Washington and former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission.

The decision seeks to let voters choose for themselves among a multitude of voices and ideas when they go to the polls, but it will also increase the power of organized interest groups at the expense of candidates and political parties.

It is expected to unleash a torrent of attack advertisements from outside groups aiming to sway voters, without any candidate having to take the criticism for dirty campaigning. The biggest beneficiaries might be well-placed incumbents whose favor companies and interests groups are eager to court. It could also have a big impact on state and local governments, where a few million dollars can have more influence on elections.

The ruling comes at a time when influence-seekers of all kinds have special incentives to open their wallets. Amid the economic crisis, the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are trying to rewrite the rules for broad swaths of the economy, from Detroit to Wall Street. Republicans, meanwhile, see a chance for major gains in November.

Democrats predicted that Republicans would benefit most from the decision, because they are the traditional allies of big corporations, who have more money to spend than unions.

In a statement shortly after the decision, President Obama called it “a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.”

As Democrats vowed to push legislation to install new spending limits in time for the fall campaign, Republicans disputed the partisan impact of the decision. They argued that Democrats had proven effective at cultivating their own business allies — drug companies are spending millions of dollars to promote the administration’s health care proposals, for example — while friendly interest groups tap sympathetic billionaires and Hollywood money.

After new restrictions on party fund-raising took effect in 2003, many predicted that the Democrats would suffer. But they took Congress in 2006 and the White House two years later.

While Democrats pledged new limits, some Republicans argued for bolstering parties and candidates by getting rid of the limits on their fund-raising as well. Several cases before lower courts, including a suit filed by the Republican National Committee against the Federal Election Commission, seek to challenge those limits.

Thursday’s decision, in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, “is going to flip the existing campaign order on its head,” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a Republican campaign lawyer at the law-and-lobbying firm Patton Boggs who has represented both candidates and outside groups, including Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group formed to oppose Senator John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

“It will put on steroids the trend that outside groups are increasingly dominating campaigns,” Mr. Ginsberg said. “Candidates lose control of their message. Some of these guys lose control of their whole personalities.”

“Parties will sort of shrink in the relative importance of things,” he added, “and outside groups will take over more of the functions — advertising support, get out the vote — that parties do now.”

In practice, major publicly held corporations like Microsoft or General Electric are unlikely to spend large sums money on campaign commercials, for fear of alienating investors, customers and other public officials.

Instead, wealthy individuals and companies might contribute to trade associations, groups like the Chamber of Commerce or the National Rifle Association, or other third parties that could run commercials.

Previously, Mr. Noble of Skadden Arps said, his firm had advised companies to be wary about giving money to groups that might run so-called advocacy commercials, because such activity could trigger disclosure requirements that would identify the corporate financers.

“It could be traced back to you,” he said. “That is no longer a concern.”

Some disclosure rules remain intact. An outside group paying for a campaign commercial would still have to include a statement and file forms taking responsibility. If an organization solicits money specifically to pay for such political activities, it could fall under regulations that require disclosure of its donors.

And the disclosure requirements would moderate the harshness of the third-party advertisements, because established trade associations or other groups are too concerned with their reputations to wage the contentious campaigns that ad hoc groups like MoveOn.org or Swift Boat Veterans for Truth might do.

Two leading Democrats, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York and Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, said that they had been working for months to draft legislation in response to the anticipated decision.

One possibility would be to ban political advertising by corporations that hire lobbyists, receive government money, or collect most of their revenue abroad.

Another would be to tighten rules against coordination between campaigns and outside groups so that, for example, they could not hire the same advertising firms or consultants.

A third would be to require shareholder approval of political expenditures, or even to force chief executives to appear as sponsors of commercials their companies pay for.

The two sponsors of the 2002 law tightening the party-fundraising rules each criticized the ruling.

Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, called it “a terrible mistake.” Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, said in a television interview on CNN that he was “disappointed.”

Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate of campaign finance laws, said the decision “wipes out a hundred years of history” during which American laws have sought to tamp down corporate power to influence elections.

But David Bossie, the conservative activist who brought the case to defend his campaign-season promotion of the documentary “Hillary: The Movie,” said he was looking forward to rolling out his next film in time for the midterm elections.

Titled “Generation Zero,” the movie features the television host Lou Dobbs and lays much of the blame for the recent financial collapse on the Democrats.

“Now we have a free hand to let people know it exists,” Mr. Bossie said.

David S. Broder
The Spokesman-Review

If you are John Cornyn, the 36 hours from Tuesday night through Thursday morning had to be the best time of your life.

Cornyn, the junior senator from Texas, is the current chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Senate GOP.

Until Tuesday, he was the spokesman for an embattled minority, staring up at a 60-vote behemoth of 58 Democrats and two independents, fond of flexing its supermajority muscles and driving the opposition into the ground.

On Tuesday night, when underdog Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat, Cornyn and his boss, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, suddenly had the power – with 41 votes – to filibuster and defeat any legislation on which they were united.

They also acquired a convincing argument to use on campaign workers, candidates and contributors all across the country: If a backbench state senator can beat the Democratic machine in Kennedy-worshipping Massachusetts, cracking a lineup where no Republican had won in years, then 2010 is a year of opportunity for the GOP you don’t want to miss.

Republican campaign aides said prospective candidates and previously reluctant donors quickly signaled their interest in playing. And then serendipitously, on Thursday morning, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority delivered a decision that may well be the best news Republicans have received since the 2000 ruling in Bush v. Gore.

The holding in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allowing corporations to spend unlimited corporate funds on their own election messages, means that the 2010 campaign will likely see a vast infusion of business-backed independent expenditures. The likelihood is that the main beneficiaries will be the Republicans recruited by Cornyn and, over in the House, by Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The same Supreme Court decision sets a precedent for freeing labor unions to tap their treasuries for the funds that, in most cases, will find their way to Democratic candidates. But the potential resources are by no means equal, and an astute fundraiser such as Cornyn is likely to come out far ahead of his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, in the race for resources.

But of course the Democrats have in President Barack Obama a resource the Republicans can’t match. Obama broke all previous fundraising records in his 2008 campaign, with a combination of big-dollar events and Internet-fueled direct mail contributions.

By rejecting public financing of his post-convention campaign and relying instead on private contributions, Obama weakened the system of taxpayer-financed campaigns his predecessors (and opponent John McCain) had relied on.

This did not inhibit Obama from complaining that “with its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special-interest money in our politics.”

Cornyn, playing it low-key as usual, simply said, “I am pleased that the Supreme Court has acted to protect the Constitution’s First Amendment rights of free speech and association.”

As a First Amendment fan myself, I had hoped the Supreme Court would find a way to safeguard conservatives’ right to make and distribute with corporate funds a propaganda film decrying Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president. I think their voice should be heard.

But the five-member majority went much further. On its own, it extended itself far beyond what was necessary and knocked out well-established precedents in order to grant free rein for corporations to spend on politics as if they were citizens with a guaranteed voice in the election.

I agreed with the dissenting opinion of Justice John Paul Stevens and his three liberal colleagues, who said the majority opinion rejects “the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense.”

Correction: A recent column quoted a source as saying Scott Brown is a Catholic. Brown is a Protestant.

David Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

By SEWELL CHAN and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

The Obama administration struggled on Friday to secure confirmation of Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, underscoring the political upheaval as both parties tried to find their footing amid a powerful wave of populism.

Two Democratic senators who are up for re-election this year announced that they would oppose Mr. Bernanke, whose four-year term as head of the central bank expires at the end of this month. Their decisions reflected a surge of opposition among some Democrats and Republicans to Mr. Bernanke, a primary architect of the bailout of the financial system and a contributor to policies that critics contend put the economy at risk in the first place.

With no vote scheduled and Capitol Hill abuzz with the possibility that more senators would use the nomination to show voters they understood the anger about bailouts and economic hardship, the uncertainty about Mr. Bernanke’s fate spread to Wall Street.

It contributed to another day of losses for investors at the end of a three-day slide that drove the markets down almost 5 percent. The Dow ended the week at its lowest close since early November.

By the end of the day, the White House had extracted a statement of support for Mr. Bernanke from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who had been noncommittal. Mr. Reid’s statement, issued after the markets closed, was intended to signal that Democrats, backed by some Republicans, could come up with the 60 votes necessary to break a deadlock and reconfirm Mr. Bernanke.

But even then Mr. Reid’s statement was remarkably unenthusiastic. After meeting with Mr. Bernanke on Thursday, Mr. Reid warned: “The American people expect our economic leaders to keep Wall Street honest and level the playing field for middle-class families.”

And in his statement Friday, Mr. Reid said he had decided to support Mr. Bernanke with trepidation and only after he received a commitment that the Fed chairman would take additional steps to increase the flow of credit to middle-class Americans.

While some Republicans were certain to oppose Mr. Bernanke, the minority leadership had its own strategic calculations to make.

Rejecting Mr. Bernanke, a Republican economist who was named chairman by President George W. Bush in 2005 and took over in 2006, could lead Mr. Obama to appoint someone from the ranks of Democratic economists that Republican lawmakers find less appealing. And if markets swooned, Republicans would share in the blame.

But even if the nomination is approved, the spasm of anxiety surrounding it will have highlighted how members of both parties are reassessing their stands on many issues as they try to understand the strain of anger toward the government, Wall Street and other institutions.

In the days since the Democrats lost a crucial Senate seat in Massachusetts, Mr. Obama has struck a tougher tone toward big banks. In the process he signaled a shift away from less aggressive regulatory policies backed by another architect of the bailout, Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary. On Friday in Ohio, Mr. Obama took a combative approach on health care reform and banking regulation.

But Mr. Obama cannot afford a failed nomination — the Senate has never before rejected a president’s nominee for Fed chairman — and he has publicly and privately backed Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Geithner for their roles in stabilizing the financial system and averting what could have been a wholesale collapse.

Opposition to Mr. Bernanke has emerged from both the left and the right, as anger has mounted over the Fed’s extraordinary interventions in the market in 2008 — which have been lumped together with the huge bailouts of big financial institutions — and over its regulatory failings before the crisis. Mr. Bernanke has also been criticized for backing an easy money policy earlier in the decade that critics say fueled the housing bubble.

“The anger at the Treasury has been spilling over to the Fed,” said Frederic S. Mishkin, a former member of the Fed’s board of governors and a close friend of Mr. Bernanke.

“My view is Chairman Bernanke helped save the world from depression,” said Mr. Mishkin, an economist at Columbia University. “Whether you agree with every policy he’s pursued or some of the ways the bailouts were done, the outcome here, given the severity of the shock, is a good one. But that’s hard to explain to the American public when we’re sitting with 10 percent unemployment.”

The two Democratic senators to come out against Mr. Bernanke on Friday, Barbara Boxer of California and Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, called for a chairman more attuned to the suffering of ordinary Americans.

“It is time for Main Street to have a champion at the Fed,” Ms. Boxer said. “Our next Federal Reserve chairman must represent a clean break from the failed policies of the past.”

Mr. Feingold was unsparing in his criticism: “Under the watch of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve permitted grossly irresponsible financial activities that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

By day’s end, other Democratic senators had rallied around Mr. Bernanke. Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the chairman of the Banking Committee, warned that a no vote would “send the worst signal to the markets right now in the country and send us in a tailspin.”

Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana announced qualified support, saying that “failing to reappoint Mr. Bernanke would only add turmoil to markets that are just beginning to recover.”

The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and Secretary Geithner were both making calls to senators on Mr. Bernanke’s behalf, administration officials said.

At least 11 senators have said they would oppose Mr. Bernanke, including four Democrats, Ms. Boxer, Mr. Feingold, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota and Jeff Merkley of Oregon; one independent, Bernie Sanders of Vermont; and six Republicans.

“Especially since the election in Massachusetts, Democrats are waking up to the fact that Americans are profoundly disgusted with the behavior on Wall Street that led to the disaster we’re currently in,” Mr. Sanders said. “In the last week the president has decidedly changed his tone on Wall Street — in my view, quite appropriately. He would be well served to have an ally at the Fed who shares those concerns.”

Senate Democratic leaders had contemplated a vote this week on the nomination, but were forced to hold off after encountering opposition at their caucus’s weekly luncheon on Wednesday. The leaders asked for a show of hands and, though aides would not provide a precise count, Mr. Reid was said to be surprised at the number.

And in a sign of such uncertainty, Mr. Reid asked the minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, to count the votes on the Republican side. Mr. McConnell has not said how he will vote, but some influential Republican senators, including Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, have said they will back Mr. Bernanke.

If Mr. Bernanke’s term as chairman expires, he would still remain a member of the board of governors, where he holds a separate 14-year appointment that does not expire until 2020. It is also possible he could continue on as chairman pro tempore. The Federal Reserve Act states that the vice chairman — Donald L. Kohn now — acts as chairman in the chairman’s absence, but how an absence is defined is not clear.

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.

The decision will be felt most immediately in the coming midterm elections, given that it comes just two days after Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and as popular discontent over government bailouts and corporate bonuses continues to boil.

President Obama called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

The justices in the majority brushed aside warnings about what might follow from their ruling in favor of a formal but fervent embrace of a broad interpretation of free speech rights.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

The ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, overruled two precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that upheld the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted campaign spending by corporations and unions.

The 2002 law, usually called McCain-Feingold, banned the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applied to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.”

The five opinions in Thursday’s decision ran to more than 180 pages, with Justice John Paul Stevens contributing a passionate 90-page dissent. In sometimes halting fashion, he summarized it for some 20 minutes from the bench on Thursday morning.

Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.

Eight of the justices did agree that Congress can require corporations to disclose their spending and to run disclaimers with their advertisements, at least in the absence of proof of threats or reprisals. “Disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” Justice Kennedy wrote. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on this point.

The majority opinion did not disturb bans on direct contributions to candidates, but the two sides disagreed about whether independent expenditures came close to amounting to the same thing.

“The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind,” Justice Stevens wrote. “And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.”

Justice Kennedy responded that “by definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The majority cited a score of decisions recognizing the First Amendment rights of corporations, and Justice Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.”

But Justice Stevens defended the restrictions struck down on Thursday as modest and sensible. Even before the decision, he said, corporations could act through their political action committees or outside the specified time windows.

The McCain-Feingold law contains an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials. But that is, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “simply a matter of legislative grace.”

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion said that there was no principled way to distinguish between media corporations and other corporations and that the dissent’s theory would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, on television news programs, in books and on blogs.

Justice Stevens responded that people who invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.” He added in a footnote that lawmakers might now want to consider requiring corporations to disclose how they intended to spend shareholders’ money or to put such spending to a shareholder vote.

On its central point, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Justice Stevens’s dissent was joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead, it addressed the questions it proposed to the parties in June when it set down the case for an unusual second argument in September, those of whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. The answer, the court ruled Thursday, was yes.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

This article is by Adam Nagourney, Jeff Zeleny, Kate Zernike and Michael Cooper.

BOSTON — The e-mail message from a Massachusetts supporter to one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement arrived in early December. The state was holding a special election to fill the seat held by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, it said, and conditions were ripe for a conservative ambush: an Election Day in the dead of winter with the turnout certain to be low.

“To be honest, we kind of looked at it and said, this is a long shot,” said Brendan Steinhauser, the director of state campaigns for FreedomWorks, which has become an umbrella for Tea Party groups. But the group was impressed by the determination of organizers in this decidedly Democratic state and was intrigued by the notion that this could be a way to effectively derail federal health care legislation.

And so FreedomWorks sent out a query to dozens of its best organizers across the country. Within days, the clamoring response made clear that what seemed improbable suddenly seemed very attainable; within weeks, the Tea Party movement had established a beachhead in Mr. Kennedy’s home state.

While conservatives quietly mobilized behind a state senator, Scott Brown, to fill the seat occupied by Mr. Kennedy for nearly 47 years, Democrats paid but slight attention to a contest that by every indication and by history should have been nothing to worry about.

Martha Coakley, the attorney general and Democratic Party candidate, barely campaigned in the weeks after winning her primary on Dec. 8.

The vastly different responses of the two parties contributed to a confluence of events that fundamentally altered the course of what should have been a routine special election.

In Washington, Senate Democrats had to engage in tawdry horse-trading to pass a staggeringly complex health care bill in the face of a Republican filibuster, displaying Congress at its partisan and dysfunctional worst.

Across the country, the bailouts of Wall Street and the banks, the big year-end bonuses for powerful executives, and the rapidly ballooning federal deficit were feeding populist anger and resentment of the Obama administration while providing the Tea Party movement with fresh energy and issues around which to organize.

Here in Massachusetts, Mr. Brown began introducing himself with a modest buy of television advertisements that would prove politically prescient: portraying himself as the outsider battling the Democratic Party establishment, in this case, Ms. Coakley.

It was less of a long shot than it seemed: The National Republican Senatorial Committee had, nine days before Christmas, quietly conducted a poll that found that among voters who seemed most likely to turn out, Mr. Brown was just 3 percentage points behind.

Ms. Coakley did almost nothing early on, lulled by the knowledge that Democrats had held the Senate seat for 57 years and emboldened by her 19-point win in a four-way primary. She disappeared from the trail for a few days of rest. Her campaign, struggling for cash, was not conducting polls in the very beginning of January, a critical period, and had yet to run a single commercial.

By the time Ms. Coakley’s campaign and Democratic officials noticed that things were not right in Massachusetts — after reading an outside group’s poll on Jan. 9 that showed Mr. Brown holding a 1 percentage point lead — the fire, as one White House official put it, was out of control. The Tea Party reinforcements had arrived, and a conservative group from Iowa started running commercials here portraying Ms. Coakley as a big spender who would raise taxes, a powerful issue with independents.

“It was a classic case of everybody getting caught napping,” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said in an interview. “This guy knew exactly what he was doing. He’s an appealing candidate. Pleasant guy. He’s smart. He tapped into an antipolitician sentiment.”

The two-week period that upended the politics of Massachusetts and the nation may well be remembered as the moment that undid the signature initiative of the Obama presidency, his health care bill. It is a story, based on interviews with more than three dozen people involved in the race, of missed opportunities and tensions among Democratic power centers here and in Washington.

But it also heralds the coming of age of the Tea Party movement, which won its first major electoral success with a new pragmatism, and the potential of different elements of a divided Republican Party to rally around one goal.

Mr. Brown’s views may not have been perfectly aligned with all of the conservative activists — in particular, he supports abortion rights, though he opposes late-term abortions — but he pledged to vote against the health care bill, opposed a cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and opposed proposals to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants. In the final week of the race, he raised $1 million a day on the Internet.

“For us, this is not so much about Scott Brown as it is about the idea that if we really collaborate as a mass movement, we can take any seat in the country,” said Eric Odom, executive director of the American Liberty Alliance, who helped organize last spring’s Tax Day Tea Party rallies to protest government spending from his home in Chicago.

For all the political power of the Democratic Party — its control of the White House and both houses of Congress — this contest highlighted serious flaws in its political operation heading into the tough midterm elections, from the political affairs office of the White House to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It demonstrated the extent to which the White House was distracted by the exceedingly difficult task of passing a health care bill before the State of the Union address, along with dealing with an attempted terrorism plot on Christmas Day.

And for Congressional Democratic leaders already chafing at the political cost of Mr. Obama’s health care plan, it was confirmation that the bill could be deadly at the polls for any member of Congress in a competitive race next fall.

There were many missteps on the ground by Ms. Coakley — off-putting remarks and gaffes, local memories of problems in her tenure as attorney general, a seething sense among many residents that she was considering herself entitled to their votes. Many voters were as angry with the Democrats who have long run the state as they were with the ones in Washington, and they enjoyed a bit of nose-thumbing on Tuesday. But if there is one question on which there appears to be a consensus among Democrats today, amid a period of full-blown blame trading and recriminations, it is that the defeat of Ms. Coakley could have been prevented.

“If we had defined Scott Brown earlier, if we had been able to go up on the air earlier, if the Democrats had passed Wall Street financial reform in Washington,” said Celinda Lake, a pollster from the Coakley campaign, looking weary as she arrived on Tuesday night at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston for her client’s concession speech. “There are lots of things that we could have done.”

A Dead Time

On the Sunday after Christmas, the senior members of Mr. Brown’s campaign gathered at his headquarters in Needham. It was a dead time of year, politically. Mr. Brown did not have a lot of money. Ms. Coakley’s strategy seemed clear: to coast to victory with a quick under-the-radar campaign. Democrats in Massachusetts and Washington were enjoying the holiday — she was resting up; the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was in India; Mr. Obama was in Hawaii — and few were paying attention to the long-shot state senator from Massachusetts.

By contrast, the National Republican Senatorial Committee zeroed in on the race — and the possibility to seize a victory — weeks before the Democratic committee realized its candidate was in real trouble. A poll conducted for Republicans on Dec. 16 showed that Mr. Brown was within 13 percentage points of Ms. Coakley and trailing by only 3 percentage points among voters who said they definitely intended to vote.

“It almost seemed too good to be true,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the committee.

The absence at this critical juncture of the White House or the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, led by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, strategists in both parties say, was a turning point that touched off a series of mistakes from which the Coakley campaign would never recover.

Mr. Brown intensified the pace of his campaigning after that meeting in Needham. He began running biographical ads — one even featured a grainy image of a young John F. Kennedy — and turned up at campaign events across the state.

A review of Ms. Coakley’s schedules showed no public campaign events between a stop where she read Dr. Seuss to schoolchildren on Dec. 23 and an appearance in New Bedford on Dec. 30. Mr. Brown’s schedule that week, on the other hand, was full: a stop at a coat drive on Christmas eve, six stops scheduled for the day after Christmas, and seven more the day after.

Mr. Brown’s surge should not have been a total surprise. Ms. Lake, the pollster for Ms. Coakley, said early surveys conducted before the primary detected that “independents were an ornery lot in an angry mood.” But those surveys did not alter the campaign strategy for Ms. Coakley or set off alarm bells for Democrats in Washington.

“Everybody took their foot off the pedal more than they should have,” Ms. Lake said.

Under the Radar

As Tea Party activists headed to Massachusetts, the National Republican Senatorial Committee made a deliberate decision to keep a low profile. It baffled and to some extent misled Democrats, who thought that the committee had concluded the race was unwinnable. But Republican officials, after a series of primary challenges from conservative and Tea Party candidates, have learned the dangers of being identified as an establishment candidate. They determined the best way to help Mr. Brown was not to be seen as helping him.

“We did not want to provoke the D.S.C.C. into a big spending battle too early, which would have allowed them to chip away at his positives in a way that they would have eventually won,” said Mr. Cornyn, often criticized by Tea Party groups as the embodiment of the establishment.

And Mr. Odom, with the American Liberty Alliance, had dismissed the race as unwinnable, too, until about 10 days ago, when the number of e-mail messages urging his group to jump into the race began to reach 50 a day. He sent out e-mail messages to the 60,000 people on the taxdayteaparty.com list, urging them to donate and he headed to Boston himself.

Indeed, there was a spirit of pragmatism emerging here that had not been seen in other races where conservative and Tea Party activists have become involved. “He’s the kind of Republican who will give conservatives heartburn, but it’s better than the other side,” said Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState.com. His Web site does not typically endorse any candidate who supports abortion rights. But by late December, it was posting almost daily appeals directing readers to Mr. Brown’s Web site to contribute.

A Blank Slate

The first wave of Democratic party operatives arrived in Massachusetts about two weeks before Election Day, only to find that it might have already been too late. Even at that late hour, some campaign strategists said they found gaps in basic procedures. The electronic database of voters was not updated, three party officials said, and there was no reliable voter identification list to find supporters among independent voters.

Dennis Newman, the chief strategist for the Coakley campaign, said it was “absolutely false” that there was no current voter database.

Mr. Newman said that the campaign had spent most of its money in the primary, which it had expected to be the tougher race, and then had trouble raising money when things tightened. When the race became a referendum on health care, he said, Ms. Coakley was put in the tricky position of defending a health care bill to voters in a state that already has near-universal coverage.

Whatever the reason, Ms. Coakley’s campaign took the stance of a front-runner, determining that the best way to defeat Mr. Brown was to ignore him. It had done relatively little to draw attention to his voting record and positions that could have halted his rise.

If the campaign had been viewed as competitive, Ms. Coakley might well not have left the trail for a few days, several Democrats said. More important, she might have used that critical period at the end of December and in the opening days of the New Year to run advertisements introducing herself to voters — who knew her only vaguely as the attorney general — and making the case for her candidacy. Instead, she decided it made more sense to wait until the final week to run her advertisements.

The result was that she was sort of a blank slate, and Mr. Brown’s small advertising buy, combined with the more ambitious attack advertisements financed by the Iowa group and others, were able to define her. Several Democrats here and in Washington expressed frustration that Ms. Coakley — who is not based in Washington and who as attorney general could easily have portrayed herself as the crusader working against corruption and special interests — permitted herself to be identified as the establishment.

Last Thursday, after the White House awoke to the danger, Mr. Axelrod called Mr. Newman, a senior adviser to Ms. Coakley, to ask what the White House could do to help; he was assured, as Mr. Axelrod later related the conversation to associates, that things were in place and that Ms. Coakley was wary about getting any more operatives from Washington.

Mr. Axelrod later expressed surprise to associates that the Coakley campaign had not requested a visit from Mr. Obama to help turn out Democratic voters who seemed underwhelmed by the candidacy. (Many black voters who were enthusiastic about Mr. Obama in 2008 failed to vote on Tuesday.)

The next day, with new polls showing the race was virtually tied, Ms. Coakley called Mr. Axelrod and asked if Mr. Obama would come to Boston.

There was some debate about whether Mr. Obama should make this trip. Some of Mr. Obama’s advisers warned that the president would suffer political damage if he went and lost. Others said they thought the visit would reinforce Mr. Brown’s message that Ms. Coakley was the tool of Washington. But as Mr. Obama contemplated the stakes of a loss — starting with his health care bill — it was determined there was no other choice.

The president, described by associates as increasingly distressed about the campaign, headed to Boston Sunday for a rally in which he could barely hide his discomfort. Mr. Obama all but pleaded with Democratic voters to be more “fired up” than they were in 2008. But two days later, his call went unanswered.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2010
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the National Rifle Association rating of Scott Brown, the winner of the special Senate election in Massachusetts. He had an A rating from the group, not an F rating.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — President Obama signaled on Wednesday that he might be willing to scale back his proposed health care overhaul to a version that could attract bipartisan support, as the White House and Congressional Democrats grappled with a political landscape transformed by the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race.

“I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on ABC News, notably leaving near-universal insurance coverage off his list of core goals.

But it was not clear that even a stripped-down bill could get through Congress anytime soon. Throughout the day, White House officials and Democratic Congressional leaders struggled to find a viable way forward for the health care bill and to digest the reality that much of their agenda, including an energy measure and an overhaul of banking regulations, had been derailed by the outcome in Massachusetts.

Inside the White House, top aides to the president said Mr. Obama had made no decision on how to proceed, and insisted that his preference was still to win passage of a far-reaching health care measure, like the House and Senate bills, which would extend coverage to more than 30 million people by 2019.

On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders said they were weighing several options. But some lawmakers in both parties began calling for a scaled-back bill that could be adopted quickly with bipartisan support, and Mr. Obama seemed to suggest that if he could not pass an ambitious health care bill, he would be willing to settle for what he could get. In the interview with ABC, he cited two specific goals: cracking down on insurance industry practices that hurt consumers and reining in health costs.

“We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people,” Mr. Obama said. “We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up, and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements to this bill.”

Republican Congressional aides said a compromise bill could include new insurance industry regulations, including a ban on denying coverage based on pre-existing medical conditions, as well as aid for small businesses for health costs and possible steps to restrict malpractice lawsuits. But as Mr. Obama noted on ABC, a pared-down package imposing restrictions on insurers might make coverage unaffordable, which is one reason he prefers a broad overhaul.

As the full Congress returned to Washington to start a new legislative year on the first anniversary of Mr. Obama’s inauguration options were limited and there were signs of a divide between the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill. House leaders signaled that they had effectively ruled out the idea of adopting the Senate bill, which would send it directly to the president for his signature. Yet close advisers to the president said such a move was still on the table.

Mr. Brown’s victory in Massachusetts on Tuesday denies Democrats the 60th vote that they need to surmount filibusters and advance a revised health measure. Senate leaders said they would not risk antagonizing voters by trying to rush a bill through before Mr. Brown could be sworn in, and Mr. Obama agreed.

“People in Massachusetts spoke,” the president told ABC. “He’s got to be part of that process.”

Another option considered by Democrats would be to use the procedural maneuver known as reconciliation to pass chunks of the health care bill attached to a budget measure, which requires only a simple majority. But there appeared to be little appetite for such a move on Capitol Hill.

Democrats also wrestled with the implications of losing their 60-vote majority for their wider legislative agenda, including efforts to tighten regulation of the financial system and combat global warming, even as they sensed new urgency to turn their attention to creating jobs and improving the economy.

Democratic efforts to pass a bill on energy and global warming were in trouble even before the special election; administration officials and Senate Democratic leaders have been quietly negotiating a scaled-back package focusing more on job-creating technologies than on limits for climate-altering pollution.

Even the president’s new proposal to tax big banks for the government’s bailout losses, which Republicans privately conceded was a political winner given widespread anti-Wall Street sentiment, suddenly did not look like such a sure thing. Industry lobbyists noted that Mr. Brown publicly opposed the bank tax and that Mr. Obama had spotlighted that opposition during a campaign appearance in Massachusetts on Sunday — to no avail.

But the outcome might put further impetus behind efforts to bring down the budget deficit, a topic the White House has addressed more visibly in recent days. On Tuesday, the administration and Congressional Democrats agreed to create a commission to attack the deficit and the national debt.

At a news conference at the Capitol, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, sought to minimize health care as compared with jobs and the economy. But he made clear that Democrats did not see a clear path forward.

“The election in Massachusetts changes the math in the Senate,” Mr. Reid said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that people are hurting.” Pressed about the health care legislation, Mr. Reid said, “The problems out there — it’s certainly more than health care.” Pressed again, he said: “No decision has been made.”

Senior Republicans showed little new willingness to collaborate with the Democrats. Asked where he might be willing to work across the aisle, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, offered praise for Mr. Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan but not a single example on domestic policy.

Mr. McConnell was asked if the health care bill was dead. “I sure hope so,” he said.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she was eager to work with Democrats in devising an alternative to the health care bill passed four weeks ago by the Senate on a party-line vote.

“What I hope the White House will do is start from scratch and, instead of pushing this bill through the House, work with a bipartisan group of senators to achieve a consensus bill that would have widespread support,” Ms. Collins said. “There are many provisions of the bill that have bipartisan support. And I believe the president would be wise to draft a new bill that he could get through both the House and the Senate with supermajority votes.”

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

By Chris Jordan
January 20, 2010

As he launched his campaign for the presidency back in 1948, Sen. Strom Thurmond said, “There’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”

The Democrat-turned-“Dixiecrat” (later Republican) broke off from his party over civil rights and ran a pro-segregation campaign.

Fast forward to 2002. At the senator’s 100th-birthday celebration, Trent Lott, the Republican Senate majority leader from Mississippi, uttered a sentence he’d later regret.

“I want to say this about my state,” Lott said. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

The damage was done. Even President Bush joined the chorus calling on Lott to resign as leader.

While he deserved the criticism for making an offensive and idiotic comment, the current “controversy” involving Sen. Harry Reid illustrates how we can often take it too far.

The Senate majority leader was overheard saying that Americans are ready to accept a black candidate, especially one such as Obama who is, “light skinned,” and has, “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Many have jumped at the chance to call for his head. It’s obvious that there’s no comparison between the comments of Lott and Reid, but cries of “Double standard!” have been rampant.

The controversy shows how quick we are to freak out over nothing and how bad we are at talking about real race issues that need addressing.

How about white attitudes toward dark-skinned blacks?

Reid said that American voters are more prone to accept a black candidate who has lighter skin, and he just might be right. Colin Powell said in 1995, explaining his appeal to white voters, “I speak reasonably well, like a white person … I ain’t that black.”

Still don’t think what Reid said is true? A 2007 study published by researchers from Harvard and the University of Virginia found that, “dark-skinned blacks in the United States have less likelihood of holding elective office than their lighter-skinned counterparts.”

But our race problems go far beyond the attitudes of individuals and isolated “racist” comments, and Obama’s election has not solved them.

Compared with whites, blacks in America today are three times as likely to live in poverty. They are also twice as likely to be unemployed and six times as likely to be in prison. For every $1 that the average white family brings home in income each year, the average black family takes in roughly 60 cents.

These issues are what we need to talk about, but rarely ever do. The extent of our racial dialog is a game of finger-pointing.

“You’re more racist!”

“No, you’re more racist!”

Repeat steps one and two.

Why is this so difficult to talk about in a serious way? Not only is it uncomfortable, but when someone proposes a solution, they are often deemed a “reverse racist.”

The truth is that slavery and segregation have left a dark, damaging scar in America that persists today. We can see signs of progress, but huge challenges still remain that deserve an honest, thoughtful discussion.

We should call out racism when we see it. But these false cries of “Reid’s a racist!” and “Double standard!” don’t even come close to the conversation we need.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

By MICHAEL COOPER

BOSTON — Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts.

By a decisive margin, Mr. Brown defeated Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, who had been considered a prohibitive favorite to win just over a month ago after she easily won the Democratic primary.

With all precincts counted, Mr. Brown had 52 percent of the vote to Ms. Coakley’s 47 percent.

“Tonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken,” Mr. Brown told his cheering supporters in a victory speech, standing in front of a backdrop that said “The People’s Seat.”

The election left Democrats in Congress scrambling to salvage a bill overhauling the nation’s health care system, which the late Mr. Kennedy had called “the cause of my life.” Mr. Brown has vowed to oppose the bill, and once he takes office the Democrats will no longer control the 60 votes in the Senate needed to overcome filibusters.

There were immediate signs that the bill had become imperiled. House members indicated they would not quickly pass the bill the Senate approved last month.

And after the results were announced, one centrist Democratic senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, called on Senate leaders to suspend any votes on the Democrats’ health care legislation until Mr. Brown is sworn into office. The election, he said, was a referendum on both health care and the integrity of the government process.

Beyond the bill, the election of a man supported by the Tea Party movement also represented an unexpected reproach by many voters to President Obama after his first year in office, and struck fear into the hearts of Democratic lawmakers, who are already worried about their prospects in the midterm elections later this year.

Mr. Brown was able to appeal to independents who were anxious about the economy and concerned about the direction taken by Democrats, now that they control both Beacon Hill and Washington. He rallied his supporters when he said, at the last debate, that he was not running for Mr. Kennedy’s seat but for “the people’s seat.”

That seat, held for nearly half a century by Mr. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, will now be held for the next two years by a Republican who has said he supports waterboarding as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects, opposes a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and opposes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants unless they leave the country. It was a sharp swing of the pendulum, but even Democratic voters said they wanted the Obama administration to change direction.

“I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country,” said Marlene Connolly, 73, of North Andover, a lifelong Democrat who said she cast her first vote for a Republican on Tuesday. “I think if Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going.”

Mr. Brown ran strongest in the suburbs of Boston, where the independent voters who make up a majority in Massachusetts turned out in large numbers. Ms. Coakley did best in urban areas, winning overwhelmingly in Boston and running ahead in Springfield, Worcester, Fall River and New Bedford, but her margins were not large enough to carry her to victory.

In a concession speech before cheering supporters, Ms. Coakley acknowledged that voters were angry and said she had hoped to deal with the concerns.

“Our mission continues, and our work goes on,” she said, echoing well-known remarks by Mr. Kennedy. “I am heartbroken at the result, as I know you are, and I know we will get up together tomorrow and continue this fight, even with this result tonight.”

The crowd at Mr. Brown’s victory rally, upset by reports that Democrats might try to vote on the health care bill before he takes office, chanted, “Seat him now!” Mr. Brown, for his part, noted that the interim senator holding the seat had finished his work, and that he was ready to go to Washington “without delay.” And he effusively praised Mr. Kennedy as a big-hearted, tireless worker, and said that he hoped to prove a worthy successor to him.

Ms. Coakley’s defeat, in a state that Mr. Obama won in 2008 with 62 percent of the vote, led to a round of finger-pointing among Democrats. Some criticized her tendency for gaffes — in a radio interview she offended Red Sox fans when she incorrectly suggested that Curt Schilling, a beloved former Red Sox pitcher, was a Yankee fan — while others criticized a lackluster, low-key campaign.

Mr. Brown presented himself as a Massachusetts Everyman, featuring the pickup truck he drives around the state in his speeches and one of his television commercials, calling in to talk radio shows and campaigning with popular local sports figures.

The implications of the election drew nationwide attention, and millions of dollars of outside spending, to the race. It transformed what many had expected to be a sleepy, low-turnout special election on a snowy day in January into a high-profile contest that appeared to draw more voters than expected to the polls. There were reports of traffic jams outside suburban polling stations, while other polling stations had to call for extra ballots.

The late surge by Mr. Brown appeared to catch Democrats by surprise, causing them to scramble in the last week and a half of the campaign and hastily schedule an appearance by Mr. Obama with Ms. Coakley on Sunday afternoon.

“Understand what’s at stake here, Massachusetts,” Mr. Obama said in his speech that day, repeatedly invoking Mr. Kennedy’s legacy. “It’s whether we’re going forwards or backwards.” He all but pleaded with voters to support Ms. Coakley, to preserve his agenda.

As voters went to the polls, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made it clear that the president was “not pleased” with the situation Ms. Coakley found herself in. “He was both surprised and frustrated,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Although the race has riveted the nation largely because it was seen as contributing to the success or defeat of the health care bill, the potency of the issue for voters here was difficult to gauge. That is because Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed when Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor.

Thus Massachusetts is one of the few states where the benefits promised by the national bill were expected to have little effect on how many of its residents got coverage, making it an unlikely place for a referendum on the health care bill.

On Capitol Hill, the fate of the health care legislation was highly uncertain as Democratic leaders quickly gathered to plot strategy in the wake of the Republican victory.

Sentiment about how to proceed was mixed, with several lawmakers saying the House would not accept the Senate-passed plan. Top officials had said that approach was the party’s best alternative, and many members said they still believed it was crucial that Democrats pass a plan.

“It is important for us to pass legislation,” said Representative Baron P. Hill, a conservative Democrat from Indiana.

Reporting was contributed by Katie Zezima, Danielle Ossher and Bret Silverberg in Massachusetts, and Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn in Washington.

Massachusetts election for Senate adds impetus
David Espo
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama and top congressional Democrats closed in on agreement Friday on cost and coverage issues at the heart of sweeping health care legislation, their marathon White House bargaining sessions given fresh urgency by an unpredictable Massachusetts Senate race.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., the third-ranking House Democrat, said, “Something should be going to CBO very soon.” The Congressional Budget Office is the official arbiter of the cost and extent of coverage that any legislation would provide.

One key obstacle appeared on its way to a resolution when Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., requested the elimination of an intensely controversial, one-of-a-kind federal subsidy to cover the entire cost of a Medicaid expansion in his home state.

In its place, officials said, Obama and lawmakers decided to increase federal money for Medicaid in all 50 states, although it was not clear if there would be enough to cover the expansion completely.

The increase in the Medicaid program is a key element in the bill’s overall goal of expanding health coverage to millions who lack it. The bill also envisions creation of new insurance exchanges, essentially federally regulated marketplaces where consumers can shop for coverage. Individuals and families at lower incomes would receive federal subsidies.

The overhaul legislation also is designed to curb insurance industry practices such as denial of coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.

At the White House, spokesman Robert Gibbs was unequivocal that Obama’s yearlong campaign for health care legislation would prove successful. “As you heard the president say yesterday, we’re going to get health care done,” he said.

Not everyone was so certain, particularly given poll results from Massachusetts that showed Republican Scott Brown within reach of a possible upset over Democrat Martha Coakley in a three-way race to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

“If Scott Brown wins, it’ll kill the health bill,” said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, reflecting that the Republican would provide opponents of the health care bill a decisive 41st vote to uphold a filibuster and block passage. Frank predicted Coakley would ultimately win the seat.

The president called on Congress in his inaugural address a year ago to send him legislation that also would slow the rise in health care costs generally. Neither the House- nor the Senate-passed legislation is certain to accomplish that last goal, according to officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, a federal agency, and it appeared the White House might be trying to redefine its terms.

The talks at the White House proceeded in private – a distinct contrast, Republicans pointed out, to Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to have final negotiations televised on C-SPAN.

The principal source of funding for the legislation is to be a series of cuts in projected federal payments to Medicare providers such as hospitals and nursing homes. Insurance companies that sell private Medicare coverage would take the brunt of the impact.

Additionally, union leaders signed off Thursday on a tax on high-cost insurance plans, and a Senate-passed increase in the payroll tax on incomes of more than $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples was likely to be expanded, possibly to apply to investment earnings.

Even with an agreement on cost and coverage, Democrats would have to resolve controversy over abortion, coverage of immigrants and other issues before sealing a final compromise.

Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review

What went wrong? A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama’s approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46 percent – and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president’s second year.

A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years (James Carville). A year ago, conservatism was dead (Sam Tanenhaus). Now the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in bluest of blue Massachusetts is surprisingly close, with a virtually unknown state senator bursting on the scene by turning the election into a mini-referendum on Obama and his agenda, most particularly health care reform.

A year ago, Obama was the most charismatic politician on Earth. Today the thrill is gone, the doubts growing – even among erstwhile believers.

Liberals try to attribute Obama’s political decline to matters of style. He’s too cool, detached, uninvolved. He’s not tough, angry or aggressive enough with opponents. He’s contracted out too much of his agenda to Congress.

These stylistic and tactical complaints may be true, but they miss the major point: The reason for today’s vast discontent, presaged by spontaneous national Tea Party opposition, is not that Obama is too cool or compliant but that he’s too left.

It’s not about style; it’s about substance. About which Obama has been admirably candid. This out-of-nowhere, least-known of presidents dropped the veil most dramatically in the single most important political event of 2009, his Feb. 24 first address to Congress. With remarkable political honesty and courage, Obama unveiled the most radical (in American terms) ideological agenda since the New Deal: the fundamental restructuring of three pillars of American society – health care, education and energy.

Then began the descent – when, more amazingly still, Obama devoted himself to turning these statist visions into legislative reality. First energy, with cap-and-trade, an unprecedented federal intrusion into American industry and commerce. It got through the House, with its Democratic majority and Supreme Soviet-style rules. But it will never get out of the Senate.

Then, the keystone: a health-care revolution in which the federal government will regulate in crushing detail one-sixth of the U.S. economy. By essentially abolishing medical underwriting (actuarially based risk assessment) and replacing it with government fiat, Obamacare turns the health insurance companies into utilities, their every significant move dictated by government regulators.

The public option was a sideshow. As many on the right have long been arguing, and as the more astute on the left (such as the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki) understand, Obamacare is government health care by proxy, single-payer through a facade of nominally “private” insurers.

At first, health care reform was sustained politically by Obama’s own popularity. But then gravity took hold, and Obamacare’s profound unpopularity dragged him down with it. After 29 speeches and a fortune in squandered political capital, it still will not sell.

The health care drive is the most important reason Obama has sunk to 46 percent. But this reflects something larger. In the end, what matters is not the persona but the agenda. In a country where politics is fought between the 40-yard lines, Obama has insisted on pushing hard for the 30.

And the American people – disorganized and unled but nonetheless agitated and mobilized – have put up a stout defense somewhere just left of midfield.

Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off.

It’s inherently risky for any charismatic politician to legislate. To act is to choose and to choose is to disappoint the expectations of many who had poured their hopes into the empty vessel – of which candidate Obama was the greatest representative in recent American political history.

Obama did not just act, however. He acted ideologically. To his credit, Obama didn’t just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something – to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America’s deeply and historically individualist polity.

Perhaps Obama thought he’d been sent to the White House to do just that. If so, he vastly over-read his mandate. His own electoral success – twinned with handy victories and large majorities in both houses of Congress – was a referendum on his predecessor’s governance and the post-Lehman financial collapse. It was not an endorsement of European-style social democracy.

Hence the resistance. Hence the fall. The system may not always work, but it does take its revenge.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Kathleen Parker
The Spokesman-Review

Ask yourself: Who is likely to be the first woman president of the United States?

Anyone? Anyone?

Despite our assumption that a female president is inevitable, and likely soonish, it’s surprisingly difficult to come up with a name.

Briefly, Hillary Clinton seemed the obvious answer. For a flicker, Sarah Palin was an entertaining notion – and remains so among a certain contingent of stubborn optimists. Other names surface now and then – Meg Whitman, Condoleezza Rice, Janet Napolitano, to name a few.

But who, really, is likely to shatter the White House ceiling? And does America, for all our talk of equality, really want a woman in the highest office?

Washington Post writer Anne Kornblut explores those questions in her excellent new book, “Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win.” As a reporter on the presidential campaign trail, Kornblut had a front-row seat to history, watching two women rise and fall from the top tickets – one a presidential and the other a vice presidential candidate.

It is easy to argue that Clinton and Palin are unique, each in her own way, so inferences about gender in politics can’t be drawn. Clinton’s role as former first lady and wife of Bill, and all the attendant baggage (not to mention the phenomenon of Barack Obama), inarguably played a bigger role than gender in her defeat. Palin, for all her charm and accomplishments, was not a competent candidate. With her winking and flirting, she made herself unserious to many who otherwise would have supported a woman for vice president. Happily.

Even so, it is impossible to argue that these two women were not treated unfairly, often cruelly, by both the media and the public – and even by their own campaigns. What gets leveled at women is of a different order than what men endure – and no woman in the public arena would insist otherwise.

I make that assertion as a not-especially sensitive fleur. Having lived most of my life in the testosterone-rich environment of men and boys, I’m fairly ism-tolerant. That is, every unflattering comment about women isn’t necessarily “sexist” in my playbook. But lately, for a variety of reasons, the usual inhibitors that have kept overt hostility confined to private spaces have been disabled. In politics, it’s open season, as Kornblut meticulously documents.

Thus, we have such clever items as the Hillary Clinton nutcracker and public references to her as a “bitch.” Rush Limbaugh asked whether Americans “want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis.”

And we have the “slutty flight attendant” look of Sarah Palin, compliments of David Letterman, who also suggested the rape of one of her daughters. The Internet roiled with sexual jokes and pornified images of Palin, amid allegations that her infant son was not her own.

Women are never more complicated than in public life, but so it has always been. Kornblut’s observations, though tied to recent events, fit the framework offered 15 years ago by Kathleen Hall Jamieson in her book “Beyond the Double Bind.” Essentially, a double bind is a rhetorical construct that posits two, and only two, alternatives – either of which serves to disempower.

Thus, women are either too tough or not tough enough. Or they can be assertive and thought immodest, or they can be silent and be dismissed. And so on.

One of five binds Jamieson described is particularly relevant to Palin – the womb/brain bind. Women can exercise their wombs or their brains, it is thought, but not both. Palin, in addition to being a popular governor, was obviously fertile.

In a quirky twist of ideology, Democratic women questioned whether Palin could be both vice president and the mother of an infant while also helping her pregnant teenage daughter. Republicans, ever the defenders of traditional family norms, were delighted that their candidate had managed to balance career and family with the help of that rare dreamboat, the helpful husband.

It’s all complicated.

What’s clear is that women are held to a different standard than men and, when deemed unworthy, are attacked specifically as women according to stereotypes we pretend to shun.

To the extent that we truly believe women ought to play a more vital role in American society – and this question remains open – we have to wonder why any woman would submit to the punishments we’ve recently witnessed.

Unfortunately, most won’t.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

TRENTON — The New Jersey Legislature approved a measure on Monday that would make the state the 14th in the nation, but one of the few on the East Coast, to legalize the use of marijuana to help patients with chronic illnesses.

The measure — which would allow patients diagnosed with severe illnesses like cancer, AIDS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis to have access to marijuana grown and distributed through state-monitored dispensaries — was passed by the General Assembly and State Senate on the final day of the legislative session.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine has said he would sign it into law before leaving office next Tuesday. Supporters said that within nine months, patients with a prescription for marijuana from their doctors should be able to obtain it at one of six locations.

“It’s nice to finally see a day when democracy helps heal people,” said Charles Kwiatkowski, 38, one of dozens of patients who rallied at the State House before the vote and broke into applause when the lawmakers approved the measure.

Mr. Kwiatkowski, of Hazlet, N.J., who has multiple sclerosis, said his doctors have recommended marijuana to treat neuralgia, which causes him to lose the feeling and the use of his right arm and shoulders. “The M.S. Society has shown that this drug will help slow the progression of my disease. Why would I want to use anything else?”

The bill’s approval, which comes after years of lobbying by patients’ rights groups and advocates of less restrictive drug laws, was nearly derailed at the 11th hour as some Democratic lawmakers wavered and Governor-elect Christopher J. Christie, a Republican, went to the State House and expressed reservations about it.

In the end, however, it passed by comfortable margins in both houses: 48-14 in the General Assembly and 25-13 in the State Senate.

Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, a Democrat from Princeton who sponsored the legislation, said New Jersey’s would be the most restrictive medical marijuana law in the nation because it would permit doctors to prescribe it for only a set list of serious, chronic illnesses. The law would also forbid patients from growing their own marijuana and from using it in public, and it would regulate the drug under the strict conditions used to track the distribution of medically prescribed opiates like Oxycontin and morphine. Patients would be limited to two ounces of marijuana per month.

“I truly believe this will become a model for other states because it balances the compassionate use of medical marijuana while limiting the number of ailments that a physician can prescribe it for,” Mr. Gusciora said.

Under the bill, the state would help set the cost of the marijuana. The measure does not require insurance companies to pay for it.

Some educators and law enforcement advocates worked doggedly against the proposal, saying the law would make marijuana more readily available and more likely to be abused, and that it would lead to increased drug use by teenagers.

Opponents often pointed to California’s experience as a cautionary tale, saying that medical marijuana is so loosely regulated there that its use has essentially been decriminalized. Under California law, residents can obtain legal marijuana for a list of maladies as common, and as vaguely defined, as anxiety or chronic pain.

David G. Evans, executive director of the Drug-Free Schools Coalition, warned that the establishment of for-profit dispensaries would lead to abuses of the law. “There are going to be pot centers coming to neighborhoods where people live and are trying to raise their families,” Mr. Evans said.

Keiko Warner, a school counselor in Millville, N. J., cautioned that students already faced intense peer pressure to experiment with marijuana, and that the use of medical marijuana would only increase the likelihood that teenagers would experiment with the drug.

“There are children at age 15, 14 who are using drugs or thinking about using drugs,” she said. “And this is not going to help.”

Legislators attempted to ease those fears in the past year by working with the Department of Health and Senior Services to add restrictions to the bill.

But with Democrats in retreat after Mr. Corzine’s defeat by Mr. Christie, some supporters feared that the Democratic-controlled Legislature — which last week failed to muster the votes to pass a gay marriage bill — would balk at approving medical marijuana.

Mr. Christie added to the suspense Monday, just hours before lawmakers were scheduled to vote, when he was asked about the bill during a press conference within shouting distance of the legislative chambers. He said he was concerned that the bill contained loopholes that might encourage recreational drug use.

“I think we all see what’s happened in California,” Mr. Christie said. “It’s gotten completely out of control.”

But the loophole Mr. Christie cited — a list of ailments so unrestricted that it might have allowed patients to seek marijuana to treat minor or nonexistent ailments — had already been closed by legislators. In the end, the bill received Republican as well as Democratic support.

“This bill will help relieve people’s pain,” said Senator William Baroni, a Republican.

Supporters celebrated with hugs and tears.

Scott Ward, 26, who said he suffered from multiple sclerosis, said he had been prescribed marijuana to alleviate leg cramps so severe that they often felt “like my muscles are tearing apart.” “Now,” he said, “I can do normal things like take a walk and walk the dog.”

Remarks on Obama were made in 2008
Steven Thomma
McClatchy

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., apologized Saturday for newly revealed racial remarks he made about Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, comments that could hurt his re-election hopes.

Reid referred to Obama, then a fellow senator, in private talks as “light-skinned” and speaking “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” according to a new book on the campaign by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” Reid said in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans, for my improper comments.”

Reid apologized to Obama in a telephone call Saturday afternoon.

“I accepted Harry’s apology without question because I’ve known him for years, I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart,” Obama said in a written statement. “As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”

Obama’s forgiveness was a secondary issue, however, as one of the nation’s top Democrats fights to keep his seat as voters back home have soured on him.

Reid already is in danger of losing his bid for re-election in Nevada, which would make him the second Democratic Senate leader voted out of office after former Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota lost his re-election bid in 2002.

A new poll for the Las Vegas Review-Journal released Saturday found that more than half of the state’s voters are unhappy with him, raising new questions about whether he might decide to retire rather than lose.

The poll also showed Reid trailing all three possible Republican rivals.

The 70-year-old Reid ruled out dropping his bid for another term, as veteran Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota have done.

“I am absolutely running for re-election,” Reid said in a statement to the Las Vegas newspaper.

Reid trails

A new survey released Saturday by the Las Vegas Review-Journal showed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid earning poor polling numbers in his home state of Nevada as he faces re-election in 2010.

In the poll, by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Reid trailed former state Republican Party chairwoman Sue Lowden 50 percent to 40 percent.

More than half of Nevadans had an unfavorable opinion of Reid. Just 33 percent of respondents held a favorable opinion.

GOP blasts response to Reid apology
Douglass K. Daniel
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Republicans on Sunday accused Democrats of a double standard by accepting Sen. Harry Reid’s apology for racial remarks about Barack Obama instead of demanding Reid’s ouster as majority leader.

In a private conversation reported in a new book, Reid described Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign as a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid, D-Nev., apologized to Obama on Saturday, and the president issued a statement accepting the apology and saying the matter was closed.

GOP Chairman Michael Steele, in appearances on two Sunday news programs, compared Reid’s predicament with the circumstances that led Senate Republican leader Trent Lott to step down from that post in 2002. Lott had spoken favorably of the 1948 segregationist presidential campaign of Strom Thurmond, and in spite of apologies for those remarks at Thurmond’s 100th birthday, Lott was forced out as leader.

“There is this standard where the Democrats feel that they can say these things and they can apologize when it comes from the mouths of their own. But if it comes from anyone else, it’s racism,” said Steele, who is black. “It’s either racist or it’s not. And it’s inappropriate, absolutely.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement that Reid should step down, calling his comments “embarrassing and racially insensitive.”

“It’s difficult to see this situation as anything other than a clear double standard on the part of Senate Democrats and others,” Cornyn said.

Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Jack Reed of Rhode Island joined other Democrats in saying Reid’s apology and Obama’s statement were enough. They also rejected comparisons to the Lott episode.

“I think that’s a totally different context. Harry Reid made a misstatement,” Reed said. “He owned up to it. He apologized. I think he is mortified by the statement he’s made. And I don’t think he should step down.”

Steele said Reid’s remarks reflect an “attitude” by the Nevada senator, and Steele cited the lawmaker’s comment last month about those who would want to go more slowly on overhauling health care: “You think you’ve heard these same excuses before? You’re right. In this country there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it’s too early. Let’s wait. Things aren’t bad enough.’ – about slavery.”

To Steele, “Clearly, he is out of touch not only with where America and his district are but where – how African-Americans generally feel about these issues.”

Rep. Barbara Lee, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, disagreed. In a statement the California Democrat said, “Senator Reid’s record provides a stark contrast to actions of Republicans to block legislation that would benefit poor and minority communities – most recently reflected in Republican opposition to the health bill now under consideration.”

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele, under fire this week for a string of controversial statements he has made while promoting his new book, has so angered the party’s congressional leaders that their aides said they told Steele’s handlers to “get him to stop.”

Steele, who has been making regular television appearances, said Monday that he did not believe Republicans could win back their congressional majorities in 2010. “Not this year,” Steele told Fox News Channel, saying he was just beginning to look at races, even though the party has been recruiting candidates for many months.

Believing that Steele’s off-the-cuff remarks threaten to damage the party’s brand — at the very time when Republicans are trying to capitalize on a national political environment that may hurt Democrats — senior aides to top Republican leaders confronted Steele’s staff on a conference call Wednesday.

“You really just have to get him to stop. It’s too much,” a top congressional aide said on the call, according to others on the call, adding that Steele was hurting morale among Republican members of Congress and candidates.

The call turned into “a bickering match,” aides said Thursday, as one top congressional staffer accused Steele of launching “a Republican apology tour at the exact wrong time.” Another congressional aide said Steele was appearing on television “unprepared and unknowledgeable.”

Steele’s aides said on the call that their boss had hired an outside public relations firm to handle his book promotions and acknowledged that they have “no control” over booking his interviews or what he says in them. They noted that Steele had dialed back his comments about Republicans’ chances in 2010 on Tuesday by telling MSNBC that he is “playing to win.”

The call came as discontent with Steele seems to be spreading among some major GOP donors, who have publicly questioned whether the party chairman is focusing more on his own image — delivering paid speeches and promoting his book, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda” — than on rebuilding the party and helping its candidates. The Washington Times reported Thursday that some prominent party fundraisers are withholding donations from the RNC because of unhappiness with Steele.

“It’s real,” a GOP strategist, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said of the donor frustration.

Steele’s spokeswoman did not return a call for comment Thursday. But in an interview Thursday, Steele lashed back at his Republican critics by telling them to “shut up.”

“I tell them to get a life,” Steele told ABC News Radio. “I’m looking them in the eye and say, ‘I’ve had enough of it. If you don’t want me in the job, fire me. But until then, shut up. Get with the program or get out of the way.’ ”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) came to Steele’s defense Thursday, telling a group of reporters in Atlanta that he is “a fan of Steele’s” even though the chairman “makes a number of old-time Republicans very nervous.”

“He comes out of a different background,” Gingrich said, according to the Associated Press. ” . . . But I think he’s pretty close to what we need. He’s different, he’s gutsy and he’s going to make a number of Republicans mad.”

Democrats have seized on Steele’s statements. The Democratic National Committee circulated an e-mail to reporters late Thursday titled, “Spiraling OUT-OF-CONTROL!!” And DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse called Steele “the gift that keeps on giving.”

“If there is a move afoot to get rid of him, we would not at all be in favor of that,” Woodhouse said. “In all seriousness, the Republican Party has got bigger problems than Michael Steele.”

Of the public criticism, Steele said his fellow Republicans should “cut it out.”

“All I’m saying is ‘cut it out,’ ” Steele told ABC. “If we have party differences that are inside the party, let’s deal with them inside the party. You don’t see the Democrats running around trying to beat up their national chairman or embarrass him.”

By JEFF ZELENY and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday ordered intelligence agencies to take a series of steps to streamline how terrorism threats are pursued and analyzed, saying the government had to respond aggressively to the failures that allowed a Nigerian man to ignite an explosive mixture on a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day.

The president also directed the Homeland Security Department to speed the installation of $1 billion in advanced-technology equipment for the screening of passengers, including body scanners at American airports and to work with international airports to see that they upgrade their own equipment to protect passengers on flights headed to the United States.

He said intelligence reports involving threats would be distributed more widely among agencies. He instructed the State Department to review its visa policy to make it more difficult for people with connections to terrorism to receive visas, while making it simpler to revoke visas to the United States when questions arise.

“We are at war,” Mr. Obama said, releasing an unclassified version of a report on the attempted attack.

He pledged not to “succumb to a siege mentality” sacrificing the country’s civil liberties for security, but he called for expanding the criteria for adding people to terrorism watch lists.

The report concluded that the government’s counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the sophistication and strength of a Qaeda cell in Yemen, where officials say the plot against the United States originated.

“We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” said John O. Brennan, the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser, in a briefing to reporters.

The report sharply criticized the National Counter Terrorism Center and the Central Intelligence Agency. The president ordered the agencies to speed the dissemination of information about potential plots and to develop ways of more quickly pursuing connective threads on potential terrorists.

“In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what these steps are designed to do.”

Mr. Obama ordered the review of the incident in which a Nigerian man traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam tried to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight and its 278 passengers. The man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is to be arraigned Friday on charges of attempted murder on a plane, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and other offenses.

It was the second time this week that the president delivered public remarks on the attempted bombing and the intelligence lapses. Administration officials said human error led to perhaps the biggest lapse of all: the failure to put Mr. Abdulmutallab on the no-fly list despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.

The internal report, conducted by Mr. Brennan, blamed a host of errors for the intelligence lapse, including a misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name. The mistake led officials at the State Department to the erroneous conclusion that Mr. Abdulmutallab did not have a visa.

“The intentional redundancy in the system should have added an additional layer of protection in uncovering a plot like the failed attack on Dec. 25,” the review found. “However, in both cases, the mission to ‘connect the dots’ did not produce the result that, in hindsight, it could have.”

But the systemic breakdown went much further. The cable from the State Department outlining Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father’s warnings about his son was available to the N.C.T.C. officials who maintained the no-fly list, the report said. But the cable alone did not meet the minimum standard for Mr. Abdulmutallab to get on the list.

At that point, a senior administration official said, the logical thing to do would have been to cross check to see if there were other red flags out on Mr. Abdulmutallab. That apparently did not happen.

“Watch-list personnel had access to additional derogatory information in databases that could have been connected to Mr. Abdulmutallab,” the report said, “but that access did not result in them uncovering the biographic information that would have been necessary for placement on the watch list.”

Mr. Brennan said that the intelligence failures that took place before Christmas were not similar to the lapses that led to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, some agencies were denied access to critical information, he said, but those problems have been resolved with the changes in the structure of intelligence agencies.

Mr. Brennan said the most significant finding of his report was the strength of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He called it “one of the most lethal” cells of the terrorist organization. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, he said, intelligence officials were not aware that the cell was organized enough to mount a plot on the United States.

The C.I.A. promised to speed the time it took to disseminate information on terrorism suspects, and to increase the number of analysts focused on Yemen.

A spokesman for the agency, George Little, said information would be shared within 48 hours of receiving it. He also said the agency would look at information it had on “individuals from countries of concern” to determine if their status on watch lists should be changed.

The White House defended Michael Leiter, the director of the counterterrorism center, who went on vacation in the immediate aftermath of the Christmas incident. Mr. Brennan said he had approved Mr. Leiter’s leave.

The president said the missteps were not the fault of one individual or agency. He took responsibility for the failures, saying, “The buck stops with me.”

The White House released the declassified report in an effort to show that the administration is conducting its business with transparency and willing to admit mistakes in order to correct them. The classified version offered a far starker view, officials said, of how close the United States came to averting the near tragedy.

The president has been criticized by some Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has suggested he does not appreciate the gravity of the threats facing the United States. Mr. Obama struck a defiant tone on Thursday.

“Great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust,” Mr. Obama said. “That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am president, we will never hand them that victory.”

The findings of the report drew criticism from some in the intelligence community.

“You can’t ask analysts to think faster,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, who was the C.I.A.’s assistant director for analysis from 2002 to 2005. “And the president’s solution to have analysts share more information sooner is only going to exacerbate the problem that got us into this flap in the first place.”

By JEFF ZELENY and ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON — The sudden decision by two senior Democratic senators to retire shook the party’s leaders on Wednesday and signaled that President Obama is facing a perilous political environment that could hold major implications for this year’s midterm elections and his own agenda.

The rapidly shifting climate, less than a year after Mr. Obama took office on the strength of a historic Democratic sweep, was brought into focus by the announcements that Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota would retire rather than wage uphill fights for re-election.

With the chances growing that the election in November would end the 60-vote majority Democrats enjoy in the Senate — the practical threshold for being able to overcome united Republican opposition — the president and his party face additional urgency to make progress on his agenda this year.

There was no immediate sign that the developments would further complicate White House efforts to secure final passage of Mr. Obama’s main domestic priority, the overhaul of the health care system, but the political pressure on Democrats from competitive states and districts will not make it any easier.

Following on the heels of the news of the senators’ retirements, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, a Democrat, also announced Wednesday that he would not seek a second term.

Together, the developments heightened a perception that a conservative push against the president’s ambitious agenda, a sluggish recovery from the deep recession and an outbreak of angry populism have combined to deplete Mr. Obama’s political strength and give Republicans a chance for big gains in this year’s races for the Senate and the House.

To the degree that the retirements reflect increasing skepticism among voters about the direction Democrats are pushing the country, Mr. Obama could face a tougher time winning legislative support as he presses ahead with initiatives on climate change, financial regulation, education and other issues.

Republicans seized on the resignations as a way to raise money and generate enthusiasm among voters in their conservative base.

“Voters and donors out in the country see two senior Democrats, both of whom were perceived to be safe a year ago, now retiring for fear of losing,” said Rob Jesmer, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “This further underscores our belief that with each passing day, the environment is getting better and better for Republicans, which energizes our people and demoralizes theirs.”

The White House and Democratic Party leaders reached out on Wednesday to reassure other potentially vulnerable Democrats in an effort to prevent any more retirements or party-switching. Obama aides played down the developments, saying it would be foolish to make predictions now about the November elections before Mr. Obama had even delivered his State of the Union address. If health care legislation passes and the economy improves, advisers believe the president and the party will be in a stronger position by fall.

“We’re weathering the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, “so it’s not a hospitable environment for incumbents generally. We’re in the majority party, so the brunt of that falls on us.”

“There’s not an election tomorrow,” he said. “There’s not an election next week. There’s not an election for 11 months.”

The effects of the retirements are not entirely negative for Democrats. Mr. Dodd had been widely expected to lose if he had stayed in the race; his departure clears the way for Democrats to put in a stronger candidate — Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general, who announced Wednesday that he was running.

Mr. Dorgan was facing tough going as it was; his departure, Democrats and Republicans said, left the Democrats with an uphill battle to hold on to the seat in North Dakota.

While Democrats seemed confident about holding on to a majority in the Senate, they acknowledged that keeping their 60-seat majority would be difficult and that 51 votes are not enough to advance most legislation in the face of united Republican opposition.

For Mr. Obama, that means the legislative clock is ticking. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the retirements of Mr. Dodd and Mr. Dorgan would not create a ripple effect among other senators facing re-election. Mr. Menendez said the senators were hiring campaign staff and raising money with an eye toward November.

“They are all in it to win it,” he said.

Still, seldom has a week passed in the last few months when a House or Senate Democrat, fearful of the outcome in the midterm elections, has not switched parties or retired. And the image of Democrats struggling could have the effect of encouraging other Democratic officeholders worried about the political climate to step aside. “We should be concerned,” said Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, “and we should develop our plans and our policies and the programs we are going to push for with an eye to 2010. But there’s no reason to panic.”

While Republicans appear to be in a position to make strong gains in Congress, analysts say they appear unlikely to regain control of either the House or Senate, given the strong margins Democrats built in 2008. In the Senate, Democrats hold 58 seats, and two independents align themselves with the Democrats; Republicans hold 40 seats. About seven Democratic seats and four Republican-held seats appear to be in play now.

In the House, Democrats have a 256-to-178 seat majority. Analysts on both sides say Democrats could lose from 20 to 25 seats in the current climate, though obviously a whole host of factors — the strength of the economy, public views of Mr. Obama’s health care plan, another attempted terrorist attack — could reshuffle that deck.

Despite the focus on the Democrats’ problems, Republicans are faring worse this year in terms of resignations putting seats in play. In the House, 14 Republicans and 10 Democrats are retiring, and Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida, has resigned, leaving one vacancy. In the Senate, six Republicans, including several in swing states requiring expensive campaigns, and four Democrats, including Mr. Dodd and Mr. Dorgan, are retiring.

Republicans have to defend open Senate seats in New Hampshire, Ohio and Missouri, after a spate of retirements last year.

When the Republican Party’s national chairman, Michael Steele, was asked on Sean Hannity’s syndicated radio program earlier this week if he believed Republicans could win the House, he replied: “Not this year.”

One day later, after facing considerable criticism from his own party, he revised his assessment in an interview with MSNBC. “Yes, we can,” Mr. Steele said.

By PETER S. GOODMAN

The nation lost 85,000 jobs from the economy in December, the Labor Department reported Friday, as hopes for a vigorous recovery ran headlong into the prospect that paychecks could remain painfully scarce into next year.

“We’re still losing jobs,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “It’s nothing like we had in the free fall of last winter, but we’re not about to turn around. We’re still looking at a really weak economy.”

The disappointing snapshot of the job market intensified pressure on the Obama administration to show results for the $787 billion spending bill it championed last year to stimulate the economy.

At a news conference, Mr. Obama acknowledged the December data as a setback, while outlining plans to deliver $2.3 billion in tax credits to spur manufacturing jobs in clean energy.

“We have to continue to explore every avenue to accelerate the return to hiring,” the president told reporters.

Most economists assume the unemployment rate — which held steady at 10 percent in December — will worsen in coming months. The nation would then confront the highest jobless rate in a generation on the eve of November elections that will determine the balance of power in Congress.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 10.8 percent by October. The so-called underemployment rate — which counts people who have given up looking for work and those who are working part time for lack of full-time positions — now sits at 17.3 percent.

Mr. Zandi argues that the economy requires an additional $125 billion jolt of stimulus spending on construction projects and aid to state and local governments — a proposal that confronts enormous political challenges.

Republicans assert the first dose of stimulus spending has been squandered on dubious projects. The Obama administration, increasingly concerned by the size of federal deficits, is loath to spend more.

Mr. Zandi argues that a failure to spend now to spur growth could leave the United States in a bigger hole.

“If we don’t do it and we slide back into recession,” he said, “that’s going to exacerbate the deficit even more.”

The December jobs report included one encouraging milestone: Data for November was revised to show the economy gained 4,000 jobs that month, compared with initial reports showing a net loss of 11,000 jobs. That was the first monthly improvement since the recession began two years ago.

But the December data failed to repeat the trend, disappointing economists, who had generally expected a decline of 10,000 jobs. The report showed continued slowing in the pace of job losses, but it also underscored that companies were reluctant to hire.

For a fifth consecutive month, temporary help services expanded, adding 47,000 positions in December. That buttressed the notion that companies required more labor, even as they held off hiring full-time workers.

“We’re going in the right direction,” said Michael T. Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, a research and trading firm. “If we just have a little bit of patience, we’ll start to see monthly increases of 200,000 to 300,000 jobs within six months.”

But millions of people still grappling with the bite of the worst downturn since the Great Depression have exhausted their patience — along with their savings and confidence.

In Charlotte, N.C., Kumar G. Navile, 33, says he has applied for 500 jobs in the year since he lost his position as an engineer.

“You get up every day and say today will be different, but it is mentally challenging,” Mr. Navile said. “I performed well in school. I got a job the day I graduated. It’s been a struggle.”

For those out of work, the market is bleaker than ever. The average duration of unemployment reached 29 weeks in December, the longest since the government began tracking such data in 1948.

“There is almost no hiring going on outside the temporary help sector,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project.

Despite the parsing of data and contrasting economic forecasts, no complexity cloaked the basic facts of the report: job openings remain scarce.

“Most people, they’re not looking at the data,” Mr. Baker said. “They’re just asking, ‘Can I get a job?’ And that’s not getting any easier.”

The government’s monthly jobs report, while always important, now stands as the crucial indicator of economic health.

For years, households spent in excess of incomes by borrowing against the value of homes, leaning on credit cards and tapping stock portfolios. But home prices have plummeted, stock holdings have diminished and nervous banks have sliced credit even for healthy borrowers, leaving the paycheck as the primary source of household finance.

Economists are divided over the nation’s economic prospects. Some argue that recent expansion on the factory floor presages broader economic improvement that will soon deliver job growth.

Not yet. Manufacturing lost 27,000 jobs in December. Construction jobs declined by 53,000. Government shed 21,000 jobs. Despite a surprisingly strong holiday shopping season, retailing lost 10,000 jobs.

Health care remained a bright spot, expanding by 22,000 jobs.

Skeptics argue that the factory expansion merely reflects a rebuilding of inventories after businesses slashed stocks during the panic. Expansion has been aided by stimulus spending and tax credits for homebuyers.

Once these factors fade in coming months, skeptics argue, the economy will confront stubborn challenges — cash-tight households curtailing spending, banks reluctant to lend and businesses unwilling to hire.

Those with the gloomiest outlooks envision a “double dip” recession, in which the economy resumes contracting. Others fear years of stagnation, like Japan’s Lost Decade in the 1990s.

One point of agreement among economists is that the nation cannot recover without millions of new jobs. The economy needs about 100,000 new jobs a month just to keep pace with people entering the work force. When workers gain wages, they spend them at other businesses, creating jobs for other workers — a virtuous cycle, in the parlance of economists.

Recent months have produced tentative signs that such a cycle might be unfolding, even as economists debate its sustainability. The December jobs report added to the ambiguity.

On the one hand, job losses undermined hopes for a quick turnaround. Yet the losses were a far cry from the roughly 700,000 monthly job losses seen a year ago.

“Standing still feels good when you’ve been used to falling backwards,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group. “But we want to move forward.”

Javier C. Hernandez contributed reporting

By Chris Jordan
January 6, 2010

A national NBC poll in December showed Congress’ job approval rating holding steady at a pitiful 22 percent.

If you don’t pay much attention to politics, you might be shocked at how low this number is. However, by standards of recent history, it’s actually quite normal.

Every two years, we elect our representatives, who are supposed to embody the will of the people. Why do Americans put so little faith in this institution?

Surely there are many plausible answers to this question. While irresponsible spending and corruption have undoubtedly played a role, there is something more fundamental contributing to this crisis of confidence: Americans just don’t think Congress can get much done.

This problem can be partly traced to the rules of the Senate and the rise in recent decades of the filibuster as a weapon of the minority party.

Although the Constitution set up the Senate (aka the “great deliberative body”) as a majority rule democratic body, long-standing tradition dictates that any senator has the right to bring Congress to a standstill. Unlimited debate rules have allowed individual senators to stand before Congress and read from the dictionary or give endless speeches in order to delay bills they strongly oppose.

Senate rules were changed in the 1970s so that if 60 senators agreed to end debate, they could proceed directly to simple majority vote on a bill’s passage.

In recent years, the use of this delaying tactic has exploded, and Democrats now have to gather 60 votes to pass pretty much anything.

A study by UCLA found that only 8 percent of major bills faced filibuster threats in the 1960s compared to 70 percent in the recent decade. Republicans in this Congress have taken it to a whole new level and used filibuster threats to obstruct almost every major piece of legislation.

The six-month health-care debate we just endured is a perfect example of the filibuster run amuck. Case in point: the public option. This government plan would have been an effective tool in lowering insurance premiums through consumer choice. Despite overwhelming public support and the backing of 56 Senators, the public option was killed to (just barely) round up the 60 votes necessary to overcome Republican obstructionism.

Don’t get me wrong; minority protections are incredibly important in our democracy. The problem is not necessarily the filibuster rule itself, but the way it has been abused.

As the health-care debate demonstrated, Republican senators have little to no interest in constructively engaging with the president. Their plan is to prevent Democrats from getting anything done, and then campaign against a “do-nothing” Congress in the 2010 elections.

Democrats should have forced Republicans to make good on their threats during the health-care debate. The nation would have been able to watch Republican senators read from the dictionary before Congress on live TV, obstructing the most important piece of legislation in generations.

You bet some would have backed down and come to the negotiating table, or at least allowed the majority vote to proceed.

The bottom line is that something has to change, or Americans will continue to lose faith in the ability of Congress to get anything meaningful done. Either the majority must force the minority’s hand, or the filibuster itself must be reformed.

It simply should not take 60 senators to pass every bill in Congress.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by Charles Krauthammer
The Spokesman-Review

Janet Napolitano – former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security – will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: “The system worked.” The attacker’s concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son’s jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.

Heck of a job, Brownie.

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York – a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over – that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately al-Qaida has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”

And produces linguistic – and logical – oddities that littered Obama’s public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as “an isolated extremist.” This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood shooting, warned us “against jumping to conclusions” – code for daring to associate Nidal Hasan’s mass murder with his Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the bomber acted alone.

More jarring still were Obama’s references to the terrorist as a “suspect” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device.” You can hear the echo of FDR: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor.”

Obama reassured the nation that this “suspect” had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant – an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians – and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaida in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point – surprise! – he stops talking.

This absurdity renders hollow Obama’s declaration that “we will not rest until we find all who were involved.” Once we’ve given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.

This is all quite mad even in Obama’s terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.

The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaida training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator – no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights “the nature of those who threaten our homeland.” But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as “extremist(s).”

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy – jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon – turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

By: Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith
December 30, 2009 05:37 PM EST

Democrats are moving to eliminate from the party’s national convention the superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders whose role in the presidential nominating process came under intense scrutiny in last year’s closely-contested primary.

Those superdelegates provided, for a time, a lifeline to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton’s flagging campaign, and the effective end of their independent role would be a major step toward reshaping the Democratic Party — and its internal politics — in President Barack Obama’s image.

A group created by the Democratic National Committee to examine the role of the superdelegates, the Democratic Change Commission — steered by the Obama campaign’s top delegate counter, Jeff Berman — held a conference call Wednesday to recommend that these unpledged delegates cast their votes based upon the electoral results of their states rather than on personal preference.

The recommendations of the commission, co-chaired by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, will now go before the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.

While the elimination of superdelegates isn’t likely to have any impact in 2012, when the party is all but certain to renominate President Obama, commission members say it will help democratize future presidential primaries.

“I think the goal here was to get away from what felt like almost a disenfranchisement at some point in time to the voters and to the caucus members in the various states,” McCaskill said.

The move follows an epic 2008 Democratic primary process in which all 50 states and the territories cast votes in a race that was effectively deadlocked between Obama and Clinton. For a time, there was grave worry among some in the party that the superdelegates, who were not bound by their states’ votes, could decide the nomination in favor of a candidate who received fewer elected delegates from primary voters and caucus-goers.

Even as Obama increases troop levels, he is scaling back American foreign policy.

By Fareed Zakaria | NEWSWEEK

If you take just one sentence out, Barack Obama’s speech on Afghanistan last week was all about focusing and limiting the scope of America’s mission in that country. His goal, he said, was “narrowly defined.” The objectives he detailed were exclusively military—to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven, reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and strengthen the Kabul government’s security forces. He said almost nothing about broader goals like spreading democracy, protecting human rights, or assisting in women’s education. The nation that he was interested in building, he explained, was America.

And then there was that one line: “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.” Here lies the tension in Barack Obama’s policy. He wants a clearer, more discriminating foreign policy, one that pares down the vast commitments and open-ended interventions of the Bush era, perhaps one that is more disciplined even than Bill Clinton’s approach to the world. (On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly invoked George H.W. Bush as the president whose foreign policy he admired most.) But America is in the midst of a war that is not going well, and scaling back now would look like cutting and running. Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis. The qualified surge—send in troops to regain the momentum but then draw down—is his answer to this dilemma. This is an understandable compromise, and it could well work, but it pushes off a final decision about Afghanistan until the troop surge can improve the situation on the ground. Eighteen months from now, Obama will have to answer the core question: is a stable and well-functioning Afghanistan worth a large and continuing American ground presence, or can American interests be secured at much lower cost?

This first year of his presidency has been a window into Barack Obama’s world view. Most presidents, once they get hold of the bully pulpit, cannot resist the temptation to become Winston Churchill. They gravitate to grand rhetoric about freedom and tyranny, and embrace the moral drama of their role as leaders of the free world. Even the elder Bush, a pragmatist if there ever was one, lapsed into dreamy language about “a new world order” once he stood in front of the United Nations. Not Obama. He has been cool and calculating, whether dealing with Russia, Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan. A great orator, he has, in this arena, kept his eloquence in check. Obama is a realist, by temperament, learning, and instinct. More than any president since Richard Nixon, he has focused on defining American interests carefully, providing the resources to achieve them, and keeping his eyes on the prize.

In 1943 the columnist Walter Lippmann defined foreign policy as “bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power.” Only then could the United States achieve strategic stability abroad and domestic support at home. Consciously or not, President Obama was channeling Lippmann when he said, “As president I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests.” In his speech he quoted only one person, a president of the opposite party, Dwight Eisenhower, who said of national-security challenges, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” Obama added that “over the past several years, we have lost that balance.” He is hoping to restore some equilibrium to American foreign policy.

“In the end,” said the president last week, “our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms.” He explained that America’s economic and technological vigor underpinned its ability to play a world role. At a small lunch with a group of columnists (myself included) last week, he made clear that he did not want to run two wars. He seemed to be implying that these struggles—Iraq and Afghanistan—were not the crucial path to America’s long-term security. He explained that challenges at home—economic growth, technological innovation, education reform—were at the heart of maintaining America’s status as a superpower.

It is now clear that Obama is attempting something quite ambitious—to reorient American foreign policy to-ward something less extravagant and adversarial. That begins with narrowing the war on terror; scaling back the conflict with the Islamic world to those groups and countries that pose serious, direct threats to America; and reaching out to the rest. He has also tried to develop a better working relationship between America and other major powers like Russia and China, setting aside smaller issues in hopes of cooperating on bigger ones. This means departing from a bipartisan approach in which Washington’s role was to direct the rest of the world, pushing regimes large and small to accept American ideas, and publicly chastising them when they refused. Obama is trying to break the dynamic that says that when an American president negotiates with the Chinese or Russians, he must return with rewards or concessions—or else he is guilty of appeasement.

And then there is that line. It might seem hard to reconcile a more targeted and focused foreign policy with the expansion of a war and the introduction of 30,000 troops. But it is not unprecedented. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger entered the White House in 1969, they inherited a war in Vietnam that they might have believed in at some theoretical level, but that they recognized was bleeding the country. Over their years in office, they focused on shoring up America’s power position through diplomacy with the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, and Israel. But they also recognized that they had to deal with the crisis in Vietnam and said explicitly that they were going to try to scale back America’s involvement there. In this they succeeded. By April 1969, soon after Nixon took office, there were 543,000 American troops in Vietnam. At the end of his first term, there were fewer than 20,000 left. But in between, in order to keep the enemy on the defensive, to gain momentum, and to create space for American troops to leave, Nixon and Kissinger ordered a series of offensive military maneuvers that were designed to hit the North Vietnamese hard. Surge and then draw down, you might say.

Although the Viet Cong were beaten back temporarily, ultimately the North took over the South in 1975. But it is instructive to think about why. First, our local ally lacked legitimacy and competence. The government of South Vietnam was simply unable to gain the confidence of its people, and the Viet Cong and its Northern allies were able to persuade or intimidate tens of thousands of Vietnamese to shift to their side. Second, the enemy had safe havens outside South Vietnam—mainly in North Vietnam and Cambodia—which provided them escape routes and supply chains. More significant, the insurgents had the active support of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, as well as some aid from China. Finally, the United States cut off all assistance to South Vietnam, abandoning a country it had lost 59,000 troops defending.

The picture today is more promising on all three fronts. In Afghanistan, for all its problems, the Karzai government has been elected and does have the support of significant sections of the population. More important, the Taliban is deeply unpopular almost everywhere. As for safe havens, it’s true that the problem of Pakistan is perhaps the central challenge in defeating the Taliban and Al Qaeda, both of whose leaderships are now based there and not in Afghanistan. But the United States has been getting better at attacking these safe havens using drones, while Pakistan’s military is beginning, slowly and reluctantly, to accept that some action will have to be taken against militant groups that it has long supported. Perhaps because this war is seen as one of necessity and not choice by most of the American public, there is much greater support for such policies than there was for the very similar efforts to attack the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia.

As for the broader problem of great-power support, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are largely isolated, with a massive international coalition arrayed against them. That does not mean that they cannot prevail in a local struggle over some parts of Afghanistan, but they will be hard pressed to achieve their ultimate goal of ruling Afghanistan. It might be difficult for the United States to “win” in Afghanistan, but it will be impossible for the Taliban to do so. And finally, America has not abandoned Iraq and will not abandon Afghanistan.

Ultimately, however, one hopes that President Obama will keep another lesson of Vietnam firmly in mind. Withdrawing from a messy situation did not permanently damage America’s national security. The United States suffered the most humiliating exit imaginable from South Vietnam in 1975, followed by reversals in Africa, Central America, and Iran. Yet within a decade, America had regained a commanding position internationally, and within 15 years its principal adversary, the Soviet Union, had collapsed. The key element in this resurgence was nothing that happened abroad—it was America’s ability to revive its economic strength at home, the engine of its superpower status.

The history of great powers suggests that maintaining their position requires, most crucially, tending to the sources of their power: economic growth and technological innovation. It also means concentrating on the centers of global power, not the periphery. Throughout history great nations have lost their way by getting bogged down in imperial missions far from home that crippled their will, strength, and focus. (Even when they won: Britain prevailed in the Boer War, but it broke the back of the empire.) It’s important to remember that in the coming century it will be America’s dominant position in Asia—its role as the balancer in the Pacific—that will be pivotal to its role as a global superpower, not whatever happens in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Obama will need to maintain his focus come July 2011. Let me make a bold prediction. Afghanistan will not be transformed by that date. It will not look like France, with a strong and effective central government. The gains that will have been made will be fragile. The situation will still be somewhat unstable. But that should still be the moment to begin the transition to Afghan rule. By the end of 2011, the United States will have spent 10 years, thousands of lives, and $2 trillion trying to create stable, democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the most difficult, divided countries in the world. It will be time to move on.

Obama’s realism is sure to be caricatured as bloodless and indifferent to human rights, democracy, and other virtues. In fact, Obama probably understands the immense moral value of an engaged and effective superpower. As he said in his speech, “More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades—a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, markets open, billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty.”

Stability, peace, prosperity, and liberty have all progressed in tandem over the past six decades. That is no accident. As Obama said, “We have spilled American blood in many countries on multiple continents. We have spent our revenue to help others rebuild from rubble and develop their own economies. We have joined with others to develop an architecture of institutions—from the United Nations to NATO to the World Bank—that provide for the common security and prosperity of human beings.” Obama is said to admire the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. This approach—engaged in the world with a positive vision but cautious about overreaching—is Niebuhr in action.

This has always been the higher morality of American realism in foreign policy, as practiced by Franklin Roosevelt or Dean Acheson. By staying focused on the large objectives of peace and stability, by maintaining our vision of an open, free world, we help sustain positive trends in the world that are broad and deep and lasting. In other words, our role as a strong and successful superpower is to make it possible for good things to happen—not just for Afghan schoolgirls, but for millions around the world.

We won the cold war and weathered 9/11. But now economic weakness is endangering our global power.

By Niall Ferguson | NEWSWEEK

Call it the fractal geometry of fiscal crisis. If you fly across the Atlantic on a clear day, you can look down and see the same phenomenon but on four entirely different scales. At one extreme there is tiny Iceland. Then there is little Ireland, followed by medium-size Britain. They’re all a good deal smaller than the mighty United States. But in each case the economic crisis has taken the same form: a massive banking crisis, followed by an equally massive fiscal crisis as the government stepped in to bail out the private financial system.

Size matters, of course. For the smaller countries, the financial losses arising from this crisis are a great deal larger in relation to their gross domestic product than they are for the United States. Yet the stakes are higher in the American case. In the great scheme of things—let’s be frank—it does not matter much if Iceland teeters on the brink of fiscal collapse, or Ireland, for that matter. The locals suffer, but the world goes on much as usual.

But if the United States succumbs to a fiscal crisis, as an increasing number of economic experts fear it may, then the entire balance of global economic power could shift. Military experts talk as if the president’s decision about whether to send an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan is a make-or-break moment. In reality, his indecision about the deficit could matter much more for the country’s long-term national security. Call the United States what you like—superpower, hegemon, or empire—but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power. Here’s why.

The disciples of John Maynard Keynes argue that increasing the federal debt by roughly a third was necessary to avoid Depression 2.0. Well, maybe, though some would say the benefits of fiscal stimulus have been oversold and that the magic multiplier (which is supposed to transform $1 of government spending into a lot more than $1 of aggregate demand) is trivially small.

Credit where it’s due. The positive number for third-quarter growth in the United States would have been a lot lower without government spending. Between half and two thirds of the real increase in gross domestic product was attributable to government programs, especially the Cash for Clunkers scheme and the subsidy to first-time home buyers. But we are still a very long way from a self–sustaining recovery. The third-quarter growth number has just been revised downward from 3.5 percent to 2.8 percent. And that’s not wholly surprising. Remember, what makes a stimulus actually work is the change in borrowing by the whole public sector. Since the federal government was already running deficits, and since the states are actually raising taxes and cutting spending, the actual size of the stimulus is closer to 4 percent of GDP spread over the years 2007 to 2010—a lot less than that headline 11.2 percent deficit.

Meanwhile, let’s consider the cost of this muted stimulus. The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That’s a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942. We are, it seems, having the fiscal policy of a world war, without the war. Yes, I know, the United States is at war in Afghanistan and still has a significant contingent of troops in Iraq. But these are trivial conflicts compared with the world wars, and their contribution to the gathering fiscal storm has in fact been quite modest (little more than 1.8 percent of GDP, even if you accept the estimated cumulative cost of $3.2 trillion published by Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz in February 2008).

And that $1.4 trillion is just for starters. According to the CBO’s most recent projections, the federal deficit will decline from 11.2 percent of GDP this year to 9.6 percent in 2010, 6.1 percent in 2011, and 3.7 percent in 2012. After that it will stay above 3 percent for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, in dollar terms, the total debt held by the public (excluding government agencies, but including foreigners) rises from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019—from 41 percent of GDP to 68 percent.

In other words, there is no end in sight to the borrowing binge. Unless entitlements are cut or taxes are raised, there will never be another balanced budget. Let’s assume I live another 30 years and follow my grandfathers to the grave at about 75. By 2039, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, the federal debt held by the public will have reached 91 percent of GDP, according to the CBO’s extended baseline projections. Nothing to worry about, retort -deficit-loving economists like Paul Krugman. In 1945, the figure was 113 percent.

Well, let’s leave aside the likely huge differences between the United States in 1945 and in 2039. Consider the simple fact that under the CBO’s alternative (i.e., more pessimistic) fiscal scenario, the debt could hit 215 percent by 2039. That’s right: more than double the annual output of the entire U.S. economy.

Forecasting anything that far ahead is not about predicting the future. Everything hinges on the assumptions you make about demographics, Medicare costs, and a bunch of other variables. For example, the CBO assumes an average annual real GDP growth rate of 2.3 percent over the next 30 years. The point is to show the implications of the current chronic imbalance between federal spending and federal revenue. And the implication is clear. Under no plausible scenario does the debt burden decline. Under one of two plausible scenarios it explodes by a factor of nearly five in relation to economic output.

Another way of doing this kind of exercise is to calculate the net present value of the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems. One recent estimate puts them at about $104 trillion, 10 times the stated federal debt.

No sweat, reply the Keynesians. We can easily finance $1 trillion a year of new government debt. Just look at the way Japan’s households and financial institutions funded the explosion of Japanese public debt (up to 200 percent of GDP) during the two “lost decades” of near-zero growth that began in 1990.

Unfortunately for this argument, the evidence to support it is lacking. American households were, in fact, net sellers of Treasuries in the second quarter of 2009, and on a massive scale. Purchases by mutual funds were modest ($142 billion), while purchases by pension funds and insurance companies were trivial ($12 billion and $10 billion, respectively). The key, therefore, becomes the banks. Currently, according to the Bridgewater hedge fund, U.S. banks’ asset allocation to government bonds is about 13 percent, which is relatively low by historical standards. If they raised that proportion back to where it was in the early 1990s, it’s conceivable they could absorb “about $250 billion a year of government bond purchases.” But that’s a big “if.” Data for October showed commercial banks selling Treasuries.

That just leaves two potential buyers: the Federal Reserve, which bought the bulk of Treasuries issued in the second quarter; and foreigners, who bought $380 billion. Morgan Stanley’s analysts have crunched the numbers and concluded that, in the year ending June 2010, there could be a shortfall in demand on the order of $598 billion—about a third of projected new issuance.

Of course, our friends in Beijing could ride to the rescue by increasing their already vast holdings of U.S. government debt. For the past five years or so, they have been amassing dollar–denominated international reserves in a wholly unprecedented way, mainly as a result of their interventions to prevent the Chinese currency from appreciating against the dollar.

Right now, the People’s Republic of China holds about 13 percent of U.S. government bonds and notes in public hands. At the peak of this process of reserve accumulation, back in 2007, it was absorbing as much as 75 percent of monthly Treasury issuance.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch in the realm of international finance. According to Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, if this trend were to continue, the U.S. -current-account deficit could rise to 15 percent of GDP by 2030, and its net debt to the rest of the world could hit 140 percent of GDP. In such a scenario, the U.S. would have to pay as much as 7 percent of GDP every year to foreigners to service its external borrowings.

Could that happen? I doubt it. For one thing, the Chinese keep grumbling that they have far too many Treasuries already. For another, a significant dollar depreciation seems more probable, since the United States is in the lucky position of being able to borrow in its own currency, which it reserves the right to print in any quantity the Federal Reserve chooses.

Now, who said the following? “My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the [fiscal] crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar.”

Seems pretty reasonable to me. The surprising thing is that this was none other than Paul Krugman, the high priest of Keynesianism, writing back in March 2003. A year and a half later he was comparing the U.S. deficit with Argentina’s (at a time when it was 4.5 percent of GDP). Has the economic situation really changed so drastically that now the same Krugman believes it was “deficits that saved us,” and wants to see an even larger deficit next year? Perhaps. But it might just be that the party in power has changed.

History strongly supports the proposition that major financial crises are followed by major fiscal crises. “On average,” write Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their new book, This Time Is Different, “government debt rises by 86 percent during the three years following a banking crisis.” In the wake of these debt explosions, one of two things can happen: either a default, usually when the debt is in a foreign currency, or a bout of high inflation that catches the creditors out. The history of all the great European empires is replete with such episodes. Indeed, serial default and high inflation have tended to be the surest symptoms of imperial decline.

As the U.S. is unlikely to default on its debt, since it’s all in dollars, the key question, therefore, is whether we are going to see the Fed “printing money”—buying newly minted Treasuries in exchange for even more newly minted greenbacks—followed by the familiar story of rising prices and declining real-debt burdens. It’s a scenario many investors around the world fear. That is why they are selling dollars. That is why they are buying gold.

Yet from where I am sitting, inflation is a pretty remote prospect. With U.S. unemployment above 10 percent, labor unions relatively weak, and huge quantities of unused capacity in global manufacturing, there are none of the pressures that made for stagflation (low growth plus high prices) in the 1970s. Public expectations of inflation are also very stable, as far as can be judged from poll data and the difference between the yields on regular and inflation-protected bonds.

So here’s another scenario—which in many ways is worse than the inflation scenario. What happens is that we get a rise in the real interest rate, which is the actual interest rate minus inflation. According to a substantial amount of empirical research by economists, including Peter Orszag (now at the Office of Management and Budget), significant increases in the debt-to-GDP ratio tend to increase the real interest rate. One recent study concluded that “a 20 percentage point increase in the U.S. government-debt-to-GDP ratio should lead to a 20–120 basis points [0.2–1.2 percent] increase in real interest rates.” This can happen in one of three ways: the nominal interest rate rises and inflation stays the same; the nominal rate stays the same and inflation falls; or—the nightmare case—the nominal interest rate rises and inflation falls.

Today’s Keynesians deny that this can happen. But the historical evidence is against them. There are a number of past cases (e.g., France in the 1930s) when nominal rates have risen even at a time of deflation. What’s more, it seems to be happening in Japan right now. Just last week Hirohisa Fujii, Japan’s new finance minister, admitted that he was “highly concerned” about the recent rise in Japanese government bond yields. In the very same week, the government admitted that Japan was back in deflation after three years of modest price increases.

It’s not inconceivable that something similar could happen to the United States. Foreign investors might ask for a higher nominal return on U.S. Treasuries to compensate them for the weakening dollar. And inflation might continue to surprise us on the downside. After all, consumer price inflation is in negative territory right now.

Why should we fear rising real interest rates ahead of inflation? The answer is that for a heavily indebted government and an even more heavily indebted public, they mean an increasingly heavy debt-service burden. The relatively short duration (maturity) of most of these debts means that a large share has to be rolled over each year. That means any rise in rates would feed through the system scarily fast.

Already, the federal government’s interest payments are forecast by the CBO to rise from 8 percent of revenues in 2009 to 17 percent by 2019, even if rates stay low and growth resumes. If rates rise even slightly and the economy flatlines, we’ll get to 20 percent much sooner. And history suggests that once you are spending as much as a fifth of your revenues on debt service, you have a problem. It’s all too easy to find yourself in a vicious circle of diminishing credibility. The investors don’t believe you can afford your debts, so they charge higher interest, which makes your position even worse.

This matters more for a superpower than for a small Atlantic island for one very simple reason. As interest payments eat into the budget, something has to give—and that something is nearly always defense expenditure. According to the CBO, a significant decline in the relative share of national security in the federal budget is already baked into the cake. On the Pentagon’s present plan, defense spending is set to fall from above 4 percent now to 3.2 percent of GDP in 2015 and to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2028.

Over the longer run, to my own estimated departure date of 2039, spending on health care rises from 16 percent to 33 percent of GDP (some of the money presumably is going to keep me from expiring even sooner). But spending on everything other than health, Social Security, and interest payments drops from 12 percent to 8.4 percent.

This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Which is why voters are right to worry about America’s debt crisis. According to a recent Rasmussen report, 42 percent of Americans now say that cutting the deficit in half by the end of the president’s first term should be the administration’s most important task—significantly more than the 24 percent who see health-care reform as the No. 1 priority. But cutting the deficit in half is simply not enough. If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.

The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don’t forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and the author of The Ascent of Money.

Will pro-choice Democrats kill health-care reform? Probably not—and that’s a good thing.

By Ruth Marcus | NEWSWEEK

In the end, I predict, their bluff won’t be called. Abortion-rights supporters have threatened to take down health reform if the final product includes the restrictive language of the House bill. In the end, the dispute will be resolved, with a few legislative tweaks that fully satisfy neither side. And in the end, although they will have succeeded in removing the offending amendment, pro-choice forces will be worse off than before the debate began.

The hard truth laid bare by the health-care debate—hard, at least, for those of us who support abortion rights—is that a Democratic president, Democratic Senate, and Democratic House do not add up to a pro-choice outcome. A victory on health care for abortion-rights supporters will consist, at best, of maintaining the status quo.

This is, of course, just one act being played out in the larger drama of the Obama administration: for all the fervent hope and soaring expectations, politics remains the art of the possible. To govern is to deal—from climate change to Guantánamo. The health-care debate itself features several similar subplots—the public option, illegal immigrants, even gun rights—and how each is resolved affects the other. Lose a few votes here, gain some there.

Abortion remains the omnipresent irritant of American politics. The country seems to have reached an uneasy equipoise on abortion rights: some, but not too much. Yet the adversaries in both sides remain engaged in trench warfare, with every battle over a few hard-fought yards. Abortion opponents have little hope of overturning Roe v. Wade, but they can try to make access more difficult. Supporters of abortion rights are, for the most part, trying to maintain the ground already won.

Meanwhile, abortion is a handy public-policy hand grenade to be tossed in the middle of any legislative battle by those whose goal is to blow things up. The current fight—over whether the health-care bill does enough to make certain that government money isn’t used for abortions—underscores abortion’s continuing potency as a political weapon.

It presents a sobering tally of the cost, from the point of view of abortion-rights supporters, of the DINO (Democrats in name only) strategy: winning back the House by backing candidates in red districts with politics scarcely different from the Republicans they replaced. Democrats have picked up 56 seats since 2004, but the number of pro-choice members has risen by 44, not nearly as much. “I wish we were fighting for advances,” says Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Instead, we’re just fighting to defend.”

As a measure of how much things have changed, consider that back in 1993, the Clinton health-care plan included abortion as part of the minimum benefits package that insurers would have to offer. Now, the compromise language—the language agreed to by pro-choice groups—explicitly excludes it.

As a measure of how quickly things have changed, consider that candidate Obama said he opposed the Hyde amendment, the longstanding prohibition against using federal Medicaid funds to pay for abortions for poor women, except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the mother is endangered. “He believes that the federal government should not use its dollars to intrude on a poor woman’s decision whether to carry to term or to terminate her pregnancy,” the Obama campaign said in answering a questionnaire. Now, President Obama embraces Hyde as the new normal. “I think that there is a balance to be achieved that is consistent with the Hyde amendment, what existed before we reformed health care,” Obama told Fox News, although he says the House language goes too far. “I believe in the basic idea that federal dollars shouldn’t pay for abortions, but I also think that we shouldn’t restrict women’s choices.” He told ABC News that he wants to make certain “we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions.” Sneaking in? This is the candidate that NARAL rushed to endorse during the Democratic primaries?

This political evolution, not surprisingly, mirrors a shift in public opinion. Support for—and opposition to—abortion rights has held fairly steady for decades. Two thirds of Americans say they do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned; even 40 percent of Republicans believe that establishing a constitutional right to an abortion was “a good thing.”

But in 1994 the public was closely divided on the question of whether abortion coverage should be a guaranteed benefit: 49 percent opposed it, while 42 percent said it should be included. Now, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reports, 55 percent oppose coverage by a government plan, and just 28 percent support it. At the same time, the issue of federal funding for abortion coverage doesn’t drive opposition to health reform. Only 3 percent cite it as the main reason for their opposition.

How this peripheral issue came to ensnarl the health-care debate offers a case study in the theory and practice of interest-group politics. Democratic leaders urged the abortion-rights crowd to stand down on health care. They were told not to push, this time around, for abortion as part of the minimum benefits package. No jockeying to use the opportunity to lift the Hyde amendment.

Abortion-rights supporters agreed, largely because they had to: the votes for what they wanted weren’t there. Not only that, they acceded, reluctantly, to compromise language explicitly excluding abortion from the required benefits package as the price of getting the measure out of committee. Now, they’ll be lucky if that language—which pro-life supporters denounce as insufficient to prevent federal funds from being used for abortion—survives.

Well-behaved women rarely make history, the bumper sticker instructs, and for many feminist leaders the lesson of the House vote was clear: no more Ms. Nice Person. Colorado Democrat Rep. Diana DeGette, the leader of the pro-choice caucus, says she has collected more than 40 signatures for a letter threatening to sink health reform if the final version includes the offending amendment by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, which would prohibit any insurer in the exchange from covering abortions if any of its policyholders receive federal subsidies. “In the end, I think we’ll fix it,” she told me. “But if it’s not fixed, in the end we would vote no … We don’t want to kill health-care reform. We think it’s a massive expansion of health care for women. But you can’t have a devil’s bargain of reducing their access to abortion at the same time. That’s a devil’s bargain nobody should have to make.” Except what happens if the devil has the votes?

Years of imperfect parenting have taught me the dangers of making threats you’re not willing to enforce. Carrying out this threat, if it comes to that, would be a terrible idea.

Women in general—and lower-income women especially—stand to gain far more from health reform than they would lose from not having abortion coverage. Most poor women, for better or worse, already have to pay for abortion out-of-pocket. If women participating in the exchanges have to pay for the procedure as well—well, many of them will have previously been without any insurance whatsoever. The average cost of a first-trimester abortion is $400. And most abortions aren’t paid for by insurance now.

There is an element of sky-is-falling-ism at work here as well. Yes, it would be outrageous to tell women that they cannot purchase coverage that includes abortion with their own money, the practical effect of the Stupak amendment. And there is a legitimate fear that the impact will become greater over time, if more Americans get insurance through the exchange or if insurers start to tailor their other coverage to comply with federal rules.

But “the greatest threat to women’s fundamental right to abortion since it was recognized under the Constitution,” as the National Organization for Women claims? Hardly. And excuse me if I take this hyperbole with a bowl of salt: these are the folks who held signs outside the 1990 confirmation hearings for Justice David Souter proclaiming STOP SOUTER OR WOMEN WILL DIE.

You don’t have to be pro-choice to be afflicted with this legislative myopia. Indeed, the Catholic bishops, who were instrumental in getting the Stupak amendment adopted, say another health-care priority is expanding coverage for the needy. Yet they, too, are willing to take down the bill over the abortion issue—even though the likely effect of passing health care would be to reduce the number of abortions. As Rachel Laser of Third Way, a centrist think tank, points out, more low-income women would have access to contraception and medical care for themselves and their children. Not only that, the language the bishops have decreed unacceptable would make it easier for those who oppose abortion to avoid buying insurance that violates their beliefs.

From the pro-choice side, the optimistic take on the implications of the fight is that it has energized a complacent constituency. “This topic has woken a sleeping giant among women in this country—and, particularly, young women,” says Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Cosmopolitan magazine put a link to Planned Parenthood’s petition against the Stupak amendment on its Web site.

Fine, but I worry that the current battle has also unavoidably opened up a dangerous new front in the abortion wars over private coverage. Expect future arguments about whether employer-sponsored plans—plans that are, after all, subsidized by tax dollars because health-insurance benefits are tax-free—should include abortion, as a large majority currently do.

Already, the Republican National Committee has ordered its abortion coverage rewritten to exclude abortion. I’d like to see Michael Steele explain that to the distraught staffer who has just discovered that she is carrying a fetus incapable of surviving outside the womb.

And consider this chilling latest from Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: 51 percent of those polled said private insurance should not include abortion coverage. Just 37 percent said it should. A CNN/Opinion Research poll produced a similar conclusion: 51 percent opposed to using private insurance for abortion coverage, 45 percent in favor.

There was no way to avoid an abortion fight in health care. The pro-choice side had no good options, only less bad ones. The worst one of all would be to take a step that punishes women in the name of protecting their rights.

Marcus is a columnist and editorial writer for the Washington Post.

By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Dec 7, 2009

Gallup is not asking about him in its prospective polling, and his daughter Liz’s recent Fox News Sunday allusion to a presidential run provoked good-natured laughter, as though the suggestion were just a one-liner. Float the hypothetical in political conversation, and people roll their eyes dismissively.

But I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama’s unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.

Three years out, the GOP field does not offer a putative nominee. When Gallup polled on the Republican race for 2012, it asked about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Haley Barbour (Huckabee won, with Romney and Palin tying for second among Republicans who were asked whom they would consider voting for). Cheney covers all the ground these folks do, and then some. (After Liz Cheney’s remark on Fox News, a flood of subsequent e-mails asked her, “Where do I sign up?”) In an era of ideological purity within the party, Cheney is among the purest; no one can question his conservative credentials on national security, and his record in the House and as vice president places him beyond reproach from the base. He was, it is true, second in command in years of great deficit spending, but his image as an implacable foe of terrorism and a hardliner on the projection of American power would go a long way toward securing his position within the party as a warrior of the old school offering himself once more to a nation he has served in four different decades.

A campaign would also give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way. As John McCain pointed out in the fall of 2008, he is not Bush. Nor is Cheney, but the former vice president would make the case for the harder-line elements of the Bush world view. Far from fading away, Cheney has been the voice of the opposition since the inauguration. Wouldn’t it be more productive and even illuminating if he took his arguments out of the realm of punditry and into the arena of electoral politics? Are we more or less secure because of the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Does the former vice president still believe in a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda? Did the counterterror measures adopted in the aftermath of the attacks go too far? Let’s have the fight and see what the country thinks.

Historically the country has tended to muddle through somewhere between the extremes of right and left. There is often much virtue in conducting public life by fits and starts. When things drift too far one way in ideological terms, Americans are pretty good about tugging them back to the middle.

But the middle moves depending on where the poles of right and left are standing at a particular moment. Given Cheney’s views, even conservatives who dislike him or think it is time to open a new chapter might give the possibility another thought, for it seems much more likely that Cheney would pull Obama to the right than that Obama would pull Cheney to the left. I think it is safe to say that neither a Huckabee nor a Palin bid would have the same effect.

No one foresaw Cheney’s reemergence as a force in the politics of the 21st century until it happened. So perhaps the pattern is set, a pattern of insistent denial of interest—until it turns out that, hey, he is interested. Cheney’s memoirs are due to be published—and thus due to be promoted—in the spring of 2011, not long before the caucuses and primaries begin. I’ll bet you that the Barnes & Noble in Des Moines (there’s a big one at The Shoppes at Three Fountains) is on the book tour.

Jon Meacham is editor of NEWSWEEK and author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation .

Enjoy the break with your friends and family – no blog assignment!

By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 28, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Dec 7, 2009

Gallup is not asking about him in its prospective polling, and his daughter Liz’s recent Fox News Sunday allusion to a presidential run provoked good-natured laughter, as though the suggestion were just a one-liner. Float the hypothetical in political conversation, and people roll their eyes dismissively.
But I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction, has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting. A contest between Dick Cheney and Barack Obama would offer us a bracing referendum on competing visions. One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction. A Cheney victory would mean that America preferred a vigorous unilateralism to President Obama’s unapologetic multilateralism, and vice versa.

Three years out, the GOP field does not offer a putative nominee. When Gallup polled on the Republican race for 2012, it asked about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Haley Barbour (Huckabee won, with Romney and Palin tying for second among Republicans who were asked whom they would consider voting for). Cheney covers all the ground these folks do, and then some. (After Liz Cheney’s remark on Fox News, a flood of subsequent e-mails asked her, “Where do I sign up?”) In an era of ideological purity within the party, Cheney is among the purest; no one can question his conservative credentials on national security, and his record in the House and as vice president places him beyond reproach from the base. He was, it is true, second in command in years of great deficit spending, but his image as an implacable foe of terrorism and a hardliner on the projection of American power would go a long way toward securing his position within the party as a warrior of the old school offering himself once more to a nation he has served in four different decades.

A campaign would also give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way. As John McCain pointed out in the fall of 2008, he is not Bush. Nor is Cheney, but the former vice president would make the case for the harder-line elements of the Bush world view. Far from fading away, Cheney has been the voice of the opposition since the inauguration. Wouldn’t it be more productive and even illuminating if he took his arguments out of the realm of punditry and into the arena of electoral politics? Are we more or less secure because of the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Does the former vice president still believe in a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda? Did the counterterror measures adopted in the aftermath of the attacks go too far? Let’s have the fight and see what the country thinks.

Historically the country has tended to muddle through somewhere between the extremes of right and left. There is often much virtue in conducting public life by fits and starts. When things drift too far one way in ideological terms, Americans are pretty good about tugging them back to the middle.
But the middle moves depending on where the poles of right and left are standing at a particular moment. Given Cheney’s views, even conservatives who dislike him or think it is time to open a new chapter might give the possibility another thought, for it seems much more likely that Cheney would pull Obama to the right than that Obama would pull Cheney to the left. I think it is safe to say that neither a Huckabee nor a Palin bid would have the same effect.
No one foresaw Cheney’s reemergence as a force in the politics of the 21st century until it happened. So perhaps the pattern is set, a pattern of insistent denial of interest—until it turns out that, hey, he is interested. Cheney’s memoirs are due to be published—and thus due to be promoted—in the spring of 2011, not long before the caucuses and primaries begin. I’ll bet you that the Barnes & Noble in Des Moines (there’s a big one at The Shoppes at Three Fountains) is on the book tour.

Jon Meacham is editor of NEWSWEEK and author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation .

By Chris Jordan
December 9, 2009

Early last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney emerged from his eerie, dark lair once again to assail President Obama’s foreign policy.

In October, Cheney claimed the president was “dithering” on the decision of a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan.

“Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our enemies,” Cheney said.

This time he accused Obama of “projecting weakness” by engaging in long periods of “continual agonizing” before finally settling on a strategy.

The new administration’s intensive three-month review of Afghanistan policy illustrates a seismic shift in decision-making style President Obama has brought to the White House. I find it interesting that the former vice president is such a vocal critic of Obama’s cautious deliberation, considering the approach he took in Iraq.

In the 1990s Dick Cheney was a member of a Washington think tank called the Project for the New American Century. Other notable members included neo-conservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. This group co-wrote a letter to President Clinton arguing for the use of military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Cheney had desired an invasion of Iraq long before Sept. 11.

After the attack and during the run-up to the Iraq War, the vice president did everything he could to attempt to link Saddam with al-Qaeda in order to build the case for war. If he could associate the dictator with terrorists, he would finally get his chance at regime change in Iraq.

Analysts from the CIA conducted a review of roughly 75,000 pages of documents and insisted they could find no connection, but Cheney continued to pressure mid-level officials in the hope they’d reach a different conclusion. He needed to produce the intelligence that would justify the invasion he wanted. In the end, the “link” between Saddam and al-Qaida became a key justification for the war in Iraq even though the CIA turned out to be right — the connection did not exist.

The contrast between Cheney and Obama could not be clearer.

The New York Times published an article last week that detailed Obama’s decision process on Afghanistan. According to the Times, “Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information.”

The president frequently “invited competing voices to debate in front of him,” and conducted a review process that was “intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating.”

Rather than attempt to cook up evidence in support of his case, as Cheney had done, Obama’s approach was to explore every option available and assess the merit of each. What Cheney calls “dithering” was actually necessary, thoughtful deliberation that was sorely lacking in the last administration.

American soldiers have been dying in Afghanistan for more than eight years, unemployment is hovering around 10 percent, we are in the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression, and the national debt is out of control. Frankly, at a time like this President Obama owed it to the American people to take a long, hard look at this policy.

I am glad the president took his time on this decision and conducted a thorough, vigorous review. Decisions this important should not be made from the gut. Rather, they should come after careful weighing of the best possible action.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

by Shailagh Murray And Lori Montgomery
Washington Post

WASHINGTON – Democratic Senate negotiators struck a tentative agreement Tuesday night to drop the controversial government-run insurance plan from their overhaul of the health care system, hoping to remove a last major roadblock preventing the bill from moving to a final vote in the chamber.

Under the deal, the government plan preferred by liberals would be replaced with a program that would create several national insurance policies administered by private companies but negotiated by the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees health policies for federal workers. If private firms were unable to deliver acceptable national policies, a government plan would be created.

In addition, people as young as 55 would be permitted to buy into Medicare, the popular federal health program for retirees. And private insurance companies would face stringent new regulations, including a requirement that they spend at least 90 cents of every dollar they collect in premiums on medical services for their customers.

The announcement came after six days of negotiations among 10 Democrats – five liberals and five moderates – appointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to work out differences between the two camps on the public option and other pressing issues. Appearing in the Capitol with Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the leader of the liberal faction, and Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., representing moderates, Reid hailed the deal as a broad agreement that has the potential to “overcome a real problem that we had” and push the measure to final Senate vote before Christmas.

“Not everyone is going to agree with every piece,” Reid said. But when asked whether the deal means the end is in sight after nearly a year of work on President Obama’s most important domestic initiative, he smiled. “The answer’s yes,” he said.

According to a Democrat briefed on the talks, the deal represents only an agreement among the 10 negotiators to send the new package to congressional budget analysts, not an agreement to support its elements. One of the negotiators, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., quickly issued a statement criticizing the deal.

“While I appreciate the willingness of all parties to engage in good-faith discussions, I do not support proposals that would replace the public option in the bill with a purely private approach,” he said. He added, however, that he will base his vote “on the entirety of what is in the bill, and whether I think the bill is good for Wisconsin.”

Democrats must also win the approval of several key lawmakers who have not been involved in the talks.

But if the deal holds, it will represent a major breakthrough on one of the most contentious issues of the health care debate, settling a dispute between moderates wary of excessive government intrusion into the private sector and liberals determined to create a strong competitor able to curb the most egregious abuses in the private insurance industry.

“It may be different from what was previously included in the bill,” said Reid spokesman Jim Manley, “but it accomplishes the same goals as a so-called public option.”

Earlier in the day, the Senate turned back an amendment that would have barred millions of Americans from purchasing subsidized insurance policies that cover abortion, as Democratic leaders struggled to maintain a delicate party coalition. The amendment was rejected 54 to 45. Although the outcome of the vote was not a surprise, the defeat could cost Reid the support of Sen. Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, a conservative Democrat who has threatened to join a GOP filibuster of the bill unless abortion restrictions are tightened.

Nelson is one of five moderates in the Democratic caucus demanding changes to the legislation, forcing Reid to balance their concerns with those of liberals as he seeks to maintain the 60 votes needed to push a bill across the finish line.

Key liberals said they were prepared to abandon a government-run insurance program if it would move the chamber closer to a final deal, provided it was replaced with other coverage options and tighter restrictions on insurance companies. “I don’t think we’re going to get that right now,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said of the public option. “So we’re going for as strong a regulation guidance as we possibly can.”

Agreement would pay individuals and buy back land

by Matthew Daly
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed spending more than $3 billion to settle claims dating back more than a century that American Indian tribes were swindled out of royalties for oil, gas, grazing and other leases.

Under an agreement announced Tuesday, the Interior Department would distribute $1.4 billion to more than 300,000 Indian tribe members to compensate them for historical accounting claims, and to resolve future claims. The government also would spend $2 billion to buy back and consolidate tribal land broken up in previous generations. The program would allow individual tribe members to obtain cash payments for land interests divided among numerous family members and return the land to tribal control.

The settlement also would create a scholarship account of up to $60 million for tribal members to attend college or vocational school.

If cleared by Congress and a federal judge, the settlement would be the largest Indian claim ever approved against the U.S. government – exceeding the combined total of all previous settlements of Indian claims.

Last year, a federal judge ruled that the Indian plaintiffs are entitled to $455 million, a fraction of the $47 billion or more the tribes have said they are owed for leases that have been overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.

President Barack Obama said settlement of the case, known as Cobell v. Salazar, was an important step to reconcile decades of acrimony between Indian tribes and the federal government.

“As a candidate, I heard from many in Indian Country that the Cobell suit remained a stain on the nation-to-nation relationship I value so much,” Obama said Tuesday in a written statement. “I pledged my commitment to resolving this issue, and I am proud that my administration has taken this step today.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar called settlement of the 13-year-old case a top priority for him and Obama and said the administration worked for many months to reach a settlement that is both honorable and responsible.

“This historic step will allow Interior to move forward and address the educational, law enforcement, and economic development challenges we face in Indian Country,” Salazar said.

Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe from Montana who was the lead plaintiff in the case, called the proposed settlement crucial for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who have suffered for more than a century through mismanagement of the Indian trust.

“Today is a monumental day for all of the people in Indian Country that have waited so long for justice,” said Cobell, who appeared at a news conference Tuesday with Salazar, Attorney General Eric Holder and other U.S. officials.

“Did we get all the money that was due us? Probably not,” Cobell said, but added: “There’s too many individual Indian beneficiaries that are dying every single day without their money.”

The proposed settlement affects tribes across the country, including virtually every recognized tribe west of the Mississippi River. Tribes in North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Montana are especially affected by the breakup of Indian land into small parcels, said Keith Harper, a lawyer who represents the plaintiffs.

The settlement would give every Indian tribe member with an Interior Department account an immediate check for $1,000, with additional payments to be determined later under a complicated formula that takes into account a variety of factors. Many tribe members also would receive payments for parcels of land that are held in some cases by up to 100 family members, in an effort to consolidate tribal land and make it more useful and easier to manage.

The settlement does not include a formal apology for any wrongdoing by the U.S. government, but does contain language in which U.S. officials acknowledge a “breach of trust” on Indian land issues.

An apology “would have been nice,” Cobell said, but was less important than settling the dispute. “Actions are more important to me than apologies,” she said.

December 7, 2009

By ERIC LIPTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, toured a prince’s vineyard and castle in Liechtenstein and spent an afternoon at a ski resort in the Alps — all at the expense of a group of European companies.

Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat, got the dignitary treatment when a big donor flew him to Inner Mongolia to lobby for a new medical supplies factory in rural China.

And Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, on another privately sponsored trip, stayed at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem and attended a gala party near the Western Wall as part of a weeklong conference that lobbyists and executives paid as much as $18,500 to attend.

Despite changes intended to curb Congressional junkets, some lawmakers and even their families continue to take trips hosted by private groups and companies that revel in their access to Washington power brokers.

An examination by The New York Times of 1,150 trips shows that some of them bent or broke rules adopted in 2007 to limit corporate influence in Washington. Others exploited glaring loopholes in the guidelines, enacted with much fanfare after scandals involving the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

While lobbyists are not supposed to pay for a lawmaker’s travel, for example, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s $14,708 trip to Liechtenstein and Germany in 2009 was organized by a nonprofit group whose president is a lobbyist. It was underwritten by European companies that, in many cases, lobby in the United States.

Another rule limits travel paid for by companies employing lobbyists to just two nights. This forced Mr. Davis to make a quick turnaround when he flew to China this year. He changed clothes in a van on a highway before meeting with officials there.

Mr. Davis said he was exhausted by the end of his journey. He said he saw nothing wrong with a businessman and big financial contributor flying him to help close a private business deal.

“He’s a guy that I really admire,” Mr. Davis said of Willie Wilson, president of Omar Medical Supplies, which got its factory. Still, Mr. Davis acknowledged, “It’s not going to create jobs in Illinois.”

The rules are filled with odd contradictions. Lobbyists themselves are not allowed to pay for trips, but their corporate clients can. And lobbyists are permitted to give huge sums to nonprofit groups that can sponsor travel. They can also travel to destinations and meet the lawmakers once they get there, though they cannot go on the same plane.

Seizing on the loopholes, lobbyists and the companies that employ them are still underwriting trips by dozens of members of Congress, particularly those in the House, the Times review shows. The companies finance much of this travel indirectly, getting around the spirit of the rules by giving money to nonprofits, some of which seem to exist largely to sponsor trips. In fact, the rules may have had the unexpected effect of obscuring who is actually paying for a lawmaker’s junket.

“If a nonprofit group is essentially just being used as a pass-through entity for corporate players that otherwise could not sponsor an event, that is a fraud and that is not allowed,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat who leads the House ethics committee.

The rules have had some real impact. Privately financed travel for members of the House has dropped to fewer than 400 trips in the first 10 months of this year, compared with 1,100 in the same period in 2005. The drop in Senate travel has been even greater: Senators took just 24 trips in the first 10 months of this year, compared with 189 in the same period in 2005. Democrats and Republicans traveled proportionate to their numbers in Congress.

The universe of regular sponsors has been reduced to fewer than a dozen big foundations and associations, the Times analysis shows. Many of the trips are sponsored by organizations with ideological and policy agendas, rather than commercial interests. Most of those rely, at least in part, on corporate financing to underwrite trips for lawmakers.

Their internal policies vary widely in how they seek to insulate the trips from corporate influence. The Aspen Institute, for instance, tries to block corporate influence-peddling by barring lobbyists from its events and declining corporate contributions for the trips, a spokesman said.

But not all groups are as strict. Some nonprofits take money from major corporations with lobbyists, like Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, Eli Lilly, the drug company, and Volkswagen, the automaker, to sponsor events for lawmakers during the trips.

When Mr. Sensenbrenner and Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, traveled to Liechtenstein in February to learn about its banking system, they attended business meetings. But they and their wives also visited the Malbun ski resort, stayed at a first-class hotel and toured the wine cellar at the prince of Liechtenstein’s historic vineyard, according to their itinerary.

The cost of the trip — $14,708 for Mr. Sensenbrenner and his wife alone — was picked up by a nonprofit group called the International Management and Development Institute. Just since 2005, International Management has paid for 34 trips to Europe for lawmakers and staff members, totaling more than $400,000, including five for Mr. Sensenbrenner to Germany, Liechtenstein, Norway and France.

The trips were largely financed by contributions from companies like Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa, which have American lobbyists and therefore would have been prohibited from directly paying for the weeklong trips. Top executives at these companies were often offered special meetings with the lawmakers. The president of the institute, Don Bonker, is a Washington lobbyist, whose firm, APCO Worldwide, has served as a registered agent for the German government.

Foreign agents are also prohibited from sponsoring travel.

Because International Management is an American nonprofit and does not retain a lobbyist, none of the rules applied. As a result, a group of big corporations were able to indirectly pay for a weeklong visit to Europe, and their executives got to meet with powerful lawmakers.

Mr. Bonker, the lobbyist, and Mr. Sensenbrenner, the congressman, said they stuck to the rules, and that the trips had been approved beforehand by the House ethics staff.

“Many organizations that are seeking to educate Congressional leaders on a range of topics receive money from a variety of sources to better enable them to do so, without any cost to taxpayers,” Wendy Riemann, a spokeswoman for Mr. Sensenbrenner, said in a written statement.

Like International Management, the Franklin Center for Global Policy Exchange seems to exist largely to sponsor Congressional travel. The group’s Web site lists an “honorary” board made up of members of Congress, but it does not disclose a separate board that includes lobbyists from the nuclear power and liquor industries, among others. Nor does it disclose that private executives and lobbyists pay to attend the events the group sponsors for members of Congress in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Another company, Doheny Global, of Manhattan, used lawmakers as a lure to attract paying attendance at a meeting in Israel.

Last year Doheny, an energy and real estate investment firm, invited private equity and energy industry executives to pay $18,500 per person to hobnob with “an elite cadre” of public and private powerbrokers, including Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida congresswoman. Doheny paid to fly her and her husband in for the weeklong gathering in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and she appeared in a promotional video calling Irwin G. Katsof, the company’s founder, “a matchmaker for business” who “enjoys great credibility in Congress.”

Ms. Ros-Lehtinen declined to comment on the trips.

The invitation to the 2008 event, which also featured Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, came from a host committee that included registered lobbyists. Depending on how much of a role that committee had in setting up the event, the trip may have violated House rules, which prohibit lawmakers from taking multiday trips “planned, organized, requested or arranged by a lobbyist.”

It takes a little digging to find the role big companies with lobbyists played in sponsoring the Congressional Black Caucus’s four-day 2008 conference at a casino resort in Tunica, Miss.

Each of the 14 House members submitted a detailed agenda for approval to the ethics committee. It listed social events like a golf outing, but it also included serious topics like health care and global warming.

But there is something missing from the agenda sent to the ethics committee.

A different copy handed out to the caucus members is much the same — except for the line under each event that names a corporate sponsor. A workshop focused on health care included the words “Sponsored by Eli Lily,” the big drug company with a huge stake in health care legislation. Edison Electric Institute, an association of power plant owners, hosted the global warming seminar. Wal-Mart sponsored a clinic to teach lawmakers and other attendees how to skeet shoot; after the lessons came a competition sponsored by the International Longshoremen’s Association.

William A. Kirk, the Washington lawyer and lobbyist who helped arrange the weekend, said the sponsor companies did not directly pay for the events or member travel. They became sponsors by contributing to the general fund of the caucus’s Political Education and Leadership Institute, which is a nonprofit. Money from the general fund, however, paid for hotels and other accommodations. Members were responsible for their own flights, though some used campaign funds.

The House ethics committee is separately investigating another event attended by members of the caucus, a November 2008 conference at a resort on St. Maarten in the Caribbean, which included corporate sponsors like American Airlines and Citigroup.

Mr. Davis’s trip to China was not so luxurious. But it may be the clearest example of a company openly paying a lawmaker to travel on purely commercial business.

Willie Wilson, the owner of Omar Medical Supplies, wanted to build a factory to make latex gloves to sell in the United States, and he thought Mr. Davis could help him negotiate better terms with the Chinese. Omar is not located in Mr. Davis’s district, but Mr. Wilson is a longtime friend who, along with his wife, has contributed $37,000 to Mr. Davis’s political causes in the last decade. Omar had also hired Richard Boykin, Mr. Davis’s former chief of staff, as lobbyist in Washington. And in between two trips to China Mr. Davis took in 2008 and 2009, Mr. Boykin held a fund-raiser for him.

The fact that Mr. Boykin actually traveled with Mr. Davis on the 2008 trip may have violated the rules, since lobbyists are not permitted to accompany members on trips.

Local officials, photographers, and a woman in traditional Mongolian garb greeted the visitors with flowers and gifts, before Mr. Wilson affixed his signature to the joint venture with Mr. Davis looking on. Mr. Wilson said Mr. Davis’s presence helped seal the deal.

“It was good to have a United States congressman speaking highly of you,” he said.

Ron Nixon and Derek Willis contributed research.

by David S. Broder
The Spokesman-Review

On the same evening last week that President Barack Obama went to West Point to outline his plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, the four Massachusetts Democratic candidates hoping to win Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat met in a televised debate.

All four – including the favorite in Tuesday’s primary, state Attorney General Martha Coakley – said they opposed the president’s decision to escalate. Referring to Obama’s promise to begin bringing an unspecified number of the “surge” forces home by July 2011, Coakley said, “It seems to me it’s impractical, given what we think the mission is, the number of troops we’re sending over.

“We really won’t be able to be finished in 18 months and start an exit strategy there,” she said.

The rejection of Obama’s argument by the leading candidate in an overwhelmingly Democratic state shows how much the president has failed to convince his fellow partisans he is right about the biggest national security policy decision of his tenure.

It is symptomatic of a bigger problem: Coakley and her rivals are emblematic of widespread Democratic dissent on Afghanistan.

Listen, for example, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, normally the lead voice for pushing Obama’s programs on Capitol Hill. When asked at her Thursday news conference about her pre-speech warning that there was little support for escalation on the Democratic side of the aisle, she reiterated that view and added that she wanted more briefings on Obama’s rationale and plans before members have to vote on funding for the war.

Carefully avoiding any words that could be interpreted as support for Obama’s policy, she said, “I think we have to handle it with care, listen to what they present and then members will make their decision. Some have already made their decisions, and they have been outspoken on the subject.”

Indeed, many of her closest allies in the House such as Rep. Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut, have declared they will oppose paying for Obama’s program. “It will be very difficult for me to support funding for an increased military commitment to fight the Taliban and various insurgent groups that are bringing instability to Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly when we do not appear to have a credible partner in the Karzai government, and are trying to bring stability to one of the most corrupt countries in the world,” DeLauro said.

That was not the universal reaction. Centrist and conservative Democrats and those who serve on the Armed Services Committee tended to be more supportive of Obama’s decision. Next year, when the additional troops are in the field and the first bills come due, there will probably be enough Democrats willing to join the vast majority of Republicans in funding the Afghan surge.

But the lessons of a previous land war in Asia cannot be forgotten. When Lyndon Johnson escalated in Vietnam, initially both Republicans and Democrats gave him their support – and public opinion was more positive than it is now for Afghanistan.

The defections began on the Democratic left – where the opposition to Obama is most visible today – and by the end, most Democrats and many of the Republicans had abandoned Johnson to his political fate.

A president who wages a war supported mainly by his political foes and opposed by large numbers of his own party is running a huge political risk. Even if he prevails for a time, he pays a price in the loss of his most loyal supporters.

Obama can rightfully claim that he made clear throughout his campaign that he saw a vital need to fight on in Afghanistan. But he has obviously not persuaded many of his important followers as yet that they should endorse his views. And nothing short of success on the battlefield is likely to convince them that he is right.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

by Gary Crooks
The Spokesman-Review

Multiple investigations have opened due to the contents of e-mails swiped from computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Great Britain. The university is delving into the issues raised in the e-mails and has sidelined the head of the climate unit. The chairman of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said allegations stemming from the e-mails would be investigated. Penn State University said it would probe the work of one of its scientists, Michael Mann.

Good. Many of the e-mails expose some bitter battles and possible collusion in avoiding public records requests. Getting to the bottom of that makes perfect sense. Transparency is wise.

Anything is better than the hyperbolic and unsubstantiated charges being tossed around by amateur scientists and wannabe detectives. Some Republicans in Congress are calling for hearings, though you have to wonder why since they’ve already donned their rumpled trench coats and cracked the case.

U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., called global warming a gigantic hoax several years ago, so it wasn’t surprising when he called for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its endangerment finding on greenhouse gases and halt any actions to limit them. And he complains of “alarmists”?

U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., claimed: “These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit.” He then tried to broaden the case by stating that the National Academy of Sciences discredited Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” research, which shows that the past 50 years have been the hottest of the past several centuries and that man is to blame.

Wrong. In 2006, the academy essentially upheld Mann’s conclusions, though it did find some technical errors.

And the academy’s take on global warming in general? “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify taking steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

Lacking authoritative sources, perhaps these politicians could’ve turned to industry-funded organizations. Bet they have some interesting correspondence about research on this issue or smoking or asbestos or acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer or lead in paint, all of which has failed to tip the scientific consensus. In the interest of transparency, perhaps they’ll produce it.

If these e-mail-inspired investigations undermine the overall case for human-caused global warming and cause major scientific organizations and national and international academies to reverse their positions, I’ll change my mind.

If the probes fail on that score, how many skeptics will do the same?

Outsource the bosses.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that pay limits could hurt General Motors’ search for a new chief executive officer after the board bounced CEO Fritz Henderson on Tuesday.

“Most executives of that caliber expect a boatload of money to join a new company,” said Jerome York, a former GM director.

The pay limit was imposed as a condition of accepting government bailout money.

Toyota and Honda have done pretty well over the years without exorbitant executive pay. At a time when Rick Wagoner was pulling down $15.7 million as the CEO of GM, Toyota’s president was making about $900,000. In 2006, Honda’s top 21 executives made $11.1 million in salary and bonuses.

As economist Dean Baker noted on his blog, “This suggests that CEOs in the United States have simply priced themselves out of the market. The obvious solution would be to outsource top management.”

Smart Bombs is written by Associate Editor Gary Crooks and appears Wednesdays and Sundays on the Opinion page. Crooks can be reached at garyc@spokesman.com or at (509) 459-5026.

Seattle group’s request coincides with tree-lighting
by Brad Shannon
Olympian

OLYMPIA – A Seattle-based atheists group asked state officials Friday for permission to display a placard outdoors on the Capitol campus over the holidays.

Jerry Schiffelbein, the treasurer for Seattle Atheists and an activist in other “free-thought” groups that advocate separation between church and state, said the sign’s message is less provocative than those that the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation put up last year.

The proposed 18-by-30-inch sign says, “In this holiday season let us remember that kindness, charity and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”

The request to put up the sign came the day that state officials lit up a 48-foot holiday tree inside the domed Capitol rotunda, a yearly tradition now entirely under state sponsorship. The evening event featured Gov. Chris Gregoire; Army Staff Sgt. Stephanie McDowell, who recently returned from Iraq; and a children’s chorale.

The atheists’ request – just like two requests to display a Jewish menorah Thursday through Dec. 19 – will be considered under the state policy adopted after last December’s ruckus over holiday displays inside the Capitol, Department of General Administration spokesman Steve Valandra said Friday. He expects a decision on the requests Monday.

“We thought we would get more requests. There is still time,” he said.

Last December, the GA declared a moratorium because it had about a dozen requests from groups wanting to put up displays, and a third-floor area for displays was getting crowded. The GA had approved a half-dozen of the requests, including a Nativity set, an atheist placard that mocked religion as superstition, Christian placards that mocked atheism, and a 9-foot menorah.

Requests halted by the moratorium included a “Festivus” pole from the mock holiday celebrated on the TV show “Seinfeld,” a “flying spaghetti monster,” and one from a Kansas church that assails homosexuality.

Before the controversy ended, someone stole the atheists’ placard. Thousands of complaints flooded the governor’s office and the GA after a national television commentator condemned the state for allowing the atheists’ display near the Nativity scene.

The GA has approved one display request so far this year. It was one of two submitted by Chabad Jewish Discovery Center in Olympia for a 9-foot menorah. The approved request is for Sylvester Park, a state-owned property in downtown Olympia; the other is for a menorah next to the Tivoli Fountain on the campus lawn.

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

The nation’s employers not only have stopped eliminating large numbers of jobs, but appear to be on the verge of rebuilding the American work force, devastated by the recession.

The unexpected improvement comes as a relief to the Obama administration, which plans to unveil new proposals next week to ease the plight of the jobless following its labor forum in Washington on Thursday.

In the best report since the recession began two years ago, only 11,000 jobs disappeared last month, the government said on Friday, and the unemployment rate actually dipped, to 10 percent, from 10.2 percent the previous month.

“There are going to be some months where the reports are going to be a little better, some months where the reports are worse, but the trend line right now is good,” President Obama said in a visit to Allentown, Pa., offering reassurance to a city besieged by unemployment and a country still suffering from the highest unemployment rate in 26 years.

Many forecasters suggest that the turning point — from jobs being cut to jobs being added — will come by March, assuming the economy continues to grow, as it finally started to do in the third quarter. If they are right, the beginning of a work force recovery would come more quickly than after the last two recessions, in the early 1990s and 2001, despite the much greater severity of this downturn.

Stock markets rose sharply early Friday after the employment report was released and ended the day slightly higher, while the dollar had its biggest one-day rally since January.

Although 15.4 million people are struggling to find work, the November report revealed signs of improvement across the country. More than 50,000 temporary workers were hired, the first surge in months and often a precursor to companies hiring permanent workers. Employees worked more hours, even in manufacturing.

And, reflecting the increased hours, the average weekly wage for most of the nation’s workers rose by nearly two-thirds of a percentage point in a single month, to $622.

“Many companies have reached the point that they can’t extract more work from their existing employees,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist for IHS Global Insight. “That means they have to add hours for existing workers or add people. Just how many depends on how quickly the economy grows.”

It also depends on business executives feeling confident enough about the economy to invest and expand their operations. That may take months of steady economic growth even after they have stopped peeling back their work forces.

In the end, the unanticipated improvement in November may turn out to be partly a correction of too much bad news in October — particularly the unemployment rate, which shot up four-tenths of a percentage point that month and has retreated somewhat.

But economists in the Obama administration were having none of that. They see the November improvement as payback from the $787 billion stimulus package. In briefings with reporters, they said the federal spending saved or created 1.6 million jobs. Without that lift, the total job loss over the 23 months of recession would have been 8.8 million instead of 7.2 million.

“I think you have to give our interventions a lot of credit,” said Jared Bernstein, chief economist for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And then, insisting that Thursday’s job conference in Washington was a step along the way to more job creation activity, he said: “By no stretch of the imagination does this report mean less pressure on us for job creation.”

Republican economists were hardly as sanguine. “Even if you accept their analysis that we are creating jobs this year, when you remove the stimulus you are going to destroy jobs,” said Kevin A. Hassett, director of Economic Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and chief economist for John McCain in his failed presidential campaign. Mr. Hassett’s preferred tonic, like that of many Republicans, is tax cuts for job creation, not public spending.

Adding to the positive signs, a broad measure of unemployment — one that includes those forced to work only part time and those too discouraged to look for work — fell to 17.2 percent, from 17.5 percent in October, the first decline in several months. In addition, job losses in September and October turned out to be far less than previously reported: 250,000 instead of 409,000.

“All this good news is miles above the underlying trend rate of improvement, so we expect a correction in the next month or two,” Ian Shepherdson, chief domestic economist for High Frequency Economics, said in a message to the firm’s clients.

Even without a correction, once the economy turns and hiring resumes, nearly 18 million people are likely to be vying for jobs, as if they were all trying at once to jam themselves through a door too narrow to accommodate more than a few. In a strong economy, the work force seldom grows by more than 300,000 workers a month.

Nearly one-third have an even greater burden. They are the long-term unemployed, out of work for six months or more, and in many cases longer than a year. Not since records were first kept in 1948 has the percentage of long-term unemployed been as high as it is today: 38.3 percent of all those seeking work, or more than 10 percentage points above the previous high, in the aftermath of the early 1980s recession.

“Assuming we have a strong recovery, it will take at least five years or more to get the unemployment rate down to a more normal 5 percent,” said Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at Goldman Sachs, adding that the long-term unemployed have lost skills and some of the habits of work because of their extended idleness. Because of this, the nation may have to get used to an unemployment rate that seldom falls below 6 percent.

Annette Mercado, 39, a single mother in Chicago, said that she had retained her skills, even though she has been hunting for work since July of last year, when she was laid off from a $12-an-hour clerical job in a motorcycle accessory shop.

She attributes that layoff to her refusal to work extra hours. “I told them I wasn’t willing to spend more time away from my 14-year-old daughter,” Ms. Mercado said. She spent months scouring Craigslist, CareerBuilder and other job sites, but the best she could do, she said during an interview at the state unemployment office, was temporary holiday season work last December at a liquor store.

Ms. Mercado gets $984 a month in unemployment benefits as well as food stamps, but that is not really enough, she said, to pay all her expenses and those of her daughter without falling behind on the rent. Her plan, if work doesn’t materialize soon, is to put her belongings in storage and move in with her parents.

“They are barely making it themselves,” she said.

Jeff Zeleny and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
contributed reporting.

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — We shall fight in the air, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, we shall fight in the hills — for 18 months. Then we start packing for home.

We shall never surrender — unless the war gets too expensive, in which case, we shall quote Eisenhower on “the need to maintain balance in and among national programs” and then insist that “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

The quotes are from President Obama’s West Point speech announcing the Afghanistan troop surge. What a strange speech it was — a call to arms so ambivalent, so tentative, so defensive.

Which made his last-minute assertion of “resolve unwavering” so hollow. It was meant to be stirring. It fell flat. In August, he called Afghanistan “a war of necessity.” On Tuesday night, he defined “what’s at stake” as “the common security of the world.” The world, no less. Yet, we begin leaving in July 2011?

Does he think that such ambivalence is not heard by the Taliban, by Afghan peasants deciding which side to choose, by Pakistani generals hedging their bets, by NATO allies already with one foot out of Afghanistan?

Nonetheless, most supporters of the Afghanistan War were satisfied. They got the policy, the liberals got the speech. The hawks got three-quarters of what Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted — 30,000 additional U.S. troops — and the doves got a few soothing words. Big deal, say the hawks.

But it is a big deal. Words matter because will matters. Success in war depends on three things: a brave and highly skilled soldiery, such as the U.S. military 2009, the finest counterinsurgency force in history; brilliant, battle-tested commanders such as Gens. David Petraeus and McChrystal, fresh from the success of the surge in Iraq; and the will to prevail as personified by the commander in chief.

There’s the rub. And that is why at such crucial moments, presidents don’t issue a policy paper. They give a speech. It gives tone and texture. It allows their policy to be imbued with purpose and feeling. This one was festooned with hedges, caveats and one giant exit ramp.

No one expected Obama to do a Henry V or a Churchill. But Obama could not even manage a George W. Bush, who, at an infinitely lower ebb in power and popularity, opposed by the political and foreign policy establishments and dealing with a war effort in far more dire straits, announced his surge — Iraq 2007 — with outright rejection of withdrawal or retreat. His implacability was widely decried at home as stubbornness, but heard loudly in Iraq by those fighting for and against us as unflinching — and salutary — determination.

Obama’s surge speech wasn’t a commander in chief’s, but a politician’s, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right — you get the troops; placate the left — we are on our way out.

And apart from Obama’s own personal commitment is the question of his ability as a wartime leader. If he feels compelled to placate his left with an exit date today — while he is still personally popular, with large majorities in both houses of Congress, and even before the surge begins — how will he stand up to the left when the going gets tough and the casualties mount, and he really has to choose between support from his party and success on the battlefield?

Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives, without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.

I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander in chief committed to success. And this commander in chief defended his exit date (versus the straw man alternative of “open-ended” nation-building) thusly: “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets — some of whom may not return alive — but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.

Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

By JACKIE CALMES of the New York Times

WASHINGTON — After months of focusing on Afghanistan and health care, President Obama turned his attention on Thursday to the high level of joblessness, but offered no promise that he could do much to bring unemployment down quickly even as he comes under pressure from his own party to do more.

At a White House forum, scheduled for the day before the government releases unemployment and job loss figures for November, Mr. Obama sought new ideas from business executives, labor leaders, economists and others. Confronted with concern that his own ambitious agenda and the uncertain climate it has created among employers have slowed hiring, the president defended his policies.

Mr. Obama said he would entertain “every demonstrably good idea” for creating jobs, but he cautioned that “our resources are limited.”

The president said he would announce some new ideas of his own next week. One of those, he indicated when he participated in a discussion group on clean energy, would be a program of weatherization incentives for homeowners and small businesses modeled on the popular “cash for clunkers” program.

On Capitol Hill, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, told senators at a sometimes testy hearing on his confirmation for a second term, “Jobs are the issue right now.”

“It really is the biggest challenge, the most difficult problem that we face right now,” Mr. Bernanke added, citing in particular the inability of many credit-worthy small businesses to get bank loans.

In the House, where lawmakers are particularly sensitive to the employment issue since they all face re-election next year, Democratic leaders on Thursday were finishing work on a jobs bill for debate this month. It would extend expiring federal unemployment benefits for people who have been out of jobs for long periods, and provide up $70 billion for roads and infrastructure projects and for aid to small business. House Democrats plan to pay for the plan by drawing from the $700 billion fund set up last year to bail out financial institutions.

The House also passed legislation on Thursday that would freeze the federal tax on large estates at its current level. Under current law, the tax would have disappeared entirely next year, only to reappear at much higher levels in 2011. The vote highlighted the raft of fiscal issues facing the administration and Congress and the tension between addressing budget deficits and taking potentially expensive actions to help the economy.

Mr. Obama’s jobs event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president and his party at the end of his first year. It came on the eve of a government report that is expected to show unemployment remaining in double digits, and two days after Mr. Obama emphasized as he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that he did not want the financial burdens of the war to overwhelm his domestic agenda.

Both the domestic and the military demands on the administration are raising costs unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office, even as pressures build to arrest annual budget deficits now exceeding $1 trillion. Those demands are also eroding the broad support that swept Mr. Obama into office, especially among independent voters, and igniting a guns-versus-butter budget debate in his own party not seen since the Vietnam era.

While liberals are calling for ambitious job-creating measures along the lines of the New Deal and Republicans want to scale back government spending programs, Mr. Obama talked at the White House on Thursday of limited programs that he suggested could provide substantial bang for the buck when it comes to job creation. Among them was the weatherization program.

Called “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.

Yet that relatively modest proposal underscores the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years — and Mr. Obama acknowledged as much. Just as he said in Tuesday’s Afghanistan speech that the nation could not afford an open-ended commitment there, especially when the economy is so weak and deficits so high, Mr. Obama emphasized at the jobs forum that the government had already done a lot with his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout that he inherited.

“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included executives and some critics from American Airlines, Boeing, Nucor, Google, Walt Disney and FedEx.

Mr. Obama told the chief executives that he wanted to know: “What’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring? And if there are things that we’re doing here in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it.”

He got a blunt answer from Fred P. Lampropoulos, founder and chief of Merit Medical Systems Inc., a medical device manufacturer in the Salt Lake City area. Mr. Lampropoulos said some in his discussion group agreed that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”

The president acknowledged, “This is a legitimate concern,” one that he and his advisers had discussed before he took office.

But Mr. Obama said he had decided that “if we keep on putting off tough decisions about health care, about energy, about education, we’ll never get to the point where there’s a lot of appetite for that.”

The argument that Democrats’ ambitions are unnerving business is one that Republicans have been making lately, and it was prominent Thursday when House Republican leaders held a competing round table on jobs with conservative economists.

“The American people are asking, ‘Where are the jobs?’ but all they are getting from Washington Democrats is more spending, more debt and more policies that hurt small businesses,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader.

But W. James McNerney Jr., the head of the Boeing Company, said in an interview after the president’s forum, “If you ask me what creates the uncertainty I’m dealing with, it’s more the state of the economy.”

The administration’s domestic agenda is a problem only to the extent that it “is crowding out their attention” to the economy, Mr. McNerney said, adding, “I think the purpose of today was to convince us that there’s at least a half-pivot in the other direction.”

By SCOTT SHANE of The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training.

Then, the job in North Waziristan done, the C.I.A. officers could head home from the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters, facing only the hazards of the area’s famously snarled suburban traffic.

It was only the latest strike by the agency’s covert program to kill operatives of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their allies using Hellfire missiles fired from Predator aircraft controlled from half a world away.

The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision, announced Tuesday, to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.

By increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, while ground forces push back the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan, American officials hope to eliminate any haven for militants in the region.

One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But despite close cooperation from Pakistani intelligence, the program has generated public anger in Pakistan, and some counterinsurgency experts wonder whether it does more harm than good.

Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.”

That claim, which the official said reflected the Predators’ ability to loiter over a target feeding video images for hours before and after a strike, is likely to come under scrutiny from human rights advocates. Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism at Amnesty International, said he found the estimate “unlikely,” noting that reassessments of strikes in past wars had usually found civilian deaths undercounted. Mr. Parker said his group was uneasy about drone attacks anyway: “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”

Yet with few other tools to use against Al Qaeda, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under President Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, C.I.A. officials were not eager to embrace killing terrorists from afar with video-game controls, said one former intelligence official. “There was also a lot of reluctance at Langley to get into a lethal program like this,” the official said. But officers grew comfortable with the program as they checked off their hit list more than a dozen notorious figures, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, a Qaeda expert on explosives; Rashid Rauf, accused of being the planner of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airliner plot; and Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban.

The drone warfare pioneered by the C.I.A. in Pakistan and the Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan is the leading edge of a wave of push-button combat that will raise legal, moral and political questions around the world, said P. W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of the book “Wired for War.”

Forty-four countries have unmanned aircraft for surveillance, Mr. Singer said. So far, only the United States and Israel have used the planes for strikes, but that number will grow.

“We’re talking about a technology that’s not going away,” he said.

There is little doubt that “warheads on foreheads,” in the macho lingo of intelligence officers, have been disruptive to the militants in Pakistan, removing leaders and fighters, slowing movement and sowing dissension as survivors hunt for spies who may be tipping off the Americans. Yet the drones are unpopular with many Pakistanis, who see them as a violation of their country’s sovereignty — one reason the United States refuses to officially acknowledge the attacks. A poll by Gallup Pakistan last summer found only 9 percent of Pakistanis in favor of the attacks and 67 percent against, with a majority ranking the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than its archrival, India, or the Pakistani Taliban.

Interestingly, residents of the tribal areas where the attacks actually occur, who bitterly resent the militants’ brutal rule, are far less critical of the drones, said Farhat Taj, an anthropologist with the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy. A study of 550 professional people living in the tribal areas was conducted late last year by the institute, a Pakistani research group. About half of those interviewed called the drone strikes “accurate,” 6 in 10 said they damaged militant organizations, and almost as many denied they increased anti-Americanism.

Dr. Taj, who lived at the edge of the tribal areas until 2002, said residents would prefer to be protected by the Pakistani Army. “But they feel powerless toward the militants and they see the drones as their liberator,” she said.

In an interview this week with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Pakistani prime minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the drone strikes “do no good, because they boost anti-American resentment throughout the country.” American officials say that despite such public comments, Pakistan privately supplies crucial intelligence, proposes targets and allows the Predators to take off from a base in Baluchistan.

Pakistan’s public criticism of the drone attacks has muddied the legal status of the strikes, which United States officials say are justified as defensive measures against groups that have vowed to attack Americans. Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions and a prominent critic of the program, has said it is impossible to judge whether the program violates international law without knowing whether Pakistan permits the incursions, how targets are selected and what is done to minimize civilian casualties.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, defended the program without quite acknowledging its existence. “While the C.I.A. does not comment on reports of Predator operations, the tools we use in the fight against Al Qaeda and its violent allies are exceptionally accurate, precise and effective,” he said. “Press reports suggesting that hundreds of Pakistani civilians have somehow been killed as a result of alleged or supposed U.S. activities are — to state what should be obvious under any circumstances — flat-out false.”

From 2004 to 2007, the C.I.A. carried out only a handful of strikes. But pressure from the Congressional intelligence committees, greater confidence in the technology and reduced resistance from Pakistan led to a sharp increase starting in the summer of 2008.

Former C.I.A. officials say there is a rigorous protocol for identifying militants, using video from the Predators, intercepted cellphone calls and tips from Pakistani intelligence, often originating with militants’ resentful neighbors. Operators at C.I.A. headquarters can use the drones’ video feed to study a militant’s identity and follow fighters to training areas or weapons caches, officials say. Targeters often can see where wives and children are located in a compound or wait until fighters drive away from a house or village before they are hit.

Mr. Mehsud’s wife and parents-in-law were killed with him, but that was an exceptional decision prompted by the rare chance to attack him, the official said.

The New America Foundation, a policy group in Washington, studied press reports and estimated that since 2006 at least 500 militants and 250 civilians had been killed in the drone strikes. A separate count, by The Long War Journal, found 885 militants’ deaths and 94 civilians’.

But the government official insisted on the accuracy of his far lower figure of approximately 20 civilian deaths, noting that the Pakistani press rarely reported local protests about civilian deaths, routine occurrences when bombs in Afghanistan have gone astray.

Daniel S. Markey, who studies South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the comments of two anti-Taliban tribal leaders he spoke with on a recent trip to Pakistan seemed to capture the paradox of the drones.

The tribal leaders told him that the strikes were eliminating dangerous militants while causing few civilian deaths. But they pleaded for a halt to the attacks, saying the strikes stirred up anger toward the United States and the Pakistani Army, and “made them look like puppets,” he said.

“It gave the lie,” Mr. Markey said, “to the argument we’ve made for a long time: that this fight is theirs, too.”

By JEREMY W. PETERS

ALBANY — The New York State Senate decisively rejected a bill on Wednesday that would have allowed gay couples to wed, providing a major victory for those who oppose same-sex marriage and underscoring the deep and passionate divisions surrounding the issue.

The 38-to-24 vote startled proponents of the bill and signaled that political momentum, at least right now, had shifted against same-sex marriage, even in heavily Democratic New York. It followed more than a year of lobbying by gay rights organizations, who steered close to $1 million into New York legislative races to boost support for the measure.

Senators who voted against the measure said the public was gripped by economic anxiety and remained uneasy about changing the state’s definition of marriage.

“Certainly this is an emotional issue and an important issue for many New Yorkers,” said Senator Tom Libous, the deputy Republican leader. “I just don’t think the majority care too much about it at this time because they’re out of work, they want to see the state reduce spending, and they are having a hard time making ends meet. And I don’t mean to sound callous, but that’s true.”

The defeat, which followed a stirring, tearful and at times very personal debate, all but ensures that the issue is dead in New York until at least 2011, when a new Legislature will be installed.

Since 2003, seven states, including three that border New York, have legalized same-sex marriage. But in two of the seven — California last year and Maine last month — statewide referendums have restricted marriage to straight couples, prohibiting gay nuptials. Pollsters say that while support generally is building for same-sex marriage, especially as the electorate ages, voters resist when they fear the issue is being pushed too fast.

In Albany on Wednesday, proponents had believed going into the vote that they could attract as many as 35 supporters to the measure; at their most pessimistic, they said they would draw at least 26. They had the support of Gov. David A. Paterson, who had publicly championed the bill, along with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Senate Democratic leadership.

The defeat revealed stark divides: All 30 of the Republican senators opposed the bill, as did most of the members from upstate New York and Long Island. Support was heaviest among members from New York City and Westchester County and among the Senate’s 10 black members. Seven of the Senate’s 10 women voted for it.

“I’m a woman and a Jew and so I know about discrimination,” said Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan.

Senators who are considered politically vulnerable also voted almost uniformly against the bill, including four first-term Democrats. All but one of those whose districts border or lie within the 23rd Congressional District, where the marriage issue erupted in a recent special election, opposed it. In that race, a Republican who supported gay marriage withdrew after an uproar from conservatives in her district.

“I think that there were political forces that in some respects intimidated some of those who voted,” said Mr. Paterson. “I think if there’d actually been a conscience vote we’d be celebrating marriage equality right now.”

While gay rights supporters such as Mr. Paterson had prominently pushed for passage, the opposition was less visible but ultimately more potent. That was reflected in the floor debate Wednesday: Opponents remained mostly silent; all but one of those who spoke on the floor supported the measure.

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops had consistently lobbied for its defeat, however, and after the vote released a statement applauding the move.

“Advocates for same-sex marriage have attempted to portray their cause as inevitable,” Richard E. Barnes, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said in the statement. “However, it has become clear that Americans continue to understand marriage the way it has always been understood, and New York is not different in that regard. This is a victory for the basic building block of our society.”

Several supporters said they felt they had been betrayed by senators who promised to vote yes but then, reluctant to support an issue as politically freighted as same-sex marriage if they could avoid it, switched their votes on the floor when it became evident the bill would lose.

“This is the worst example of political cowardice I’ve ever seen,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat. “Clearly people said things prior to coming to the floor and behaved differently.”

Republican advocates who supported the bill insisted that the agreement they struck with Democrats called for Democrats, who have 32 seats in the 62-member Senate, to deliver enough support so only a handful of Republicans were needed to take such a politically risky vote.

“Several Republicans wanted to vote for this,” said Jeff Cook, a legislative adviser for the Log Cabin Republicans. “But those Republicans aren’t willing to take a tough political vote when the bill has no chance of passage. And that’s the political reality.”

It is rare for legislation to reach the floor in Albany when passage is not all but assured. And initially, gay rights advocates resisted bringing this bill to a vote, fearing the consequences of a defeat. But they shifted that strategy over time, becoming convinced that an up or down vote was necessary so they could finally know which senators supported the bill.

That was in part because gay rights groups, which have become major financial players in state politics, wanted to know which senators they should back in the future and which ones to target for defeat.

Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York’s largest gay rights group, hinted that senators who voted against the bill on Wednesday could face repercussions. And Christine C. Quinn, the New York City Council speaker, echoed that sentiment, saying, “Anybody who thinks that by casting a no vote they’re putting this issue to bed, they’re making a massive miscalculation.”

Polls suggest that voters in New York favor same-sex marriage, though the electorate is clearly split. A poll released Wednesday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie showed that 51 percent of registered voters supported same-sex marriage while 42 percent opposed it.

On Wednesday, as news of the vote made its way to demonstrators standing outside the Senate chamber, some erupted in angry chants of “Equal rights!” and surrounded a senator who opposed the measure.

By KATE ZERNIKE

When Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister then serving as governor of Arkansas, granted clemency to Maurice Clemmons nine years ago, he cited his age: Mr. Clemmons was 16 when he began the crime spree for which he was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.

Now, Mr. Clemmons is being sought as the suspect in the killing of four uniformed police officers, execution-style, on Sunday as they sat in a coffee shop near Tacoma, Wash., writing reports.

Mr. Huckabee, now a Fox News talk-show host, has been leading the pack of possible Republican contenders for president in 2012. But the killings of the police officers are focusing renewed attention on his long-contentious record of pardoning convicts or commuting their sentences.

In a decade as governor beginning in 1996, Mr. Huckabee did so twice as many times as his three predecessors combined. He typically gave little explanation for individual pardons. But he spoke often of his belief in redemption, based on a strong religious belief that even criminals are capable of changing their lives and often deserve a second chance. He also raised concerns about the fairness of the Arkansas justice system.

The commutation of Mr. Clemmons’s sentence was routine enough that it failed to make a list of Mr. Huckabee’s 10 “most publicized” prison commutations compiled by an Arkansas newspaper in August 2004. And if it turns out to be a case in which a parole had gone bad, it will be difficult to pin responsibility solely on Mr. Huckabee, because many others made decisions that kept Mr. Clemmons out of prison.

Mr. Clemmons had been convicted for a series of burglaries and robberies that began in 1989, and would not have been eligible for parole until 2021. He applied for clemency in 2000, writing in a petition to Mr. Huckabee that he had simply fallen in with a bad crowd in a bad neighborhood as a teenager, and that he “had learned through the ‘school of hard knocks’ to appreciate and respect the rights of others.”

Mr. Huckabee commuted his sentence, making him eligible for immediate parole. Within six months, Mr. Clemmons violated the conditions of his parole, returning to prison in July 2001 for aggravated robbery. When he was paroled again by the state in 2004, the police in Little Rock served a warrant on him related to a 2001 robbery. But a lawyer for Mr. Clemmons argued that too much time had elapsed since the warrant was issued, and prosecutors dropped the charges.

Mr. Huckabee, who rode a brand of prairie populism to finish second in the Republican presidential primaries in 2008, granted more than 1,000 pardons or clemency requests as governor. As his reputation for granting clemency spread, more convicts applied. Aides said he read each file personally.

In most cases, he followed the recommendation of the parole board, but in several cases he overrode the objections of prosecutors, judges and victims’ families. And in several, he followed recommendations for clemency from Baptist preachers who had been longtime supporters.

Prosecutors told him he was ignoring his responsibility to explain to citizens why he was setting free convicted murderers and rapists. His response, some of them say, was to blame others and strike out against his critics — an off-note from a man they consider a gifted politician.

“Victims groups were pretty well ignored, along with boots-on-the-streets law enforcement and good citizens who sit on these juries,” said Larry Jegley, who objected to Mr. Clemmons’s clemency request as the prosecuting attorney for Pulaski County, where he was convicted.

Robert Herzfeld, then the prosecuting attorney of Saline County, wrote a letter to Governor Huckabee in January 2004, saying his policy on clemency was “fatally flawed” and suggesting that he should announce specific reasons for granting clemency. Mr. Huckabee’s chief aide on clemency wrote back: “The governor read your letter and laughed out loud. He wanted me to respond to you. I wish you success as you cut down on your caffeine consumption.”

“It was all a very personal issue for him,” said Mr. Herzfeld, who later sued successfully to overturn one of Mr. Huckabee’s clemency decisions, which would have set free a man convicted in a bludgeoning death. “It was always about how I was trying to get him or another prosecutor was trying to get him, not about how to do it right. He’s brilliant politically and very likable, but it seems like there’s a blind spot on this issue.”

With Mr. Clemmons, political consultants say Mr. Huckabee may have hit his Willie Horton moment

“As a front-runner, obviously with circumstances like this, it’s out there as a big issue,” said Ed Rollins, the manager of Mr. Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Mr. Huckabee survived a similar moment before, during the Iowa caucuses, when former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts criticized his judgment in the case of Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist who raped and killed a woman 11 months after being paroled in Arkansas.

Mr. Huckabee said that he had opposed clemency, and that it had been his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, who had made Mr. DuMond eligible for parole by reducing his sentence. “If anyone needs to get a Willie Horton out of it, it’s Jim Guy Tucker and the Democrat Party and it ain’t me,” he said to reporters at the time.

But Mr. Huckabee had come into office saying he intended to commute Mr. DuMond’s sentence. He later denied the request only as the state’s board granted Mr. DuMond parole. Members of the board later said they had been pressured by the governor.

Mr. Clemmons’s case packs more potency: the facts of Mr. Huckabee’s involvement in the clemency decision are less in dispute, and the crime has played over and over on national television.

“It’s the same issue yet again,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “The difference this time is that Governor Huckabee would start with greater visibility and higher in the polls, which always enhances and exacerbates any possible criticisms.”

Should he run, there are many prosecutors and victims’ advocates in Arkansas who say they are ready to argue to the national news media that this is just one of the cases where Mr. Huckabee used poor judgment and ignored an inmate’s history of criminal behavior in deciding for clemency. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Huckabee declined requests for an interview, but a statement from the “press team” on the Web site of his political action committee said that should Mr. Clemmons be found responsible for the shootings, “it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State.”

“He was recommended for and received commutation of his original sentence from 1990,” the statement said. “This commutation made him parole-eligible and he was then paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time.”

On Sunday, before the shooting, Mr. Huckabee sounded ambivalent on Fox News about running for president, saying he liked his role at the network and wanted to be sure that, unlike in 2008, he would receive support from the Republican establishment.

By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — The Congressional Budget Office said Monday that the Senate health bill could significantly reduce costs for many people who buy health insurance on their own, and that it would not substantially change premiums for the vast numbers of Americans who receive coverage from large employers.

The eagerly awaited report, which came as the Senate began debate on the legislation, provided Democrats with ammunition against Republicans who have criticized the bill on the ground that it would raise costs for a majority of Americans.

Centrist Democrats like Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, whose votes are vital to President Obama’s hopes of getting the bill approved, had feared that the measure would drive up costs for people with employer-sponsored coverage. After reading the budget office report, Mr. Bayh said he was reassured on that point.

Before taking account of federal subsidies to help people buy insurance on their own, the budget office said the bill would tend to drive up premiums. But as a result of the subsidies, it said, most people in the individual insurance market would see their costs decline, compared with the costs expected under current law. The subsidies, a main feature of the bill, would cost the government nearly $450 billion in the next 10 years and would cover nearly two-thirds of premiums for people who receive them.

For most people who get health insurance through employers — five-sixths of the total market — the budget office concluded that there would be little change in their premiums relative to the amounts projected under current law.

Administration officials said the report provided a lift to the bill, which embodies Mr. Obama’s top domestic priority.

“The C.B.O. has rendered a fundamental judgment that this will reduce the deficit and reduce people’s premium costs,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who huddled with Senate Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill on Monday. “All the Republican leadership will guarantee you is the status quo.”

But Republican senators like Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said the report validated their concerns. They focused on the prediction that unsubsidized premiums in the individual insurance market, less than a fifth of those with health insurance, would rise an average of 10 percent to 13 percent.

“The analysis by the Congressional Budget Office confirms our worst fears,” Mr. Grassley said. “Millions of people who are expecting lower costs as a result of health reform will end up paying more in the form of higher premiums. For large and small employers that have been struggling for years with skyrocketing health insurance premiums, C.B.O. concludes this bill will do little, if anything, to provide relief.”

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said the highly partisan floor debate that opened Monday afternoon was one of the most significant in the history of the Senate. It is expected to continue for much of December, with supporters and opponents alike offering a raft of amendments as the White House and Democratic leaders seek to put together the 60-vote coalition necessary to win passage.

Administration officials continued to reach out to lawmakers in both parties to try to build support. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she met Monday for 45 minutes with Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, to discuss her concerns about the legislation.

In its report, the budget office compared estimates of premiums in 2016 under the new legislation and under current law. In either case, after seven years of inflation, premiums would be substantially higher than they are today.

The budget office said the analysis of premiums was extremely complex, so the experience of individuals and families “could vary significantly from the average.”

“In general,” it said, “the proposal would tend to increase premiums for people who are young and relatively healthy, and decrease premiums for those who are older and relatively unhealthy.”

Under the legislation, it said, the average premium per person in the individual insurance market would be 10 percent to 13 percent higher than under current law. But, it said, most people in this market — 18 million of the 32 million people buying insurance on their own — would qualify for federal subsidies, which would reduce their costs well below what they would have to pay under current law.

For people receiving subsidies, the budget office said, premiums would be 56 percent to 59 percent lower than under current law.

Without subsidies, it said, premiums under the bill would average $5,800 a year for individuals and $15,200 a year for families buying coverage on their own. Under current law, the comparable figures would be $5,500 and $13,100.

“This study indicates that, for most Americans, the bill will have a modestly positive impact on their premium costs,” Mr. Bayh said. “For the remainder, more will see their costs go down than up.”

Under the bill, the budget office said, individual policies would have to provide more benefits and pay a larger share of costs than most existing policies do. In other words, it said, some people would pay more, but would also get more.

Insurers, it said, would have to cover certain services that, in many cases, are not covered by existing policies in the individual insurance market. These include maternity care, prescription drugs, mental health services and substance abuse treatment. Moreover, it said, under the legislation, insurance would cover an average of 72 percent of medical costs for people buying insurance on their own, up from 60 percent under current law.

The budget office said it foresaw “smaller effects on premiums for employment-based coverage.”

In groups with 50 or fewer employees, it said, unsubsidized premiums in 2016 would average $7,800 a year for individuals and $19,200 for families — scarcely any different from the amounts expected under current law. Of the 25 million people receiving coverage from small businesses, it said, 3 million would qualify for subsidies, which would reduce their premiums by an average of 8 percent to 11 percent.

Large employers would generally not be eligible for such assistance. Their premiums in 2016 under the bill would average $7,300 for individual coverage and $20,100 for family coverage, the report said. Under current law, the comparable figures would be $7,400 for individual coverage and $20,300 for family coverage.

The Senate bill would impose an excise tax on high-premium health plans offered by employers. People who remain in such “Cadillac health plans” would pay higher premiums, but most people would avoid the effect of the tax by enrolling in plans with lower premiums, the budget office said.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

By Sam Youngman

President Barack Obama has already ordered his military commanders to implement his Afghanistan strategy, which will be unveiled to the nation in a primetime address from West Point on Tuesday.

Obama is expected to order another 34,000 troops to Afghanistan during the address from the United States Military Academy, though a White House spokesman refused to confirm that figure Monday morning.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama had been consulting with members of Congress on Monday and will continue to do so Tuesday. Obama is set to meet with a bipartisan, bicameral group of at least 31 lawmakers at the White House on Tuesday afternoon before he leaves for West Point.

Obama was also spending Monday and Tuesday briefing world leaders on his new strategy. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was informed of the decision by phone Sunday night, will travel to Europe later this week to meet with NATO allies.

Obama spent much of the weekend working on his remarks to the nation with Ben Rhodes, his top national security speechwriter.

Gibbs declined to divulge much of what Obama will tell the country, but Gibbs emphasized that the president will make it clear to the American people, U.S. allies and Afghans that “this is not an open-ended commitment.”

Obama delivered marching orders during a Sunday Oval Office meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates; commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. David Petraeus; National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen; Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“The commander in chief delivered the orders,” Gibbs said.

After issuing his orders in the Oval Office, Obama held a secure video conference with U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the U.S. ambassador to the country, Karl Eikenberry, from the White House situation room, Gibbs said.

Congressional Democrats are deeply divided on how to pay for the increased involvement in Afghanistan, and Gibbs declined to say if Obama was discussing that point of contention with lawmakers.

Gibbs did say that Obama will acknowledge in his address that there are “limits on our resources,” both budgetary and in terms of manpower, and that Obama will lay out objectives for the increased troop presence in the country.

As officials have debated whether to target al Qaeda and the Taliban, Gibbs did not appear to draw much of a distinction, saying that a goal of the strategy will be to ensure that “the Taliban are not capable of providing a safe haven for al Qaeda” like they did before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Obama will also stress that the U.S. will lay out “benchmarks for progress” for the Afghan government for the training of Afghan security personnel and for eliminating government corruption.

by David Masci
The Spokesman-Review

A century and a half after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” the overwhelming majority of scientists in the United States accept Darwinian evolution as the basis for understanding how life on Earth developed. But although evolutionary theory is often portrayed as antithetical to religion, it has not destroyed the religious faith of the scientific community.

According to a survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center in May and June this year, a majority of scientists (51 percent) say they believe in God or a higher power, while 41 percent say they do not.

Furthermore, scientists today are no less likely to believe in God than they were almost 100 years ago, when the scientific community was first polled on this issue. In 1914, 11 years before the Scopes “monkey” trial and four decades before the discovery of the structure of DNA, psychologist James Leuba asked 1,000 U.S. scientists about their views on God. He found the scientific community evenly divided, with 42 percent saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not.

The scientific community is, however, much less religious than the general public. In Pew surveys, 95 percent of American adults say they believe in some form of deity or higher power.

And the public does not share scientists’ certainty about evolution. While 87 percent of scientists say that life evolved over time due to natural processes, only 32 percent of the public believes this to be true, according to a different Pew poll earlier this year.

If a substantial portion of the scientific community is made up of believers, why do so many people think evolution and religion are incompatible? It may be because some of our most famous and prolific scientists, such as American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and British physicist Stephen Hawking, were or are atheists and agnostics. But what about Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project, who was recently appointed as director of the National Institutes of Health by President Barack Obama? Collins is an evangelical Christian who speaks passionately about his faith – and also thinks evolution is an established scientific fact.

As for Darwin, his letters indicate that he was probably an agnostic who lost his faith not because his groundbreaking theory was incompatible with religion, but because of his grief after the 1851 death of his favorite child, his 10-year-old daughter, Annie. And even then, he may not have completely rejected the idea of a higher power. The concluding sentence of “Origin of Species” speaks of a “Creator” breathing life “into a few forms or into one.” The passage raises at least a little doubt as to how the father of modern evolutionary theory might have responded to the question on belief in Pew’s recent survey of scientists.

David Masci is a senior researcher at the Pew Forum.

The Spokesman-Review

As the Senate tackles the health care bill that may be its most important domestic legislation in a generation, you might have expected thousands of citizens to descend on Capitol Hill to demonstrate, for or against. But the streets outside – and even the Senate floor – aren’t where the action is. The important parts of this debate have moved into the Senate’s back rooms. The great health care debate hasn’t been a triumph of mass politics on either side. Congress isn’t being stampeded by the public into passing a bill – and it’s not being stopped by the public from passing one either.

Instead, the debate has turned out to be a battle of old-fashioned special interests and parochialism. The most important players have been the insurance industry, the American Medical Association, labor unions and AARP, the senior-citizens lobby. As for parochialism, last week’s most blatant action may have been Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s insertion into the bill of a $100 million Medicaid bonus for Louisiana, whose senior senator, Mary Landrieu, has been one of the holdouts.

One reason for this resurgence of backroom politics is simple: Polls show the public to be fairly evenly divided on health care reform and understandably confused by its details. But there’s also a deeper reason. In modern American politics, with its professional lobbyists and millions of dollars in campaign advertising, public opinion isn’t always the most important thing.

For members of Congress who anticipate tough re-election campaigns, what’s most important is not what voters think of health care proposals today, but which interest groups will spend money in their states to shape voters’ perceptions next year. Groups on both sides, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the unions, have already announced millions of dollars in planned advertising spending to do just that.

When he ran for president last year, Barack Obama said he’d try to change that system, in part by keeping his gigantic grass-roots network of campaign supporters together as a new, populist force in the legislative battles to come. But that’s not what happened. Members of Congress and their aides say the Obama organization, rechristened Organizing for America, or OFA, after the campaign, has had negligible effect on the debate.

For most of the year, the group was hobbled by the fact that Obama didn’t have a clear proposal for it to support, beyond a general commitment to (almost) universal health insurance. It did make sure that reform supporters turned out for town-hall meetings over the summer, and it’s running some ads attacking Republican House members in districts that Obama won.

But doing much beyond that has proved difficult, primarily because the most important debate over health care is not between the two parties – Republicans decided early that their goal was simply to stop a bill – but among Democrats. And OFA, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee, has carefully refrained from criticizing any Democratic incumbents. One of its biggest efforts this fall, instead, was organizing rallies and letter-writing campaigns to say “thank you” to House members who voted in favor of health care reform – lobbying with all the bite of a Hallmark greeting card.

OFA was also undercut by Obama’s own strategy for winning health care reform, which began by cutting deals with the most important interest groups – including, initially, the health insurance industry – not by mobilizing public pressure.

Obama’s choice of strategies may well turn out to have been good politics, especially on an issue as complex as health care. Well-funded, well-focused interest groups often wield power more effectively than the general public, even though the public has more at stake.

That’s not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it’s one Obama told his followers he wanted to change. If the president wins a health care bill, it will be a major victory. But he will have won the old-fashioned way, not by reinventing American politics. It will be evidence that Obama, an untraditional candidate, has turned out to be a very traditional president.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. He can be reached at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com.

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 25, 2009

President George W. Bush once boasted, “I’m not a textbook player, I’m a gut player.” The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, “You’ve got to make decisions based on information and not emotions.”

Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

“He’s establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was “cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive.”

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: “He’s not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn’t go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable.” Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, “I don’t think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one.”

But to his critics, Obama’s prolonged Afghanistan review suggests weakness rather than wisdom. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney lobbed the “dithering” accusation last month. Then last week, former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) said on his radio show that Obama has waited so long to decide on an Afghanistan strategy that the war is now lost. “The president does not have the will and determination to do what’s necessary to win it. His heart’s not in it, and never has been,” Thompson said.

Obama’s style has been attacked from his left flank as well. Liberals have zinged him as being too cautious, too much of a compromiser. Some of his supporters would like to see him show more fire in the belly and recapture the energy that propelled him to victory last year.

“I think the Obama we’ve seen as president is a very different Obama than we saw during the campaign. He doesn’t seem to be connected, he doesn’t seem to have the passion, he doesn’t seem to be conveying the grand and inspiring vision,” says the progressive historian Allan Lichtman of American University. “If you want to be a transformational president, you’ve got to take the risks.”

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. “They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn’t happen,” he says. “People were comparing the candidate to Abraham Lincoln before he served a day of his presidency. Nobody can live up to that.”

Many jobs, many crises

As commander in chief, economist in chief, diplomat in chief and figurehead in chief, the president has a job description nearly as long as the tax code. He is in the Situation Room one night, holding a state dinner in a South Lawn tent the next — and pardoning a turkey in the Rose Garden the following morning. His portfolio of responsibilities covers much of the planet; no president has seen so many countries so fast. But critics are not satisfied. The reaction to his recent trip to Asia was, in effect, that he went all the way to China and came back with only a lousy T-shirt.

With multiple crises on his docket, the president has much to contemplate as he enters the holiday season. The economy has shown signs of growth and the stock market is up, but it’s a jobless recovery, unemployment is at the highest rate since he was in college, and there are fears of a double-dip recession. The dollar is down. The national debt is oceanic. Obama’s health-care plan is imperiled by the whims of a handful of lawmakers. His approval rating has dipped below 50 percent. Even once-Obama-friendly “Saturday Night Live” has taken to mocking him as a do-nothing president. This follows historical patterns: New presidents always experience a drop in popularity as the romance of the campaign trail gives way to the mundane bill-paying and grocery shopping of governance.

The public debate over Afghanistan has focused on whether Obama should authorize more troops. The actual decision is vastly more complicated. Whatever the president chooses to do, he must bring on board as many allies as possible, which means getting a buy-in from Congress, his Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the bean counters who budget military action, NATO, various dyspeptic European leaders, the generals in the theater, the troops on the ground, the sketchy Afghan leadership, the Pakistanis and so on. He must also sell his plan to the American people, convincing the right that he’s tough enough to fight and the left that he knows where the exit is.

Obama told Chip Reid of CBS News, “I think the American people understand that my job here is to get it right, and I’m less concerned about perceptions, about process, than I am at making sure that once a decision is made everybody understands it, everybody is on the same page, and we’re able to move forward with the support of the American people.”

‘A lot of different layers’

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked Monday if the president had anguished over the Afghanistan decision.

“I don’t know if he’s anguished through this process,” Gibbs said. “I just think the president understands that there are a lot of different layers to our involvement in Afghanistan, how it relates to the region, what its impact is on our forces, what its impact is on our fiscal situation.”

Obama discussed his professorial leadership style in a recent interview with U.S. News & World Report. He said he is not afraid of doubt and is comfortable with uncertainty: “Because these are tough questions, you are always dealing to some degree with probabilities. You’re never 100 percent certain that the course of action you’re choosing is going to work. What you can have confidence in is that the probability of it working is higher than the other options available to you. But that still leaves some uncertainty, which I think can be stressful, and that’s part of the reason why it’s so important to be willing to constantly reevaluate decisions based on new information.”

This past spring, Obama was asked by “60 Minutes” to describe the toughest decision in his first few months of office. He quickly said that it was the decision to deploy 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The increase had been requested by military commanders during the previous administration. Obama signed off on it.

He noted the grave responsibility of sending young men and women into harm’s way. But he also expressed discomfort with the process.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “But it’s a weighty decision, because we actually had to make the decision prior to the completion of a strategic review that we were conducting.”

No one can accuse him of rushing the decision this time around.

by Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Spokesman-Review

“We (should) wrap him in bacon and deep fry him at a state fair while Lee Greenwood stabs him in the face.”

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” on confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

And seriously now, who doesn’t agree?

You’d have to be defective in your humanity not to. Mohammed plotted the greatest act of mass murder in American history. Who among us wouldn’t like a piece of this guy?

Indeed, if critics of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try him and his terrorist confederates in a New York City courtroom would be honest with themselves, they’d admit that this is what drives their condemnation, not questions of security, fears of acquittal or other obfuscatory concerns they’ve raised.

No, the baseline here is the understandable belief that these thugs, these gangsters of Islam, have no right to a trial, that the American legal system, with all its protections for the accused, all its rights and procedures and niceties, is more than they deserve.

Americans have always been ambivalent about the ability of our justice system to give bad people what they’ve got coming. That’s why the action movie almost always ends with the bad guy shot, impaled or fed into a wood chipper: Seeing him led away in handcuffs simply doesn’t impart the same visceral sense of just deserts.

But you have to wonder: Are our emotional needs the most important consideration here?

It’s worth remembering that even the architects of the greatest barbarism in history had their day in court. After burning away 11 million lives, the leaders of the Nazi regime found themselves facing not summary execution, but a trial before a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany.

As prosecutor Robert Jackson put it: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”

And when the trials were over and the verdicts delivered – death or imprisonment for most, three were acquitted – the New York Times editorialized as follows: “These sentences can neither atone for all the evil these men have brought into the world nor undo any part of it. But they help to assuage the conscience of mankind and to restore to honor the concept of the dignity of man which cannot be violated with impunity.”

Compare that with the Bush administration’s original, Supreme Court-rebuked vision of justice – minimal rights for the accused, torture allowed, the government’s thumb on justice’s scale – and maybe you’ll agree: we need this trial more than Mohammed does. For all its risks – and they are real – it offers a prize worth risking for: the promise of feeling like Americans again.

That feeling is arguably the most significant casualty of Sept. 11. On that day, we elevated a mob of stateless criminals, a mafia in cleric’s clothing, to the exalted level of rogue nation. But they were never that, never a threat to our national existence, lacked the forces to take even one square inch of American soil. What they could threaten – and take – was our sense of ourselves as a brave, reasonable and civilized people, inhabiting a nation of laws. They beckoned us into the mud with them, and we leapt.

It’s not the first time. Periodically, we have shed the burden of bravery, reason, civilization, laws. Always, it happens in moments of national stress, moments of overwhelming confusion, anger or fear, moments that make us prey to demons of expedience and moral compromise. Moments when we wonder if we can still afford to act like America.

But we face a band of bloodthirsty hoodlums whose dearest wish is to make us just like them. So maybe the better question is this:

Can we afford not to?

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

November 23, 2009
Payback Time
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.

But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.

The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.

The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”

So far, the demand for Treasury securities from investors and other governments around the world has remained strong enough to hold down the interest rates that the United States must offer to sell them. Indeed, the government paid less interest on its debt this year than in 2008, even though it added almost $2 trillion in debt.

The government’s average interest rate on new borrowing last year fell below 1 percent. For short-term i.o.u.’s like one-month Treasury bills, its average rate was only sixteen-hundredths of a percent.

“All of the auction results have been solid,” said Matthew Rutherford, the Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary in charge of finance operations. “Investor demand has been very broad, and it’s been increasing in the last couple of years.”

The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.

“What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter,” said William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm. “The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”

The current low rates on the country’s debt were caused by temporary factors that are already beginning to fade. One factor was the economic crisis itself, which caused panicked investors around the world to plow their money into the comparative safety of Treasury bills and notes. Even though the United States was the epicenter of the global crisis, investors viewed Treasury securities as the least dangerous place to park their money.

On top of that, the Fed used almost every tool in its arsenal to push interest rates down even further. It cut the overnight federal funds rate, the rate at which banks lend reserves to one another, to almost zero. And to reduce longer-term rates, it bought more than $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and government-guaranteed securities linked to mortgages.

Those conditions are already beginning to change. Global investors are shifting money into riskier investments like stocks and corporate bonds, and they have been pouring money into fast-growing countries like Brazil and China.

The Fed, meanwhile, is already halting its efforts at tamping down long-term interest rates. Fed officials ended their $300 billion program to buy up Treasury bonds last month, and they have announced plans to stop buying mortgage-backed securities by the end of next March.

Eventually, though probably not until at least mid-2010, the Fed will also start raising its benchmark interest rate back to more historically normal levels.

The United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt. Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.

Even a small increase in interest rates has a big impact. An increase of one percentage point in the Treasury’s average cost of borrowing would cost American taxpayers an extra $80 billion this year — about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

But that could seem like a relatively modest pinch. Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, estimated that the Treasury’s tab for debt service this year would have been $221 billion higher if it had faced the same interest rates as it did last year.

The White House estimates that the government will have to borrow about $3.5 trillion more over the next three years. On top of that, the Treasury has to refinance, or roll over, a huge amount of short-term debt that was issued during the financial crisis. Treasury officials estimate that about 36 percent of the government’s marketable debt — about $1.6 trillion — is coming due in the months ahead.

To lock in low interest rates in the years ahead, Treasury officials are trying to replace one-month and three-month bills with 10-year and 30-year Treasury securities. That strategy will save taxpayers money in the long run. But it pushes up costs drastically in the short run, because interest rates are higher for long-term debt.

Adding to the pressure, the Fed is set to begin reversing some of the policies it has been using to prop up the economy. Wall Street firms advising the Treasury recently estimated that the Fed’s purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities pushed down long-term interest rates by about one-half of a percentage point. Removing that support could in itself add $40 billion to the government’s annual tab for debt service.

This month, the Treasury Department’s private-sector advisory committee on debt management warned of the risks ahead.

“Inflation, higher interest rate and rollover risk should be the primary concerns,” declared the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a group of market experts that provide guidance to the government, on Nov. 4.

“Clever debt management strategy,” the group said, “can’t completely substitute for prudent fiscal policy.”

November 22, 2009
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted on Saturday to begin full debate on major health care legislation, propelling President Obama’s top domestic initiative over a crucial, preliminary hurdle in a formidable display of muscle-flexing by the Democratic majority.

“Tonight we have the opportunity, the historic opportunity to reform health care once and for all,” said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and a chief architect of the legislation. “History is knocking on the door. Let’s open it. Let’s begin the debate.”

The 60-to-39 vote, along party lines, clears the way for weeks of rowdy floor proceedings that will begin after Thanksgiving and last through much of December.

The Senate bill seeks to extend health benefits to roughly 31 million Americans who are now uninsured, at a cost of $848 billion over 10 years.

The House earlier this month approved its health care bill by 220 to 215, with just one Republican voting in favor. That measure is broadly similar to the Senate legislation, but there are some major differences that would have to be resolved before a bill could reach Mr. Obama, and that would almost surely push the process into next year.

As the Democrats succeeded Saturday in uniting their caucus by winning over the last two holdouts, big disagreements remained, making final approval of the bill far from certain.

Two reluctant Democratic senators, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, warned that their support for a motion to open debate did not guarantee that they would ultimately vote for the bill. Their remarks echoed previous comments by several other senators, including Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut.

Those comments made clear that more horse-trading lies ahead and that major changes might be required if the bill is to be approved. And it suggested that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who relied only on members aligned with his party to bring the bill to the floor, may yet have to sway one or more Republicans to his side to get the bill adopted.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said his party’s opposition would persist. “The battle has just begun,” he said.

In a rare ceremonial gesture reserved for major votes, senators cast their yeas and nays from their desks in the chamber, each one rising to voice his or her position. Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, was not present and did not vote.

After the vote, Mr. Reid said he understood that Ms. Landrieu was already working with two other Democratic senators, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Charles E. Schumer of New York, to see if they could devise a public insurance plan with broad appeal.

The White House issued a statement praising the vote. “The President is gratified that the Senate has acted to begin consideration of health insurance reform legislation,” his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said, adding that President Obama “looks forward to a thorough and productive debate.”

Mrs. Lincoln, who faces a tough re-election campaign next year and has in recent weeks been the target of millions of dollars in television advertising by both sides in the health care fight, said pointedly that she would not vote for the measure if it retained a government-run health insurance plan, known as the public option, to compete with private insurers. “Although I don’t agree with everything in this bill, I believe it is more important that we begin debate on how to improve the health care system for all Americans,” said Mrs. Lincoln, who was the last uncommitted Democrat, and whose speech, at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday, lifted a cloud of suspense that had hovered around the Capitol.

She added: “But let me be perfectly clear. I am opposed to a new government-administered health care plan as a part of comprehensive health insurance reform, and I will not vote in favor of the proposal that has been introduced by leader Reid as it is written.” But Senator Lieberman, who voted to take up the health care bill, said he was still staunchly opposed to a government-run plan. It is “a terrible idea,” he said.

Ms. Landrieu, whose support came after she won a provision that could be worth more than $100 million in additional federal aid for her financially troubled state, said, “I have decided there are enough significant reforms and safeguards in this bill to move forward, but much more work needs to be done.”

A parade of Democrats and Republicans spent Saturday laying out their arguments for and against the bill in floor speeches.

Mr. Reid, in a rousing closing speech given at his customary volume, which is barely audible, likened the health care bill to some of the most profound issues confronted by the Senate across history.

“Imagine if instead of debating either of the historic G.I. Bills — legislation that has given so many brave Americans the chance to brave college — if this body had stood silent,” Mr. Reid said. “Imagine if instead of debating the bills that created Social Security or Medicare, the Senate’s voices had been stilled. Imagine if instead of debating whether to abolish slavery, instead of debating whether giving women and minorities a right to vote, those who disagreed were muted, discussion was killed.”

With the Democrats nominally controlling 60 votes — the precise number needed to overcome the Republican attempt to stop the bill — the vote on Saturday evening was the biggest test yet of the Democrats’ resolve and of Mr. Reid’s ability to unite his fragile caucus. Mr. Reid faces a tough re-election fight next year.

The bill would expand health benefits by broadly expanding Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for low-income people, and by providing subsidies to help moderate-income people buy either private insurance or coverage under a new government-run plan, the public option. And it would impose a requirement that nearly all Americans obtain insurance or pay monetary penalties for failing to do so.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of the legislation would be more than offset by new taxes and fees and reductions in government spending, so that the bill would reduce future federal budget deficits by $130 billion through 2019.

Mr. Reid accused Republicans who opposed the legislation of “living in a different world.” He and several other Democrats also used their speeches to assail perceived abuses by private insurers. “The health insurance industry has an insatiable appetite for more profit,” Mr. Reid said.

Senate Republicans countered with an impassioned denunciation of the measure as an ill-conceived budget-busting expansion of government and a threat to the health and economic security of all Americans, especially the elderly.

The Republicans sought to portray the vote on Saturday — on whether to end debate on a motion to bring up the health bill — as tantamount to a vote on the bill itself, and to shake the confidence of Democrats who had wavered in recent days.

In his closing argument, just ahead of the vote, Mr. McConnell implored at least a single Democrat to vote no. “If we don’t stop this bill tonight,” he said, “the only debate we’ll be having is about higher premiums, not savings for the American people, higher taxes instead of lower costs, and cuts to Medicare rather than improving seniors’ care.”

“The American people are looking at the Senate tonight; they’re hoping we say no to this bill,” Mr. McConnell added moments later, holding up a single index finger. “All it would take,” he said, “is just one member of the other side of the aisle, just one, to give us an opportunity not to end the debate but to change the debate in the direction the American people would like us to go.”

Mr. McConnell warned of the political consequences for senators who voted to move ahead. “Senators who support this bill have a lot of explaining to do,” he said. “Americans know that a vote to proceed on this bill, to get on this bill, is a vote for higher premiums, higher taxes and massive cuts to Medicare.”

Republicans also said that the vote was a proxy for a larger dispute over abortion, because they said the bill did not sufficiently restrict the use of federal money for insurance covering abortions. Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, described the vote as “the key vote on abortion in the health care debate.”

Saturday night’s vote was required because Senate rules and precedent have long granted a right of virtually unlimited debate, or filibuster, to the minority that can be curtailed only by a supermajority vote of 60 senators to move ahead. Currently, there are 58 Democrats in the Senate and two independents who routinely align with them. If the Democrats had lost the vote, they could have tried again, presumably after changing the bill to try to attract more votes.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont assailed the Republicans as obstructionists on Saturday morning. “I will vote today to end the filibuster so the Senate can begin the historic debate to improve and reform our nation’s health insurance system,” he said. “Let’s not duck the debate, let the debate begin. Let’s not hide from the votes.”

While Democrats generally agree on the broad goals of the legislation, to cover the uninsured and to slow the growth in health care spending, there are potentially serious disagreements over any number of provisions that could sink the bill.

Ms. Landrieu, in her speech, methodically cataloged provisions of the bill that she liked and those that she said needed improvement.

Under the bill, she said, owners of small businesses would no longer face “volatile costs” for health insurance. In addition, she said, the bill would “encourage employers to move away from high-cost benefit plans” and shift some compensation to wages.

But more needed to be done to improve the bill, she argued, particularly to help small businesses and the self-employed. And she issued a stern warning about the public option, one of the most contentious features of the sweeping health care legislation.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

by Mary Sanchez
Kansas City Star

It will take a significant change in policy for this nation to overcome its appalling school dropout problem, but maybe the place to start is coming up with a good slogan.

Something along the lines of “Buckle Up!” or “Don’t Drink and Drive.” What’s needed is a pitch that fundamentally changes our perception of dropping out, that highlights what it really is: a drain on society.

We tend to regard dropping out as a personal failing – or as an individual tragedy, depending on your point of view. The victim is often a low-income kid stuck in a bad school with parents not engaged enough to do anything about it.

We can argue about who’s to blame for high dropout rates. But it might be more productive to focus on who loses out. The answer is the entire community where dropouts live.

The dismal earning prospects a high school dropout faces are well known. In 2005, dropouts could expect to earn about $17,300, compared with $26,900 for those with only a high school diploma and $52,600 for those with a four-year college degree. The less money people make because they dropped out, the less they spend at local businesses. The less they contribute to productivity. And the less they pay in sales taxes and property taxes, not to mention income taxes. By failing to live up to their potential, dropouts cost their communities.

But what if a city knew how many fewer cars were bought in a year, how much was never added to the tax base, how many fewer homes were bought and sold because of its dropout rate? Would it be more likely to do something about its education system? A nonprofit group called the Alliance for Excellent Education has tallied up such costs for the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

It found that in those areas combined, some 600,000 students failed to graduate in 2008. The alliance estimates that if only half of those dropouts had gone on to earn their diplomas, they would have earned an estimated $4 billion more in wages in a typical year. Had they done so, their state and local tax coffers could have seen an additional $536 million in revenue. A surprising number would have probably continued on toward even higher educational attainment, which would have boosted their earning potential even more.

How’s that for a stimulus? In fact, the Alliance for Excellent Education has made that point with a pitch that just might be the one I’m looking for: “The best economic stimulus is a high school diploma.” That may seem like a little overstatement, given that in the deep recession we’re currently in, a lot of educated people can’t seem to find work. The point is that better-educated employees make and spend more money, which makes the economy grow. At least, that’s what happens in normal economic times.

The Alliance for Excellent Education based its estimates on data from the U.S. Census and the Labor Department, along with dropout statistics reported by school districts.

Dropout rates are notoriously skewed, with districts often using dubious criteria to tweak results. By 2011 all states will be required to calculate and report the rates in comparable ways. That will make the kind of analysis the alliance has done even more telling and valuable.

Some will protest that this emphasis on “cost” is another way of demonizing troubled students. But a nurturing, understanding approach to the problem isn’t likely to cut much ice in American politics. This is a nation that continues to fund school districts largely by local property taxes, despite the well-known fact that this perpetuates inequalities between suburban and urban districts.

But costs and tax losses – now those are motivators the American public understands.

For years, one of the best marketing campaigns around education prompted us to accept that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” What if people could be convinced that wasting that mind was also wasting their money?

Mary Sanchez is an opinion page columnist for the Kansas City Star. She can be reached at msanchez@kcstar.com.

By Chris Jordan
November 18, 2009

As a liberal, and an avid news consumer, there is no cable news channel that warms my heart more than MSNBC.

Why do I find MSNBC so appealing? The network made a business decision in recent years that it was good for ratings to move to the political left. With a few exceptions, strong liberal commentators like Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and Chris Matthews have become the face of MSNBC.

The same trend is taking place on the opposite side of the cable divide. We’ve known for years that Fox News’ “Fair and Balanced” act was a charade, but since Obama’s election, they’ve taken it to a whole new level.

Fox was instrumental in relentlessly promoting the right-wing “tea parties,” even going so far as to inform its viewers of their times and locations. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been given his own talk show. Glenn Beck has also joined Fox and has seen his ratings skyrocket after labeling the president a racist.

While Fox and MSNBC have shifted further away from the center, CNN has largely stuck to simply covering the news.

Anchors Larry King, Wolf Blitzer, and Anderson Cooper rarely promote a politically slanted agenda on their shows. What’s been their reward? Declining ratings.

The trend toward more partisan news is clear. Cable stations are transitioning to more and more commentary, less and less hard news.

I’m not trying to argue that opinions are bad. Heck, I’d be out of a job if we didn’t have opinions in the media. But this trend seems to indicate that news stations are increasingly going to have to “pick sides” or suffer lower ratings, and citizens are getting more news from one-sided sources.

Simultaneously, high-profile stories of late have demonstrated the mainstream media’s obsession with the political angle over substantive discussion and debate.

A perfect example is coverage of the health care issue. Until several weeks ago, the phrase, “the public option is dead” was spouted on cable news, oh, about 10,231 times, by my count. We’ve seen endless stories about the “fate” of this proposal, but it’s hard to remember if there was even a serious and thorough discussion of its merits.

While partisan news sources are on the rise, we are seeing less and less debate of key issues. News channels obsess over the politics of health care — Will it pass? Are there enough votes? Obama’s approval rating is down! — without paying much attention to the actual components of reform.

It’s no wonder then, that less than half of Americans, 47 percent, say they are very or somewhat familiar with the details of the health-care legislation, according to a recent Washington Post survey. While Congress is on the verge of passing the most important reform in decades, most people don’t even know what is in the bill.

Thanks a lot, news media.

As we strive to be informed citizens, it is important that we make extra effort to get a range of perspectives instead of merely “picking a team.” One-sided news is becoming increasingly prevalent. So next time you’re watching MSNBC, consider switching over to Fox during the commercial break (I know it’s painful) just to see what they’re saying, or seek out conservative opinions elsewhere. The same idea applies if Fox News is the channel that warms your heart: Seek out other views.

As far as a robust debate in the news media goes, we can only hope that the recent trend reverses itself and consumers start to reward those programs that go truly in depth on the issues.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

November 18, 2009
By HELENE COOPER

BEIJING — In six hours of meetings, at two dinners and during a stilted 30-minute news conference in which President Hu Jintao did not allow questions, President Obama was confronted, on his first visit, with a fast-rising China more willing to say no to the United States.

On topics like Iran (Mr. Hu did not publicly discuss the possibility of sanctions), China’s currency (he made no nod toward changing its value) and human rights (a joint statement bluntly acknowledged that the two countries “have differences”), China held firm against most American demands.

With China’s micro-management of Mr. Obama’s appearances in the country, the trip did more to showcase China’s ability to push back against outside pressure than it did to advance the main issues on Mr. Obama’s agenda, analysts said.

“China effectively stage-managed President Obama’s public appearances, got him to make statements endorsing Chinese positions of political importance to them and effectively squelched discussions of contentious issues such as human rights and China’s currency policy,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a China specialist at Cornell University. “In a masterstroke, they shifted the public discussion from the global risks posed by Chinese currency policy to the dangers of loose monetary policy and protectionist tendencies in the U.S.”

White House officials maintained they got what they came for — the beginning of a needed give-and-take with a surging economic giant. With a civilization as ancient as China’s, they argued, it would be counterproductive — and reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s style — for Mr. Obama to confront Beijing with loud chest-beating that might alienate the Chinese. Mr. Obama, the officials insisted, had made his points during private meetings and one-on-one sessions.

“I do not expect, and I can speak authoritatively for the president on this, that we thought the waters would part and everything would change over the course of our almost two-and-a-half-day trip to China,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman. “We understand there’s a lot of work to do and that we’ll continue to work hard at making more progress.”

Several China experts noted that Mr. Obama was not leaving Beijing empty-handed. The two countries put out a five-point joint statement pledging to work together on a variety of issues. The statement calls for regular exchanges between Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu, and asks that each side pay more attention to the strategic concerns of the other. The statement also pledges that they will work as partners on economic issues, Iran and climate change.

But despite a conciliatory tone that began weeks ago when Mr. Obama declined to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, before visiting China to avoid offending China’s leaders, it remains unclear whether Mr. Obama made progress on the most pressing policy matters on the American agenda in China or elsewhere in Asia.

The president has had to fend off criticism from American conservatives that he appeared to soften the American stance on the positioning of troops on the Japanese island of Okinawa, and for bowing to Japan’s emperor.

At a regional conference in Singapore, Mr. Obama announced a setback on another top foreign policy priority, climate change, acknowledging that comprehensive agreement to fight global warming was no longer within reach this year.

Past American presidents have usually insisted in advance on some concrete achievements from their trips overseas. President Bush received vigorous endorsements of his top foreign policy priority, the global war on terrorism, during his visits to Beijing, and President Bill Clinton guided China toward joining the World Trade Organization after prolonged negotiations. When either of those presidents visited the country, China often made a modest concession on human rights as well.

This time, Mr. Hu declined to follow the lead of President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, who, after months of massaging by the Obama administration, now says that he is open to tougher sanctions against Iran if negotiations fail to curb Iran’s nuclear program. The administration needs China’s support if tougher sanctions are to be approved by the United Nations Security Council. But during the joint appearance in Beijing on Tuesday, Mr. Hu made no mention of sanctions.

Rather, he said, it was “very important” to “appropriately resolve the Iranian nuclear regime through dialogue and negotiations.” And then, as if to drive home that point, Mr. Hu added, “During the talks, I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues.”

White House officials acknowledged that they did not get what they wanted from Mr. Hu on Iran but said that Mr. Obama’s method would yield more in the long term. “We’re not looking for them to lead or change course, we’re looking for them to not be obstructionist,” one administration official said.

In a meeting in Beijing with a senior Chinese official on Wednesday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton again pressed China on Iran. She told the official, Dai Bingguo, that even if China had not decided what sanctions on Iran it would accept, “you need to send a signal,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could describe the exchange.

Mr. Obama did not appear to move the Chinese on currency issues, either. China has come under heavy pressure, not only from the United States but also from Europe and several Asian countries, to revise its policy of keeping its currency, the renminbi, pegged at an artificially low value against the dollar to help promote its exports. Some economists say China must take that step to prevent the return of large trade and financial imbalances that may have contributed to the recent financial crisis.

Mr. Obama on Tuesday could only cite China’s “past statements” in support of shifting toward market-oriented exchange rates, implying that he had not extracted a fresh commitment from Beijing to move in that direction soon.

There are many reasons the White House may have heeded China’s clear desire for a visit free of the polemics that often accompany meetings between leaders of the two countries. Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is rooted in recasting the United States as a thoughtful listener to friends and rivals alike. “No we haven’t made China a democracy in three days — maybe if we pounded our chest a lot that would work,” Mr. Gibbs said in an e-mail message on Tuesday night. “But it hasn’t in the last 16 years.”

Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar who oversaw China issues in President Clinton’s White House, agreed. “The United States actually has enormous influence on popular thinking in China, but it is primarily by example,” he said. “If you go to the next step and say, ‘You guys ought to be like us,’ you lose the impact of who you are.”

The National Security Council’s spokesman, Michael A. Hammer, added, “What we did come to do is speak bluntly about the issues which are important to us, not in an unnecessarily offensive manner, but rather in the Obama style of showing respect.”

Mr. Obama, even as he projected a softer image, did nudge the Chinese on some delicate issues.

On Tuesday, standing next to Mr. Hu, Mr. Obama brought up Tibet, where Beijing-backed authorities have clamped down on religious freedom. “While we recognize that Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China, the United States supports the early resumption of dialogue between the Chinese government and representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve any concerns and differences that the two sides may have,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Sharon LaFraniere, Edward Wong, Michael Wines and Mark Landler.

GOP and liberals put pressure on Democrat as Senate vote nears

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

When the Senate begins floor debate on a health-care reform package this week, the outcome is almost certain to rest on decisions made by a handful of moderate Democrats.

None of those Democrats is feeling the heat as intensely as Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), who has become emblematic of the improbable distance that health-care reform has traveled, and how far it still must go before becoming law.

Her vote and that of two other Democrats expressing serious reservations about the legislation — Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) — will determine whether it will garner the 60 needed to break an all-but-certain Republican filibuster.

There are 60 members of the Democratic caucus but one, independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), has threatened to join a GOP filibuster if the final bill contains a government insurance plan, or “public option.” With only a single Republican, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, even considering backing the final product on the floor, the trio of Democratic centrists could make or break the reform effort.

And of those three, only Lincoln must face voters next year.

Hundreds of thousands of Lincoln’s constituents are low-income and lack insurance, the very kind of voters expected to benefit under the Senate bill. Lincoln, a second-term senator, helped write some of the legislation’s key provisions as a member of the Finance Committee, and her sometimes uncomfortable role near the center of the debate could cost her in culturally conservative Arkansas. Despite the potential benefits for many in her state, polls show her support weakening, and constituents are expressing doubts about the proposed overhaul.

The low-profile centrist is being pressed by both sides. Democratic activists are incensed that she has turned against the public option, an idea she once supported. Republicans are casting her cautious approach to the health-care debate in starkly political terms, saying that she is unwilling to put local interests above those of a president who lost the state by a resounding 20 percentage points.

“I want to be a check and balance on Barack Obama’s extreme agenda,” state Sen. Gilbert Baker, a front-runner for the GOP nomination, told reporters last week.

An Arkansas Poll published Nov. 5 found that Lincoln’s job-approval rating had dropped to 43 percent, from 54 percent a year ago. At least seven Republicans are vying to challenge her bid for a third term; Baker raised $500,000 in his first month as a candidate. And if she does not embrace the party line on the health issue, Lincoln could also face a Democratic primary challenger, along with a Green Party opponent in the general election.

“In some ways, there’s not a good vote on this,” said Sen. Mark Pryor (D), Arkansas’s junior senator, who coasted to reelection last year. “You’re going to have detractors on either side, no matter what you do. So I think in the end you have to what you think is right. And I think that’s what we’re all going to have to do.”

The first test for Lincoln could come as early as Friday, when the Senate will vote on whether to bring the bill to the floor. Lincoln told party leaders she would study the final product before committing either way.

“What people want is for us to take our time and not rush into something that we haven’t thought completely through,” she said, shrugging off the pressure as she hurried back to her office after a Senate vote last week.

Although Pryor supports the reform effort, another prominent Arkansan, Rep. Mike Ross (D), voted against the House bill.

“Most people support the need for health-insurance reform; they just think we can do it for less,” Ross said. “They really, as I do, support more choices. They’re just skeptical of a bill that takes 2,000 pages to accomplish that.”

Ross was reluctant to offer Lincoln advice, but acknowledged her predicament. “She represents the whole state. I just represent one-fourth of the state. I’d just be guessing.” But he added: “I think people fear the unintended consequences in a bill this massive.”

Democratic leaders expect Lincoln to stick with them on key procedural votes, but are less confident about winning her support on critical amendments — particularly on the contentious public option.

Lincoln’s record on a government insurance plan has drawn detractors on both sides. In July, she wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.”

By Sept. 1, she had changed her mind. “I would not support a solely government-funded public option,” Lincoln said at an event in Little Rock. “We can’t afford that.”

In recent weeks, she also has raised concerns about both potential compromise approaches — one that would allow states to “opt out” of a public plan that Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is expected to include in the Senate bill, and a proposal by Snowe, the only Republican still at the negotiating table, to create a public option as a fallback if private insurers do not offer reasonable rates.

In the process, Lincoln has riled liberal groups including MoveOn.org, which is targeting her with radio ads, direct mail and rallies outside two of her Arkansas offices. Perhaps more ominously, MoveOn — working with the liberal group Democracy for America — has amassed $3.5 million in pledges to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who sides with Republicans to block an up-or-down vote on a bill with a public option.

“We think it’s really important for her to see there are negative political consequences to being on the wrong side of this issue,” said Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s campaign director. “There’s no arguing she’s in a conservative state, but she’s going to face a tough election no matter what, and she can’t do it without the base. These are the activists, the people who knock on doors, and she is really running the risk of alienating them.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also documenting each of Lincoln’s comments on health care to build a case against her. The Republican National Committee released a Web video this week that compares her public-option remarks to Sen. John F. Kerry’s “I actually voted for it before I voted against it” line about Iraq war funding.

For GOP leaders, the best strategy for defeating the Senate bill is to sow doubts among vulnerable Democrats, convincing them that Reid is leading them off a political cliff.

“There’s a great effort under way here to convince their members to ignore public opinion” on health-care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters last week. “I hope it will not be lost on our Democratic friends where the public is, how the public feels about this measure. They’re speaking increasingly loudly that they do not think it ought to pass.”

Recent polls suggest that reform is a difficult sell in Lincoln’s home state. The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas’s Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea. And respondents split about evenly on the question of whether reform would improve or hurt their quality of care.

“It’s hard to draw firm conclusions,” said Arkansas Poll Director Janine Parry. “People are dissatisfied, but they haven’t signed on with an alternative.” Lincoln, said Parry, appears to be “right with her constituents — convinced that we need to do something, and not convinced it’s this.”

Senior Senate aides said Lincoln helped to shape measures aimed at reducing the cost of such procedures as MRIs and at better coordinating care among doctors, hospitals and nursing homes. And she was the primary sponsor, along with Snowe, of a provision aimed at giving small businesses more health-care choices for employees.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, of the nearly 473,000 Arkansas residents who lacked coverage as of 2008, virtually all would be eligible for federal assistance under the Senate bill — either through Medicaid or through tax credits that would subsidize the purchase of private plans.

“There’s a lot in the bill that will be good for Arkansas,” Pryor said. “But there are a lot of people in our state who are against this bill. Some have very legitimate concerns and ask very good questions. But also some is based on bad information. We have to try to talk to those people.”

If Lincoln supports the Senate bill, she will have to sell it to constituents before they see many of the legislation’s benefits. But she says she is well aware of the challenge. “I have no doubt that I’ll be held accountable on this,” she said. “We’re going to be held accountable on a lot of things.”

But poll finds support for key provisions of reform effort

By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

As the Senate prepares to take up legislation aimed at overhauling the nation’s health-care system, President Obama and the Democrats are still struggling to win the battle for public opinion. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Americans deeply divided over the proposals under consideration and majorities predicting higher costs ahead.

But Republican opponents have done little better in rallying the public opposition to kill the reform effort. Americans continue to support key elements of the legislation, including a mandate that employers provide health insurance to their workers and access to a government-sponsored insurance plan for those people without insurance.

Over the past few months, public opinion has solidified, leaving Obama and the Democrats with the political challenge of enacting one of the most ambitious pieces of domestic legislation in decades in the face of a nation split over the wisdom of doing so. In the new poll, 48 percent say they support the proposed changes; 49 percent are opposed.

With the bill through the House, Senate Democrats are now looking for the votes to enact their version of the legislation and keep the reform effort moving forward. Whatever the outcome of the health-care debate, it will have a powerful influence in shaping the political climate for next year’s midterm elections.

The House bill contains a highly controversial provision prohibiting abortion coverage for those insured under a new public insurance plan as well as those who received federal subsidies to purchase private insurance. In the poll, 61 percent say they support barring coverage for abortions for those receiving public subsidies, but if private funds were used to pay for abortion expenses, the numbers flipped. With segregated private money used to cover abortion procedures, 56 percent say insurance offered to those using government assistance should be able to include such coverage.

The new poll provides ammunition for both advocates and opponents of reform. For opponents, a clear area of public concern centers on cost — 52 percent say an altered system would probably make their own care more expensive, and 56 percent see the overall cost of health care in the country going up as a result.

Few see clear benefits in exchange for higher expenses. Rather, there has been a small but significant increase in the number (now 37 percent) who anticipate their care deteriorating under a revamped system, putting that number in line with opinion in July 1994, just before President Bill Clinton’s health-care reform efforts fizzled.

Among those with insurance, three times as many continue to see worse rather than better coverage options ahead (39 to 13 percent), and fewer than half of those who lack insurance see better options under a changed system. Six in 10 see it as “very” or “somewhat” likely that many private insurers would be forced out of business by a government-sponsored insurance plan, a potential result that GOP leaders frequently warn about.

But reform proponents have other findings to bolster their case. Two-thirds of those surveyed support one of the basic tenets of the reform plan, a new requirement that all employers with payrolls of $500,000 or more provide health insurance coverage for their employees or face fines.

As in previous polls, a majority supports a government-sponsored heath insurance plan to compete with private insurers, although the percentage supporting the general idea has slipped slightly over the past month to 53 percent. Support for the scheme jumps to 72 percent when the public plan is limited to those who lack access to coverage through an employer or the Medicare or Medicaid systems.

While Americans overall are divided on reform legislation, the Democrats have made some progress among at least one key group. Support among senior citizens, while still broadly negative, is up 13 points since September to 44 percent.

Seniors have also tilted back toward Obama when matched head to head with congressional Republicans on dealing with health-care reform, helping the president to a 13-point advantage over the GOP on this issue.

Republicans appear to be hampered by a widespread perception that they have not offered clear choices: 61 percent of those polled say the GOP is “mainly criticizing” without presenting alternatives to Democratic proposals.

Looking toward next year’s midterm elections, 25 percent say they more apt to back a candidate who supports the proposed health-care changes; 29 percent are less likely to do so. More, 45 percent, say the vote will not make much of a difference. Independents are nearly twice as likely to be swayed away from rather than toward a candidate who supports the changes (31 percent to 17 percent).

Beyond health care, Obama continues to garner broadly positive ratings from the public. His overall approval rating stands at 56 percent, holding steady in Post-ABC polls since the late summer. More, 61 percent, say they have an overall favorable impression of him, and a slim majority continues to see him as “about right” ideologically (four in 10 consider him “too liberal.”

The president, who is on a 10-day visit to Asia, gets his top mark on handling international affairs, and also picks up majority approval on dealing with the threat of terrorism. But Americans are more divided over his performance on other key issues, with nearly even splits in satisfaction with his work on health care, the economy and the situation in Afghanistan. On each of these three issues, intensity runs against the president, with significantly higher numbers expressing “strong” disapproval as strident approval. Obama receives generally negative reviews on his handling of the federal budget deficit, with 53 percent disapproving of his actions on that front.

Obama continues to be lifted by weakness in the opposition. In addition to his double-digit lead over congressional Republicans on health care, the president has a 15-point advantage on handling the nation’s still-struggling economy. More broadly, Democrats continue to have the edge as the party more trusted to deal with the country’s main problems over the next few years and when it comes to being more empathetic and more in tune with people’s values.

But there are also evident signs of an anti-incumbent mood in the new survey, which would disproportionately hurt the majority Democrats next fall should they hold. Most see the country as headed pretty seriously off on the wrong track and half of all Americans say they are inclined to look around for someone new to support for Congress; just 38 percent are inclined to reelect their member of Congress. These numbers are similar to those from November 1993, one year before Republicans took back control of the House and Senate and close to those from May 2006, six months before Democrats re-captured the Congress.

Among independents, nearly two-thirds say they are inclined to seek new representatives. Independents also about evenly divided over which party better represents their personal values and give Democrats a narrow advantage on being more in tune with “needs of people like you.” More than a quarter of independents do not trust either party to adequately deal with the country’s primary concerns in the coming years.

The poll was conducted Nov. 12-15 by conventional and cellular telephone among a random national sample of 1,001 adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

Agency says Tehran hindered its probe
by George Jahn
Associated Press

VIENNA, Austria – Iranian construction of a previously secret uranium enrichment site is at an advanced stage, with high-tech equipment already in place at the fortified facility ahead of its 2011 startup, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report Monday.

The revelation of the existence of the underground plant known as Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, has heightened concerns of other possible undeclared Iranian facilities that are not subject to IAEA oversight and therefore could be used for military purposes.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the IAEA report “underscores that Iran still refuses to comply fully with its international nuclear obligations.”

The IAEA report offered no estimate of Fordo’s capabilities, but a senior international official familiar with the U.N. agency’s work in Iran said it appeared designed to produce about a ton of enriched uranium a year.

The official, as well as analysts, said that would be enough for a nuclear warhead but too little for Iran’s civilian reactors that have yet to come online, including the still unfinished plant at the southern port of Bushehr. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information he was citing was confidential.

“It won’t (even) be able to produce a reactor’s worth of fuel every 90 years, but it will be able to produce one bomb a year,” said Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Strategic Security Program of the Federation of American Scientists. “It does look strange.”

The IAEA also said production at Iran’s main enrichment site at Natanz – revealed by dissidents in 2002 and under IAEA monitoring – was stagnating at mid-2009 levels.

The report did not offer a reason. But the official suggested that experts who used to work at Natanz could be preoccupied with finishing the Fordo site.

As early as three years ago, Iran had said immediate plans for Natanz were to install about 8,000 enriching centrifuges, and Monday’s report suggested Tehran had reached that goal.

The IAEA summary said that as of Nov. 2, about 8,600 centrifuges had been set up, but only about 4,000 were enriching – or 600 fewer than in September. Still, the official said output had been steady since June with about 220 pounds of enriched uranium being produced a month.

The report said Natanz had churned out nearly 4,000 pounds of uranium by Nov. 2 – close to what experts consider to be needed for two nuclear weapons. But for use as warhead material it would have to enriched further – it is now low-enriched uranium suitable only for fueling nuclear plants.

Iran insists it only wants to enrich uranium to make fuel to power nuclear reactors for civilian purposes, but fears that it could at some point use the technology to make weapons has resulted in three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions meant to pressure Tehran into freezing the activity.

The restricted document, which was obtained by the Associated Press, also noted that “for well over a year,” Iran had stonewalled IAEA efforts to investigate allegations it actively worked on a nuclear weapons program.

Unless Tehran has a change of heart, the IAEA “will not be in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities.”

Justices decline to review ruling on team nickname

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

A nearly two-decade legal challenge by Native American activists to the nickname of the Washington Redskins came to a close Monday when the Supreme Court declined to review the group’s last loss in federal courts.

The justices declined without comment to reconsider a lower court’s ruling that the activists waited too long to bring their assertion that the nickname is so racially offensive that it does not deserve trademark protection.

“Obviously, we’re quite pleased; it’s been a long road,” said Robert Raskopf, a lawyer for the team since the suit was first filed in 1992. “We’re not surprised the court didn’t see any issue worthy of review.”

Philip Mause, who represented the challengers, said the activists were “disappointed” by the court’s decision but not yet resigned to accept defeat. A new group of challengers has filed the same trademark cancellation suit in hopes that their slightly different circumstances can avoid the procedural bar that halted this case.

Raskopf said the team is not worried about the new complaint. “I think we’re very confident with our likelihood of success,” he said.

Through the years, the team has steadfastly defended the use of the Redskins nickname as honoring Native Americans, not disparaging them. When based in Boston, the team was known as the Boston Braves and was renamed in 1933 as the Redskins. The team said in its brief to the court that the new name was “in honor of the team’s head coach, William ‘Lone Star’ Dietz, who was a Native American.”

The team became the Washington Redskins in 1937, when it moved south.

Native American groups have persuaded scores of high school and college teams to rename their mascots. The National Congress of American Indians told the justices in a friend of the court brief that the name is “patently offensive, disparaging, and demeaning and perpetrates a centuries-old stereotype.”

But despite vociferous protests, Washington has not budged. Under both former owner Jack Kent Cooke and current owner Daniel Snyder, Raskopf said, there has never been “even a whisper” about changing the nickname.

For the most part, though, the battle has been fought on the more mundane grounds of legal procedure, and even a victory by the activists would have cost the team only trademark protection and would not have forced it to abandon the name.

The battle began in 1992, when seven activists, led by Suzan S. Harjo, challenged Redskins trademarks issued in 1967. They won a decision seven years later from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, which said the name could be interpreted as offensive to Native Americans.

Trademark law prohibits registration of a name that “may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, . . . or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.”

Pro-Football Inc., the team’s corporate owner, appealed to federal court.

In 2003, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sided with the team, ruling that the activists had not produced enough evidence to show the name was so insulting that it could not be protected by a trademark. She also said the trademark-cancellation claim was barred by the doctrine of laches, which serves as a defense against claims that should have been made long ago.

She revisited the issue after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia returned it to her, saying the youngest of the plaintiffs might have standing to pursue the case. But Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the challenger, Mateo Romero, waited eight years after he reached the age of majority to file the complaint. She said the delay unfairly penalized the Redskins, who invested millions of dollars marketing the team during that eight-year span.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court agreed that eight years was too long to bring the claim.

The Supreme Court was being asked only to review whether the claim was brought too late, not whether the nickname was offensive.

Mause had argued that the justices should take the case to decide whether disparaging trademarks can be challenged at any time. He cited a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which was written by then-judge, now-Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., that he said supported that view.

The case the court declined to hear is Harjo v. Pro-Football, Inc.

Why right-of-center candidates are succeeding in the age of Obama.

By Yuval Levin | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

All year, leading Democrats from the president on down have argued that the Republican Party is in the midst of a catastrophic civil war. You know the story. Successive election defeats have narrowed the GOP’s ideological range, and now an open struggle is afoot for control of its voice and agenda. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, it seems, are out to destroy Republican moderates and commit the party to a radical course sure to relegate it to irrelevance. Only a move to the left can save the Republicans.

And, in fact, the new president and Congress had a real opportunity to divide the Republican Party. A moderate stimulus bill that offered a short-term boost and included a meaningful tax-cut component, for instance, might have won a very significant number of Republican votes in Congress last winter and launched a damaging internal GOP battle over the proper role of the opposition. Some restraint on taxes and spending in general, and on health care and energy policy in particular, would also have divided congressional Republicans and left the direction of the party in doubt.

But Washington Democrats chose a different route. While they have been peddling the story of Republican self-immolation, they have actually been creating the conditions for a Republican resurgence. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid have launched the country on a course of massive spending, a dramatic expansion of government, and a slew of new taxes in the midst of a recession. Finding themselves in control of Congress and the White House and so possessed of an unusual opportunity to pursue their ideological agenda, they have sought to make the most of it. But they have misjudged just how far to the left of the country as a whole the Democratic base now resides—and so, rather than strengthen their own brand, they have inadvertently done wonders to build and unify the Republican Party.

In Congress, Republicans now march nearly as one, to a degree not seen in 15 years. Rather than split on the stimulus, conservative and moderate Republicans easily agreed that it went much too far to the left. The bill received zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate. On many crucial votes since, and in the ongoing health-care and cap-and-trade debates, Republicans have stood together almost unanimously.

Around the country, the party seems to be regaining its balance. Last Tuesday’s election results were an extraordinary boost for Republicans. They showed that it is not necessary to run away from the party’s conservative brand to win elections. On the contrary, Republicans running as Republicans seem to succeed in the age of Obama, and to attract independent voters in droves.

In Virginia—which went for Obama last year, and elected Democratic -senators in the last two cycles and Democratic governors throughout this decade—-Republican Bob McDonnell ran as a practical conservative with an extensive policy agenda and was elected governor by an enormous 18-point margin. He produced concrete proposals on transportation and education but was also forthright about his conservative views on taxes and his opposition to abortion and gun control. In deeply blue New Jersey, which Obama won last year by double digits, Republican Chris Christie let the incumbent Democrat embrace Obama, refused to run away from his own party, and won the governorship decisively. He, too, is pro-life; he opposed gay marriage and even associated himself with several GOP governors who had refused to accept stimulus funds. Both Republicans won independent voters by roughly a 2-to-1 margin.

In the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Democrat Bill Owens defeated Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman a few days after the liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava (who had run to the left of the Democrat on key issues) dropped out of the race. The peculiar circumstances of that contest, with prominent conservatives supporting Hoffman over Scozzafava, have been taken by Democrats eager for good news as proof of a Republican breakdown. The day after the election, White House political adviser David Axelrod even went so far as to say that the victory “should be reassuring to Democrats.”

But, in fact, the message of that race was largely the same as those of New Jersey and Virginia: in this political climate, Republicans can win by nominating an identifiably Republican right-of-center candidate in tune with local voters. It seems clear that had they done so from the outset in upstate New York they would have won there, even though Obama won the district comfortably last year. For decades, almost no New York Republicans have been elected without the endorsement of the state’s long-established Conservative Party—that dynamic in this case hardly indicates new divisions on the right—and Republican leaders this year clearly erred by choosing (without a primary) a candidate well to the left of the district. Even so, Owens defeated Hoffman by a mere 4,218 votes, while Scozzafava, who withdrew at the last minute but still appeared on the ballot, received 6,986 votes. And every poll of the district in recent weeks suggested that the same uneasy mood prevailed there as in New Jersey and Virginia.

That mood is the crucial fact of this moment in our politics. It does not signify a mass migration into Republican ranks, only deep anxiety regarding what the Democrats are up to, and a renewed openness to hear what Republicans have to say. It means that Bush fatigue is in the past, early signs of Obama fatigue are emerging, and Republicans have an opportunity to win independents again if they can speak to their concerns.

Last week’s elections won’t fundamentally transform our politics, but they will likely help the GOP continue to build its strength. They will persuade some serious Republicans around the country to run for Congress next year, now that it’s clear that serious Republicans can win. That is just what happened in the first midterm elections of the last Democratic president’s term: most of the winning candidates in the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress decided to run only after seeing Christine Todd Whitman and George Allen win the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia in 1993.

The results will also make some moderate Democrats very nervous about the health-care and cap-and-trade bills being pursued by their leaders. Both bills are political risks—support for the health-care bill hovers around 40 percent in recent polls and a small majority opposes it, and the higher utility costs that would follow cap-and-trade legislation would surely be deeply unpopular in much of the country. Both would have to be passed on essentially party-line votes, leaving Democrats answerable to voters for their consequences. In both cases, too, last week’s elections will reinforce Republican unity.

The fact is, we remain a two-party nation. Republicans are not in the midst of a destructive civil war, any more than the Democrats were when they kicked out Joe Lieberman in 2006. When it comes to the major debates of the moment—health care, energy, the budget, even most social issues—the Democratic Party is far more divided than the GOP. Republican Party identification remains low (about 25 percent, compared with the Democrats’ 35 percent), but in a country where 40 percent of voters identify as conservative and only 20 percent as liberal (according to a Gallup poll released last month), the more conservative party isn’t going anywhere.

Rather than a civil war, we appear to be witnessing the beginnings of a significant Republican revival. The Grand Old Party is finding its footing again in Congress and the states, and behind the scenes there is a growing intellectual effort to develop the next conservative agenda—focused in particular on easing the burdens faced by middle-class parents and contending with the bleak long-term federal budget outlook. Much work remains on that front, but early indications suggest that this work—substantive policy development, seeking to apply conservative principles to the enormous problems of the moment—not only will help Republicans speak more effectively to middle-class voters, but will also help the party’s conservatives and moderates hone their common voice. Issue by issue, it turns out they don’t disagree all that much.

None of this means that President Obama has lost all his appeal, or that the Democrats don’t have an opportunity to advance their agenda in the coming year. It does mean, however, that liberals in Washington would do well to let go of the Republican breakdown narrative, take a real look at the mood of the country and the state of their own party’s prospects, and pull back to the center—or suffer the consequences.

Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes.

From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, “Let me pass you to General McChrystal.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: “Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?” Karnow’s reply was just as simple: “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place.”

Words of wisdom, but not all that useful to General McChrystal. Like it or not, he is already in Afghanistan, along with roughly 68,000 American and 35,000 European troops. McChrystal has been charged by President Obama with presenting a strategy for victory, generally defined as standing up the Afghan Army to beat back the Taliban and deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda. An avid reader of history, McChrystal has read Karnow’s book, but he has also read many others. One that he has read—and reread—is a 1999 book called A Better War, written by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. Sorley argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States could have won in Vietnam—if only the U.S. Congress hadn’t cut off military aid to South Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, the Sorley book is getting a lot of attention at the upper levels of the Pentagon and at McChrystal’s headquarters in Kabul. Told that NEWSWEEK was looking into the parallels between the Sorley book and General McChrystal’s situation in Afghanistan, a senior Marine general exclaimed, “You’re on to something there!” (Like other senior military officials contacted by NEWSWEEK, the general declined to be quoted praising a book that argues, though not in so many words, that the military was stabbed in the back by its civilian leaders.)

As he decides how to respond to McChrystal’s request for at least another 40,000 troops, President Obama has been reading some books, too. One that has caught the attention of some top advisers is Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein, recounting how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson were not well advised on Vietnam. The very title of Goldstein’s book captures the conventional wisdom (at least at the center and left of the political spectrum) that Vietnam was a hopeless, unwinnable war.

But was it? The lessons of Vietnam are not necessarily the ones we glibly assume—chief among them that Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a quagmire, and that achieving some sort of victory is out of reach. Vietnam has become code for American hubris and inevitable military defeat. “What ifs” are always a risky exercise, but some good historians have suggested that there were two moments when victory—or at least a semblance of victory—was possible in America’s long war in Southeast Asia. The first came early, in 1965. Had Lyndon Johnson moved aggressively into Vietnam then—taking the war to the enemy and cutting off its supply routes into South Vietnam—the North Vietnamese might have backed off. The second fell five years later, when the military was finally having success with a new counterinsurgency strategy. Would more resources and more fighting later in the war have resulted in South Vietnam remaining independent of the communist North, leaving Vietnam divided in the manner of Korea? Some historians now say yes; many others still say no.

What makes the conversation about Sorley’s thesis especially interesting now, of course, is, as McChrystal asked Karnow, whether there is anything to be learned from Vietnam that would illuminate the way forward in Afghanistan. To be clear: there is no precise parallel to draw between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Every war is different. But the revisionists’ view of Vietnam does shed some light on the issues facing Obama about war leadership. The most surprising guidance Vietnam may have to offer is not that wars of this kind are unwinnable—which is clearly the common wisdom in America—but that they can produce victories if presidents resist the temptation to fight wars halfway or on the cheap. As President Eisenhower liked to say, if you fight, “you must fight to win.”

With their natural tendency to wage the last war, armies learn slowly. In World War II, American armed forces fought badly in Africa in 1942–43 and not so well in Italy in 1943–44 before getting it right in France and Germany in 1944–45. In Vietnam in 1965–67, the Americans pursued a misbegotten strategy of “search and destroy,” trying to fight an unconventional war with conventional forces that focused on “body counts” while the North Vietnamese more shrewdly infiltrated into towns and villages. Not until Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as U.S. commander in 1968 did the Americans smarten up and begin to fight a true counterinsurgency, focusing on protecting the population by a strategy of “clear and hold.” Instead of shoving aside the South Vietnamese Army, Abrams built up the local forces until they could stand and fight largely on their own—as they did in 1972, repulsing North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive with the aid of American airstrikes.

But by then, as Sorley laments in A Better War, it was too late. American public opinion had turned. In 1973, President Nixon and the North Vietnamese signed a peace treaty that allowed Hanoi to keep 150,000 troops in South Vietnam, just waiting on orders to march. In 1974, breaking Nixon’s promises of continued support to Saigon, the U.S. Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Without logistical support or air cover, the South Vietnamese Army collapsed in 1975 and the communists swept into Saigon. Sorley quotes one of General Abrams’s closest colleagues, Gen. Bruce Palmer, as saying that Abrams “died [of cancer in 1974] feeling that we could have won the war. He felt we were on top of it in 1971, then lost our way.” Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon who worked with Abrams to turn the war around, felt the same: “We eventually defeated ourselves,” Bunker said.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces have also been slow learners. Ever since the Civil War, the American way of war was to overwhelm the enemy with superior firepower. Against the better-led but materially weaker Confederate Army, a war of attrition finally brought results for Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who had been made commander by President Lincoln only after much trial and error by the Union Army. In Iraq, the learning curve again stretched out for years. After Vietnam, the Army adopted an approach known as the Powell doctrine that called for overwhelming force and a quick exit strategy. Forgotten was how to fight a counterinsurgency. At the outset of the Iraq War, U.S. forces overwhelmed the pitiful Iraqi Army—but then got bogged down in a guerrilla struggle. At last realizing the futility of superior “kinetics”—roughly speaking, putting a lot of metal in the air—American forces belatedly adopted a counterinsurgency strategy. Using a new field manual—FM 3-24, written under the supervision of Gen. David Petraeus—U.S. forces began to focus on protecting civilians while ruthlessly targeting jihadist leaders. The so-called surge, along with a vigorous effort to negotiate with Sunni enemies and bring them over to our side, worked. It bought the shaky Iraqi government breathing room to establish itself in relative peace. Still marred by violence, Iraq is nowhere near the all-out civil war that had long been predicted.

Now, in Afghanistan, McChrystal is implementing a strategy that draws on the lessons of Iraq—and looks an awful lot like the “pacification” program adopted by General Abrams in Vietnam in 1968. By ratcheting back the heavy use (and overuse) of firepower, McChrystal has reduced civilian casualties, which alienate the locals and breed more jihadists. At the same time, U.S. Special Operations Forces use the intelligence gleaned from friendly civilians to find and kill Taliban leaders. That is precisely what the Phoenix Program was designed to do 40 years ago in Vietnam: target and assassinate Viet Cong leaders. McChrystal is focusing on recruiting and training Afghan Army and police so they can take over the job of securing Afghanistan as soon as possible. “Afghanization” of the war is much the same as “Vietnamization,” the strategy adopted—successfully, Sorley argues—before Congress voted an end to aid to the South.

If it was working in Vietnam, will it work in Afghanistan? Contacted by NEWSWEEK, even Sorley wouldn’t predict. He would say only that if Obama and his advisers are to study the lessons of Vietnam, they should at least be informed by the right ones. With smarter generals and a “population-centric strategy”—to use the counterinsurgency term now in vogue—the United States could have enabled South Vietnam to beat back the North.

Or so Sorley contends. Vietnam remains a toxic subject for historians, and Sorley’s book has inspired no shortage of critics. George Herring, a highly respected historian whose study of Vietnam, America’s Longest War, is a standard text, told NEWSWEEK that he is “rather appalled that Sorley’s book is being taken so seriously.” He acknowledges that the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were doing better by 1971, but notes that Hanoi wanted to prevail more than Saigon or Washington did—and was prepared to pay whatever price, in human terms, was necessary. “The war could not have been won at a price we were willing to pay,” he says. A more immediate observer, NEWSWEEK correspondent Ron Moreau, recalls patrolling with South Vietnamese infantry in 1973. The South Vietnamese troops, Moreau says, had become utterly dependent on U.S. air power. Without it, they were reluctant to venture forth against the enemy. Moreau, who now covers the war in Afghanistan for NEWSWEEK, sees the same rickety, corrupt power structure in Kabul that he recalls from Saigon and doubts that America can prop it up indefinitely.

America’s best chance to win in Vietnam may have come earlier in the war. In 1964–65, the top military leadership understood that to defeat the North, it was necessary to go all-out. As historian Mark Moyar points out in his groundbreaking work, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954–1965, that would have meant a massive bombing campaign, mining Hanoi’s port, and sending troops into Laos and Cambodia to cut off the North’s all-important sanctuaries and resupply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But LBJ’s advisers were reluctant—fearful, in part, of dragging China and the Soviet Union into a larger war. The military pressed—but not very hard. As Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster shows in Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, the top brass made the classic mistake of telling their political masters what they wanted to hear.

Johnson was horribly conflicted. One of his advisers, Douglass Cater, recalled the president’s angst: “I’d never seen the man in as dejected a mood—he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. If I send more boys in, there’s going to be killin’. If I take them out, there’s going to be more killin’ ‘ … And he never put a ‘g’ on the ‘killin’,’ it was Texas ‘killin’.’ Then he got up and walked out of the room, leaving us in a somewhat shattered state.” Despite these melodramas, Johnson’s heart was never in the Vietnam War. He was much more concerned with getting his Great Society legislation through Congress. To avoid a fractious public debate over Vietnam, he tried to slide by without leveling with the American people about the commitment required to win. Inevitably, he just got sucked in deeper, an agony he captured in his colorful way: “I knew from the start if I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to fight this bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home,” he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “All my programs. All my hopes … all my dreams.”

History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain said, it does have a tendency to rhyme. Interviewed by NEWSWEEK in September as his secret 66-page analysis of the mess in Afghanistan was leaking out, General McChrystal said it was his “duty,” his “sacred duty,” to tell the president exactly what the military required to win there. McChrystal was clearly mindful of the cautionary tale told by McMaster in Dereliction of Duty. But duty is not a simple notion, and it’s possible that the range of options presented to the president by McChrystal—to dispatch 40,000 more troops? Or 20,000? Or 80,000?—has been massaged for political effect. The formula used by General Petraeus’s own counterinsurgency manual—one soldier for every 50 square miles—suggests America would need far more troops, something like a half million all told, to pacify the whole country. An aide to McChrystal, who would not speak for attribution on this sensitive subject, told NEWSWEEK that there’s “a bit of a Goldilocks scenario—too hot, too cold, just right”—in the general’s recommendation. McChrystal is sensitive to the need to make do with whatever he gets, though if he gets “the lower number” (roughly 10,000 to 20,000 troops), says this aide, he will have to “rethink strategy.” (Article continued below)

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The Vietnam Wall: What We Left Behind

Just as Afghanistan is not Vietnam, President Obama is not President Johnson. LBJ’s heart truly did belong to his dream of a Great Society. It’s not clear what Obama’s heart belongs to—he is a much more dispassionate figure. Nonetheless, he is undoubtedly thinking about how history will judge him. He may want to show that he is decisive, that he did not just kick the problem down the road. If he decides that Afghanistan is winnable—i.e., that the Afghans can find some lasting measure of security against the Taliban—he will need to give the war his wholehearted backing. It may be true, as Sorley’s detractors suggest, that by 1972 Vietnam was already lost. But that does not mean it’s too late to win in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not the North-Vietnamese. When the Americans and Saigon finally found an effective counter-insurgency strategy and took control of the countryside from the Viet Cong, Hanoi responded by sending in whole divisions of battle-tested troops. The Taliban are much weaker and far less organized. They do not have waves of combat troops and armor.

Or Obama may decide that Afghanistan is too hard, that the country’s leadership is too corrupt; that too many Afghans will forever regard American soldiers as alien occupiers; that a big influx of troops will only fuel the insurgency and make the Afghan military more dependent; that America will not indefinitely tolerate a war that costs more than $40 billion a year and bleeds off hundreds or thousands of young American soldiers. But if that is the case, Obama needs to start preparing for an orderly withdrawal—and explaining to America and the world why it’s necessary.

Obama’s pronounced tendency is to try to find a middle ground, a compromise. He may try to find a way to send, say, 20,000 troops and ask McChrystal to make do. If so, he runs the real risk of repeating Johnson’s mistake of incrementalism—of doing just enough (or so he hoped) to get the enemy to the bargaining table and to keep the hawks at home off his back. Hoping to muddle through only got LBJ stuck deeper in the mud. Afghanistan may not be Vietnam, but Obama risks repeating Johnson’s mistake.

by David S. Broder
The Spokesman-Review

The more President Barack Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose – and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point.

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision – whether or not it is right.

The cost of indecision is growing every day. The United States and its people, the allies who have contributed their own troops to the struggle against al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the Afghans and their government are waiting impatiently, while the challenge is getting worse.

When Obama became commander in chief, his course of action seemed clear. He was bent on early withdrawal from Iraq and an increase in resources and emphasis on winning in Afghanistan – the struggle he repeatedly called “a war of necessity.”

He sent 21,000 more troops to hold it together through the Afghan election, and named two new generals: Stanley McChrystal to run the war and Karl Eikenberry to manage the politics and reconstruction from the ambassador’s office in Kabul.

McChrystal came up with a new plan of battle, emphasizing protection of population centers and requiring up to 40,000 more troops. Eikenberry, we now know, balked, giving voice to the widespread fear that Hamid Karzai, the carry-over winner of the election the ambassador helped arrange, was too weak and corrupt to govern the country effectively, even with an enlarged American force keeping order.

Their disagreement was echoed and amplified throughout the Obama administration. The secretaries of defense and state came down on McChrystal’s side; the vice president and many on the White House political staff with Eikenberry.

The president, notwithstanding his earlier rhetoric and actions, has hesitated to resolve the issue. Obama needs to remember what Clark Clifford said about the president he served, Harry Truman. Clifford, one of Truman’s closest advisers, said the president “believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.”

While Obama deliberates, his party in Congress shows increasing reluctance to make an all-out commitment to the war effort. The chairmen of two key Senate committees, Foreign Relations and Armed Services, are arguing for retraining Afghan troops – if they can even be found – and turning over more of the burden of fighting to them.

Meanwhile, events in Afghanistan support McChrystal’s prediction that delay in expanding the American troop commitment will almost certainly lead to gains for the Taliban and greater risk for U.S. and allied troops.

In all this dithering, it’s easy to forget a few fundamentals. Why are we in Afghanistan? Not because of its own claim on us but because the Taliban rulers welcomed the al-Qaida plotters who hatched the destruction of 9/11. The Taliban also oppressed their own people, especially women, but we sent troops because Afghanistan was the hide-out for the terrorists that attacked our country.

We knew governing Afghanistan would never be easy. It had resisted outside forces through the ages, and its geography, its tribal structure, its absence of a democratic tradition and its poverty all argued that once we went in, it would be hard to get out.

But George W. Bush said – and Obama seemed to agree – that withdrawal was not and is not an option.

That imperative is reinforced by the presence of Pakistan, a shaky nuclear-armed power across a porous mountain border. If the Taliban comes back in Afghanistan, the al-Qaida cells already in Pakistan will operate even more freely – and nuclear weapons could fall into the most dangerous hands.

Given all of this, I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress – as it has done in Iraq.

Obama did not believe that could happen there. But given what he inherited, and given what he has done himself so far, I think he has no choice but to play out that hand. If we can’t afford to lose, then play to win.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

by Kathleen Parker
The Spokesman-Review

Growing concern about incivility is one of America’s more appealing trends. Increasingly, individuals and institutions are seeking ways to burnish the golden rule.

The concern isn’t new – professor P.M. Forni started the Johns Hopkins Civility Project 12 years ago and published a book in 2002: “Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct.”

Civility even has a Facebook page called “The Civility Initiative,” where Forni and visitors exchange thoughts on the subject.

But recent events and trends – from rowdy town hall meetings to sideshow rants on television to the outburst of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson – have brought vague unease about manners into sharper focus.

In Wilson’s home state, University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides has made civility a focal point of the institution’s goals. And an Atlanta public relations executive, Mark DeMoss, has organized a coalition of conservatives and liberals, religious and secular, in his own Civility Project to promote a grass-roots, voluntary effort toward renewed civility.

His Web site ( www.civilityproject.org) urges a voluntary pledge to be civil in discourse and behavior, and to stand against incivility.

President Barack Obama addressed civility directly in his commencement address to Notre Dame earlier this year, and recently said, “One of the things I’m trying to figure out is, how can we make sure that civility is interesting.”

That’s more than enough evidence to declare a trend. But do Americans really want to be civil?

Our nostalgia for civility, some say, is misplaced or at least exaggerated by wishful thinking. Americans have never been exemplars of manners in politics. Often cited are the anti-federalists, though the federalists were hardly rearranging the doilies. In one case, when federalist legislators needed a quorum for a key vote, they dragged anti-federalists from their rooms and locked them in the statehouse.

Imagine the fun we’d have if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi decided to lock their moderate colleagues in the Capitol until they agreed to sign off on health care reform.

During the Andrew Jackson-John Quincy Adams election of 1828, the former general was called a murderer and a cannibal; his wife was accused of being a harlot. Closer to Joe Wilson’s stomping grounds, politics has always been a blood sport and most natives are proud of it. In the election of 1832, mobs assaulted candidates. Not very civil, that.

Nonetheless, something has changed – and what has changed is media. I don’t mean traditional media, the so-called mainstream media everyone loves to hate these days. In fact, old media have strict standards about civility and appropriate language in the public sphere. Such concerns prevented me recently from publishing the obscenity uttered in the Washington Post newsroom that provoked an editor to punch a writer.

Most crucial in the viral growth of incivility are new media – the Internet, the blogosphere and all the social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, and whatever else may have developed since I began typing this page.

Whereas in previous eras an uncivil exchange might be confined to a room, a building or a public square, today’s media technology means that it is captured, amplified, replayed and distributed – perpetually.

There are now Joe Wilson “You Lie” T-shirts and bumper stickers. Meanwhile, a recent USA Today/Gallup poll found that three-quarters of those surveyed were not “outraged” by Wilson’s outburst.

Incivility may be bad form, but it can be good politics. Susan Herbst, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech, is finishing a book on civility in politics in which she argues that civility and incivility are both timeless strategic rhetorical assets. Some people are just more effective at using them.

The real challenge for the civility-minded is that incivility is more exciting. Human beings are drawn to spectacle, as the bookers of Rome’s Colosseum understood. Glenn Beck is proof of the constancy of human nature.

Herbst insists that if we really want civility to prevail, we have to find a way to make it exciting and interesting to young people, and she urges the teaching of debating skills to high school and college students.

“We will never see the sort of civil, thoughtful, inventive debate that enables good public-policy-making until we inspire the young adults in our midst how to pursue it themselves,” she wrote recently for the online publication Inside Higher Ed.

Making debate cool is a challenge, not least because clear thinking is hard work that requires skill and discipline. Perhaps a few Hollywood celebrities might help lead the way? Civility, after all, is nothing but great acting.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Her e-mail address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

Damn the pesky models! Full speed ahead.

By George F. Will | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

In last week’s NEWSWEEK, the cover story was a hymn to “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.” Beneath the story’s headline (”The Evolution of an Eco-Prophet”) was this subhead: “Al Gore’s views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself.” Which was rather rude because, if true, his views have not advanced for 11 years.

There is much debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased for that long. What we know is that computer models did not predict this. Which matters, a lot, because we are incessantly exhorted to wager trillions of dollars and diminished freedom on the proposition that computer models are correctly projecting catastrophic global warming. On Nov. 2, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Ball reported some inconvenient data. Soon after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—it shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Thinking Man’s Thinking Man—reported that global warming is “unequivocal,” there came evidence that the planet’s temperature is beginning to cool. “That,” Ball writes, “has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.”

Models are no better or worse than their assumptions, and Ball notes how dicey these assumptions can be: “The effects of clouds, for example, are unclear. Depending on their shape and altitude, clouds can either trap heat, warming the earth, or reflect it, cooling the planet.” It gets worse: “The way that greenhouse gases affect cloud formation—and how clouds in turn affect temperature—remains a subject of debate. Different models treat these factors differently.”

Some scientists say the cooling is a product of what Ball calls “the enigmatic ocean currents.” Others say that even if the cooling continues for several decades, as some scientists think it might, warming will resume.

And if it does not? A story in the April 28, 1975, edition of NEWSWEEK was “The Cooling World.” NEWSWEEK can recycle that article, and recycling is a planet-saving virtue.

Meanwhile, however, the crusade against warming will brook no interference from information. With the Waxman-Markey bill, the House of Representatives has endorsed reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 83 per-cent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is surely the most preposterous legislation ever hatched in the House. Using Energy Department historical statistics, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have calculated this:

Waxman-Markey’s goal is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83 percent reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capita emissions of 1910, a level probably last seen when the population was 45 million—in 1875.

Such nonsense is rare, but nonsensical fears are not. In their new book, SuperFreakonomics, Steven D. -Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner revisit the great shark panic of the summer of 2001. Eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast was playing in the surf near Pensacola, Fla., when a bull shark bit off his right arm and gouged a piece of his thigh. The country, with an assist from the media, became fixated on the shark menace. Time’s cover proclaimed “The Summer of the Shark”; Time’s story began:

“Sharks come silently, without warning. There are three ways they strike: the hit-and-run, the bump-and-bite and the sneak attack. The hit-and-run is the most common. The shark may see the sole of a swimmer’s foot, think it’s a fish and take a bite before realizing this isn’t its usual prey.”

Jeepers. Everyone out of the water!

Or not. Time, to its credit, let the air out of its story by noting that the numbers of shark attacks “remain minuscule.” They were small during all of 2001, all over the globe. That year there were 64 shark attacks, only four of them fatal. Between 1995 and 2005, shark attacks worldwide varied between a high of 79 in a year and a low of 46, averaging 60.3. Fatalities averaged 5.9, about 50 percent higher than in 2001. The unfortunate Jessie Arbogast became an occasion for the fun of experiencing a frisson of synthetic fear. The real thing arrived in late summer 2001, on September 11.

George Will is also the author of One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation and With a Happy Eye But . . .: America and the World, 1997—2002 .

You can’t stop either. Why that’s good.

By Jacob Weisberg | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 31, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 9, 2009

“I think this would be a good time for a beer,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said upon signing a bill that made 3.2 percent lager legal, ahead of the full repeal of Prohibition. I hope Barack Obama will come up with some comparably witty remarks as he presides over the dismantling of our contemporary forms of prohibition—laws that prevent gay marriage, restrict cannabis as a Schedule I controlled substance, and ban travel to Cuba. “You may now kiss the groom,” perhaps, or a version of the comment he once made about smoking pot: “I inhaled—that was the point.” (Click here to follow Jacob Weisberg)

Prohibition now is different from Prohibition then. When the 18th Amendment went into effect in 1920, it was a radical social experiment challenging a custom as old as civilization. A predictable failure—the insult to individual rights, the impossibility of enforcement, the spawning of organized crime—it came to an end in 1933. Today it is a byword for futile attempts to legislate morality and remake human nature.

Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they’re instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the ’20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast. Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. These reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed, but because society has.

A few reference points: in April, Obama lifted restrictions on travel and remittances by Cuban-Americans. Last month the Justice Department announced that it would no longer prosecute cases involving medical marijuana. Same-sex marriages are recognized in six states and counting. In a larger frame, loosening restrictions and lax enforcement reflect evolving social norms. Gay unions have been celebrated on the New York Times weddings page since 2002. Since George W. Bush left office, American tourists no longer worry about being prosecuted for visiting Havana without a Treasury license. In L.A., you need only tell an on-site doctor at a walk-in pot emporium that you feel anxious to walk out with a legal bag of Captain Kush.

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What’s driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument, but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What’s advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don’t believe they should face legal jeopardy. What’s bringing the change on Cuba is not the epic failure of the 49-year-old U.S. embargo, but the demand on the part of Americans who want to go there—whether to visit relatives, prospect for post-Castro business opportunities, or sip rum drinks on the beach.

For similar reasons, there isn’t likely to be any retreat on the right to have an abortion or own a gun. Popular demand for an individual right is simply too powerful to overcome. The Internet has been a crucial amplifier of all such claims. With pornography and gambling, the Web itself became an irrepressible distribution tool. When it comes to gay marriage, it has accelerated the recognition of a new civil right by serving as an organizing tool and information clearinghouse. More broadly, the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised expectations of personal liberty. In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on personal behavior become increasingly untenable.

Politicians will continue to lag, rather than lead, these changes. Republicans face a risk in resisting the new realities. If the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian leaners and the young. Democrats face a different danger in embracing cultural transformations too eagerly. Nearly four decades after George McGovern became known as the candidate of amnesty, abortion, and acid, cultural issues are still treacherous territory for them. Why get in front of change when you can follow from a safe distance and end up with the same result?

Jacob Weisberg is also the author of The Bush Tragedy and In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington .

by Betsy Z. Russell

BOISE – After Washington this year became the fifth state to endorse a big change in how the nation elects presidents – letting whoever wins the popular vote take the office – Idaho is poised to debate the same question.

Nothing changes until enough states sign on to represent a majority of electoral votes; only about a quarter of them are on board so far. “We’re just waiting to see if there are additional states that decide to join in,” said Glenn Kuper, spokesman for Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, who backs the move and signed the Legislature-passed bill into law in April.

It may be a tougher sell in Idaho, the very last state to see the measure introduced. But state Rep. Donna Boe, D-Pocatello, who plans to introduce the bill in January, is enthusiastic about it. “Under this national popular vote, everyone’s vote will go to the total,” Boe said. “So all of us will have our vote count – that was the appeal to me.”

Currently, Idaho’s four electoral votes are something of a foregone conclusion: They’ve gone to the GOP candidate for president in every election since 1964.

But when the California-based National Popular Vote group, which is pushing for the measure in all 50 states, polled 800 registered Idaho voters in May, it found that 77 percent favored a switch to electing the president by popular vote – 84 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of Republicans.

“We don’t see this to be a partisan issue,” said Pat Rosenstiel, a consultant who’s worked for GOP campaigns and now serves as the National Popular Vote lobbyist for five states, including Idaho.

Backers of the change argue that it’ll force presidential candidates to address issues important to voters everywhere, not just in key battleground states. Opponents say the current Electoral College system forces candidates to pay attention to small rural states, such as Idaho, rather than just a handful of large metropolitan cities.

“It’s certainly an issue of federalism, in terms of state role in the presidential vote,” said Boise State University political scientist emeritus Jim Weatherby.

Said Kuper, Gregoire’s spokesman, “Her perspective is that it’s a national election, and that the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationally ought to be elected president.” He added, “As a state that has a moderately large population, I think we would still receive the same kind of attention that we have in the past, just based on the number of popular votes we would have to deliver to either candidate.”

Four times in U.S. history, including the Bush-Gore race in 2000, the Electoral College selected a president who had lost the national popular vote.

Attorney says life sentence for teen lacks decency
by David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON – Confronted with the stark reality of a 13-year-old boy sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, the Supreme Court justices signaled Monday that they were inclined to limit, or perhaps abolish, the use of life terms for teenagers whose crimes do not involve murder.

The court often has invoked the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” to restrict the death penalty. On Monday, the justices also sounded ready to rule that some states, in particular Florida, had gone too far by sentencing children to life in prison without a chance for a parole.

“To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel,” attorney Bryan Stevenson told the court. “It cannot be reconciled with what we know about the nature of children. It cannot be reconciled with our standards of decency.”

Stevenson is representing Joe Sullivan, who at age 13 was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman and given a life prison term. Stevenson said rapists in Florida are sentenced, on average, to 10 years in prison. Yet, Sullivan, who already has served 20 years, will die in prison unless the Supreme Court intervenes.

A second case heard Monday involved Terrance Graham, who at 17 was given a life term for his part in an armed robbery of a restaurant and a later home invasion robbery.

Sullivan and Graham are among 109 inmates nationwide who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for nonhomicide crimes.

During oral arguments, most of the justices sounded as though they were inclined to overturn at least some of these sentences as too extreme. However, they differed on how to do it. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. offered a middle-ground approach that could overturn prison terms in some cases if the state judges failed to weigh the youthful age of the offender. Roberts said this “case-by-case approach” was wiser than setting a single rule.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he agreed.

But most of the liberal justices hinted they would go further and rule it was always cruel and unusual punishment to impose a life term for an offender who is under age 18 and who did not commit a murder.

“Every state recognizes the difference between an adult and a minor. And you have to make a line. We have it at 18,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “The teenager can’t drink, can’t drive, can’t marry. There are many (legal) limitations on children just because they are children.”

Only Justice Antonin Scalia defended Florida’s policy, saying the court should look to history.

“When the ‘cruel and unusual’ clause was adopted (in 1791), 12 years was viewed as the year when a person reaches maturity,” Scalia said. “And then all felonies (were subject to) the death penalty.”

House liberals threaten to vote against final version of health overhaul
by James Oliphant And Kim Geiger
Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – Furious liberals on Monday threatened to derail the massive health care overhaul bill to protest a last-minute deal over insurance coverage of abortions that had secured passage of the legislation in the House.

At least 40 House members pledged not to vote for a final health care bill if the abortion provision survives – endangering the exceptionally fragile Democratic coalition that has kept the bill afloat.

At issue are the insurance policies offered in a new “exchange,” or insurance marketplace, that the legislation would create to help consumers purchase health plans, many using newly created federal subsidies.

The House measure says the federal subsidies cannot be used to buy health policies that cover elective abortion. But abortion rights supporters say this would affect a broad set of consumers, because insurers would likely abandon abortion coverage in all policies offered in the exchange.

The provision “represents an unprecedented and unacceptable restriction on women’s ability to access the full range of reproductive health services to which they are lawfully entitled,” the House members wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It was a tougher line than they had adopted less than 48 hours earlier, when they had, almost to a member, voted to pass the health legislation. The bill cleared the chamber late Saturday night by a mere five votes.

The tumult over abortion now travels to the Senate, where it promises to cause headaches for Democrats still wrestling with fundamental issues of cost, coverage and revenues in its version of the health legislation.

Legislation before the Senate contains looser restrictions on abortion coverage than was approved by the House. But, already, at least one Senate Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, appears willing to work with abortion rights opponents on language similar to that from the House.

President Barack Obama suggested Monday the House measure might be altered as the legislation moves through Congress, though he did not say he would push for changes himself.

Obama told ABC News the bill should uphold the principle that federal money may not be used to subsidize abortions.

“And I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test – that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions, but, on the other hand, that we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices,” he said. “Because one of the pledges I made in that same speech was to say that if you’re happy and satisfied with the insurance that you have, that it’s not going to change.”

The House amendment would allow people buying insurance in the exchange to purchase separate “riders” that would cover abortions. Abortion-rights advocates say few would do so, because few women anticipate an unplanned pregnancy and few insurers are likely to offer such a separate service.

“No one counts on getting an abortion,” said Rachel Laser, a lawyer with Third Way, a Washington think tank that advocates centrist policies.

In 2001, 13 percent of abortions were billed directly to insurance companies, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health. That figure, however, may understate insurance payments for abortion, because it does not include cases where women paid for the procedure out of pocket and later asked for reimbursement from their insurers.

Dr. Willie Parker, a board member at Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, said the amendment could have the greatest impact on women whose underlying health conditions require hospitalization in order for a safe abortion to be performed.

Parker cited an example of a woman with a pregnancy that involves abnormal attachment of the placenta. While a standard abortion may cost just $350, the cost in that situation would range between $3,000 and $4,000.

by Mark Sherman
Associated Press

At a glance:

Only 9 people in the country are serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were 13. The number rises to 73 when 14-year-olds are added in. No other country allows life sentences for young offenders.

WASHINGTON – Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman and judged incorrigible though he was only 13 at the time of the attack.

Terrance Graham, implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17, was given a life sentence by a judge who told the teenager he threw his life away.

They didn’t kill anyone, but they effectively were sentenced to die in prison.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Now the Supreme Court is being asked to say that locking up juveniles and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual – and thus, unconstitutional. Other than in death penalty cases, the justices never before have found that a penalty crossed the cruel-and-unusual line. They will hear arguments today.

Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for nonhomicide crimes. Although their lawyers deny their clients are guilty, the court will consider only whether the sentences are permitted by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s latest look at how to punish young criminals flows directly from its four-year-old decision to rule out the death penalty for anyone younger than 18.

In that 2005 case decided by a 5-4 vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion talked about “the lesser culpability of the juvenile offender.”

“From a moral standpoint it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed,” Kennedy said.

Yet Kennedy also acknowledged the possibility that for the worst crimes and the worst offenders, “the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person.”

Both sides point to the same basic facts – the rare imposition of Draconian prison terms on people so young – to make their point.

The state of Florida, backed by 19 other states, argues it should retain flexibility in sentencing so that “particularly heinous acts that stop short of causing death” can be punished vigorously.

Life without parole “is appropriately rare and reserved only for the worst of the worst offenders,” crime victims groups said in court papers.

Most victims of juvenile violence also are young, the victims groups said, citing Justice Department statistics. “Softening sentences for juvenile offenders puts actual children in harm’s way – innocent ones, not those who have committed violent crimes,” the victims groups said.

Opponents of such sentences said, however, that most states have in practice rejected life terms for juveniles when no one was killed. The 109 juveniles serving terms of life without parole are in Florida and seven other states – California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina – according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone.

Beyond the infrequency of such punishment, lawyers for Graham and Sullivan argue that it is a bad idea to render a final judgment about people so young.

“They are unfinished products, works in progress,” said Bryan Stevenson, who will argue Sullivan’s case at the high court.

Actor Charles Dutton, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson and others who committed crimes as teenagers have weighed in against life-without-parole sentences. Corrections officials, psychologists, educators and even some victims also have taken Graham and Sullivan’s side.

Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, served 18 years in the Senate, but as a teenager, he pleaded guilty to setting fire to an abandoned building on federal property and later spent a night in jail for slugging a police officer.

Simpson said he sees no good argument for refusing even to review their sentences after the passage of time.

“When they get to be 30 or 40 and they been in the clink for 20 years or 30 or 40 and they have learned how to read and how to do things, why not?”

If a prisoner shows he is not fit to be released, “throw him back in,” he said. “That’s better than saying ‘Sorry, we can’t look at that file because you were sent here for life.’ ”