Chris Stirewalt

How expensive will Blanche Lincoln's vote be?

Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln has the toughest line to walk on her party's health care plan in the Senate. Up for election next year, Lincoln is facing a possible primary challenges from the left and right in her party -- a conservative state Senate president and a liberal lieutenant governor. There is a strong field of Republicans that may produce a tough challenger if she shape to take her on if she makes it through. The latest polls show Lincoln in serious jeopardy -- President Obama's low approval in Arkansas of 41 percent looks robust compared to Lincoln's anemic 27 percent. Lincoln may not be able to pull off a win no matter how she votes on health care, but there's reason to...

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Morning Must Reads -- Dems willing to win ugly on health

New York Times -- Reid, as Legislative Tactician, Takes Ownership of Health Care Overhaul They say dogs look like their owners, so it makes sense that the Senate health bill is a reflection of Harry Reid. Writer Carl Hulse looks at the Senate majority leader’s now personal effort to produce legislation that will allow him to avoid the Scylla of liberal outrage and Charybdis of electoral defeat in Nevada next year. The bill reflects Reid’s oleaginous approach to lawmaking, which is the only reason to believe that something might pass the Senate. I’m still putting my money on Sen. Blanche Lincoln becoming the next secretary of Agriculture, but the effort to pick off...

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Morning Must Reads -- Reid, the bill

Wall Street Journal -- Showdown Set for Health Bill Liberals are scanning the fine print on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s proposed health care bill today looking for the catch. A big, expensive plan paid for with big taxes on those making more than $200,000 and a lot of new fees. Most of the Left don’t mind too much the fact that Reid’s plan would allow states to “opt out” of the government plan because all states will eventually opt in. Who wants to pay for socialism but not get its modest benefits? That’s why Reid appeared with the most liberal members of the Senate, Al Franken, Tom Harkin, etc. to announce his bill. My column today argues...

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Harry Reid needs a defeat on health care bill

A lot of politicians will tell you that a loss can be a win. When independent voters in New Jersey and Virginia gave Democrats a sound spanking some argued that it was proof the party was on the right track in trying to pass a huge, flatly partisan health care plan. When Republicans lost a congressional seat in New York because of an internecine spat, some in the party argued it that was evidence of a much-needed cleansing. Time will tell on both counts, and soon enough -- though the argument from President Obama that losing the governorships of two large states proves the need to pass the most divisive part of his agenda looks less and less plausible. The flight of independents has...

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Morning Must Reads -- Hot seat for Holder

USA Today -- Senators have tough questions for Holder It’s roasting time for the attorney general. The unconnected dots on the Hasan attack, the decision to bring the baddest of the bad from Guantanamo to civilian courts in Manhattan, and now President Obama’s acknowledgement that he’s going to miss his Guantanamo deadline mean that there will be lots of unpleasantness for Eric Holder at today’s Senate Judiciary hearings. Writer Kevin Johnson has the details: “Holder's visit to Capitol Hill comes after President Obama last week ordered a government-wide inquiry into how intelligence about Hasan was handled in the months before the rampage. The Defense...

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Morning Must Reads -- Will the geek's grenade blow up Reid's bill?

New York Times -- When the Budget Director Talks, People Will Listen The E.F. Hutton of the health care debate is about to pipe up on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill. And with new polls from the AP and the Washington Post showing that increasing costs – individual and those paid by all taxpayers -- are a paramount concern among opponents, supporters, and undecideds. Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf is holding the future of the legislation in his hands. A pricey score on Reid’s bill may push Democratic leaders to water down the legislation like well drinks at a college bar. A good score means Reid can start hammering away at nervous moderates...

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Morning Must Reads -- Chasing the dragon

Washington Post -- In China, Obama presses for rights President Obama told a hand-picked group of Chinese Communist Party members that on the question of the Beijing government’s control of the Internet viewing of it’s citizens: "I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. I recognize that different countries have different traditions.” And that was as peppery as Obama got in his best chance to speak out on his China trip. Not exactly Bill Clinton denouncing the Tiananmen Square crackdown or George W. Bush worshiping with Chinese Christians. As I argue in my column today, Obama, who seeks to efface ideas of American superiority anyway, finds himself in a poor...

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Obama bows to the Chinese with deficit posturing

The announcement that President Obama was going to adopt a new deficit-busting stance next year was met with a good bit of derision. But you can't propose a budget that would double the national debt in a decade, rack up $176 billion a month in deficit spending, pound the table for a $1.3 trillion health care plan and expect to be taken seriously on spending. Even so, the White House is clear: in the 2010 State of the Union, Obama will preach a new gospel of fiscal restraint. The idea of Obama as deficit hawk will be hard to swallow, even for a nation so credulous that only recently have voters come to question the wisdom of spending trillions of dollars on a quixotic effort to change...

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Morning Must Reads -- New York sheik

Washington Post -- Official: Accused 9/11 mastermind, others to be tried in N.Y. It is not coincidental that on the same day that White House Counsel Greg Craig will formally announce his departure the administration makes it known that the highest-value terrorists in Guantanamo Bay – the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks and some of his helpers – are heading to New York City for criminal trial. The struggle to close Guantanamo has been a persistent annoyance to liberal Democrats. That’s why the White House spent months pinning the blame on Craig and now seeks to couple his departure with the biggest action yet on clearing out the terrorist prison in Cuba. But after...

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Morning Must Reads -- Dare to dither

Associated Press -- Obama said to want revised Afghanistan options President Obama inverst General Patton’s axiom about military strategy: Obama is looking for a perfect plan to be executed at some indefinite point in the future on Afghanistan rather than a good one that could be executed today. Writers Anne Geran and Ben Feller report that just as it seemed the president had all abut announced his decision to put 35,000 more troops in Afghanistan, he changed course and has asked for a new set of options. The process has gone on so long that Obama must be stalling for a more advantageous moment in which to announce his plan or really intends to micromanage the strategy if...

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Obama should accept Nobel on behalf of military

President Obama has often expressed the kind of unilateral attitude about domestic policy that his predecessor supposedly had on foreign affairs. Obama's big, partisan initiatives have divided an anxious nation, but Obama has refused to admit mistakes. He plunges ahead on health care, promising the members of his party that history demands action even if most Americans are pleading for a pause. Liberals who constantly complain about the insufficiency of the health bills in Congress should remember the reckless political risks the president is already taking with what's under consideration. On security matters, though, Obama has tended toward uncertainty. Weak words follow strong ones....

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Morning Must Reads -- Slow and unsteady on Afghanistan

Los Angeles Times -- Military not told about Ft. Hood suspect's e-mails A strong, unambiguous speech from President Obama at the Ft. Hood memorial service. He was clear that the soldiers were killed in a war and that religion motivated the attacker. An impressive pivot. Writers Julian Barnes and Josh Meyer tell us that the Army never heard about the contact between one of its officers and a radical cleric because law enforcement officials opted not to pass the information along. Nidal Hasan’s conduct had already raised flags in the Army – lectures on jihad, bitter complaints about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. – so perhaps knowledge that he was chatting...

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Morning Must Reads -- Ft. Hood killer's radical sympathies were no secret

Washington Post -- Hasan e-mails to cleric didn't result in inquiry Writers Phillip Rucker, Carrie Johnson, and Ellen Nakashima and their colleagues at the Post have been all over the Ft. Hood shootings. Tremendous coverage. As we learn more about Nidal Hasan it becomes harder to imagine how his behavior in the years leading up to the shooting did not trigger an investigation or discharge – a lecture to colleagues about the need to allow Muslim soldiers to be excused from service, the online glorification of suicide bombers, and now, email exchanges with his former Imam, Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical cleric who would later praise Hasan’s rampage as the model for any Muslim...

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Morning Must Reads -- Harried Reid

Wall Street Journal -- Health Bill Faces Senate Heat As Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio observed today “[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi lost almost 15 percent of her members. If Reid loses one member of his 60-vote majority, his bill might be doomed.” That’s the conclusion reached by Janet Adamy and Naftali Bendavid and everyone else looking at the Senate prospects on health care today: the House passage of an extreme bill by a tiny margin will rile up moderate members of the Senate who can now be more demanding. There’s running room to the right on a final compromise bill but none to the left (Dennis Kucinich was the only liberal “no” vote). The...

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Obama plays Peter Pan for nervous Democrats

The grown-up lawmakers in the Democratic caucus must have cringed when some of their colleagues started chanting "Fired up! Ready to go!" when President Obama came to Capitol Hill for another pep talk this weekend. For Rep. Rick Boucher -- a Virginia Democrat who snuck into Congress in 1982 when Republicans took a pummeling because of high unemployment -- being "Fired up!" means you get fired by your constituents. For Rep. Chet Edwards -- a Democrat who has represented a hunk of central Texas including a little ranching community called Crawford since 1991 -- "Ready to go!" means get ready to go back to Waco because voters gave you the heave-ho. Members...

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"The bright lights of freedom have been dimming for decades"

Talk about "Fired up! Ready to Go!" House Minority Leader John Boehner is tearing into not just the Pelosi health plan but the whole Obama agenda. Must watching for C-SPAN nerds like me. UPDATE: As he did with the House global warming bill, Boehner is going through some of the additions to the federal regulatory structure -- restaurants with more than 20 locations to post calorie counts in menus,...

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TARP funds taking on unemployment... in Germany

General Motors (majority owner, US taxpayers) is trying to rescue its European subsidiary Opel after backing out of a plan to sell the company to a consortium led by auto-equipment maker Magna. In order to get clear of the sale, GM cut a deal with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to pour billions into Opel. Merkel had to sign off on the deal because Germany had provided a bridge loan to Opel in order to carry the company over until the sale could be completed. German labor unions are up in arms over GM's reversal and Merkel was under pressure to get something back. Merkel was in town this week and after a meeting with President Obama and a phone call with him Wednesday,...

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Morning Must Reads -- "... suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers.”

Houston Chronicle -- Army: Fort Hood suspect shouted religious slogan before firing Writers Scott Huddleston and Sig Christenson have the best narrative about the shooting spree authorities say was committed by Army psychologist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a devout Muslim who had grown agitated about his pending deployment to Iraq and who had been under surveillance for online postings expressing admiration for terrorists. “Hasan is accused of attacking his fellow soldiers about 1:30 p.m. at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where troops waited to see doctors as they prepared to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan — or return from combat. Armed with two pistols, he shot more...

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Morning Must Reads -- Unemployment hits home for Democrats

Wall Street Journal -- Democrats Confront Coalition Strains Is it time for Democrats to galvanize the base or reach out to the middle? With election results causing new anxieties in the party over the president’s big agenda, Democrats are looking for a new direction. In the short term, the answer from the White House/DNC will be to try to get beyond the dithering/bickering phase and pass something/anything on health care – water it down, get it passed, and start campaigning for 2010 and talking about jobs. As I argue in my column today, not seeming obsessed with the economy and unemployment has been a major mistake for President Obama. Writers Peter Wallsten and Jonathan...

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Famously smart, Obama was stupid about economy

President Obama came into office believing that in order to achieve two of the hearts' desires of his electoral base -- universal health care and global warming legislation -- he would have to act while his political capital was at its highest point. Now, a year after his election, the president finds himself lugging two divisive initiatives and facing simmering outrage over the stagnant economy. Exit polls from this week's contests in Virginia and New Jersey show health care with half the level of concern among voters as economic issues. Carbon emissions didn't even produce a BTU's worth of interest. This is not a time to be selling plans that idealistic Americans support despite a...

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Morning Must Reads -- Mid-Atlantic meltdown

Politico -- Dems, incumbents get wake-up call A blowout win in Virginia and an unexpectedly decisive victory in New Jersey have given Republicans reason to believe that they can succeed again after five long years in retreat. The elections were not a referendum on Obama, but perhaps on his party’s policies and priorities and certainly were a test of the president’s ability to help fellow Democrats in tough times. Whether Republicans can press the advantage into 2010 is an open question, illustrated by the loss in a New York House race caused by friction between base voters and some party leaders. But as writers Jonathan Martin and John Harris show, the immediate effects of...

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Morning Must Reads -- After the Hopium wears off

Wall Street Journal -- In Vote, Watch the Intensity Factor Voters today will choose the governors of Virginia and New Jersey, the representatives of House districts in New York and California, the mayors of New York City, Atlanta, and Detroit, and whether to allow gay marriage in Maine and Washington state and 24 other ballot initiatives (casino gambling, medical marijuana, etc.) across the land. But only three – New York’s House race, and the governorships – really matter on the national level because they are in places the president won handily last year and now see hotly contested elections. The voters in Virginia and New York’s 23rd Congressional District...

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If the French think Obama is haughty...

Steven Erlanger has an interesting piece in today's New York Times talking about Euro frustration with President Obama's foreign policy methods and priorities. But it was this passage that seemed so funny to me: "A lot of the problem is the fault of the Europeans themselves, said Hubert Védrine, a former French foreign minister. 'Europe for Obama is not a priority, not a problem and not a solution for his problems,' he said in an interview here. 'Obama keeps a distance and has a kind of hauteur' with European leaders, Mr. Védrine said. 'But that’s not a sufficient reason for Europeans to act like spectators' as Mr. Obama tries to cope with his...

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Morning Must Reads -- The Creigh Deeds of Kabul

New York Times -- Off-Year Races May Provide Insight Writer Adam Nagourney provides a useful tip sheet on the big off-year races being contested on Tuesday. He wastes a good bit of copy asking whether or not there are lessons to be learned, but then gives us the stuff. In my column today I argue that the biggest surprise of them all – the New York congressional race that has turned into a free for all – may help get the Republican Party off its keister. But it’s the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia that will hold the data over which political operatives will endlessly pore. “1) Virginia. Mr. Obama won this state, becoming the first presidential...

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Conservative revolt good news for Republicans

A liberal Republican was driven out of the race for a vacant House seat in upstate New York by a surge in support for the Conservative Party candidate. As a result, a political neophyte CPA running as a third-party candidate stands a good chance of getting elected to Congress on Tuesday. Democrats say they’re thrilled. The talking points already in heavy rotation say that a win by Conservative Doug Hoffman over Democrat Bill Owens will only encourage tea party populists to take on the Republican establishment. More primaries. Weaker general election candidates. Fewer Democratic losses in 2010. That’s the way Obama political operatives are spinning the withdrawal of Dede...

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Real congressional genius

In honor of today's revelation about the depth of the ethical issues Rep. John Murtha and his cronies on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee are facing for their connections to the PMA lobbying firm, I offer you this video homage to "Mr. Really in Your Face Earmarker." Time to kick back with a cold Bud Light, congressman. For one of the best from real commercial series click...

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Morning Must Reads -- The grim whimsy of Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman -- The Defining Moment Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally dropped her 2,000-page, $1.06 trillion health bill. Huge tax increases, withering requirements on employers and individuals, a bureaucratic expansion on par with the Department of Homeland Security, and plenty of shady side deals with special interests. It's a perfectly detestable piece of legislation: neither conscientiously liberal nor fiscally responsible. But what Dr. Krugman wants you to do is stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. He rightly says that the far Left will back Pelosi's bloated plan because even those who feel that it is too soft on insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals realize that it would...

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Morning Must Reads -- Growth, but still feeling fluish

Washington Post -- Obama seeks study on local leaders for troop decision Writers Scott Wilson and Greg Jaffe look at the way in which the president is preparing his announcement of a mini-surge in Afghanistan. It’s so detailed that Obama is breaking down the leadership structures and security needs of all the Afghan provinces. There are some shades of micromanagement here, but there’s also evidence of an effort to deal with Afghanistan regionally and cut out the middleman in Kabul. “The review group once included intelligence officials, generals and ambassadors, but it has recently narrowed to a far smaller number of senior civilian advisers, including [Vice...

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Bitter-enders cling to dreams of hope and change

America gave itself over to the dream of transformative change 51 weeks ago, but the moment has passed. Yet for a claque of die-hard Barack Obama fans, including many in the media, a new America is still just over the horizon. "Yes he can" blares the cover of the current edition of Newsweek, which bills itself as "A liberal's survival guide." Writer Anna Quindlen assures readers that while Obama has stumbled, he is still on track to deliver sweeping change. Newsweek is looking for relevancy these days, but like an 80-year-old woman in a miniskirt, its cover story draws the wrong kind of attention. It's a good example, though, of how the true believers are clinging...

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New low in White House name calling: Bush administration = the Redskins

I didn't notice this gem in Josh Gerstein's piece on the common refrain in Washington "What if George W. Bush had done that?": “As our administration makes progress on the agenda that Washington has ignored for too long, we expect we’ll get some news coverage of that progress that we like and some tough coverage that we don’t,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “It’s not unlike the New Orleans Saints, who are getting lots of good coverage of their perfect record so far — certainly better coverage than the [2-5] Redskins — but it doesn’t mean the Saints have liked every story that’s been written about them since...

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Morning Must Reads -- Where dithering stops and stalling begins

New York Times -- U.S. to Protect Populous Afghan Areas, Officials Say At what point does dithering become stalling? It’s already the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the November 2001 invasion of Afghanistan—eight more GIs were killed in bombings Tuesday to bring the total to 55. Taliban militants brazenly attacked the UN compound in downtown Kabul and across the border in Pakistan, suspected Talibani killed at least 90 people with a marketplace bomb on the day that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived to try to soothe anti-American sentiments. It is in this environment that writers Thom Shanker, Peter Baker, and Helene Cooper tell us that aside from knowing...

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Morning Must Reads -- Reid tries to get out from under the bus

Dana Milbank – Harry Reid, shopping for reelection insurance Milbank looks at the Senate majority leader’s solo performance in announcing that the final Senate health bill will include a government-run insurance plan and sees Nevada politics. With liberal groups pummeling Reid in his home state for his accommodating ways with moderates and his pursuit of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, Reid broke out of his closed-door meetings with the White House policy team and Sens. Max Baucus and Chris Dodd to announce he favored a government-run plan… kind of. Reid is a bad bet for reelection next year. He has lots of problems, including a son, Rory, running for governor on the...

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Morning Must Reads -- Harry Reid is so optimistic that he might just cry

New York Times -- Democrats Are Optimistic That Public Option Will Be Approved Writer Joseph Berger has caught the public option fever and he can’t shake it. Berger’s piece reflects a theme building steam since Harry Reid’s effort to dump Medicare costs into the deficit failed on Thursday: that Reid and President Obama will have no choice but to accept a government-run insurance plan favored by liberals. I argue in my column today that the re-emergence of a public option is not a good sign for overall Democratic aims. For the reasons Robert Samuelson and others ably explain, the dangers of such a plan are so great that they scare even some liberals. But Berger runs...

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Public option revival not a sign of strength

There is great excitement on the Left because the public option has been revived in the Democrats' health care plan. But while it may be cause to raise a glass of carbon-neutral pinot noir in Berkeley and on the Upper West Side, the renewed talk of a government-run insurance program is a sign of weakness, not strength, for President Obama's health plan. The president and his team have put the insurance industry at the top of their ever-lengthening list of enemies and are now threatening to cut them out of the great health care takeover. But the plan until recently was to turn the health insurance industry into a public utility: Americans would have no choice but to buy their products,...

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Morning Must Reads -- Confusing movement with progress on health care

Wall Street Journal -- Offer to Let States Opt Out of Health Plan Gains Support Harry Reid is sending up trial balloons faster than Richard Heene. Having seen his plan to shift a quarter-trillion dollars of Medicare payments to the deficit get popped by a dozen members of his own party, the majority leader has turned to the issue of having a new government insurance plan. He may either push for a public option that isn’t called that or something called a public option that doesn’t work as one. Writers Greg Hitt and Janet Adamy say that Reid is heading toward a national public option that individual states could choose to reject. It would be sort of like imposing the...

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Morning Must Reads -- Deficit worries nix key health proposal

New York Times -- Democrats Lose Big Test Vote on Health Legislation Ouch. Harry Reid thought that by taking the $247 billion cost of blocking scheduled cuts to Medicare reimbursements out of the main health bill and doing it as a separate deficit dump he might hold down costs f the larger legislation and get doctors and seniors on board. Not so much. There were 12 Senate Democrats (plus Joe Lieberman) who voted against the plan. It wasn’t just moderates like Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner, either. Conscientious liberals like Russ Feingold and Ron Wyden voted against the measure as being fiscally reckless. This limits dramatically the options that the majority leader and the...

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The White House wages an unworthy media war

Politicians are sounding a little paranoid about the media these days. The White House is trying to blockade the largest cable news network. A House candidate called the police when a reporter asked her about abortion. Congressional leaders turn to angry media critics as they talk about why support for health care legislation remains tepid. Lashing out at the press has always been a popular play for politicians in distress, and it's often a precursor to eventual failure. (See Hart, Gary, and Agnew, Spiro). But the antagonism of left-leaning politicians toward the conservative media goes beyond blaming the messenger. The vilification of media naysayers represents an effort to...

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Morning Must Reads -- He said it won't add a dime to the deficit. He didn't say anything about a quarter-trillion dollars.

Wall Street Journal -- Fight Over Medicare Cuts Plays Into Larger Debate Democrats’ bid to shore up support for a health-care overhaul among seniors and doctors with a $247 billion package of deficit spending on Medicare is looking pretty fishy. Writers Greg Hitt and Janet Adamy look at Majority Leader Harry Reid’s effort to keep two key constituencies on health care happy and engage in some creative accounting by on that “one dime” pledge President Obama made about the deficit. “The bill is supported by the American Medical Association and AARP, the lobbying group for seniors. Adoption of the measure would take one of the most contentious and costly...

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Morning Must Reads -- When will the Post get a real pollster?

New York Times -- Afghan Leader Said to Accept Runoff After Election Audit The Obama administration is waiting to see how things shake out in the Afghan elections before announcing what to do with U.S. troop levels. That gives the U.S. leverage over President Hamid Karzai, as does news that at least a quarter of his votes were fraudulent. Today, Karzai will accept a runoff election with rival Abdullah Abdullah, the first step in the Obama team’s effort to develop a coalition government between the two men. Writers Sabrina Taverise and Helene Cooper explain how the U.S. team, including Sen. John Kerry, is working hard to keep the veneer of autonomy for the Afghan government....

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Morning Must Reads -- Calculated dithering is still dithering

New York Times -- Decision on Afghan Troops May Wait Americans understand that losses are part of achieving the aims of a war. But seeing troops die in service of an unclear objective or because of political hand wringing is another matter. Sixty nine troops have died in Afghanistan since President Obama started his lengthy reconsideration of the war there, starting with his review of the McChrystal report on deteriorating security conditions. Obama is starting to pay a heavy political price for suspending his strategy, announced in March and vigorously defended in August, with troops still in harms way. Writers Peter Baker and Sabrina Tavernise pass along the message from the...

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Republican optimism may get scotched by reality

Republicans finally have reason to like the polls after four years of unrelenting bad news. But like a preseason top-10 football team, the optimism might only last until the first quarterback sack. In just six months, the GOP has clawed its way back from near irrelevancy. It has closed a 10-point gap in the generic ballot for the 2010 House election and become competitive in contests in previously safe Democratic states like Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut. Some of that can be credited to pragmatic candidate recruitment. With the exception of misreading the strength of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, the Republican establishment has made smart bets on which candidates would...

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Morning Must Reads -- Doing a little costs a lot

New York Times -- Job Program Found to Miss Many States That Need It Most The stimulus program’s inability to deal with unemployment remains the biggest political liability for the Obama administration. It merges economic fears with concerns about the exploding national debt. President Obama’s new preference for a straight cash dump for older Americans shows the growing realization that the Keynesian impulses of strategic big spending have given way to a more desperate approach of borrowing money to give away to placate political opponents. But even so, the stimulus must be turned into a positive, or at least less of a negative, to prevent an electoral disaster. A nod to...

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Congressman's questionable real-estate deal now in foreclosure

Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., once got into hot water for the huge gains he and his wife racked up on investment properties with allegations of hidden income. Back then, Mollohan said that the reason for his multi-million jump in assets from 2000 to 2004 was because of his wife's real estate acumen. The National Legal and Policy Center found that the value of one the 27 condos in DC which the congressman and his wife were part owners increased from between $2,002 and $30,000 to between $2 million and $10 million in just 10 years. Of particular note in the Mollohans' holdings was a beach home worth millions on North Carolina's Bald Head Island, owned in conjunction with a former staffer...

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Morning Must Reads -- Our commitment to cutting Medicare begins with... A $13 billion giveaway!

New York Times -- White House Team Joins Talks on Health Care Bill It’s Obama’s health-care bill now. The session in Ted Kennedy’s old conference room with Majority Leader Harry Reid at the head of the table, flanked by senators Max Baucus and Chris Dodd, gazing down at President Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, administration budget boss Peter Orszag, Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, and White House Legislative Director Phil Schiliro was pure kabuki, but significant kabuki. The real negotiations are taking place in phone calls and emails including lobbyists and interest groups and pretty obviously don’t have much to...

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Disillusioned liberals yearn for Hillary Clinton

Where were you when you came to the panicky realization that Hillary Clinton was right? For me, it was while driving to work one recent morning and talking with a colleague about the state of the health legislation. I was explaining how the Obama plan wasn’t really about universal coverage but rather cutting a deal with the insurance industry and then making it look good for liberals. I paused, realizing that I had just repeated, almost verbatim, the lines that Clinton used to bludgeon then-Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries. As they debated in Cleveland — the nastiest of their one-on-one matchups after John Edwards dropped out to spend more time with his...

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Morning Must Reads -- Health-care bill in the burning ring of fire

USA Today -- GOP's Snowe shaped health bill before backing it If Republicans were upset to see Olympia Snowe break ranks, imagine the disappointment of some Democrats who now must try to entice her as the bill moves forward. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, a team from the White House and Max Baucus will now go behind closed doors to make a new bill and Snowe’s vote puts pressure on them to keep it more reasonable in hopes of a bipartisan plan. The Left thought that once the hope of bipartisanship was gone, the Senate could get a more liberal bill passed — and perhaps employ the so-called nuclear option to with only 51 votes to create a bill that would have mirrored the...

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Morning Must Reads -- More costs, less coverage: what a sales pitch!

Los Angeles Times -- Universal healthcare coverage appears elusive The president and his fellow Democrats like to talk about being closer to the goal of universal health care than ever before, but what is being discussed in Congress isn’t really universal health care but rather a plan to regulate insurance companies and force Americans to buy their products or pay a fine. And at the end, at least 17 million people will still be uncovered. With warnings that private premiums would go up, Medicare coverage would go down, and access to care might be limited, American taxpayers may find the goal of near-universal coverage an unworthy of such a high price. Examiner colleague Susan...

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Obama will stick with embattled OSHA nominee if he knows who pays the bills

Liberal discontentment with President Obama knows many forms, and will no doubt grow as he continues to, in labor-union terms, "slow wobble" the jobs on Afghanistan, gay marriage, Guantanamo, etc. And if it weren't for the self-preservation instincts that have brought the liberal Left back together to defend Obama from conservative attacks, the president's approval with his own party would already be substantially lower. One particular area of frustration for liberals is the president's failure to stand by his men. Green jobs czar/conspiracy theorist Van Jones and federal art publicist/propoganda enthusiast Yosi Sergent were both men of the Left who the administration kissed...

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Must Reads -- Still looking for an applause line on health care

New York Times -- Insurance Industry Assails Health Care Legislation The blowback has begun. Democrats closed last week strong on health care – a report from the CBO that showed good marks on deficit reduction for the least liberal version of the plan, a display of ersatz bipartisanship by President Obama, and a lot of credulous questions from reporters about a new momentum behind health care. But now, to paraphrase Johnny Cash, Monday morning is coming down. First, it began to occur to smart people that you can’t spend $900 billion without raising the deficit unless someone pays for it. The middle class tax increase to pay for health care is proving as popular as sand...

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Morning Must Reads -- Arafat, Gore, Carter, and now Obama

Associated Press -- Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize It’s not the Olympics, but it’s still a nice showing of Euro love for the President. Making him the third sitting president to receive the prize (TR for settling the Russo-Japanese War and Woodrow Wilson for the Treaty of Versailles) and the fourth overall, President Obama got the nod from Oslo today. Jimmy Carter won in 2002 for general peaciness, but that was after the prize had already become something of a groaner and largely intended to point out American arrogance or scold George W. Bush specifically. What did Obama do to promote peace, since the world is no more peaceful today than it was when he took over as...

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Morning Must Reads -- The best-case scenario for health care

Bloomberg -- Senate Finance Panel Prepares Health-Plan Vote After CBO Boost Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio explains in concise fashion the costs and consequences of the most conservative of the health plans in Congress as described by the Congressional Budget Office: it’s less than $900 billion and doesn’t increase the deficit but it also forces people out of their policies and levies large new taxes. Writers Kristin Jensen and Brian Faler look ahead to see how moderate Democrats (and Olympia Snowe) are feeling now that the high water mark has been set for fiscal restraint. They welcomed the CBO report, but it was also clear that they didn’t greet it as a major...

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Phony bipartisanship is no substitute for debate

Liberals are having a splendid time telling the Republican Party what it ought to be. But the spider does not design the fly, and the general does not get to plan his enemy's attack. There is something amusing in the lament among liberal intellectuals that conservatives have turned into what faux centrist Sam Tanenhaus calls "radicals who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government." American conservatives have never thought government virtuous. That's why they want so little of it. The Republican Party has been through dozens of iterations in the past 153 years: abolitionism, pro-plutocracy, progressivism, steady hands, radical lurches, and on and on....

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Morning Must Reads -- Goldilocks in Afghanistan

New York Times -- Obama Rules Out Large Reduction in Afghan Force The White House message on Afghanistan after a big powwow with congressional leaders is the same as it is on all of the other issues on which the administration is currently kicking the can -- health care, the deficit, inflation, taxes, etc: when the moment comes they will do exactly the right thing, whatever that is. The president told the upper crust of Congress that on Afghanistan, he won’t surge and he won’t scale back. The blind quotes and hints from members of Congress indicate that Obama plans to keep the same number of troops (about 68,000) but use them differently than he directed in March --...

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Morning Must Reads -- Afghan, jobs pressure mounting at White House

Wall Street Journal -- Gates Silences Strategy Talk As Examiner colleague Julie Mason points out, the administration blowback against the uncharacteristic public pressure being applied by Gen. Stanley McChrystal for more resources for Afghanistan was unmistakable. But writers Peter Spiegel and Anand Gopal alert us to something else: an effort to insulate the president from other political pressures on Afghanistan. Facing liberal unrest and near-monolithic conservative opposition on domestic issues, the president may be tempted to use the war and foreign policy as a bargaining chip and make his decisions as part of a grand game in Washington. Good commanders in chief pick strategies...

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Morning Must Reads -- A tipping point for Afghanistan. But in which direction?

Washington Post -- Deadly Attack By Taliban Tests New Strategy The consequences of a Taliban attack that killed 8 Americans at a 140-man border outpost in Afghanistan are being sharply felt in Washington as President Obama tries to make up his mind about the conflict. The attack complicates the administration’s pushback against the public pressure from Gen. Stanley McChrystal for more troops for the war effort, with the White House tapping National Security Advisor James Jones to appear on Sunday shows to chide McChrystal for not going through the chain of command and painting too bleak a picture of the security situation in Afghanistan. Writers Joshua Partlow and Greg Jaffe...

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Ugly health debate reflects an ugly culture

People are doing a tremendous amount of hand-wringing about the tenor of the national debate. But at least Americans are finally being rude about something that matters. Most of the bad, boorish behavior that Americans increasingly inflict on each other is for selfish reasons or no reason at all. Anyone who has ever been to a professional football game or gone shopping on the day after Thanksgiving surely can’t be surprised that things have gotten a little ugly as we discuss health care and, by extension, our fundamental relationship with our government. Survivors of an increasingly coarse American society where adults routinely get into fistfights over the athletic exploits of...

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No snickering about the Olympic loss, please

While some may be snickering at the surprising first-round defeat of Chicago in the Olympic bidding -- and the Oprah-riffic sense of celebrity entitlement with which Chicago and the Obama entourage approached the bid did make the Windy City's enterprise feel hubristic -- I tend to see the decision as pretty bad news for the USA. Once President Obama put national prestige on the line by backing his city's bid, being so easily brushed off by the Olympic grandees is a real slap and a revelation of our world status, Obama or no Obama. The White House has been laughing off claims that the president's stunts pose a risk -- an address to Congress, a five-show Sunday swing, doing the late-night...

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Morning Must Reads -- Unemployment still climbing. Hey Oprah, can you spare a krone?

Bloomberg -- U.S. Employers Cut More Jobs Than Forecast; Unemployment Rises The economy is looking better for Wall Street but Main street is still taking a pasting as the unemployment rate climbed to its 26-year high — more than 2 points higher that promised when the Obama stimulus was approved -- and companies continued layoffs at a steeper rate than expected. Writer Bob Willis has the data: “The Labor Department today also published its preliminary estimate for the annual benchmark revisions to payrolls that will be issued in February. They showed the economy may have lost an additional 824,000 jobs in the 12 months ended March 2009. The data currently show a 4.8...

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Universal coverage is not about the public option

The battle over the public option on health care has been little more than a distracting skirmish. Liberals are fired up because the final Senate health bill will almost certainly not include a provision for a government-run, nonprofit insurance company. Moderate Democrats and Republicans are cheering because the dread provision is staggering like a wino in a stiff breeze. But so what? The bill will include a new law that requires every American to buy government-approved health insurance with free or subsidized coverage for those who can't afford it. Universal coverage with middle- and upper-income earners paying for the poor has been the liberal goal for generations. It shouldn't...

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Morning Must Reads -- What about a carbon cap on the Taliban?

New York Times -- E.P.A. Moves to Curtail Greenhouse Gas Emissions President Obama is playing hardball on global warming in hopes that his trip back to Copenhagen for Kyoto II in December won’t be in vain. The day that the Senate version of the president’s preferred plan for reducing industrial emissions through the creation of a new currency of government carbon credits the EPA laid out new rules to regulate the carbon dioxide output from every power plant in the nation with fines and penalties for those that violate the Obama administration’s standard. As Writer John Broder acknowledges, it will be a long process, 2011 at the soonest and likely 2013 after lawsuits...

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Universal coverage is not about the public option

The battle over the public option on health care has been little more than a distracting skirmish. Liberals are fired up because the final Senate health bill will almost certainly not include a provision for a government-run, nonprofit insurance company. Moderate Democrats and Republicans are cheering because the dread provision is staggering like a wino in a stiff breeze. But so what? The bill will include a new law that requires every American to buy government-approved health insurance with free or subsidized coverage for those who can’t afford it. Universal coverage with middle- and upper-income earners paying for the poor has been the liberal goal for generations. It...

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Morning Must Reads -- Who better than Joe Biden and John Kerry to get this whole Afghanistan thing ironed out?

Wall Street Journal -- White House Starts Review of Afghan Strategy The Obama team is carrying a heavy course load, but they’re cramming for their big test on Afghanistan. As Examiner colleague Julie Mason observes, today’s second-ever teleconference with Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal is also part of a PR effort to show that the president is doing more than just contemplating the worsening situation there. Writers Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman see where this is all heading: “Mr. Obama gave voice to a possible shift in emphasis on Tuesday when he spoke of ‘dismantling, disrupting, destroying the al Qaeda network’ as the mission, without...

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Morning Must Reads -- But what does Oprah think about the Iranian intelligence?

New York Times -- Nuclear Debate Brews: Is Iran Designing Warheads? President Obama’s efforts to be the anti-Bush have taken us to a strange moment in history in which the United States is being scolded by France for a lack of resolve on foreign affairs. As the Wall Street Journal editorial shows, French President Nicholas Sarkozy could barely contain his contempt for Obama’s decision to not confront Iran about its nuclear program at the United Nations. Now, writers William Broad, Mark Mazzetti and David Sanger show us that in advance Thursday’s talks -- the first direct diplomacy between America and Iran in 30 years -- the U.S. is resisting European and Israeli...

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Can wrestling's McMahon play it straight in her Senate run?

We might have guessed that the entry of World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon into the race to unseat Sen. Chris Dodd in Connecticut might have made for some good moments. Her first ad is McMahon talking a businesslike way about her goals and her family's business -- very straight. A blogger at Pajamas Media has re-cut the ad with some of her in-ring antics -- and a joke about a kick to the groin. You can view it here. It's a little over the top, but would have been an interesting way for her to handle the, um, colorful nature of her business and get the jump on opponents who might like to use the video against her. If she plays it straight, she'll get hammered for the...

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Morning Must Reads -- Exit strategies foreign and domestic

The Hill -- Despite pressure, McChrystal to hold firm on request for troops Appearing on 60 Minutes, the allied commander in Afghanistan kept the pressure on the Obama administration for a speedy decision on his request for what is reportedly 40,000 more troops for the fight. As I argue in my column today, the president is looking for a middle way on the war: another strategy shift that reduces the demand for reinforcements but doesn’t concede that the Obama doctrine of nation building is kaput. This is magical thinking. One sign that the administration isn’t ready to go through with a radical change, though, is that Secretary of State Clinton and other Western diplomats...

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Obama can't avoid hard choices on Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan may be a situation with no good outcomes. This means Barack Obama faces the kind of decision every president dreads: choosing the lesser evil. Public opinion is mostly divided into two camps -- one that holds that we must do whatever necessary and another that insists that victory as Obama has defined it -- the creation of a stable, Western-style nation -- is impossible. About 40 percent of voters favor a further escalation. Another 40 percent support withdrawal. Of the 20 percent left over, most would like to have more success with no additional sacrifices. This 20 percent, like the president and his team, is engaging in magical thinking. Since getting the bad...

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Morning Must Reads -- Iran has secret nuclear program. In other news, water still wet

New York Times -- U.S. to Accuse Iran of Having Secret Nuclear Fuel Facility The headline should actually be “U.S. to accuse Iran of admitting to having secret nuclear fuel facility.” Having gotten support for a United Nations resolution heightening the opprobrium with which nuclear proliferation is met, President Obama today looks to test the new standard by publicizing Iran’s cryptic revelation of an ongoing effort to make nuclear fuel. The U.S. has known about the facility for years (it’s the one Dick Cheney wanted to bomb as a housewarming present for Obama) but the Iranians admitted the existence of the program in a letter to the International Atomic...

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Morning Must Reads -- No nukes?

Wall Street Journal -- U.N. to Pass Nuclear-Safeguards Plan Today, Barack Obama will be the first American president ever to be the chairman at meeting of the U.N. Security Council. He’s set the table to have the meeting be focused on a resolution in support of nuclear disarmament, his top foreign policy issue. Giving in to Russian demands on missile defense and other moves helped pave the way for unanimous approval. But those on the Left and Right want to know: What about Afghanistan? The New York Times editorial page chides Obama today for leaving the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan out of his speech to the General Assembly on Wednesday. If Obama doesn’t use his...

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Independents desert Obama, putting 2010 in play

Independent voters are turning away from President Obama and his fellow Democrats in droves. And if they can't find a way to get them back, the party could be in deep trouble for 2010 and beyond. Independents gave Obama the White House last year with a vote for pragmatic competence. They have been repaid with partisanship and dithering. And unlike liberals who Obama has quickly re-energized after their summer doldrums, independents are devilishly hard to win back once they lose faith. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the Rolls-Royce of public surveys, showed that for the first time, independents disapproved of the president's performance, 46 percent to 41 percent. For the...

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Morning Must Reads -- Flash back to Afghanistan

New York Times -- Obama Is Considering Strategy Shift in Afghan War When President Obama made a throaty defense of his broader, nation-building aims in Afghanistan on Aug. 17, he said: “The insurgency in Afghanistan didn't just happen overnight. And we won't defeat it overnight. This will not be quick. This will not be easy.” But six months after deciding to escalate the Afghan war and more than a month after calling it a “war of necessity,” the president is considering a dramatic a dramatic reduction in the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan proposed by Vice President Biden. It comes as a new Wall Street Journal poll says that Americans are starting to have...

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Morning Must Reads -- Who said anything about a war of necessity?

Washington Post -- General's Review Creates Rupture Writer Karen DeYoung provides a very useful look at the splintering relationship between the Obama administration and the military as the president looks for a way to climb down from his warlike language and more-ambitious goals on Afgahnistan. Afraid of getting stuck with the blame, the Pentagon is moving to try to implement the president’s goals before he can wriggle out of them. Obama’s team, meanwhile, seems to be wriggling fast and playing for more time against the military. “But before any decision is made, some of President Obama's civilian advisers have proposed looking at other, less costly options to...

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Morning Must Reads -- Afghan policy springs a leak

Washington Post -- McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure' The first big leak from the military during the Obama era went public hours after the president accused his commanders of putting the “resource question ahead of the strategy question.” Someone in the chain of command slipped Bob Woodward the 66-page assessment of the situation in Afghanistan by commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal that suggests without a substantial increase in U.S. forces, the war against Taliban insurgents will be irrevocably lost. The report has been on President Obama’s desk for two weeks, but the White House has been sitting on the bombshell as Democrats have complained more bitterly...

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Obama won’t win by calling opponents cowards

During his current media bombardment, President Obama is wisely downplaying the charges of racism his allies have been making. He told CNN’s John King that race wasn’t “the overriding issue” for the opponents of his health care plan. Not exactly an exoneration of his critics’ racial attitudes, but at least an acknowledgment that there is more than bigotry at work. What Obama says is really driving the negative response to his policies is fear. Fear of “big changes.” Fear of “uncertainty.” The president likes to equate the resistance he’s facing with that met by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. It’s nice that Obama...

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Morning Must Reads -- No love for fiscal responsibility after all

Washington Post -- Affordability Is Major Challenge for Reform If you want a health plan that “bends the cost curve,” Sen. Max Baucus has given you one. But the problem is that liberal supporters of health care don’t really want to bend the cost curve, they want to give away health care. And conservatives are not concerned about the deficit as much as they are the federal takeover of our lives -- having already seen so much regulation of our liberties and pursuits of happiness. Baucus’ bill offers a grim vision of the future with compulsory coverage, huge taxes on, or passed on to, the middle class, and millions of Americans dumped into a health-care purgatory...

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Morning Must Reads -- They hated all of the components. But other than that, they thought the bill was great

Washington Post -- From Finance Chief, a Bill That May Weather the Blows The legislative vessel that will carry the president’s health-care ambitions forward was christened amid the angry shouts of the Left and to the disregard of the Right. By the time Democratic senators are through with the bill in the Senate Finance Committee, the legislation will be more suitable to liberals, appalling to conservatives, and scary to moderates. But after months of gobbling up White House spin on health and credulously passing it along, writer Ceci Connolly has decided that the more people who fulminate against the “compromise” bill produced by Sen. Max Baucus, the...

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The Left overplays the race card for Obama

It's too bad that the first black president wasn't a conservative. Not that there wouldn't have been charges of racism and some actual racism, too. But it would have finally dispelled the old myth about the racist Right and the tolerant Left. As it is, many liberals who once complained about being labeled unpatriotic for their vituperative opposition to George W. Bush are suggesting that anyone who opposes the policies of President Obama is a racist. Jimmy Carter, who at age 85 has still not tired of inflicting damage to his own party, suggested in an MSNBC interview that the broad-based opposition that has met Obama's proposals is racist. "I think it's bubbled up to the surface...

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Morning Must Reads -- If you don't like Obamacare, check your 'racism inclination'

Washington Post -- As Right Jabs Continue, White House Debates a Counterpunching Strategy The string of small conservative successes – exposing White House green jobs czar Van Jones’ unsavory associations, busting Obama ally ACORN for corruption, and holding big rallies – has the Obama administration wondering how to deal with those who are resisting the change the president is trying to bring. Writer Anne Kornblut talks to several unnamed administration sources about how Team Obama is dealing with the restive Right. But the old approach of “myth” busting that the team prefers may work to some extent for “death panels” as it did for the once...

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Morning Must Reads -- Keeping the bounce going or just repeating mistakes?

New York Times -- New Objections to Baucus Health Care Proposal In what continues to be a frustration for Democrats, the bipartisan gang of six on the Senate Finance Committee is now hearing and circulating the objections of Republican members. With the next deadline – a committee vote next week – looming, Dems don’t want to see a lot of foot dragging on points where there is unlikely to be bipartisanism. For Republicans Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, Olympia Snowe, avoiding the idea of a federal health mandate – get insurance, go into a government program, or pay a hefty fine – is a top priority. All three have proposed alternatives, including Snowe’s...

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Morning Must Reads -- Be regulated or be nationalized

New York Times -- U.S. Is Finding Its Role in Business Hard to Unwind The reason the executive branch needs more regulatory control over the financial sector is that otherwise it has to take direct control of companies. That’s the argument from the Obama administration and allies that runs through the piece by writers Edmund Andrews and David Sanger. As president Obama prepares to make his speech rearticulating and expanding his vision of a new set of financial regulations and consumer protection in New York today, his team, including Economic Vizier Larry Summers, explain the “be regulated or be nationalized” argument. In the process, Andrews and Sanger point out...

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Left swallows defeats to pave way for victory

It will be the $900 billion cost of President Obama's health plan that will cause the most problems among Democrats. Deciding whom to tax, hiding the fact that they are pushing the national debt past 100 percent of our gross domestic product, and trying to wiggle out of the political blame for Medicare cuts should keep the majority party busy through much of the fall. An already long battle for liberals is only just beginning as the Congressional Budget Office keeps dumping boiling oil on the advancing forces of do-gooderism. The idea that giving away health care saves money is so laughable that the phrase "bend the cost curve" may become the "mission accomplished" of the Obama...

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On the Sunday Shows: The “You lie!” congressman speaks and Dems face off on health care

FOX NEWS SUNDAY’ 9 a.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific » Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. » Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. » Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah » Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. » Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. NBC’S ‘MEET THE PRESS’ 9 a.m. Eastern/8 a.m. Pacific » Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. » Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas » Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean » Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich On the roundtable: » CNBC host Erin Burnett » Author Joshua Cooper Ramo » NBC Political Director Chuck Todd ABC’S ‘THIS WEEK’ 10:30 a.m. Eastern/8 a.m. Pacific » Sen. Jay...

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Morning Must Reads -- Butter, Then Guns

New York Times -- Obama Facing Doubts Within His Own Party on Afghanistan If the president wants to get liberals on board with a health plan that will look more like Mitt Romney’s than Henry Waxman’s, he is going to have to heed their calls on Afghanistan. Writers Eric Schmitt and David Sanger look at the state of political play after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi practically dared the president to seek a troop increase that the Pentagon will soon be requesting. Military leaders, though, are increasingly alarmed about a vague but growing mission, a crumbling local government, and a more effective enemy. They warn that without a substantial increase now, U.S. casualties will...

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Morning Must Reads -- Everyone Gets Insurance... Or Else

Los Angeles Times -- Obama avoids the details on divisive issues to keep his healthcare goals on track President Obama managed to create a new center of gravity among Democrats on health care in his speech to Congress, but he also raised more questions than he answered. Writer Noam Levey looks at the risks and potential rewards of keeping his proposal – new regulations for insurance companies, a new, government-run insurance plan and a new law making health insurance mandatory for every American – vague. It may be a quantum leap forward in specificity from his earlier statements and liberals did thrill to his defiant tone, but as the New York Times lead editorial said...

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Obama picks a fight with talk radio - and loses

Democrats beat Republicans soundly in 2008. But they're losing the fight with their current opponent - conservatives on the Internet, radio, and television. It was the wrong battle for President Obama and his party to pick in the first place, but the policy decisions and mistakes made since the Democratic takeover have shifted the battle to even less favorable terrain. Worse still, the fight is only just beginning. The strategy early on in the administration was to mock talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Remember the weeks of discussion over whether Limbaugh was the head of the GOP? That was back in the days when the White House was feeling invincible and thought it was a grand...

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Morning Must Reads - Left May Accept Emotion Over Substance on Health

Washington Post -- In Illinois, a Similar Fight Tested a Future President A story this bad needs to be read. Writers Michael Shear and Ceci Connolly engage in a massive bait and switch as they take thousands of words to talk about how state Sen. Barack Obama dealt with the issue of health care as the proponent of the Illinois Health Care Justice Act in 2004, intended to expand coverage to the state’s uninsured. Like a treatment for a political remake of Rocky, the story has Obama aiming high and then seeming almost defeated by impossible odds. The story reaches its crescendo as the gentleman from Cook County rises to accuse those who complain about a back door to socialized...

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Morning Must Reads -- Rebuilding the Straw Man Factory

New York Times -- As Obama Speech Nears, Details on a Compromise With the president’s latest prime-time address on health care looming, would-be dealmaker Sen. Max Baucus is pushing hard on what he hoped to be a bipartisan plan on health care. What Baucus has ended up with has some things for moderate Democrats: modestly expanding health coverage by growing Medicaid and a stab at health co-ops paid for by a bevy of new taxes and fees on the insurance and health industries. It has one major thing that Republicans like – it allows for insurance companies to sell stripped-down, catastrophic policies to young Americans, something currently blocked by state insurance...

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Morning Must Reads -- Truthers and Birthers and Taxes. Oh My.

New York Times -- New Fee on Health Insurance Companies Is Proposed to Help Expand Coverage Sen. Max Baucus is not ready to step aside on health care as he works to get a bill out of his Finance Committee before the president tries yet another approach on the issue Wednesday. The name of the game in the Senate is pleasing Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who Baucus and the White House hope will be the 60th vote for a less ambitious, but still expensive health-care plan. Baucus has been working with Snowe for months but now faces a Tuesday deadline for putting together a bill. Writer Robert Pear suggested that Baucus’ plan for raising the dough needed to fund expanded coverage has...

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Sen. Kit Bond calls for investigation of Green Jobs Czar Van Jones

The senior senator from Missouri has sent a letter to the head of the Senate green jobs subcommittee, Vermont's Sen. Bernie Sanders, calling for an investigation into Green Jobs Czar Van Jones' connection to the "truther" movement. One of the reasons Senators have been complaining about the proliferation of czars in the Obama White House is that they can be given broad portfolios without any Senate approval. Picking such a fringe character for such a big job may end up creating momentum for more Senate oversight. You can join John McCormack's contest to guess Jones' departure date from the Obama White House at The Weekly Standard. Here's the letter: September 4, 2009 The...

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Morning Must Reads -- Dems say Obama AWOL on Afghanistan Pitch

Reuters – U.S. August payrolls fall 216,000, jobless rate 9.7 percent The short term news was not as bad as expected but the long-term picture was significantly bleaker. This further complicates the administration’s 200-days-of-stimulus celebration over the weekend more complicated. “U.S. employers cut a fewer-than-expected 216,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high, the government said on Friday in a report showing a still fragile labor market. The Labor Department said the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent after dipping to 9.4 percent in July and the decline in payrolls was the smallest in a year. The department revised job...

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Morning Must Reads -- From a Joint Session of Congress to Mrs. Miller's 3rd Grade Class, He'll Talk Anywhere

New York Times -- Obama Aides Aim to Simplify and Scale Back Health Bills They’ve figured out where to say it, but the White House is still trying to figure out what to say when the president makes his address to Congress next week. While administration bargainers are working to see how much they could get through the Senate and how little they could get through the House. In my column today I argue that doing a 51-vote budget reconciliation on a real plan was never a credible threat, so the pressure is really on the White House to bring back some of the Republicans who the administration was dismissing last week. Writers Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes look at what’s...

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President Obama fiddles while health care burns

President Barack Obama is trading in his only bargaining chip in the health care debate, but there’s no reason to expect that it will change the game. The White House has climbed down in stutter steps from Obama’s support for a new government-run insurance program. It was once the only thing that we knew the president supported. That’s at least one health care myth dispelled, I suppose. Obama was wise to hold on to the public option for as long as he could, though. Dropping the idea makes liberals see red. They know that the fastest way to get to a single-payer, European-style system is to start with a public plan. So does Obama. But the idea never had a chance in...

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Morning Must Reads -- Two Presidencies in One

Politico -- Under fire, Obama shifts strategy After two brutal months, Team Obama is ready to try something different but can’t seem to decide what that would be. In the same way that Karl Rove once did, White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod gave some interviews to lay the groundwork for the next political gambit. In an indication of the state of confusion is, Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei took Axelrod to be saying that a compromise was in the offing while the Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Weisman and Janet Adamy heard Axelrod talking about getting tough with opponents. Both are probably right, but that an already muddled message remains this confused...

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Obama was a health-care "myth" buster in 2004 too

If you're wondering what it would sound like if President Obama actually debated health care reform, this audio from 2004 gives a good idea. In it, then state Sen. Brack Obama went after Republican Sen. Peter Roskam (now a congressman from suburban Chicago) over the Illinois Health Care Justice Act. Roskam suggested that the Obama-sponsored bill, which created a panel that later recommended an individual insurance mandate, a public insurance option and generous subsidies for Illinois in 2007. The state legislature has sat on the proposal since then. But at the time, Republicans have argued that it was a back door to having a single-payer system once private insurers were put out of...

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Morning Must Reads -- The Anti-War Right Re-Emerges

New York Times -- Groundwork Is Laid for New Troops in Afghanistan The report on the condition on the newly expanded U.S. mission in Afghanistan is making its way to the president’s desk. But as writers Peter Baker and Dexter Filkins point out, sooner or later, President Obama is going to have to read it and the assessment that the 21,000 additional troops committed to the country are not sufficient to the nation-building job he has set out for them. Estimates for what the eventual ask will be hover around 35,000 more troops for the increasingly violent country. The president took a bellicose line two weeks ago (calling it a “war of necessity”) and accepted ownership...

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Morning Must Reads -- Winning Ugly

New York Times -- Stronger Prospects for the President on a Health Care Bill Any Democratic senators who missed Sunday’s editorial in the Times that counseled ramming through a health-care bill with 51 votes was the only thing left to do, Writer John Harwood provides a field guide for employing the nuclear option. Harwood suggests that the basis of the plan will be mandatory insurance for every American, huge subsidies, and regulations to convert insurance companies into public utilities. How much it costs, who it covers and when it goes into effect? Details! The important thing is that a W is a W. “The Finance Committee is pursuing a plan costing roughly $900 billion...

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Chris Stirewalt: Obama should copy Reagan and keep it simple

Americans understand that the presidency is an awfully hard job. That generates much-needed good will, especially in tough times. But voters won’t tolerate a president making things harder than they need to be. And with the latest changes in how we deal with terrorists, Americans are again worried that President Barack Obama is making the seemingly impossible job of protecting the country unnecessarily complex. Having the FBI investigate the CIA for seven-year-old offenses against mass murderers or turning the war in Afghanistan into a decade-long effort to build a liberal democracy are examples of Obama’s tendency to make a hard job harder. It may be a lack of humility or...

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On the Sunday shows -- Cheney bites back and Kennedy remembered

‘FOX NEWS SUNDAY’ 9 a.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific ------------------------------------- » Former Vice President Dick Cheney CBS’ ‘FACE THE NATION’ 10:30 a.m. Eastern/8:30 a.m. Pacific ----------------------------------------------- » Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. » Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. » Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah » Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. » Georgetown University sociologist Michael Eric Dyson NBC’S ‘MEET THE PRESS’ 9 a.m. Eastern/8 a.m. Pacific ------------------------------------ » Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. » Democratic strategist Bob Shrum » Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen...

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Morning Must Reads -- Mr. Holder's Prerogative

Washington Post -- Holder's Decision To Probe CIA Hints At a New Dynamic Attorney General Eric Holder has tremendous stroke inside the Obama administration. According to writers Carrie Johnson and Anne Kornblut, his decision to launch a criminal probe of the CIA was met with a presidential nod, even though the administration has publicly acknowledged that such a prosecution will make fighting Islamists harder and be a political liability. The story ends up being mostly treacle about how President Obama is both wise and good based on blind quotes from administration officials. But the nugget of news that Obama gave the tacit okay to Holder does have some consequence. First, it...

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White House says no one "bemoaned" Bush vacations?

The president is going to add another min-vacation to his August break next week with a a four-day weekend at Camp David. No big deal. But the administration, ever sensitive to criticism, had to rationalize the time at the presidential retreat, with Spokesman Bill Burton saying that the vacation week has been newsier than expected considering the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy. From Politico: "'When you're president, you've always got that job,' Burton said. On Monday, Burton pointed to former President George W. Bush's vacation habits to defends scattered criticism of Obama's August schedule 'As I recall, the previous president [took] quite a bit of vacation himself, and I don't...

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Morning Must Reads -- No Grace Period on Health

New York Times – Push Grows for Fast Choice on a Successor to Kennedy Many Democrats tried to suggest that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death should cool passions on health care and make the passage of a bill more possible, but Kennedy hadn’t been part of the legislative process and embattled Sen. Chris Dodd is the custodian of the bill that bears Kennedy’s name, and Dodd is ill-equipped to revive the stalled legislation. President Obama may wrap himself in Kennedy’s legacy, but by Monday morning when Obama goes back to work, the over-the-top coverage of his death and funeral will already be fading from view. Plus, in the parts of the nation where the legislation is...

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With Teddy gone, liberals want fire from Obama

With the passing of their last great champion, American liberals will have to decide whether it’s time to renew the fight or accept being sold out again. If President Barack Obama wants to get his administration on track, he had better hope for the latter. Liberals loved Ted Kennedy because he did not apologize for his liberalism or try to hide it under euphemisms. He made them feel good about their views, which he said were not just necessary, but right. The frustrations of 40 years of thwarted liberal aims thundered in his voice. Whether he was savaging George W. Bush’s foreign policy or demanding an increase in the minimum wage, Kennedy didn’t sound like some...

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Morning Must Reads -- After the Lion

Boston Herald -- Sen. Edward M. Kennedy dies at age 77 Ted Kennedy knew he was near the end and did everything he could to clear the way for the health legislation that bears his name. That included seeking to overturn the law passed by Massachusetts Democrats in 2004 to prevent then-Gov. Mitt Romney from appointing the successor to Sen. John Kerry if Kerry had won the presidency. While Kennedy will be eulogized at length for the next week, the fate of the bill that was his obsession for the last six months of his life is the real issue. President Obama owes Kennedy a huge debt. Without Kennedy’s February endorsement, Obama would have had much more trouble closing the deal with...

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Morning Must Reads -- Let's Talk About Something Else, Shall We?

Financial Times – Obama to offer Bernanke second term What do you do when you find out that you’re $9,000,000,000,000 in the hole instead of just $7,000,000,000,000 and are running up the numbers at a rate four times higher than ever before? Reappoint the guy who will print the money to pay it all off. Looking to soothe markets that have gotten jittery after a brief, good run and, most of all, distract from today’s release of revised debt projections that were already delayed a month to coincide with the president’s vacation, President Obama today will announce that he is reappointing Ben Bernanke to another four-year term. Bernanke, whose term runs five more...

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Morning Must Reads -- Past is Present on Afghanistan

New York Times—Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases In moves that will help reunite the political Left, further inflame the Right, and seed deeper doubts about the Obama administration in the center, Attorney General Eric Holder will release a mountain of details from an investigation into CIA treatment of terror detainees and open the door to criminal prosecutions of U.S. agents. Writer David Johnston says that today Holder will make public the recommendation from his staff that cases pitched by the Bush Justice Department should be reopened. This is likely the final step before Holder taps a special prosecutor to seek out American war crimes. Most of the...

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The thrill is gone for Obama and the media

There’s nothing like a summer vacation to rekindle a romance. So maybe a week on Martha’s Vineyard can bring back some of the magic between the Obama administration and the media. Before White House press secretary Robert Gibbs left town, he tried to clarify President Barack Obama’s comment that “everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.” Gibbs explained to reporters that what the president meant was that they were a bunch of bed wetters who made too much out of the implosion of the White House health care strategy. Gibbs has grown more sardonic and patronizing as the summer wears on and Obama’s poll numbers wilt. The press secretary has lectured...

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Morning Must Reads -- Angry at Numbers

Washington Post -- Faith in Obama Drops As Reform Fears Rise At the beginning of the summer it seemed certain that the only thing that could hold back President Obama and his fellow Democrats would be a worsening economy. But the new ABC/Washington Post poll shows that even as people express more optimism about the economy, approval for the president’s performance and his policies have been sinking like a stone. An economic turnaround of major proportions, particularly one that decreased unemployment by 5 percent, would likely put Obama back in the catbird seat. But the indication from all the recent public opinion work, including the Post poll that usually runs about 6 points...

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Morning Must Reads -- Heath Care on a Left Wing and a Prayer

Wall Street Journal -- New Rx for Health Plan: Split Bill Writers Jonathan Weisman and Naftali Bendavid give the first useful glimpse at the Democratic playbook for unilateral passage of major changes to the health-care system. Since getting all 60 Democrats in the Senate to support a plan that is anything but happy talk and some handouts seems unlikely, party leaders are doping out the strategy for jamming through a government health-insurance plan using the nuclear option of a 50-vote procedural measure reserved for budget matters. It would be winning ugly, and perhaps even a Pyrrhic victory, so many Democrats say that it should be avoided at all costs. But the White House is facing...

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Questions of competence begin to dog Obama

President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats are again in an uproar over health care. Liberals say they'll blockade any bill that doesn't include a government-run insurance program. And labor says it will sit out the 2010 elections if the president doesn't come across with a stout public plan. Meanwhile, the moderate Democrats who were wooed for weeks by the administration are sidling toward the door, saying that the best thing would be just to start over. Many at the White House no doubt wish they could take that advice. It's been 177 days since Obama made his initial pitch for a health care overhaul to a joint session of Congress. That the president's team is still spending so much...

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Losing confidence in Afghanistan

Something of a signal moment with the release of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows for the first time more than half of Americans think that the Afghan war is not worth fighting. The survey says that 51 percent of Americans think the war has not been worth fighting compared to 47 percent who do. Just a month ago, 51 percent supported the war and 45 percent opposed it . In December, the same poll showed 55 percent thought the war was worth fighting and 39 percent did not. In the latest poll, Republicans held steady around 70 percent supporting the war in both July and August. Democrats, meanwhile, turned against the war. They went from 41 percent in support to 27 percent in...

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Morning Must Reads -- More Spin Than a Maytag Factory

New York Times -- Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill They've been going it alone for a while, actually. In what writers Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny cast as a failure of Republicans to stop “misinformation,” Democrats are again forced to admit that they have a supermajority in both the House and Senate as well as the presidency and therefore should be able to pass health legislation if they want to. In a fervid spin job, source Rahm Emanuel suggests that misbehavior from rogue agents like Chuck Grassley leaves Democrats no choice but to go it alone on health care. But even more than when the threat was originally made in April, Democrats don’t have...

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Morning Must Reads -- Off Message. Off Balance. Just Plain Off.

New York Times -- Alternate Plan as Health Option Muddies Debate Muddy is an understatement. In trying to get the health debate back under control, the White House has made a total hash of the discussion. The good news for team Obama is that no one is talking about who gets to “pull the plug on granny.” The bad news is that the one point on which the president was clear about health care – he wanted a new national health plan funded in part by cuts in Medicare – is now another mystery. The secretary of health and the White House press secretary expressed openness to non-profit, highly regulated, private health co-ops designed on the template of public...

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Boehner rips Tauzin for giving in to big government "bully"

This afternoon, Minority Leader John Boehner sent a letter to PhRMA president and former Republican Rep. Billy Tauzin over the deals the congressman turned drug lobbyist has cut with the White House. Boehner also sent the letter to Tauzin's board. Here's the letter: The Honorable Billy Tauzin PhRMA 950 F Street NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 Dear Billy, Appeasement rarely works as a conflict resolution strategy. This is as true in the arena of policymaking as it is in schoolyards across America. When a bully asks for your lunch money, you may have no choice but to fork it over. But cutting a deal with the bully is a different story, particularly if the “deal”...

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Morning Must Reads -- Public Option Bait and Switch

New York Times -- ‘Public Option’ in Health Plan May Be Dropped If only writer Sheryl Gay Stolberg had read her colleague David Kirkpatrick’s Thursday piece about how the White House had been working intimately with the Senate Finance Committee on a compromise health care bill that doesn’t initially include a new national health plan. Perhaps the Times has cut reporter subscriptions in these hard times, but had she read Kirkpatrick’s piece, perhaps Stolberg would have been less credulous about the administration’s Sunday roll out of its openness to dropping a public option. Conservatives are calling it a surrender and liberals say it’s a...

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Obama fighting for his presidency, not reform

The big question for President Barack Obama right now isn't about health care, but his own political survival. If he fails to deliver health legislation, Obama will prove right those who said he was in over his head. That would make him something of a lame duck after only seven months in office. But if he does manage to squeeze a bill out of Congress, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. By delivering unwanted changes to unwilling voters on a life-or-death issue, the president would squander the goodwill he earned during the campaign. Voters now say passing nothing would be better than any of the plans stewing in Congress, so it's hard to imagine that lawmakers will return from their recess...

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Morning Must Reads -- Dems and drug companies team up against... the voters?

Washington Post -- Obama to Take On Health-Care Critics Writer Anne Kornblut captures the breathless, outraged tones of the White House and its supporters on health care who believe the president is the victim of a powerful conspiracy. Today, President Obama heads to Montana for a town hall, with anther one in Colorado on Saturday. Including his stop in New Hampshire, the president has chosen three of the most libertarian states in which to make his argument for a big government plan. While his team would say it’s just another example of the president dealing with opponents head-on, one starts to wonder if there isn’t a hope that Obama will have the chance to face off with,...

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By the time we got to Woodstock...

I've gotten remarkable response to my column today "Boomer bust hinders Democrats' aims." A small fraction has been ugly, but that's mostly from reactionaries who are fighting the culture war as a win/loose proposition -- it's going to either be an American theocracy or an Aquarian explosion: "I am sorry you grew up in a hardcore Christian family that didn't let you be yourself and chided you when you thought outside of the box. I did too. The only difference is that once I reached adulthood I began thinking critically on my own. You can do it to and so can the rest of America" -- etc. I didn't mention religion or even Republicans (and to clarify, my folks let me...

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Morning Must Reads: Granny Pulls the Plug on Obama

Obama Injects Himself Into Health Talks, Despite Risks Writer David Kirkpatrick confirmed from sources what many have understood for months – that the White House will support a compromise health plan being crafted in he Senate Finance Committee, even though it lacks the public option the president has repeatedly demanded. Health lobbyists and Capitol Hill insiders told Kirkpatrick that the White House has been a shadow negotiator in the ongoing talks in Sen. Max Baucus’ offices, while letting the rest of the process work itself out. The first challenge for the White House is to get anything at all passed, which seems less likely given the plummeting approval ratings for...

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Boomer bust hinders Democrats' aims

Baby Boomers may take some perverse pleasure in helping to trash an American culture that they thought was too stuffy anyway. But the real disaster of the Me Generation is the death of serious political debate. This week is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock -- the high-water mark for the generation born immediately after World War II. This week will also see the 64th anniversary of the apex of their parents' generation -- Victory Over Japan Day. A big, dirty party for 400,000 bourgeois bohemians versus total victory in a war that killed 417,000 American troops. Heavy, dude. The myth of Woodstock as an "Aquarian explosion" propagated by the film that came out the year after...

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Morning Must Reads -- It's the Big Government, Stupid

Washington Post -- What They're Really Arguing About Writer Dan Balz gets the point of the national uproar about health care – it’s about the size and power of government. While the president was in New Hampshire rebutting claims about his party’s health plans and offering more platitudinous promises about proposals that he says will only make you give up the things that don’t help you, he wasn’t talking about why it’s necessary at this moment to turn up the volume on government control. This isn’t about Medicare reimbursement rates or even death panels. This is about liberty. Balz, echoing Examiner colleague Michael Barone’s column,...

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Morning Must Reads: White House stuck in reboot cycle

Politico -- President Obama distances himself from Nancy Pelosi The White House is getting ready for the Super Bowl of health-care town halls. The president heads today to libertarian-leaning New Hampshire for his first health care town hall since the congressional recess began and opponents started making a ruckus and the presidents’ supporters started pushing people around. Writer Nia-Malika Henderson explains how as the president gets ready to face the nation on health care, he is distancing himself from the provocative comments by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the protesters are un-American. It was a strange piece of tit-for-tatism from the speaker, presumably still steaming over...

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Morning Must Reads -- Heath Care Town hell

In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains Today is the first day of the White House Web page devoted to battling health care “misinformation” reported by concerned citizens. After collecting the emails forwarded from their helpers, the White House unloads with… some gauzy platitudes from no-name administration bureaucrats. Modeled after the site that helped dispel the rumors that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim etc., the new site struggles because there are no clear answers available. Instead of a sentence explaining that the then-candidate is a Christian, the health site features blabby videos from the likes of Linda Douglass of the White...

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Morning Must Reads -- Heath Care Town hell

In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains Today is the first day of the White House Web page devoted to battling health care “misinformation” reported by concerned citizens. After collecting the emails forwarded from their helpers, the White House unloads with… some gauzy platitudes from no-name administration bureaucrats. Modeled after the site that helped dispel the rumors that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim etc., the new site struggles because there are no clear answers available. Instead of a sentence explaining that the then-candidate is a Christian, the health site features blabby videos from the likes of Linda Douglass of the White...

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Obama forgets who's speaking truth to power

Liberals struggle to govern because no one has found a way to be powerful and oppressed at the same time. President Barack Obama is trying to push back against the chorus of dissent on his health plan, whatever it turns out to be. The only thing he really seems to insist on is that the plan includes a government-run insurance option paid for, in part, by reducing spending on Medicare and other existing government plans. Unfortunately for Obama, the government plan and the Medicare cuts are what have everybody so out of sorts. The summer swoon for the president's poll numbers continues, and even Americans who agree with the president's health goals think he and Congress have handled the...

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Grumbling about elites in the Hillbilly Firewall

CLINTON, W.Va. The first phase of the recession may be over, but recovery has not visited America’s industrial heartland. And the country that’s being imagined in Washington doesn’t leave much room for smokestack brawn. In an economy structured around low-wage service jobs and high-paying “knowledge worker” jobs, there isn’t much room for the American yeomanry. The past 35 years have seen the upper Ohio Valley’s status greatly reduced, but the current moves by the political elite are the most aggressive yet and come after a period of elevated expectations. The time for green shoots in the upper Ohio Valley was a few years ago, when energy...

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John Thune's workmanlike Republicanism

There are some tremors of optimism rumbling through the Republican Party these days. The generic ballot for the 2010 congressional elections is about even, and Democrats are preparing for a defensive cycle after eight years on offense. The gleam has come off President Barack Obama, now seen as a conventional politician, not a transcendent figure. But Republicans are still very worried, and with good cause. The Democrats' loss has not become their gain. Voters still have misgivings about the party that gave them the Iraq war and runaway deficits. Sticker shock at the fiscal recklessness of the Democrats hasn't erased the bad memories of the GOP's big-spending ways under President George W....

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Morning Must Reads - Survey says... No health bill soon

Wall Street Journal -- Key Senate Panel Won't Vote Till Fall The last hope is gone for Democrats to be able to show real hope for progress on health care before moderate and conservative Dems go home to get browbeaten by constituents who hate the idea of a plan that would cost more and deliver worse care to the already insured. The Senate Finance bill is important to the effort because it allows many Democrats who would have to walk away if faced with only the Kennedy and Waxman bills to say they are still at the table. That’s why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had been so hopeful that the group of six bipartisan negotiators led by Finance Chairman Max Baucus would have...

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Morning Must Reads: Health Care Slipping

Wall Street Journal -- Support Slips for Health Plan Well, they can’t say the president isn’t spending his political capital anymore. After a smattering of bad polling news last week, another round of surveys from the Journal, The New York Times, Gallup and Time Magazine show President Obama’s signature legislative issue – health care reform – in serious trouble and confidence in Obama continuing to fall. Confidence in the president’s leadership overall has dropped noticeably in the past month and substantially since April. Obama lost points on being decisive, strong, and in touch with the concerns of regular Americans. Health care reform continues...

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Pelosi falls to the back of the pack of speakers

In an era of symbolic breakthroughs, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is closing in on a dubious achievement — being the least effective leader of the House in the modern era. Since the 1920s, when Speaker Nicholas Longworth rescued the position from a brief period of irrelevancy, the office of speaker has been held by political heavyweights. The 17 speakers since Longworth have mostly maintained or enhanced the power and prestige of the post, but with a train wreck taking shape in the House, Pelosi may be remembered for diminishing the office. And when historians inspect the record of the lady from California, they will find that hubris and empty talk sealed her fate. In seven months, the...

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Morning Must Reads -- New hopes and new perils for health care

Wall Street Journal -- Liberals Fear Losing Public-Plan Option As Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio showed today, many in the Senate are expressing new hope for a compromise health plan that that includes state-level, participant-owned health care co-operatives but not a new national health insurance plan. The idea, partly financed by a tax on high-end insurance policies, is likely the only one that could control costs and adequately protect private insurance from a taxpayer-subsidized competitor enough to get 60 votes in the Senate. And even that is an optimistic forecast for a bill that still has a lot of moving parts. But as writers Laura Meckler and Naftali Bendavid explain, the...

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Morning Must Reads -- An unhealthy obsession

New York Times -- Health Policy Now Carved Out at a More Centrist Table Writers David Herszenhorn and Robert Pear go inside the Senate negotiating room where the last hope for health care reform resides and find junk food and a strong sense of significance. As Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio observed, hopes for ramming through a party-line health vote a la cap and trade are fading as Speaker Nancy Pelosi gives her new timeline as “whenever.” That means the only way forward will likely be the Senate Finance Committee where a bipartisan group hammers out details in Chairman Max Baucus’ office day after day. The bill they’re working up would require all...

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Morning Must Reads: The real cost of health legislation

New York Times -- Reach of Subsidies Is Critical Issue for Health Plan Have Morning Must Reads in your Inbox Email: What will $1.6 trillion buy you? Probably not enough to get a soup-to-nuts health-care plan passed. While paying for an expansion of health insurance coverage is still a matter of great dispute, one point of agreement between all three plans working their way through Congress right now is mandatory health insurance for individuals – get covered or get fined. Liberals prefer the idea of an employer mandate like the one the Clintons suggested – cover your workers or get fined. But such a plan would be onerous to employers...

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Obama missed his moment to fix health care

President Barack Obama says his Republican foes have no plan for health care. In fact, they do. They just don’t want to bring it up right now. And one can hardly blame them. The core of the conservative idea on health care is taxing health benefits. John McCain offered a version in 2008 that included a $5,000-per-family tax credit to offset the switch. Obama brutalized McCain for his suggestion. It was the ugliest phase of the Obama campaign, featuring a lot of scaremongering about how McCain’s plan amounted to a “trillion-dollar” tax on the middle class based on a “radical” idea that could have a “catastrophic” effect on health...

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Morning Must Reads: Police standoff

Boston Herald – 911, police tapes key in Gates case The next chapter in the saga of Henry Louis Gates and President Barack Obama vs. Sgt. James Crowley and the cops of America will likely be the release of the 911 tapes and police radio recording surrounding the arrest. If Gates is heard behaving in a way that most reasonable people find objectionable, it could make the president’s attempts to climb down from his “stupidly” remarks more difficult. If the cops sound like goons and bullies, it will get Obama off the hook. So far, the police lodges in Cambridge and across the country are sticking together and doing a good job of making Obama sound like a...

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The Obama phase of the recession and health care

Harry Reid's decision to wait until September for a vote was a bit of a slap to the president, coming as it did the day after his reassertion that he wanted the deadlines kept. But the move may have an upside for the Democratic health plan if the economy continues to improve. Moderate voters may have a better attitude about the plan if the Dow is up to 9500, second quarter growth rates aren't as bad as they could be and the revised budget forecasts recently delayed by the White House aren't as dire as some think they could be. But there is another side to the equation. We are now in the Obama phase of the recession. The president has proposed a massive reordering in the American economy...

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Morning Must Reads - Little fibs on health care

New York Times -- Experts Dispute Some Points in Health Talk One of the things that President Obama’s supporters once raved about was his willingness to deal with complex issues in a direct, in-depth fashion. With his health plan listing badly as it tries to steam into port, the president threw all that out the window and went for the cheapest, easiest answers on health care possible. In sometimes shockingly facile answers he said that his plan would mean no sacrifices except for among millionaires and only changes to the good. Writers Robert Pear and Peter Baker went through and looked at the little fibs and exaggerations that the president used to back up his facile answers on...

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When he isn't winning, Obama turns to whining

It seems that Americans are a little tired of Barack Obama, and the feeling may be mutual. Believing they had elected a postmodern medicine man for the Oprah era, voters are recoiling from Obama's attempt to become a PG-13 version of Lyndon Johnson. His poll numbers have slid mostly because people are suffering economically. Obama promised to heal their pain and failed. He may yet succeed, but for now, disillusionment hangs like a pea-soup fog over the land. In France, they call Nicolas Sarkozy the "omnipresident" because he is seemingly everywhere doing everything at once. Obama is more of the commenter in chief, with something to say about everything from Michael Jackson's...

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Over promised. Under delivered.

After a blizzard of spin before his press conference it was clear that what President Obama aimed to do tonight was to show the voters of America what his health care plan would do for them. Obama himself even used the line"What's in it for me?" to talk to Mr. and Mrs. America -- the moderates who have been fleeing the concept of a government health overhaul after word of high costs and concerns of rationing. What he told them was that health care costs too much and that he could make it cost less... somehow. The benefits were still in the future, related to the systemic health of the economy and vague. The basic conceit was that Americans should trade in the decaying product...

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Well, if it's only bad things that get cut...

Asked by ABC's Jake Tapper what Americans will have to give up to save half-a-trillion-dollars on health care, President Obama responded: "They're going to have to give up paying for things that aren't making them healthier." The answer went on in the same vein about how his plan will only cut bad things and nothing good. An astonishingly facile answer....

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Obama Ups Ante on Health The Journal put three top Washington hands -- Laura Meckler, Jonathan Weisman and Gerald Seib -- on the case of describing the state of play on health care as President Obama prepares for yet another prime-time presser. The New York Times story on the press conference passes along the assertion from the White House that the president will use the chance to sell health care but also as a “six-month report card” on their success in “rescu[ing] the economy.” Not likely. This is all about the medicines. The Journal’s more lucid verdict: the White House is consciously staking the president’s political future...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- GOP Focuses Effort To Kill Health Bills The White House is using opposition from Republicans to try to solidify the president’s liberal base in advance of offering a compromise bill. Facing the realities that huge tax increases for a generous plan won’t likely work as moderate Democrats balk and that the Congressional Budget Office won’t allow hypothetical future savings to offset current spending, the White House is preparing to do what it did on cap and trade: win ugly. To that end, President Obama and his team, with the help of writers like Perry Bacon and Michael Fletcher, are playing up Republican opposition to the president’s...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- President Is Set to 'Take the Baton' Writers Michael Shear and Shailagh Murray explain that the next two weeks will define the Obama presidency, suggesting that only a quick, thorough win on health care will allow the president to get back on track. That may or may not be true, but if that’s what the administration believes, then it’s the political reality. As the president’s top politico, David Axelrod, said it is time for the president “to take the baton.” What Axelrod means is that Obama will be much more visible on the issue in public and much more focused on it in private. But the question remains – what’s left? The...

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Obamacare: The fast and the furious

The health care testimony of the director of the Congressional Budget Office sounded almost desperate. There was poor Douglas Elmendorf — Larry Summers’ protegé, Brookings Institution liberal, Pelosi-picked, Harvard mega-wonk — practically begging his bosses in Congress to just slow down a little. Elmendorf wants actual health care reform — the kind that President Barack Obama used to talk about. The kind that covers the uninsured, gets people into doctors’ offices instead of emergency rooms, and is paid for in a responsible fashion. But now the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress will take whatever they can get as long as it...

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Senate needs a part-time hair stylist

After Matt Drudge busted the Department of the Treasury for trying to hire a contract humorist for the Bureau of Public Debt (New motto: 11.6 trillion reasons to smile!) senators were outraged http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/senator-quashes-treasurys-bid-for-humorist-2009-07-17.html over the waste. It also came after lawmakers gave the Social Security Administration a whipping for having a $700,000 managers’ retreat at a posh Phoenix resort. But let the branch of government without sin cast the first stone. In it’s latest job circular, the U.S. Senate is advertising for a part-time hair stylist: PART-TIME HAIR STYLIST - US Senate seeks a Part-time Hair Stylist for full...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Budget Blow for Health Plan Speaking to a group of Virginia senior citizens, Vice President Joe Biden laid out the administration’s view of the economics of health care: “Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.” That may have worked with AARP of Alexandria, but the same logic got nowhere with the head of the Congressional Budget Office, which delivered a smackdown to the idea that a national health service would be a long-term cost...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Democrats Turn Up the Heat on Insurance Industry Moderate Democrats are getting that seasick feeling again as the most liberal versions of President Obama’s health care plan are zooming ahead and a compromise plan in the Senate looks less moderate by the day. To try to get his compromise plan going again, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus is talking about huge new special taxes on health insurance companies. Now the insurance companies that cut deals with the White House in hopes of benefiting from coverage mandates and new spending find themselves facing major cuts in Medicare payments, a public health plan that would cost 10 percent less than private...

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When in doubt, soak the rich, whoever they are

The productive Americans who pay for government are precariously close to becoming a political irrelevancy. The only good news for them is that the folks trying to take their money may have jumped the gun. And in the showdown between resentment and entitlement, timing is everything. The current recession is so big and bad that people are anxious about the future, but it hasn't been terrible or long enough to change the balance between the producers and the takers. One reason liberal economists are so nostalgic for the Great Depression is that the depth of despair in the nation -- a quarter of able men out of work and upheaval of the old social order -- made lawmakers and voters open to...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Small Business Faces Big Bite While President Obama was in Michigan taking swipes at his economic detractors and rather ruefully saying he was ready to take ownership of the economy after Republican failures, his fellow Democrats in Congress were helping him in his goal by moving ahead a health care plan that fits his requirements, particularly a national health service and a path to near-universal coverage. But as writers Janet Adamy and Laura Meckler point out the legislation, backed by all of the House grandees from Nancy Pelosi on down, the legislation is expensive, would undercut private insurance substantially, levies a massive tax on high earners and forces...

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Morning Must Reads

The Hill – With Pelosi’s blessing, Dems push ahead with probe of CIA Despite the collective shrug with which the CIA program to assassinate al Qaeda leaders was greeted by Americans, House Democrats are still eager to press their disadvantage with an investigation. But now they will be acting with the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, whose own credibility is at stake. Pelosi’s claim that the CIA routinely misleads Congress now depends on former Vice President Dick Cheney telling the agency not disclose having considered, but not acted on a plan to kill the leaders of the world’s top terrorist group. Pelosi is hoping for a little backup from the attorney general’s...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- CIA Had Secret Al Qaeda Plan Eric Holder is ready to prosecute, Diane Feinstein is talking about hearings and some House Democrats want Dick Cheney in the dock, but just what is the secret program at the CIA that has everyone up in arms? Writer Siobhan Gorman says it was a capture or kill directive that gave legal authorization to the CIA to assassinate senior members of al Qeada in 2001. The directive, which came from President Bush, was a reversal of President Ford’s ban on assassinations, but was never put into action. While Holder’s investigation into interrogation techniques will continue, and Congress may hold hearings into why the program was...

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Rangel just wants to keep the faith, baby

The White House and the Senate have spent four months dithering over how to fund an expansion of subsidized health care, but it was a no-brainer for Charlie Rangel and his team on the House Ways and Means Committee. That's because Rangel believes his job is to take money from people who have it and give it to people who don't, like his Harlem constituents. President Barack Obama wanted to do much the same thing, but in a high-minded, pro-growth, post-partisan sort of way. Rangel isn't post-anything. Rather than finding some euphemism for sharing the wealth -- a tax on "gold-plated" health benefits, lowering the deduction for charitable giving, etc. -- Rangel is doing...

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Pope Obama? Hardly.

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has a provocation styled as argument in Newsweek which holds that Barack Obama better represents the values and aspirations of American Catholics than Pope Benedict XVI. It's piffle, yes, but it also shows the shifting ground on which politicians struggle for Catholic votes. After a years-long trend of Democrats struggling to keep once-solid support among Catholics, Kennedy argues that the core issues are shifting from the bright-line concerns relating to human life and family to the more esoteric concerns relating to economic justice. Pope Benedict, she suggests, is mean to women and gay people and too slow to start preaching the...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- Secret Program Fuels CIA-Congress Dispute House members looking to back up Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claim that the CIA routinely misleads Congress, but not back it up so much that there has to be an investigation, are plunging ahead with publicizing a secret plan for intelligence gathering that was never put into action. The goal is to show that even if there aren’t the sins of commission alleged by the speaker, there was at least a sin of omission. CIA Director Leon Panetta informed Democrats of the plan three weeks ago, but it’s taken that long for Democrats to realize how indignant they really were. Writers Paul Kane and Ben Pershing explain how...

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How liberal laments may drive Obama to ruin

One of the prevailing questions in politics today is whether Obama will fight for his liberal agenda. Not whether he is liberal, but whether he is a fighter. It was the topic of my column for today's paper and a revealing piece from Joe Klein at Time.com. To me its more of a question of what will happen for the rest of this year and in preparation for the 2010 elections. I argue that if Obama continues to try to community organize Congress he will fail to enact his goals of global warming fees and a national health system. If he fails in those causes, his already loose control over his own party will be broken and Congress will be further factionalized and even less effective at putitng...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Democrats Say C.I.A. Deceived Congress for Years It’s on now. In an effort to placate the Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee after his refusal to provide cover for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s tall tales about her post 9/11 CIA briefings, agency director Leon Panetta tried to make common cause by bashing the Bush administration. Now the Democrats are publicizing his remarks and saying that they validate the speaker’s claim that she not only didn’t know about “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding, but that her assertion that the CIA “routinely misleads” Congress is true. Writer Scott Shane...

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Admiral Obama dithers on the poop deck

Like an armada making its uncertain way through rough seas, the Obama administration's agenda is fast approaching the point of no return. Sailing into a headwind of worsening unemployment, mounting public skepticism, and anxieties on Capitol Hill, the temporizing admiral of the fleet must choose whether to risk utter ruin or turn back for safer waters. We know President Barack Obama to be audacious about his own advancement, but he has never shown a tendency to be bold on big ideas. He is a conciliator and a mender of hurt feelings for the Oprah era. He talked big to achieve the presidency, but since his election has been more comfortable in his old role of mediator. But to get the two...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- In Retooled Health-Care System, Who Will Say No? With the president overseas, the ideologically flexible Rahm Emanuel opened the door rather widely to the notion of a health plan with a government-run component that would only go into effect if new proposals for private insurance fail to produce the desired result. A murmur ran through liberal interest groups, still smarting from recent reversals on global warming, transparency, gay rights and the war on terror from the administration. The concern was enough that the president had to issue a brief statement from Moscow reasserting his commitment to a national health service. What Emanuel was trying to save Obama from...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- Hospitals Reach Deal With Administration Vice President Biden will today announce with much fanfare another $155 billion in savings to the American health system. This time it’s hospitals, with drug companies and the nation’s largest healthcare providers having already taken their turns with dramatic announcements of late night deals and the photo-ops. And as in both previous cases, there is less here than meets the eye. What writers Ceci Connolly and Michael Shear fail to point out is that most of the savings have already been discounted. $100 billion of the funds are from lower Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, reductions already planned or at least...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Obama to Seek New Arms Control Deal in Moscow In Moscow, President Obama got brushed back on his efforts to engage on issues of the courts and democracy. With Obama expressing concerns about the phony trial and lengthy imprisonment of a defenestrated oligarch who had become a political rival of Vladimir Putin, Putin’s man, President Dmitry Medvedev, laughed it off with a comparison to Bernard Madoff’s 150-year sentence. But the Democracy posturing now out of the way, Clifford Levy and Peter Baker explain that Obama can get to what he’s gone to Russia for – arms control. Obama’s goal is a successor deal to the soon-to-expire Start treaty...

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Palin can't win unless she stops the drama

Sarah Palin learned a lot of things in her time as John McCain's running mate -- about the savagery of the media; about the duplicity of politicos; about her own gifts as a politician. But she did not learn the most important lesson of 2008: no drama. The passing months show how right Barack Obama's critics, starting with Hillary Clinton, were about his inexperience. But his supreme overconfidence prevents the caution humility would suggest. The waves are well over the bow of the ship of state now, yet Obama's White House seems to change course almost hourly. What hasn't happened is much unnecessary drama. There were the income tax problems, and Clinton's team at State has started...

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Stimulus plan not working politically either

When President Obama signed his stimulus into law in February, Democrats issued grave warnings of the price Republicans would pay for their opposition to the bill. “Americans will hold House Republicans accountable for ‘just saying no’ to the largest tax cut in American history and saving and creating three to four million jobs,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who also serves as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. There are still about 140 million jobs still left in the country, so taken in the broadest possible sense, Democrats have exceeded their promise on the “save” end of the equation. It’s hard in the face of recent...

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Nobody likes a quitter, Sarah Palin

Her move to leave office early may save Sarah Palin the hassle of having to grind out the acrimonious end of her term in Alaska, battling Democrats and batting down frivolous ethics complaints as conservatives battle each other over her role. But how can leaving office early help her with her greatest deficiency as a presidential contender -- a lack of experience on big issues? Palin has the total package has a candidate, except the obvious lack of a long track record of success. She took on the Alaskan establishment, rose quickly and energized the Republican party in August of 2008 -- a rise as fast as Barack Obama's. But what people want to know is whether she can get results. She was...

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Morning Must Reads

Financial Times -- Jobs data dash recovery hopes When the May jobs report came out, some people were shocked to see unemployment up over 9 percent and climbing. The concern was that combined with the people who have been unable to find a job for long enough to be dropped from the rolls, the newly fired added up to a large enough number to create a perpetual motion recession in our consumer-based economy that could last for months. The Obama administration pooh-poohed the worriers as chicken littles. The number of people being fired was shrinking and while many people already laid off still couldn’t find work, one of the first signs of a turnaround is always the decline in the...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- S.C. Governor Resists Pressure to Resign It’s getting pretty crazy down in South Carolina, even by local political standards which include two attempts to secede from the Union and a goodly number of duels. Mark Sanford, who vowed to keep his job because he shouldn’t take the easy way out after playing Wild Bull of the Pampas, seems to be beyond dignity and unable to be silent for even a moment. In the wake of Sanford’s Tuesday interview in which he was compulsively confessional about his relationships and personal failings, Sanford Wednesday became suddenly secretive, withdrawing a promise to release records about his trips to see his mistress on...

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Obama can’t delay breaking tax pledge

Telling voters about a tax increase is like telling your spouse you strayed — there’s no good time or way to do it. But, as the governor of South Carolina continues to ably prove, some options are worse than others. It’s no longer a question of if President Barack Obama will have to come clean about breaking his campaign promise not to raise taxes on families who make less than $250,000. The president once believed he had a slick way to pay for universal coverage. First, he would lower the tax deductions for rich people who donate money to charities. Then, he could add the proceeds from global warming fees to cover the more than $600 billion he said his plan would...

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Morning Must Reads

Franken Heads to Senate, Bolsters Democrats' Hand With Al Franken’s victory in Minnesota and Sen. Robert Byrd discharged from the hospital after six weeks on the same day, Democrats are only one member – the ailing Ted Kennedy -- away from the magical 60-vote threshold. But as Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio reported, most of what Democrats seem to be doing about it is managing expectations – pointing out that the same gang of moderates will still run the show as the swing votes. Writers Naftali Bendavid and Greg Hitt echo that theme, but also point out that Franken, who will enter the Senate Monday with a high profile on the judiciary and health committees, seems...

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A breach in the Obama-Clinton truce?

In the gestation and infancy of the Obama presidency, one of the favorite points of the president's media admirers was his ability to turn Hillary Clinton from rival into teammate. But there are signs that the secretary of state is striking out on her own as the president grapples with what shape his own foreign policy will approach. Clinton, who famously said, "Barack Obama, you are naive if you think you can sit down with people like Ahmadinejad in Iran or Chavez in Venezuela," has not followed the president's lead so willingly as the regimes in Iran and Venezuela have been flexing their muscles. On Iran, Clinton confidantes let it be known to the New York Times that the...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- New Honduras Leader Faces Backlash From Coup Reporting from Tegucigalpa, writers Paul Kiernan and David Luhnow look at the devolving situation in Central America. The Journal got an interview with interim president Roberto Micheletti, who said that despite pressure from President Barack Obama, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chvez and the nine other socialist regimes in Latin America, his government can hold on until regular elections are held this fall. Micheletti – who was the Honduran equivalent of the speaker of the house – was pleading with Obama to support the new government. The ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, is heading to the United Nations today...

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Morning Must Reads

Los Angeles Times -- Obama champions energy bill but not its tariffs In a Sunday-night interview with a group of reporters including writer Jim Tankersley, President Obama praised the climate bill that he helped squeeze out of the House. One point Obama took exception with was the 11th-hour addition of tariffs on foreign goods from counties that don’t take similar steps. But since the only way to get the bill passed in the more-liberal House was to add the tariffs, the bill’s real chances to pass the Senate seem even less likely without some acknowledgement of the competitive disadvantage created by the bill. Senators know that placing burdens on the relatively clean...

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Sanford can’t save Democrats on ethics woes

Writing and rewriting Michael Jackson’s obituary distracted the media from the latest draft of its preferred death notice — that of the Republican Party. But now that we are down to the sad minutiae of Jackson’s life and death, some of the cameras have swung back around to the tale of the terminally weird Gov. Mark Sanford. Sanford’s midlife meltdown pales in comparison with Jackson’s lifelong soap opera. But for political journalists, the Sanford affair is too perfect to pass up. The Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton is the central event in the professional lives of most of the media folks working in Washington today. To them, the story was really...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- Close Win Predicted For Cap-and-Trade Bill In a move reminiscent o the stimulus in February, a plan for global warming fees got a lot bigger and a lot more complicated late in the process and now the House speaker and the president want rapid passage. There is the safeguard that the Senate may take the time to brush the burrs out, but as writers Paul Kane, Ben Pershing and David Fahrenthold point out, the Frankenstein bill leaders have created in order to prevent the 41 Democratic defections that would kill the legislation – including potentially massive new subsidies included in a bill that once again, no one will have read. “Keith McCoy, of the National...

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Gore told to help pass global warming bill by staying away from the microphones

"Al, you can reduce your carbon footprint by staying In Tennessee" (AP) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to avoid having former Vice President Al Gore turn up at the House today to push for the Global warming bill, according to Politico's Lisa Lerer. Rather than have Gore come and get gusty, reminding centrist Democrats of how the last energy plan he was pushing blew up in their faces, Pelosi kept him down in Tennessee calling the greenest members of the House and reminding that while this bill is a rotten collection of special interest payoffs, it can be used in the long term to cripple existing manufacturing and energy. Instead of Gore gassing, centrist lawmakers are...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Sanford Case a New Dose of Bad News for Republicans Among the five stories that the Times did on Gov. Mark Sanford’s foreign flake out, writer Jim Rutenberg talked to some prominent conservatives about what the implosion of a promising standard bearer means to them and the GOP. Even though John Ensign was not a credible 2012 candidate, the week after week admissions of sex scandals by conservatives is a heavy blow. The GOP had just gotten over the damage from the Mark Foley/Larry Craig sex scandals and the Bob Ney/Duke Cunningham corruption cases that were major contributors to the electoral drubbings of the past four years. With the party brand still ailing,...

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Global warming fire sale means trouble for Dems

Global warming legislation came back to life this week like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster lurching from the operating table. Speaker Nancy Pelosi opted to reanimate the stitched-together brute that makes angry mobs of both environmentalists and capitalists and did so by making the bill even less attractive to both groups. Part of the reason was to get the cap-and-trade proposal out of the way before the big battle for health care, but it’s also part of a new “get tough” approach coming from the White House and the speaker’s office. Last week was dismal for the Democrats. Polls showed the public is quickly losing faith in the idea of a stimulus and bailout...

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Sanford sex scandal roils the political pot

Republicans still can't handle sex scandals. Rather than the dismissive attitude with which Democrats treat their own peccadilloes, Republicans, like Sanford lose their cool. Watching Sanford torture himself over his transgressions was borderline unbearable, and one suspects that he will be out of the national political mix. If he can put his family back together again, it seems unlikely that he would subject his wife and children to a campaign. Some quick thoughts on the political impact: 1) Coming as quickly as it has on the heels of the Sen. John Ensign affair, Sanford's Argentine tryst will undo much of the credibility Republicans had rebuilt on ethics after the debacles leading...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Behind the Scenes, Fed Chief Advocates Bigger Role Political, ambitious and publicly engaged, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been lobbying for the much-enhanced role that President Barack Obama now foresees for the central bank as a super regulator in addition to its role as currency protector. Writer Stephen Labaton observes that rather than the aloof approach taken by chairmen past, Bernanke is part of the internal lobbying within the administration and has a powerful ally in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. But as Bernanke and his proxies make the argument that the Fed can be not just the chief regulator for too-big-to-fail institutions but also a...

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Cap and trade mercy killing?

A pile of problems for Waxman-Markey (AP) After weeks in the legislative mire, the Waxman-Markey carbon cap-and-trade plan got jolted back to life by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Today, President Obama spoke of a "clean energy transformation" as he brushed by the subject in between Iran and health care, and spoke almost optimistically about the prospects of a bill widely believed to either be dead or only able to pass in such a compromised form that it would achieve little of what the global warmists want. The erratic course that legislation establishing transferable global warming fees has taken shows how hard it is to get a coalition together for a future problem that many people...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- Iran Unrest Reveals Split In U.S. on Its Role Abroad As the president holds a midday press conference today, the main topic will be Iran’s disputed elections. As the protests and government crackdown continue, President Obama finds himself in a difficult position abroad diplomatically and at home politically. Writer Scott Wilson devotes most of the piece to commiserating with a president he sees batting the simple-minded, opportunistic Republican view of the world in an effort to implement a better, high-minded, less nationalistic and more nuanced foreign policy. Even so, Wilson does accidentally brush past the underlying political tension that will greet the...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times – Iran Admits Possible Discrepancy in 3 Million Votes Iran’s leaders continue to make it hard for President Barack Obama to use his “smart power” and engagement approach in regard to the country’s disputed election. By first taking a hard line on demonstrations and protests, the mullahs drew Obama into his first rebuke of the Tehran regime. But even as the White House was considering the next move under pressure from pro-democracy Americans, the theocrats in Iran seemed to undertake the recount they promised last week. The Iranian government’s argument that all nations have to work out their own electoral problems seems designed to box...

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How the stimulus put health care in critical condition

Washington is already sick of health care, and Dr. Obama’s course of treatments is just getting started. It’s true that a bill may still pass this year, but Democrats from the president on down are dramatically reducing expectations. We were told this was the year for health care because with a Democratic mega-majority and past detractors — the health care industry and big business — ready to make a deal, a bill could move fast enough not to get bogged down. As President Barack Obama said, “The stars are aligned.” That was just May 12, but the astrological charts seem to have already been mislaid. Since then, Americans have seen none of the...

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Swing state downturn will push Obama toward second stimulus

(AP) Sorry Indiana! New state unemployment figures show that as the nation moves toward an overall 10 percent unemployment rate, some politically vital states are leading the pack. Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Tennessee, Indiana, California, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Nevada and North and South Carolina are all over 10 percent now and will all continue to expand their jobless rolls as the bottoming out of the first wave of a double dip recession continues. There is much debate over whether more deficit spending is needed now in order to prevent the second phase of the recession from taking hold. The Obama administration warns against the curtailment of the extraordinary...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Iran’s Supreme Leader Warns Protesters Facing pressure from Republicans and some quiet grumbling in his administration from Hillary Clinton to strike a more aggressive tone with the theocrats in Iran, President Obama today will contend with a dare from Ayatollah Khamenei who told the hundreds of thousands protesters in his country to go home and accept the results of the election now widely seen as fraudulent around the world. Obama has tried to be respectful of the democratic process in Iran, having lately praised the “dialogue” there, in an effort to preserve his chance to negotiate in with the nation’s leaders about acquiring only peaceful...

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Another watershed moment in American indebtedness

The Treasury Department tries to hold down interest rates by not dumping bonds onto the world market. The more bonds, the higher the interest rate we must pay in order to get people to buy them. They like to float some and then let the market for American debt get primed again. But with $2 trillion in debt to move this year alone, the administration has had to keep upping the size of its bond sales. It's expensive, and can have serious effects on inflation. Next week, the Treasury will float $104 billion in U.S. debt on the world market to keep paying off our lusty spending. Next week, we'll also pay off about $19 billion in debts coming due, making the haul for the week about $85 billion...

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Dems circumvent ethics policy for Obama fundraiser

In my column today I argue that as President Obama's agenda gets derailed by deficits and a series of missteps, pragmatic liberals are going back to the old way of doing things -- take what you can, when you can. The gay right movement's decision to stampede Obama into a politically damaging stance on benefits for domestic partners that does little to help the president with his base and risks a national backlash is one piece of evidence. "At the outset, liberals accepted Obama’s implicit bargain that if they would play along and not spook Mr. and Mrs. America, he would have the power and the opportunity to make all their dreams come true later on. As health care seems to be...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Public Wary of Deficit, Economic Intervention Poll numbers from the Wall Street Journal and NBC show rough waters for the administration, especially when trying to sell an expensive health care plan. 57 percent of Americans now think of Obama as very or somewhat liberal compared to 49 percent when he took office. 43 percent of Americans disapprove of many of his policies compared to 51 percent who mostly approve. When he took office, 32 disapproved of many policies and 65 percent mostly approved. Substantial majorities oppose the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the bailout/buyout of General Motors. Attitudes about the current state of the economy have gotten worse...

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Obama is a liberal, but is he liberal enough?

Only a liberal president would extend benefits to gay domestic partners and move to double the regulatory load on the financial sector on the same day. The question about Barack Obama is whether he is liberal enough. Despite his major moves leftward on economic and social issues since taking office, his base continues to have doubts. Those on the Left who are anti-establishment bomb throwers, like Bill Maher, certainly find Obama to be insufficiently liberal. Part of the appeal of the Left for them is to fight the power. Obama is cool with the power. He is more of a European-style Social Democrat — he accepts the erosion of the culture and favors engineering the social...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Draft Details New Rules for Markets Proving that the best politicians are unselfconscious, President Barack Obama told the Wall Street Journal that he believes in a “light touch” for federal involvement in the economy in an interview about his proposals for the largest expansion of federal financial regulatory power in 75 years. For those worried about a heavy hand, though, there is some good news. The complex plan produced by the Laurel and Hardy of economic regulation, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, now has to wend its way through Congress, which, aside from being in a dither over health care,...

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Is the great Guantanamo getaway proving to be a distraction?

(Daily Telegraph) Arrivederci Gitmo, ciao Roma! With news that three more Guantanamo Bay detainees are heading to Italy that means that we have fewer than 50 of the easiest category of detainees to deal with -- folks not deemed a material threat but who can't safely be sent home because of reprisals. This includes the Uighur Muslims shipped, along with some purely coincidental U.S. aid, to the island paradises of Palau and Bermuda. We'll be sending some aid along with the folks headed to Italy, I'm sure. Some have lamented the plight of the Uighurs, but from the looks of it they're having a pretty swell time. I've never been to Bermuda or Palau, but I have to imagine that they are a...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Guardian Council in Iran to Recount Contested Vote President Obama is taking more charge of U.S.-Iranian relations, taking the point man on Iran – Dennis Ross – out of the State Department and bringing him into the White House – something of a snub to his secretary of state. Meanwhile, the administration waits for the situation in Iran to clarify before doing more than equivocating. In Tehran, the man behind the curtain stepped out to announce a partial recount in addition to the inquest already underway into Friday’s elections. Despite state radio admitting that six Iranians were shot trying to burn down a military station, protesters seem to...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post – Obama Is Pressed to Tax Health Benefits Even if one accepts, as writers Ceci Connolly and Lori Montgomery do, that there will be hundreds of billions in savings from reforming health care, there is still the matter of paying for at least $1.5 trillion in upfront costs to change the system. The president favors decreasing the tax deduction for charitable giving, but aside from punishing non-profits and charities, the plan would probably not cover the massive costs expected to be associated with either of the main Democratic plans working their way through the Senate. That leaves taxing health benefits above a certain level. Republicans proposed it before, so...

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First lady extends her reach at the White House

Washington took note when first lady Michelle Obama suddenly sacked her chief of staff in favor of her old boss from Chicago at the beginning of June. It was widely seen as a sign that the first lady wanted to start pumping up policy as well as her biceps. The new chief of staff, Susan Sher, had helped Obama move from an unsatisfying job as a corporate lawyer grinding out billable hours to a lush, $317,000-a-year community relations job at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Sher, Senior White House Adviser Valerie Jarrett and the first lady are close friends. They were all lawyers with political clout in Chicago Democratic politics, and they all learned how to make public...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post - Obama Bows on Settling Detainees Four members of the Guantanamo Bay bunch – the Uighur Muslims who the Chinese say are terrorists but we say are not – have been released in Bermuda as “guest workers.” But the fact that the least troublesome of the Guantaamo bunch has squeaked into valet duty on St. George’s means that there will be no more easy answers on the military prison President Obama has promsed to close by the beginning of next year. The president has found a home for some of the other Gitmo boys at Palau, but the hundreds of real terrorists still in Cuba will be harder to place as writers Peter Finn and Sandhya Somashekhar...

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Morning Must Reads

Financial Times –Surge in US bond yields sparks concern When the U.S. Treasury offered $19 billion in bonds on Wednesday, world markets shrugged and demanded dramatically higher interest rates. The threat of massive inflation has investors demanding more return to stay ahead of what they believe will be the declining value of the dollar. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reports that Brazil and Russia are preparing to dump billions in U.S. bonds, which they will convert into IMF notes. That will weaken the market and likely force the U.S. to pay even more to borrow money. The impact is already being felt at home, where mortgage interest rates for U.S. homebuyers have climbed...

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Obama must do more than avoid Clinton’s mistakes

Bill Clinton’s legacy may have been on life support after his wife’s failed bid for the presidency, but Virginia voters pulled the plug when they repudiated the candidacy of his man, Terry McAuliffe. Clinton helped McAuliffe raise $7 million for the contest and made multiple visits to the Old Dominion to stump for his erstwhile bagman at the Democratic National Committee. The former president believed he could still deliver the Democratic nomination in America’s most-watched election of 2009. Hardly. Virginia voters gave the Clinton candidate an even worse time Tuesday than they did in 2008 when the former president barnstormed through rural and black precincts for...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Democrats Nearing Consensus on Health Plan Writer Robert Pear explains that Democrats are getting close on health care legislation – except on who the government will cover and how to pay for it. Taxing existing insurance benefits is gaining steam among Democrats, as is the idea of requiring employers to provide health care for workers. What the Democratic supermajority in the House wants – a single payer system – is of no consequence now. The fight is in the Senate, where conservative Democrats horrified by runaway deficits and the idea of socializing medicine only to later ration care to pay for the program. Republicans don’t matter much...

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Practical Virginia Democrats

Despite my hunch that Terry McAuliffe would be able to spend enough to get Tidewater voters and late deciders to vote for him, Virginia Democrats sent him packing. We'll likely never know the demographic splits in the race, but the huge margin for Creigh Deeds says that his support was pretty transcendent. Deeds may not reflect the new, more liberal Democratic party of Virginia, but he will be a strong contender against Republican Bob McDonnell. Deeds did well in all regions of the state. McAuliffe won only one of Virginia's congressional districts -- the third which includes Norfolk and Newport News. Brian "Also" Moran didn't even beat Deeds in brother Rep. Jim Moran's...

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McAuliffe rolling with the Tidewater

Because of the regional and ideological split among the Democrats running for Virginia governor today, the deciding district will likely be the Tidewater region -- down by Norfolk and Hampton Roads. State Sen. Creigh Deeds is from southwestern Virginia and will pull heavily from that region -- perhaps 2 to 1 over his opponents. Former Del. Brian Moran is from Alexandria and folks from Northern Virginia are well accustomed to his last name, even though all the connotations are not positive. Beyond nepotistic alliegence Moran will get the hard-line, less-practical liberals from the urban precincts of the northern part of the state. Terry McAuliffe is from Syracuse by way of Washington and...

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'Guerrilla drive-in' movies merge nostalgia, technology

Think the only way to see a big-screen movie is while slurping a 64-oz. soft drink, eating a $5 candy bar and shushing the wannabe film critic behind you?

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Morning Must Reads

Associated Press – Justice Dept.: First Gitmo Detainee arrives in U.S. The Obama administration dipped its toe in the water of closing Guantanamo Bay by bringing Ahmed Ghailani, who bombed U.S. embassies, from the military prison to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. If President Obama’s justice department can successfully detain and convict Ghailani, the president will argue that many or most of the hundreds of terrorists and Islamist fighters under guard by the U.S. Marines in Cuba can be imported and handled by civilian authorities “Ghailani was indicted in 1998 for the al-Qaida bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks which killed...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal – Ailing Kennedy Key to Health Bill Not since Willis Reed hit the court at Madison Square Garden in 1970 has there been such anticipation about the health of a public figure as the question about Sen. Ted Kennedy’s return to Capitol Hill following treatment for a brain tumor to push health care legislation. This week, President Obama begins a campaign-style push to pass a health plan, but it’s a plan that is almost wholly unformed. Public option or no public option? Mandate or no mandate? Taxing benefits or not taxing benefits? The president benefits from not having to defend a specific plan as he stumps for happy-sounding “health care...

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Scandal could derail Democratic dreams

The Republican Party’s fall from dominance in 2002 to utter collapse in 2008 is mostly attributed to the GOP either being too conservative or not conservative enough. But Republicans were mostly incoherent on domestic policy during their six-year ride to the bottom. Whether it was pandering to baby boomers with a prescription drug benefit or stoking the fires of the gay marriage debate, amassing and retaining power was the GOP’s only evident priority. When Republican members were taking bribes or in the thrall of lobbyists or even propositioning House pages, congressional leaders tried to avoid the swift investigations and appropriate disciplinary action that would have...

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Unemployment soars beyond projections used to sell stimulus

Over at the Innocent Bystanders blog there's a great comparison of how the unemployment rate of 9.4 percent announced today stacks up against the Obama administration's forecast at the time of the president's $787 billion stimulus. Innocent Bystanders uses the administration's own unemployment projections from the stimulus sales pitch and then plots in red dots the actual numbers. To sell the plan, the White House said that the unemployment rate would zoom up to 8.5 percent by now without borrowing and printing the money for crisis spending. With the cash dump, the administration forecast that unemployment would have already leveled off and be starting downward from a peak of 7.8...

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Poll shows wide disdain for racial prefrences as Team Obama pushes the Sotomayor view of the world

Judge Sonia Sotomayor came out of the gate with a bang -- rolling up broad, bipartisan support , with towering approval among women of all stripes. Her numbers even helped buoy President Obama's approval rating. The White House even felt comfortable enough last week to send the president into the fray Friday on her race-based jurisprudence, saying that she had misspoken when she said a "wise Latina" would be a better judge than a white male. Note that they president didn't just rally to her defense, but jumped into the very fraught issue of racial preferences that he successfully sidestepped in his presidential campaign. But since then, support for Sotomayor has slipped...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal – Obama Aims to Repair Ties With Muslim World In his 6,000-word “address to the Muslim world” from Cairo, President Obama spoke of the shared blame for the poor relationship between Muslims and the West, touted his own Muslim heritage, indicated that his rise to power in America was evidence of tolerance, and called for mutual sacrifice to resolve the problem. “‘This cycle of suspicion and discord must end,’ Mr. Obama said in a much-anticipated speech in one of the world's largest Muslim countries, an address designed to reframe relations after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq. In a gesture, Mr. Obama conceded at...

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Obama’s regret-and-redemption road show

If only President Barack Obama would take the same approach on domestic policy that he is taking on foreign affairs. Whatever happy banalities the president offers in his “address to the Muslim world,” Obama has so far acknowledged by his actions that a youth spent in Indonesia and an African name are not a sturdy basis for setting America’s military and diplomatic course. On Thursday, Obama will indulge his hubris in Cairo by treating 1.4 billion Muslims to a lecture on American failures, a subject on which most of his intended audience needs no further instruction. He will go on to explain how his own presidency is a repudiation of that checkered past. Americans...

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Obama helps Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee with Army appointment

With President Obama's decision to appoint GOP Rep. John M. McHugh as the Secretary of the Army, his fellow Democrats will look to shrink the number of Republicans in the 31-member New York congressional delegation from three to two . The district is right next to the one just narrowly held by Democrats in the special election to replace Sen. Kristen Gillibrand. Democrats are already hoping that a candidate will show up who can help them replicate the success they enjoyed last month with Scott Murphy. The distract may be tougher for Democrats, especially as the bailout train keeps rolling in Washington and unemployment remains relatively high, especially in New York, but as with the...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Obama’s Test: Restoring G.M. With a Limited U.S. Role Writer David Sanger provides a smart analysis of the political box in which the president finds himself having taken over busted General Motors with tax dollars. While members of Congress are already putting pressure on the company for favors, the White House is trying for the Goldilocks approach to running the company – not so much that they’ll be politically liable for unpopular or unwise decisions but not so little that critics can accuse them of neglecting a $50 billion investment. What comes through in Sanger’s piece is that Obama and his team were rather untroubled by the notion of...

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Morning Must Reads

Financial Times – GM to file for Chapter 11 protection What will $50 billion buy you these days? How about 60 percent of a bankrupt car company worth less than $58 billion that provides health insurance for 1 million retirees and has a plan to lose less money by making fewer cars? Writers Tom Braithwaite, Julie MacIntosh, Bernard Simon and John Reed provide a clear, concise and useful explanation of what’s going to happen today as failed General Motors likely becomes a shared liability for every taxpayer. “However, the agreement is likely to draw strong objections from GM’s dealers and other creditors, who will argue that the plan is illegal, said one person...

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Obama administration tries railroading General Motors

The Obama administration is dropping a cool $8 billion on improving long-distance passenger rail service in the United States. President Barack Obama’s goal is to get back what America had decades ago — a large, reliable passenger rail network that kept people off overburdened highways. It would be a propitious time for Obama to consider why America went from having the greatest railroad service in the world to having sorry old Amtrak creaking along, still managing to lose money despite a $1.5 billion annual subsidy. As General Motors enters into an Obamafied version of bankruptcy, the company is suffering from the same ills that killed passenger rail service: over-powerful...

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When you’re a celebrity, it’s adios reality

The president and the first lady are on a date night in New York tonight -- dinner , a show and then back to the White House. Lots of presidents past have sought frequent escapes from what Abraham Lincoln called his “iron cage,” usually in the form of vacation homes that gave them weeks away from Washington But the Obamas are city folks and their movements and privacy (and their neighbors’) would be just as circumscribed in their Chicago home as it would be in the White House and Honolulu is a bit far for a getaway. They tried Camp David last week and the president has been playing a good bit more golf, but the city life seems to suit them most of all. There will...

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The only thing getting grilled in NBC's Obama interview

Dig in! (AP) After heading to suburban Northern Virginia for a cheeseburger with Vice President Joe Biden a few weeks ago, President Obama went to urban southeast DC for his patty fix this week. From the AP: "President Barack Obama made a surprise lunchtime stop at Five Guys, a fast-food restaurant in southeast Washington. The president ordered a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, jalapeno peppers, and mustard as well as several other cheeseburgers to go. He also ordered a cheeseburger for Brian Williams, anchor for NBC. The network was filming a day-in-the-life program at the White House. Early this month, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden took a short motorcade ride from the...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Israel Rebuffs U.S. on Settlements Writer Charles Levinson looks into the increasingly fraught relationship between the U.S. and Israel. The Obama administration is talking very tough about the top U.S. ally in the region – no new settlements in the West Bank at all, not even the fudge factor of “natural growth” allowed in the past. It’s a political strategy aimed at undoing the coalition of new Prime Minister Netanyahu to get a government more in line with the Obama agenda. The Palestinians are thrilled to see the change in U.S. policy and it seems to be working. “Mr. Obama made reference to the pressures on Mr. Netanyahu Thursday,...

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Specter sinking a bit

The bold and the baleful Sen. Arlen Specter may want to keep hanging out around President Barack Obama as he did Wednesday night in Beverly Hills, because the new polling numbers in Pennsylvania show some potential trouble ahead for the Senate’s newest Democrat. The new Quinnipiac University poll finds that likely Pennsylvania voters go for Specter by 9 points over likely Republican nominee, former Rep. Pat Toomey in a hypothetical 2010 face-off. But on May 4, immediately after switching from Republican to Democrat, Specter was rocking a 20-point edge on Toomey. Particularly of interest is the fact that Specter got only 16 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Independents....

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Single-Regulator Plan for Banks Now Close The Obama administration has more rocks for Congress to break this year, as a plan for a highly-centralized, more powerful financial regulatory agency takes shape. It would amount to the biggest regulatory overhaul since the New Deal – possibly bigger – and would be aimed at ironing out risk and eliminating bubbles. Writer Damian Paletta explains that insurance companies, investment firms, hedge funds and others are all going to get a taste, but up first it’s banking. “The new bank regulatory agency could prove controversial because it would consolidate the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency...

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Establishment press channels Team Obama

President Barack Obama may not have spent many years in the political game, but he still has plenty of silky moves. Consider the trap he set for Republicans with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. First, he hails the choice as historic, maintains that she brings a fresh perspective because she’s a Hispanic, and depicts her as a benign liberal in the David Souter mold. Then his henchmen put out the word, swallowed whole by the establishment press, that only right-wing troglodytes could oppose a woman of Sotomayor’s unquestioned virtues. At the heart of the strategy is a false choice: Republicans could be progressives like Colin Powell or retros like...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Record Shows Rulings Within Liberal Mainstream President Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee may have plenty of trouble with what she said off the bench (Latinas are wiser than white males, courts make policy, etc.) but she’s not likely to have any hassles over her actual legal work. Writers Jess Bravin and Nathan Koppel looked at Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s greatest hits from more than 4,000 decisions and found that she has been a conventional liberal in her jurisprudence. Her biggest cases – like striking down firefighter promotions because not enough minorities passed advancement exams or siding with baseball players against owners –...

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A brief history of presidential spin on female court nominees from O'Connor to Sotomayor

President Reagan and Sandra Day O'Connor Presidents deal with Supreme Court nominations differently, but it’s still instructive to note the differences in how identity politics and personal biography has seeped into the process. Once, presidents simply submitted names and made brief announcements. But since Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy put the hurting on Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, the game has changed. Presidents now feel the need to cast their picks not as marble models of rectitude and immaculate qualifications but of flesh and blood folks who ought not be roughed up by a bunch of Senators snarling behind their cap-toothed smiles. That being said, President Obama carried the...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Liberals Sketch Out Dreams and Limits for Supreme Court The Associated Press reports that the president will announce his pick to succeed Justice David Souter mid-morning today. The New York Times obligingly has a story about how liberals have given up on getting a big win and that the administration has focused on a conventional liberal in the mold of Bill Clinton’s picks. But at the Journal, writer Jess Bravin looks at what the Left and the legal minds of the Obama administration really want. Bravin reads two new books that liberals hope to provide the same intellectual underpinnings to their drive to remake the courts during the Obama era. They are...

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Evasive tactics on global warming won't help Obama

The Obama administration prides itself on not dumbing things down for voters. President Obama's political counselor David Axelrod has argued that whether it is a pestilent preacher, stimulus worries or blowback over changes to his terror policy, the president can talk frankly and at great length about issues and that average Americans can understand and follow along. Sometimes it seems more like flip-flopping and nuance overload, but until now, the president has had success in at least buying himself more time with complex explanations that often include what sound like tough medicine for his audience or a harsh truth. His speech on Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the prime example. It included...

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Ridge may sway Republicans. Powell? Not so much.

We heard from erstwhile Bushies former Homeland Security Secretary Gov. Tom Ridge and former Secretary of State Colin Powell today how the Republican Party needs to change and become more inclusive. Presumably, that has mostly to do with social issues for Ridge and for fiscal policy for Powell. And there are a lot of Republicans, like Utah Gov. John Huntsman who will become President Obama's man in China, who are betting that the Democratic era that began in 2006 will continue certainly through 2012. Powell has generally had more stroke with Democrats than with Republicans. Like he did for the U.N. on Iraq, Powell's chief political role was to appeal to the middle on behalf of Bush and...

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Obama takes swipe at Bush in Memorial Day message

In his weekly radio address, President Obama took time to commend American fighting forces and to explain how his defense, veterans and even economic programs (which he continues to call the "New Foundation") are part of serving the armed forces. It might have been superior for the president to have offered only a patriotic message and a word of thanks and remembrance for the fallen soldiers, but that's debatable. What seems wholly out of place, though, is the president's swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, and others: "Our fighting men and women – and the military families who love them – embody what is best in America. And we have a responsibility to...

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Sunday morning chatter

I'll be appearing on Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz at 10 am Sunday on CNN. My fellow panelists will be Karen Tumulty of Time and Clarance Page of the Chicago Tribune. The topics will include the media's difficult relationship with former Vice President Dick Cheney and the question of who the press corps really thinks runs the Republican...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- House Panel Clears Plan to Cut Greenhouse Gases Rep. Henry Waxman was able to get his bill for global warming fees to the full House by the Memorial Day recess as promised. The remaining questions, though, are whether it actually amounts to a climate change bill or corporate welfare and if the measure can advance through the House, let alone the Senate. President Obama has gone off on his own hook on global warming and is using the EPA and the Department of Transportation to enforce a carbon crackdown. That may encourage some environmentally minded members of Congress to vote against the Waxman plan that would dole out hundreds of billions of dollars to connected...

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Morning Must Reads

Los Angeles Times -- California voters kill budget measures Only one measure – the cap on the salaries of elected officials – won in California’s big referendum on Tuesday. Everything else – extensions of tax increases, shifting resources from the state lottery to pay bills, a bigger rainy day fund and more – got utterly smashed. Nothing but the salary caps even made it to 40 percent. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger must have known it would be bad because he went to Washington to cheer on President Obama’s car emission crackdown rather than stay and face the music. Without the extended taxes and shifted funds, the state will be $22 billion short of making...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- Obama Will Try to Quell Concern on Detainees President Obama will today try to have it both ways, this time on terrorists with a major speech. Obama is expected to say that he is fulfilling his pledge upon taking office that he would close Guantanamo Bay by releasing, transferring abroad or trying all its inmates will be fulfilled, but in a fashion less scary to Congress. But as writer Karen DeYoung points out, puffs of talk on the subject may not reveal that great a shift, except for in PR. “In a move that is likely to further antagonize lawmakers, a Justice Department task force reviewing the detainee cases has decided to send the first Guantanamo prisoner...

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Impatience drives Obama to expand his powers

Perhaps President Barack Obama spent so little time in the Senate because he has little tolerance for the glacial pace at which Congress was designed to move. The nation might have profited if Obama had been patient enough to make it through his first term. Even if he had just moved some meaningful legislation or missed fewer than 308 votes before vaulting to the presidency, Obama would have been better equipped. Instead, Obama has wildly overestimated the ability of Congress to achieve his massive first-year agenda. As a result of his frustrations, Obama is embarking on a breathtaking expansion of executive power. Many said it was too much for Congress to tackle the president’s...

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Steele tries out tougher tone on Obama at the RNC’s state chairmen’s meeting

Remarks of Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele today at National Harbor: Once again, welcome to Maryland. Welcome to Prince George’s County, Maryland. This is my birthplace, the place where I raised my family and the place of my first leadership position in the Republican Party. It was a tough job – and the pay wasn’t very good. Most of my time was spent walking neighborhoods, licking envelopes, and making phone calls for the County Republican Party. You don’t know lonely until you announce: “Hi, I’m from the Prince George’s County Republican Party.” But, I learned a great deal; and it served as a foundation on my...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times – A Leadership Test for an Unbowed Pelosi House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat down with the Times’ John Harwood for a chat, and the embattled speaker again maintains that attacks on her for dissembling about waterboarding and then accusing the CIA of criminal dishonesty are a Republican effort to distract from other more important issues. But Pelosi’s problem isn’t with Republicans. It’s with Democrats who now feel less comfortable with her being part of the accountability structure in Washington. Her attack on the CIA was blunted by the fact that former Democratic Rep. turned CIA boss Leon Panetta so quickly swatted it down and her shifty...

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Obama tries spin moves to dodge Notre Dame tacklers

A politician as good as Barack Obama knows his opponent’s argument better than he knows his own. But while Obama may have enough rhetorical command of conservatism to build straw men or to ingratiate himself to a hostile audience, he still does not understand what really animates the Right. Obama tried to dodge the resurgent issue of abortion in his commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame on Sunday, explaining that people who disagree can still work together. Obama pointed to the favored Democratic common ground of reducing the number of abortions while retaining unlimited access to the procedure. To make his point, and to show respect for his hosts, Obama invoked...

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Morning Must Reads

Chris Stirewalt's Morning Must...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Obama Considers Detaining Terror Suspects Indefinitely The national security turnaround of the Obama administration may go beyond the decision to reverse a plan that would have released photos that would have likely cost American lives in Muslim uprisings. Writer Evan Perez learns that the administration is considering keeping some terrorists in custody indefinitely without trial. The administration is trying to find a way to close Guantanamo Bay – including with a plan to bring detainees to a new facility in the U.S. and another proposal to keep Bush-era military tribunals in place. Now, the same hawkish faction in the administration that convinced the...

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Will Obama get in trouble looking for trouble?

President Barack Obama came to American voters as a community organizer who could build consensus to tackle the hardest issues. He ran, not on his slight record, but on his personality. For his early followers, it was his temperament that won them over and his temperament that made them stay. Last November, his “famously unflappable temperament” was mainly responsible for catapulting Obama to the most exalted position of power in the world. As The Washington Post said when endorsing then-Senator Obama last fall: “Mr. Obama’s temperament is unlike anything we’ve seen on the national stage in many years. He is deliberate but not indecisive; eloquent but a...

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What the detainee photo reversal tells us about Obama

Only the president and his key staff know whether his reversal on releasing photos of alleged abuses of detainees in the Global War on Terror was a result of a genuine change of heart about how to fight the Islamists or a response to the mounting domestic political pressure -- from Left and Right -- about his efforts to incriminate members of the previous administration. It was likely some combination of the two. Those who want America to win the battle against the jihadis should be happy Obama relented, whatever the combination of factors made him back down. It's not hard to imagine the Muslim world in an uprising just like the one that followed the photos of the grubby guardsmen's...

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Morning Must Reads

Hesitation at White House On Releasing Abuse Photos Before releasing terrorist interrogation memos, before Dick Cheney started barking about the threat created by Obama administration’s ongoing apologia for American anti-terror practices, and before Nancy Pelosi got in too deep on what she knew and when she knew it about waterboarding, the White House agreed not to fight the release of 44 photos alleged to show U.S. personnel abusing detainees abroad. Now that the consequences of national security show and tell are becoming more clear, though, the White house is reconsidering the wisdom of having dozens of potentially embarrassing photos circulating among allies and enemies. It...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- 45 Centrist Democrats Protest Secrecy of Health Care Talks The sense is growing in Congress that the massive costs associated with a federal health care program could gobble up everything else – that the $2 trillion in savings touted by Obama and his backers in the managed care industry will not likely materialize and if it does, won’t offset the incredible expense the nation would incur. Blue Dog Democrats – who style themselves as the fiscal conscience of their party in the House – have so far bounced along with the president’s big-spending ways, and even done some recent pork barreling of their own. But it’s on health care that...

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The dangers of euphemisms in the environmental debate

"Freedom fuel" awaits conversion into "opportunity juice" We are closing in on energy legislation in Congress as House Energy Committee Chairman Henry Waxman's Memorial Day deadline looms. The issue for the Obama administration and congressional leaders has been convincing voters that the cost of regulation is either very small or unavoidable because of the urgency of global warming problems. We've seen that a growing number of Americans think the hazards of global warming have been exaggerated. This may be because the economic climate makes worrying about carbon dioxide seem like a bit of a luxury. It may also be because the purveyors of global warmism have been...

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Morning Must Reads

Bloomberg – Obama Promised $2 Trillion Savings in 10 Years by Health Groups Today is health-care day as the White House releases the details of the Obama plan for spending $634 billion as a down payment on universal health care. The big question is whether the federal government is going to start offering mainstream insurance – the “public option” – or whether the president will instead expand existing programs that, combined with new rules for private insurers, would have the same net effect. Writers Aliza Marcus and Kim Chipman explain that the final offer from the health care industry is a doozy -- $2 trillion in lost profits and voluntary agreement to...

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There’s trouble on the Left for Democrats

If there are any more revelations about what Nancy Pelosi knew of interrogating terrorists, she may have to up the ante from a truth commission to an inquisition. Because if she again gets called out for knowing more than she let on, Pelosi would have to get Dick Cheney in leg irons to prevent a revolt on the Left. The speaker is already having a tough time keeping liberals off her back since former CIA boss Porter Goss and others shed light on the 2002 briefings Pelosi received. Pelosi’s position is that she knew waterboarding was an approved practice, but not that it had been employed. Some feel certain she knew more. And among those who take Pelosi at her word, liberals...

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Schwarzenegger's tough lesson on stimulus

Why did conservative governors Mark Sanford, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and others resist potions of the Obama stimulus ? For the very reason that Arnold Schwarzenegger is now learning the hard way. We learn today that the Obama administration will withhold some expected funding if the state goes through with a budget plan that requires unionized, state-employed home health care workers to accept $75 million in pay cuts. If the state doesn’t go through with the cuts, it will be insolvent. If the state does go through with the cuts, President Obama could withhold $6.8 billion in stimulus funds… making the state insolvent. Back in February when Sanford and Jindal were...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal – CIA Says It Briefed Congressional Leaders There would be no reason for Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to at least threaten a probe of Bush-era interrogation practices. But rather than using the it as a chance to placate her grumbling base, Pelosi has stood against truth commissions, hearings, etc. Using CIA documents prepared at the request of GOP lawmakers, writer Siobhan Gorman explains that Pelosi may have more skin in the game than previously believed. Pelosi, whose story has evolved over recent weeks, said she had heard about waterboarding at her CIA briefings, but not that it actually had been done. “The document lists 40 briefings provided to...

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False alarm -- Ridge won't run

Just as everyone was speculating that Tom Ridge would jump in the Senate race (myself included), the former governor has announced that he's staying on the sidelines. But for the reasons I explained that Toomey could make it competitive with Ridge, he still might make it a real contest in the general election. It's a long shot, but Specter has made very few friends with his switch and may even get a Democratic primary challenge. Update : Will Ridge be willing to campaign for Toomey? If he did, it could score big centrists points for Toomey in the fall. Pennsylvanians clearly still love Ridge and don't know Toomey nearly as well. Some retail politicking by Ridge in Western Pa. could make...

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Could Toomey make it a race with Ridge?

Ready to rumble? As I pointed out in my column today, if Tom Ridge were to decide to run for Senate in Pennsylvania, he’d likely beat current Republican frontrunner Pat Toomey in the June GOP primary. But Toomey’s boosters aren’t so terrified of the 35-point favorability rating edge the former two-term governor enjoys among Republicans over Toomey. And it’s true that the Ridge race would be a tougher version of what they had been preparing for with Specter. “Polls at this point can only tell you so much, but what are the grass roots and the people who really get involved in primaries thinking?” asked one Toomey insider. “There’s a lot of...

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Morning Must Reads

Los Angeles Times – Big banks' 'stress test' results to be reassuring, Geithner says By setting the parameters for a new kind of examination, Treasury Secretary Time Geithner has controlled the outcome of the bank stress tests due out today all along. The goal has been to spur confidence and to prepare the ground for new regulations. The Obama administration has obtained half of the intended effect of the tests by creating new market enthusiasm for the financial sector. Now comes the hard part. As writers Jim Puzzanghera and Scott Reckard explain, if the results are too reassuring, it will make the administration’s plan for lots of new oversight and for specific actions...

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Specter finds the joke’s on him if Ridge runs

Rather than getting the last laugh, Sen. Arlen Specter has become the butt of Washington’s biggest joke. And if Tom Ridge decides to jump in the race to replace him, Specter’s recent embarrassment will be a deadly serious matter. Specter believed his new Democratic brethren would honor him for defecting to their side. Instead he was humiliated — stripped of his seniority on Senate committees and sent to the back bench with the freshmen. Specter negotiated his switch for months — including no fewer than 15 conversations with Vice President Joe Biden. He even won a public promise that he would get to keep his status from Majority Leader Harry Reid. But by...

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Morning Must Reads

Financial Times – Debt holders move to block Chrysler’s restructuring The Obama administration got Chrysler’s biggest creditors to sign off on taking huge losses from selling the failed company to the U.S. and Canadian governments, the United Auto Workers and Italian carmaker Fiat because the biggest creditors all happen to be government bailout recipients themselves. But in bankruptcy court today, 20 other non-TARP creditors will be protesting the raw deal they’re getting by Obama circumventing the traditional bankruptcy process. “The dissident non-Tarp lenders allege that Chrysler’s proposal strips them of their rights as senior lenders and ignores...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Progressive Vision Likely in Next Jurist Writer Jess Bravin spoke to former Obama law professor and current Obama legal advisor Lawrence Tribe about what kind of justice the president will pick to replace David Souter. The answer was that Obama would want a transformational figure who would start to turn the court beyond the liberal-conservative debate and toward a new vision of the law. The key, Tribe said, is how the nominee makes the sale of the new approach to the law. The goal is to make a big shift sound like a small one. “Thus, said Mr. Tribe, the president would want not merely a nominee of academic and professional excellence, but one who -- like...

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Obama wants a social engineer for high court

The White House and The New York Times are assuring Americans that President Barack Obama wants the next Supreme Court justice to be a pragmatist. If you think of the law as a sick patient and the justices of the high court as country doctors, then pragmatism sounds pretty good. The most effective, least disruptive way to fix the problem is what everyone wants from a sawbones. But what if you don’t agree with the diagnosis? When legal scholars talk about a pragmatic justice, they’re talking about someone who isn’t bound by the law as written. In rendering a decision, he or she considers the context of the case and outside factors, like the greater social good. But as...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Baghdad Bombings Stir New Insurgency Concerns Things are getting more dangerous in Iraq. Until Wednesday’s coordinated attacks, though, the consensus was that the violence was a last gasp of the long, hard-fought insurgency. There seems to be less certainty on that front today and a concern that the civil conflict between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority may be opening again as U.S. troops hasten their withdrawal. Writer Charles Levinson shows that the latest round of violence has received less coverage because Iraqis themselves are mostly the targets and the storyline of Iraq as in its denoument has taken hold. The political consequences, though,...

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Four reasons for (a little) GOP optimism

Conservative Republicans are putting on a brave face about Arlen Specter’s departure, and correctly pointing out that the only difference will be that he’ll now be stabbing them in the front, not the back. But if the rats are leaving, the ship must be sinking. With Specter aboard, congressional Democrats, strangely timid despite their largest majority in 30 years, are feeling emboldened. Specter has promised to be as feckless a Democrat as he was a Republican. But when alleged comedian Al Franken becomes a senator, the magic number of 60 on procedural votes will give Democrats the kind of control they enjoyed under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. Specter will be...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- So Far, Obama Remains Popular With Public The Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll done by pollsters Bill McInturff and Peter Hart is the best regarded public poll and at 100 days, the survey shows Barack Obama with very high personal popularity, moderate acceptance of his policies, and some notes of caution for the days beyond the first 100. Of particular note, as writer Laura Meckler points out, is that on the Obama plan for historic short-term deficits, the release of interrogation memos and even the stimulus plan, Americans are showing some strong reservations. If such signature issues continue to dismay voters, the 30-point gap between his personal popularity...

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Can Obama bring change without a crisis?

Barack Obama’s political counselor, David Axelrod, called the 100-day mark of the new presidency a “Hallmark holiday.” But despite Axelrod’s blasé public attitude, the administration is certainly treating Wednesday as a big occasion, complete with a prime-time news conference and plenty of behind-the-scenes access for reporters to make sure the first draft of history casts glory on Obama. And that’s reasonable, because Axelrod and his team know 100 days is as good a time as any to take stock of what kind of man Americans elected and how he will govern. What you can’t do in 100 days is measure success. History still wrestles with the...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Torture Cases Would Face Legal Hurdles Some Democrats are eager to exploit the Bush Justice Department interrogation memos for political gain and to repudiate the Republican hawks who took a hard line on roughing up terrorists, but the prospects of a long battle over uncertain political terrain has other Democrats concerned about endless rounds of recriminations and blowback. Writer John McKinnon explains that truth commissions, independent counsels, and what Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., described as a “banana republic” approach to jailing the members of the former administration could still be in the offing. “Mr. Obama has said it is up to Attorney...

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Memo release puts Obama in political bind

President Barack Obama said that while he wanted to see the whole truth come out about what kind of interrogation tactics were used on the Sept. 11 plotters and other terrorists, he did not want to see the matter become “politicized.” But by releasing four memos from the Bush Justice Department providing CIA agents with guidance on working over the bad guys, Obama has ensured that it will be a dominant political issue for months to come. It would have been helpful for Obama if the memos were a little more shocking. As it is, the Left remains convinced that there is more to learn about Dick Cheney’s dark arts. And those on the Right and in the middle are underwhelmed...

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Democratic downturn in Colorado

Democratic survey firm Public Policy Polling has new numbers from Colorado out today, and they show a surprising lack of support for both President Obama and the state's new Senator, Mark Udall. Obama and Udall both won with 53 percent of the vote last fall, so the downturn is surprising -- especially for Udall. One theory is that Colorado has strong libertarian leanings and that the rolling bailouts and other government expansions has rubbed folks the wrong way. BARACK OBAMA RATING PERCENT APPROVE 49 DISAPPROVE 45 UNDECIDED 4 (PPP) MARK UDALL RATING...

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Morning Must Reads

Thiessen -- The CIA's Questioning Worked It was part of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s message on FOX News Monday night and in the wake of President Obama’s fresh apologies at the CIA earlier in the day, it’s becoming the central argument of Bushies being slammed for mistreating terrorists – “what we did worked.” Now that the Obama administration has released the memos that detail interrogation techniques waterboarding and putting a bug near an Islamist with an insect phobia, Cheney and others are moving beyond their original calls to keep the tactics secret and saying the rest of the memos should be released – particularly the ones that...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- U.S. Projects Openness at Summit After his bromance with Hugo Chavez, deepening detente with the Castro brothers, and enduring an hour-long harangue from former Sandinista boss Daniel Ortega on American imperialism, President Obama came home calling his first Latin American trip a big success. By accepting blame for U.S. policy mistakes, offering concessions to longtime enemies, and other moves away from American superpower dominance, Obama was greeted warmly by his fellow hemispheric leaders. As writer Laura Meckler points out, though, the smiles of a summit may not turn into real policy shifts. As Obama learned in Europe, a warm reception doesn’t translate...

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Is Obama’s EPA crackdown threat hot air?

President Barack Obama has chosen global warming as the ground on which to make his first tough political stand. And to win the battle, he must convince Congress and the voting public that he is willing to utterly wreck the U.S. economy in the name of climate protection. By allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to classify carbon dioxide as a danger to human health, the president hopes to force moderate Democrats to back his plan to charge companies $646 billion over the next decade for the right to emit greenhouse gases. The president’s message to lawmakers: Either back the White House plan, or he will let Climate Czarina Carol Browner and the carbon crusaders at the EPA...

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Newspaper bailout fan joins Obama team

It had gone largely unnoticed that former Los Angeles Times columnist and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks had been tapped by the Obama administration for a senior spot in the Pentagon. Brooks, whose last two columns at the Times were "Bail Out Journalism" and "Bush's Big Lies" is a pretty hard-line liberal who frequents the sets of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann. Her legal work, which focuses on international human rights law, includes stints with Amnesty International and the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute . Her last diatribe against George W. Bush includes both scare quotes around "war on terror" and a Bush-Nazi...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- NATO Leaders Debate Afghan Strains at Summit NATO’s commitment to Afghanistan was already slipping before President Obama announced his ambitious plan to expand the scope and aims of the almost-eight-year-old effort there. Today, Obama is talking with the other NATO heads at an event celebrating both the 60th anniversary of the treaty organization and the return of French military might to the group 43 years after a partial withdrawal in protest of American dominance. Writers Steven Erlanger and Thom Shanker show that Obama, who promised a more international mission in Afghanistan as a candidate, is reconciling himself to the fact that the U.S. will have to go...

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Morning Must Reads

The Times -- G20 leaders begin talks to bury 'free' markets Before the leaders of the largest economies in the world met, the debate was whether they should stimulate and regulate -- as President Obama and U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggest – or regulate but not stimulate -- per German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The compromise being reached today seems to be to regulate now and provide emergency funds for economic bailouts. Writer Phillipe Naughton explains that while most g-20 meetings produce non-committal boilerplate statements, this one may end up actually laying the roundwork for the first-ever global financial...

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Is the sun setting on American-style conservatism?

From the sounds of it, President Barack Obama and the leader of the British Conservative Party had a fine time in their one-on-one meeting Wednesday. David Cameron called it “excellent,” saying he and the American leader found “common ground” and a “wide range of agreement.” It’s not surprising. If the Republicans in the United States were more like their British counterparts, Obama would have been able to deliver on his promises of bipartisanship. Indeed, as the GOP looks to reinvent itself after appalling losses last year, some Republicans are flirting with the Tory conservatism of Cameron and his team. The strong conservatism of Prime...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- U.S. Plan Sees Easing of G.M. to Bankruptcy As the Obama administration’s plans for GM become clear, competitors like Ford and Toyota are starting to have some concerns about how the new game of bankruptcy with benefits is being played. What the White House seems to be arranging is a two-company solution in which the biggest problems (Hummer, pension debt, old plants) are quarantined in one group and viable resources (Cadillac, Chevy, new facilities) are put into the other. The eventual, intentional taxpayer-cushioned failure of the sickest part of the company could deprive competitors of key suppliers even as GMs viable components begin to reassert themselves...

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Newspaper bailout looms large

With word today that both of Chicago's daily newspapers are now or will soon be bankrupt, the clock is likely running on some government action on the implosion of the newspaper industry. These are the president's hometown newspapers and with other industries -- autos, insurance, banking, and construction -- all on the federal dole, the motivation to give newspapers a taste will mount. Maryland Democrat Sen. Ben Cardin has already floated an idea to make newspapers tax exempt, if they don't try to influence politics. John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi have both expressed concern for the industry and suggested that newspapers are too important to be allowed to fail. Cardin's bill may well be...

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Morning Must Reads

The Times -- President Obama will employ all his gifts to avoid sign of a snub With the G-20 about the get underway in London, all the world leaders are doing their parts. Nicolas Sarkozy is threatening to walk out. Dmitry Medvedev is looking tough flying a jet – like a 5’2” Vladimir Putin – and Barack Obama is brushing up on his diplomacy. After an embarrassing meeting at the White House with British PM Gordon Brown in which the Obamas gave Brown a box of DVDs in exchange for a pen holder carved from the timbers of a ship that led the fight against the international slave trade, team Obama is looking to not sink the politically waterlogged Brown. Writer Tom...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- GM Chief to Resign at White House's Behest The Obama administration seems to be pretty excited about sacking GM’s CEO, with leaks and process pieces abounding Sunday and Monday in advance of the White House roll out for the tough love approach for the failed automaker and it’s even sicker competitor, Chrysler. Writer Peter Whorisky’s useful piece puts into perspective just what a horrible and impossible job it is to be CEO of what has become a health-care provider and pension fund that happened to make cars. Running AIG will seem like a dream gig compared to steering a bailed-out GM. Not discussed are the consequences of the administration taking...

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What’s good for Kabul is good for Detroit

Critics who had been asking whether there is any limit to what the Obama administration will try finally got an answer: The line was drawn at back-to-back news conferences about escalating an Asian land war and nationalizing the auto industry. The communications folks at the White House decided that rolling out a new plan for Afghanistan was all the public could take Friday. Announcing the supposed tough love for GM and Chrysler was bumped to today. Sounding like someone confronting an addict at an intervention, President Barack Obama hinted over the weekend at all manner of requirements for the companies to meet in order to keep living on public credit. While the president’s...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- In New Afghan Strategy, Obama Will Add Troops Asked initially by military commanders for 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan, President Barack Obama went for the 17,000 he announced on Feb. 16. Today, he will announce 4,000 more troops for the effort there, but strictly as “military advisors” who won’t fight but will work with the Afghan army. And unlike the 20,000 troops President Bush sent to Iraq, though, the Obama team is adamantly refusing to refer to this as a surge. In order to convince his fellow Democrats that he is not escalating the conflict and deepening U.S. involvement, which he is, Obama will also announce new benchmarks for the Karzi...

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Without passion, Obama agenda will falter

As a man who takes two days to decide whether he’s angry, President Barack Obama seems to be struggling to summon the vigor required to implement his own audacious vision. It’s becoming clear that while Obama may think boldly about policy, he seems timid about putting his aims in action. Obama surprised many when, rather than the consensus-driven positions that his centrist supporters predicted, he offered an agenda that would constitute a sharp left turn. But presidents often set out on history-making paths, then entice, cajole or even beg the country to come along. There is always compromise, certainly, but leadership at that level means, at some point, subjecting others...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- White House to Hunt for New Tax Revenues President Obama conceded in his Tuesday night press conference that the final federal budget won’t be just a photocopy of his plan. And it’s starting to look like it might not even be a faded mimeograph. Congressional Democrats are busy dropping key points from the Obama proposal -- including new taxes and fees. The White House, though, has a recipe for turnip blood soup. In a very useful, broad piece, writers John McKinnon, Greg Hitt and Naftali Bendavid explain that one of the ways the administration is looking to salvage some of their spending proposals is by making the most of the tax code they have –...

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Obama looks to close the gap between his popularity and his policies

After weeks of criticism from the left and the right about the size, priorities and execution of his agenda, President Barack Obama has yet to yield on any substantial point. But if Obama wants to keep his plans intact as Democratic members of Congress grow restive and Republicans become more defiant, he must close a widening gap between his personal popularity and public support for his policies. When he held his first prime-time news conference six weeks ago, the president was mostly selling his $787 billion stimulus plan. Since then, the administration has been busy on fiscal, military and social issues. But it’s his $3.6 trillion budget — including global warming fees...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms In the past, being “too big to fail” meant free money. In the future, it may mean government regulation beyond anything ever seen in American finance and possibly having the government take your stuff. A document leaked to reporters Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho reveals the outline of the broad regulatory plan that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will pitch to members of Congress on Thursday and, presumably, President Obama will take up tonight in his second prime-time press conference. Insurance firms, investment houses and other institutions “whose collapse would damage the broader economy,” as...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- U.S. Rounding Up Investors to Buy Bad Assets Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner takes his second swing at the bank bailout piñata today. Wisely, this time the Treasury Secretary will issue his plan (also previewed in weekend leaks and a Wall Street Journal op-ed) and then President Obama will speak to the nation a day later. The last time, Obama hyped Geithner and Geithner fell flat. The plan requires the biggest predators on Wall Street – hedge fund managers – to gobble up $1 trillion in toxic mortgage debt. It should be appealing to the hedge funders, since the taxpayers assume all the risk. But writers Andrew Sorkin, Eric Dash and Rachel Swarns...

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Political do-overs in the Octomom era

In the era of the Octomom, public rehabilitation is only as far away as the next news cycle. And that’s exactly what the Obama administration is counting on as it brings its bank bailout back into view this week. If mega-mommy Nadya Suleman can get a media makeover, maybe Wall Street can too. Suleman is the single, jobless woman whose latest round of in vitro fertilizations yielded eight children in January, bringing the total size of her test-tube brood to 14. A month ago, there was wide opprobrium for Suleman after she appeared on the “Today” show. Suleman claimed creepy victim status, saying that people denouncing her reckless reproduction were attacking her because...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- A Defining Moment for Treasury Secretary As he puts in yet another 16-hour day in an under-staffed Treasury Department, Secretary Timothy Geithner at least has the circling sharks to keep him company. Writer Jackie Calmes looked at the AIG timeline put out by the White House (graphic helpfully provided) and put that together with some leaks from the administration to paint the picture not of someone, as John Boehner said, “on thin ice,” but someone being pushed out on an ice floe. Obamaland is building its case against him – not populist enough, too chummy with Wall Street and Bush-tainted: “The A.I.G. tempest has been especially explosive for...

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Politics as hardball, not as a higher calling

“You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington; to end the political strategy that’s been all about division and instead make it about addition — to build a coalition for change that stretches through Red States and Blue States.” — Barack Obama, Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 3, 2008 - York: Candidate Obama vs. President Obama - Mason: Stumbling along the learning curve - Carney: AIG mess clips the wings of high-flying Obama team - Tapscott: When America becomes Obamaland - York: Obama pushes his...

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What’s keeping Geithner on board at Treasury?

If only a troubled treasury secretary was as easily shed as a pestilent pastor or a crummy commerce secretary. If the Obama administration could jettison the politically disastrous Timothy Geithner without causing massive market upheaval and wiping out what remains of public confidence, the secretary would surely be toast by now. But, like the designated driver on a college road trip, Geithner can’t be ditched until Team Obama finds a better way until to reach its desired destination. Surely Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod curse daily the decision to stick by the nebbishy Geithner when they first learned of his Turbo Tax troubles. The White House jammed through his nomination,...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Treasury Will Make Grab to Recoup Bonus Funds The prevailing approach for the Obama administration to this point has been to try to turn short-term issues to long-term advantage – most notably selling 20-year public schooling, nationalized health care and a global warming tax on the basis of the current recession. But it’s what the administration tried at first on the AIG mess. While President Obama and his economic team said they were frustrated but powerless to do anything about the bonuses, they wanted long-term regulatory fixes that would give the White House more control over the financial sector. Writers Jonathan Weisman, Naftali Bendavid and...

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Morning Must Reads

Milbank – Scolding the Bonus Babies Democrats and Republicans alike are livid about the bonuses bailed-out insurance giant AIG recently paid, and many are also upset about the fact that so much of the money borrowed by taxpayers and given to the company went to overseas banks. President Obama knew he had a tough sell Monday trying to avoid the bipartisan anger while still advancing a new bailout plan. Dana Milbank set the scene rather nicely as Obama and his beleaguered Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner fumbled to find the right tone. “Geithner, the warm-up act, delivered what he said would be ‘a clear message to our nation's banks.’ But it wasn't all that clear....

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Obama must show competence to move agenda

The fear among conservatives was that President Barack Obama and his team would be so smoothly effective in pursuing their aims that European-style socialism would come to America without anyone really noticing. Now, Republican worries of political irrelevance are starting to give way to more fundamental concerns. The men and women of the right are wondering whether the new president can keep it together well enough to avoid running the country into a ditch. As one former Republican National Committee hand and Bush lieutenant said: “You at least want the other guys to be competent enough to avoid disaster. Not too good, but at least competent.” The current Republican fear...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- U.S. to Toughen Finance Rules Today, President Obama and his Treasury Secretary will be talking about the nearly billion dollars they’ve set aside to help American small businesses. It’s a good time to do so, because the rest of the week may be given over to the growing symbiosis between the Treasury Department and the biggest lenders and financial institutions. Writer Damian Paletta lays out the broad parameters of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s new banking regulations. The new rules would strengthen government control over financial institutions and make the government a much bigger player in the lending market. “Mr. Geithner is...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Daily News -- President Obama: Economic crisis not as dire as it seems After getting pounded for selling his audacious plan to overhaul environmental regulations, expand educational entitlements, and nationalize healthcare in the midst of a recessions – and talking up the crisis to sell his package – President Barack Obama made an abrupt about face Thursday in an address to the nation’s top CEOs. Writer Ken Bazinet explains how Obama transformed from the “day of reckoning” president to the business booster full of breezy confidence. Obama talked about his belief in the free market and said he felt government’s job was just to help...

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Obama whiffs on fat pitch down the middle

President Barack Obama hasn’t missed many chances, but in signing the proudly porky spending bill sent to him by Congress Wednesday, he missed a chance to hit the ball out of the park. If Obama had said he would not sign any bill that wasn’t clean as a hound’s tooth — no earmarks, no increases in spending and no funny business — the president today would be soaring to new heights of popularity. Instead, Obama opted to sign the $410 billion blob and then retreat to what is coming to be his default position: Expressing regret for a flawed choice and promising to do better next time. As a result, Obama sowed new doubts about his credibility as a reformer and...

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Obama whiffs on fat pitch down the middle

President Barack Obama hasn’t missed many chances, but in signing the proudly porky spending bill sent to him by Congress Wednesday, he missed a chance to hit the ball out of the park. If Obama had said he would not sign any bill that wasn’t clean as a hound’s tooth — no earmarks, no increases in spending and no funny business — the president today would be soaring to new heights of popularity. Instead, Obama opted to sign the $410 billion blob and then retreat to what is coming to be his default position: Expressing regret for a flawed choice and promising to do better next time. As a result, Obama sowed new doubts about his credibility as a reformer and...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal – U.S. to Push for Global Stimulus With dark clouds gathered around the beginning of the market week and credible economists talking about the Dow heading for 5,000, the Obama Administration is trying to get the leaders of the countries with the world’s 20 largest economies on board with a mega-stimulus on par with the borrow-and-spend plan President Obama pushed through in the U.S. Writer Bob Davis explains how Obama’s plan is at odds with European leaders who want to focus on fixing the rules for the banking and investment games, not making themselves players. “The shift in priorities urged by the U.S. is especially at odds with Germany,...

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Obama White House may face a crisis surplus

We recently heard from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton what has become the mantra of the new administration — “Never waste a good crisis.” Speaking in Brussels, Belgium, over the weekend, Clinton said that the countries of the world — especially the U.S. — should take the “propitious” opportunity of the dire economy to team up on global warming. On Saturday, President Barack Obama himself talked in his radio address about there being “great opportunity in the midst of great crisis” to change the way American government operates. As much as Obama and his team talk about all the good things about having the economy losing steam...

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Who leads the Republican Party? Who cares?

Leading a political party in a time of defeat is like being the coach the Southeast Missouri State University basketball team. As the guy holding the clipboard for the SMSU Redhawks — who just ended their season with college basketball’s longest losing streak at 19 games — can attest, it’s not a glamour job. The coach (an interim named Zac Roman, by the way) can also tell you that nobody really cares who you are. Michael Steele might be feeling the same way these days after his shaky start as RNC chairman became even more turbulent after losing a tiff with Rush Limbaugh. Steele — a natural politician who can read a room better than most — has so far...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- In Health Plan, Industry Sees Good Business Writers Dan Eggen and Ceci Connolly seem surprised at how much the medical industry likes the Obama administration’s subsidized, cartel-oriented health-care program. The president will be rolling out parts of his plan at a White House summit today. But the Obama White House learned a lesson from the Clinton administration’s failures. The new president brought the fat cats in at the beginning “Obama's opening gambit to dramatically expand the health-care system has attracted surprising notes of support from insurers, hospitals and other players in the powerful medical lobby who are set to participate in an...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Release of Memos Fuels Push for Inquiry Into Bush’s Terror-Fighting Policies The Obama administration is finding that a little honesty can be a difficult thing in the worlds of counter-terrorism and espionage. The release of several documents that show the expansive approach the Bush administration adopted to spying on and detaining suspected terrorists has only whetted the desire among some congressional Democrats for a “truth commission” that would likely be a political millstone for President Obama. Writers Charlie Savage and Neil Lewis explain how team Obam is reacting to the pressure. “The Office of Professional Responsibility at the...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter Most of the Obama administration’s moves on foreign policy thus far have been either sending Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton globe trotting with messages of goodwill or to continue down the path already laid by his predecessor in Iraq and Afghanistan. But with word that President Obama has been offering to drop a proposed missile shield designed to protect U.S. allies from Iranian attacks in exchange for cooperation from Dimitri Medevdev and Vladimir Putin on corralling Iran. Writer Peter Baker ties together the news that broke like a thunderclap in Moscow. “Missile defense has...

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Morning Must Reads

Bloomberg -- AIG to Get Up to $30 Billion More in New Bailout After Loss Insurance giant AIG, which was deemed “too big to fail,” lost another $62 billion in he fourth quarter of 2008. The federal government has already put $150 billion into AIG and owns 80 percent of its holding company. With another injection of taxpayer cash, the feds are getting ready to take an even more hands-on role in the company. Writers Scott Lanman and Hugh Son explain how the effort to not just regulate but also run AIG has fed into a cycle of failure. “‘We priced their capital punitively and forced them to sell things fast; that hasn’t worked either so we’re having to...

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Heard the news? Reporters think the time for panic is now

A recession is like the Spanish flu — the weakest members of the population are always the first to go. And among American industries, there were few weaker at the onset of the current panic than the news business. It’s no wonder then that the reporters still clinging to jobs have been quick to declare catastrophe and credulous about proposals for a titanic reordering of the American economic model. When one’s inbox is peppered with e-mails announcing colleagues’ layoffs and buyouts, reporting on a political or economic story is more than just hammering out some copy. It’s an effort for survival. “This was the year that pretense and pride fell by...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- U.S. Is Said to Agree to Raise Stake in Citigroup The White House was plain last week – the new stake in Citigroup would only be about 25 percent. Bt today we learn that the number will be much closer to the 40 percent originally reported. Writer Eric Dash broke the story that shows how deeply the federal government is getting into the banking business. “The Obama administration deliberately stopped short of securing a majority or controlling interest in Citigroup, but will probably come under intense pressure to take a much larger role in shaping the bank’s direction. Taxpayers, after pumping more than $45 billion into the bank, have become...

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Morning Must Reads

New York Times -- Obama to Seek Higher Tax on Affluent to Pay for Health Care Writers Jackie Calmes and Robert Pear point out that President Barack Obama’s budget proposal, out today, will hit big earners and businesses pretty hard with tax increases and new fees. For individuals, the Bush tax cuts will expire and then Obama wants to increase the top tax rate another five points -- from 35 percent to 40 percent and limit deductions. For companies, it may be even more grim, with fees and taxes targeted to encourage and discourage a host of behaviors, but costing somebody. The piece, which gives a quick overview of the new spending and the taxes that will pay for it also explains...

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Once again, Mr. November swings for the fences

Barack Obama has defied many conventions, but that doesn’t mean the president isn’t predictable. As he showed with his address to Congress Tuesday, Obama relies on his ability to deliver big speeches to get out of tight spots. All politicians try to talk their way out of trouble, but Obama needs more grand slam speeches than most. It’s the Reggie Jackson approach to the presidency — no small ball. And if you’re certain that you can hammer three home runs in three at bats to win the World Series, why not? After all, they didn’t come to see Reggie bunt. Most modern administrations, though, have obsessively focused on winning each of the individual...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- U.S. Eyes Large Stake in Citi The Obama White House was adamant over the weekend that there was no plan to nationalize major U.S. Banks as was being reported in many quarters. But reporters David Enrich and Monica Langley discovered that the administration is in talks to take over up to 40 percent of Citigroup stock and establish new rules for governance – nationalization lite. While administration officials tell the Journal that they may wait months before going through with the plan, but stockholders are already nervous that their investments in the bank may get wiped out. Critics are worried that the shift could be another interim step toward full...

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High stakes for Obama and Jindal this week

It’s been a rough takeoff for President Barack Obama, but his fifth week in office offers him a chance to shake off his jitters and demonstrate the cool composure for which he is famous. After passing his stimulus plan the Washington way (porky and partisan), preaching doom from the bully pulpit and struggling almost daily to keep his team on message and out of trouble, this week offers the president a chance to get his groove back. He’ll discuss rescuing Social Security and other essentially broke entitlement programs with a bipartisan group at the White House on Monday, address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, and roll out a budget that will likely include his first...

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Morning Must Reads

ABC – Bill Clinton: Obama Should Sound More Hopeful Former President Clinton had some advice for the current occupant of the White House in his appearance on Good Morning America today – cheer up, dude. “I just would like him to end by saying that he is hopeful,” Clinton said in the interview that dwelled on the issue of President Obama’s predictions of disaster for the economy. But it wasn’t all critique. Clinton, who cast himself as a mix of Reagan and FDR with a Hot Springs attitude, said he understood that Obama has no choice but to spend big and wreck the budget for years to come. “‘I think it's absolutely the right thing to...

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The mortgage bailout could blow back on Obama

Bringing class resentments into politics is like launching a nuclear bomb. You have to make sure that you’re way outside the blast zone before you press the button. John Edwards used the dirty bomb approach with his “two Americas” spiel and became radioactive in the process. Neither America was interested in Edwards again until the National Enquirer caught him hiding in a men’s room. Richard Nixon, conversely, made a strategic strike when he made common cause with the “silent majority” of middle-class folks against radicals and elitist intellectuals. Who wouldn’t want to be an “honest, patriotic American?” Now, with the introduction...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal – Dukes of Moral Hazard The Journal’s lead editorial succinctly explains why investors and lenders are uneasy about the big new mortgage plan the president rolled out Wednesday. Their critique acknowledges that the plan willl help some struggling homeowners. But says President Obama is prolonging the housing downturn, making the eventual rebound harder and not slowing the dec line in hosing prices. The reason – bad borrowers who get government-mandated modifications often still fail after an expensive delay. “The recent history of mortgage modifications isn't encouraging. According to the December report by the Comptroller of the Currency and the...

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Senate battle lines already taking shape for 2010

Anger continues to grow among House Democrats about how Harry Reid let Republican Sens. Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins throw a wet blanket on the big stimulus party. But smarter Democrats are trying to make sure that there will be no need to compromise the next time they bring some budgetary shock and awe down on the American economy. With just a few more Democratic votes in the Senate, Stimulus 2.0 could have money for both electric cars and contraceptives without any tax cuts for fat cats, or even cats who look a little pudgy. With five Republican senators retiring and at least three GOP incumbents who appear to be at risk, Democrats are already raising big money and...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post -- New Mortgage Plan to Focus on Lowering Payments The $50 billion plan President Obma will roll out on Phoenix today is being touted as an example of fiscal restraint by Democrats and White House sources, but the real fight may be over the fine print of the deal that would change the way debtors and creditors interact. Writer Renae Merle sketches some of the most controversial components. “A key part of the administration's package is expected to be legislation changing the bankruptcy law to allow judges to modify the mortgages of distressed homeowners, including by reducing the principal of the loan to the property's current market value. About 150 consumer...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Auto Maker Bankruptcy Looms It might be too late for GM and Chrysler, due to submit survival plans to the White House today. Bankruptcy may now be the only way put for the automakers who borrowed $19 billion from taxpayers last year in a bid to survive. Writes David Stoll and Monica Langley explain how the Obama administration’s auto point man – labor negotiator Ron Bloom – will be wringing major concessions from workers but mostly management as part of a restructuring – perhaps the same kind of controlled-burn bankruptcy the Bush administration had discussed. “On Monday, GM's bondholder committee delivered a "framework" for a...

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Morning Must Reads

Wall Street Journal -- Obama Will Not Name 'Car Czar' to Oversee Detroit In a sign of the shifting economic approach in the White House, the White House is taking a team approach to administering and extending the bailout offered to GM and Chrysler last year. While the Bush administration wanted a Car Czar, Obama will have more like a car politburo. Writer Deborah Solomon explains how Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and economic advisor Larry Summers will lead a team that works to fundamentally remake the auto industry. Auto company leaders – whose interim reports on sustainability are due to the government this week – have expressed concern about the delay in standards created...

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Barack Obama’s long campaign drags on

It had been a rough week. Two nominees had gone down in flames, and Republicans had made him look like a pork peddler with their resistance to his stimulus package, which was sinking in the polls. But by last Sunday, Barack Obama could look forward to seven days that were going to get his infant presidency back on course. All went well on Monday. The president flew to Indiana to plump for his stimulus plan, seemingly pleased to be back in campaign mode, talking to ordinary voters. In Washington, three Republicans allowed the bill to move ahead, which virtually assured that the package would be passed by week’s end. Obama returned to the capital for his first White House press...

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Morning Must Reads

- Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} McClatchy -- Obama wins stimulus fight, but how battle played out suggests challenges for agenda At the end of another difficult day, the...

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Morning Must Reads

The top five news stories driving the day Politico -- Did Reid roll Pelosi? In what could produce serious heartburn for Democrats down the road, it seems that Harry Reid jumped out ahead of Nancy Pelosi on announcing the stimulus deal. It stopped the speaker from taking credit and, more importantly, prevented her from making some last-minute tweaks to school construction provisions. Everybody has the story, but Glenn Thrush has the best details of just how awkward a moment it was for lawmakers on the Hill when House members found out that they were being stampeded on the conference bill. The Senate president should sleep with one eye open for a while. “Even Senate Democrats...

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Gauzy Geithner lays an enormous bailout egg

In terms of a warm-up act, you could hardly ask for better than Barack Obama. But even after the president went on TV Monday night and got Americans ready to hear just about anything, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner still laid a colossal egg Tuesday morning. With Obama’s stimulus plan making its bumpy way through Congress, Geithner outlined a bank rescue that sounded vague, invasive and expensive. Even before the Senate could pass Obama’s $827 billion stimulus plan, here was the administration talking about another trillion-and-a-half dollars for the financial sector. And while he was gauzy on the details, Geithner was sure of one thing — this would be just the...

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Morning Must Reads

Washington Post – New Bailout May Top $1.5 Trillion Writers David Cho and Lori Montgomery outline the hidden costs of the bank bailout strategy that will emerge from the White House today. Inside Secretary Tim Geithner’s four-part plan are expandable pockets of spending – both public and private – that will continue to drive the cost beyond the $700 billion sought by the Bush administration. And even so, more money may be required after the first trillion-and-a-half is used up. “Both lenders and borrowers have been frozen by the perception that the government may continue to unveil new and better modification programs...” Geithner Said to Have...

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Morning must reads

Washington Post – If Spending Is Swift, Oversight May Suffer Writer Robert O’Harrow explains how a federal contract bureaucracy overtaxed by privatization of so many government functions over the past 16 years would buckle under the demands of spending hundreds of billions of dollars as fast as the president is hoping. The result will likely be colossal waste – perhaps billions of dollars -- as agencies are forced to fast track deals that would otherwise require months of scrutiny. “The stimulus plan presents a stark choice: The government can spend unprecedented amounts of money quickly in an effort to jump-start the economy or it can move more...

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Who knew running a country would be so hard?

What’s funny about the battle over the stimulus package is that there’s never really been any doubt that it would pass. A trillion dollars borrowed from Shanghai or printed on the white-hot presses at the Treasury has been all but inevitable since Election Day. The battle instead is over who gets the blame for passing it. President Obama enjoys the same kind of advantage on Capitol Hill that his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter had when they took office. But Obama adds to his legislative strength a personal popularity greater than any president since Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s popularity and Carter’s Congress should be enough to pass any bill...

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Morning must reads

N.Y. Times -- Bipartisan Push to Trim Size of Stimulus Plan Writer David Herszenhorn stayed up late with the Democrats and liberal Republicans who were trying to hammer out enough cuts to pass the stimulus bill. With the pressure on to get a version passed today, emotions were a little frayed on the Senate floor. “At times the spirit of bipartisanship dissipated from the chamber. At one point, Senator Richard J. Durbin ,Democrat of Illinois, sought to remind Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, that Democrats had agreed to add to the stimulus bill two major tax provisions proposed by Republicans. ‘I thank the senator for his comments,’ Mr. Graham...

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No surprises in the RNC race

Contenders for Republican National Committee chairman are a lot like the candidates the party put forward in the 2008 primaries: There are too many of them and too little that sets them apart. The presidential primaries at least had some wild hares. Populist Mike Huckabee and libertarian Ron Paul made for good television, but this contest doesn’t even offer that degree of diversion. Even so, whoever wins the demolition derby that will begin at the Washington Hilton this afternoon will be in charge of America’s No. 2 political party. So we probably should know who they are. You have Michigan’s state chairman, Saul Anuzis, who’s big on using the Internet but...

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Tallyho! In hot pursuit of Geithner’s tax fox

The bipartisan glow in which Washington basked after Barack Obama’s stirring inaugural address lasted a little less than 24 hours. The spell was broken just after 11 a.m. on Wednesday, and Obama’s own nominee for treasury secretary was to blame. “It was TurboTax," said Tim Geithner, explaining that his failure to pay more than $40,000 in federal taxes over a five-year period was partly due to his use of the tax preparation software. Because of the economic meltdown Geithner has been getting a pass on tax problems that would have scuttled any Treasury nominee in the past. In exchange for his pass, Geithner was supposed to do what is expected of nominees toting...

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A little less transparency, please

After Tim Geithner’s tax and nanny troubles came to light, the Democratic consensus was that his nomination was too big to fail. And the consensus is probably right. But the dust up over the would-be treasury secretary, like the awkward moments caused by Bill Richardson, Rahm Emanuel, and Hillary Clinton, shows the need for President-elect Barack Obama to do a better job of managing expectations. If Obama continues to over promise and under deliver on his pitch of having “the most transparent administration in history,” his honeymoon may end abruptly. Geithner, who has spent most of his professional life inside the federal bureaucracy, ought to have known better than...

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The trouble with Harry

Harry Reid has been backed so far down on the matter of seating soon-to-be Senator Roland Burris that he’s going to spend the rest of 111th Congress in a perpetual crouch. Reid talked tough, and even forbade Burris entrance to the Senate Chamber in a bit of theater. But now he acknowledges that he will eventually admit Burris to the world’s most deliberative body. The former Boys Club boxer was no match for the feints and flurries of the disgraced Rod Blagojevich and Illinois’ former Black Panther in Congress, Bobby Rush. By climbing down so quickly and thoroughly from his previous position of huffy moral indignation, Reid took a bad fall. He may be presiding over a...

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Harry Reid's Unhappy New Year

Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush said that those upset about Rod Blagojevich¹s audacious U.S. Senate appointment “need to take a chill pill.” The biggest dose of Rush¹s prescription should be reserved for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is now facing the possibility of ordering his Sergeant-at-Arms to bar a 71-year-old black man from the Senate floor, as the white folks inside talk about the “taint” of his appointment. Reid knows that scene would be followed by Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, D-TX, and the most aggressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus denouncing him as the new Orval Faubus. That¹s a thought that would quite rightly terrify a...

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Loose Ends of a Cockeyed Christmas

Christmas Carl is having a little trouble getting into the spirit this year. In Christmases past, Carl could count on being swept up in the season by now. But last night, in a reduced-fat eggnog haze, he wasn¹t able to set up his 8-year-old daughter¹s main gift -- a toy computer with more horsepower than the one he used in college. Leaving the error screen flashing underneath the smallish-seeming tree he and Christmas Carrie had selected the week before, Carl picked up his phone for advice and maybe a little solace. The first call went to Mom out in Henderson, Nev., whose "best friend" took a buyout from Dell a couple of years back, and still did some freelance tech...

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Candidate 5 or Agent 007?

Here we had been thinking that Jesse Jackson Jr. was just another of the Chicago politicians trying to wheedle a Senate seat out of Rotten Rod Blagojevich. But now Jackson is telling us that all along he was an undercover agent fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, or at least the Illinois way. If that¹s the case, Jackson may have been very slow to get results, but did manage to keep his cover better and longer than even Leonardo DiCaprio¹s character in The Departed. Jackson said through his spokesman on Tuesday that he first contacted the FBI about Blagojevich years ago. A supporting anonymous quote provided to the AP indicates that the Blagojevich told Jackson...

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Waiting For Blagojevich

President-elect Obama’s daily visit to the gym at the Regent’s Park apartment building in Chicago ran long on Wednesday. Perhaps the president-elect was just blasting his abs or catching up on his cardio. But Obama may have just wanted someplace to hole up while his city and state are having a political meltdown. While he was hitting the gym, Obama was getting ready to send spokesman Robert Gibbs forward not to condemn Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but to second the motion of other Illinois lawmakers that he step aside for the good of the state. With Blagojevich looking at plenty of time to get buff downstate at the federal prison camp in Marion, it’s understandable that...

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Bad Auguries of the GOP's Georgia Victory

It was a Libertarian, not a Democrat, who forced Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia into a runoff election this week. And it will be libertarian-leaning folks who decide whether the Republican Party enjoys relevancy again. The South has been Republican territory for 40 years, but this year was the Democrat’s high-water mark in the region since 1976. As the presidential results showed, the GOP faces marginalization unless it holds its ground down south in addition to getting back in play in the Midwest and West. With Barack Obama driving black turnout and some individual Republicans running ineptly, Democrats had their best chance in years to make gains in Dixie. Out of 22 contested...

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Barack "Woodrow" Obama

As President Bush was pardoning a pair of fat turkeys on Wednesday, I tried to imagine Barack Obama doing the same thing. I have never seen a politician more dignified than Obama, and I imagine it would pain him greatly to be trotted out to the front yard to make cornball jokes about the prize hen and tom that have been brought before him. Bush seems to genuinely enjoy the folksier aspects of the office, which Obama may abjure. They may not be beneath the dignity of the office, but I suspect it would be beneath his own dignity. In an Obama Administration perhaps a panel will meet on Thanksgiving week and talk about turkey farming issues, followed by brief remarks from the president on our...

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The Difference Between Honest Abe and The One

The old battle between Time and Newsweek is back on as the two magazines try to outdo each other in celebrating Barack Obama on their covers. Time says Barack Obama is FDR, complete with a photo illustration of the president-elect in an open-topped car with cigarette holder. Newsweek upped the ante with a cover on which Obama's shadow grows into a likeness of Abraham Lincoln. Finally, an Obama debate that energizes the Washington media bigs: Is the still un-inaugurated 44th president more in the mold of the Great Emancipator or the father of the New Deal. I smell a panel discussion at the Brookings Institute: “Barack Obama - America's Greatest President Elect?” Michael...

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GOP Cools Heels While Waiting for Obama

The key player missing from most of the recent conversations about the future of the defeated Republican Party has been Barack Obama. But in truth, no one will have more to say about what the GOP should and will do than Obama. The president-elect’s successes, failures, and policy pivots will help decide the national mood and, by extension, the areas of opportunity for the minority party. Had Jimmy Carter not managed U.S. foreign policy like a Sunday school teacher, would Americans have been ready to push back against the Soviets again in 1980? Had George W. Bush not run the government like a CEO fighting a hostile takeover bid, would Americans have embraced a confection made of...

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Busting the Turnout Myths of Campaign 2008

The purveyors of conventional wisdom offered two competing assumptions about how voters would behave on Tuesday. Either Barack Obama would underperform polls because of secret white racism or voters would be so excited about Obama that they would turn out in record numbers and carry him into the electoral stratosphere. Both theories turned out to be bunkum. With a seven-point national win for Obama, we saw that sensible pollsters like Scott Rassmussen and the folks at TIPP polling just about nailed the final number. Thank goodness they did, thereby sparing Americans from being lectured about their vestigial hatred of blacks by the media and academic race-grievance industry. Sorry, Al...

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After defying gravity, Republicans crash to earth

Give John McCain credit. At a moment in history that running for president as a Republican was akin to entering the Kentucky Derby as a pack mule, McCain managed to mount a credible effort against the most talented Democratic politician in a generation. Now, McCain could have surely done a better job, especially on matters of discipline and organization. A prideful man who hates structure, McCain found it hard to submit himself to the ignominy of handlers and flacks and sound bite messages. He chafed at the bit, but old war horse still moved ahead with the campaign. Of course you can't exactly call what the GOP did this year a campaign. It was more of a try. A campaign suggests...

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The year of the wayward pollster

We’ve read a lot about how Americans’ confidence in the national media has curdled during the current campaign. Watching and reading the predominantly poll-driven coverage this year has been like making your dinner out of a jumbo bag of cheese curls. News consumers, who currently have a huge appetite for political reporting, have been left feeling bloated but unsatisfied, knowing that they’ve gorged themselves on something unwholesome. There’s little doubt that the blathery and biased coverage of the 2008 election will help hasten the undoing of traditional newspapers and broadcast television. After seeing the new circulation numbers and ratings, it seems that...

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Obama Spells Victory With a Dubya

Despite the vacuous hours of TV chattering and thousands of column inches of newsprint devoted to the subject, the reasons John McCain is getting pasted in the polls are the woebegone state of the economy and George W. Bush. Democrats look at polling numbers and say that it must be Sarah Palin’s wardrobe allotment from the RNC or the fact that Joe the plumber doesn’t have a union card. Republicans look at the same numbers and say that it must be McCain’s lack of a swing state ground game or a refusal to talk about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. If 8 percent fewer women like Sarah Palin or 7 percent more men think Barack Obama trustworthy on economic issues, the poll watchers...

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Barone’s Quest

For Michael Barone, one fact is never enough. As he’s talking about the impact of Sarah Palin on the 2008 election, it occurs to him that the question is also about public perceptions of the mass media. Which snaps him to the battle in the 1930s between Franklin Roosevelt and Republican “press lords” like William Randolph Hearst and Col. Robert McCormick. Which snaps him to Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, simultaneously targeting Democrat George McGovern and the national media in the 1972 campaign. Which snaps him back to Palin and how she’s been able to rally the Republican base by lambasting the press and the political establishment. Snap....

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It’s called an almanac, but for pols, it’s the bible

Michael Barone probably knows more about your congressional district than your congressman does. “West Virginia Second,” Barone says when someone mentions Charleston, W.Va. in conversation. “Longest district east of the Mississippi. [U.S. Rep. Shelley Moore] Capito. Bush by 14. Or 15. I think it was ahead of the rest of the state. I think 15 is right.” And he is right. President Bush defeated John Kerry in the district 57 percent to 42 percent in 2004, as opposed to the statewide total of 56 percent to 43 percent. Barone has that kind of factual command over all of America’s 435 congressional districts largely because of his work on The Almanac of American...

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McCain scores points, but may be too late

Joe Sixpack became Joe the Plumber as John McCain reached out to middle-class Americans and tried to paint Barack Obama as a traditional liberal who would punish success. With Obama looking bound for victory and carrying a 15-point lead in most national polls on handling the economy, McCain was under tremendous pressure to deliver a game-changing performance. McCain didn’t do that, but he did manage to finally speak directly to voters’ economic concerns and provide a critique of Obama’s plans that was more than complaints about bear DNA earmarks. But to have a game-changing moment, McCain needed Obama to slip or go off message. Obama was not obliging. By this final...

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Analysis: McCain scores points, but maybe too late

Joe Sixpack became Joe the Plumber as John McCain reached out to middle-class Americans and tried to paint Barack Obama as a traditional liberal who would punish success. With Obama looking bound for victory and carrying a 15-point lead in most national polls on handling the economy, McCain was under tremendous pressure to deliver a game-changing performance. McCain didn’t do that, but he did manage to finally speak directly to voters’ economic concerns and provide a critique of Obama’s plans that was more than complaints about bear DNA earmarks. But to have a game-changing moment, McCain needed Obama to slip or go off message. Obama was not obliging. By this final...

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A World Beyond Political Deadlock

You could have won a lot of money this year betting that the winning presidential candidate would carry more than 300 electoral votes. Most everyone expected a narrow contest this year because that is what we have become accustomed to. George W. Bush won his elections by sliding in just over the 270 electoral vote mark required for a win: 286 to 251 in 2004 and 271 to 266 in 2000. The political orthodoxy has held that we live in evenly divided nation in which a handful of swing voters in a few states hold sway over the nation. We bemoaned the tyranny of the undecided Ohio voter. This was supposed to be the next episode in the saga of our deeply divided nation. There were many...

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Analysis: Old problems for the GOP in the Old Dominion

John McCain’s electoral hopes rely on Virginia. And right now, Virginia isn’t looking very reliable. Running six points behind Barack Obama in an average of recent polls of the state, McCain has been forced to devote precious resources for a state that has gone to every Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon ran in 1968. Virginia is not alone its must-win status for McCain. Losing any one of Florida, Ohio, Colorado or Virginia would likely mean the end of his presidential hopes. The problem for McCain in Virginia is that while Republicans are used to running and winning close races in those other swing states, the GOP isn’t accustomed to the kind of...

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The Man With the Brand Must Explain Himself

This election was supposed to be a referendum on Barack Obama. It has turned into a referendum on John McCain. Obama started this election cycle as the unknown, if largely unblemished, candidate. McCain, meanwhile, began the process as one of the nation’s best-known political commodities. Or so he thought. In Tuesday’s debate, it was McCain who was explaining himself and his worldview. And even if he succeeded in that explanation, it is surely not what he expected to be doing in October. Democrats assumed that Republicans would define Obama as they had John Kerry and Al Gore. And for a time, it looked like it might happen. Obama as celebrity. Obama as unready. But even...

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ANALYSIS: McCain the aggressor in second debate

John McCain was said to be a master of the town hall format and on Tuesday he showed why with quick, sometimes salty answers and with an unswerving line of attack on Barack Obama. Obama started out the night with a performance worthy of Bill Clinton’s legendary showing in the town hall in 1992 as he carefully, compassionately answered questions from the undecided voters in the hall. He spoke about high gas prices instead of high finances and answered economic questions simply and directly. But as McCain started landing blows on Obama and moderator Tom Brokaw repeatedly inserted himself — even changing the rules at one point — McCain took control of the evening. McCain...

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Analysis: Making a play for Joe Six Pack

Sarah Palin came into the vice presidential debate lugging two sets of expectations — one from Democrats who hoped she would give the same awkward, halting answers she’s given in recent interviews and another from Republicans who were counting on her to deliver a knockout punch to Joe Biden. She probably disappointed both on Thursday night as she made a homespun pitch to the mothers of America. Palin held her own in a much anticipated face-off with Biden in which they each seemed leery of doing direct combat. Biden and Palin mostly fired past one another, aiming at the men at the top of the tickets. It had been made clear for weeks what the consequences would be for Biden if...

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Defining Moment for Biden and Palin

It would be hard to overstate the importance of tonight’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, even though television commentators will surely try. Viewership may be higher for these 90 minutes than for any of the face-offs between ticket toppers John McCain and Barack Obama. Plenty of persuadable voters who are sick to death of the maverick and the messiah will be looking for reasons to go one way or the other. At the outset, both veep choices were defensive picks intended to prove something about the nominees to their skeptical bases. Picking Palin was indeed the greatest publicity play since PT Barnum brought Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, to these shores. But the...

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Joe Biden’s coal-fired gaffe machine

Joe Biden’s coal-fired gaffe machine By Chris Stirewalt It’s an election year and the gaffe olympics -- the least appealing portion of any campaign – are in full swing. Howlers, idiocies, and self-contradictions will dominate the political discussion for the next six weeks, with Friday night’s debate no doubt providing plenty of each from John McCain and Barack Obama. Sure, there will be bombshells this year that reshape the race (e.g. the financial sector of the American economy smoldering like burnt bacon in a pan) just as there have been in the past (e.g. the revelation of George W. Bush’s youthful drunken driving or Osama bid Laden’s...

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McCain better lawyer-up and fast

Their initial broadsides have been fired and the dreadnaughts Obama and McCain are listing, but neither seems likely to sink in open water. Despite the hopes of some partisans, this battle will be fought to the last man on decks. The Sarah Palin phenomenon will settle down to a low roar among the GOP base as a very angry press corps has its revenge on Alaska’s governor. She soared when they said she would be a flop and now they will dog her until they are proven right or Election Day, whichever comes first. In three weeks, persuadable voters in swing states will decide that they still like Palin, but have concerns about the story they heard about her brother-in-law ‘s...

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Democrats’ anger over Palin could undo them

Anger is a great way to start a revolution but a bad way to win an election. John Kerry found that out in 2004 when he asked Americans to punish George W. Bush for his offenses, including winning the 2000 election and invading Iraq. The idea was that once Bush had been thoroughly discredited, the American electorate would welcome any reasonable alternative. It was the second part of the plan that came up short. Instead of selling Kerry, Democrats tried to get Americans to share their contempt for the incumbent and drive him from office. The message was pessimistic, mean-spirited and rooted in victimhood. Kerry’s argument was that Democrats knew they been victimized by Bush, and the...

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By choosing Palin, McCain revives culture wars

The charge from Democrats was that John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin was a cynical gambit aimed at female voters. McCain’s real objective in the pick was the same as so many of his Republican predecessors: to win over swing voters anxious about cultural decay. At their convention last week, Democrats sought to cast the central conflict in America as a struggle between rich and poor, not good and evil. The culture wars, they hoped, were drawing to a close. But Palin has allowed McCain to change the character of the race. The argument during the Democratic primaries was that Barack Obama could avoid the charges of liberal elitism and moral ambiguity that have dragged down...

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The GOP pays the price of hubris

It wasn’t too long ago that Republicans were talking about “permanent majority” and the great unraveling of the Democratic Party. Here in the Twin Cities, though, the Republicans seem pretty sheepish. They even applauded -- albeit awkwardly -- when erstwhile Democrat Joe Lieberman praised the bipartisan accomplishments of Bill Clinton on Tuesday night. You could see delegates looking at each other and asking with their eyes: “Is this OK?” The price of hubris for the GOP is being exacted in bizarre and cruel ways these days, but the thought of the ladies with the big, sparkly elephant pins applauding the record of Slick Willie has to be near the top of the...

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Palin derides Obama, Washington insiders

ST. PAUL, Minn. - In the pivotal moment of the Republican National Convention and Sarah Palin’s career, the hockey mom proved that she could throw a punch. Palin, 44, has been ripped by Democrats for a lack of experience as a small-town mayor and the first-term governor of the nation’s third-least-populous state. She and her family have also been subjected to a scouring by the national media and been the subject of sneering commentary. On Wednesday night, Palin had an answer to her detractors, especially in the media. “Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion — I’m...

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News of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy rocks convention

John McCain’s surprise pick of a running mate kept on surprising Monday. As Republicans were gathering in the Twin Cities, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, released a statement acknowledging that their 17-year-old daughter was five-months pregnant and soon to wed the baby’s father. McCain campaign officials said they went public with the story after Reuters began following up on rumors on liberal Web sites that Palin’s newborn son wasn’t hers at all. The claim was that Palin did not give birth to son Trig on April 18, but that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol had the baby and the governor faked her pregnancy as a cover story. In response, the Palins...

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Palin daughter pregnant

The McCain campaign has announced that the 17-year-old daughter of new vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin is five months pregnant and soon to marry the father of the child. Republicans say that Reuters was following up the work of liberal bloggers who were alleging that the newborn son of the governor was really born to her daughter, Bristol, as part of a vast conspiracy to conceal a teen mother. But when the news service came asking, the campaign came clean and told the tale of Bristol Palin's delicate condition. McCain reportedly know about the pregnancy when Gov. Palin was picked. The initial reaction among Republicans here -- dropped jaws....

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Five things McCain must do to have a successful convention

1. Don’t try to compete. The Democrats put on a star-studded spectacular in Denver, complete with A-listers and a stadium speech. John McCain must resist the idea of trying to compete on Barack Obama’s terms. Voters are more serious than the pundits think. McCain needs to make a simple, heartfelt appeal, not go for the glamour. 2. Go with God. Democrats have made their best play for evangelical voters, and polls show they missed by a mile. The St. Paul, Minn., convention is McCain’s best chance to fire up his party’s religious base. If he speaks from the heart about God, family and country as he did at the Saddleback Forum, religious Republicans will go wild. 3....

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Republicans praise McCain for ‘unconventional’ VP pick

John McCain’s choice of a running mate may have finally won him the full support of the Republican Party’s conservative base. But in choosing 44-year-old, first-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain has opened himself to the sharpest criticism yet that at 72, he may be too old to be president — especially with a number two who went from small-town mayor to governor only 19 months ago. Palin, an abortion foe who cut taxes, assailed corruption in her own party, knows how to handle a high-powered rifle and went to college on a beauty pageant scholarship has been drawing rave reviews from many of the same folks who were skeptical of McCain’s conservative...

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Whining won’t give Dems the White House

It’s been hard to avoid the sense the Democratic National Convention has largely been about the past. That has mostly come from the grip that the Clinton family has held on the proceedings until Wednesday night when Barack Obama walked out on the stage and broke their spell. But the backward-looking feeling has also come from the fact that so much of the discussion here has been about lingering grievances. John Kerry’s remarks Wednesday sounded like they were coming from someone who was having trouble getting over old injuries. For a guy who is a U.S. senator, rich in his own right, and married to an even richer woman, Kerry sounded like a victim when he was bleating about...

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Oh, what might have been with Hillary

Democrats found their nominee three months too late. It turns out that the candidate they really wanted was Hillary Clinton after all. But not the Hillary Clinton of tears in New Hampshire or "change you can Xerox " in Ohio. Instead they wanted the Hillary Clinton who came to them on Tuesday at the Pepsi Center confident enough to embrace Barack Obama without fear. She was funny, brassy, and natural. It was the best speech of her career. As one awed Democrat standing next to me said as the cheers were just starting to fade away Tuesday night, "Where was she before?" Where she was, it seems, was stuck in the middle of a muscle-bound campaign operation afraid to risk...

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Greek columns, fireworks set for Obama speech

It’s up to voters to decide whether Barack Obama will win the White House, but when he accepts the Democratic nomination at Invesco Field, it will look as if he’s already there. Throughout the day Wednesday, Democrats and officials with the local host committee were scrambling to put together the venue for Obama’s acceptance speech at the home of the Denver Broncos. A video taken by a crew member and posted online shows a plywood set that is built in faux-neoclassical grandeur with white columns. A long narrow walkway extends from the rear of the stage to a circular platform that will be surrounded by a sea of supporters when Obama is speaking. After the speech,...

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Warner's keynote address will call for bipartisanship

Democrats will get a look at what might have been when former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner takes the stage tonight. Warner, leading in his U.S. Senate race against his Republican challenger by a couple of dozen polling points, was once considered a contender for the Democratic nomination. But with Hillary Clinton thought by most to be a shoo-in in the fall of 2006, Warner removed his name from consideration. A year later, he announced his Senate candidacy. Tonight, Warner and Clinton's public paths cross again as he goes to the stage as keynote speaker before her effort to soften the bitterness over her and Barack Obama's pitched battle for the nomination. Warner, a Harvard Law School...

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Michelle stresses family values

In her marquee moment, Michelle Obama talked less about her husband and more about her family's values. The wife of soon-to-be Democratic nominee Barack Obama described how her family fits into the American mainstream and how a shared vision of a nation dedicated to the well-being of children and with enhanced opportunities for women and minorities is the "thread that connects our hearts." Introduced by her older brother Crag Robinson, Michelle Obama spoke movingly of her own middle-class upbringing on Chicago's South Side and the way she and her husband have raised their two young daughters. "[My dad] and my mom poured everything they had into me and Craig. It was the...

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The American Family

Chris Stirewalt The CEO of the Democratic National Convention, Leah D. Daughtry, just used a novel term in her salutation to the assembled crowd: "Greetings my brother and sister Americans." Perhaps John McCain will start using that instead of "my...

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Can Michelle Obama win over Hillary's women?

During her walkthrough at the Pepsi Center, Michelle Obama was sizing up the massive multimedia display that will serve as the backdrop to her speech tonight. With all the swirling graphics and colors, the video-charged podium threatened to distract from the slender, neatly dressed woman standing at the small wood-trimmed podium in front. She stood with her brother, Craig Robinson, who will introduce her tonight, and her daughters Sasha, 7, and Melia, 10. The younger girl swatted down her sister's arm when she pointed at the bank of cameras on bleachers across the convention floor. Sasha made an excited noise into the microphone before the little group was ushered back through the...

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Hillary looms large as DNC kicks off

Chris Stirewalt Preventing a message derailment looks like it will be the biggest challenge for Democrats here in Denver. The party is trying to highlight two stars today. Ted Kennedy, who is the subject of a lengthy video tribute -- though NBC is reporting he is in town and planning to appear in person at the convention -- is the opening act, and Michelle Obama is the main attraction. The would-be first lady is going to start her walkthrough at the Pepsi Center in about an hour. Her speech is set to begin at 10:35 Eastern time. But the hottest ticket in the Mile High city this morning is the breakfast being hosted by Hillary Clinton for her colleagues in the New York delegation. This...

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Five things Obama has to do to have a successful convention

1. Stay humble. The principal problem for Barack Obama’s general election effort so far has been a susceptibility to hubris and vanity. The campaign overplayed its hand with grandiose moves like making up its own presidential seal and a European tour that was more Rolling Stones than Ronald Reagan. Republican attacks on those points have clearly drawn blood, and Obama must avoid looking more like a celebrity than a prospective commander-in-chief this week. His campaign chose the 75,000-seat Invesco Field for his nomination speech before Obama was linked to Paris and Britney in the public mind. Obama was emulating JFK’s speech at the LA Coliseum in 1960 but there was no...

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What happened on the way to Denver?

What was supposed to be a summertime blowout for Barack Obama has become a deadlock on the eve of the conventions. If nothing else, the 2008 presidential race has done wonders for the humility of America's political pundits. Even for those members of the chattering class who strive to stay connected to the real America outside the green room, back room, barroom circuit of Washington, it was hard to imagine the collective shrug with which the American electorate would receive Obama. So many of us assumed that Obama would have the same kind of experience in the general election that he had in the Democratic primaries. He would open up a big lead early and then give it away piece by...

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Chris Stirewalt: John McCain’s veep vibes

W hile Barack Obama was trying to avoid rhetorical quagmires in the Middle East, John McCain’s flirtations with potential running mates was starting to look more like heavy petting.As demonstrated by the posse of media bigfoots covering his grand tour this week, Obama won’t need a vice presidential pick to create buzz.In fact, the coverage has been so ecstatic that he needs to be more worried about Obama fatigue than Obamania.Just to test how far the prestige of the TV pooh-bahs has fallen in the era of cable and Internet......

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Chris Stirewalt: Bad hand for poker-faced Obama

E very moment that Barack Obama is talking about foreign policy is a step backward for his candidacy, just as every moment spent talking about the economy is a setback for John McCain.So why on earth has Obama seemingly dedicated the entire month of July to talking about threats abroad? It’s no mystery. For all his talk about audacity, Obama is one of the most deliberate, calculating politicians we’ve seen since Richard Nixon. As we read in Time magazine last week, Obama is a careful poker player who never made......

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Chris Stirewalt: Obama’s tough talk stops at the Iranian border

F inding out that fission fanatics in Iran had tested a long-range missile was sort of like finding out that the parents of the miscreant teenager next door decided to buy the little hooligan a car. You’ve got to give it to Iran’s leaders, though: They may be trying to re-create the sixth century for their subjects, but they’ve gotno qualms about 21st-century hardware.After the Iranian rockets lifted off, that weird little man in the Members Only jacket was yelling about American......

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Chris Stirewalt: Obama’s summer lovin’ with the right wing

B arack Obama’s supporters must be feeling a little like Olivia Newton-John’s character in "Grease."She’s the nicey-nice Sandy Olsson, who falls in love with greaser Danny Zuko at the beach. But when they end up in the same high school, Danny (played by a pre-Continued...

 

Chris Stirewalt: Presidents are known best by how they run

F or the politically disenchanted, the popular view of our presidential selection process is that it was designed to hoodwink an uninterested electorate into making superficial choices and allow candidates to avoid real issues.It’s the process that’s the problem, goes the refrain. For Naderites, hand-wringing editorialists, professors and campaign finance reform zealots, our current system is a disaster, tainted by money and lacking seriousness.As the primaries were first lurching forward, frustrated presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich summed up the processthusly: "This is......

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Chris Stirewalt: The difference between Barack and Barry

H   ow would Barack Obama fare in the 2008 election if he were named Barry Dunham?Had Obama continued to use the Americanized version of his first name as he did in Hawaii as a child — Barry — and, like many other very young children of broken homes, taken his mother’s maiden name — Dunham — his path would have no doubt been different.......

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Chris Stirewalt: Battlefield counties of 2008

In what is promising to be the closest presidential race since the people of Palm Beach were dimpling the chads on their butterfly ballots, battleground states are a thing of the past.What really matter are the key counties in those states. Call them battleground counties.Inside the campaigns, strategists are looking at the counties that could make or break their effort to reach 270 electoral votes.While the pundits will be chattering about soccer moms, Continued...

 

Chris Stirewalt: McCain must pick own fight if he wants to win presidency

The Democratic Party has nominated a candidate starkly different in terms of race, culture and ideology from the swing voters needed to reclaim the White House. As it happened, the party did so in a process that deepened those very weaknesses.But from the sound of things, Democrats are thrilled about how it all worked out.Some are even positing that Hillary Clinton......

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Chris Stirewalt: Barack Obama: Bubba, redux

Just like a young Bill Clinton once did, Barack Obama has wooed Democrats by playing to the center while using his biography to maintain his credibility with the left.Remember that Clinton, before he alienated the far left by "triangulating" to save his own skin in the White House, was once the hope of liberal Continued...

 

Chris Stirewalt: Hillary Clinton just wants her stapler back

Barack Obama is acting pretty antsy about bringing the Democratic nominating process to a close. He and his team are talking about turning toward the general, but they don’t quite seem to believe it themselves.As he walked the stage in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday, Obama sounded as if he was trying to convince himself that his long ordeal was over.The problem is that......

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Chris Stirewalt: Will John McCain learn from GOP's latest loss?

While some Republicans are eager to exploit the political weaknesses Hillary Clinton has exposed in Barack Obama during her march through the backcountry, John McCain won’t be able to make use of Obama’s cultural disconnection as ably as the former first lady.The most obvious problem is that if any Republican had bragged about having "white voters" on his side and had surrogates dismissing......

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Chris Stirewalt: Hillary has bad case of Republican envy

As military philosophers from Sun Tzu to the screenwriters of "Iron Man" have taught us, adversaries come to resemble each other over time.And Hillary Clinton has certainly come to resemble her longtime conservative foes — and probably even admire their ability to thwart the loftiest aspirations of Democrats, including hers and her husband’s.But she seems to have learned too well from her opponents. Her Republican envy has cost her the presidency.A military......

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Chris Stirewalt: Lower black turnout crippled Obama in Pennsylvania

As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were doing their best to turn the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary into a springtime jamboree for the Moral Majority and the NRA, all anyone could talk about were white, small-town voters.The results, though, would indicate that, while Obama was explaining that he meant "bitter" as a compliment and discovering......

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Chris Stirewalt: Five people who can’t wait for Hillary’s departure

Were Hillary Clinton to make a timely departure from the Democratic race — say after a Pennsylvania win and in a posture of duty to party and country above self —many would rejoice.The Rev. Jeremiah Wright might even call it a miracle.But Barack Obama would not be among the delighted throngs, because as Clinton goes......

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Chris Stirewalt: Campaign hounds didn’t bark at Petraeus’s Senate hearing

Gen. David Petraeus’ Senate testimony on the war in Iraq was less political theater and more kabuki theater, an elaborate production in which everyone already knows the outcome.Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., aware that many Democrats in the upcoming states on the primary calendar happen to take a rather high view of the military, was working hard to avoid another......

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Chris Stirewalt: Is Hillary Clinton like Rocky on race?

When Hillary Clinton suggested in Philadelphia this week thatshe was like Rocky, I assumed she was comparing herself to the movie franchise: that she kept going long after her audience lost interest.But she was actually likening herself to Sylvester Stallone’s character Rocky Balboa, which is her way of saying she......

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Chris Stirewalt: Hillary Clinton still has the hillbilly firewall

If Hillary Clinton means to hold on to her 10 percent chance at the Democratic nomination, she will have to sweep through Appalachia like an Ohio River flood.And she may well do it, because long after all her other strongholds have fallen, she has kept the poor, often overlooked folks in between the north and south. It’s her final firewall — the hillbilly firewall.Her husband, now looking appropriately like the......

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