Morning Must Reads — Michelle Obama stumped by second grader

When the little girl told her that “Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn’t have papers,” the first lady must have wanted to say “No, he isn’t.”

The second grader’s mother must not be following the news. Not only does the president not want to take away illegal immigrants, but he also opposes closing the U.S. border with Mexico until there is a law in place that says everybody who is here without papers can stay.

In fact, just across town, the president was joining his Mexican counterpart in bashing an Arizona law that makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant and requires police to check the ID of those they detain on other charges.

Far from “taking everybody away that doesn’t have papers” Obama was calling the Arizona law “discriminatory” and “troubling.”

But the first lady couldn’t really get into all that on one of her obesity lectures. She had already forced her guest, Mexican first lady Margarita Zavala, a former member of her country’s congress who has actual policy duties inside her husband’s administration, to skip around a gymnasium in service of the anti-obesity cause.

Instead, Michelle Obama stuck to the talking points that the White House has been leaning on when it comes to illegal immigration: “That’s something that we have to work on, so that everybody can be here with the right kind of papers.”

When the girl was insisted to the first lady that her mother was here illegally, Mrs. Obama said that “we’ve got to fix that” and even tried to shift the political blame to Republicans for the sorry state of America’s immigration apparatus: “Everybody’s got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens.”

In a moment that might have provided the chance to humanize a debate that her husband is losing, Mrs. Obama was rigid and stuck to talking points. A scared little girl did not need to hear about the need for bipartisan action on comprehensive immigration reform. At least the first lady didn’t ask the second grader about her body mass index.

Writers Michael Shear and Michael Birnbaum tell us that the way the president talks to the American press is little different than the way his wife talks to second graders.

“Standing next to Mexican President Felipe Calderón in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, President Obama said, in essence, that the ball is in the GOP’s court.

‘I don’t have 60 votes in the Senate. I’ve got to have some support from Republicans,’ Obama told reporters. ‘I don’t expect to get every Republican vote, but I need some help in order to get it done.’”

New York Times — White House Embraces Upstart Who Beat Specter

The lavish and mostly glowing profile of the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s Senate race by Katharine Seelye, Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny is most notable for the White House spin it memorializes.

The message: We’re glad Arlen Specter lost.

How nasty.

Obama coaxed Specter, obsessed by the idea of political immortality, out of the Republican Party with lavish promises of support. But when the going got tough, the administration gladly ditched the five-term incumbent. George W. Bush surely wished he could have done the same in 2004, but wouldn’t let himself.

A big part of the White House spin in pooh-poohing Specter, just as David Axelrod and others did with Martha Coakley, Jon Corzine and Creigh Deeds, is to suggest that the vote was not a reflection of Obama’s clout in the state.

But the real point seems to be to brag of their cunning in using Specter and then ditching him when he became inconvenient.

Sestak, a grim, know-it-all liberal out of the Wes Clark mold, may not prove to be so wonderful a candidate to support this fall against Republican Pat Toomey, whose smile doesn’t seem to cause him pain.

(My column about Pennsylvania and the mood for 2010 is here.)

One reason Obama may one day find himself pretending he never much liked Sestak either is the lingering question about the congressman’s claim during the primary that the White House illegally tried to bribe him out of the race.

Those questions will persist and there seems to be no good answer from either side of the alleged conversation. Sestak doesn’t want to talk about it and the White House denies it happened.

While that plays out, Democrats are left to consider what a promise from the president is really worth:

“Mr. Specter requested a last-minute presidential visit — a trip that would have filled local television with images of Air Force One flying into Pennsylvania with Mr. Obama standing at Mr. Specter’s side — but strategists said that every analysis of the race suggested it was futile.

At the same time, the White House came to see Mr. Sestak as a more disciplined candidate — resolving one of the early questions about him — and decided he would be stronger in November against Mr. Toomey in a year of deep incumbent resentment.”

Washington Post — Anti-government? Not in Rep. Murtha’s old district.

A question for all the Republicans running in Democratic districts this year – why would you get your anti-Washington message from Washington consultants?

John Murtha aide Mark Critz won a big victory in his former bosses’ district by promising to keep the pork barrel rolling, opposing every key part of the president’s agenda, and, perhaps most importantly, with the help of high Democratic turnout.

His party’s Senate primary was a hot ticket, while there was not much of interest on the GOP side.

The shock to many Republicans was that the voter intensity on the Right did not close the gap more. Pollsters expected a photo finish with models based on high GOP intensity. But Republican’s weren’t so intense.

Candidate Tim Burns repeated Nancy Pelosi’s name so often that it came to sound like an incantation, but he failed to summon the army of angry tea partiers.

The approach will work better in November when turnout is up, but it won’t be enough in historically Democratic districts, especially if there is no incumbent with bad votes to oppose.

Good campaigns are still built on the local level. Nationalizing House races will prove very tough.

Republicans have done well in elections on the statewide and state legislative level since 2008. But they’ve been swept in special House elections.

Writer Sandhaya Somashekhar was in Johnstown:

“Critz bested Tim Burns, a businessman and ‘tea party’-affiliated Republican who pitched himself as a “Washington outsider” whose election would strike a blow to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). That message apparently rang hollow with voters who felt it ignored the work government has done for them.”

Wall Street Journal — Democratic Rift Stalls Financial Overhaul

Harry Reid says he wants to get the Dodd bank bill finished so he can get on with the rest of his agenda. That may not be the best argument for election-year Democrats who dread having to consider things like illegal immigration and global warming.

On Wednesday, members of the Senate majority leader’s party blocked his effort to wrap up debate on the bill and move to a vote.

The legislation doesn’t really please anyone and has mostly advanced this far on the grounds that we must “do something.” Now, as they approach the finish line, Democrats are having some reservations about a bill that doesn’t regulate as much as the Left wants, has more special interest goodies and government control than the right wants and turns a blind eye to the underwriters of the Panic of 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Plus, the sooner they finish, the sooner Reid can start pushing his agenda, designed to save his bacon with the Nevada voters who detest him but deadly in other states.

Reid is getting nervous, because the longer the bill sits on the shelf the more likely it is that liberals and conservatives will team up and succeed in putting some teeth in the legislation, which would violate the terms of Reid’s campaign finance shakedown of Wall Street.

Greg Hitt and Damian Paletta explain:

“Ms. Cantwell said she wanted to toughen provisions in the bill that would restrict trading by banks in derivatives, complex financial instruments often used to hedge risk. Many lawmakers argue that bad speculative bets by banks on derivatives exacerbated the financial crisis in 2008, and that therefore the sector needs closer regulation.

Mr. Feingold said he wanted to reimpose Depression-era rules that would bar traditional banks from affiliating with investment firms, among other things.”

New York Times — Scientists Fault U.S. Response in Assessing Gulf Oil Spill

The Obama administration is breaking up the agency that regulates offshore drilling in the wake of the BP oil spill and replacing it with a tougher taskmaster for the industry. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the oil industry will pay a heavy price for years to come for BP’s mistakes.

But that’s not cutting it for the Left, which has become obsessed with, of all things, counting the number of barrels of oil blurping out of the seabed.

While the administration is worried about containment, blame placement and other issues that relate to real life or at least politics, environmentalists are mad that they can’t say just how much oil there is.

The belief that hidden plumes of undersea oil will kill everything in the deep blue sea is driving the push.

Of course, there’s lots of oil in the ocean. Most seeps from pockets in the seabed and gets broken up by the sun and hungry bacteria. Some, from spills, builds up in the sediments in shallow spots and poses an environmental risk. But the greenies want to know is if diffuse tidbits of oil poses a threat to every krill in the world.

Now, the White House is responding with a water sampling surge.

“In an interview, Dr. Lubchenco said she was mobilizing every possible NOAA asset to get a more accurate picture of the environmental damage, and was even in the process of hiring fishing vessels to do some scientific work.

‘Our intention is to deploy every single thing we’ve got,’ Dr. Lubchenco said. ‘If it’s not in the region, we’re bringing it there.’”

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