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 nationalizing one of the nation’s principle industrial firms. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel gave a verbal shrug saying they knew it was “a big deal” but that they had worked out all the problems, so why worry?
“In interviews in recent days, Mr. Obama’s economic team said it anticipated those pressures, and had moved to cut them off early.
‘It started right around the time of the bank stress tests,’ said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, in an interview on Monday. During one of the president’s daily economic briefings, Mr. Emanuel added, ‘he said that taking over companies like this is a big deal, and that no president has ever faced anything like this before. And he said he wanted to see some rules of the road about how the government should act’ when it suddenly becomes the biggest shareholder in the market.”
Wall Street Journal — Busy Not Running GM
A Journal editorial looks at just how hands-off the administration will really be capable of being. Brief and borrowed from a Detroit News article, the piece says a great deal about how things will likely be:
“The President is so busy not running GM that he had time the night before to call and reassure Detroit Mayor Dave Bing about the new GM’s future location. GM is being courted to move its headquarters to nearby Warren, Michigan. And Mr. Bing told the Detroit News that he had received a call Sunday evening from the President “informing me of his support for GM to stay in the city of Detroit with its headquarters at the Renaissance [Center].”
The newspaper went on to report that “The mayor said he’s more secure in knowing GM will stay in Detroit, a move paved by several conversations Bing and his administration had with several top White House officials in recent days.”
We don’t know whether GM should stay in Detroit. But we do know that the location of a company’s headquarters is one of those decisions typically not made by people who are busy not running the company.”
New York Times — Senators Set to Visit White House to Discuss Health Care Overhaul
The Obama administration is still talking costs first when it comes to healthcare. Quality or access haven’t really come up as the administration talks about the issue which became the new number one priority for President Obama last month.
Writers Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear explain that before he leaves for his latest world tour today, Obama is bringing the Democrats on the Senate Health and Budget committees to the White House for a pep talk on his new cost savings estimates and some talking points for the next couple of weeks.
The president got jammed up on his promise of $2 trillion on health care savings over the next decade and has now had to go with the un-sexy $2 trillion less in cost increases, so he had his economic team put together a report that gives some better-sounding arguments – like the promise of $10,000 in annual savings per family starting in a scant 21 years.
On health care, the Obama administration is sounding increasingly like the Bush administration did on Social Security – asking lawmakers to take big risks now for the sake of preventing a possible disaster that will take place long after they’ve left office.
“‘If we don’t do this we’re going to be facing a real mess 30 years from now,’ Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters Monday on a conference call to discuss her new report, ‘The Economic Case for Health Care Reform.’”
Washington Post — McChrystal to Face Questions on Plans for Afghanistan
Moderate Democrats are looking for a little assurance that they can continue to back the president’s more-aggressive Afghanistan plan when the man who the president tapped to oversee his ambitious agenda in central Asia heads to the Hill.
The president sacked his former commander because he wanted someone new to execute his plan to treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as one, interconnected theater of war where special operations, billions more in civilian aid and new U.S. mandates for conducting government affairs create stable societies.
Republicans have been skeptical of the long-range plans but supportive of the short-term surge. Democrats, meanwhile are starting to feel the dreaded Q word forming in their mouths.
In his confirmation hearings, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal will be tasked with making the president’s fellow Democrats learn to stop worrying so much.
Writers Karen De Young and Ann Scott Tyson suggest that fringier Democrats may also rake up a bunch of torture questions.
“During his confirmation hearings for his current position, lawmakers probed McChrystal’s knowledge of alleged abuse of detainees by Special Operations task force members at a secret facility in Iraq known as Camp Nama and at other locations. According to a report released this spring by Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the Special Operations task force preparing to go to Iraq in February 2003 obtained a copy of interrogation procedures approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld for Afghanistan — where McChrystal had served as head of military operations between 2001 and 2003 — and “adopted [the procedures] verbatim.”
The procedures included stress positions, sleep deprivation and use of dogs and were the rule until October 2003. In May 2003, CIA general counsel Scott W. Muller told Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II that techniques used by the Special Operations unit interrogating detainees in Iraq were “more aggressive” than those used by the CIA on the same prisoners, according to Levin.”
Wall Street Journal — Mexican Truckers File $6 Billion Claim Against U.S. in Nafta Spat
The simmering trade war with Mexico over NAFTA changes inserted into the omnibus budget President Obama signed in March continues to slowly intensify.
The treaty requires participants to allow trucks from other counties to ply each other’s highways, but even a pilot program that gave the U.S. the barest of cover on compliance is gone thanks to Teamsters who got Democrats to slip the amendment into the spending bill. Mexico immediately responded with tariffs on U.S. goods of up to 20 percent on consumer goods. Now, Mexico’s freight haulers are publicly demanding arbitration for what their association, Canacar, said are billions of dollars in losses.
As writer Jose de Cordoba explains, with a saggy economy, the Obama administration has been quietly backing away from the president’s campaign promises to revisit NAFTA rules, but things may get much noisier.
“Canacar said its members have lost money and missed business opportunities because Mexican truckers have been restricted to operating within 25 miles of the border on the U.S. side. Mexico City’s position is that this restriction violates Nafta.
Nafta called for creating a trans-border trucking program by 2000. But it never materialized mainly because of opposition from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and its allies in Congress, who have argued that Mexican trucks are unsafe, that some drivers don’t know English, and that Mexican authorities don’t keep adequate safety records on drivers.”
