Morning Must Reads

What the evidence actually seems to show was that skeptical scientists hadn’t settled on a way to disprove an unproven theory.
But either way, it sounds like the plaintiffs’ bar may be the next weapon in the war on carbon dioxide.

“Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.”
 
Washington Post – In Obama’s Inner Circle, Debate Over Memos’ Release Was Intense

The White House gave Post reporters Jeffrey Smith, Michael Shear and Walter Pincus access to key players in the decision to release the memos on harsh interrogation techniques and lots of details about how the president made his choice.

The deliberate Obama comes through very clearly – just as it did when the White House released details about his worrying over the pirate standoff. Whatever the actual process is like, it is clear that what the administration prizes is caution and consensus.
Even the president’s mixed messages on an investigation, aides say, is part of a calculation to confuse opponents.

“The aides also said they hope the memos’ release will focus public attention on the coldness and sterility of the legal justifications for abusive techniques, with Obama telling reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that the documents demonstrate that the nation lost its ‘moral bearings’ in the Bush years.

A source familiar with White House views said Obama’s advisers are further convinced that letting the public know exactly what the past administration sanctioned will undermine what they see as former vice president Richard B. Cheney’s effort to ‘box Obama in’ by claiming that the executive order heightened the risk of a terrorist attack.”
 
Wall Street Journal — Watergate’s Lesson on Crises, Closure and Moving On
 
A thoughtful piece from Gerald Seib on what Barack Obama could learn from Gerald Ford’s example and why he may not be able to follow it.

Even as congressional leaders slow walk efforts to form a commission to investigate the CIA in hopes that the Left’s rage will dissipate, the administration may not be able to resist. While Ford pleased his base by pardoning Nixon, Obama would infuriate his supporters if he was seen to be protecting the Bush team.

“But Mr. Obama also seems to know he faces a backlash among his supporters if he tries to cut off debate. So he has released previously secret memos describing the precise rules for interrogations promulgated by the Bush administration.

And then, this week, he pointedly didn’t rule out prosecution of the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the memos, saying that decision is up to his Justice Department. More important, Mr. Obama didn’t say the one thing he could have to cut off the debate: He didn’t call on Congress to drop the idea of creating a special commission to investigate torture allegations, but merely said such a commission should be independent rather than partisan.”
 
USA Today — Obama’s style shifts with task at hand

Richard Wolf provides some useful analysis of Obama’s presidential style, but mostly passes along the admiring remarks of the president’s friends and advisors, including groaners like “”It’s kind of the Kennedy style with the FDR context.”
Wolf does include the critique that is gathering strength – that Obama is great on style and atmospherics but can’t put a coherent agenda together.

And what’s important in the story are the Gallup poll results on job approval – 56 percent approve, 23 percent disapprove and 23 percent are unconvinced – “Just OK” was their choice. The poll isn’t predictive in that it doesn’t survey likely voters, but it does reveal something of the national uncertainly about Obama. After a long campaign and 100 days in office, Americans may not feel they really know him and what he’s all about.

“Stanley Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at City University of New York who’s writing a book on Obama, sees a “pragmatic, slow, deliberative, not-too-risky, hedging-your-bets style.” Yet he says grandiose goals such as overhauling health care highlight Obama’s “audacity of ambition” — a play on the president’s book The Audacity of Hope.”
 
Politico — Schmidt, Plouffe on long-shot McCain
 
As it happens, the top operations men for both candidates in 2008 had attended the University of Delaware. Republican Steve Schmidt and Democrat David Plouffe went back to their old school for a panel.

Writer Ben Smith was there to chronicle how Schmidt, always frank, was downright blunt. The Republican Party is still in retreat, he said, and Obama has had a politically successful first 100 days, even if the policy has been weak or confused.

Schmidt also said what a lot of Republicans had been thinking about the McCain campaign.

“The McCain campaign, Schmidt said, was “the strategic equivalent of throwing a football through a tire at 50 yards,” an analogy that Plouffe agreed with – though he said he hadn’t seen it that way at the time. Schmidt returned again and again to the notion that McCain’s defeat was essentially pre-ordained, a comfortable belief that’s now widely held among McCain’s former aides, and was fairly common among them even during the final weeks of the campaign.

“We were running a campaign under extra difficult circumstances – the state of the Republican party, the president’s unpopularity, the economy – a lot of issues that were not John McCain’s fault but were John McCain’s problem in this race,” Schmidt said. “When Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall I knew pretty much right away that … from an electoral strategy perspective, the campaign was finished,” he said.”