The One

Blame the Left for Massachusetts

2010-01-20T00:15:00.002-04:00

Democrats should be willing to seek common-ground reforms.

By LANNY J. DAVIS

Liberal Democrats might attempt to spin the shocking victory of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts by claiming that the loss was a result of a poor campaign by Martha Coakley. Would that it were so. This was a defeat not of the messenger, but of the message—and the sooner progressive Democrats face up to that fact, the better.
It's the substance, stupid!
According to polls, fears about the Democrats' health-care proposal played a prominent role in Mr. Brown's victory yesterday. In the last several months, the minority congressional Republicans have dominated the message on health care—and stamped on the Democratic Party the perception that we stand for big government, higher taxes, and health insecurity when it comes to Medicare.
How is that possible? The Democrats have a simple message on health care that has still not really gotten through: If our bill passes, you never have to worry about getting, or losing, health insurance for the rest of your life. How is it that so few people have heard that message?

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Associated Press

President Barack Obama

Then there were the two "deals" that put congressional Democrats in a worse light than the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere"—as impossible as that might have seemed—as an emblem of the special interest politics Barack Obama ran against. We Democrats had to explain to Massachusetts voters and other Americans why non-Nebraskans and nonunion members have to pay more taxes, while Nebraskans and union members get to pay less. Those two deals seem to have alienated most people across the political spectrum. That's not easy.

Somehow, in the last 12 months, we allowed the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to morph into the party of George McGovern (or more accurately, his most ardent supporters) and Howard Dean, who called for the defeat of the Democratic health-care bill if it had neither a public option or Medicare buy-in. (He couldn't possibly have been speaking for the 31 million uninsured people in taking that all-or-nothing position.)
In 1996, Mr. Clinton was the first Democrat to win re-election since FDR—expanding the electoral map once again into western, southern, and sunbelt states. He did so by creating a new ideological hybrid for a still-progressive Democratic Party: balanced-budget fiscal conservatism, cultural moderation, and liberal social programs administered by a "lean and mean government." This New Democrat combination appealed to Ross Perot independents concerned about deficits, and also to traditional Republican suburbanites who were culturally moderate on issues like abortion and gay rights but opposed to high taxes and wasteful, big-government bureaucracy.
Then, in 2008, Barack Obama added something extra: a commitment to a "new politics" that transcended the "red" versus "blue" partisan divide. He explained this concept clearly in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote speech and during his 2008 presidential campaign. It meant compromise, consensus and bipartisanship, even if that meant only incremental change. The purists on the left of the Democratic Party who demanded the "public option" or no bill at all apparently forgot that candidate Obama's health-care proposal did not include a public option; nor did it include a government mandate for everyone to either purchase insurance or pay a significant tax approximating the cost of that insurance—the "pay or play provision" in both the Senate and House bills.
Bottom line: We liberals need to reclaim the Democratic Party with the New Democrat positions of Bill Clinton and the New Politics/bipartisan aspirations of Barack Obama—a party that is willing to meet half-way with conservatives and Republicans even if that means only step-by-step reforms on health care and other issues that do not necessarily involve big-government solutions.
That's what Massachusetts Democrats and independent voters were telling national Democrats yesterday. The question isn't just, will we listen? The question is, will we stop listening to the strident, purist base of our party who seem to prefer defeat to winning elections and no change at all if they don't get all the change they want.
Stay tuned.
Mr. Davis, a Washington, D.C., attorney and a weekly columnist for "The Hill" newspaper, was special counsel to President Bill Clinton from 1996-98. He is the author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

The Once-Appealing Barack Obama

2010-01-19T00:52:00.002-04:00

Peter Wehner - 01.18.2010 - 8:46 AM
Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration. It has been, by almost any measure, a difficult and disappointing year for him and his party.
Mr. Obama now has the highest disapproval rating in Gallup’s history for a president entering his second year in office. According to a new Washington Post–ABC News poll, among independents, only 49 percent approve — the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies. (Obama has lost a stunning 18 points among independents in just a year’s time.) In November, Democrats suffered crushing defeats in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial campaigns — and if Republican Scott Brown prevails in his race against Martha Coakley in tomorrow’s Senate election in Massachusetts, it will rank among the most important non-presidential elections in our lifetime.
It has been a staggering collapse by a president who entered office with enormous support and an unprecedented amount of goodwill.
The reasons for this slide include unemployment rates that are much higher than the Obama administration predicted, job growth that never materialized despite the president’s promises, a record-setting spending binge, a massive and hugely unpopular health-care proposal, and an agenda that is far too liberal for most Americans.
But there is another, and I think quite important, explanation that was reinforced to me while reading John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book, Game Change, which is a fascinating (and very well-written) account of the 2008 presidential campaign.
One is reminded once again of how the core of Obama’s popularity was an appeal not to policy or to a governing agenda; instead it was an appeal to thematics and narrative. “Obama cast himself as a figure uncorrupted and unco-opted by evil Washington,” the authors write. He was the candidate who “promised to be a unifier and not a polarizer; someone nondogmatic and uncontaminated by the special-interest cesspool that Washington had become.” Obama’s appeal was romantic and aesthetic, built on the rhetoric of hope and change, on his “freshness and sense of promise.” A cult of personality built up around Obama — not because of what he had achieved but because of what he seemed to embody. (”Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention,” Michelle Obama dryly told a reporter.)
“We have something very special here,” Obama’s top political aide Axelrod is quoted as saying. “I feel like I’ve been handed a porcelain baby.” Axelrod tells Obama — dubbed by his aides as the “Black Jesus” — that voters were looking for “a president who can bring the country together, who can reach beyond partisanship, and who’ll be tough on special interests.”
That was what we were promised. What we got instead is a president who increased the divisions in our nation, the most partisan and polarizing figure in the history of polling, one who is dogmatic and has been as generous to special interests as any we have seen. The efforts to buy votes in pursuit of the Obama agenda has added sewage to the cesspool.
This would hurt any president under any circumstances; for Barack Obama, whose allure was based almost entirely on his ability to convince the public that he embodied a “new politics,” it has been doubly damaging. It was Hillary Clinton of all people who understood Obama best when she said during the campaign, “We have to make people understand that he’s not real.”
Not real indeed. Obama’s stirring call for Americans to reject the “politics of cynicism” was itself deeply cynical. Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. After all, Heilemann and Halperin write, Axelrod was “a master of the dark arts of negative campaigning.” The first major profile of him, more than 20 years ago, was titled, “Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod.”
Obama and Axelrod might have been able to get away with this if Obama’s presidency had been viewed as successful and skilled. But it’s not. And when combined with the growing realization that Obama is not up to the task of governing, that he is pursuing policies that exacerbate our problems and takes us down a wrong and even perilous path, it is poison. The toxicity is such that what was once unthinkable now seems more likely than not: Democrats losing the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for almost half a century. And even if they don’t, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfectly awful year for Democrats. It’s a safe bet that in response they and their allies will lash out in rage, angry at the perceived injustice of it all, furious at the fate that has befallen them. They will blame Obama’s predecessor, Republicans in Congress, the conservative movement, angry white males, Fox News, Sarah Palin’s tweets, and the wrong alignment of the stars. It won’t work.
Having created a myth, they must now live with its unmasking.

A by-the-numbers look at Obama's first year

2010-01-19T00:36:00.001-04:00

Highlights of Obama's first year, by the numbers: ___
7,949.09—Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 20, 2009.
10,609.65—Dow Jones Industrial Average close on Jan. 15, 2010.
13 million—Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of January 2009.
14.7 million—Number of people 16 and older unemployed as of December 2009.
7.7 percent—Unemployment rate January 2009
10.0 percent—Unemployment rate December 2009
$787 billion—Cost of economic stimulus approved by Congress.
$10.6 trillion—Outstanding public debt Jan. 20, 2009.
$12.3 trillion—Outstanding public debt Jan. 14, 2009.
$296.4 billion—Federal spending from the financial crisis bailout fund before Jan. 20, 2009.
$173 billion—Federal spending from the financial crisis bailout fund after Jan. 20, 2009.
$165 billion—Amount of bailout funds repaid by banks and automakers.
139—Bank failures between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 14, 2010.
274,399—Number of properties that received forclosure-related notices in January 2009.
349,519—Number of properties that received forclosure-related notices in December 2009.
34,400—U.S. troops in Afghanistan in January 2009.
70,000—U.S. troops in Afghanistan as of Jan. 12, 2010.
319—U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan from January 2009 through Jan. 15, 2010.
139,500—U.S. troops in Iraq in January 2009.
111,000—U.S. troops in Iraq as of Jan. 12, 2010.
152—U.S. military deaths in Iraq from January 2009 through Jan. 15, 2010.
539—Appointments to top federal policy positions submitted to the Senate
352—Appointments confirmed by the Senate.
180—Appointments in top policy positions carried over from the Bush administration.
12—Formal news conferences.
21—Foreign countries visited.
29—States visited.
10—Visits to Camp David.
2—Vacations.
___
Sources:
AP reporting and analysis
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Treasury Department
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
RealtyTrac Inc.
Defense Department
White House Transition Project

PROMISES, PROMISES: Many Obama pledges unkept

2010-01-15T00:43:00.002-04:00

By PHILIP ELLIOTT

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WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama ends his first year in office with his to-do list still long and his unfulfilled campaign promises stacked high.

From winding down the war in Iraq to limiting lobbyists, Obama has made some progress. But the president has faced political reality and accepted - sometimes grudgingly - compromises that leave him exposed to criticism. Promises that have proven difficult include pledges not to raise taxes, to curb earmarks and to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba by the end of his first year.

"We are moving systematically to bring about change, but change is hard," Obama told a town hall crowd in California. "Change doesn't happen overnight."

That was in March.

During his two-year campaign, Obama thrilled massive crowds with soaring speeches, often railing against an Iraq war that now is seldom mentioned. His presidential comments now are often sober updates on issues like terrorism and the economy, a top priority now that emerged as a major issue only in the campaign's final weeks.

Obama's campaign ambition has been diluted with a pragmatism that has been the hallmark of Year One - without much of the progress he had hoped.

A look at some of the promises:

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THE ECONOMY, TAXES AND DEFICITS

Obama inherited an economy in severe distress that has since shown marked improvement. With the crisis developing so close to last year's election, it wasn't the focus of his earlier campaign promises. But Obama managed to craft his main anti-recession measure to address one of the top political commitments.

He campaigned on a pledge to provide a $1,000 tax credit to 95 percent of all working families, and almost delivered.

The $787 billion stimulus bill included an $800 tax credit for couples making up to $150,000, and a declining credit for those making up to $190,000. The Tax Policy Center estimates that 90 percent of taxpayers qualified for a tax cut under the stimulus package.

In a Dover, N.H., campaign stop, Obama pledged that "no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase - not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

True, unless you're a smoker.

Obama, himself an occasional smoker, signed into law a 159 percent increase in the tax on a pack of cigarettes. Other tobacco products were hit with similar or much steeper increases to help pay for a children's health initiative, enabling him to keep another promise to make sure all kids have health insurance.

Obama also promised to cut the federal budget deficit by more than half in his first term. That now appears unlikely, given the spending on the stimulus and the billions of dollars spent on bank and auto company bailouts. The 2009 federal budget deficit hit a record $1.42 trillion, and the red ink in the first two months of fiscal 2010 was nearly 6 percent higher than the same period in 2009.

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FOREIGN POLICY

As a candidate, Obama touted his early opposition to the Iraq war and pledged to pull all U.S. combat troops out within 16 months. As president, he pushed that deadline back two months, to August 2010.

Even then, he will leave 35,000 to 50,000 military personnel in Iraq through 2011 to train, equip and advise Iraqi security forces, and to help in counterterrorism missions.

As a candidate, he vowed to prosecute the war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan, arguing that Iraq had distracted the U.S. from its anti-terror priorities. By the end of his first year, he had retooled the Afghan war strategy, replaced the U.S. commander there, doubled the number of U.S. troops in the country and ordered another 30,000 there by the middle of this year.

He also promised to "end the use of torture without exception" in U.S. anti-terror campaigns and to close Guantanamo Bay, which he called "a recruiting tool for our enemies." He signed an executive order outlawing torture, cruelty and degrading treatment of prisoners. A companion order closing the Guantanamo prison has proven more challenging.

Congress refused to fund the transfer of any Guantanamo detainees to U.S. prisons, and foreign countries are reluctant to accept them. Obama did order the purchase of an Illinois prison to house up to 100 Guantanamo detainees. Still, Guantanamo cannot be closed until the disposition of more than 200 remaining detainees is resolved. A failed attempt at bombing a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas has made that more difficult.

Obama also campaigned to restore U.S. prestige abroad by engaging allies and adversaries alike, a direct swipe at George W. Bush, his predecessor. Now, he's finding that rhetoric tough to live up to.

He vowed to use "tough, direct diplomacy" to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Once in office, he offered dialogue to Tehran, made direct appeals to the Iranian people and included Iran in multinational discussions, while insisting that Iran not be permitted to develop nuclear weapons.

The power centers in Tehran have largely shrugged, and Obama so far has been unable to unite a coalition of countries behind new economic sanctions intended to block Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

A solution for North Korea's nuclear program also remains elusive. Its envoy to the United Nations said his nation is willing to conduct talks, but only if all sanctions against it are lifted.

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TERRORISM

On his 2008 campaign Web site, Obama declared that "we must redouble our efforts to determine if the measures implemented since 9/11 are adequately addressing the threats our nation continues to face from airplane-based terrorism," including screening all passengers against "a comprehensive terrorist watch list."

The verdict on that promise came last month, when an alleged terrorist known to authorities boarded an airliner bound for Detroit from overseas carrying explosives in his clothes. Disaster was averted when he botched an attempt to ignite the bomb.

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HEALTH CARE

During his political run, Obama said he would increase the number of people covered by health insurance and pay for it by raising taxes on families making more than $250,000 a year and by taxing companies that do not offer coverage to employees.

Although lawmakers have taken steps toward the broad outline Obama promised, it remains unfinished. The House and Senate have passed versions of the plan, but major differences remain. And Obama's left flank is none too pleased with the compromises to this point, which have all but eliminated a government-run insurance option, something he called for in the campaign.

Even the process has violated one campaign pledge.

"We'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies," Obama said.

That hasn't happened. Instead, Democrats in Congress and the White House have made multibillion-dollar deals with hospitals and pharmaceutical companies in private. C-SPAN asked to televise the negotiations between the House and Senate versions; the White House insists it hasn't seen the request.

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OTHER ISSUES

On other domestic promises, from energy to education, Obama has been faced with a tight budget, a struggling economy and a deficit-conscious public that he will need to court if he seeks another term in 2012.

Early on, he had to recant his pledge not to sign legislation that includes lawmakers' pet projects. "When I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely," Obama had said in September.

But Congress controls spending, and Obama hasn't been willing to veto bills approved by his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill. For example, he signed what he called an "imperfect" $410 billion spending bill that included 7,991 so-called "earmarks" totaling $5.5 billion. He had little choice. The measure, a holdover from the Bush presidency, was needed to keep government from shutting down.

Obama also promised to require lawmakers seeking money for earmarks to justify their requests in writing 72 hours before they're voted on in Congress.

That hasn't happened yet. Nor has his pledge to post legislation online for five days before acting; he broke that pledge with his first bill, a non-emergency measure giving workers more time to bring pay discrimination lawsuits. A promised ban on lobbyists serving in his administration hasn't been absolute; a few former lobbyists were granted exemptions.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs explained that by saying:

"Even the toughest rules require reasonable exceptions."

Obama 'strengthened America' in first year: White House

2010-01-13T00:57:00.002-04:00

The White House Tuesday argued President Barack Obama's "steady diplomacy" had made America stronger and renewed its moral authority despite "unprecedented challenges" in his first year in office.

But the assessment, posted on the White House website, did not dwell on the lack of success garnered by one of Obama's top priority foreign policy drives, peace moves in the Middle East, and reflected a tougher tone on Iran.

"A year later, America is stronger because of the president's leadership," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, in a White House blog post.

"The global economy has been pulled back from the brink of catastrophe. We are responsibly winding down the war in Iraq, and increasing our focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Rhodes argued Obama that had quickly got to work refocusing the fight against Al-Qaeda, restoring US alliances, committing the United States to confronting climate change and nuclear proliferation.

He said Obama's 30,000 strong troop surge in Afghanistan proved the strategy and resources were now in place "that this urgent challenge demands" and noted Obama was on track to get combat troops out of Iraq by the end of August.

"By prohibiting torture and working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, we are denying Al-Qaeda a recruiting tool," said Rhodes, who has played an instrumental role in many of Obama's biggest foreign policy speeches.

He said domestic terror plots had been disrupted and terrorists had been caught, but added in a reference to the thwarted bid to blow up a US airliner "as we learned over Christmas, more work has to be done."

When he came to office in January 2009, Obama offered a hand of dialogue to Iran but has been rebuffed and now the administration is working with international partners on a toughened sanctions regime over a nuclear showdown.

"After a year of American engagement, the international community is more united than ever before in calling on Iran to live up to its obligations, while Iran is more isolated," he said.

It remains unclear however if permanent five UN Security Council members Russia and China will sign up to tough sanctions being developed for Tehran.

Rhodes drew an analogy between the Iranian and North Korean nuclear crises.

"President Obama continues to present a clear choice: if nations abide by their obligations, the door is open to a better relationship with the international community; if they don't, they will be isolated."

The Obama administration is currently trying to revive its efforts to open peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, but so far has seen little success, a factor on which Rhodes did not chose to comment.

But he said that Obama's decision to "reset" ties with Russia had enabled the two former Cold War foes to work towards a new nuclear arms reduction treaty.

He also said that Obama's "steady diplomacy" with nations like China and India had helped to convince nations to embrace their responsibilities to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the Copenhagen summit last month.

The treaty however did not forge an agreement for binding deal with legal force.

Obama and the 'Fat Cat Bankers'

2010-01-13T00:47:00.002-04:00

Surprise! Banks with government guarantees take the biggest risks, make the most money, and pay the highest bonuses.

By JONATHAN MACEY

President Obama said last month on "60 Minutes" that he "did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." This assertion may mollify his constituents, but it is not consistent with his administration's own policies.
We are on the cusp of what is going to be the most highly visible and contentious bank bonus season in history. Bonuses are predicted to run into the billions of dollars, and many of the banks that got the most bailout money are paying the biggest bonuses. The two issues are intimately related—and as long as the administration continues down its too-big-to-fail regulatory path, Mr. Obama will stay in the business of paying huge bonuses to fat cat bankers. Here's how it works.
All of the banks in which the bonus-driven employees work have highly leveraged balance sheets. This leverage greatly magnifies bank profits in good times and causes their losses to mushroom in bad times. The public shareholders of these companies tend to be highly diversified against the risk of failure at any particular financial institution, so they have a strong personal interest in seeing the bankers who manage their leveraged investments swing for the fences.

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Corbis

On the other hand, these institutions are considered vital to the national interest, and therefore can't be allowed to fail because they are allegedly too big or too interconnected. So the managers of these banks are assured that the government will bail them out if they falter.

The bankers, in short, face a massive conflict. They have a great responsibility to the public which arose as soon as the politicians decided to guarantee the survival of their businesses. They also have a legal responsibility to their owner-shareholders, whose diversified investments in these highly levered companies makes them eager to take on as much risk as they possibly can.
It isn't hard to figure out how the bankers are likely to act in the face of this conflict between the government's interest in avoiding future bailouts and the shareholder's interest in the rewards associated with significant risk-taking. They will follow their paychecks.
These paychecks are highly rational from the shareholders' perspective. The basic pay structure is the same at all of these banks. The bankers make relatively modest base salaries and receive most of their compensation in the form of bonuses. The average bonuses will be around $500,000—$595,000 at Goldman Sachs, $463,000 at JP Morgan Chase—but some will make far more (as much as eight figures). These bonuses are big and they are unremittingly linked to performance.Together a mere five banks—Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, all of which got billions of bailout dollars—have allocated about $90 billion for overall compensation, with bonuses comprising more than half.
What Mr. Obama and others apparently fail to understand is that the banks' own shareholders benefit from these huge performance bonuses. The bonuses are paid to those who make large profits for their employers—that is, they are linked to performance.
In our "heads the shareholders and bankers win, tails the U.S. taxpayers lose" world, neither the public's supplicant pleas for restraint nor the politicians' bursts of outrage is likely to change banker behavior. This is why the banks are doing so little (and most are doing nothing) to reduce the size of their bonuses. On Wall Street the din of populist outrage is drowned out almost entirely by the sonorous jingle of bonus money.
People say that shareholders have no control over executive compensation. In fact, it appears that a clear rule of thumb about executive compensation has emerged on Wall Street. When banks make profits, the managers keep 40%-50% of the take, and the rest goes to the shareholders, either by being re-invested in the company or paid as dividends.
John S. Reed, a former CEO of Citigroup, said a few days ago that the banks won't regain the public's trust until they reduce bonus payments. He contends that the bankers have learned nothing from the crisis, and that "They just don't get it. They are off in a different world."
Mr. Reed is mistaken. It is the government, not that the shareholders, that is incapable of making a win-win deal with our financial institutions. And it is the government, not the banks, that has lost the public's trust. The public has been giving the banks credible and convincing votes of confidence all year by bidding up the value of their shares. It cannot seriously be argued that investors are ignorant of bonus arrangements.
Politicians are frustrated because they are virtually powerless to stop the flow of bonus payments to bankers. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio) thinks that the U.S. should follow the lead of Britain, France and Germany and levy heavy taxes on bonuses. While such action might placate some people, it is the shareholders, not the banks, who will end up paying this tax. Worse, this sort of tax will not affect banker behavior, because it will not reduce (and probably will increase) the government's proclivity to bail out banks that have made bad bets.
There is only one way to resolve the bonus problem. We should continue to let shareholders pay their managers whatever and however they want. But we must get out of the business of guaranteeing against failure. The bankers and the shareholders who enjoy the rewards of risk-taking should be made to act like real capitalists: They should be required to assume the risks that go along with the banks' business activities.
Banks that are considered too big to fail should be dismantled into smaller pieces that the economy can digest. And the government should make it clear that it will allow these institutions to fail. When this happens, the shareholder-owners of these banks will pay their managers much more sensibly—and Mr. Obama will be able to wash his hands of the business of helping out the fat cat bankers on Wall Street.
Mr. Macey is a professor at Yale Law School and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on Property Rights.

Obama's Fiscal Fantasy World

2010-01-08T00:25:00.002-04:00

Spending is up nearly 24% since Bush's last full budget year.

By KARL ROVE

After President Obama devoted much of 2009 to health care and global warming—two issues far down Americans' list of concerns—the White House says he will pivot to jobs and deficit reduction in his State of the Union speech in a few weeks. The White House is considering dramatic gestures, perhaps announcing a spending freeze or even a 2% or 3% reduction in nondefense spending.
But Americans shouldn't be misled by the election year ploy: Mr. Obama rigged the game by giving himself plenty of room to look tough on spending. He did that by increasing discretionary domestic spending for the last half of fiscal year 2009 by 8% and then increasing it another 12% for fiscal year 2010.
So discretionary domestic spending now stands at $536 billion, up nearly 24% from President George W. Bush's last full year budget in fiscal 2008 of $433.6 billion. That's a huge spending surge, even for a profligate liberal like Mr. Obama. The $102 billion spending increase doesn't even count the $787 billion stimulus package, of which $534 billion remains unspent.
Mr. Obama can placate congressional Democrats by arguing that all that extra spending he has already crammed through can cover their spending desires at least through the 2010 congressional elections.

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Associated Press

Mr. Obama is thinking of tapping another pocket of cash. Now that the banks are repaying—with interest and dividends—the $240 billion the Bush administration lent them, the Obama administration is considering recycling those dollars into new spending on "green" technology and more stimulus, despite provisions Congress wrote into the law creating the Troubled Asset Relief Program that requires that repaid TARP funds be used exclusively for deficit reduction.

Meanwhile, defense spending is being flattened: Between 2009 and 2010, military outlays will rise 3.6% while nondefense discretionary spending climbs 12%.
All this leaves Mr. Obama in the enviable position of appearing tough on spending while growing the federal government's share of GDP from its historic post-World War II average of roughly 20% to the target Mr. Obama laid out in his budget blueprint last February of 24%.
There are also those pesky entitlements. This mandatory spending has grown to 66% of the budget, up from 29% in 1965. Serious budgeters understand spending cannot be brought under control unless these mandatory outlays are part of the mix.
One idea on Capitol Hill is to create a commission that would propose a package of entitlement reforms that Congress would have to vote on as a package, up or down, take it or leave it—much like the base closing commission.
The Obama White House likes this idea in part because the proposal calls for including some congressional Republicans but would reserve a majority of the seats on the commission for Democrats. That would put Democrats in charge while also making the GOP share in the political pain that would come with whatever the commission proposes. Conservatives worry, with justification, that a commission's purpose would be to provide Republican cover for tax increases and a permanent increase in the size of the federal government.
What's more, the White House may only be interested in an election-year gesture. White House staff are apparently considering creating a presidential commission that would look like it's working on deficit reduction but that would be established by executive order. Of course, without congressional authorization, there's no way to force Congress to vote on a commission's recommendations.

About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy-making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).
Email the author atKarl@Rove.comor visit him on the web atRove.com. Or, you can send a Tweet to @karlrove.

Whatever Mr. Obama says in his State of the Union, Republicans need to be tougher on spending and deficits. Later this month, Senate Republicans are planning to force their colleagues to go on the record on how to spend returned TARP funds by demanding that Democrats vote on the issue. Some House Republicans are also considering calling for a return to the level of discretionary domestic spending that existed when Mr. Obama entered office last January.
Few things focus the attention of politicians as much as approaching elections. Democrats are aware that spending and deficits are big reasons Republicans have a nine-point lead on the Rasmussen Poll's generic ballot.
Independents are particularly sensitive about deficits, spending and taxes, whose growth they see aversely affecting jobs and the economy. They give Mr. Obama only a 21% approval on handling the deficit. Only 10% of independents want to spend unused bank bailout money on other government programs.
At the beginning of his term, Americans believed Mr. Obama would follow through on his campaign promises about "cutting wasteful spending" and going "through the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don't need" and putting "an end to the run-away spending the record deficits."
After a year of living in his fiscal fantasy world, Americans realize they have a record deficit-setting, budget-busting spender on their hands. Voters are now reading the fine print on all that Mr. Obama proposes and as they do, his credibility, already badly damaged, suffers.
Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

Obama Reneges on Health Care Transparency

2010-01-07T00:53:00.002-04:00

President Barack Obama speaks at a town hall meeting on health care reform. As a candidate, Obama promised health care negotiations would take place in the open, and even be broadcast on C-SPAN - a promise that he has not fulfilled. (AP

(CBS) President Obama wants the final negotiations on health care reform - a reconciliation of the House and Senate versions of the bill - put on a fast track, even if that means breaking an explicit campaign promise.

"The House and Senate plan to put together the final health care reform bill behind closed doors according to an agreement by top Democrats," House Speaker Nanci Pelosi said today at the White House.

The White House is on board with that, too, reports CBS News political correspondent Chip Reid. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed today that "the president wants to get a bill to his desk as quickly as possible."

Special Report: Health Care Reform

During the campaign, though, candidate Obama regularly promised something different - to broadcast all such negotiations on C-SPAN, putting the entire process of pounding out health care reform out in the open. (That promise applied to the now-completed processing of forging House and Senate bills, too.)

Back when Republicans controlled Congress and George W. Bush was in the White House, it was Democrats who angrily complained about secret backroom deals.

Now the roles are reversed.

"The negotiations are obviously being done in secret and the American people really just want to know what they are trying to hide," said Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga.

Even with no cameras and no Republicans in the room it will be a tall order for the House and Senate to resolve their differences - especially on abortion coverage and how to pay for health reform

Even so, top Democrats in both houses say they hope to have the final bill ready for the president's signature in time for his State of the Union address - less than four weeks from now.

Year One of a President at War with Reality

2010-01-06T00:40:00.000-04:00

Just about a year ago, many people here and abroad had very high hopes for our new president and for us. He was going to take on our economic woes, improve our international reputation (as he defined it), and fight a smarter and better war on terrorism. How has the year unfolded?

Using Gallup numbers, President Obama began his administration with a 69 percent approval rating. Today he’s at 49 percent — a 20-point drop. Last January unemployment was at 7.2 percent; today it’s at 10 percent. President Obama came to office criticizing the public debt, and continues to speak of the debt he inherited, but let’s get it right: According to the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl, "President Bush presided over a $2.5 trillion increase in the public debt through 2008. Setting aside 2009 (for which Bush and Obama share responsibility), President Obama’s budget would add $4.9 trillion in public debt from the beginning of this year through 2016." In addition, there is now talk of a second stimulus, and a nearly trillion-dollar health-care plan is in the works.

On the international front, Iran is more threatening and dangerous than ever. President Obama campaigned on a new kind of policy toward Iran, but the only thing new is that the Iranian government has become more aggressive, more brutal, and more contemptuous toward our desire to curb its nuclear ambitions. North Korea has test-fired banned missiles and broken off accords. Russia is as aggressive as ever. We have spurned the Dalai Lama. We have upset Eastern European allies from Poland to the Czech Republic. Israel is more nervous than ever — both about its existence and about the pressure the U.S. is putting on it. Sudan has been appeased further than it was by either of the last two administrations but is no less of a threat to Darfur, where things are getting worse. And in Latin America, the president has received praise from Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Meanwhile, he’s twice gone to Copenhagen and come back empty-handed: once to bring the Olympics to Chicago, once to formulate a climate policy. In neither visit did he get what he set out for.

On Afghanistan, he has finally come out with a policy and committed to sending more troops. His administration’s spokesmen are unclear on what the exit or ramp-down procedures and timelines are, but for now, we can praise the ramp-up. But on the terrorism and war issue more generally, we have seen a backslide. Despite ringing statements that we will close Guantanamo, stop enhanced interrogation, and move detained terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into our civil-justice system with a public trial, thus bestowing constitutional rights on those terrorists, an interesting statistic came out last week: More terrorist acts and attempts took place in the United States in 2009 than in any year since 2001. According to the Rand Corporation, there have been 33 terrorism-related events on these shores since 9/11, and 13 of them occurred in 2009.

Meanwhile, President Obama seems to want to take the focus off this threat by changing the language of what we are in — which is a war. He tries to narrow and crib the definition as much as possible: a) by not talking about any of it very much and b) when talking about it, by restricting the discussion to al-Qaeda. He has a genus problem, but really only mentions the species; you never hear him talk about Islam or Islamic terrorism, and he hardly ever uses the word “war."

Barack Obama is president. He asked to be. The complaining, the blaming, and the distracting are not presidential. We need a president who sees the world as it is and rises to the challenges.

"Screw Up"

2010-01-05T22:31:00.000-04:00

Christmas incident was "screw up" - Obama said

WASHINGTON, Jan 5 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama told his security chiefs on Tuesday that the botched Christmas Day plane bombing was the result of a screw up by U.S. intelligence and that the country had barely dodged disaster, according to a quotation released by the White House.

"This was a screw up that could have been disastrous," the president said during a meeting in the White House situation room, according to the White House media office. "We dodged a bullet but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals not because the system worked and that is not acceptable. While there will be a tendency for finger pointing, I will not tolerate it."

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, editing by Bill Trott)

Crises to greet Obama return to Washington

2010-01-04T01:01:00.000-04:00

US President Barack Obama Monday swaps his Hawaiian vacation hideaway for Washington, with resurgent fears of airborne terror and Iran's nuclear defiance darkening his already daunting agenda.

Challenges facing the White House in 2009 -- including the worst economic meltdown in 70 years -- look if anything likely to be trumped by the building crises threatening to rage through 2010.

Hyper-partisan politics will get even more nasty, with Republicans targeting gains in mid-term elections in November -- which normally wound first-term presidents -- and Democrats defending their grip on Congress at all costs.

The thwarted Christmas Day attack on a US airliner reintroduced the terrifying and polarizing spectre of terrorism into American life, just as a wary normality was easing memories of the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Criticism of Obama's handling of the attack is likely to complicate his task of enacting an ambitious domestic program. He will attempt to address what he says are "systemic" US failures over the episode by meeting spy chiefs Tuesday.

Obama's plan to close the Guantanamo Bay camp, already set to miss a one-year deadline, looks in deep peril: nearly half of the remaining 198 detainees are from Yemen, where the Christmas Day attack was planned.

Yemen, with its building Al-Qaeda presence is a widening front for US forces in the global anti-terror struggle, along with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Iran, beset by its own political turmoil, is meanwhile escalating the showdown over its nuclear program, with Washington seeking tougher sanctions.

Tehran last year spurned Obama's engagement push -- leading the president's foes to brand him as naive.

Recent deaths of seven CIA employees in Afghanistan meanwhile underscored the political risks and deep human cost of the president's 30,000 strong troop surge into Afghanistan.

Fresh global challenges come as Obama faces 10 percent unemployment, which is dampening hopes for economic recovery and his own political prospects.

Republicans are painting Obama as a big spending, big government liberal, and will skewer him with huge joblessness and a budget deficit of over a trillion dollars in 2010.

"The country is in deep, deep trouble," Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty -- a possible Republican 2012 presidential candidate told Fox News last week.

"People are going to hold office holders and candidates to account."

Amid the gloom, Obama must try to rekindle the theme of change and hope which powered his 2008 election win.

"While 2009 was difficult for many Americans, we must also look back ... with the knowledge that brighter days are ahead of us," he said in his New Year message.

One political triumph -- health care reform -- a task that has confounded generations of Democratic presidents, may be in reach.

A final bill could emerge from Congress within weeks, setting up a historic signing ceremony to boost the president early in 2010.

After nearly a year in power, Obama is grayer, drained by Washington's acrimony and no longer an untested source of hope for millions, but a commander-in-chief who agonized, then escalated the Afghan war.

His once soaring job approval ratings are now around the critical 50 percent threshold though he will be comforted, that unlike many lawmakers, he does not face voters for three more years.

Judged by massive expectations which greeted his election, Obama's first year looks unimpressive, but history may give him more credit.

Despite the economic blight, Obama argues that he stopped a traumatized economy slipping into depression -- and if the US economy shows its historic resilience, he may reap a political benefit.

However, the long fight over health care has delayed much of his domestic agenda and Wall Street is battling to water down a regulatory reform drive.

Obama's hopes of passing a cap-and-trade bill to fight global warming also look increasingly doubtful and dreams of his devotees that he could cleanse Washington's partisan swamp have proven fanciful.

Abroad, the administration's bid to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now looks clumsy, and the Middle East peace process is stalled.

In Iraq, however things look better: the White House hopes to get US troop numbers down to 50,000 by August.

The administration also hopes to conclude a landmark nuclear deal with Russia in early 2010 and will also seek to build on a tortuous start in engaging China and hopes to ease the North Korea nuclear crisis.

Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem

2009-12-30T01:10:00.002-04:00

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

By SHELBY STEELE

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.
The essence of our new "post-modern" race problem can be seen in the parable of the emperor's new clothes. The emperor was told by his swindling tailors that people who could not see his new clothes were stupid and incompetent. So when his new clothes arrived and he could not see them, he put them on anyway so that no one would think him stupid and incompetent. And when he appeared before his people in these new clothes, they too—not wanting to appear stupid and incompetent—exclaimed the beauty of his wardrobe. It was finally a mere child who said, "The emperor has no clothes."
The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees—in this case the emperor's flagrant nakedness.

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Martin Kozlowski

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.
Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.
Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn't there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?
Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.
On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the "rational" and "earnest" way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.
And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? Are we the world's exceptional power and thereby charged with enforcing a certain balance of power, or are we now embracing European self-effacement and nonengagement? Where is the clear center in all this?
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.
The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.
He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.
Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.
But then Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask—winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not—not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.
But this mask comes at a high price. When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken. Think of Tiger Woods, now so humanly visible. Or think of Bill Cosby, who in recent years has challenged the politically correct view and let the world know what he truly thinks about the responsibility of blacks in their own uplift.
It doesn't matter that Mr. Woods lost his bargainer's charm through self-destructive behavior and that Mr. Cosby lost his through a courageous determination to individuate—to take public responsibility for his true convictions. The appeal of both men—as objects of white identification—was diminished as their human reality emerged. Many whites still love Mr. Cosby, but they worry now that expressing their affection openly may identify them with his ideas, thus putting them at risk of being seen as racist. Tiger Woods, of course, is now so tragically human as to have, as the Bible put it, "no name in the street."
A greater problem for our nation today is that we have a president whose benign—and therefore desirable—blackness exempted him from the political individuation process that makes for strong, clear-headed leaders. He has not had to gamble his popularity on his principles, and it is impossible to know one's true beliefs without this. In the future he may stumble now and then into a right action, but there is no hard-earned center to the man out of which he might truly lead.
And yes, white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness—valued him all along for his "articulate and clean" blackness, so flattering to American innocence. He is a president come to us out of our national insecurities.
Mr. Steele is a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

STATE CONTROL?

2009-12-22T01:18:00.000-04:00

Schultz: WH Contacts Team 'Joe' Directly During Program!

For anyone wondering why an increasing number of conservatives now use the term "state-controlled media" (which originated with Rush Limbaugh) to refer to television networks and newspapers, here's one that drives the point home.

During his syndicated radio show Friday, libtalker and MSNBC host Ed Schultz relayed to listeners how he observed 'Morning Joe' Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski take feedback directly from the White House during their program last week.

Schultz appeared on Thursday's Morning Joe and directly challenged Obama's David Axelrod on the current version of the health care bill under consideration in Congress. Interestingly, this particular segment has since generated a great deal of attention elsewhere, given the defensive nature of the White House advisor and the supposed conflict between the far left and the administration:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And here's what Ed told radio listeners the next day about the visit:

SCHULTZ (07:14): I just want to get things clear, it was not arranged for me to have a question for David Axelrod.

SCHULTZ (08:12): So Mika starts looking at her Blackberry and so does Scarborough and obviously the White House is texting them or emailing them or whatever and they didn't like the show. Because Arianna had been on there, I'm on there, Howard Dean had been on there and they wanted some balance.

Now think about that - here's the White House getting in contact with 'Morning Joe' because they're afraid there's too many lefties on the air! Now if that's not sensitivity at its highest level, I don't know what is! I told ya a few days ago they had rabbit ears! They don't like anything that's being said right now, they're getting beat up!

Is it really possible that the White House has a direct line to MSNBC's hosts, communicating with them during their live broadcasts? Now THAT'S state control!

And do MSNBC staffers actually carry out the administration's commands? In this case, they certainly made room on short notice for a lengthy segment featuring Axelrod, there to rebut comments made by Howard Dean and other recent guests.

Now, imagine if Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or another non-"progressive" host had been caught taking orders from Bush during the program. When would we ever hear the end of that?

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White House v. White House

2009-12-18T00:58:00.002-04:00

The health-care contradictions multiply.

The left is staging a revolt over ObamaCare, at least for 48 or 72 hours, but more revealing is the way this revolt is scrambling the White House's case for a bill that everyone save Big Pharma and AARP now seems to hate. The ad hoc arguments its spokesmen use to put out one political fire invariably contradict those they're using to put out another, so allow us to adjudicate.
Among labor's complaints is a 40% excise tax on high-cost insurance plans, given that union-negotiated benefits are more generous than average. So Jason Furman, the deputy economic director, took to the White House blog on Wednesday to declare that this so-called Cadillac tax "will affect only a small portion of the very highest cost health plans—a total of 3% of premiums in 2013." He added that "The vast majority of health plans fall below the thresholds set in the Senate plan and would be completely unaffected by the provision."
But wait: White House budget director Peter Orszag has been emphasizing the excise tax as critically important in the cost-control stone soup that he's been trying to sell. He cited this in his response to one of our editorials on Monday, and as he put it earlier this month, "You're creating an incentive for plans for employers to design their plans in such a way that they're under that threshold. . . . You're creating an incentive to slow the growth rate in private health costs."
So a tax that applies to 3% of premiums is going to reshape the entire health-care market? These guys can't even get their blog posts straight.
Our view is that they're both wrong, as it were. The Cadillac tax is not indexed for inflation, so it will gradually snare ever-more workers as a revenue grab. But contrary to Mr. Orszag's assertions, it doesn't fundamentally change the structural incentives created by the U.S. subsidies for employer- and government-provided coverage that have sent health costs soaring.
Mr. Furman used to advocate policies that really would make a difference, by "helping consumers become more cost conscious about their health-care choices," as he put it in a 2007 Brookings paper. He estimated that increasing cost-sharing could lower total health spending from 13% to 30%.
The Administration went in a far more political direction, which is why the White House brain trust, which seems to have been placed in a blind trust, is finding it so hard to make a coherent case. But maybe the handful of Democratic Senators worried about ending their careers by voting for ObamaCare should embrace the contradiction: The best way to support "health-care reform" is by voting against it.

The President Is No B+

2009-12-17T00:16:00.000-04:00

In fact, he's got the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year.

By KARL ROVE

Barack Obama has won a place in history with the worst ratings of any president at the end of his first year: 49% approve and 46% disapprove of his job performance in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll.
There are many factors that explain it, including weakness abroad, an unprecedented spending binge at home, and making a perfectly awful health-care plan his signature domestic initiative. But something else is happening.
Mr. Obama has not governed as the centrist, deficit-fighting, bipartisan consensus builder he promised to be. And his promise to embody a new kind of politics—free of finger-pointing, pettiness and spin—was a mirage. He has cheapened his office with needless attacks on his predecessor.
Consider Mr. Obama's comment in his interview this past Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" that the Bush administration made a mistake in speaking in "a triumphant sense about war."

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Associated Press

This was a slap at every president who rallied the nation in dark moments, including Franklin D. Roosevelt ("With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph"); Woodrow Wilson ("Right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts"); and John F. Kennedy ("Any hostile move anywhere in the world against the safety and freedom of peoples to whom we are committed . . . will be met by whatever action is needed").

This kind of attack gives Mr. Obama's words a slippery quality. For example, he voted for the bank rescue plan in September 2008 and praised it during the campaign. Yet on Dec. 8 at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Obama called it "flawed" and blamed "the last administration" for launching it "hastily."
Really? Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner designed it. If it was "flawed," why did Mr. Obama later nominate Mr. Bernanke to a second term as Fed chairman and make Mr. Geithner his Treasury secretary?
Mr. Obama also claimed at Brookings that he prevented "a second Great Depression" by confronting the financial crisis "largely without the help" of Republicans. Yet his own Treasury secretary suggests otherwise. In a Dec. 9 letter, Mr. Geithner admitted that since taking office, the Obama administration had "committed about $7 billion to banks, much of which went to small institutions." That compares to $240 billion the Bush administration lent banks. Does Mr. Obama really believe his additional $7 billion forestalled "the potential collapse of our financial system"?

About Karl Rove

Mr. Obama continued distorting the record in his "60 Minutes" interview Sunday when he blamed bankers for the financial crisis. They "caused the problem," he insisted before complaining, "I haven't seen a lot of shame on their part" and pledging to put "a regulatory system in place that prevents them from putting us in this kind of pickle again."
But as a freshman senator, Mr. Obama supported a threatened 2005 filibuster of a bill regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He doesn't show "a lot of shame" that he and other Fannie and Freddie defenders blocked "a regulatory system" that might have kept America from getting in such a bad pickle in the first place.
The president's rhetorical tricks don't end there. Mr. Obama also claimed his $787 billion stimulus package "helped us [stem] the panic and get the economy growing again." But 1.5 million more people are unemployed than he said there would be if nothing were done.
And as of yesterday, only $244 billion of the stimulus had been spent. Why was $787 billion needed when less than a third of that figure supposedly got the job done?
Mr. Obama also alleged on "60 Minutes" that health-care reform "will actually bring down the deficit" (which people clearly know it will not). He said his reform reduces "costs and premiums for American families and businesses" (though they will be higher than they would otherwise be). And he claimed 30 million more people will get coverage through "an exchange that allows individuals and small businesses" to purchase insurance (though 15 million of them are covered by being dumped into Medicaid and don't get private insurance).
Mr. Obama may actually believe it when he says, "I think that's a pretty darned good outcome" and congratulates himself that he could succeed where "seven presidents have tried . . . [and] seven presidents have failed."
But voters seem to have a different definition of success. And they are tiring of the president's blame shifting and distortions.
Mr. Obama may believe, as he told Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview, that he deserves a "solid B+" for his first year in office, but the American people beg to differ. A presidency that started with so much promise is receiving unprecedentedly low grades from the country that elected him. He's earned them.
Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions).

Economy, Health Care Sends Obama to New Lows in Approval Ratings

2009-12-16T01:09:00.002-04:00

A double punch of persistent economic discontent and growing skepticism on health care reform has knocked Barack Obama's key approval ratings to new lows, clouding his administration's prospects at least until the jobless rate eases.

U.S. President Barack Obama listens during his meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of...

(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Fifty percent of Americans in this ABC News/Washington Post poll approve of the president's work overall, down 6 points in the last month; nearly as many, 46 percent, now disapprove. On the economy, 52 percent disapprove, a majority for the first time. On the deficit, his worst score, 56 percent disapprove.
Click here for a PDF with charts and questionnaire.
Such numbers aren't unexpected; Ronald Reagan, in similar economic straits, dropped to 52 percent overall approval at this point in his presidency. But it's not just the economy: Fifty-three percent also disapprove of Obama's work on health care, and the public by 51-44 percent now opposes the reform package in Congress – both more than half for the first time in ABC/Post polls.

Unwitting tourists attend White House breakfast

2009-12-16T01:05:00.002-04:00

By BEN EVANS (AP) – 6 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The White House is once again explaining how uninvited guests wound up shaking hands with President Barack Obama.
This time, a Georgia couple hoping to tour the White House ended up at an invitation-only Veterans Day breakfast.
White House officials say the couple mistakenly showed up a day early and were allowed into the breakfast because there were no public tours available. They say the couple, Harvey and Paula Darden of Hogansville, Ga., were properly screened for security.
Harvey Darden, however, said there appeared to be a mix-up. No one told them about the breakfast, he said, and the Dardens thought they were starting their tour until they were ushered into the East Room and offered a buffet.

Obama's War of Words

2009-12-15T01:02:00.002-04:00

Eloquence without action is soon forgotten.

Whatever else he may be, Barack Obama is a gifted orator whose words will be remembered by generations. Or will they?
In the first two weeks of this month, President Obama has delivered two critical war speeches. At West Point he outlined a new policy for Afghanistan, committing 30,000 additional troops to deal with the threat that militant Islam continues to pose to the American people. In Oslo scarcely a week later, he used the occasion of his Nobel Prize to deliver a bracing reminder that the reality of evil requires nations willing to confront it.
Now comes the question put to all presidential speechwriters when a wartime president gives a major address. What did you think? Did he make his case? How will these speeches be treated by history?
The answer, surely, is that the measure of a speech goes beyond words. When it comes to the English language, the speechwriters around President Obama enjoy more than their share of talent. Still, ultimately a war speech will be judged as much on the success of the war as on the eloquence of the words.

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Associated Press

Think of the great war speeches, starting with the Gettysburg Address. When Abraham Lincoln delivered those words at a cemetery for the Union fallen in 1863, he justified the terrible human toll on the promise "that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Ask yourself this: Had Lincoln not committed himself so single-mindedly to that effort, had he given in and sued for peace, would schoolchildren still be memorizing his words today?
Or consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Historians are still debating his decisions. But there can be no debate that his exhortations resonate even today because they were backed by policies that defeated totalitarian threats across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

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Ditto for John Kennedy. In his memoir "Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History," Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen did not dismiss the power of the spoken word, but neither did he confuse it with action. "[A]fter all is said and little is done, a speech—even an elevated, eloquent speech—is still just a speech," he wrote. "Saying so doesn't make it so."
Kennedy is sometimes compared with Ronald Reagan, often thought to have been a great presidential speech-giver because of his gifts as an actor. No doubt the Gipper understood the stage. But the point about Reagan is that when he spoke, he wasn't acting. When Reagan declared that the "last pages" of communism were being written or called for the Berlin Wall to come down, he believed it—and his policies reflected those beliefs.
"Nobody remembers "Tear Down this Wall" because I did an OK job of stringing the words together," says my speechwriter friend, Peter Robinson. "We remember the speech because Reagan meant it, because it expressed the principles that he acted on, and because history proved him right. We remember Reagan at Berlin because the wall did come down—and he did his part to help bring it down."
As the chief speechwriter who helped President George W. Bush draft his remarks on the surge in Iraq, I've been amused these past few days by hearing people compare that speech favorably to President Obama's recent announcement of the surge in Afghanistan. It's amusing because that's not the tone many of these folks were taking back when President Bush delivered those remarks.
If that speech holds up well today, it's because of more than words. It's because President Bush burnished those words with actions—insisting that we could still win in Iraq, backing that up with more troops at a time when many Americans wanted them home, and, most of all, by refusing to countenance an end game that would see our men and women in uniform leaving Iraq from the ignominy of an embassy rooftop.
In wartime, people soon tire of lofty words that do not seem borne out by events. In September 2001, with the twin towers still smoldering and the Pentagon wounded, President Bush delivered a war address to a joint session of Congress (which I had no part in, so am free to praise) that ranks with the best of FDR. Whether that speech ever receives its full due depends in part on how this war ends.
The same goes for President Obama. At West Point and Oslo, he spoke to the challenge of defending our freedom against hard men with no moral limit on what they are willing to do to crush it. The irony is that whether these fine speeches are remembered by history depends on a word he didn't use in either one: victory.
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

Obama Approval at 44%

2009-12-14T13:28:00.002-04:00

Monday, December 14, 2009

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The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18.
That’s a one point improvement from yesterday when Obama’s Approval Index rating fell to the lowest level yet recorded. Prior to the past three days, the Approval Index had never fallen below -15 during Obama’s time in office (see trends).
As the health care plan struggles in the Senate, public opposition remains stable. Fifty-six percent (56% ) oppose the plan working its way through Congress while just 40% favor it. In Nevada, the health care bill is causing problems for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bid for re-election.
The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates are also available on Twitter and Facebook.
Overall, 44% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. That’s the lowest level yet measured for this president. Previously, his overall approval rating had fallen to 45% twice, once in early September and once in late November.
Fifty-five percent (55%) now disapprove.
Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats now offer their approval while 80% of Republicans disapprove. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, just 36% approve.
Seventy-seven percent (77%) of liberals approve while 76% of conservatives disapprove. The bad news for the President is that there are a lot more conservatives in the country than liberals. However, he gets a bit of a boost because 57% of moderate voters still offer their approval.
The President earns approval from 37% of White voters and 98% of African-American voters.
(More Below)

Check out our review of the week’s key polls to see “What They Told Us.”
Rasmussen Reports has released updated polls on the 2010 Senate races in Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and California. Overall, the results confirm the conventional wisdom that the mid-term election season is off to a tough start for the Democrats. However, there is a long way to go until November.
Scott Rasmussen has recently had several columns published in the Wall Street Journal addressing how President Obama is losing independent voters , health care reform, the President's approval ratings, and how Obama won the White House by campaigning like Ronald Reagan. If you'd like Scott Rasmussen to speak at your meeting, retreat, or conference, contact Premiere Speakers Bureau. You can also learn about Scott's favorite place on earth or his time working with hockey legend Gordie Howe.
It is important to remember that the Rasmussen Reports job approval ratings are based upon a sample of likely voters. Some other firms base their approval ratings on samples of all adults. President Obama's numbers are always several points higher in a poll of adults rather than likely voters. That's because some of the President's most enthusiastic supporters, such as young adults, are less likely to turn out to vote. It is also important to check the details of question wording when comparing approval ratings from different firms.
(More Below)

Rasmussen Reports has been a pioneer in the use of automated telephone polling techniques, but many other firms still utilize their own operator-assisted technology (see methodology).
Pollster.com founder Mark Blumenthal noted that “independent analyses from the National Council on Public Polls, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Pew Research Center, the Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight.com have all shown that the horse-race numbers produced by automated telephone surveys did at least as well as those from conventional live-interviewer surveys in predicting election outcomes.”
In the 2009 New Jersey Governor’s race, automated polls tended to be more accurate than operator-assisted polling techniques. On reviewing the state polling results from 2009, Mickey Kaus offered this assessment, “If you have a choice between Rasmussen and, say, the prestigious N.Y. Times, go with Rasmussen!” During Election 2008, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com said that the Rasmussen tracking poll “would probably be the one I'd want with me on a desert island."
A Fordham University professor rated the national pollsters on their record in Election 2008. We also have provided a summary of our results for your review. In 2008, Obama won 53%-46% and our final poll showed Obama winning 52% to 46%. While we were pleased with the final result, Rasmussen Reports was especially pleased with the stability of our results. On every single day for the last six weeks of the campaign, our daily tracking showed Obama with a stable and solid lead attracting more than 50% of the vote.
An analysis by Pollster.com partner Charles Franklin “found that despite identically sized three-day samples, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll is less variable than Gallup.” During Election 2008, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll was the least volatile of all those tracking the race.
In 2004 George W. Bush received 50.7% of the vote while John Kerry earned 48.3%. Rasmussen Reports was the only firm to project both candidates’ totals within half a percentage point by projecting that Bush would win 50.2% to 48.5%. (see our 2004 results).
Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The margin of sampling error—for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters--is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Results are also compiled on a full-week basis and crosstabs for full-week results are available for Premium Members.
Like all polling firms, Rasmussen Reports weights its data to reflect the population at large (see methodology). Among other targets, Rasmussen Reports weights data by political party affiliation using a dynamic weighting process. While partisan affiliation is generally quite stable over time, there are a fair number of people who waver between allegiance to a particular party or independent status. Over the past five years, the number of Democrats in the country has increased while the number of Republicans has decreased.
Our baseline targets are established based upon separate survey interviews with a sample of adults nationwide completed during the preceding three months (a total of 45,000 interviews) and targets are updated monthly. Currently, the baseline targets for the adult population are 37.1% Democrats, 32.4% Republicans, and 30.5% unaffiliated. Likely voter samples typically show a slightly smaller advantage for the Democrats.
A review of last week’s key polls is posted each Saturday morning. Other stats on Obama are updated daily on the Rasmussen Reports Obama By the Numbers page. We also invite you to review other recent demographic highlights from the tracking polls.

Obama Gives Himself a B-Plus Grade

2009-12-14T01:26:00.002-04:00

President tells Oprah the only thing that stands in the way of giving himself a better grade is the fact that health care reform is unfinished and many Americans remain out of work.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, in an interview that aired Sunday, gave himself "a good solid B-plus" grade for his first year in office.
Speaking with fellow Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey, the president claimed progress on economic and international fronts.
Obama said the only thing that stands in the way of giving himself a better grade is the fact that some elements of his agenda -- health care reform and putting more Americans to work -- remain undone.
"The biggest burden on me right now is that economic growth has happened, but job growth has not happened," Obama told Winfrey on the ABC special.
On the plus side, Obama said, "We are on our way out of Iraq." And, he added, "I think we've got the best possible plan for Afghanistan."

Blagojevich's lawyers seek FBI interview with Obama

2009-12-14T01:12:00.002-04:00

BY NATASHA KORECKI Federal Courts Reporter nkorecki@suntimes.com

Rod Blagojevich's lawyers want the FBI to give up details of interviews conducted last year of President Obama, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and others as part of the investigation into the former governor.
In a Friday filing, Blagojevich attorneys also asked for information regarding first lady Michelle Obama. However, a source said late Friday that the FBI never interviewed the first lady.
Then-President-elect Obama, Emanuel and Jarrett sat down with the FBI about a year ago -- just after Blagojevich was arrested on charges of trying to sell Obama's recently vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.
Obama revealed he was interviewed in a report he made public last December.
The defense request, filed in federal court, asks for "notes, transcripts and reports" of interviews with the Obamas, Emanuel, Jarrett and union chiefs Thomas Balanoff and Andy Stern.
The request was part of a larger bid by defense lawyers to have prosecutors turn over additional materials, including witness statements, six months before the June trial date. Typically, prosecutors give the defense such information 30 days before the trial.
Shelly Sorosky, an attorney for Blagojevich, said the defense needs additional time with the material "because there's so much of it. This is massive stuff."

Bush closes the gap

2009-12-11T00:29:00.003-04:00

Public Policy Polling:

Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.

(via Political Wire)
Public Policy Polling:
Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama's declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they'd rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that's somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country's difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.

WHITE HOUSE NOTEBOOK: Short stay miffs Norwegians

2009-12-11T00:28:00.002-04:00

President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama poses with his medal and diploma at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony at City Hall in Oslo, Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009. (AP Photo/Odd Andersen)

By MATTI HUUHTANEN (AP) – 6 hours ago

OSLO — President Barack Obama's decision to break with tradition and not follow the lead of past Nobel Peace Prize winners bewildered some Norwegians. Others thought he was being impolite.
Obama had quite a whirlwind day Thursday — he signed the Nobel guest book, huddled with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, met with King Harald V and Queen Sonja, and delivered an acceptance speech after he was formally presented with the prize. He also joined the king and queen at an evening banquet.
But he skipped several other activities, including lunch with the king, a news conference at Oslo's Grand Hotel, CNN's traditional interview with the prize winner and a "Save the Children" benefit concert, where organizers replaced him with an Obama cardboard cutout. Obama also won't be around for Friday's Nobel Concert.
Obama blamed his schedule. "I still have a lot of work to do back in Washington, D.C., before the year is done," he said during an appearance with Stoltenberg. The president's quick visit also reflected a White House that saw little value in trumpeting an honor for peace just days after Obama announced he was sending more troops off to war.
In a survey published Wednesday in Norwegian VG daily, 53 percent of respondents said Obama's decision not to attend the Nobel Concert was "impolite," and 48 percent said the same of his decision to skip the CNN interview and the news conference. Forty-four percent disapproved of his decision to pass up lunch with the king.
The survey was conducted Dec. 8 by InFact. It involved telephone interviews with 1,000 people and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Siv Jensen, leader of the right-wing opposition Progress Party, told VG she thought Obama should "show some respect for the monarchy."
Jonathan Mann, the CNN reporter who for the past 15 years has interviewed the Nobel Peace laureate, said he wasn't offended at being turned down by Obama.
"He's a busy guy, essentially. We're not taking it personally," Mann told Norwegian national broadcaster NRK.
___
Obama's first stop after arriving in Oslo was the Norwegian Nobel Institute, where the Nobel committee meets to decide who gets the prestigious prize.
The momentous nature of the occasion didn't keep the publicly playful Obama and his wife, Michelle, from teasing each other.
"You writing a book there?" she said as he wrote what appeared to be a seven-line passage in the thick guest book. "Yeah," he responded.
When Obama finished, Geir Lundestad, the Nobel permanent secretary, invited Mrs. Obama to sign, too. "Mine won't be as long," she quipped. Obama then turned to the committee members and reporters in the room and, noting that his wife's words will be recorded for history, said: "She will resist writing something sarcastic."
Obama said he had thanked the committee for highlighting the cause of peace and giving "voice to the voiceless and the oppressed."
___
Obama's acceptance speech clocked in at 36 minutes with more than 4,200 words. So how does it stack up against some of his other big speeches?
It was neither the longest nor the shortest speech of his time in office.
Last week's speech on the decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan had more than 4,600 words.
His speech to the Muslim world, delivered from Cairo in June, topped out at more than 6,000 words.
The inaugural address had a mere 2,300 words.
At an evening banquet with Norwegian royalty, Obama poked fun at his long-winded acceptance speech, saying he had "entirely exhausted himself" delivering the address.
"I spoke for a very long time," he admitted, then promised not to do likewise with his dinner toast.
The president got his biggest laugh line of his toast when he took note of Nobel committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland's laudatory introduction of him, saying, "I told him afterward that I thought it was an excellent speech — and that I was almost convinced that I deserved it."
___
Wherever Obama is, chances are celebrities will follow. And follow him to Norway they did.
Husband-and-wife actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, along with daughter Willow, were among those trekking to Oslo for the festivities. Wyclef Jean, the former frontman for the hip-hop group, The Fugees, also was spotted seated in the audience at City Hall, where Obama delivered his acceptance speech. Country music star Toby Keith also was present.
The sight of Smith, accompanied by his wife and waving to a cheering throng as he walked into the Grand Hotel, where Obama was staying, sparked speculation that the couple would have a private audience with the first sitting president in 90 years to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
But if for some reason the Smiths couldn't get upstairs to see their president and first lady, they had the option of meeting with the unidentified couple that wore large, inflatable Barack and Michelle Obama masks and milled about outside in front of the hotel.
The Smiths were scheduled to participate in Friday's concert.
___
Besides the signs held by anti-war and environmental protesters, there were few other signs of Obama paraphernalia on Oslo's streets.
A few blocks away from the Grand Hotel, a local pharmacy advertised the GX+ brand of anti-bacterial hand soap with the tag line: "Barack Obama, Use GX+ and Face No Drama." It was a reference to Obama's cool and collected way.
A local convenience store chain promoted its coffee with an "Obama in Oslo" sale, listing prices in dollars aimed at members of Obama's entourage. The advertisement also noted that President Bill Clinton, who visited Oslo in 1999 and was the last sitting U.S. president to touch down in Norway, "had one."
Associated Press writers Ben Feller and Ian McDougall contributed to this report.

Obama's 'Pedestrian, Turgid, and Uninspired' Address

2009-12-11T00:21:00.002-04:00

Earlier today, Pres. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony in Oslo. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton tells NRO that President Obama’s address in the Norwegian capital was “pedestrian, turgid, and uninspired.”

“It followed the standard international leftist line,” says Bolton. “He played to the crowd and filled the speech with clichés from the American and international left by saying ‘America cannot act alone’ and that he ‘prohibited torture.’ The speech was also typical of Obama in its self-centeredness and ‘something for everybody’ approach.”

“It was so diffuse that though I wouldn’t call it incoherent, it was getting close,” says Bolton. “It was a lot about him, again, especially with his comments about being at the ‘beginning, not end’ of his labors for the world.”

Obama made some “breathtakingly simpleminded statements in his section on humanity’s history of war and the ‘hard truth’ that war will not end in our lifetimes,” adds Bolton. “No kidding. I don’t know what that is supposed to prove.”

More bad poll numbers for Obama - six year olds with crayons again?

2009-12-10T00:30:00.002-04:00

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary compared Obama's fluctuating poll numbers to a "six-year old with a crayon." A new Quinnipiac poll is out today with similar numbers.

(NEWSCOM)

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More bad poll numbers for Obama - six year olds with crayons again?

By Jimmy Orr | 12.09.09

Maybe six-year olds are working for Quinnipiac too…
A day after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs criticized a Gallup poll showing President Obama’s approval rate at a low point in his presidency, another poll is out with more dismal numbers.
Yesterday Gibbs was asked about Gallup’s daily poll numbers which gave Obama a 47 percent approval rating on Monday. These daily numbers, of course, fluctuate. Yesterday, Obama’s numbers were back up to 50 percent.
Gibbs blew off the Monday’s marks with a quippy, “I am sure a 6-year-old with a crayon could do something not unlike that.”
“I don’t put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is daily Gallup trend,” he continued. “I don’t pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it.”
New poll
When Gibbs takes the podium today, he may have to focus some more attention on the meaninglessness of those polls. The Quinnipiac University Polling Institute released a new survey today which gave the president a 46 percent approval rating.
“President Barack Obama’s job approval rating continues to slide and it’s evident the deterioration stems from voter unhappiness over domestic policy matters,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Key findings of the poll include:

Voters give President Barack Obama a split 46 - 44 percent job approval, his lowest ever, and both the health care reform package that he wants Congress to pass and his personal rating on handling health care now win support from less than four in 10 Americans.
Voters disapprove 52 - 38 percent of the health care reform proposal under consideration in Congress.
Voters disapprove 56 - 38 percent of President Obama’s handling of health care, down from 53 - 41 percent in a November 19 poll.
Voters support 56 - 38 percent giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan, compared to 57 - 35 percent November 19.
Voters trust Obama more than Republicans in Congress to handle health care 44 - 37 percent, down from 45 - 36 percent three weeks ago.
Voters disapprove 58 - 30 percent of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job, and disapprove 56 - 33 percent of Democrats in Congress.

We’ll have to wait to see how Gibbs reacts to these numbers. His press briefing is scheduled for 1:30pm today.
GOP says listen up
The low polling numbers from Gallup was something conservatives paid special attention to. Speaking on Greta Van Susteren’s FOX News program last night, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson added some historical perspective to Obama’s numbers.
“This president is at the lowest point as measured by Gallup of any president in the modern age, lower than Harry Truman, who was deeply unpopular, lower than Ronald Reagan, who was facing tough economic times after his first election,” Carlson said. “No one mentions it. I mean, if this were Bush - - when Bush’s numbers started to drop, you read about it parenthetically in every single news story.”
Let’s dance
Does this mean Republicans will start dancing on the sidelines like Lebron James? Unlikely. But the Quinnipiac pollster did sound a cautionary note for the majority party.
“With just 11 months until congressional elections, the White House and all Democrats must worry about the steady deterioration in their lead over the GOP in congressional job performance. Now, only 33 percent give the Democrats in Congress a positive rating, compared to 30 percent for Republicans. Last July Democrats had a nine point edge.”
You can read the full poll here.
See also:
Gallup defends Obama poll results
Gibbs slams Gallup’s poll numbers
Sarah Palin escapes flying tomato attack

Obama's 47 Percent Approval Lowest of Any President at This Point

2009-12-09T14:13:00.002-04:00

President Obama's job approval rating has fallen to 47 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the lowest ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.
Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and even Richard Nixon all had higher approval ratings 10-and-a-half months into their presidencies. Obama's immediate predecessor, President George W. Bush, had an approval rating of 86 percent, or 39 points higher than Obama at this stage. Bush's support came shortly after he launched the war in Afghanistan in response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said he doesn't "put a lot of stock" in the survey by Gallup, which has conducted presidential approval polls since 1938, longer than any other organization.
"If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG, I'd visit my doctor," Gibbs said in response to questions from Fox. "I'm sure a six-year-old with a Crayon could do something not unlike that. I don't put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is daily Gallup trend. I don't pay a lot of attention to the meaninglessness of it."
Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport responded: "Gibbs said that if Gallup were his EKG, he would visit his doctor. Well, I think the doctor might ask him what's going on in his life that would cause his EKG to be fluctuating so much. There is, in fact, a lot going on at the moment -- the health care bill, the jobs summit, the Copenhagen climate conference and Afghanistan."
The new low comes as Obama struggles to overhaul the nation's health care system and escalates America's involvement in the Afghanistan war. He is also presiding over a deep and prolonged recession, with unemployment at 10 percent.
"There's no doubt Obama's 47 percent is mainly a result of the continuing bad economy," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "But there is also a growing concern about government spending and debt, and a sense that Obama is trying to do too much, too soon."
He added: "President Obama has reason to be concerned about his ratings. Even in tough times, presidents have usually been able to stay above the critical 50 percent mark in the first year, when the public is most inclined to give the new incumbent the benefit of the doubt."
Obama officials have not always shown disdain for Gallup. During last year's presidential campaign, Obama adviser David Plouffe, trumpeted "the latest Gallup poll" to reporters because it showed that 53 percent of Americans did not find Obama Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, "trustworthy."
When Gallup began taking presidential approval polls 71 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt had been president for more than five years. During his remaining time in office, his job approval rating never fell below 48 percent.
The next 11 presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, all had higher job approval ratings than Obama at this stage of their tenure. Their ratings were:
-- George W. Bush, 86 percent
-- Bill Clinton, 52 percent
-- George H.W. Bush, 71 percent
-- Ronald Reagan, 49 percent
-- Jimmy Carter, 57 percent
-- Gerald Ford, 52 percent
-- Richard Nixon, 59 percent
-- Lyndon Johnson, 74 percent
-- John Kennedy, 77 percent
-- Dwight Eisenhower, 69 percent
-- Harry Truman, 49 percent
The poll is an average of a three-day tracking of 1,529 adults taken Dec. 4-6. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Poll: 26% think Obama deserves Nobel

2009-12-08T11:45:00.002-04:00

ood news/bad news Q Poll on war and peace for Barack Obama.
Approval for the Afghanistan escalation is up by nine points in the past month -- voters now think the war is a good idea by a 57-to-35 percent margin.
A healthy 60 percent favor his new troop surge, according to the Quinnipiac survey, which has a two percent margin of error.
But only 26 percent think the president, who has been in office for less than a year, deserves to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Q: "The jump in public support for Obama’s war policy comes as voters say 66 – 26 percent he does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he will be awarded this week, and 41 percent say the Nobel committee’s choice of Obama for the award causes them to think less of it, while 6 percent say it makes them think better of the prize and 49 percent say it makes no difference."
The whole release, which has crosstabs, after the jump.
FOR RELEASE: DECEMBER 8, 2009

OBAMA GETS SURGE IN AFGHAN WAR APPROVAL,
QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY NATIONAL POLL FINDS;
BUT ONLY 26% OF U.S. VOTERS SAY HE DESERVES NOBEL PRIZE

Public support for the war in Afghanistan is up nine percentage points in the last three weeks, as American voters say 57 – 35 percent that fighting the war is the right thing to do. Approval of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war is up seven points in the same period, from a 38 – 49 percent negative November 18 to a 45 – 45 percent split, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.
American voters approve 58 – 37 percent of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more combat troops to the war-torn nation, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-per-ack) University poll finds. And voters approve 60 – 32 percent of the President’s plan to begin withdrawing combat troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. But by a 45 – 40 percent margin, Americans do not believe he will be able to keep that promise.
The jump in public support for Obama’s war policy comes as voters say 66 – 26 percent he does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize he will be awarded this week, and 41 percent say the Nobel committee’s choice of Obama for the award causes them to think less of it, while 6 percent say it makes them think better of the prize and 49 percent say it makes no difference.
“President Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech explaining his policy and troop buildup has worked, at least in the short term, in bolstering support for the war effort and his decisions,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “History teaches that the bully pulpit can be a powerful tool for a president who knows how to use it, especially when it comes to foreign policy. The American people tend to rally around their presidents in military matters, at least for a while. It took some time for similar type speeches about Vietnam and Iraq by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush respectively to lose their ability to rally support.”
-more-
Quinnipiac University Poll/December 8, 2009 – page 2
“It’s probably a good thing for President Obama that the time difference from Norway means the Nobel presentation will occur while most Americans are sleeping and might get less coverage in the United States,” Brown added. “Two out of three Americans don’t think he deserves it compared to the quarter who do. Even among Democrats, only 49 percent think he deserves it, compared to 8 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of independent voters. As is the case with many questions related to the President there are wide gender and racial gaps.”
Among women, 31 percent think Obama deserves the award, compared to only 19 percent of men. Seventy-three percent of blacks, 29 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of whites think so.
In a November 18 Quinnipiac University survey, American voters said 48 – 41 percent that fighting in Afghanistan was the right thing to do. Since then Democrats have moved from 58 – 31 percent against the war to a 47 – 46 percent split. Republican support inched up from 68 – 22 percent to 71 – 21 percent and independent backing is up from 51 – 39 percent to 58 – 34 percent.
“The dichotomy between the almost two-to-one support for setting a July 2011 date for beginning withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan and the doubt that Obama will be able to deliver on the promise reflects a skeptical public about America’s ability to triumph there,” Brown said.
“Similarly, American voters say 64 – 30 percent that eliminating the threat from terrorists operating from Afghanistan is a worthwhile goal for American troops to fight and possibly die for, but those same voters say 52 – 38 percent they don’t think the United States will be successful in eliminating the terrorist threat from Afghanistan.”
From December 1 – 6, Quinnipiac University surveyed 2,313 registered voters nationwide with a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points.
The Quinnipiac University Poll, directed by Douglas Schwartz, Ph.D., conducts public opinion surveys in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and the nation as a public service and for research.
For more data or RSS feed– http://www.quinnipiac.edu/polling.xml, call (203) 582-5201, or follow us on Twitter.

President Obama told me to stop ‘demeaning’ him, says Rep. Conyers

2009-12-08T11:44:00.000-04:00

President Barack Obama recently called Rep. John Conyers Jr. to express his frustrations with the Judiciary Committee chairman’s criticism.
In an interview with The Hill, Conyers said his opinions of Obama’s policies on healthcare reform and the war in Afghanistan have not sat well with the president.

According to the lawmaker, the president picked up the phone several weeks ago to find out why Conyers was “demeaning” him.
Obama’s decision to challenge Conyers highlights a sensitivity to criticism the president has taken on the left. Conyers’s critical remarks, many of which have been reported on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, appear to have irritated the president, known for his calm demeanor.
Conyers, the second-longest-serving member of the House, said, “[Obama] called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him and I had to explain to him that it wasn’t anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues. And he said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’”
Sitting in the Judiciary Committee’s conference room two days after Obama delivered his speech on Afghanistan, the 23-term lawmaker said he wasn’t in the mood to “chat.”
Obama’s move to send in 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by the summer of 2010 has clearly disappointed Conyers.
He said he intends to press his case in writing soon.
“I want something so serious that he has to respond in writing, like I am responding in writing to him,” he said.
“Calling in generals and admirals to discuss troop strength is like me taking my youngest to McDonald’s to ask if he likes french fries,” Conyers said.
Many on the left have argued that military leaders routinely respond to crises by calling for more troops.
“I’ve been saying I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan, I think he screwed up on healthcare reform, on Guantánamo and kicking Greg off,” Conyers said, referring to the departure of former White House counsel Greg Craig.
Craig was a leading proponent in the White House of closing the terrorist detention center at Guantánamo Bay and releasing photos of detainees undergoing torture. Closing the military prison has proven to be politically difficult, and Obama reversed field on the photos, opting not to make them publicly available.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
The liberal Conyers has been an outspoken proponent of a single-payer healthcare system and a critic of U.S. involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He has also been at odds with White House policy on extending expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, crafting legislation that is to the left of the Senate’s version.
Obama and Conyers have a complicated and nuanced relationship.
Conyers was the first member of the Congressional Black Caucus to endorse Obama over then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.
Conyers earlier this year noted that he spent most weekends in 2007 and 2008 on the campaign trail trying to get Obama elected.
“I did whatever was necessary to be done to win. I met with ministers, I met with unions, I met with lawyers, I met with community activists, I met with healthcare people,” Conyers explained in early April.
The 80-year-old lawmaker, who participated in the civil rights movement alongside Martin Luther King Jr., does not shy away from saying what is on his mind.

In mid-November, Conyers said on the Bill Press radio show that Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been “bowing down” to “nutty right-wing” healthcare proposals in a desperate effort to get legislation passed.
The Michigan Democrat, a friend of liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, said he was “getting tired of saving Obama’s can in the White House,” after progressive Democrats were forced to vote for a healthcare bill that did not call for a “robust public option” and includes language opposed by abortion-rights supporters.
Since the House narrowly passed its healthcare bill, Conyers has grown increasingly frustrated with what he sees as the White House’s willingness to weaken the role of the government in administering the proposed new benefits.
Conyers also said last month that Obama was “getting bad advice from … clowns” on Afghanistan, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.
At times, Conyers has shown his pragmatic side. For example, he has abandoned hope of moving his legislation calling for a commission to review whether the U.S. government should pay reparations to descendants of slaves. He has called his measure too controversial.
On the morning following Obama’s landmark speech on the war in Afghanistan, Conyers sent around a “Dear Colleague” letter to Democratic and GOP lawmakers interested in joining his newly formed “Peace and Progress in Afghanistan Caucus.”
In the letter, Conyers explained that the caucus “will serve as an informal bipartisan group of members dedicated to reorienting the United States’ commitment to the Afghan government and people by emphasizing indigenous reconciliation and reconstruction strategies, rigorous regional diplomacy, and swift redeployment of the U.S. military.”

My Big Fat Government Takeover

2009-12-08T00:45:00.001-04:00

Rule by the best and the brightest.

Some mistakes are so big that only smart people are tempted to make them. One is the faith in Big Government.
We'll see that in full force today, when Barack Obama gives another major address on the economy. On the generalities, there won't be much real disagreement. But at a time when many claim to see no difference between the two political parties, President Obama and his Democratic allies are making one distinction paramount: their operating assumption that bigger government is better government.

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Associated Press

Many of the people in the Obama administration, the president included, enjoy all the credentials we associate with the best and the brightest: the right schools, the good grades, the successful careers. Alas, whether it be allocating health care or defining the kind of jobs the economy ought to create, the policies they favor suggest a strong belief that they know what's best not just for themselves, but for everyone else too.

Of course, the kind of people who are apt to push for government-imposed solutions are those who are also apt to believe they will be the ones imposing decisions, not the ones who have to live with decisions imposed by others. Sometimes that's because they enjoy the wealth that gives them escape hatches unavailable to the less affluent, such as their ability to ensure that their own children never have to set foot in a public school. Mostly, however, their trust in government reflects their confidence that they have all the answers and that it's government's job to enforce them.
What about conservatives? Don't we have confidence in our judgment and abilities? Of course we do. The difference is that we trust free citizens to make decisions about themselves—and are skeptical about government. As someone who worked inside a White House, I say you really believe government should be small when you see your friends running it.
Now, I know there are people who believe that George W. Bush was a Big Government Republican. And you can make arguments about spending and so forth. Even so, however, there's simply no comparison with the Obama administration.
That's because conservatives believe that even our smartest friend is no match for the collective wisdom of the marketplace. If we were to wake up and find that someone we knew well had been given control over some important part of the economy, the conservative would not likely think, "Everything will be fine now that Harry's in charge." Far more likely we'd be saying to ourselves, "If it weren't for his wife, Harry would be wearing red and purple socks every day—and we're giving him that kind of power?"
Mr. Obama and his team appear to be unburdened by such modesty.
Detroit is in decline because its automotive giants no longer build the kind of cars Americans want to buy? Let's have the president sack the CEO of General Motors, and then use the bailout money as leverage to appoint a car czar and get GM and Chrysler to build the kind of cars that Washington wants.
Wall Street execs are getting sweet bonuses at a time when millions of other Americans are unemployed? Well, instead of encouraging these financial concerns to pay back the Troubled Asset Relief Program monies and get the taxpayers off the hook, send in Ken Feinberg to set their salaries.
Health-care spending is inefficient? The answer is obvious: Expand the Department of Health and Human Services and give its secretary more power. Under the bill now before the Senate, for example, Kathleen Sebelius would have the authority to decide what care insurance companies could offer, who could get an abortion under a government-run plan, what prices were fair, and so on.
Of course we shouldn't draw any conclusions from an advisory task force that recently created a stir when it suggested women get fewer mammograms—and Ms. Sebelius's disavowal in the face of public heat. She pointed out that the task force does not set government policy. But at some point some government task force will—and there will be fewer ways around it.
That's government by the smart. The good news is that it doesn't seem to be selling. According to a recent poll, 57% of Americans believe government is doing things that should be left to business and individuals. Not only do most Americans object, Gallup says the opposition is the "highest such reading in more than a decade."
Today Mr. Obama is going to give us more details about the wonderful things all those smart people in Washington are going to do to help us on the economy. Maybe he would do well to take another look at all those bright lights around him. For the more he proposes government will do, the more skeptical Americans seem to be.
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

Congressman: ACORN Investigation "Will Lead to the White House"

2009-12-07T00:30:00.002-04:00

Does Obama Listen to Himself?

2009-12-07T00:15:00.002-04:00

By Mona Charen

Barack Obama is demonstrating bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness. A full 13 months after his election, in the course of justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, President Obama could not spare a word of praise for George W. Bush -- not even when recounting the nation's "unified" response to 9/11. To the contrary, throughout his pained recitation of the choices we face in Afghanistan, he adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.
It's beginning to sound whiny -- and unpresidential. Enough about the terrible mess he inherited. Let's hear a little more about the tremendous honor that has been bestowed on him. Ronald Reagan inherited a worse situation in 1980 -- inflation at 13.5 percent; the prime rate at 21 percent; the Soviets in Afghanistan; American hostages in Tehran; communist coups in 10 new countries over the previous decade -- but Reagan never impugned his predecessor. As biographer Lou Cannon noted "Reagan ... was generous to Carter in his public statements even though he did not care for him."

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George W. Bush showed the same chivalry toward Bill Clinton, declining to breathe a negative word about him -- even when sorely tempted by the pardon scandal that further tarnished an already clouded tenure. Even now, despite the unremitting barrage from his successor, Bush keeps silent, true to his tradition of civility toward opponents.
President Obama is so spiteful that he warps history to fit his prejudices. Everything was going brilliantly in Afghanistan, he explains, until "the decision was made to wage a second war, in Iraq." Iraq took the lion's share of resources and ruined our international reputation, he argues. But in the next sentence, without acknowledging the surge (far less the courage Bush demonstrated in pursuing it despite tremendous political and military pressure against it), Obama boasts that "we are bringing the Iraq War to a successful conclusion" and "successfully leaving Iraq to its people."
No doubt Obama's "success" in Iraq is attributable, as he sees it, to the fact that "I've spent this year renewing our alliances and forging new partnerships" including "a new beginning" between America and the Muslim world. Oh yes, that's going so well. As the Taliban gain strength in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the chief object of Mr. Obama's flirtation, Iran, spat in the eyes of the U.S. and the U.N. last week by announcing that it will build 10 new nuclear enrichment facilities. This follows contemptuous brush-offs from Iran's bosses. In November, Ayatollah Khameini again spurned Obama's "many private approaches" saying it would be "perverted" to negotiate with the United States.
President Obama has been crystal clear that Bush's "arrogance" led to disaster for the United States. And once again, he's at pains to emphasize his new approach. The president assured the Afghans that "America is your partner, never your patron" (though a miserably poor and besieged country might like a patron very much). The odd thing is Obama's tone toward our "partners" sounded downright scolding in several places. "This effort must be based on performance. The days of providing a blank check are over." That is not exactly partnerish talk. "... We will be clear," he continued, "about what we expect from those who receive our assistance ... We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable."
It would be nice if that standard were applied to Washington, D.C., far less Kabul. But this is the tone of his vaunted new diplomacy? Of Pakistan, the president said, "In the past, we too often defined our relationship ... narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership ... built on ... mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust." But then comes the poke in the shoulder: "... We have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear."
Well, perhaps President Obama doesn't realize how he sounds. That must be it. He had the gall, after kneecapping Bush, to demand a halt to "rancor" and "partisanship." But the greater outrage was his pious declaration that "we must make it clear to every man, woman, and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights"? This from the man whose State Department told China early on that human rights were not our priority; who has decided he can deal with the butchers of Darfur; who averted his eyes from the bloody crackdown on protests in Iran; and who tamely permitted the Chinese to censor his words during his visit.
But there's no cause for self-examination. There's still George W. Bush to kick around.

Bam: Man in the muddle

2009-12-07T00:03:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it was inevitable. A man who voted "pres ent" 130 times in the Illi nois Legislature couldn't possibly morph into a savvy and decisive leader of the free world in such a short time.
Yet even the pessimists among us are alarmed by the cloud of uncertainty and confusion hanging over the White House. Less than a year on the job, President Obama seems to have run out of both charm and ideas.
The biggest issues facing a president are the economy and national security. They are the whole ballgame. Everything else is detail.
It is now frighteningly obvious Obama doesn't have a clear, understandable strategy on either.

Helayne Seidman

Robert Morgenthau

It's one thing to lack confidence in a president's plan. It's quite another when he doesn't have a plan.
He began his hokey job summit by conceding many viewed it as a gimmick, then promptly confirmed those suspicions by saying it was time to put aside partisanship. This from the guy who gives blank checks and high praise to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the most partisan congressional leaders in recent memory.
Obama also said he was open to new ideas, then shot down a corporate executive who complained too many big-government initiatives were creating uncertainty and leading employers to hold off hiring.
The president said it was a "legitimate concern," then plunged ahead by rote to defend health care, carbon taxes and massive education spending -- the very things the exec said were the problem.
Why bother telling him anything? He doesn't listen to what he doesn't want to hear.
He certainly didn't listen to the advisers who warned him his Afghanistan speech would come off as a muddle. It was clear to some in his endless war council that sending 30,000 more troops to fight a war he called vital, then slapping an 18-month limit was by definition a contradiction.
Predictably, liberals blasted the escalation, under which Obama has tripled the American troop presence from about 35,000 to over 100,000. Conservatives blasted the deadline as dangerous to those troops and their mission.
As a fuming Sen. John McCain memorably declared, "You can't have it both ways."
Apparently, you can if you are Barack Obama. At least you think you can.
He is probably taking comfort in a common political conceit. To wit, that bipartisan criticism proves the policy is the sound middle between extremes.
Not this time. This time, the middle path reflects a transparent effort at political compromise that has nothing to do with sound policy. After three months of deliberation, he punted on the central question.

Either the war is vital, or it's not. It can't be vital until an arbitrary deadline.
Two days of hearings on Capitol Hill didn't clarify the issue. Top aides alternately called the deadline flexible and important, leaving the muddle in place.
If Obama has any sense of the dimensions of the doubts he faces, he's keeping it well hidden. He's going to Copenhagen to push for global emissions rules, even as the science consensus he touts was arrived at by cooking the books and squelching dissent.
If he actually succeeded getting the rules in place at home, they would add another burden to job creation and economic growth. Still he plunges forward, unmolested by inconvenient facts.

Facts schmacts, reality is what the White House says it is.
Take the $787 billion stimulus bill, the economic equivalent of an empty suit. Just in time for the jobs summit, Vice President Joe Biden suddenly declared it saved or created up to 1.6 million jobs. That was a cool million jobs more than claimed before.
Poof. A million more jobs. That was easy.
Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau appears determined to end his long career on a sour note -- and a questionable one at that. City Hall found 68 bank accounts it didn't know existed containing $83 million Morgenthau deposited from settlements. The city's insistence he turn the money over led him to accuse the mayor's office of a "power grab" and "chickens- - - comments."
Good thing the 90-year-old prosecutor is retiring. It's clearly time to go.
Pols finally chipping away at pension costs
Finally, good news on the gloom-and-doom deficit front, with the Legislature ratifying deals Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg struck with unions to reduce soaring pension costs.
Paterson estimates the state will save billions over the long haul, with a new pension tier raising the minimum age for civilians to retire from 55 to 62 and the minimum years required for a pension from five to 10. The provisions, which apply only to employees hired after Jan. 1, also cap the amount of overtime used to calculate benefits. Slightly different terms apply to state teachers.
The city deal, covering only its teachers so far, will save $100 million a year, Bloomy says. New employees will contribute more to their pensions and, as in the state, will need to work at least 10 years to get one.
In truth, the changes are modest, given the huge deficits and the fact that many of the taxpayers who foot the bill for government workers are losing their jobs and nest eggs completely.
Still, this is a good first step in paring back the outrageous cost of labor, with each city worker averaging $107, 000 annually.
Keep the cuts coming.
Noose is tightening for Hevesi
The central mystery in the state pension-fund scandal was whether disgraced Democratic former Comptroller Alan Hevesi got a cut of the gusher of payoffs involved. Although his political consultant, Hank Morris, allegedly got $24 million in fees, outside fixer Ray Harding took $800,000, and Hevesi's top deputies reportedly pocketed hundreds of thousands, probers were not able to confirm suspicions Hevesi benefited from the scam run out of his office.
Until now.
The announcement by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that investment manager Elliott Broidy had admitted paying $1 million in bribes to officials included at least $75,000 spent on lavish trips and other benefits for Hevesi. In return, Broidy got $250 million of state pension money to invest, which earned him $18 million in fees.
He is giving the money back and is cooperating with Cuomo, as are several others. All of which means Hevesi ought to squirm.
His pattern was to tell people seeking investment money to see Morris, who didn't even work for the government. After Morris received large finder fees, Hevesi, with sole authority for the pension funds, would turn over hundreds of millions for the investors to manage.
The belief that Hevesi was getting a cut of Morris' fees was based in part on the fact he wasn't against stealing. He had pleaded guilty and resigned after being caught using a state employee as a chauffeur and servant for his wife, so prosecutors had reason to think he was getting something for his pension decisions.
Now they have evidence. My bet is there's more to come. Plenty more.
Quite a party trick
Thanks to Tiger Woods, we've learned of a new occu pation. One of the women in volved, Rachel Uchitel, is in variably called a "party girl." Then again, maybe it's just a new way of describing the world's oldest occupation.

Obama Persists on Broad Front as Polls Drop

2009-12-04T01:16:00.000-04:00

By Mort Kondracke

President Barack Obama has so loaded up the policy circuits this month that you'd expect a government-wide blackout any minute.

Still, in spite of declining approval ratings for him and most of his policies, he's decided to forge ahead - on Afghanistan, health care, jobs, climate change and deficit reduction. Give him credit for courage and tenacity, even if all the details aren't right.

Even though his Afghanistan speech and health care are at the front of the media agenda, I'd say his most important event this week is today's jobs summit because job creation - legitimately - is the No. 1 issue in the minds of voters.

The mid-November Washington Post/ABC poll showed that Obama's approval rating on the economy has dropped from 60 percent in March to 51 percent, though objectively he's probably not getting the credit he deserves.

Obama inherited what amounts to an economic 9/11, and his stimulus package, the bank bailouts and action by the Federal Reserve really did stave off calamity - at least so far.

As a White House official told me in an interview, "I've heard a lot of criticism about how we did all this spending to no effect.

"The truth is, most economists from right to left agree that the stimulus package had a great deal to do with growth in the third quarter.

"Now the same people who were criticizing us for doing something that had no impact are saying, ‘Yeah, we had growth, but it was only because of the stimulus package.' Well, you've got to choose a horse and ride it."

Indeed, on Monday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the stimulus raised the gross domestic product in the third quarter by 1.2 to 3.2 percent above what it would have been and increased employment by 600,000 to 1.6 million.

But unemployment still was at 10.2 percent in October and may be higher when November figures come out on Friday.

Even though liberal economists and Members of Congress are arguing for a new stimulus package, a White House official told me, "There's a limit to what government can do in terms of these cycles. Some of it just has to work its way through the system.

"We also have a fiscal crisis so if we overspend to create minimum effects, it just adds to another problem," he said.

Still, Obama has to - and presumably will - do something to stimulate job creation, and it might help if he tried tax cuts for small business as well as possible infrastructure spending and aid to state and local governments.

A tax credit or corporate tax reduction for firms that add jobs to their payrolls might even pay for themselves in tax revenue.

My opinion is that Obama should have concentrated in his first year on the economic crisis and financial services reform to prevent it from happening again - plus Afghanistan and Iran - but he's determined to push forward on a broad front.

Financial reform is unconscionably delayed and banks are paying out big bonuses while not lending, but it's probable Obama will get a health care reform bill to sign by the time he delivers his State of the Union address.

Polls show that a majority of voters disapprove of the health care bills making their way through Congress, but administration officials say they are delighted with their progress and with the contents, especially, of the Senate's measure.

On Wednesday, Obama budget director Peter Orszag declared, "We stand on the verge of a dramatic accomplishment - not only meeting the moral imperative as the world's foremost economic power in dramatically [reducing] the rates of its uninsured, not only doing it in a fiscally responsible way, but also putting in place the key tools that will lead to the health system of the future, emphasizing quality and not quantity."

He's relying on features of the Senate bill - a commission to impose Medicare cuts, taxation of high-priced insurance plans, digital medical records and tests of provider payment reforms - to hold down costs, but some of them are opposed by House Democrats.

Democrats in both the House and Senate, too, are resisting his 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan - now widely labeled "escalation" - even though he tried to assure them he has an exit strategy in mind.

And on it goes. Obama will be heading off to the Copenhagen climate summit even though his cap-and-trade bill seems dead in the Senate. He'll make commitments there to go along with new promises won from China and India, but it remains to be seen whether any action really will lessen emissions.

Obama has sent so many policy ships out to sea that at least some of them should return successfully. But some could crash on the rocks - and if that includes job creation, he's in trouble.

Mort Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill since 1955. © 2007 Roll Call, Inc.

Cringing Over Climategate

2009-12-03T00:54:00.004-04:00

A major scandal was exposed. So why won't Obama acknowledge it?

"Science and scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my administration on a wide range of issues, including … mitigation of climate change," President Barack Obama declared in a not-so-subtle dig at his predecessor soon after assuming office. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process. Public officials should not suppress or alter scientific technological findings."
Last week's Climategate scandal is putting Obama's promise to the test. If he wants to pass, there are two things he should do, pronto: (1) Start singing hosannas to whoever broke the scandal instead of acting like nothing has happened; and (2) Ask eco-warriors at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit next week to declare an immediate cease-fire in their war against global warming pending a complete review of the science.
Someone--a whistleblower or a hacker--got into the computers of University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in England, also known as the Hadley Research Center, and revealed reams of e-mails showing that its leading climatologists had engaged in all kinds of scientific shenanigans including manipulating data, destroying evidence that didn't support their conclusions and keeping contrarian scientists from being published in peer-reviewed journals.
The revelations are significant because the Hadley Center is no marginal outfit. It is among the most influential research organizations in the field whose work forms the basis of all official global warming reports, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that serves as the Vatican of global warming.
One e-mail as recent as last month acknowledged that global temperatures plateaued in 1998, something that skeptics have been pointing out for years and warming warriors have been pooh-poohing. "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment," the e-mail confessed. But instead of celebrating the good news that the planet may not ineluctably fry to a crisp, the e-mail continues with its gloom and doom, blaming an "inadequate observing system" for not picking up on the warming.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if other e-mails didn't show even worse malfeasance. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith to hide the decline [of temperatures]," one said. To most people with normal IQs, the words "trick" and "hide" in the same sentence would suggest manipulation of data. But the brainiacs at Hadley claim that these are just standard colloquialism that scientists use to describe completely innocent operations.

Really? Then how do they explain this 2005 e-mail by Phil Jones, the director of the center, to the aforementioned Mike. "The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone… We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind." The "two MMs" refers to Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. And--lo and behold--when one of them asked Jones for his data, what did he do? He hid behind the data protection act. But no, there is nothing premeditated here!
Why was Jones so afraid of the two MMs? Because they had debunked Mike's--or Michael Mann of Penn State University's--infamous "hockey stick" graph that supposedly offered proof positive that humans were warming the earth. It showed that global temperatures had remained flat for a millennium only to spike sharply in the 20th century following the industrial revolution. But McIntyre and McKitrick found that the innocent "tricks" that Mann was performing on the data were so riddled with methodological errors that even the IPCC was forced to remove the graph from its official reports.
One would have thought that the hockey-stick episode would have instilled some humility in the Hadley gang, prompting them to invite ever greater scrutiny and debate of their work. That is, after all, what real scientists would do. Think again. In fact, the e-mails show that they did the exact opposite. Around the time the "two MMs" went public with their analysis in 2003, Mann urged his colleagues to blacklist Climate Research, a journal that had published research by skeptics. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," he wrote. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit or cite papers in this journal."
This is precisely the kind of perfidy that undermines public trust in the scientific process that Obama pledged to restore. So if Obama had his priorities straight, he would end his radio silence and thank the authors of Climategate for performing a great public service. Indeed, if President Bush had been so lucky, perhaps fate would have contrived a WMDgate for him before he launched the Iraq invasion and saved him from the worst mistake of his presidency.

It is worth recalling that Bush too was relying on an international consensus--especially reports by U.N. arms inspectors--that Saddam Hussein was sitting atop stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," Bush said in a 2003 prewar declaration calculated to escalate the hysteria level against Saddam. After a two-year-long wild goose chase through the deserts of Iraq, Bush was finally forced to admit that Saddam no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. But at least the phony consensus on which he based his decision was intact at the eve of the war.
However, Climategate is fast shattering the global warming consensus, and so Obama won’t have even that to hide behind should he go ahead and sign up the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 at Copenhagen next week. There is zero chance right now that Congress will endorse these cuts, which will dwarf the trillion-dollar Iraq price tag. So Obama won't really be able to advance his foolish crusade, but he will lose the opportunity to protect his own integrity by joining the growing chorus of voices--some of them of global warming believers--demanding a thorough investigation of this episode. Former Chancellor Lord Lawson is asking the British government to launch a formal inquiry about it. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, is doing the same here in the U.S. Penn State is launching an investigation of Mr. Hockey Stick Mann's conduct. Calls for Phil Jones resignation are rising in England.
But the issues go beyond the misconduct of just one outfit. One of the dirty little secrets of the field revealed by the scandal is that climate scientists, though they are publicly funded, don't as a matter of routine make their raw data publicly available. This makes it exceedingly difficult for their peers to replicate their findings, subverting the scientific method at its core. Judy Curry of Georgia Tech, a stalwart in the field who is convinced that global warming is real, is exhorting her colleagues to end this incestuous tribalism and open their work to scrutiny, even of skeptics." Make all your data, metadata and codes openly available," she urges. Meanwhile, George Monbiot--the British media's alarmist-in-chief who has called global warming the "moral question of the 21st century"--is demanding a reanalysis of the climate science data.
A complete airing of the science of global warming, which is looking less and less avoidable by the day, might eventually vindicate the claims of climate warriors. Or it might not. The only thing Obama can control in this matter is which side he will support: The truth, or--what he accused his predecessor of--ideology.
Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly columnist at Forbes.

EDITORIAL: Obama in handcuffs

2009-12-02T00:37:00.002-04:00

International Criminal Court seeks to extend its jurisdiction

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Imagine if President Obama went to Oslo next week to receive his Nobel Peace Prize and was arrested for purported war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This bit of historical irony would be possible under an argument being made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Mr. Ocampo claims jurisdiction over actions of U.S. troops in Afghanistan because Kabul in 2003 acceded to the Rome Statute, which established the court. He said a preliminary examination already is under way regarding possible American culpability in crimes against humanity.
There are 110 ratified parties to the agreement, but of them, only Afghanistan has a major U.S. combat-force presence, and the United States does not recognize the treaty. President Clinton signed the Rome Statute in December 2000, but the Senate did not ratify the treaty, and Mr. Clinton's signature was nullified by President George W. Bush in May 2002. The Bush administration was concerned that the ICC would become a permanent arena for endless harassment of American military personnel and civilian leaders on trumped-up war-crimes charges. But under Mr. Ocampo's logic, the court's jurisdiction would be determined by the nation in which foreign forces or personnel are stationed regardless of whether the forces' home country recognized the treaty. The United States would have to face the music.
As early as September, Mr. Ocampo was investigating allegations of "massive attacks, collateral damage exceeding what is considered proper, and torture" conducted by coalition forces. Those who believe that Mr. Ocampo only has a case against the previous administration should think again.
Several events have taken place under Mr. Obama's watch that could bring charges for war crimes. On May 4, American bombers killed as many as 147 Afghan civilians, 93 of them children, in an air strike in western Afghanistan that locals call the Farah Massacre. On Sept. 4, up to 90 civilians were killed by two 500-pound bombs dropped by a U.S. F-15 fighter on fuel trucks in Kunduz province that had been hijacked by the Taliban but were stuck in the mud. About 500 civilians had gathered to help themselves to the fuel when the air strike hit. Even the widespread use of unmanned drone aircraft to conduct strikes on terror targets is considered illegal activity in some quarters - and that is a program the Obama administration has openly endorsed and expanded.
The United States is well-equipped to defend itself against predatory moves by The Hague. In August 2002, Congress passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act to "protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party." The act authorized the president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of or at the request of the International Criminal Court." Presumably, this act authorizes the use of force should the ICC seek to force Americans to trial.
The Obama administration has thus far been largely sympathetic to the global court and its mission. It endorsed Mr. Ocampo's move to indict Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on genocide charges, and in August, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it is "a great regret, but it is a fact that we are not yet a signatory. But we have supported the court and continue to do so." We wonder if the United States would continue to support the court with the president in handcuffs.

He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing

2009-12-01T12:46:00.000-04:00

Does anyone have confidence in Barack Obama?

By JAMES TARANTO

Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"--to wit, that he "hasn't done anything yet." This, he claims, "isn't just premature--it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20." Or maybe not sure. Weisberg continues:

If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record--how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

Actually, maybe Weisberg does have a problem with grammar. He certainly has a problem with logic. He claims to have disproved the claim that Obama "hasn't done anything yet"--a formulation in the present perfect tense--by citing something Obama hasn't done yet!
Further, Weisberg's "if" is not an insubstantial one, especially given that any "health care reform" bill would have to be passed by the Senate, which so far has only approved a motion to end debate on a motion to begin debate, and that by the absolute minimum required number of votes. With public opinion increasingly turning against the effort, passage of such a bill can hardly be taken for granted.
What's more, Weisberg himself admits that "health care reform" could be a dubious accomplishment indeed:

The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways—weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed.

Despite not being a politician, Weisberg is not as honest as Robert Reich, so he doesn't even mention that ObamaCare could end up impoverishing the young, killing the old, and stifling medical innovation.
Keep in mind that Weisberg is a flatterer, not a critic, of Obama's. When he says the president may end up burdening the country with an "imperfect behemoth," he means it as praise, and lavish praise at that. Objectively, this is faint praise at best--and that is just the tip of the Weisberg. By his standard of presidential greatness--the making happen of "big, transformational things"--George W. Bush was a great president if you believe that the liberation of Iraq was the greatest disaster in the history of American foreign policy.
Yesterday we noted that a Georgetown University scholar had this to say about the president's prolonged show of irresoluteness over Afghanistan: "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one." That this was meant as a defense shows how little confidence the speaker has in Obama. The test of decisiveness, after all, is not how one faces the easy questions.
In a related vein is this comment from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos":

If there's one thing that this president is good at [it] is explaining things. That's what he ought to be able to do. And look, I mean, I feel a little bit sorry for him. This was inflicted upon him. This was--he was left a legacy . . . of basically a failed war, a war that might have been won quite easily in 2001, 2002, if Bush hadn't had his eyes on Iraq instead. And now he has got to play catch-up. I'm sure he would prefer not to be doing this at all. He's kind of in a political box. What can you do?

This, of course, is an echo of Obama's own incessant whining about the "mess" he "inherited" when he somehow, through no fault of his own, became president. But there is one additional element here: Paul Krugman doesn't have confidence in Obama. He feels sorry for him.
Obama's strongest sympathizers in the media don't seem to have anything to offer him right now except sympathy. They are able to praise him only by holding him to ridiculously low standards. Does anyone in America have real confidence in Barack Obama? Does he have it in him to inspire it?
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
"Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year," London's Daily Telegraph reported Thursday:

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.

Concerns about death rates at the foundation hospital trust were first raised a year ago, but an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong and managers dismissed the concerns.

But the new report found "systematic failings" in the trust's management, all of whom are still in their jobs. The CQC said its confidence in the management's ability had been "severely dented."

Perhaps the only good news in the whole story comes from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who observes: "And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason--treason against the planet."
Sorry, wrong quote. We mean this one: "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."
Whoops, wrong again. OK, let's try once more: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."
That's it. Third time's the charm. And do you know what, Krugman is right. The Daily Mail has the number of deaths cited in the "shocking report" as just 70--well, "at least 70." Oh, but wait, the Mail's Saturday follow-up raises the figure to 3,000. The left-wing Observer, a Sunday paper, says 5,000.
But does it really matter? As Stalin is said to have observed, while one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. And here's a first for this feature: a tragedy--or prospective tragedy--here in the U.S. It comes from Krugman's New York Times colleague, Nicholas Kristof, who has no connection to Enron.
It seems that 23-year-old John Brodniak has a cavernous hemangioma, "an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John's case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain." He suffers from constant pain, impairments of memory and coordination, and nausea and vomiting. There is a danger of premature death should a blood vessel burst. Surgery could relieve his condition, but he says doctors won't operate on him because he's uninsured, and he can't get insurance because he has a pre-existing condition.
If any of our readers are in a position to help this young man, please email us and we'll pass the information along to Kristof.
From the standpoint of public policy, though, the key passage in the Kristof column is this one:

In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn't been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low.

Somehow Kristof thinks he has made an argument for more government control over health care, when in fact the case he has made against it is nothing short of devastating.
Keep America Beautiful
To help pay for the ObamaCare boondoggle, Democrats in the Senate have proposed a 5% tax on "any cosmetic surgery that is not necessary to address deformities arising from congenital abnormalities, personal injuries resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring diseases," the New York Times reports. Such operations already get unfavorable treatment in the tax code, under which they are not deductible medical expenses.
The Times, to its credit, tells the opponents' side of the story, but this comment is a non sequitur:

The 7,000-member American Society of Plastic Surgeons said its internal surveys showed that 60 percent of members' patients earn less than $90,000 a year.

"A lot of people think of this as a tax on rich Republican housewives; rich, nonworking Republican housewives," said Dr. Phil Haeck, the group's president-elect. "And that's not the case."

By definition, someone who doesn't work for pay has an earned income of zero. Thus the ASPS's statistics are consistent with up to 60% of cosmetic-surgery patients being "nonworking Republican housewives," although our guess is that the proportion isn't actually quite that high.
Are Usurious?
Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com has a very amusing follow-up on the Acorn stings. It turns out that in its 2005 annual report, Acorn boasted that one of its employees, Christina Talarczyk of San Antonio, had cooperated with a major broadcast TV network in a hidden-camera journalistic sting not unlike the ones that hit Acorn this summer. Talarczyk, who worked as a tax preparer for the organization, wanted to call attention to "refund anticipation loans," which she believed were usurious:

In March 2004, Christina introduced millions of primetime television viewers to RAL scams when she played an undercover role in a segment of Dateline, NBC's Emmy-winning investigative news program.

Pretending to be a naive tax preparation customer, Christina walked into a Jackson Hewitt office with a Dateline producer who had a camera hidden in his sunglasses. The tax preparation employees were caught on camera as they tried to convince Christina to take out a high-interest RAL. "The Jackson Hewitt employee said it takes the IRS too long to process a refund, and made RALs seem so much faster," Christina explains. "It was surreal to see myself on TV. I had family members calling from Minnesota and New Mexico to tell me they'd seen it."

One suspects many of her Acorn colleagues' families were considerably less proud to see them on TV. Better to sting than to be stung. As a matter of journalistic ethics, though, it's difficult to conceive of a standard by which the Talarczyk-NBC sting would measure up but the Giles-O'Keefe-Breitbart sting of Acorn would not.
Accountability Journalism
The Associated Press manages to find fault with the Obama administration, but the case it makes could hardly be weaker:

President Barack Obama entered the White House promising a new era of openness in government, but when it comes to bad news, his administration often uses one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook: putting it out when the fewest people are likely to notice.

Former White House environmental adviser Van Jones' resignation over controversial comments hit the trifecta of below-the-radar timing: The White House announced the departure overnight on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, when few journalists were on duty and few Americans awake, much less paying attention to the news.

If the White House has a pattern of making news at times when journalists aren't "on duty," doesn't that suggest that news organizations ought to reconsider which hours their employees work?
What's more, the "controversial comments" that led to Van Jones's resignation had been reported by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck in July. There was ample time for reporters at the AP and other "mainstream" news outlets to bring their readers and viewers the "bad news," had they been inclined to do so. Or maybe all journalists are off duty for the entire month of August.
The Metric System, Explained
A passage in a Reuters dispatch on Bethlehem (the one in the Bible, not Pennsylvania) clarifies something that has long mystified this column:

Foreign tourists are whisked through Bethlehem from nearby Jerusalem on half-day visits organized by tour companies located in Israel. The two cities are divided by just a few kilometers (miles) but also an Israeli wall that complicates the journey.

Of course. "Kilometers" are miles. Now it all makes sense. The one complication is that they're the wrong length.
An Athlete Puts Things in Perspective
"You never forget that day. That was pretty unbelievable for all of us. A lot of us you know, your first chance to play in a Super Bowl and winning the Super Bowl, and of course the circumstances of that year with 9-11 happening and U2 performing at halftime--that was pretty unbelievable."--New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady on Super Bowl XXXVI, quoted by the Associated Press. Nov. 26
We Blame Global Warming
"Hezbollah Blames U.S. for All Terrorism"--headline, CNN.com, Nov. 30

7 stories Barack Obama doesn't want told

2009-11-30T10:39:00.000-04:00

: There are seven storylines Barack Obama needs to worry about. Photo: AP

Presidential politics is about storytelling. Presented with a vivid storyline, voters naturally tend to fit every new event or piece of information into a picture that is already neatly framed in their minds.

No one understands this better than Barack Obama and his team, who won the 2008 election in part because they were better storytellers than the opposition. The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist who stood for change in a disciplined and thoughtful way. This easily outpowered the anti-Obama narrative, featuring an opportunistic Chicago pol with dubious relationships who was more liberal than he was letting on.

A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.

The Obama White House argues that all of these storylines are inaccurate or unfair. In some cases these anti-Obama narratives are fanned by Republicans, in some cases by reporters and commentators.

But they all are serious threats to Obama, if they gain enough currency to become the dominant frame through which people interpret the president’s actions and motives.

Here are seven storylines Obama needs to worry about:

He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money

Economists and business leaders from across the ideological spectrum were urging the new president on last winter when he signed onto more than a trillion in stimulus spending and bank and auto bailouts during his first weeks in office. Many, though far from all, of these same people now agree that these actions helped avert an even worse financial catastrophe.

Along the way, however, it is clear Obama underestimated the political consequences that flow from the perception that he is a profligate spender. He also misjudged the anger in middle America about bailouts with weak and sporadic public explanations of why he believed they were necessary.

The flight of independents away from Democrats last summer — the trend that recently hammered Democrats in off-year elections in Virginia — coincided with what polls show was alarm among these voters about undisciplined big government and runaway spending. The likely passage of a health care reform package criticized as weak on cost-control will compound the problem.

Obama understands the political peril, and his team is signaling that he will use the 2010 State of the Union address to emphasize fiscal discipline. The political challenge, however, is an even bigger substantive challenge—since the most convincing way to project fiscal discipline would be actually to impose spending reductions that would cramp his own agenda and that of congressional Democrats.

Too much Leonard Nimoy

People used to make fun of Bill Clinton’s misty-eyed, raspy-voiced claims that, “I feel your pain.”

The reality, however, is that Clinton’s dozen years as governor before becoming president really did leave him with a vivid sense of the concrete human dimensions of policy. He did not view programs as abstractions — he viewed them in terms of actual people he knew by name.

Obama, a legislator and law professor, is fluent in describing the nuances of problems. But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.

Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.

That’s the Chicago Way

This is a storyline that’s likely taken root more firmly in Washington than around the country. The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols.

It does not help that many West Wing aides seem to relish an image of themselves as shrewd, brass-knuckled political types. In a Washington Post story this month, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, referring to most of Obama’s team, said, “We are all campaign hacks.”

The problem is that many voters took Obama seriously in 2008 when he talked about wanting to create a more reasoned, non-partisan style of governance in Washington. When Republicans showed scant interest in cooperating with Obama at the start, the Obama West Wing gladly reverted to campaign hack mode.

The examples of Chicago-style politics include their delight in public battles with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (There was also a semi-public campaign of leaks aimed at Greg Craig, the White House counsel who fell out of favor.) In private, the Obama team cut an early deal — to the distaste of many congressional Democrats — that gave favorable terms to the pharmaceutical lobby in exchange for their backing his health care plans.

The lesson that many Washington insiders have drawn is that Obama wants to buy off the people he can and bowl over those he can’t. If that perception spreads beyond Washington this will scuff Obama’s brand as a new style of political leader.

He’s a pushover

If you are going to be known as a fighter, you might as well reap the benefits. But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.

It seems a bit contradictory, to be sure. But it’s a perception that began when Obama several times laid down lines — then let people cross them with seeming impunity. Last summer he told Democrats they better not go home for recess until a critical health care vote but they blew him off. He told the Israeli government he wanted a freeze in settlements but no one took him seriously. Even Fox News — which his aides prominently said should not be treated like a real news organization — then got interview time for its White House correspondent.

In truth, most of these episodes do not amount to much. But this unflattering storyline would take a more serious turn if Obama is seen as unable to deliver on his stern warnings in the escalating conflict with Iran over its nuclear program.

He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe

That line belonged to George H.W. Bush, excoriating Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But it highlights a continuing reality: In presidential politics the safe ground has always been to be an American exceptionalist.

Politicians of both parties have embraced the idea that this country — because of its power and/or the hand of Providence — should be a singular force in the world. It would be hugely unwelcome for Obama if the perception took root that he is comfortable with a relative decline in U.S. influence or position in the world.

On this score, the reviews of Obama’s recent Asia trip were harsh.

His peculiar bow to the emperor of Japan was symbolic. But his lots-of-velvet, not-much-iron approach to China had substantive implications.

On the left, the budding storyline is that Obama has retreated from human rights in the name of cynical realism. On the right, it is that he is more interested in being President of the World than President of the United States, a critique that will be heard more in December as he stops in Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize and then in Copenhagen for an international summit on curbing greenhouse gases.
No figure in Barack Obama’s Washington, including Obama, has had more success in advancing his will than the speaker of the House, despite public approval ratings that hover in the range of Dick Cheney’s. With a mix of tough party discipline and shrewd vote-counting, she passed a version of the stimulus bill largely written by congressional Democrats, passed climate legislation, and passed her chamber’s version of health care reform. She and anti-war liberals in her caucus are clearly affecting the White House’s Afghanistan calculations.

The great hazard for Obama is if Republicans or journalists conclude — as some already have — that Pelosi’s achievements are more impressive than Obama’s or come at his expense.

This conclusion seems premature, especially with the final chapter of the health care drama yet to be written.

But it is clear that Obama has allowed the speaker to become more nearly an equal — and far from a subordinate — than many of his predecessors of both parties would have thought wise.

He’s in love with the man in the mirror

No one becomes president without a fair share of what the French call amour propre. Does Obama have more than his share of self-regard?

It’s a common theme of Washington buzz that Obama is over-exposed. He gives interviews on his sports obsessions to ESPN, cracks wise with Leno and Letterman, discusses his fitness with Men’s Health, discusses his marriage in a joint interview with first lady Michelle Obama for The New York Times. A photo the other day caught him leaving the White House clutching a copy of GQ featuring himself.

White House aides say making Obama widely available is the right strategy for communicating with Americans in an era of highly fragmented media.

But, as the novelty of a new president wears off, the Obama cult of personality risks coming off as mere vanity unless it is harnessed to tangible achievements.

That is why the next couple of months — with health care and Afghanistan jostling at center stage — will likely carry a long echo. Obama’s best hope of nipping bad storylines is to replace them with good ones rooted in public perceptions of his effectiveness.

He Can't Take Another Bow

2009-11-27T17:40:00.000-04:00

An icon of a White House that is coming to seem amateurish.

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.
From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man." They once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama," and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought."

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Associated Press

President Obama bows as he shakes hands with Japanese Emperor Akihito.

She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."

As I read Ms. Drew's piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, "Well, I was for Hillary." This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they're not dazzled and head over heels. That's gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock—bottom 20 percent who, no matter what's happening—war, unemployment—adore their guy, have complete faith him, and insist that you love him, too.
They're the hard 20 a president always keeps. Nixon kept them! Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn't seem to be love.

Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it "as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs."
He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"—he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.
When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.
It also raises a distressing question: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise. I suppose Vietnam was the end of that, but establishments exist for a reason, and it is hard for a great nation to function without the presence of a group of "the oldest and wisest" who can not only give sound advice but help engineer how that advice will be reported and received.

Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can't afford to lose is exactly wrong—he can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama's rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demands baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.
Which gets us back to the bow.
In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn't that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He'd been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.
But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford's policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren't playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying "Tough Talks Yield Big Progress" or "Obama Shows Muscle in China," the bowing pictures might be understood this way: "He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation's interests."
But that's not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.
It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.
The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.
It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through '08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you're stupid doesn't mean you're Lincoln.
One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we've got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don't worry.
But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

Why Obama Isn't Changing Washington

2009-11-27T01:57:00.000-04:00

There is no way he can grow the government without attracting more lobbyists and more political acrimony.

By FRED BARNES

One insight distinguished Barack Obama from the other presidential candidates last year. While he lacked experience or a special grasp of issues, Mr. Obama said he uniquely understood what ails Washington, and what was causing the endless squabbling and bitter stalemate on important issues. If elected, he said he would change the way business is done in Washington, end the partisan deadlock and the ideological polarization.
"Change must come to Washington," Mr. Obama said in a June 2008 speech. "I have consistently said when it comes to solving problems," he told Jake Tapper of ABC News that same month, "I don't approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective."
Mr. Obama also decried the prominent role played by lobbyists. "Lobbyists aren't just a part of the system in Washington, they're part of the problem," Mr. Obama said in a May 2008 campaign speech.
I was reminded of this last statement by a recent headline on the front page of USA Today. It read: "Health care fight swells lobbying. Number of organizations hiring firms doubles in '09." The article suggested that what Mr. Obama had promised to fix had only gotten worse.

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corbis

Indeed that's the case. Washington is more partisan than ever, and more polarized. Even on a purely procedural vote to begin Senate debate on health-care reform this past Saturday, every Democrat voted one way (yes), every Republican the other (no).

With rare exception and with no objection from the president, Democrats draft bills with no input from Republicans. In return, Republicans vote in lockstep against Democratic legislation. Every House Republican voted against the stimulus, all but one against liberal health-care reform, and all but eight against cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House earlier this year.
Why has the president's publicly expressed vision of a kinder, gentler Washington failed to materialize? I think Mr. Obama—while hardly the only person at fault—is chiefly responsible.
He might have spawned a different Washington, a less divided town with Democrats firmly in charge but Republicans actively involved. The bonus for Mr. Obama and Democrats would be higher popularity and better prospects in 2010 midterm elections. Instead, the president made three strategic mistakes—or, really, misreadings of the political landscape—and they've come back to haunt him and his party.
First, Mr. Obama misread the meaning of the 2008 election. It wasn't a mandate for a liberal revolution. His victory was a personal one, not an ideological triumph of liberalism. Yet Mr. Obama, his aides and Democratic leaders in Congress have treated it as a mandate to radically change policy directions in this country. They are pushing forward one liberal initiative after another. As a result, Mr. Obama's approval rating has dropped along with the popularity of his agenda.
Mr. Obama should have known better. The evidence that America remains a center-right country was right there in the national exit poll on Election Day. When asked about their political beliefs, 34% identified themselves as conservative, 22% as liberal, and a whopping 44% as moderate.
As Mr. Obama has unveiled his policies, the country has tilted more to the right. A Gallup Poll on Oct. 21 found the country to be 40% conservative, 36% moderate, and 20% liberal.
Nearly every Obama policy has thrilled either the president's base in the Democratic Party or a liberal interest group but practically no one else. Nearly every policy is unpopular with a majority or large plurality of Americans. The $787 billion economic stimulus was enacted in February with strong public support. But it has long since lost favor.
It should have been no surprise the public gave a thumbs down to Mr. Obama policies. The decision to close the prison in Guantanamo, the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, the bailout of banks and financial institutions (begun under President George W. Bush), the trillion-dollar deficits, cap and trade, the surge in the size and scope of the federal government—these were out of sync with the country's right-of-center majority.
Mr. Obama argued in his Feb. 24 address to Congress that health-care reform, billions in new education spending, and cap and trade to reduce carbon emissions were necessary to revive the economy. This was a clever attempt to exploit the recession to pass unrelated liberal policies. It was too clever. It didn't work.
Second, Mr. Obama misread his own ability to sway the public. He is a glib, cool, likeable speaker whose sentences have subjects and verbs. During the campaign, he gave dazzling speeches about hope and change that excited voters. His late-night speech at a Democratic dinner in Des Moines on Nov. 10, 2007, prior to the Iowa caucuses, convinced me he'd win the presidential nomination.
But campaign speeches don't have to be specific, and candidates aren't accountable. Presidential speeches are different. The object is to persuade voters to back a certain policy, and it turns out Mr. Obama is not good at this. He failed to stop the steady decline in support for any of his policies, most notably health care.
The president spent much of the summer and early fall touting his health-care initiative. He spoke at town halls, appeared on five Sunday talk shows the same day (Sept. 20), turned up on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and on "60 Minutes." All the while, support for ObamaCare fell. His address to Congress on health care on Sept. 9 is now remembered only for Republican Rep. Joe Wilson's shouted accusation, "You lie!"
Third, Mr. Obama misread Republicans. They felt weak and vulnerable after losing two straight congressional elections and watching John McCain's presidential bid fall flat. They were afraid to criticize the newly elected president. If he had offered them minimal concessions, many of them would have jumped aboard his policies. If that had happened, the president could have boasted of achieving bipartisan compromise on the stimulus and other policies. He let the chance slip away.
By March, tea parties had begun cropping up across the country to protest spending in Washington. Over the summer, independents moved away from Mr. Obama when they learned of the soaring cost of his policies. By late summer, Republicans emerged as a full-blown opposition with growing public backing.
The point in all this is Mr. Obama could have given a little and gained a lot. To change Washington, he would have had to corral congressional Democrats, who weren't interested in bipartisanship or compromise. He would have had to disappoint his base and, at times, anger liberal interest groups. Mr. Obama wasn't willing to go that route.
In Washington it's business as usual, except for one thing. The bigger the role of government, the more lobbyists flock to town. By pushing for his policies, the president effectively put up a welcome sign to lobbyists. Despite promising to keep them out of his administration, he has even hired a few. So nothing has changed, except maybe that Washington is now more acrimonious than it has been.
Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.

Obama's Approval Slide Finds Whites Down to 39%

2009-11-25T00:33:00.002-04:00

Support has declined much more among whites than among nonwhites

by Jeffrey M. Jones

PRINCETON, NJ -- Since the start of his presidency, U.S. President Barack Obama's approval rating has declined more among non-Hispanic whites than among nonwhites, and now, fewer than 4 in 10 whites approve of the job Obama is doing as president.

Obama last week fell below 50% approval in Gallup Daily tracking for the first time in his presidency, both in daily three-day rolling averages and in Gallup Daily tracking results aggregated weekly.

"The only subgroup showing a greater change than whites is Republicans, down 24 points since Obama's first full week in office."

In his first full week in office (Jan. 26-Feb. 1), an average of 66% of Americans approved of the job Obama was doing, including 61% of non-Hispanic whites and 80% of nonwhites. In the most recent week, spanning Nov. 16-22 interviewing, his approval rating averaged 49% overall, 39% among whites, and 73% among nonwhites. Thus, since the beginning of his presidency, his support has dropped 22 points among whites, compared with a 7-point loss among nonwhites.
Given the 17-point drop in his approval rating among all U.S. adults, it follows that Obama's support has declined among all major demographic and attitudinal subgroups, with one notable exception -- blacks.
Blacks' support for Obama has averaged 93% during his time in office, and has been at or above 90% nearly every week during his presidency. Thus, part of the reason Obama's support among nonwhites has not dropped as much as his support among other groups is because of his consistent support from blacks. (With Hispanics' approval rating down five points, greater declines among Asians, Native Americans, and those of mixed races account for his total seven-point drop among nonwhites.)
The accompanying table shows how Obama's approval rating has changed by subgroup from his first full week in office to the most recent week. The only subgroup showing a greater change than whites is Republicans, down 24 points during this time. Independents' approval of Obama has declined nearly as much (down 18 points), whereas support among Democrats is down only 6 points.
Obama's strongest support comes from blacks, Democrats, and liberals -- all of whom give him approval ratings above 80%. He maintains solid support of more than 60% from nonwhites, Hispanics, and young adults.

A Closer Look at Race and Party
One reason Obama may have maintained support among blacks is their overwhelming affiliation with the Democratic Party. This is not a sufficient explanation, though, because Obama's approval rating has dropped among Democrats even as it has held steady among blacks.
In fact, it appears as though Obama's relatively small loss in support among Democrats has come exclusively from white Democrats. In late January/early February, Obama averaged 87% approval among white Democrats and 90% approval among nonwhite Democrats. Now, his approval rating among white Democrats is 76%, down 11 points, but is essentially the same (if not a little higher) at 92% among nonwhite Democrats.

Bottom Line
Obama won the Democratic nomination and the presidency with strong support from blacks and other racial minorities. In fact, according to exit polls and Gallup's final pre-election estimates, he won the election despite losing by double digits to John McCain among white voters.
Those patterns of support seem to have persisted into his presidency, with his support among whites starting out lower and dropping faster than his support among nonwhites. And though he maintains widespread loyalty among Democrats, the small loss in support he has seen from his fellow partisans seems to be exclusively from white Democrats.
It is important to note that this pattern is not unique to Obama. For example, Bill Clinton averaged 55% job approval during his presidency, including 52% among whites but a much higher 76% among nonwhites and 82% among blacks.

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Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 3,611 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Nov. 16-22, 2009, as part of Gallup Daily tracking. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of error is ±2 percentage points.
For results based on the sample of 2,879 non-Hispanic whites, the maximum margin of error is ±2 percentage points.
For results based on the sample of 732 nonwhites, the maximum margin of error is ±5 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones and cellular phones.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

2009-11-24T15:22:00.002-04:00

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

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The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15. This is the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for President Obama (see trends).
Fifty-two percent (52%) of Democrats Strongly Approve while 68% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major political party, just 16% Strongly Approve and 51% Strongly Disapprove (see other recent demographic highlights from the tracking poll).
Forty-five percent (45%) want U.S. troops home from Afghanistan either right away or within a year.Forty-three percent (43%) are opposed to such a firm timetable.
Fifty-three percent (53%) of voters worry that the federal government will do too much when it comes to reacting to the nation’s financial problems. That’s up seven points since President Obama took office.
The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates are also available on Twitter and Facebook.
Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. That matches the lowest level of total approval yet measured for this president. Eighty-one percent (81%) of Democrats approve as do 33% of unaffiliated voters. Eighty-three percent (83%) of Republicans disapprove.
Among all voters, 54% now disapprove.
Support for the health care plan proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats has fallen to a new low of 38%. Sixty percent (60%) of voters believe passage of the bill will lead to higher health care costs.
(More Below)

In Arizona, Democrat Terry Goddard leads incumbent Governor Jan Brewer by nine percentage points in an early look at that possible 2010 match-up. However, if Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the Republican nominee, he leads Goddard by twelve. Arpaio also leads the Republican Primary competition. The state of Arizona may also feature an interesting Senate primary as John McCain is in a toss-up with former Congressman J.D. Hayworth.
Scott Rasmussen has recently had several columns published in the Wall Street Journal addressing how President Obama is losing independent voters , health care reform, the President's approval ratings, and how Obama won the White House by campaigning like Ronald Reagan. If you'd like Scott Rasmussen to speak at your meeting, retreat, or conference, contact Premiere Speakers Bureau. You can also learn about Scott's favorite place on earth or his time working with hockey legend Gordie Howe.
It is important to remember that the Rasmussen Reports job approval ratings are based upon a sample of likely voters. Some other firms base their approval ratings on samples of all adults. President Obama's numbers are always several points higher in a poll of adults rather than likely voters. That's because some of the President's most enthusiastic supporters, such as young adults, are less likely to turn out to vote.
(More Below)

Rasmussen Reports has been a pioneer in the use of automated telephone polling techniques, but many other firms still utilize their own operator-assisted technology (see methodology).
Pollster.com founder Mark Blumenthal noted that “independent analyses from the National Council on Public Polls, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Pew Research Center, the Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight.com have all shown that the horse-race numbers produced by automated telephone surveys did at least as well as those from conventional live-interviewer surveys in predicting election outcomes.”
In the 2009 New Jersey Governor’s race, automated polls tended to be more accurate than operator-assisted polling techniques. On reviewing the state polling results from 2009, Mickey Kaus offered this assessment, “If you have a choice between Rasmussen and, say, the prestigious N.Y. Times, go with Rasmussen!”
Additionally, an analysis by Pollster.com partner Charles Franklin “found that despite identically sized three-day samples, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll is less variable than Gallup.” During Election 2008, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll was the least volatile of all those tracking the race. That stability is one reason that Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com said that the Rasmussen tracking poll “would probably be the one I'd want with me on a desert island."
A Fordham University professor rated the national pollsters on their record in Election 2008. We also have provided a summary of our results for your review. In 2008, Obama won 53%-46% and our final poll showed Obama winning 52% to 46%. While we were pleased with the final result, Rasmussen Reports was especially pleased with the stability of our results. On every single day for the last six weeks of the campaign, our daily tracking showed Obama with a stable and solid lead attracting more than 50% of the vote.
In 2004 George W. Bush received 50.7% of the vote while John Kerry earned 48.3%. Rasmussen Reports was the only firm to project both candidates’ totals within half a percentage point by projecting that Bush would win 50.2% to 48.5%. (see our 2004 results).
Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The margin of sampling error—for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters--is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Results are also compiled on a full-week basis and crosstabs for full-week results are available for Premium Members.
Like all polling firms, Rasmussen Reports weights its data to reflect the population at large (see methodology). Among other targets, Rasmussen Reports weights data by political party affiliation using a dynamic weighting process. While partisan affiliation is generally quite stable over time, there are a fair number of people who waver between allegiance to a particular party or independent status. Over the past five years, the number of Democrats in the country has increased while the number of Republicans has decreased.
Our baseline targets are established based upon separate survey interviews with a sample of adults nationwide completed during the preceding three months (a total of 45,000 interviews) and targets are updated monthly. Currently, the baseline targets for the adult population are 37.5% Democrats, 32.2% Republicans, and 30.3% unaffiliated. Likely voter samples typically show a slightly smaller advantage for the Democrats.
A review of last week’s key polls is posted each Saturday morning. Other stats on Obama are updated daily on the Rasmussen Reports Obama By the Numbers page. We also invite you to review other recent demographic highlights from the tracking polls.

Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama: The approval gap silently shrinks to a few points

2009-11-24T00:46:00.002-04:00

November 23, 2009 | 1:32 am

Not that it matters politically because obviously she's a female Republican dunce and he's obviously a male Democratic genius.
But Sarah Palin's poll numbers are strengthening.
And President Obama's are sliding.
Guess what? They're about to meet in the 40s.
Depending, of course, on which recent set of numbers you peruse and how the questions are phrased, 307 days into his allotted 1,461 the 44th president's approval rating among Americans has slid to 49% or 48%, showing no popularity bounce from his many happy trips, foreign and domestic.
Riding the wave of immense publicity and symbiotic media interest over her new book, "Going Rogue," and the accompanying promotional tour, Palin's favorable ratings are now at 43%, according to ABC. That's up from 40% in July.
One poll even gives her a 47% favorable.
Most recent media attention has focused on the 60% who say she's unqualified to become president. Her unfavorable rating is 52%, down from 53%, which still doesn't ignite a lot of optimism for Palin-lovers.
On the other hand, 35 months before the 2008 election, that Illinois senator was such a nobody that no one even thought to ask such a question about him. Things seem to change much more quickly these days.
Saturday night Palin's book bus swung by a mall in Roanoke, Va., a state Obama won a year ago but just recently elected a Republican governor to replace departing Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The former Alaska governor wanted to greet the hundreds of fans already lining up in 39-degree weather for her Sunday morning signing.
"She brings out a different crowd, " Salem Republican Party Chairman Greg Habeeb told the Roanoke Times. Habeeb was struck by the numerous non-Republicans he spotted in the line snaking all over the mall. "She taps into something that the Republican Party really needs to tap into."
Sunday, Palin flew ahead of her bus to visit the Rev. Billy Graham and his son Franklin at the father's North Carolina home before her appearance today at Fort Bragg.
Overall, Palin's, well, campaign will visit 25 states, most of them politically crucial. Florida gets the most stops, three.
Everybody thinks 2012 when they think of Palin, who last week pushed Oprah's show to....

... its highest ratings in nearly three years. Remember, though, in 2012 the first hurdles a rehabbed candidate Palin would face are her own party's primaries, where diligent conservatives conscientiously come out to play. If she somehow mobilized Iowa's white evangelicals as Mike Huckabee did to win the 2008 season-opening caucus, many bets would be off about her unelectability. Right now, Palin holds 65% approval among white evangelical Protestants, not a bad place to start, if she decides to.
Anyway, Palin says 2012's not on her radar. Which is a good idea. The year 2010 is much more important for both of these political personalities.
No longer holding any office and personally set financially by the book's runaway success, Palin can devote her SarahPac and the entire year to collecting chits from local Republicans.
As Mitt Romney has already been quietly doing. Other Republicans will no doubt nominate themselves to join along the way, especially if Obama looks vulnerable after November 2010.
Although presidential incumbency has hardly kept Obama chained to the Oval Office, he and Joe Biden now own the U.S. economy, where their much-vaunted $787 billion economic stimulus package has so far stimulated unemployment to grow from 8% to more than 10%.
And then there's the growing deficit dread and the mounting costs -- human and financial -- in the increasingly unpopular Afghan conflict, where Obama is about to commit more U.S. troops at the end of the eighth and worst casualty year of the war.
We'll all hear much next year about how jobs are the last thing to improve in a sour economy, even in congressional districts that don't actually exist. Which is too bad for Democrats because jobs are the obvious first measure the public uses to measure the economy.
Historically, the White House party loses about 17 House seats in a normal midterm election cycle. That wouldn't change control of the House.
George W. Bush's GOP actually gained seats in 2002. Democrat Bill Clinton's first midterm election was a political Katrina, producing the Contract with America and so-called Republican revolution that saw the GOP take control of both houses of Congress after years of minority status.
Much of that turnaround was attributed to Clinton having run in 1992 as a centrist and then immediately pushed a more liberal agenda involving something called healthcare reform.
But that couldn't possibly happen again because of the popularity of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi whose current favorable poll ratings are -- let's see here -- OMG, only about half of Palin's.

Obama Thanks Hollywood With Coveted Invites To First White House State Dinner

2009-11-23T13:14:00.002-04:00

EXCLUSIVE: If tradition stands, the details of the guest list will be revealed only a few hours before the Obama administration's first state dinner tomorrow. The welcome for India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be the biggest social event of the Obama White House. Already the Washington DC press corp is buzzing about the "got-to-be-there" fever. But this first dinner is primarily a thank you to the Obamas' most important political supporters. So I've learned that, among the Hollywood contingent asked to attend, are onetime DreamWorks partners David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg; Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Michael Lynton; and WME Entertainment Agency co-CEO Ari Emanuel.
Spielberg's inclusion is interesting since he was a much ballyhooed Hillary Clinton supporter during the first months of her primary campaign when she looked like a sure thing, then quietly threw his clout behind Obama after he became the clear winner. But, given that the guest of honor is India's highest ranking statesman, Spielberg's new financial relationship with India's giant corporation Reliance more than explains his presence. Geffen was an early Obama backer who publicly took on the Clintons with pointed criticism at the start of the primary season. Katzenberg was not an early bird, but he became a faithful fundraiser. Both he and Geffen were considered Obama's biggest Hollywood bundlers during the campaign. Lynton was a longtime supporter primarily because of the influence of his wife Jamie whose Chicago family has longtime political connections to the Obamas. Her mother Joanne Alter, the first female Democrat elected in Cook County, talent-spotted Obama in 2003 and convinced her daughter to support him. As a result, Lynton co-hosted an early fundraiser for Obama’s Senate bid in 2004 in addition to hosting one of the earliest Hollywood campaign events for him when most showbiz types were still supporting Hillary. (Will.i.am, who composed the viral video for the Obama campaign anthem “Yes, We Can,” met the candidate during a fundraiser at the Lyntons' home.) And Chicago native Emanuel not only was one of Obama's first Hollywood political and financial backers, but, like duh, his brother Rahm is the White House chief of staff. They'll join the President and First Lady and 400 guests in an elaborate tent erected on the South Lawn. As for who has been chosen to provide the evening's entertainment, this White House has shown eclectic taste: Stevie Wonder already has played a concert in the East Room, Marc Anthony already took to the South Lawn for an evening of Latin music, and the Foo Fighters played the Fourth of July party.

Barack Obama: the politics of hypocrisy and cynicism

2009-11-23T01:17:00.002-04:00

It was supposed to be all about the end of politics as usual. But while President Barack Obama has been happy to bring about change while abroad by doing all he can to diminish the superpower status of the United States, at home it's been the same old, writes Toby Harnden.

Talk of fresh sanctions also showed that Barack Obama was preparing for the next phase should Iran fail to meet his year-end deadline for progress in negotiations Photo: GETTY

Take the case of Greg Craig, the first big figure to depart the Obama White House and the victim of the Washington equivalent of a back-alley stabbing. A respected lawyer who defended President Bill Clinton during impeachment, the former State Department official was one of the first big guns to break with the Clintons and go all in for Obama.
Bowing to the wishes of Hillary Clinton, who blocked him from his preferred field of foreign policy, Craig was made White House Counsel.
He was charged with closing Guantanamo Bay, overhauling interrogation rules and translating Obama's high-minded campaign ideals into workable policy.
Having issued a directive on his second full day in office that Guantanamo Bay would close "no later than one year from the date of this order", Obama soon came up against reality. Last week, he lamely conceded that he would miss his own deadline but "would anticipate" the jail shutting in 2010.
Faithfully implementing Obama's wishes, Craig drew up plans for the release of photos of American troops engaging in the abuse of prisoners.
Faced with fierce opposition from generals and former CIA chiefs the President then changed his mind.
Before you could whisper "change we can believe in", Craig became the designated scapegoat for Obama's photos U-turn and the Guantanamo debacle. The campaign had been free of leaks but Craig was knifed by Team Obama in time-honoured Washington. He was toast, confided anonymous officials who portrayed him as an incompetent in the thrall of bed-wetting human rights types.
On the record, officials flatly denied Craig might be fired and airily dismissed reports of the authorised leaks as "typical Washington parlour games". A bemused Craig wondered who his enemy might be, realising too late that it was Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, operating with Obama's blessing.
White House officials were demonstrably lying to reporters when they said Craig was not under threat. With breathtaking chutzpah, they briefed last week that his departure had been on the cards "for months".
In the Clinton era it was OK to lie about sex. Under Obama, it seems, it's just fine to lie about running the country.
Bill Clinton's administration was bedevilled by self-serving leaks from ambitious staffers trying to promote themselves or their cause. For Obama, leaking is a way of doing business.
Thus, General Stanley McChrystal's request for up to 44,000 more troops in Afghanistan was leaked to Bob Woodward, allowing White House officials to float a trial balloon.
Then, classified cables sent from Kabul by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and opposing McChrystal's analysis appeared in the Washington Post. Few believe that the leaks were anything other than a deliberate White House attempt to shift the Afghanistan debate by saying: "Look, there's a former general who differs from McChrystal."
When Robert Gates, the straight-shooting Defence Secretary, fulminated that he was "appalled" by the leaks, Obama clamoured to insist that he was "angrier than Bob Gates about it" and pronounced leaking a "firing offence". Call me a sceptic but I doubt that the likes of Emanuel or David Axelrod will be dismissed any time soon.
During the campaign, Mr Obama said loftily that his opposition researchers would concentrate on policy. But we now know from his campaign manager David Plouffe that it was Obama staff who leaked the devastating nugget that Democratic rival John Edwards had spent $400 on a haircut.
One of this White House's flaws is that it is packed with campaign operatives like Axelrod at senior levels or other refugees from the Windy City like Emanuel, who delight in the dark arts of Washington and Chicago-style hardball.
What Mr Obama lacks is wise, detached counsel from outside his inner circle. Mr Craig might have fulfilled such a role. His replacement? Mr Obama's personal lawyer Bob Bauer, another campaign loyalist. It was an eerie echo of President George W Bush's installation of his crony Alberto Gonzales in the same position.
The supposedly post-partisan Obama is operating a one-party system in Washington in which Republicans are frozen out. His big campaign donors are now housed in sumptuous ambassadorial residences across the world.
Where he promised transparency, everything is opaque.
Far from changing Washington, Obama has slipped effortlessly into its ways. Could it be that the hallowed figure who preached hope and "yes we can" is really a hypocrite whose legacy will be greater cynicism?

Obama faces bruising battle with his own party as radical healthcare bill passes major hurdle

2009-11-23T01:11:00.004-04:00

By David Gardner
Last updated at 1:37 AM on 23rd November 2009

President Obama faced stiff opposition from two female senators

President Obama is facing a bruising battle with moderates in his own party after the Democrats narrowly avoided a humiliating setback in their bid to overhaul America’s healthcare system.
Two women senators took party leaders right down to the wire before finally agreeing to back the bill.
The strictly partisan 60-39 vote allowed the Democrats to squeak through a key procedural hurdle to clear the way for a full debate on the £513 billion health reforms in the US Senate.
The Democrats needed at least 60 votes to overcome a Republican-led 'filibuster' – a delaying tactic designed to block consideration of the landmark bill indefinitely.
The White House said last night that President Obama was ‘gratified’ by the vote.
The healthcare plan has been the centrepiece of his domestic agenda since coming to power in January and its success or failure in Congress is likely to define his first term as President.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said: ‘It brings us one step closer to ending the insurance company abuses, reining in spiralling health care costs, providing stability and security to those with health insurance, and extending quality health coverage to those who lack it.'
The bill will extend health insurance to 31 million Americans who are uninsured. But it still faces a rocky road through Congress.
Fears over claims that the new law would effectively nationalise the US health system and subsidise abortions have raised the hackles of centrist Democrats as well as Republicans eager to inflict a body blow on the president.
Democrat congressional leaders, who got a healthcare bill through the House of Representatives a fortnight ago, are struggling to move legislation through the Senate by Christmas.
Both houses must agree on a bill before it can be delivered to Mr Obama to sign into law.
The Senate Democrats only prevailed on Saturday night after tense day of brinkmanship by senators Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu.

The Senate on Capitol Hill where senators voted whether to move to debate on the health care reform legislation

Both finally agreed to vote with their Democrat colleagues and two independents only after winning key concessions in the bill.
Senator Landrieu won millions more government money for her home state of Louisiana and Senator Lincoln demanded the removal of the ‘nationalisation’ clause.
Both represent traditionally right-wing Republican states where Mr Obama’s health reforms are unpopular.
They maintained yesterday that their vote at the weekend did not necessarily mean they would be backing the bill after the full Senate debate, which is likely to take up much of next month.
Senator Lincoln said Saturday’s vote would ‘mark the beginning of consideration of this bill by the US Senate, not the end.’
One of the most controversial issues will be a provision for a government-run insurance plan that would compete with traditional private insurance companies.
The House plan included the so-called public option, but it was cut from the Senate bill at Senator Lincoln’s insistence.
Democrats are also nervous over Republican claims that government funding for health insurance will mean state subsidisation for abortions, a hot button issue in the US.
The White House is increasingly wary of any further delays to the passage of the reforms, worrying that they would push it into an election year with Democrats afraid of a voter backlash for a plan that draws decidedly mixed reviews in the polls.
The Senate drama came as it was revealed that Mr Obama is considering setting a provisional target for cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions.
US officials are said to be seeking agreement from Congress on a figure before next month’s UN global warming summit in Copenhagen.
With China, the US is responsible for 40 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gasses and is the only major developed nation yet to table an emission target.
By agreeing to a provisional target of reducing greenhouse gases by 14-20 per cent over the next decade, Mr Obama would resurrect hopes for a global climate change agreement in Copenhagen.

Obama Union Rules

2009-11-21T02:14:00.002-04:00

A federal agency rips up 75 years of labor policy.

The National Mediation Board, which oversees labor relations in the air and rail industry, this month moved to overturn 75 years of labor policy.
The board plans to stack the deck for organized labor in union elections. Under a proposed rule, unions would no longer have to get the approval of a majority of airline workers to achieve certification. Not even close. Instead, a union could win just by getting a majority of the employees who vote. Thus, if only 1,000 of 10,000 flight attendants vote in a union election, and 501 vote for certification, the other 9,499 become unionized.
This radical break with precedent is the handiwork of President Obama's appointees to the three-member board: Harry Hoglander, once president of a pilots union, and Linda Puchala, former president of the Association of Flight Attendants.
The board got a request to adopt the jerry-rigged voting standard from the AFL-CIO in September. Without a hearing or invitation for preliminary views, the Obama duo drafted the AFL-CIO demand and published it in the Federal Register. It's now subject to a 60-day comment period, after which Ms. Puchala and Mr. Hoglander will no doubt vote to inflict it on all the nation's airline and rail carriers.
Since 1934, every National Mediation Board—even those with Democratic majorities—has upheld the current rule on grounds that companies governed by the Railway Labor Act are vital to the U.S. economy. The existing rules were designed to reduce strikes by ensuring that a majority of airline and rail employees support union representation. In their rule change, Mr. Hoglander and Ms. Puchala brush aside the many historical and legal barriers to their change, arguing that under "broad statutory authority" they can do what they want.
And that's kind compared to their treatment of the board's Bush-appointed Chairman Liz Dougherty. According to a letter Ms. Dougherty sent Congress, the two Democrats never sought her input or participation in crafting the proposal. Instead, they gave her a "final" version of the rule, said they were sending it in two hours and forbade her from publishing a dissent. They relented later, but only if she removed some of her criticism.
Ms. Dougherty noted such "arbitrary" and "exclusionary" behavior (we'd call it thuggish) has never been the norm at the agency. Her Democratic colleagues' frantic rush to change a 75-year-old rule "gives the impression that the Board has prejudged this issue," and is trying to "influence the outcome of several very large and important representation cases currently pending."
Indeed. The AFL-CIO letter was inspired by Delta's acquisition of Northwest. Northwest was largely unionized but Delta wasn't. The unions are now struggling to win the required new elections, and they want the Mediation Board to manipulate the rules in their favor. It is growing clear that Ms. Puchala and Mr. Hoglander are in on the game. So too, presumably, are the folks who appointed them.

Barack Obama’s Chump Diplomacy

2009-11-20T15:55:00.002-04:00

It’s our enemies and the authoritarian big powers that Obama wants to woo.

By Rich Lowry

EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.

Oh, how the international community loves Barack Obama — loves to stiff him, play him along, and manipulate him. He’s the world’s celebrity ingenue, the slender naïf perpetually undone by the recalcitrance of foreign leaders.

Earlier this year, in a touching exercise in diplomatic and civilizational outreach, he sent two letters to Iran’s mullahs and a new year’s message to the Iranian people. How mannerly, how unthreatening. When the Iranian government beat protesters in the streets after it stole the election for Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, Obama kept his criticism muted. How sensitive, how subtle.

In October, the Iranians agreed to send their low-enriched uranium — at least the portion of it we know about — to Russia in what was hailed as a triumph for Obama’s charm offensive. Except it’s all predictably ending in tears. If George W. Bush put too much faith in oppressed people — their ability and willingness to rise up for freedom — Barack Obama puts too much faith in their oppressors.

The Iranians have all but announced that they are reneging on the October deal. U.S. officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, “acknowledge Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be using negotiations to limit U.N. pressure while also working to legitimize his government domestically.” Maybe they should get word to the president?

In response to Iranian intransigence, Obama is supposed to be poised to crack down with harsh sanctions supported by the Russians and Chinese, won over by Obama’s accommodating gestures. Neither is likely to go along, though. True to his word, Obama has worked a remarkable change in America’s reputation in the world — from purported bully to notorious chump in less than a year.

As Obama demonstrated again on his Asian trip, he is the leader of the free world in adoring crowds (“Obama-san!” they shouted in Japan) and personal charisma (“I would like to be his friend,” Xie Lijun, 28, told the Washington Post in Shanghai). But even the press is beginning to realize that all this personal good will generates only personal good will.

Obama’s chief politico, David Axelrod, explained that Obama’s team never expected “change overnight.” Now he tells us. It’s not just that the world hasn’t fallen at Obama’s feet, it’s that the administration’s self-described “smart power” has — to borrow an old gibe about the Moral Majority — proven to be neither.

Afghan ambassador Karl Eikenberry is fundamentally at odds with Gen. Stanley McChrystal over Afghan strategy, making it all but impossible that the two will replicate the superb civil-military cooperation of Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq during the surge; super Af-Pak envoy Richard Holbrooke is persona non grata in Afghanistan; Amb. Christopher Hill in Iraq is something of a diplomatic nonentity; Middle East envoy George Mitchell has hurried the “peace process” to a point of crisis worse than when he started.

As Casey Stengel famously asked, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” The administration might have waited to accomplish something before adopting a foreign-policy slogan pre-emptively congratulating itself for its diplomatic acumen. But that’s not the Obama way.

Democrats spent years banging on Bush for alienating our allies. What they really meant was that he hadn’t been nice enough to our enemies. Reversing field entirely, Obama has been hell on allies like Hamid Karzai and the Israelis. He’s undercut the Poles and Czechs. He’s given a cold shoulder to friends who have the temerity to want to trade with us, like the Colombians and South Koreans. He’s cooled the special relationship with Britain. And he hammered the government of Honduras when it stopped a creeping Chávezist coup by its sitting president.

The more pro-U.S. a country is, the more it can expect scolding or neglect from the president of the United States. It’s our enemies and the authoritarian big powers that Obama wants to woo. And like every cad who’s ever been presented with achingly defenseless innocence, they are very glad to see him. Yes, the world loves Barack Obama.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. © 2009 by King Features Syndicate

Obama's Dysfunctional Decision-Making

2009-11-20T10:34:00.003-04:00

By Michael Gerson

WASHINGTON -- In the beginning, the Obama administration directed a spotlight toward its careful, thoughtful decision-making process on Afghanistan. National security meetings were announced, photographed and highlighted in background briefings to the media. President Obama would apply the methods of the academy to the art of war -- the University of Chicago meets West Point -- thus assuring a skittish public that deliberation had preceded decision.
Now the president and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are desperately trying to jerk the spotlight away from a dysfunctional Afghan decision-making process in which chaos has preceded choice, complicating every possible outcome.

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Gates is "appalled by the amount of leaking that has been going on," which would be, if the culprits are discovered, "a career-ender." Obama recently added, "I think I am angrier than Bob Gates about it." They should be appalled and angry at the process they created -- as should the rest of the country.
Sometimes government leaks are merely self-serving, reflecting the powerful passion of midlevel functionaries to appear in the know. But leaks in this process have been attempts to rig the outcome of a national security decision.
This summer, nameless White House officials began leaking their skepticism of plans for troop increases. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal's assessment, calling for a more troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy, was leaked. Then a leak of internal government reviews on the poor state of the Afghan military and police forces. Then a leak from "informed sources" that Obama had settled on a troop increase of 34,000. Then the leak that Obama had rejected all the military options on the table and was insisting on refinements. Then the leak of two classified cables from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, which cautioned against troop increases, leaving McChrystal, according to another nameless source, feeling "stabbed in the back."
The Afghan policy process has resulted in more leaks than Oktoberfest. Leaks are a form of disloyalty -- an attempt to box in the president of the United States, a mini-coup in which unelected officials attempt to substitute their judgment for the president's own. Leaks increase tension and anger, then leave the losing side in a debate publicly humiliated and perhaps alienated from the outcome. Depending on that outcome, Obama will be vulnerable to charges of buckling to military pressure or disregarding the advice of his commanders.
Though leaks are bad for the president and the country, they are gifts for journalists and commentators, who often draw their purpose from the failures of others. We have learned that Obama's national security team is both deeply divided and playing for blood. Military-civilian tensions are growing and have become reflected on the ground in Afghanistan. One key to the success of the surge in Iraq was the close cooperation of Gen. David Petraeus, in charge of military operations, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who led the civilian efforts. McChrystal and Eikenberry seem to have a different relationship.
We have also learned that military and civilian timelines are quickly diverging. In his strategy memo sent on Aug. 30, McChrystal warned: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." At that time, I talked to administration officials who were hoping the scale-up of troops would begin in earnest before the end of the year. Soon, three months will have passed since McChrystal made his dire assessment -- three months of leaks and recriminations that must give pause to our troops and encouragement to our enemies. While it is important to get a military decision right, it is also possible for the right decision to come too late.
It is not fair that large presidential choices must be made with insufficient time and information, but it is also not unusual. A dysfunctional process on Afghanistan has begun to narrow the range of good outcomes. The time and the options in Afghanistan are limited. "As an analogy," says David Kilcullen, an expert on counterinsurgency strategy, "you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave. It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending firemen into harm's way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house."

mgerson@globalengage.org

Why the Greg Craig debacle matters

2009-11-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

President Barack Obama is returning from his trek to Asia Thursday to a capital that is a considerably more dangerous place for him than when he departed.

While he was abroad, there was a palpable sense at home of something gone wrong. A critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man. Most significant, these doubters now find themselves with a new reluctance to defend Obama at a phase of his presidency when he needs defenders more urgently than ever.

This is the price Obama has paid with his complicity and most likely his active participation, in the shabbiest episode of his presidency: The firing by leaks of White House counsel Gregory Craig, a well-respected Washington veteran and influential early supporter of Obama.

The people who are most aghast by the handling of the Craig departure can’t be dismissed by the White House as Republican partisans, or still-embittered Hillary Clinton supporters. They are not naïve activists who don’t understand that the exercise of power can be a rough business and that trade-offs and personal disappointments are inevitable. Instead, they are people, either in politics or close observers, who once held an unromantically high opinion of Obama. They were important to his rise, and are likely more important to the success or failure of his presidency than Obama or his distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team appreciate.

The Craig embarrassment gives these people a new reason – not the first or only reason – to conclude that he wasn’t the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought, and, more fundamentally, that his ability to move people and actually lead a fractured and troubled country (the reason many preferred him over Hillary Clinton) is not what had been promised in the campaign.

This may seem like a lot to hang on a Washington personnel move. After all, intramural back-stabbing or making people fall guys when things go wrong (think Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin after the disaster in Somalia) are not new to Washingtonians.

But Craig’s ouster did not occur in a vacuum. It served as a focal point to concerns that have been building for months that Obama wasn’t pressing for all that might be possible within the existing political constraints (all that one could ask of a president); that his presidential voice hadn’t fulfilled the hopes raised by his campaign voice (which had also taken him a while to find); that he hadn’t created a movement, as he had raised expectations that he would; that would be there to back him up and help him fulfill his promises.

That is why it is worth pondering how the Craig story, unfolded in detail – its consequences likely will echo far longer than anything Obama said or did in Asia.

Briefly, here’s what happened, some of it told for the first time: Craig, who had known the Clintons since they were all at Yale Law School together, had served as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, but in 1998 gave up that job to help defend Bill Clinton against impeachment. Yet in 2008, he supported Obama for the nomination – not so much a turning against Hillary Clinton as being impressed early, as were some other prominent Washingtonians, by the then-state senator but would-be U.S. Senate candidate at a fundraiser held by Vernon Jordan, seeing Obama as the first potentially inspiring Democratic figure since Robert Kennedy. In the course of the campaign, Craig wrote a highly publicized memo questioning some of Hillary Clinton’s claims of foreign policy experience, such as coming under enemy fire in Tuzla, Bosnia. During the campaign, Craig coached Obama for the debates (playing McCain), and praised him highly. Craig’s imprimatur helped the neophyte Obama in certain influential circles.

He hoped to get a high foreign policy position in an Obama administration, but when Clinton was named secretary of state, this of course became untenable. The Clintons are an unforgiving lot. So, Obama and Craig agreed that Craig would take the job of White House counsel for a year, and then they’d discuss what he’d do next. Thus, Craig was handed a very tricky portfolio.

During the transition, about mid-December, Craig presented to a group of the president’s newly named national security advisers meeting in Washington – including Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, national security adviser General James Jones, and others – three proposed executive orders: One ordered the shutting down of Guantanamo in a year. (The others banned torture and closed down the C.I.A.’s “black sites”; and addressed future detainee policy.) The one-year target for closing Guantanamo resulted from consultations with human rights and detainee rights groups, who argued that Guantanamo could be shut down in three months, and with Pentagon officials, who had no united position but argued that it would take from a year to 18 months.

At the meeting, only the newly named Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, beamed in from Arizona, questioned whether a year was realistic. When Gates, as he later confirmed publicly, said that though it was an “ambitious” deadline, he supported it because setting it was the only way to get things, especially the bureaucracy, moving toward that end, and that it could be extended if it couldn’t be met, that was it.

Obama’s new national security team signed off on the executive order to close Guantanamo in a year. This was passed along to the president as well as his top aides; Craig was never in a meeting with the political side of the White House on the Guantanamo matter – and the president-elect and then president raised no objection before, when, or after he signed off on it.

Unsurprisingly, the deadline became hard to meet, for various legal and political reasons – including the congressional outburst of NIMBYISM (similar to its earlier outbursts on Dubai Ports and even Terri Schiavo – short-term, irrational, and politically motivated fits that erupt from the Congress from time to time). If Craig failed to foresee this (as some later charged), he had a lot of company.

The closing of Guantanamo is undoubtedly far further along than it would have been without the executive order. But along the way, Craig fell out of favor with the president’s political aides and, apparently, the president himself. Whether he was simply being made the fall guy, or the tight circle of Chicagoans in the White House didn’t care for this outsider, or he committed some unknown errors, suddenly, in August, leaks began to surface that his job was in danger. Non-denial denials were issued from the White House. The leaks became a pattern, a systematic, anonymous, tipping off of reporters that Craig would soon be gone.

Craig was accused, anonymously of course, of a welter of charges: of being “too close to the human rights groups” (if so, what was wrong with that?), of not playing well with others, of being a bad manager, of being fixated on Guantanamo to the detriment of other issues. In the summer, Obama offered Craig another job, which Craig declined, and the two agreed that they would discuss the matter further later in the year. But the leaks continued, and Craig decided that his situation was untenable, and he had to leave.

To make sure he did, he was leaked his way out, up to the day before he planned to resign. What caused so many Obama supporters’ stomachs to turn was that Obama could have stopped the leaking at any time; he or White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel could have arranged a dignified departure. (They’re within their rights to get rid of someone if they’re dissatisfied, for good reasons or not – but a preferred route would be to call that person in and ask what day would suit him or her to resign, and then just let that person do it. This happens a lot in administrations; even if people don’t believe the resignation was voluntary, there’s a soupcon of dignity left to that person.) Even some Hillary Clinton supporters, who still hold no brief for Craig, think he was treated shabbily.

And this opinion is not confined to “political junkies.” Thomas Wilner, a distinguished Washington attorney who challenged Bush administration detainee policies, particularly on Guantanamo, and had worked with Craig on these issues, told me, “There's a lot of concern among a lot of lawyers in this town, especially those who were supporting Obama, that somebody this bright, this respected, this good, and with this integrity, was treated in such a way."
Yes, we knew, or should have, during the campaign that the supposed idealist Obama had a bit of the Chicago cut-throat in him, but there was little sign that he could be as brutal and heedless of loyalty as he was in the Craig affair. An unexpected climate of fear emanates from the Obama White House.

The incident underscored worries that several had held about the Obama White House for some time: that it was too tightly controlled and narrowly focused by the Chicago crowd; that it seemed from the outset to need an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment.
The current crowd displays a certain impulsiveness and vindictiveness that do it no good – as in the silly war-let on Fox News that it is now trying to back out of. Even if Craig was making a hash of his job – and there’s no independent evidence of this – it just wasn’t smart to treat someone widely held in such high respect in this manner; once again, the impulsiveness backfired.

The replacing of Craig with Washington attorney Robert Bauer, Obama’s own attorney for years as well as counsel for the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign, further narrowed the White House circle just when it needed broadening, lowered the stature of the office, and choosing the president’s personal attorney for a position that calls for dispassionate judgment is hazardous. (Does anyone remember Alberto Gonzalez?)

The Obama’s themselves hang tight with a small Chicago crowd. Yes, he talks to others, and yes, a president’s time is very limited, but the Obama’s themselves seem as closed-off and unto themselves as does his inner White House circle. (Is this a coincidence? What is all this wariness about?) When the Obama’s go to someone’s house for dinner, almost invariably it’s to that of Valerie Jarrett, the old friend from Chicago who serves as a counselor and whom they see all day. Old Chicago friends fly in for weekends frequently. Old friends, who had helped launch him, helped them personally, have been left behind.

At the same time as the Craig imbroglio happened, many people who had defended Obama against charges that he wasn’t what he’d been cracked up to be were now becoming concerned themselves: though it was a relief to have a president who thought through crucial decisions about sending the country’s young to war, it was taking him awfully long to make up his mind about what to do about Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the decision-making was bafflingly leak-ridden (was this a deliberate airing of ideas or a loss of control over the process?); that the health care debate had in fact careened out of his control and it seemed less and less likely that, having used up almost a year of his presidency on it (his “deadlines” had become irrelevant, and so, in a way, had he), he would end up with a bill, if at all, that did enough net good.

Certain things are not his fault: the unprecedented truculence of the Republican Party, scared silly by right-wing ranters on cable television; the unholy economic and foreign-policy mess that he inherited; the fact that he never had, as so many liberal commentators asserted, the 60 (or 58 or 59) Senate votes that would enable him to get what he wanted from the Congress. It’s not his fault that unemployment rates remain stubbornly high following a traumatic recession.

And it’s always risky to project the long-term from the moment. Perhaps this will prove to have been a passing moment. Perhaps Obama will still salvage a health care bill that is a real step forward (though there will be a humongous fight over its definition); maybe he’ll come up with a smart strategy – or the best of bad options – on Afghanistan and Pakistan; it’s not impossible that he’ll add real progress on climate change and regulatory reform to his list of achievements, and that he’ll start to get the deficit under control.

Maybe there’ll be enough examples of grace that will make people forget this period of pettiness. He’s been lucky before; maybe he’ll get lucky again. Meanwhile, serious people who had a lot of hope about him and who defended him are more worried than ever, and in this if anything over-communicative society the White House can’t write them off as “a bunch of Washington insiders.” So meanwhile, there’s a palpable mood change in Washington that could signify that Barack Obama is in deeper trouble than he was even a week ago.

Elizabeth Drew is a journalist and author in Washington. She is the author of 14 books, most recently "Richard M. Nixon" (Times Books, 2007)

Obama's Stimulus Number's: A Return to Enron Style Accounting

2009-11-20T00:10:00.000-04:00

by Mike Flynn
The Sarbanes-Oxley Law was rushed through Congress in the wake of an enormous corporate accounting scandal that shook Wall Street and investors across the country. CEO’s and officers at several large companies were found to have “cooked the books”; i.e. knowingly falsified earnings statements to maintain stock prices or propel them higher. The practice came to be known as, Enron-Style Accounting.

The new law had many provisions, but one of its more sweeping was the requirement that corporate officers and executives assume personal responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of financial reports. In some cases, corporate officers could face civil or even criminal penalties if the numbers they reported to the public turned out to be inaccurate.
If only the law applied to politicians.

On October 30th, senior Administration officials went on a full-court media blitz to crow that, to date, the stimulus bill spending had “saved or created” over 600,000 jobs.The numbers were based on reports filed with Recovery.gov, the government’s clearinghouse for stimulus spending.
The Associated Press cautioned that the data was preliminary and reminded readers that a previous Administration report on “jobs saved or created” had overstated the data by several thousand jobs.
Vice-President responded by saying that the latest report “showed the stimulus bill was operating as advertised” and on target to reach Obama’s goals.
No doubt the Administration was in a hurry to get ahead of the October jobs report to be released by its Labor Department the following week. And no wonder, that report showed that the number of unemployed persons increased by more than 500,000 in October and the unemployment rate edged up to at least 10.2%.
By convincing the press, the public and, even, Congress that its stimulus spending had “saved or created” 650,000 jobs, the Administration hoped to obscure the fact that lots of people were still losing their job. At the very least, they could argue that the jobs situation would be a lot worse without the stimulus.
Kind of like, to pick a random example, a company might issue some good future earnings guidance to dull the impact of an analyst’s bad call on a stock.
It turns out the Administration’s media blitz about saving or creating over 600,000 was duct-taped together with some pretty flimsy data. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they seem to have just made up numbers.
Consider:

The Franklin Center recently reported that, according to Recovery.gov, $6.4 billion in stimulus funds were spent in Congressional Districts that don’t exist. Specifically, 440 Districts that don’t exist. There are only 435 Districts to begin with. A occasional data-entry error is understandable, but 100% more districts than exist?
GAO reported Wednesday that almost 10% of the jobs the administration said were “saved or created” were in projects were no stimulus money has been spent. It also found that 10,000 projects had spent almost $1 billion and hadn’t created or saved any jobs.
Ed Pounds, Communications Director for Recovery.gov, told a newspaper today that, “We’re not certifying the accuracy of the information.” Asked why recipients would enter Congressional Districts that don’t exist, he replied “who knows, man, who really knows. There are 130,000 reports out there.”
Even in Congressional Districts that do exist, the date seems sketchy. Big Government contributor Kristina Rasmussen delved into Illinois’ data and found lots of inconsistencies.

Yes, with the number of records pouring into Recovery.gov there are certain to be some problems. And, not every human being knows their Congressional District and may not know how to accurately estimate jobs “saved,” since there actually is no way to do so.
Still, remember, a couple weeks ago Administration officials used this very same data to take to the nation’s airwaves and proclaim success for their initiative. They reviewed this data and said that over 600,000 jobs had definitely been “saved or created.” That so many problems with the data have been exposed so quickly underscores how irresponsible the Administration’s press blitz was. Even if they were confident Big Media would never hold them accountable for running ahead of the data, the general public does remember these things.
The government requires corporate officers to be personally accountable for all financial information released to the public. Having tens of thousand of employees making hundreds of thousands of separate reports doesn’t absolve them of final responsibility on the numbers. Neither does a need to get out in front of some impending bad news.
A few years ago, politicians passed a law to hold accountable corporate officers who mislead the public. If only politicians were held to the same standards they wrote.
Until his dying day, Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron, professed his innocence, saying be believed the numbers he reported and had been misled by his employees. We didn’t give him a pass. Why should we give one to Biden.

Barack Obama rewards big donors with plum jobs overseas

2009-11-19T11:53:00.002-04:00

: President Barack Obama has bestowed prized ambassadorships on big donors, such as Charles H. Rivkin and Louis B. Susman. Photo: AP photo composite by POLITICO

He may have promised to change Washington, but President Barack Obama is continuing one of its most renowned patronage traditions: bestowing prized ambassadorships on big donors.

Of the nearly 80 ambassadorship nominations or confirmations since Obama’s Inauguration, 56 percent were given to political appointees and 44 percent have gone to career diplomats, according to records kept by the American Foreign Service Association.

The latest nomination came this week, when Beatrice Wilkinson Welters was nominated to serve as ambassador to the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

Welters, a longtime advocate for underprivileged children, and her husband, Anthony, an executive with UnitedHealth Group, generated between $200,000 and $500,000 in donations to Obama’s presidential campaign and an additional $100,000 for his Inauguration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political giving.

The Welters can be counted among the nearly two dozen Obama bundlers — fundraisers who together organized and solicited more than $10 million in donations during the 2008 campaign — who now are being dispatched to some of the world’s greatest cities.

Charles H. Rivkin, a Los Angeles-based children’s television executive and an $800,000 bundler, is in Paris; Alan Solomont, a Boston-based investor and $500,000 bundler, is in Madrid; Louis B. Susman, a Chicago investor and $500,000 bundler, is in London; and Don Beyer, a Virginia Volvo dealer and $745,000 bundler, is in Bern, Switzerland.

Nicole Avant, a member of a Motown family dynasty who is credited with bundling up to $800,000 for Obama, was granted the coveted and cushy ambassadorship in Nassau, Bahamas.

Beyond the bundlers, Obama’s ambassador ranks are also teeming with good, old-fashioned, loyal Democrats who have given generously to the party but weren’t ranked among his top fundraisers.

Counted on those rolls are newly installed Ambassador to Germany Philip Murphy, former finance chairman for the Democratic National Committee who since 1989 has personally donated nearly $1.5 million to the party; and Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Costa Rica, Anne Slaughter Andrew, an environmental attorney whose husband, Joe, is a former DNC chairman who provided a well-timed endorsement of Obama during the extended 2008 primary against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.

For career diplomats, the selection of amateurs is always galling. “It is time to stop this spoils system and these de facto, three-year-term rentals of ambassadorships,” said Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association.

“We believe the appointment of noncareer individuals, however accomplished they may be in their own field, to lead American diplomatic missions should be exceptional and circumscribed and not the routine practice it has become over the last three or four decades,” she added.

The politicization of the diplomatic corps, which began in the 1960s, is of increasing concern to some foreign policy experts, given the rise of terrorism and the need for greater coordination between the U.S. and foreign governments on national security issues.

Diplomatic posts that may once have largely involved ceremonial appearances now can be focused on issues such as human and drug trafficking, kidnappings, war and intelligence sharing. With that worldview, “We believe America is best served by having career foreign service officers, just as we have career military officers,” Johnson said.
Obama never promised an end to the practice of ambassadorial patronage. In an appearance before his Inauguration, he said, “it would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some” political appointments.

But what has surprised some foreign policy experts is how traditionally Obama has defined the word “some”:

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said it is unfair to judge the Obama administration by its first wave of ambassadorial nominations, because most of the openings involve traditional political posts recently vacated by Bush administration appointees.

More career diplomatic posts, which run on staggered, three-year terms, will begin opening up in the next year or two. That should produce a second wave of nominations dominated by professional foreign service officers, he added.

“We’re well-aware of the historical target of career vs. noncareer ambassadors, and we will be right on that target,” said Vietor.

That historic benchmark is roughly 30 percent political appointees to 70 percent career diplomats, and Obama seems on track to meet it.

But Johnson said the career diplomatic community had hoped for more than just the status quo from a candidate who campaigned on a vision of transforming Washington into a city less beholden to special interests and wealthy political benefactors.

“There is a bit of disappointment largely because expectations were raised by the ‘change’ theme of Obama’s campaign and that there would no longer be ‘business as usual’ in Washington,” she said.

Equally disappointing — but perhaps more expected — to career diplomats is that the distribution of assignments shows no sign of changing: The political appointees get the big mansions in big-name countries, while the careerists pack off to Haiti, Zimbabwe, Serbia and other less inviting postings.

To be sure, many of Obama’s new ambassadors are accomplished executives who were schooled in the nuances of diplomacy in corporate boardrooms rather than in foreign capitals.

They also bring to their embassies the gravitas and personal ties needed to cut through the State Department bureaucracy and speak directly to the president when a situation requires it — an asset some U.S. allies have come to expect and demand.

And several of Obama’s chosen diplomats have foreign policy backgrounds and are noted experts in their new areas of work.

For instance, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is a well-known expert on foreign affairs, as is Ivo H. Daalder, ambassador to NATO. Rivkin, the new ambassador to France, is the son of a diplomat and was a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

The president has, occasionally, tweaked the patronage mold.

His selection of then-Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican who had bundled $100,000 for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, as his ambassador to China was a shock to Republicans who had seen Huntsman as a possible GOP presidential candidate. And in choosing Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis as ambassador to Hungary, Obama chose someone who had bundled $100,000 — for Hillary Clinton.

An even more surprising pick was Obama’s choice for ambassador to the Holy See, a coveted post for Roman Catholics. Obama’s choice, Miguel H. Diaz, an associate professor of theology at St. John’s University, has made one political donation in his life: a $1,000 check to Obama’s campaign.

But Dave Levinthal, communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics, said, “At least to date, it’s clear that a notable number of the ambassador nominees have been bundlers, and more have been donors. Those numbers appear to speak for themselves.”

I'm not losing weight, says Obama as he hits back at claims stress is causing him to shed the pounds

2009-11-19T01:52:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama has hit back at claims he is losing weight, insisting he is eating just fine despite the stress of being president.
Earlier this month American media had claimed 'Barack n Bones' was shedding the pounds after stress was causing him to skip meals.
He was pictured looking even skinnier than usual while leaving a gym in Washington, D.C. - though an oversized jacket may have been to blame.

The president walks alone: Mr Obama took time out from a visit to Beijing yesterday to see the Great Wall of China

However today Mr Obama said that while he is indeed going grey, reports that he is skipping meals and shedding pounds are untrue.
He claimed his weight fluctuates by about five pounds - less than half a stone - and has for the last 30 years.
He also claimed on American television that while the multitude of issues facing the country do weigh on him, being president is a privilege.
Even his grey hairs are more a sign of age than of stress, he said.

'I'm skinny but I'm tough': One of the pictures of Barack Obama leaving a Washington gym that were published earlier this month leading to fears he is losing weight

Mr Obama spoke in the wake of pictures published on the influential U.S. website The Drudge Report, which described him as 'thin as a rail'.
The right-wing website quoted an unnamed 'insider' who said the president was working so hard that 'yes he does occasionally skip meals'.

Under the headline 'Barack n Bones', the report claimed that the president's exercise regime - including basketball games - is behind the 'dramatic weight loss'.
The source quoted by the report insisted that Mr Obama was working 'non-stop' - and that he was not chain-smoking.
In the pictures, the president was wearing a oversized jacket that did dwarf his frame, which may have contributed to the impression that he is losing weight.
Last month Mr Obama cheerfully announced in Miami that though he may be skinny, 'I'm tough'.
His weight has been debated since he became the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, with some conservative opponents jokingly asking if he was too skinny to be president.
He was even teased by Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger almost exactly one year ago for having such skinny legs.
'I'm going to make him do some squats,' the former Terminator star told a campaign rally for Mr Obama's presidential rival John McCain.

He also teased the president about his 'scrawny little arms'.

Both the president and First Lady Michelle Obama have made healthy living a focal point of their time in the White House.
Mr Obama is often pictured playing basketball or returning from the gym with aides, while Mrs Obama's infamous vegetable garden in the grounds of the White House promotes healthy eating on top of exercise.
The First Lady's gym-toned arms have also been the topic of much discussion.
The news that Mr Obama is skinny because he exercises will be welcomed by health professionals and doctors also trying to promote healthy living.

Obama's wow bow II: Turns out Japan's emperor is just fine with simple handshakes (video)

2009-11-18T20:49:00.001-04:00

November 17, 2009

Among the thousands of comments left on the Ticket in recent days, most dealt with our item: "How low will he go?" about the awkward bow that President Obama gave Japan's Emperor Akihito over the weekend.
Apparently improperly briefed about accepted procedure in Japan or perhaps having a time zone mind melt, Obama stuck out his hand for a shake. Which was fine. And friendly.
He then proceeded to simultaneously bow. Which was not.
And take his eyes off the person he's greeting. Which was not.
And, worst in the eyes of many, the over-enthusiastic president of the United States bowed way down at a 45-degree angle, indicating in that culture, and apparently in the eyes of many others, subservience to the emperor, son of the man who authorized the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.
This came only a few months after White House aides denied that Obama bowed to the Saudi king, when it sure looked like a bow to non-aides.
And it all seemed to fit in with what critics mockingly call Obama's world apology tours.
It also adds to previous Obama diplomatic gaffes. There was that promise to talk with the president of Canada. A reference to not speaking Austrian. Giving Britain's prime minister a chintzy collection of American movie DVDs, which weren't formatted for video players in the U.K. And Michelle Obama's friendly or patronizing pat to the back of Queen Elizabeth II, who received as her presidential gift an iPod with Broadway show tunes.
The emperor of Japan, who does not bow to anyone, and his wife handled the awkward wow bow moment with regal aplomb. Japanese do not typically expect foreigners to bow anyway and often feign pleasant surprise when one is attempted.
Fact is, as the photo of Vice President Dick Cheney shows on that same post, the Japanese emperor is good with handshakes. He really is.
To make the point humorously -- sure, and with a little political dig -- the College Republicans at the University of Connecticut spent some time this last weekend assembling a hilarious video of just exactly how good the Japanese emperor is with handshakes.
And just how unusual Obama's attempted bow was.
It's even got music:

-- Andrew Malcolm

David Obey (D) Slams Obama Administration for Errors in Reporting Stimulus Job Gains

2009-11-18T16:21:00.001-04:00

The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee slammed the Obama administration Tuesday for "outrageous" errors in data that led to inflated job-creation numbers on recovery.org, the Web site that reports on the president's stimulus program. The Hill reports that, due to "unrealistic" reports from about a dozen federal agencies, the site incorrectly reported more than 600,000 jobs had been saved or created by the stimulus. An ABC News report outlined some of the site's inaccuracies on Monday.

"The inaccuracies on recovery.gov that have come to light are outrageous and the Administration owes itself, the Congress, and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes," Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) said in a statement Monday. "Whether the numbers are good news or bad news, I want the honest numbers and I want them now."

Obey was a major player in writing the stimulus bill, and said he was dismayed to see it failing to meet the goal of complete transparency.

The White House has deleted at least 60,000 positions from its hard count of jobs saved, because the original figure was based on overstated reporting from agencies.

Quinnipiac: Obama Under 50 For First Time

2009-11-18T12:30:00.002-04:00

President Barack Obama's job approval rating is under 50% for the first time, according to a new national survey from Quinnipiac University. The survey, conducted November 9-16 among 2,518 registered voters, shows 48% approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president, while 42% disapprove. That is a slight decline from Quinnipiac's last poll in early October, which showed 50% approval and 41% disapproval.
Support for Obama's handling of specific issues has also declined in the past month, most notably on Afghanistan:
Afghanistan
Approve 38 (-4 vs. last poll 10/8)
Disapprove 49 (+9)
Economy
Approve 43 (-4)
Disapprove 52 (+6)
Foreign Policy
Approve 49 (no change)
Disapprove 42 (+5)
A plurality (48%) still believes we are "doing the right thing" by fighting the war in Afghanistan, though that's a four point drop from the same question in October's survey.
The public is slightly in favor (47% to 42%) of Obama granting General McChrysta'ls request for 40,000 additional troops, though 55% say they would like to see us spend no more than two more years with troops in Afghanistan.
Fifty-three percent say the "trust" President Obama to make the right decision regarding troop levels in Afghanistan - a net 6-point decline from last month - while 77% say they trust the US military to make the right recommendations on troop levels - also a 7 point net decline in support from last month.
Fifrty-four percent believe we will stay in Afghanistan too long rather than leave too soon, but a slim majority - 51% - believe we will avoid Afghanistan becoming a replay of Vietnam.

Cheney: Obama shows weakness with bow

2009-11-18T00:55:00.002-04:00

Dick Cheney blasted President Obama today for showing weakness when he bowed to Japan's Emperor Akihito.
There is no reason for an American president to bow to anyone, the former vice president told Politico.com.
PHOTOS: OBAMA IN ASIA
"Our friends and our allies don't expect it, and our enemies see it as a sign of weakness," he added.
The State Department said that its protocol office worked closely with the White House to provide Obama with advice on how to deal with Akihito.
"Protocol, in general, is about respecting the customs and traditions of a host country," the department said in a statement said. "The president was simply showing respect."

AFP/Getty Images

President Barack Obama bows as he shakes hands with Japanese Emperor Akihito and as Empress Michiko looks on.

Obama gave a deep bow, mixed with a handshake, when he was greeted by Akihito and Empress Miochiko at their imperial palace in Tokyo last Saturday.
Conservative bloggers contrasted that with photos showing how when Cheney was vice president he gave Akihito a straight-backed handshake.
It was the second protocol flap for the much-traveled Obama. He was criticized earlier this year for appearing to genuflect to Saudi King Abdullah at a summit meeting.

Heading to Oslo in Weeks, President Obama Faces Tough Days on the Diplomatic Front

2009-11-17T14:05:00.002-04:00

BEIJING, CHINA -- In less than a month, President Obama will step onto a stage in Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
If Mr. Obama hoped that his week-long four-country visit to Asia, his first as president, would yield concrete accomplishments that might silence critics skeptical that he deserves that prize, he might be disappointed.
Though White House aides insist the president's trip was mainly to reassert a US presence in Asian diplomacy, and that his itinerary set no expectations for major feats, the president has heard disappointing news in the past few days.
On Tuesday, even as one member of the White House National Security Council seemed to signal his belief that President Obama would soon be pushing for economic sanctions against Iran for refusing to cooperate with international diplomatic efforts to end its suspected nuclear weapons program, Chinese President and Paramount Leader Hu Jintao Tuesday signaled he might not be willing to go along if the matter comes up for a vote on the United Nations Security Council.
"We both stressed that to uphold the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and to appropriately resolve the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiations is very important to stability in the Middle East and in the Gulf region," President Hu said after meeting with President Obama. "During the talks, I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues. What is important is to respect and accommodate each other's core interests and major concerns."
Earlier on his trip, in Singapore, the Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the U.N.-sponsored climate conference's chairman, formally announced that he did not think there would be an agreement coming out of Copenhagen, and more negotiations will be necessary.
Then, after meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in a side meeting in Singapore, President Obama acknowledged that US-Russian negotiators would almost certainly not make the deadline for a new nuclear disarmament agreement to take the place of the START treaty that expires on December 5.
More frustrations followed.
On Monday, Chinese government officials refused to broadcast live President Obama's Shanghai town hall meeting on state-run television.
Moreover, Chinese authorities attacked the US economy. China Banking Regulatory Commission chairman Liu Mingkang blamed falsely inflated assets throughout the world on "massive speculation" caused by a weak U.S. dollar and low U.S. interest rates, which he said prompted "unavoidable risks for the recovery of the global economy, especially emerging economies." Yao Jian, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Commerce, complained of "a protectionist side" of the US economy, a concern President Hu echoed.
Asked about these incidents, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that President Obama "did not think the waters would part and everything would change as a result of his 2 1/2 day trip to China."
But more widely, said a senior administration official, "We came on this trip to try to incrementally move the ball forward on a number of key and important issues."
On climate change, said the official, "we have reached consensus with the leaders of APEC" -- the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit -- "and now with this visit to China, to keep working to make Copenhagen a success by reaching a political agreement that allows the process to continue to move forward. On START, similarly, we had our meeting with Medvedev to try to create further momentum to try to get this done by as close as possible to the December 5 expiration date."
"And on Iran," continued the official, "we wanted to continue our close consultation with the Russians and the Chinese on our agreed-upon dual-track approach," pursuing negotiations with Iran while also preparing for sanctions.
Jeffrey Bader, Senior Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council acknowledged that "the Chinese clearly are hoping that there will be some sort of resolution" on the Iranian nuclear dilemma. "the president did talk to President Hu about the possibility... that we will not reach a resolution of this issue and we may have to go to track two and greater pressure. I would not say we got an answer today from the Chinese, nor did we expect one on the subject."
He seemed to almost say that he thought sanctions would be a "probability," but he stopped himself and stuck with "possibility."
"We expect the Chinese to be with us," Bader said.
Other issues also make the US-China relationship "complex," as US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman acknowledged. For example: US owes China roughly $800 billion, which some analysts suggest doesn’t exactly give the US the strongest hand in negotiations.
Michael Froman, deputy US National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs, said that the US's massive debt had "no impact whatsoever" on negotiations and was never raised in conversations.
"The president dealt with every issue on his agenda in a very direct way," Froman insisted.
That included President Obama politely pressing the issue of human rights -- even if Chinese government officials emphasized their own views of matters.
"I spoke to President Hu about America’s bedrock beliefs that all men and women possess certain fundamental human rights," President Obama said. "We do not believe these principles are unique to America but rather they are universal rights and that they should be available to all peoples, to all ethnic and religious minorities."
Said President Hu, "the two sides reaffirmed the fundamental principle of respecting each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Neither sides supports any attempts by any force to undermine this principle. We will continue to act in the spirit of equality, mutual respect and non-interference in each other's internal affairs, and engage in dialogue and exchanges on such issues as human rights and religion in order to enhance understanding, reduce differences and build common ground."
Asked how President Obama pressed the issue of human rights, Bader told ABC News that the US is most "persuasive if we have our own house in order."
President Obama's presidential order to close the detainee center at Guantanamo Bay is an example of how he is working hard "to correct and improve the image of the United States on human rights," Bader said, which makes his appeals to China more impactful than when the "salesman is not persuasive." The president told China how the US has been strengthened by such values, Bader said.
As for nuclear disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, and climate change, "we believe we have on this trip successfully moved these issues forward," the senior administration official said. "We were not expecting any major breaththroughs. Diplomacy is incremental."
-- jpt

Major Garrett Among White House Correspondents to Interview Pres. Obama Today

2009-11-17T11:49:00.000-04:00

By Chris Ariens on Nov 17, 2009 07:49 AM

It's official. Fox News' Major Garrett will interview Pres. Obama at 9:20pmET tonight. He tweets:

I will interview POTUS on camera Wed am here in Beijing. 4 other networks will too. 10 mins per. Many had asked. Can say now.

Stimulus Spending is Super-Effective in Nonexistent Congressional Districts

2009-11-16T23:12:00.000-04:00

By Bonnie Kristian at 6:45PM

Nov 16, 2009

ABC News reports:

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.
There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.
There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

Government is so awesome, right? I did a little fact checking just to make sure, and there are definitely only eight districts. I also checked out the state legislature, but there are only 30 districts there, so we still don't make it to Recovery.gov's 86th district. The best part? The government hasn't realized its mistake yet. Here's a screenshot of the AZ by district page from Recovery.gov that I've taken as a precaution against its eventual correction (click on the image for a larger version):

Line 9 is (nonexistent) District 86. The list also includes nonexistent Districts 40, 9, 15, 00, 78, 38, 11, 29, 36, 50, 52, 25, and 18. The $34 million in 86 didn't even save any jobs, but it's way weirder that the $761,420 spent in nonexistent District 15 did save 30.

Obama's Malpractice

2009-11-16T13:12:00.002-04:00

By Robert Samuelson

WASHINGTON -- There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called "health care reform." Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. Recovering slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending, and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.
So, what do they do? Just the opposite. Their sweeping overhaul of the health care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.

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The campaign to pass Obama's health care plan has assumed a false, though understandable, cloak of moral superiority. It's understandable because almost everyone thinks that people in need of essential medical care should get it; ideally, everyone would have health insurance. The pursuit of these worthy goals can easily be projected as a high-minded exercise for the public good.
It's false for two reasons. First, the country has other goals -- including preventing future financial crises and minimizing the crushing effects of high deficits or taxes on the economy and younger Americans -- that "health care reform" would jeopardize. And second, the benefits of "reform" are exaggerated. Sure, many Americans would feel less fearful about losing insurance; but there are cheaper ways to limit insecurity. Meanwhile, improvements in health for today's uninsured would be modest. They already receive substantial medical care. Insurance would help some individuals enormously, but studies find that, on average, gains are moderate. Despite using more health services, people don't automatically become healthier.
The pretense of moral superiority further erodes before all the expedient deceptions used to sell Obama's health care agenda. The president says he won't sign legislation that adds to the deficit. One way to accomplish this is to put costs outside the legislation. So: Doctors have long complained that their Medicare reimbursements are too low; the fix for replacing the present formula would cost $210 billion over a decade, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. That cost was originally in the "health reform" legislation. Now, it's been moved to another bill, but because there's no means to pay for it (higher taxes or spending cuts), deficits would increase.
Another way to disguise the costs is to count savings that, though they exist on paper, would probably never be realized in practice. So: The House bill is credited with reductions in Medicare reimbursements for hospitals and other providers of $228 billion over a decade. But Congress has often prescribed reimbursement cuts that, under pressure from squeezed providers, it has later rescinded. Claims of "fiscal responsibility" for the health care proposals reflect "assumptions that are totally unrealistic based on past history," says David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general and now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
Equally misleading, Obama's top economic advisers assert that the present proposals would slow the growth of overall national health spending. Outside studies disagree. Three studies (two by the consulting firm the Lewin Group for the Peterson Foundation and one by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency) conclude that various congressional plans would increase national health spending compared to no legislation. The studies variously estimate the extra spending, over the next decade, would be $750 billion, $525 billion and $114 billion. The reasoning: Greater use of the health care system by the newly insured would overwhelm cost-saving measures ("bundled payments," "comparative effectiveness research," "tort reform"), which are either weak or experimental.
Though these estimates could prove wrong, they are more plausible than the administration's self-serving claims. Its health care plan is not "comprehensive," as Obama and The New York Times (in its news columns) assert, because it slights cost control. Obama chose to emphasize the politically appealing path of expanding benefits rather than first attending to the harder and more urgent task of controlling spending. If new spending commitments worsen some future budget or financial crisis, Obama's proposal certainly won't qualify as "reform," as the president and The Washington Post (also in its news columns) call it. A more likely verdict: self-inflicted wound.