House Attacks Fed, Treasury

Actually some on House panel, not the House itself, attacked the Fed and the Treasury.

At the Joint Economic Committee, a couple of House Republicans called for the resignation of Mr. Geithner, who, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, played a major role in last fall's moves to prevent the collapse of the financial system. "The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job," said Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas.

The public? Who the hell is the public? I'm part of the public, and I haven't lost confidence in Secretary Geithner. I have a lot of confidence in him. Whom I don't have confidence in is a Representative who thinks that by grandstanding and demagoguery he can strongarm fiscal policy.

Mr. Geithner, in an unusual public display of pique, fired back. "What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you've bequeathed this country," he told Mr. Brady.

Exactly. While Geithner is not perfect, by any means, he is dealing with the mess left by the tram of Bush and Greenspan, the most severe economic crisis in three quarters of a century.

Although several Democrats defended Mr. Geithner at the hearing, some liberal Democrats have been complaining that the Obama administration isn't doing enough to combat unemployment. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.) called on Mr. Geithner to resign this week, and said in an interview that Mr. Geithner is too close to Wall Street.

Whom would he have? Paulson?

Treasury chief Geithner faced a House Republican who told him, 'The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job.' He shot back: 'What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you've bequeathed this country.'

You go, Timothy.

The House Financial Services Committee voted, 43-26, to approve a measure sponsored by Texas Republican Ron Paul, vociferously opposed by the Fed, that would direct the congressional Government Accountability Office to expand its audits of the Fed to include decisions about interest rates and lending to individual banks. The Fed says the provision threatens its ability to make monetary policy without political interference.

43 plus 26 means there are 69 members in the committee. What in hell could 69 politicians possibly get done? Less than nothing is what.

Curbing size of bog firms

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall Act, passed in 1933, separating commercial and investment banking.

And Bill Clinton signed the bill that repealed the Act.

Strategy appears to work

After months of plodding work by five Congressional committees and weeks of back-room bargaining by Democratic leaders, President Obama’s arms-length strategy on health care appears to be paying dividends, with the House and the Senate poised to take up legislation to insure nearly all Americans.

Appears to be working, that oft-criticized strategy. Perhaps all the pundits were wrong.

The bills have advanced further than many lawmakers expected. Five separate measures are now pared down to two. But the legislative progress has come at a price. In the absence of specific guidance from the White House, it has moved ahead in fits and starts. From here on, the challenges will only grow more difficult.

In fits and starts, but it has moved. Out of committees, soon onto the floors.

In the Senate, where Democrats will need support from every member of their caucus to reach a critical 60-vote threshold to avoid a potential filibuster, Mr. Obama’s hands-off strategy carries particular risks. Without clear direction from the president on the public option, the Democratic leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, moved ahead last week on his own, unveiling a bill that includes a government-run plan, but allows states to opt out.

Within hours, the proposal was being questioned by centrist Democrats whose concerns Mr. Obama must now address. As Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, said, “When you are seeking 60 votes, every person is a kingmaker.”

Including Senator Lieberman, who needs to have his knuckles rapped.

Last week’s back-and-forth in the Senate was emblematic of a process that has at times seemed on the brink of anarchy. Lawmakers have missed many deadlines, including the one Mr. Obama set for all five Congressional committees to wrap up work by August. (Only four did.) Even close allies of the White House sometimes questioned its approach.

But it has worked.

Mr. Emanuel also said it was no accident that “the basic bones” of the House and Senate legislation were, despite some big differences, quite similar. “While there was a cry for more presidential direction,” he said, “that direction was being provided by the president’s staff.”

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill. “White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

White House? How about Republicans? What they know how to do is criticize, and say no.

House Votes to Expand Hate Crimes Definition

The measure was named in part for Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student murdered in 1998.


The House voted Thursday to expand the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim’s sexual orientation, a step that would extend new protection to lesbian, gay and transgender people.

Democrats hailed the vote of 281 to 146, which brought the measure to the brink of becoming law, as the culmination of a long push to curb violent expressions of bias like the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student.






Representative John A. Boehner, the House Republican leader, voiced opposition to the measure.





Republicans criticized the legislation, saying violent attacks were already illegal regardless of motive. They said the measure was an effort to create a class of “thought crimes” whose prosecution would require ascribing motivation to the attacker.

Thought? Aren't all crimes that are outlawed as hate crimes the same? How does anybody know that a crime was perpetrated against a black person because the person is black and not another reason? Because the victim was black and the crime seems to have been committed precisely for that reason. Same with gays. Republicans, most, anyway, do not want to vote for anything connected with gay, to stay on the good side of the extreme right-wingers who demand such behavior.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, called the legislation radical social policy. “The idea that we’re going to pass a law that’s going to add further charges to someone based on what they may have been thinking, I think is wrong,” Mr. Boehner said.

Another enlightened view of Mr. Suntan.

Republicans were also furious that the measure was attached to an essential $681 billion military policy bill, and accused Democrats of legislative blackmail. Even some Republican members of the usually collegial House Armed Services Committee who helped write the broader legislation, which authorizes military pay, weapons programs and other necessities for the armed forces, opposed the bill in the end, solely because of the hate crimes provision.

“We believe this is a poison pill, poisonous enough that we refuse to be blackmailed into voting for a piece of social agenda that has no place in this bill,” said Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, a senior Republican member of the committee.

The military bill has yet to be approved by the Senate. But the hate crimes provision has solid support there, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the overall bill outweighed his own objections to including the hate crimes measure.

Mr. Obama supports the hate crimes provision, though the White House has raised objections to elements of the bill related to military acquisitions. If signed into law, the hate crimes legislation would reflect the ability of Democrats to enact difficult measures with their increased majorities in Congress and a Democrat in the White House.

“Elections have consequences,” Mr. McCain said.

McCain can speak clearly.

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the No. 3 House Republican, said the measure could inhibit freedom of speech and deter religious leaders from discussing their views on homosexuality for fear that those publicly expressed views might be linked to later assaults.

“It is just simply wrong,” Mr. Pence said, “to use a bill designed to support our troops to reverse the very freedoms for which they fight.”

Democrats, however, noted that the bill would specifically bar prosecution based on an individual’s expression of “racial, religious, political or other beliefs.” It also states that nothing in the measure should be “construed to diminish any rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

Amazing how two sides can see the same thing so differently.

A lowered profile

Gen. David H. Petraeus was the face of the Iraq troop surge.




Gen. David H. Petraeus, the face of the Iraq troop surge and a favorite of former President George W. Bush, spoke up or was called upon by President Obama “several times” during the big Afghanistan strategy session in the Situation Room last week, one participant says, and will be back for two more meetings this week.

But the general’s closest associates say that underneath the surface of good relations, the celebrity commander faces a new reality in Mr. Obama’s White House: He is still at the table, but in a very different seat.

“General Petraeus has not hinted to anyone that he is interested in political life, and in fact has said on many occasions that he’s not,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and professor of military history at Ohio State University who was the executive officer to General Petraeus when he was the top American commander in Iraq.

“It is other people who are looking at his popularity and saying that he would be a good presidential candidate, and I think rightly that makes the administration a little suspicious of him.”

Difficult to conceive of a candidacy based solely on the troop surge. If troop levels have been reduced in Iraq and Afghanistan stabilizes a bit by 2011, any life in that candidacy will be gone.

General Petraeus’s advisers say he has stepped back in part because Mr. Obama has handpicked his own public face for the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who last week gave an interview to CBS’s “60 Minutes,” met with Mr. Obama on Air Force One and used a speech in London to reject calls for scaling back the war effort.

If anything, General McChrystal’s public comments may prove that General Petraeus might be prudent to take a back seat during the debate. On Sunday, when CNN’s John King asked Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, if it was appropriate for a man in uniform to appear to campaign so openly for more troops, General Jones replied, “Ideally, it’s better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

Ideally, indeed. Making a speech in public to lobby for his selected policy might be a bit out of line for an active general.

“He understands the Congress better than any military commander I’ve ever met,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who said that General Petraeus had the nationwide influence to serve as a spokesman for the administration’s policy on the Afghan war.

But until the president makes a decision, and determines if he wants to deploy General Petraeus to help sell it, the commander is keeping his head down. “He knows how to make his way through minefields like this,” said Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army.


In the London Telegraph, a different take on Gen Stanley McChrystal's speech.

Barack Obama angry at General Stanley McChrystal speech on Afghanistan

The relationship between President Barack Obama and the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan has been put under severe strain by Gen Stanley McChrystal's comments on strategy for the war.

US General Stanley McChrystal

A lack of civility

Passions run high in politics; that is a given. This year has seen a crescendo, culminating in a Representative heckling the President of the United States during a speech in the House chamber. Disagreeing is fine; it is even patriotic, given this nation's birth from dissidence. Yet the level of vitriol has reached bothersome levels.

Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, pictured here, yelled "You Lie!" at another point at the president, after Mr. Obama asserted that no illegal immigrants would receive benefits under his plan. Mr. Wilson later issued an apology to the president for what he called "this lack of civility."

That has become the way of doing things: first commit a transgression, then apologize. But heckling the President is really objectionable; it legitimizes all the anger that has been spewed, and the anger to come.

Rep. Wilson's 'Lie' Yell Boosts Rival In the hours following the South Carolina Republican's outburst during Obama's speech, his 2010 Democratic opponent has raised about $100,000.

• Wash Wire: GOP Rep. Wilson, Presidential Heckler
• Emotions Run High in Capitol During Speech

Gail Collins always impresses me with her insight. To wit: This was when Obama said illegal immigrants would not be covered by health care reform. It seemed like a pretty tame remark for so much disrespect, given all the recent uproar over the president’s alleged ability to brainwash elementary school students.

Sure, Obama talked the fiscally responsible talk last night. But he cannot hold a candle to Baucus and Chuck Grassley, the committee’s lead Republican. These guys are really, really, really concerned about balancing the budget. And that seems only fair since they were basically the ones who unbalanced it in the first place when they worked in splendid bipartisan concert in 2001 to pass George W. Bush’s first $1.6 trillion in tax cuts.

How is it that the very people who made the mess get to clean it up?

Slide Show
Obama's Health Care Speech

It’s always possible that the Republicans will realize that their virulent opposition is not doing the country any good, and at least be obstructionist in a more cheerful way. Although Wednesday night, when the TV cameras caught the House minority leader, John Boehner, he looked as though he had just swallowed a cough drop.

Yet look at the picture of the President surrounded by members of Congress: to the President's right is Senator McConnell, and, behind him, that tanned dude, that's Boehner. Guess he couldn't help himself.

Boehner got the day off to a fine start by telling reporters he expected the president would “try to put lipstick on this pig and call it something else.” It was a stunning development, suggesting that a new page in American politics was turning, one in which members of both parties could once again come together and toss around that lipstick-pig metaphor without being accused of a sexist attack on Sarah Palin.

Emanuel wields power freely

“The president has a zenlike quality. Rahm is a pile driver.” David Axelrod President Obama’s senior adviser















Seven months after moving into his office in the West Wing, Mr. Emanuel is emerging as perhaps the most influential White House chief of staff in a generation. But with his prominence in almost everything important going on in Washington comes a high degree of risk.

Who does not implicitly understand that risk is part of the package will not get to the position he is in, and, if somehow one does, that one will not last long.

As the principal author of Mr. Obama’s do-everything-at-once strategy, he stands to become a figure of consequence in his own right if the administration stabilizes the economy and financial markets, overhauls the health care system and winds down one war while successfully prosecuting another.

The principal author? Perhaps the secondary; his boss is the principal strategist. Emanuel is already a consequential figure. If all things work out his power base will be formidable, and, if things do not go well, he will be sacrificed.

If things do not go well — and right now Mr. Obama’s political popularity is declining, his health care legislation is under conservative assault, the budget deficit is at an eye-popping level and Afghanistan remains volatile — it is Mr. Emanuel whose job will be on the line before Mr. Obama’s.

Political popularity is far too ephemeral for a week's polls, or even a month's, to derail the primary strategy of the Administration. Conservative assault is a lot of noise without much substance; a passed bill on health care reform, which will get done, will deflate the conservative juggernaut back to size. Budgets are not the primary priority right now. And Afghanistan has bedeviled the West, and Russia, for more than a century. It does need to be stabilized, and could well be so in a few months, after its election and some fighting.


David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett with Rahm Emanuel, who seems as if he is also political, legislative and communications director.



The caricature of Mr. Emanuel as a profanity-spewing operative has given way to a more nuanced view: as a profanity-spewing operative with a keen understanding of how to employ power on behalf of a new president with relatively little experience in Washington.

Who was smart enough to hire him.

Although relentlessly deferential to the president, Mr. Emanuel is clearly more chief than staff. While some predecessors husbanded their authority, lest it be diluted, friends said he believed the more someone used power, the more power that person had.

Some times caution is the wrong approach, and this is one of those times: the challenges of a busted economy are enormous, and the opportunity to get several things done within one year are too great to be cautious.

His mantra: take what victories you can, stay on the offensive and do not be afraid to stroke big egos to advance the president’s agenda.

Staying in the offensive is critical, and will prove, I am certain (almost always), the difference, and provide the winning edge. Let the right-wing rant about death squads and government bureaucrats, and focus on what needs to get done.

“I’ve heard more from Rahm in six months than I heard from Andy Card in six years, and Card’s daughter worked for me,” said former Representative Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, referring to a chief of staff under President George W. Bush.

This is one intense person. He is part of the reason President Obama will be successful, and I think that Senator Obama understood that.

Mr. Emanuel presides over a White House where people are defined by whether they went through the fires of the campaign. He did not. When Mr. Obama invited longtime aides like Mr. Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, to Camp David recently, Mr. Emanuel was not included.

Shrewd.

But when a New York Times Magazine profile of Ms. Jarrett last month explored the old scratchiness, White House officials said the normally calm Mr. Obama erupted with anger. An informal edict went out: no more cooperating with staff profiles. As a result, Mr. Emanuel declined a formal interview for this article.

Informal? C'mon.

While jousting with the right, Mr. Emanuel has tried to impose order on the left, dispatching Mr. Messina to weekly meetings with liberal interest groups called the Common Purpose Project, a tactic adopted from the Bush White House. Mr. Emanuel showed up this month amid internal tension over health care. Asked about liberal advertisements aimed at Democrats in conservative districts, he delivered an obscenity-laced tirade about the senselessness of attacking each other, participants said.

Critical. The Left is always intent on infighting, on undermining itself, and on self-destruction, seemingly unable to wield power effectively. Often, ideological purity is made more important than accomplishing concrete results.

Obama takes health risks

Members of the Senate Democratic leadership and their aides leaving the White House last week after meeting with President Obama on health care legislation.






In pursuing his proposed overhaul of the health care system, President Obama has consistently presented himself as aloof from the legislative fray, merely offering broad principles. Prominent among them is the creation of a strong, government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers and press for lower costs.

Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Obama and his advisers have been quite active, sometimes negotiating deals with a degree of cold-eyed political realism potentially at odds with the president’s rhetoric.

Cold-eyed politics? What do people think Barack Obama is? He is a politician, and how good of one is proven by his being president. He is not the evil socialist right-wingers want their zealot legions to believe he is; nor is he the soft-hearted liberal that left-wingers are fretting he is not being. He is a moderate.

Last month, for example, hospital officials were poised to appear at the White House to announce a deal limiting their industry’s share of the costs of the overhaul proposal when a wave of jitters swept through the group. Senator Max Baucus, the Finance Committee chairman and a party to the deal, had abruptly pulled out of the event. Was he backing away from his end of the deal?

Senator Baucus has emerged as a key player. Ted Kennedy's absence is part of the reason for that. Yet his position of influence in the health care debate is consistent with the President's strategy (or, perhaps better put, tactical approach): it will be Congress that will shape the legislation, not the Administration (openly, that is).

Not to worry, Jim Messina, deputy White House chief of staff, told the lobbyists, according to White House officials and lobbyists briefed on the call. The White House was standing behind the deal, Mr. Messina said, capping the industry’s costs at a maximum of $155 billion over 10 years in trade for its political support.

Trading support for money.

Some Democrats and industry lobbyists now argue that, in negotiating deals through Mr. Baucus’s panel with powerful health care interests, the White House was tacitly signaling as early as last spring that it might end up accepting something more modest than the government insurer the president has said he prefers.

He prefers; that is a key phrase. If, and I increasingly think that it will be when, the public option is negotiated away, he will say, words to the effect of, well, can't get everything we want, but we have started the process of reform.

The Finance Committee, for example, appears to be coalescing around the idea of nonprofit insurance cooperatives instead of a government-run plan. It is a proposal the health care industry prefers, but many liberal Democrats oppose, in both cases because cooperatives are likely to have less leverage over health care prices.

How much influence the White House has had in helping the process of coalescing is, and will remain, known behind closed doors. The coops will be easier to sell to moderates than a public plan, and will coopt the fire the right wing is fanning, that of creeping socialism.

Industry lobbyists and moderate Democrats in both chambers, though, argue that the White House’s actions behind the scenes show a recognition that the finance panel’s anticipated compromise is the most likely template for any final legislation.

Recognition? Methinks the WHite House has been more active than passive.

“The House has largely been a sideshow,” said Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee, a member of the so-called Blue Dog caucus of conservative Democrats. “The Senate Finance Committee is where it really matters. That’s the bottleneck.”

Members and staff of the four other committees say the White House has largely stayed on the sidelines. “They have been — what is a good way to put it? — available for consultation,” Mr. Cooper said.

What are they going to say in public?

Mr. Obama and his top aides have immersed themselves in the Senate Finance Committee process. The president talks to Mr. Baucus several times a week, people briefed on their conversations say. Mr. Obama has also held a few calls with the panel’s ranking Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

Ah, yes, Grassley, he of the "pulling the plug on grandma" infamy. Key player, but something of a schmuck.

Lobbyists for the drug and hospital industries say that, as early as June, White House officials directed them to work out cost-saving deals with Mr. Baucus’s committee. Drug industry lobbyists said they negotiated a deal to contribute $80 billion over 10 years toward the cost of an overhaul with Mr. Baucus, under White House supervision, before taking it to the president for final approval. House lawmakers have said they were caught by surprise when it was announced.

House lawmakers? The leadership? Rank-and-file members?

Hospital industry lobbyists, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the White House, say they negotiated their $155 billion in concessions with Mr. Baucus and the administration in tandem. House staff members were present, including for at least one White House meeting, but their role was peripheral, the lobbyists said.

That makes $235 billion of the about $1 trillion estimated needed funds to pay for the health plan that is bandied about as the to-be-legislation.

Several hospital lobbyists involved in the White House deals said it was understood as a condition of their support that the final legislation would not include a government-run health plan paying Medicare rates — generally 80 percent of private sector rates — or controlled by the secretary of health and human services.

Hospital lobby is speaking confidently. Too early? October will bring the answer.

Mr. Emanuel and liberal Democrats argued that the White House had worked more closely with the Senate Finance Committee because it was stepping in to break up legislative logjams. In the same way, they said, Mr. Obama and Mr. Emanuel had personally interceded to resolve a last-minute revolt by conservative House Democrats that threatened to derail a bill in the energy and commerce panel in July.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said Mr. Obama had assured House members that he did not intend to let the Senate Finance Committee determine the final bill.

It will have to be negotiated in conference. Will any one party have a weighted hand?

“This is going to be a genuine conference with give and take,” Mr. Waxman said. He added: “The president has said he wants a public option to keep everybody honest. He hasn’t said he wants a co-op as a public option.”

Negotiations will determine the final legislation. Some details that are now being argued about might well disappear. That's how laws are made.

Target of Racism, Swastika

A vandalized sign outside the office of Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., is shown Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009 in Smyrna, Ga. Scott had a contentious community meeting on health care last week. Scott, who is black, said the swastika is the latest example of what he believes is an increasingly hateful and racist debate over reforming health care. The Atlanta lawmaker said he also has received mail in recent days that used N-word references to him, and that characterized President Barack Obama as a Marxist

The use of words and symbols of hate and intolerance has to eventually explode into some very ugly things. After Limbaugh called the President a Nazi and Beck called the President a racist, the tone got uglier. Palin followed with lies about death squads and evil. Now we have a manifestation of that ugliness.

The right-wing backlash against Democrats took a decidedly ugly turn in Smyrna, Georgia, home to moderate Democratic Rep. David Scott: On Tuesday, a swastika was found painted across a sign with the Congressman's name at his office.

Rep. David Scott: http://davidscott.house.gov/

Take a Chill Pill

You can’t channel surf on cable these days without seeing pundits who insist that: 1) Obama has over-learned the lessons of Clintoncare; 2) ceded too much power to Congress; and 3) blown it by not detailing what he wants in a final bill at this point. These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. The nattering nabobs of an earlier era would have likewise slammed Abraham Lincoln when he said, apropos of his general outlook, that “my policy is to have no policy.” But Lincoln knew a thing or two about political leadership. Within general parameters (pro-slavery or anti-slavery, pro-health reform or anti-health reform), a president’s job is to preserve enough flexibility to get the results he seeks while carrying most of the people along with him. A studied ambiguity as events unfold is indispensable to this task, and Obama intuits this just right.


Take a Chill Pill
by Matt Miller
August 6, 2009 | 10:57pm

No matter what the critics say, health-care reform isn’t in trouble yet. The Daily Beast’s Matt Miller says the bill should get through Congress and offers a prescription for making it easier to swallow.

Business-minded Democrats and Republicans are apoplectic over the emerging House health plan because it funds expanded coverage with stiff new taxes on business, as well as surtaxes that could lift marginal rates on high-earning Americans toward the high 50s. For their part, liberal Democrats are apoplectic that the all-important Senate Finance Committee (fresh from a White House powwow Thursday with the President) is throwing the public option overboard, which they view as the litmus test for serious reform. If I hear anyone else explode over what they see as the fatal flaws of what’s happening on health care, I may go apoplectic myself. Which is why my advice to well-meaning zealots of every stripe is to chill. The truth is that everything that’s taking place right now is irrelevant.

Why do I say this? Whatever your leanings, if (like me) you’re hoping for some kind of major health reform this year, the crucial text at this juncture is from Schoolhouse Rock—where that famous old ditty, “I’m Just A Bill,” lays out how a bill becomes a law. We’re at the point in the process where this is literally all that matters. For health reform to happen this year, something has to pass the House, and something has to pass the Senate. It doesn’t matter exactly what those somethings are, or how offensive big chunks of those somethings may be to some of us. Never forget that when the Clintons convulsed the country over health care in 1993 and 1994, these simple Schoolhouse Rock steps never came close to happening. For all the drama back then, nothing came to a vote.

Even if his poll numbers are a bit tarnished, does anyone really want to bet against Obama seizing the presidential megaphone and making health care reform compelling?

Only after something passes the House and the Senate will the real work begin. The conference committee to hammer out a final, identical bill will be the mother of all summits. That’s where President Obama must weigh in heavily to shape and then sell the outcome. Contrary to all the carping, what he and the White House do before then on the specifics of the legislation doesn’t much matter. The White House’s only job until we get to conference is to shape the climate of opinion with one simple end in mind. Legislators need to get the message that their constituents want “change” on health care, and will punish them for supporting the status quo. The White House’s mission is to be sure that enough legislators feel they cannot safely oppose Obama’s definition of “change.” That’s it. (It’s also a tall enough order, what with organized conservative protesters having the early edge in disrupting town hall meetings as lawmakers head home for recess).

You can’t channel surf on cable these days without seeing pundits who insist that: 1) Obama has over-learned the lessons of Clintoncare; 2) ceded too much power to Congress; and 3) blown it by not detailing what he wants in a final bill at this point. These folks don’t know what they’re talking about. The nattering nabobs of an earlier era would have likewise slammed Abraham Lincoln when he said, apropos of his general outlook, that “my policy is to have no policy.” But Lincoln knew a thing or two about political leadership. Within general parameters (pro-slavery or anti-slavery, pro-health reform or anti-health reform), a president’s job is to preserve enough flexibility to get the results he seeks while carrying most of the people along with him. A studied ambiguity as events unfold is indispensable to this task, and Obama intuits this just right.

Once we get to conference, however, Obama’s role must change. That will be the moment. That’s when he and his team have to knock heads, crafting a deal that covers everyone, funds this in economically rational ways, and slows system-wide cost growth. As importantly, that’s when Obama must move from Rose Garden jawboning and press conference talking points to a riveting series of speeches on health care that will rival his race speech during the campaign. He needs to take the issue to an entirely new level of adult conversation, frame the case for “change” versus “the status quo” in ways that empathize with the fears and aspirations of all sides, and show why the path he’s forged is good for average Americans and a fit with the journey the country has been on since its founding. Only Obama can provide the macro political framing and cover and energy that at the end of the day (around Thanksgiving) gets a majority of legislators to transcend their own preferred versions of reform and agree to act.

Even if his poll numbers are a bit tarnished, does anyone really want to bet against Obama seizing the presidential megaphone and making this compelling?

Between now and then, everyone should take a deep breath. The talking heads have to fill up air time, but the rest of us should remember: until we get to conference, it’s all prelude.

Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.

Memo from Larry

Memo to Congress.
From: Larry Summers
Re: We fixed the Economy

Mr. Summers does not lack in confidence, yet this spin control is important.

We have traveled a remarkable distance over the past six months in pulling our economy
back from the brink of economic catastrophe. The wide-ranging efforts taken by the
Obama Administration, working closely with the 111th Congress – implementing the
Recovery Act, restoring confidence in the financial system, providing assistance for
responsible homeowners and pressing to get credit flowing to small businesses – have
helped pull the economy out of a nosedive, and have put us on a path toward a sustained
economic recovery. While we still have a long way go, we are far closer to that recovery
today than we were in January.

Where We Were
What We Have Done
Where We Are Now

The Argentine Firecracker

Gail Collins on the mark.


The only good news this week for Gov. Mark (“I love your tan lines”) Sanford is that all those celebrity deaths have knocked him off the top of the news cycle.

Poor Farrah Fawcett got knocked off the top of the page by Michael Jackson.

For the rest of us, the whole vanishing-governor-sneaks-off-to-visit-Argentine-squeeze has had a number of side benefits. The Appalachian Trail has certainly gotten a well-deserved shot of publicity. And I have to believe that business is booming for call-forwarding services.

Another big plus is that Governor Sanford has provided us with a chance to revisit little-remembered historical precedents for scandals involving American politicians and Argentine women.

O, yes: Fanne Foxe, “The Argentine Firecracker," who took a hysterical leap into the Tidal Basin after a fight with her inebriated escort, the House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. I remember.

Foxe was a stripper at the Silver Slipper nightclub in Washington, and the married Mills began escorting her around during a period of major-league alcoholism. They were speeding past the Jefferson Memorial when they were stopped by police. Foxe jumped out, took a dive into the Tidal Basin, and pretty soon Mills was in the headlines and in disgrace.

Years later, after he had retired, dried out and returned to Washington as a tax lawyer, Mills told a Times reporter that during his Firecracker days, he was drinking a half-gallon of vodka a night and had hallucinations that buzzards were chasing him. As a result, he said, he lost control of his committee and failed to report out a bill in which he had a great interest.

“I had President Ford convinced on national health,” Mills said. “I could have passed it on the floor. But hell, I couldn’t get the damned committee to go with me. They had never failed to do that before, and I know now it was because of my drinking that they didn’t.”

All of that I didn't know about.

Now South Carolinians will have to decide if they want their state run by a man who can’t remember to leave a forwarding number when he scampers off to make whoopee in a different hemisphere.

While most people in the state seem to feel as if it would be swell if Sanford just resigned, the governor isn’t showing any signs that he intends to quit. It isn’t entirely clear why he wants to hang on. He’s term limited. And whatever presidential ambitions he harbored were pretty much quashed when he vanished and aides started explaining that he took a hike (well, not really) because he was emotionally exhausted from his fight over the state budget. You had to ask what he’d have to do to get over North Korea.

Really.

So far, it appears that Sanford is going to devote his career to apologizing. On Wednesday, he held a press conference and apologized to everyone from his father-in-law to American Christianity. On Thursday, he was closeted with his wife, which undoubtedly involved heavy-duty apology time. Friday, he called his staff together for more apologies, including one to the leader of the Commerce Department, to whom the governor conveyed his regrets for having undermined the dignity of a state trade mission by having sex on the Buenos Aires stop.



It was right about then that Sanford compared himself to King David, who “fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways, but was able to pick up the pieces.” I will end here so we can all ask ourselves whether the entire course of the Old Testament would have been different if David and Bathsheba had had access to e-mail.

Amen.

Old Confirmation Wars Fueling Some Critics Now

Judge Robert H. Bork lost his battle for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987. (Dude makes Scalia look friendly.)
















Miguel Estrada’s appeals court nomination failed in 2003.





Court Nominee Criticized as Relying on Foreign Law





Conservatives who oppose the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court can quickly list their criticisms of her record. But the fervor with which some of those criticisms have been hurled may not be just about Judge Sotomayor. Those emotions, say people who have followed the confirmation wars, are often fueled by the sense of grievance among conservatives and Republicans who say their judicial nominees have been treated unfairly and, sometimes, disrespectfully.

Richard A. Epstein, a noted libertarian-conservative scholar at the University of Chicago, said he had concluded that the case against Judge Sotomayor was thin but that it was energized by the anger over the treatment of past conservative nominees like Robert H. Bork, who lost his confirmation battle in 1987, and Clarence Thomas, who was narrowly confirmed four years later.

“There’s no question that those hurts remain powerful today,” Professor Epstein said in an interview. “And there’s no question that Breyer and Ginsburg were never subjected to anything remotely like that,” a reference to Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the last two Democratic nominees, both of whom faced relatively easy confirmation proceedings.

It has been ugly. Yet if Breyer and Ginsburg got in easily, why is Epstein complaining? Republicans had their chances, and chose to go easy on them.

The Limbaugh and Gingrich comments provoked a small backlash from some Republican senators who, by and large, have been more muted in their criticisms of Judge Sotomayor.

Because of political calculations Congressional Republicans, who have to run campaigns, have not gotten shrill or abusive: the party needs Hispanics.

Neomi Rao, a law professor at George Mason University who worked on judicial nominations for Mr. Bush, said Mr. Bush “should have gotten to name the first Hispanic justice on the court.”

“He really wanted to do so,” Professor Rao said. But she said that he was largely stymied when Democrats blocked Mr. Estrada from going on the appeals court.

That's politics.

Democrats have their own grievances, notably a failure of Senate Republicans to consider a group of appeals court nominees during the Clinton administration. That group included Elena Kagan, who became the dean of Harvard Law School and is now solicitor general in the Obama administration. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a principal organizer of the strategy to use filibusters to block Republican appeals court nominees, has argued that it was needed because Republican presidents have tried to choose ideological nominees to move the courts rightward, while Democrats have been less concerned with their nominees’ judicial philosophy.

The tit-for-tat has been going on for decades. There is institutional memory on each side, Senators passing on to new colleagues the inside dope, the resentments, the battle plan, the tactics. It is ongoing.

Charles J. Cooper, a Washington lawyer who was a senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration and involved in the Bork battle, lamented what he said was the degradation of the confirmation process.

Agreed, though this commentators is hardly an impartial observer.

The beginning, Mr. Cooper said, was doubtlessly the Bork confirmation battle in which the tools, sensibilities and ethics of modern political campaigns were in play as critics accused Judge Bork of being out of the mainstream on issues like civil rights and women’s rights.

It might have begun then, yet the Democrats had little power during the ascendancy of Reaganism; fighting Bork was one of the few things they could do to defend their side of the equation. I do recall the Bork fight being intense and getting ugly, but to blame the Democrats is too easy.

“That’s when things changed qualitatively,” he said. “And unfortunately it contributes to the public grasp of the courts as political institutions.”

Aside from the condenscension toward the public, it is disingenious to charge that politics never before entered into choosing Justices.

The sense of grievance is reinforced by events like an annual picnic hosted by the Federalist Society, a conservative group, for student leaders at the home of Theodore B. Olson, a Washington lawyer. The young conservatives, participants say, are able to gaze at guests like Judge Bork, Mr. Estrada and Justice Thomas, who are regarded at those events as something akin to living martyrs.

Sounds a brainwashing session, or, perhaps better said, a meeting of the minds, as much as anything else: the grievances are passed on by the old bulls to the new generation who carry on the battle and the sense of having been mistreated.

There were no cheatin'

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a sermon during Friday prayers at Tehran University on Friday










Iran's Ayatollah: Stop protesting or deal with 'consequences' Calls Ahmadinejad's reelection an "absolute victory" and blames west for unrest. Blah, blah, blah.

He called Britain the biggest evil. Bigger than America the Great Satan? We're making progress, of sorts. Blaming outsiders for unrest is a time-tested way to deflect criticism, but it ignores the domestic truth: there is popular dissatisfaction.

• China Orders Google to Cut Services

I guess the Politburo hasn't been watching teevee; in the age of Twitter and camera cellphones, communications can not be restricted.

Khamenei Praises Vote Iran's supreme leader said there was "definitive victory" and no rigging in disputed elections, offering no concession to protesters demanding the vote be held again.

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"The U.S. president said 'We were waiting for a day like this to see people on the street,'" Mr. Khamenei said. "They write to us and say they respect the Islamic Republic and then they make comments like this.... Which one should we believe?"

Dismissing Obama won't be that easy.

The Friday prayer was televised live on state-run Channel One. The camera showed Mr. Ahmadinejad sitting in the front row and conservative candidate Mohsen Rezaei a few rows back. It wasn't clear whether Mr. Mousavi or Mehdi Karroubi had accepted the leader's invitation to come to the prayers.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 405-1 Friday to condemn Tehran's crackdown on demonstrators and the government's interference with Internet and cell phone communications.

Do I hear the whimper of irrelevancy?

Headline news

Democrats in Senate Block Money to Close Guantánamo

by DAVID M. HERSZENHORN In an abrupt shift, Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million President Obama requested to close the detention center.

Advocates of Gun Rights Are Poised for a Victory

By CARL HULSE

President Obama appears likely to sign a provision, added to a measure on credit cards, that would allow loaded and concealed weapons in national parks.

Calif. Voters Reject Measures to Keep State Solvent

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER 56 minutes ago

The results dealt a severe setback to the state’s fragile fiscal structure and to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

First Lady’s Guests Reflect Speech Themes

Michelle Obama, center, flanked by, from left, Dina Leach, Ty’Sheoma Bethea, Officer Richard DeCoatsworth of the Philadelphia police and Jill Biden.


More Photos >







February 25, 2009

First Lady’s Guests Reflect Speech Themes
By MICHAEL FALCONE

WASHINGTON — Seated in Michelle Obama’s box on Tuesday night were living symbols of the ideas in President Obama’s first speech to a joint session of Congress, including a bank executive, Leonard Abess, who shared a vast fortune with his employees, and an eighth-grade student from South Carolina, Ty’Sheoma Bethea, who in a letter had urged Congress not to neglect education financing.

Mr. Obama used a line in Ty’Sheoma’s letter, “We are not quitters,” as one of his closing themes.

Mr. Abess split $60 million among several hundred current and former workers at his bank.

Other guests sitting with Mrs. Obama included Lilly M. Ledbetter, whose Supreme Court case resulted in Congressional action to prevent wage discrimination, and Jonathon N. James, an Army veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan.

Bob Dixson, the mayor of Greensburg, Kan., which was destroyed by a tornado in May 2008, was also invited. Mr. Obama praised the spirit of that community, which is being redeveloped as an energy-efficient “green town.”

Two other guests were sophomores at Washington high schools, Akrem Muzemil and Francisco Rodriguez. Both plan on attending college and are interested in studying engineering.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely landed a jetliner in the Hudson River last month, saving 150 passengers and four other crew members. Mr. Sullenberger’s first officer and a flight attendant also sat in the speaker’s box.

Ms. Pelosi also chose to give two of the prime seats to labor leaders, John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union.

Murderer's Row?

The chief executives of banks that have received federal-government aid testified Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee, including, from left: Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, James Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, Robert Kelly of Bank of New York Mellon, Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America, Ronald Logue of State Street, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup and John Stumpf of Wells Fargo.








These guys got grilled, and deservedly so. And about time that bankers heard the wrath of the people.

Chief executives at eight banks and securities firms that have gotten $165 billion in federal aid were barraged by U.S. lawmakers, who showed little patience for a charm offensive aimed at defusing ire over pay and lending. During Wednesday's seven-hour hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) referred to the CEOs, sitting in alphabetical order at a long table, as "captains of the universe."When Bank of America Corp. Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lewis responded, "corporals of the universe," Rep. Waters looked at him blankly. "Did you raise your credit-card rates?" she demanded.

I am not often impressed with Representative Waters, but she was spot on this time.

It was a typical moment in a hearing that underscored how big-bank CEOs have become lightning rods for the anger and misery fueled by falling home prices, rising unemployment and the deepening recession. From Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein to John Stumpf of Wells Fargo & Co., the eight executives endured relentless questions that included being forced to recite their salary, bonus and stock compensation in a hearing meant to assess the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Bad, bad boys.

In 2006 and 2007, the eight executives got total compensation of $401 million, according to securities filings. The combined stock-market value of their companies has plunged 69% since the Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked in October 2007.

Wealthy bad boys.

Anticipating tough questions about pay and perks, James Dimon, chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., took the Acela, Amtrak's high-speed train, and stayed overnight at Washington's Park Hyatt hotel. He bumped into Bank of New York Mellon Corp. CEO Robert Kelly at breakfast. Mr. Blankfein and John Mack, Morgan Stanley's chief executive, flew commercial flights, but Mr. Blankfein stayed at a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Mr. Pandit spent hours cramming for the hearing.

Well, at least they realized that taking a corporate jet would have been a bad move. A room in the Hyatt goes for $439 - $499 (an Ambassador suite goes for about $3,800). The Ritz Carlton advertises itself as a luxury hotel. Its rates start at $549. Guess Lloyd still doesn't think he's gotta slum it.

"You come to us today on your bicycles, after buying Girl Scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa, telling us: 'We're sorry. We won't do it again,' "said Rep. Michael Capuano (D., Mass.). "America doesn't trust you anymore."

Good line. Trust? You kiddin'?

Gregg's Appointment to Commerce on Track

This is really a fascinating development. Republican Sen. Judd Gregg is the leading candidate to become the next Commerce Secretary, a move that could happen in the next day or two, White House officials said on Saturday. Gregg is a Senator from New Hampshire, and is a Republican. That in itself is interesting, but there is another twist: the Governor of New Hampshire is a Democrat, and guess from which party Senator Gregg's replacement will come from?

The real question is why Judd Gregg is doing this: he knows the consequences of his actions: the Democrats could have a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority in the Senate, not just insuring that the Democrats will be able to pass bills they want, but insuring the Republicans will be stymied at every turn.

Still, it might not be that simple.

Gregg's selection and exit from the Senate would clear the way for the New Hampshire governor, John Lynch (D), to appoint a Democrat as his replacement - giving Pres. Barack Obama the 60-vote majority he needs for a filibuster-proof majority. But Lynch, a moderate, could appoint a Republican instead, filling the seat with a caretaker senator until the next election, in 2010.

Still, this is clearly a trial balloon.

Gregg acknowledged on Friday that he was under consideration for the post. Administration officials took it a step further, saying he is atop the list to fill a job that has sat empty since New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) withdrew his nomination because of an investigation involving government contracts.

But Gregg would also bring more than bragging rights: he could help Obama sell entitlement and budget reform to a wary Congress and to the business community, of which Gregg has been a strong advocate. Gregg, a three-term senator, is former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and helped devise the $700 billion bank bailout package that passed last year.


O, to be a fly on the wall.

Defense and No Apologies From Author of Fiscal Bill

The stimulus bill, officially called the Economy Recovery something or other Act, is being defended and attacked by pundits, talking heads, politicians, and others. Republicans ridicule it by pointing out it contained 50 million dollars for condoms; even Chris Matthews picked up on that one. Obama jettisoned it. The Wall Street Journal condemns it as wasteful. Republicans want more tax cuts, less spending. Democrats want more spending, less tax cuts.

In a New York Times article, Defense and No Apologies From Author of Fiscal Bill, about the HOuse member who authored it, David Obey, the following sentence jumped out at me.

Mr. Obey’s impatience, temper and occasionally cutting tone are well known. Even as he outlined the economic plan before Mr. Obama’s inauguration, he flippantly referred to the new president as “the crown prince.” The remark was evidence that Mr. Obey, like other veteran chairmen involved in writing the stimulus package, might not be entirely deferential to the new president until he proved he could exert his influence.

Much of that is going on: Republicans, even Democrats, are testing Obama, seeing how far they can push him, daring him to shows his toughness. I am confident he will show who is boss.

Bush's Influence in Final Days

This caught my attention: In an article about the Detroit bailout bill being negotiated between the White House and Congress, Bush's influence is discussed. The phrasing is particular.

The White House has outmaneuvered Congress many times, on topics including the war in Iraq and surveillance powers. But this was a rare instance of the speaker backtracking on an issue of significance, something that has happened rarely since she rose to power in 2006.