The paranoid style in American politics

This is a classic statement of movements in American politics which are often hard for international observers to grasp.

http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/0014706

Congressional District Newsletter 4/27/2010

This week we move to the East Coast and Virginia's 2nd congressional district, a district that crosses the Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Coast of Virginia. This November a freshman Democrat, Glenn Nye, faces a tough challenger in a local Car Dealership owner, Scot Rigell.










Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District

District Background (taken directly from CQPolitics)

Taking in the state’s Atlantic coastline, the 2nd is dominated by Virginia Beach, a center for white-collar military families and retirees. The district takes in parts of Norfolk and Hampton and crosses the Chesapeake Bay inlet to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Growth in Virginia Beach slowed in the wake of military base closings and a national recession. The 2005 BRAC round ordered Fort Monroe, in Hampton, closed by 2011, but increases at the 2nd’s other bases and commercial development at Fort Monroe may mean the 2nd will avoid job losses. The 2nd also includes half of largely blue-collar and Democratic-leaning Norfolk (shared with the 3rd). Its naval base, shipbuilding and shipping drive the economy.

Any conservatism here stems more from military and economic issues than from social questions, and the 2nd has followed the growing Democratic trend in Virginia. Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential race here with 50 percent of the vote.

Major Industry
Military, tourism, shipbuilding

Military Bases
Naval Station Norfolk, 51,413 military, 1,975 civilian (2008); Naval Air Station Oceana, 12,000 military, 2,500 civilian; Langley Air Force Base, 7,948 military, 2,100 civilian (2008); Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, 7,700 military, 1,815 civilian; Naval Air Station Oceana Dam Neck Annex, 3,600 military, 1,300 civilian (2005); Fort Monroe (Army), 1,250 military, 1,680 civilian (2009); Fort Story (Army), 842 military, 71 civilian (2008)

Cities
Virginia Beach, 425,257; Norfolk (pt.), 112,102; Hampton (pt.), 54,753



Electoral History & the 2010 Elections (taken directly from CQPolitics)

Glenn Nye (D), one of three Democrats to win GOP-held seats in Virginia in 2008, will have a tough time holding on in 2010. He’s young and smart and will not be outworked. Still, his job may be even harder than was anticipated several months ago.

The Republicans have a crowded field of contenders who want to take Nye on. Drake, the congresswoman whom Nye ousted last cycle, is not running again, but has thrown her support to Scott Rigell, the wealthy owner of a local car dealership.

Now, with Rigell emerging as clear favorite among Republican candidates, Nye’s re-election bid increasingly bears the marks of a very competitive contest.

As Nye and his party shift to playing defense in a historically challenging midterm election year, CQ Politics changed the race rating for the 2nd District race in early April to Tossup from Leans Democratic. This rating change had been held back because the June 8 Republican primary was so crowded, with six candidates vying. But the general election contest bodes as competitive whoever wins the Republican nomination.

Rigell is the preferred candidate of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm. He has the personal and campaign resources and other political assets to run a very competitive race against Nye.

Also competing for the GOP nomination are Ed Maulbeck, a businessman and retired Navy SEAL; Scott Taylor, another retired Navy SEAL; Naval Reserve Capt. Ben Loyola; and editor Jessica Sandlin.

Nye has represented the area in and around Virginia Beach only since 2009. He won the seat by defeating Drake by 5 percentage points in an ideal political year for Democrats.
Democrats have a much less favorable environment to run in this year, and their task is made more difficult because there is no presidential race to entice voters to polls and no big statewide race — neither U.S. senator is up for election in 2010, and Virginia elected its governor in 2009.
In Nye’s district, the House race will top the ballot, and turnout can be expected to be a lot closer to the 2006 level of 173,000 than to the 2008 level of 271,000.

Nye actually received a slightly larger share of the vote than Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who edged Republican John McCain in the district by 50 percent to 48 percent. And he does have some major political assets.

Like many of his junior colleagues from politically competitive districts, including freshman Reps. Tom Perriello of Virginia’s 5th and Gerry Connolly of Virginia’s 11th, Nye is well-funded and will not be caught off-guard in the fall campaign.

And it will be difficult for Republicans to portray him as a lockstep adherent of Democratic leaders because his voting record is among the least liberal in the House Democratic Caucus. He voted for the economic stimulus law but bucked his party on the cap-and-trade climate change bill and a Democratic-written health care bill President Obama recently signed into law.

One Republican challenging Nye has opted to run as an independent candidate. Kenny Golden, a former chairman of the Republican Party organization in Virginia Beach, said in a video April 9 on his Facebook page that he is concerned “this primary has already been decided, and it was decided a good while ago.”

Golden was referring to support Rigell has received for his campaign from the NRCC and some GOP luminaries in southeastern Virginia.[2]

The Candidates

For the Democratic Nomination:
· Glenn Nye (D) – Nye grew up in Norfolk and graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He was a Foreign Service officer and served in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq. He is currently the Chairman of the House Small Businesses Subcommittee on Contracting and Technology.[3]

For the GOP Nomination:
· Scott Rigell (R) – Rigell grew up on Virginia Beach and served in the United States Marine Corps Reserve and graduated with an MBA from Regent University in Virginia. He has been very involved in many community organizations.[4]
· Ed Maulbeck (R) – Maulbeck worked as a carpenter for a few years before enlisting in the armed services, and excelled as a Navy SEAL. He went on to serve the military until he sustained an injury that eventually led to his retirement.[5]
· Scott Taylor (R) – Taylor became a U.S. Navy SEAL at the age of 19 and served for eight years. He owns a real estate brokerage company, a fitness center, and a security consulting firm.[6]
· Ben Loyola (R) – Loyola was born in the United States to a father who mutinied against Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba. He served in the U.S. Navy, founded his own engineering service contracting firm, and has been involved in community organizations.[7]
· Jessica Sandlin (R) – Sandlin was born and grew up in Northern Virginia, and graduated from James Madison University for English and secondary education. She has worked as a substitute teacher and for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).[8]

The Issues

Glenn Nye (D) –
· Tax cuts for small businesses
· Veterans’ rights[9]

Scott Rigell (R) –
· Veterans – Servicemen and women should have access to technology, training, weapons, support and equipment, and veterans should have solid benefits.[10]
· Job Creation – The government should not be bailing out financial institutions. Small businesses should be a priority and benefit from lower taxes and regulation.[11]

Ed Maulbeck (R) –
· Economy – The government should not spend money it doesn’t have, and then work to repay its debts. The administration should not be socializing the economy.[12]
· Unemployment – Illegal immigration is causing a lot of problems for small businesses. The government needs to focus on creating jobs.[13]

Scott Taylor (R) –
· Budget & Government Spending – The government “should cut wasteful spending, improve technology for greater efficiency, reform huge entitlements, and ensure that we fully fund our priorities in national defense.”[14]
· Jobs & Economy – The government should keep taxes low for businesses, keep regulation limited, and offer tax cuts for small businesses.[15]

Ben Loyola (R) –
· Jobs & Economy – “Taxes must be decreased or eliminated, the burden must be lessened, and the red tape must be cut in order for business and our workers to operate freely.” The market must be kept free from government intrusion.[16]
· Limiting Government – “The federal government needs to focus on national defense and criminal justice rather than placing undue burdens on the American citizens and private industry. We must eliminate the growth of the federal government and scale back the size and scope to constitutionally acceptable levels.”[17]

Jessica Sandlin (R) –
· “Fiscal sanity, a climate for free enterprise, smaller government, renewable energy, healthcare costs, education, immigration, and veteran’s issues.”[18]



[1] “Virginia - 2nd District,” CQ Politics - http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=district-2010-VA-02
[2] Ibid.
[3] “About,” Vote Glenn Nye for US Congress - http://www.glennnye.com/
[4] “Scott Rigell’s Biography,” Rigell for Congress Campaign - http://www.scottrigell.com/biography/
[5] “Biography,” Ed Maulbeck for Congress - http://www.edmaulbeck.com/biography.html
[6] “About Scott,” Taylor for Congress - http://www.scotttaylorforcongress.com/about/
[7] “About Ben Loyola,” Ben Loyola for Congress - http://www.benloyola.com/about/ben/
[8] “Meet Jessica,” Jessica Sandlin for Congress - http://sandlinforcongress.com/meet-jessica
[9] “About,” Vote Glenn Nye for US Congress - http://www.glennnye.com/
[10] “Veterans,” Rigell for Congress Campaign - http://www.scottrigell.com/topics/?topicId=25
[11] “Job Creation,” Rigell for Congress Campaign - http://www.scottrigell.com/topics/?topicId=15
[12] “Economy,” Ed Maulbeck for Congress - http://www.edmaulbeck.com/economy.html
[13] “Unemployment,” Ed Maulbeck for Congress - http://www.edmaulbeck.com/unemployment.html
[14] “On the Issues,” Taylor for Congress - http://www.scotttaylorforcongress.com/on-the-issues/
[15] Ibid.
[16] “Jobs and the Economy,” Ben Loyola for Congress - http://www.benloyola.com/issues/economy/
[17] “Limiting Government,” Ben Loyola for Congress - http://www.benloyola.com/issues/government/
[18] “Visit HOME,” Jessica Sandlin for Congress - http://sandlinforcongress.com/

Tea Party Article

Here is a link to an article by Forbes magazine's Bruce Bartlett on the Tea Party Movement in American Politics. This article beats up the tea party a bit, but also provides some good information clearing up myths about tax burdens in America.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/18/tea-party-ignorant-taxes-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett_2.html

If you found this article to your liking, here is a link to Bartlett's homepage on the Forbes Magazine website, and has links to all of the articles Bartlett has written recently.

http://search.forbes.com/search/colArchiveSearch?author=bruce+and+bartlett&aname=Bruce+Bartlett

Congressional Newsletter

This week we look at Michigan's 1st congressional district. Democrats dominate local politics in this district, but a majority of citizens are also strong social conservatives, and very pro gun rights:




Michigan’s 1st Congressional District

Background (from CQPolitics):

Beginning along the Saginaw Bay shore, the 1st stretches 25,000 square miles from Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula to take in the entire Upper Peninsula (U.P.). Full of rolling, forested hills, the rural 1st encompasses 44 percent of Michigan’s land mass, but did not contain a single city with more than 20,000 residents at the time of the 2000 census.

Tourism is a major economic engine in the 1st, and many down-state residents head north to ski, hunt and fish. Touching three of the Great Lakes, the 1st has more freshwater shoreline than any other district in the continental United States. Mackinac Island, known for its prohibition on cars, its Victorian-style lake houses and its fudge, is a popular destination. Isle Royale, the state’s northernmost outpost, plays host to wolves, elk and backpackers.

Self-proclaimed “Yoopers” from the U.P. are connected to the rest of the district in Northern Michigan only by the Mackinac Bridge. Despite being Michiganders, Yoopers, isolated from the rest of their state, tend to identify culturally with nearby Wisconsinites or Canadians. Although logging remains important, nearly tapped-out resources in the existing mining industry now provide only modest incomes for district residents. Keweenaw County, once a booming copper mining center at the northern tip of the U.P., now has the highest unemployment rate in the state.

The district has suffered from recent national economic downturns, the continuing auto industry decline and steady population loss. Housing markets have crashed in Lower Peninsula lakefront towns such as Petoskey, Torch Lake and Charlevoix, established beach resort and second-home havens for residents of the state and visitors from across the upper Midwest.

There is a strong current of social conservatism in the 1st, particularly with regard to gun rights, although Democrats still dominate local politics. Democrat Barack Obama eked out a 2-percentage-point victory here in the 2008 presidential election.[1]

Electoral History & the 2010 Elections (from CQPolitics)

Bart Stupak’s image as a center-right Democrat helped him build a long House career in northern Michigan’s conservative-leaning 1st District — and his decision not to run for re-election hampers Democrats’ prospects for holding onto the seat. CQ Politics’ rating on the 1st District race, at Safe Democratic prior to Stupak’s April 9 retirement announcement, now rates the 1st District race a Tossup.

Since first winning the seat in 1992, Stupak has been re-elected by comfortable margins by voters in the vast district, which takes in all of the largely rural Upper Peninsula and a sizable chunk of the Lower Peninsula inland from the coast of Lake Huron. The swing district, which has a history of favoring moderates from both parties, narrowly went for Barack Obama as the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, but a backlash against Democratic leadership at the state and national levels has given Republicans momentum in what’s expected to be a hard-fought contest for the open seat.
Stupak’s decision came shortly after he had played a highly visible role — and had become the target of attacks from both ends of the ideological spectrum — in the climactic debates that preceded the enactment of the sweeping legislation to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

Activists on the left first assailed him for leading a bloc that demanded language barring any federal money from being used to obtain an abortion. Then conservatives, some of whom had hailed Stupak as a hero for his stand, turned on him after he brokered a compromise and cast a crucial vote in favor of final passage of the legislation, a major policy and political priority for President Obama and the leaders of the congressional Democratic majority. “Tea Party” activists launched an ad campaign against him and held rallies in his district.

There’s already a Democrat in the race who had been ready to challenge Stupak from the left in the Aug. 3 primary: former Charlevoix County Commissioner Connie Saltonstall, who has the backing of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood and National Organization of Women. She has raised nearly $100,000 on the Democratic fundraising site Act Blue.

But Bill Ballenger, publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, said Democrats “better come up with somebody who is pro-life” if they hope to win in Stupak’s socially conservative district.

Among the names circulating in Michigan are those of Michael Prusi, the state Senate’s Democratic leader, and state Rep. Jeff Mayes. Ballenger said Prusi as “ideally positioned” to defend the seat for the Democratic Party. Former state Rep. Don Koivisto, who now heads the state Agriculture Department, also could make a credible run, he said.

Democrats also are looking at state Reps. Gary McDowell, Mike Lahti, Judy Nerat and Steve Lindberg as possible contenders.

Some rookie Republican candidates were already running, and now that there’s no incumbent to try to topple, more seasoned GOP officials are expected to consider the race.

The leader among Republicans who’ve already declared is surgeon Dan Benishek, who enjoyed a fundraising surge after Stupak’s health care vote.

State Sen. Jason Allen, who is term-limited this year, and former state Rep. Tom Casperson would be serious GOP contenders should they choose to run. Casperson, who is running for the state Senate, lost to Stupak in 2008, but had been a strong vote-getter in statehouse races, Ballenger said.

Former state Rep. Scott Shackleton could be another strong candidate for the GOP in a district that favored Obama over Republican John McCain by 50 percent to 48 percent, but before that gave Republican George W. Bush 53 percent of its votes in each of the prior two presidential elections.[2]

[1] “Politics in America District Profile,” CQPolitics - http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=district-2010-MI-01
[2] “Michigan – 1st District,” CQPolitics - http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=district-2010-MI-01

This week's newsletter focuses on the retirement of Justice Stevens, Immigration reform, and the recent Nuclear summit. Articles on Kyrgystan, and the upcoming elections in America also.








American Politics:

G.O.P. Weighs Political Price of Court Fight
By PETER BAKER and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — The retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens presents a test for Republicans as much as it does for President Obama as they weigh how much they want to wage a high-profile battle over ideological issues in the months before crucial midterm elections.
In the aftermath of the polarized health care debate, some Republican leaders said they were reluctant to give Democrats further ammunition to portray them as knee-jerk obstructionists. But they also want to harness the populist anger at Mr. Obama’s policies and are wary of alienating their base when they need it most.
As they balance these competing imperatives, Republicans said they planned to move deliberately at first and avoid declarations that could box them in. With Democrats’ poll numbers down, Republicans said they did not necessarily want a fight for the sake of a fight, and they left open the possibility that Mr. Obama might pick someone they could largely support.
“We need to do our due diligence, and we need to probably bend over backwards both in appearance and in reality to give the nominee a fair process,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Likewise, some conservatives who led the fight against Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation last year said they should learn from mistakes made then, like making grand claims about raising vast sums of money only to find that Republican senators were not as committed to an all-out battle.
“We will all be laughed at — including laughed at by Republican senators — by raising the war cries too loud and too early, when in fact the senators will not deliver what we are promising,” said Manuel Miranda of the Third Branch Network, who organizes regular conference calls of like-minded conservatives about judicial nominations. Instead, he said, conservatives should take a more “modest” and “measured” approach at first.
Mr. Obama appears to be leaning toward choices intended to avoid provoking Republicans. Still, any Supreme Court vacancy energizes the most committed advocates on both sides, particularly over issues like abortion, guns and religion.
The Family Research Council, a leading conservative group, sent an alert to members on Friday and will ask supporters to begin contacting senators. “If he selects someone with a radical judicial philosophy, the fabric of our already divided country will be torn even more,” Tony Perkins, the group’s president, said in an interview.
Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the new health care law would play into the debate, especially given legal challenges to the program.
Even if Republicans cannot stop an Obama nominee, the fight could shape the fall campaign. “I think Republicans are going to try to take advantage of the Tea Partiers’ anger at what is a populist view of a government that is out of control,” Mr. Shapiro said. “They will try to make this a debate whoever the nominee is — not in the sense of trying to derail the nominee, but just to showcase the issues and to make the case that this is why you need to elect Republicans in the fall.”
Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, chairman of the House Republican Conference, pointed out that the Supreme Court could eventually “decide whether the federal government has the power to compel Americans to purchase health insurance,” and so, he said, “now is the time to have a thorough debate over the course and direction of the court.”
Republicans said they saw little prospect of a filibuster unless they could make the case that the nominee was far out of the mainstream. A filibuster would be hard to justify, they said, after Republicans assailed Democrats for blocking votes on President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees.
But they noted that Mr. Obama voted as a senator to filibuster Mr. Bush’s nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr., so they could rationalize one if necessary. “In truly extraordinary cases, I reserve the prerogative to vote no on confirmation or even to vote to deny an up-or-down vote,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.
The court vacancy was barely raised on Saturday at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, where hundreds of party activists met to strategize for the midterm election campaign. The relative silence on the issue underscored the sensitivity as Republicans decided how to respond to the nomination.
“No matter what new liberal the president appoints to take Justice Stevens’ place,” said Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, “I like our chances in the United States Supreme Court that we have a Constitution that requires limited government.” By all accounts, the three front-runners are Solicitor General Elena Kagan and two appeals court judges, Diane P. Wood of Chicago and Merrick B. Garland of Washington. The main choices of liberals are not in the top tier.
Ms. Kagan, considered by some Democrats as the most likely candidate, could be hard for Republicans to block given her lack of a judicial paper trail and her support from conservatives who appreciated her opening the doors to them when she was the dean of Harvard Law School.
Judge Garland, who is well known and well regarded in Washington’s political and legal circles, is widely seen by Republicans and Democrats as the safest choice, most likely to draw overwhelming bipartisan support. Judge Wood, who is less known in Washington, would be the favorite of liberals among the top three and has written decisions on abortion and religion that would generate more fire from the right.
“This nomination, I don’t think they’ll have that hard of a time,” said John D. Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress and an adviser to the White House. “It’ll be hard to hold 41 Republicans against these candidates. They’re pretty solid.”
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democratic leader who shepherded Justice Sotomayor through confirmation, said the focus should be finding a nominee who could influence Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the swing vote on the closely divided nine-member court, rather than selecting a firebrand who writes powerful dissents.
“One of the most important qualities for the new justice is the ability to win over Justice Kennedy,” Mr. Schumer said. In other words, he added, “somebody who’s going to be one of the five and not one of the four.”
But Republicans could accomplish goals short of actually denying Mr. Obama his choice. A confirmation fight could take up valuable Senate time and complicate the rest of Mr. Obama’s legislative agenda. A top Republican lawmaker said it might give Republicans leverage to negotiate a compromise over regulation of financial markets, so Democrats could clear the decks to take up the nomination this summer.
A confirmation fight on social issues like same-sex marriage or judicial activism could also create political problems for Democrats running in conservative states, like Senators Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Michael Bennet of Colorado.
Some conservatives argued that they had already framed Mr. Obama’s choice. “One clear lesson from the Sotomayor process,” said M. Edward Whelan III, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “is the political appeal of the traditional understanding of the judicial role, as Sotomayor tried to sound like a judicial conservative in her confirmation hearing.”


Hispanics skeptical that Obama, Democrats will deliver immigration overhaul
By Sandhya Somashekhar

AURORA, COLO. -- Maria Garcia can rattle off a dozen things that are more important to her than politics. Her sky-high mortgage payments, for instance. The convenience store she owns, which isn't making money. And, at this moment, the chili peppers toasting in the store's kitchen.
"I don't have time to think about politics," she said, rubbing her eyes amid the caustic fumes. "Ten years ago, I was doing good. But right now, when you have all these problems, you feel lazy. You can't do anything. Sometimes, it's better that you have nothing because you just have to make money to eat and to pay rent."
Garcia was among the 61 percent of Hispanic voters in Colorado who turned out in 2008 to vote for Barack Obama. But her political disengagement now hints at the difficulty Democrats face in rallying their core constituencies ahead of the November midterm elections.
Among Hispanics, one concern often voiced is that Obama has not moved quickly on changing immigration law. He campaigned on the issue two years ago, but he and his party appear hesitant to take on such a contentious issue soon after the battle over health-care legislation.
Immigrant advocacy groups have ratcheted up the pressure on lawmakers, saying they risk losing the support of Hispanic voters if they do not establish a way for the 12 million people thought to be in the United States illegally to achieve legal status. They say there could be political consequences in swing states such as Colorado, where Hispanics made up 13 percent of the electorate in 2008.
A measure that would have created a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants contributed to the downfall of a 2007 bipartisan effort in Congress to remake the immigration system. But activists argue that disconnected voters such as Garcia might be motivated to go to the polls this year if lawmakers appeared poised to take up the issue again.
Indeed, Garcia perks up when the topic of immigration is raised, saying that from her own experience, she feels a strong kinship with those living and working here without papers.
A block from Garcia's store, East Colfax Avenue echoes other suburban streets where immigrant-owned businesses have flowered: lined with faded strip malls, enlivened by stores selling quinceañera dresses and SpongeBob SquarePants piñatas. There are hints of an underground economy as well: check-cashing stores, pawnshops and street-corner car dealerships that do not check credit.
"The Mexican people here need help," said Juan Luevanos, whose Mexican restaurant, Real de Minas, on this street is named for the Zacatecas mines where his family once worked. He thinks that giving illegal immigrants a path to legalized status would reduce crime and offer a measure of stability to a community in which many people carry fake IDs and cannot dream of buying a home.
An avowed Democrat, he shrugs when asked if he'll stick by his party this fall. He voted for Obama in 2008 but now says: "I'm fifty-fifty on him. He doesn't keep his promises."
The desire among Colorado's Hispanics for immigration-law changes is not limited to Democrats. Republican Diedra Garcia, president of DRG Construction in nearby Lakewood, said offering a path to legalization makes good conservative sense. "I believe [immigrants] are serving a clear economic need," Garcia said. "We need those resources, and without them I shudder to think what would happen to our economy."
That position puts her at odds with her party's most vocal strains, a divide that highlights the potentially toxic nature of the debate for many politicians.
Kelly Standley, a coordinator of one of Colorado's "tea party" groups, also lives in Aurora. The highly motivated tea party movement nationally is pushing candidates to take more-conservative stands on a variety of issues, including immigration, and opposes anything that resembles amnesty. Standley says the community has been overrun with illegal immigrants; as evidence, he points to what he sees in his job as a manager at a Family Dollar store.
"If they're paying by credit card, I ask for an ID. Then they hand me a Mexico ID, and I say, 'Oh no, no, no,' " Standley said. He is also bothered by some of his customers' desire to speak to him in Spanish. "I can speak it; I just don't like to," he said.
The economy is paramount for Maria Garcia. Once prosperous, she bought two homes and the commercial building where she recently opened Florence Mini Mart.
But the mortgages on the homes are now larger than the houses' value. In hopes of affording the monthly payments, she rented out the homes and moved into an office in the largely vacant commercial building. Her daughters moved in with their father, unwilling to live in the empty office, she said. Her savings are drained, and she is contemplating foreclosure.
Garcia said she thinks that new immigration laws would bring prosperity to the community by allowing many more people to buy homes and would reward those who have lived and worked in the shadows.
"Some people have been here a very long time, paying taxes," she said.
About Obama, she said: "Maybe he will do something, because he's getting a lot of pressure. But I don't know. I can't worry about it right now."


Republicans focus efforts on November, say 2012 can wait
By Dan Balz

The Southern Republican Leadership Conference has become known in recent years as an early testing ground for would-be presidential candidates, a place to make an impression on party activists and the media. But there is a far different message coming out of New Orleans this weekend: 2012 can wait.
A host of potential candidates trooped through the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel during the three-day gathering -- Sarah Palin being the most prominent, although not necessarily the best received -- but the gathering had none of the feel of four years ago in Memphis.
In 2006, buffeted by growing dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush and heading toward midterm elections in which they ultimately lost control of the House and Senate, Republicans were eager to jump ahead to 2008. Every major potential candidate made an appearance, and all the hallway conversations revolved around a nomination battle far off into the future.
This year, the roughly 3,000 activists from across the South have their eyes on 2010, as do the politicians who may seek the nomination in two years. With President Obama and the Democrats weakened, the energy and enthusiasm on display throughout the weekend reflect optimism among Republicans that, after drubbings in 2006 and 2008, a genuine turnaround may be on the horizon -- if they don't get distracted or divided.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a young party staff member in his home state when the SRLC was born 40 years ago, delivered that message at a breakfast for Southern GOP chairmen and members of the Republican National Committee that was hosted by the Republican Governors Association.
Quoting Fred Smith, the founder and chairman of FedEx, Barbour told the group: "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. The main thing is winning in 2010. . . . Then we'll worry about 2012."
Like many conference speakers this weekend, Barbour could have his eye on a presidential campaign in two years. But he asked the organizers of the presidential straw poll not to put his name on the ballot. "I'm trying to practice what I preach," he said. "I didn't think we ought to have a [straw poll] ballot."
Barbour understands how meaningless such early straw polls are -- the winner in 2006 was then-Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who eventually decided not even to run for president. Barbour also understands how embarrassing it can be to perform badly, especially in your home region.
As a former national party chairman at the time of the GOP's 1994 victory, Barbour knows that the best thing he can do as a prospective candidate is to help Republicans maximize the party's gains in 2010. He is taking every opportunity to do so.
Barbour, the chairman of the GOP governors group, is moving deftly to fill the vacuum left by RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who is under fire and on the defensive after a series of gaffes and missteps by his committee.
The breakfast Barbour hosted Saturday was a not-so-subtle way to establish the governors group as central to the party's rebuilding hopes, and to make himself one of its leading voices in shaping both the message and strategy for 2010.
Republicans are determined to reverse the policies of the Obama administration. That makes winning control of the House or Senate the party's highest priority this year. But Barbour reminded the breakfast audience that not only did governors help rebuild the party in the 1990s but also that there is a greater chance of winning congressional races if there is a strong incumbent GOP governor or winning gubernatorial candidate on the ballot.
Barbour had another message when he spoke later on Saturday: Republicans could squander their opportunities if they do not remain united. He said the party should make room for tea party activists and keep them in the conservative movement.
"The Democrats' fondest hope is to see tea-party or other conservatives split off and have a third party and split the conservative [vote]," he said. He added: "Please leave here unified and stay that way through November and beyond."
The list of prospective 2012 candidates who appeared in New Orleans included, in addition to Barbour and Palin, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), a presidential candidate in 2008.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who stayed in the state to welcome home National Guard soldiers returning from Iraq, spoke by video. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, two of the three finalists for the 2008 GOP nomination, skipped the New Orleans gathering.
Palin was clearly the biggest draw and got an enthusiastic response. Whether she will try to convert her celebrity status into being a candidate or choose to play kingmaker to another candidate in 2012 isn't clear yet. She should not be underestimated as a force within the party, but the weekend showed that she isn't the only Republican who can appeal both to tea party activists and GOP rank-and-file.
Perry, who has said he is not interested in running for president and faces a competitive reelection in Texas, spoke several hours after Palin and received a reception that was easily the equal of hers. His message, which blended Texas-centric pride and traditional Republican doctrine with a strong dose of tea-party-inspired rhetoric attacking Washington, seemed ready-made for conservative audiences in 2010.
Gingrich attacked Obama in the strongest terms possible and urged Republicans to become "the party of yes" if they are to regain the confidence of the American people. Asked about his plans for 2012, Gingrich said he would decide early next year, but he echoed Barbour by saying, "Let's all get out and campaign this year to win this year's election."
None of these possible presidential candidates -- those who came to New Orleans and those who didn't -- can know at this point what kind of shape Obama will be in when 2012 rolls around. Their prospects will be determined significantly by what happens in November.
But the absence of 2012 buzz in New Orleans underscores the singular focus for a party eager to return to power. There is also a recognition that any perceived failures in November could make 2012 even more difficult.
Clarke Reed, who served for years as the RNC member from Mississippi and who founded the Southern Republican Leadership Conference 40 years ago, said the meeting this weekend has restored the group to its original purpose. Four years ago, he said, the organization got infatuated with presidential politics and straw polls.
Now, he said, "It's back to the grass roots."
That's why 2012 can wait.


Foreign Policy:


Agenda of Nuclear Talks Leaves Out a New Threat
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — Three months ago, American intelligence officials examining satellite photographs of Pakistani nuclear facilities saw the first wisps of steam from the cooling towers of a new nuclear reactor. It was one of three plants being constructed to make fuel for a second generation of nuclear arms.
The message of those photos was clear: While Pakistan struggles to make sure its weapons and nuclear labs are not vulnerable to attack by Al Qaeda, the country is getting ready to greatly expand its production of weapons-grade fuel.
The Pakistanis insist that they have no choice. A nuclear deal that India signed with the United States during the Bush administration ended a long moratorium on providing India with the fuel and technology for desperately needed nuclear power plants.
Now, as critics of the arrangement point out, the agreement frees up older facilities that India can devote to making its own new generation of weapons, escalating one arms race even as President Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia sign accords to shrink arsenals built during the cold war.
Mr. Obama met with the leaders of India and Pakistan on Sunday, a day ahead of a two-day Washington gathering with 47 nations devoted to the question of how to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. In remarks to reporters about the summit meeting, Mr. Obama called the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon represented “the single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short-term, medium-term and long-term.”
The summit meeting is the largest gathering of world leaders called by an American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt organized the 1945 meeting in San Francisco that created the United Nations. (He died two weeks before the session opened.) But for all its symbolism and ceremony, this meeting has quite limited goals: seeking ways to better secure existing supplies of bomb-usable plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The problem that India and Pakistan represent, though, is deliberately not on the agenda.
“President Obama is focusing high-level attention on the threat that already exists out there, and that’s tremendously important,” said Sam Nunn, the former Democratic senator from Georgia who has devoted himself to safeguarding global stockpiles of weapons material — enough, by some estimates, to build more than 100,000 atom bombs. “But the fact is that new production adds greatly to the problem.”
Nowhere is that truer than Pakistan, where two Taliban insurgencies and Al Qaeda coexist with the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. According to a senior American official, Mr. Obama used his private meeting Sunday afternoon with Yousaf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s newly empowered prime minister, to “express disappointment” that Pakistan is blocking the opening of negotiations on a treaty that would halt production of new nuclear material around the world.
Experts say accelerated production in Pakistan translates into much increased risk.
“The challenges are getting greater — the increasing extremism, the increasing instability, the increasing material,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who as a C.I.A. officer and then head of the Energy Department’s intelligence unit ran much of the effort to understand Al Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions.
“That’s going to complicate efforts to make sure nothing leaks,” he said. “The trends mean the Pakistani authorities have a greater challenge.”
Few subjects are more delicate in Washington. In an interview last Monday, Mr. Obama avoided a question about his progress in building on a five-year, $100 million Bush administration program to safeguard Pakistan’s arms and materials.
“I feel confident that Pakistan has secured its nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama said. “I am concerned about nuclear security all around the world, not just in Pakistan but everywhere.” He added, “One of my biggest concerns has to do with the loose nuclear materials that are still floating out there.”
Taking up the Pakistan-India arms race at the summit meeting, administration officials say, would be “too politically divisive.”
“We’re focusing on protecting existing nuclear material, because we think that’s what everyone can agree on,” one senior administration official said in an interview on Friday. To press countries to cut off production of new weapons-grade material, he said, “would take us into questions of proliferation, nuclear-free zones and nuclear disarmament on which there is no agreement.”
Mr. Obama said he expected “some very specific commitments” from world leaders.
“Our expectation is not that there’s just some vague, gauzy statement about us not wanting to see loose nuclear materials,” he said. “We anticipate a communiqué that spells out very clearly, here’s how we’re going to achieve locking down all the nuclear materials over the next four years, with very specific steps in order to assure that.”
Those efforts began at the end of the cold war, 20 years ago. Today officials are more sanguine about the former Soviet stockpiles and the focus is now wider. Last month, American experts removed weapons-grade material from earthquake-damaged Chile.
The summit meeting will aim to generate the political will so that other nations and Mr. Obama’s own administration can create a surge of financial and technical support that will bring his four-year plan to fruition.
“It’s doable but hard,” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard. “It’s not easy to overcome secrecy, complacency, sovereignty and bureaucracy.”
Mr. Obama plans to open the summit meeting with a discussion of the scope of the terrorist threat. The big challenge, Mr. Mowatt-Larssen said, is to get world leaders to understand “that it’s a low-probability, but not a no-probability, event that requires urgent action.”
For instance, in late 2007, four gunmen attacked a South African site that held enough highly enriched uranium for a dozen atomic bombs. The attackers breached a 10,000-volt security fence, knocked out detection systems and broke into the emergency control room before coming under assault. They escaped.
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to “increase funding by $1 billion a year to ensure that within four years, the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons are removed from all the world’s most vulnerable sites and effective, lasting security measures are instituted for all remaining sites.”
In Mr. Obama’s first year, though, financing for better nuclear controls fell by $25 million, about 2 percent.
“The Obama administration got off to an unimpressive start,” Mr. Bunn wrote in his most recent update of “Securing the Bomb,” a survey to be published Monday by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy group that Mr. Nunn helped found in Washington. But he added that its proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year calls for a 31 percent increase.
The next phase in Mr. Obama’s arms-control plan is to get countries to agree to a treaty that would end the production of new bomb fuel. Pakistan has led the opposition, and it is building two new reactors for making weapons-grade plutonium, and one plant for salvaging plutonium from old reactor fuel.
Last month, the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington, reported that the first reactor was emitting steam. That suggests, said Paul Brannan, a senior institute analyst, that the “reactor is at least at some state of initial operation.”
Asked about the production, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said, “Pakistan looks forward to working with the international community to find the balance between our national security and our contributions to international nonproliferation efforts.”
In private, Pakistani officials insist that the new plants are needed because India has the power to mount a lightning invasion with conventional forces.
India, too, is making new weapons-grade plutonium, in plants exempted under the agreement with the Bush administration from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Neither Pakistan nor India has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.)
The Obama administration has endorsed the Bush-era agreement. Last month, the White House took the next step, approving an accord that allows India to build two new reprocessing plants. While that fuel is for civilian use, critics say it frees older plants to make weapons fuel.
“The Indian relationship is a very important one,” said Mr. Nunn, who influenced Mr. Obama’s decision to endorse a goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. But he said that during the Bush years, “I would have insisted that we negotiate to stop their production of weapons fuel. Sometimes in Washington, we have a hard time distinguishing between the important and the vital.”


Jet Fuel Sales to U.S. Base Are an Issue in Kyrgyzstan
By ANDREW E. KRAMER

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Back in 2005, the last time angry crowds toppled the government of Kyrgyzstan, the United States found itself in an awkward position: among the rallying cries was an allegation that the ruling family had benefited handsomely from Pentagon contracts. Now, substantially the same thing appears to be happening again.
Senior leaders in the interim government that took power last week are accusing the United States of allowing family members of the ousted president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, to enrich themselves with contracts supplying jet fuel to Manas Air Base outside Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital.
Companies controlled by the president’s 32-year-old son, Maksim, who became a loathed figure during the uprising, skimmed as much as $8 million a month from fuel sales to the base, according to senior leaders in the new government, relying on a monopoly and favorable taxes.
That such accusations became a factor in last week’s uprising speaks to the entrenched cronyism of former Soviet states, where power often blends seamlessly with wealth.
For the United States the base is integral to the logistics of supplying fuel, troops and equipment to Afghanistan. The uprising on Wednesday, in which more than 80 people died, has created some uncertainty about those logistics.
While establishing offices and mulling what to do with the president, who is in the south of the country, officials have already begun releasing details of an elaborate payment system for up to a quarter million gallons of jet fuel used at the base each day.
They accuse the United States of having used that system to curry favor with the ousted president in order to hold onto the air base, the only remaining Amerian military refueling site in Central Asia after Uzbekistan closed a base in a dispute with the United States over human rights.
“Whatever the Pentagon’s policy of buying warlords in Afghanistan, the state of Kyrgyzstan demands more respect,” Edil Baisalov, chief of staff of the interim leader, Roza Otunbayeva, said in an interview. “The government of Kyrgyzstan will not be bought and sold. We are above that.”
Officials with the military agency that buys fuel, the Defense Energy Supply Corporation, have said no United States laws would be violated if contracts were awarded to companies owned by relatives of a foreign heads of state.
In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Mr. Bakiyev denied that his family profited from the deals. “Money that comes in for services at the Manas airport does not go into the pocket of the president,” he said. “It goes into an account that everyone can check. Everything goes through the bank.”
The contracts to supply the base have been coveted, and delicate.
In the haste of the buildup for the war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, companies controlled by Aidar Akayev, son of Askar Akayev, who was then the president, had wound up with lucrative contracts to sell fuel to Manas, according to Kyrgyz officials. A lawyer for Mr. Akayev’s son has also said the contracts were not illegal.
Nonetheless, when President Akayev was deposed in 2005, the prosecutor’s office under the new leader, Mr. Bakiyev, opened a criminal investigation, asked for F.B.I. cooperation and hired an independent corporate investigations company to untangle the arrangement.
According to a report prepared by that investigator, who asked not to be identified, as he was not authorized to disclose the report, the primary source of aviation grade kerosene used at the base is an oil refinery in the Siberian city of Omsk, owned by the oil division of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.
Red Star, a company with offices in London and Bishkek, contracted with Defense Energy Supply to buy the fuel and move it across several Central Asian countries to Manas. Chuck Squires, a former American Army lieutenant colonel, was hired to handle the contract.
The outside investigator met with Mr. Bakiyev to present the initial findings, and characterized his responses as: “Thank you very much for your job. Your services are no longer needed.” The investigator said he suspected the new president was in fact taking over the same business model.
“They changed the names of the companies but the scheme remained the same,” he said.
Some of Red Star’s business had been assumed by another company, the Mina Corporation Limited, he said.
Turusbek Koyenaliyev, an aide to the new acting minister for economic affairs, said one company supplying the base today was Manas Aerofuels. He said it was controlled by Maksim Bakiyev, the son of the president.
Manas Aerofuels and the Mina Corporation share office space in the Hyatt Regency hotel in Bishkek. A man who opened Mina’s door said the company sold jet fuel to Manas but declined to answer other questions. On a list of companies in the business center provided by Hyatt, the contact for Mina is a “Mr. Squires.”
In interviews, the acting prime minister, the president’s chief of staff, a former foreign minister and a former acting president asserted that the younger Mr. Bakiyev was the owner of the fuel-supply companies. They were unable to provide documentation, citing the chaotic state of the government.
Omurbek Tekebayev, the former acting president, said in an interview that the trading companies made money selling cheap Russian jet fuel at world prices to the American base.
Until April 1, when the Russian government abruptly imposed a steep tariff on refined products for Kyrgyzstan, these exports were tariff-free under a customs agreement. Within Kyrgyzstan, sales to the base were exempt from the usual 20 percent sales tax, Mr. Tekebayev said.
The Bakiyev family, Mr. Tekebayev said, assumed control of part of the business immediately after the 2005 uprising.
Alikbek Jekshenkulov, who was serving as Mr. Bakiyev’s foreign minister at the time, said the ruling family consolidated its control of the trade in 2006, after Mr. Bakiyev issued the first of several public threats to expel the base. The threat, he said, was used to compel the transfer of the remaining fuel contracts to the Bakiyev-family-controlled firms.
Mr. Jekshenkulov, in an interview, said he met with Mr. Bakiyev to object and explain that others, too, would like the business. “I said, ‘There is a war between the clans to sell gas to the base. There ought to be an open tender, so people will believe it is honest, and you can be clean as a politician,’” Mr. Jekshenkulov said. “As always, he just nodded his head and said, ‘That’s all.’ ”
“Nothing changed,” Mr. Jekshenkulov said. “They changed the names.”
Partly as a result of this confrontation, however, Mr. Jekshenkulov said he was dismissed as foreign minister in February 2007, and later joined the opposition, which was repressed under Mr. Bakiyev. Last year, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement from March until August.

Opinion Pieces:


Sorry: No bump for Obamacare
Examiner Editorial

Last September, just as public opinion was beginning to turn against Obamacare in a serious way, Bill Clinton made a bold prediction. "The minute health care reform passed," he said in a policy forum in New York City, "President Obama's approval ratings would go up 10 points." Clinton's prediction reflected the wishful assumption of many wishful liberal-leaning pundits and think tank analysts, as well as the strategy of Obama's political advisers. They viewed the rising public clamor against Obamacare as a temporary aberration, not as a lasting problem that could potentially undo his presidency. When Obamacare passed, they confidently reasoned, the public would suddenly appreciate its virtues and acquiesce to federal control over nearly every aspect of health care.
This notion consoled them in the following months as Republicans shockingly captured the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, then the Senate seat held for more than four decades by Ted Kennedy in deepest blue Massachusetts. But despite these unmistakable electoral manifestations of deepening voter displeasure, Obama and congressional Democrats soldiered on, often resorting to desperation tactics, until they finally secured a victory that put Obamacare on the books as the law of the land.
But -- surprise! -- there has been no bump for Obama, nor for Democrats in Congress, nor for Obamacare. In fact, Obama's public approval rating now registers consistently below 50 percent and seems headed steadily downward, with polls conducted for CBS, Fox News, and Quinnipiac putting him in the mid-to-low 40s. Republicans lead in nearly every poll of the generic congressional ballot, prompting liberal Democrat number-cruncher Nate Silver to write that if the election were held today, Republicans would likely take control of the House of Representatives by a comfortable margin. Democratic retirement announcements keep coming even at this late date, mostly in districts where Republicans can compete.
Meanwhile, polls continue to show a strong majority opposing Obamacare and favoring its repeal. The latest Fox News poll puts the opposition at 55 percent, with 39 percent in favor. This reading comes despite Obama's backward-looking campaign tour in recent weeks to build public support for Obamacare, something he and his party were unable to do during the year prior to its enactment. The Democrats assumed they had to pass a health care reform bill, any bill, regardless of the depth or intensity of opposition. Failure, they reasoned, would harm them at the polls. As it turned out, their success may kill them in November.


Who’s Not Sorry Now?

“I’m sorry that the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact on our country. I’m sorry for the millions of people, average Americans, who have lost their homes. And I’m sorry that our management team, starting with me, like so many others, could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.”
— Charles O. Prince III, former chairman and chief executive officer, Citigroup, April 8, 2010
“We all bear responsibility for not recognizing this, and I deeply regret that.”
— Robert E. Rubin, former Treasury secretary and former director, Citigroup, April 8, 2010
•
The latest public hearings of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, held last week, made headlines for eliciting more apologies from financiers who presided over the market collapse.
You may recall a similar flurry last year, when Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was widely credited for having apologized for his firm’s role in the financial crisis.
We did not buy it then; Mr. Blankfein never said what he was sorry for or to whom he was apologizing. And we are not buying it now.
Mr. Prince says he “could not” foresee the impending collapse, when he could have and should have seen it coming. Certainly, others did. Mr. Rubin has said that under his employment agreement, he was not responsible for the bank’s operations. But he was a towering figure at Citi, a source of its credibility and prestige. That implies responsibility, no matter what his contract said. Add all that to the “I wasn’t the only one” context of both men’s comments, and their regret translates as, “We feel bad about an accident we were powerless to prevent.”
Except that the financial crisis was not an accident and they were not powerless. The crisis was the result of irresponsibility and misjudgments by many people, including Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin. Citi, under their leadership, epitomized the financial recklessness that ruined the economy.
More important, the “apologies” are distractions. The purpose of the inquiry is not catharsis. It is to determine the causes of the crisis and present the truth. A successful inquiry would compel the government to take appropriate corrective action.
The commission has managed to unearth some compelling testimony. (Last week’s hearings produced detailed evidence of how the mortgage-investment pipeline came to be stuffed with toxic loans.) But the inquiry can strangely lack vigor. It has not issued any subpoenas for documents — satisfied so far with voluntary submissions — and does not administer oaths to witnesses it interviews in private. Lying to a federal investigator is illegal under oath or not, but experience shows that taking an oath is a powerful incentive to tell the whole truth.
The commission is supposed to finish its work by Dec. 15. In the meantime, Congress’s efforts at financial reform appear to be weakened daily by politicians who are more concerned with campaign donations than regulating the financial system. This week, for instance, a Senate committee is expected to propose new regulations for derivatives that are more loophole than rule.
Sorry, indeed.


Pretend pensions

HERE'S MORE evidence that state governments are not leveling with their citizens about the costs of pensions for public employees: A new Stanford University study commissioned by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has found that that the state's pension funds are understating their likely unfunded liabilities by almost half a trillion dollars.
California's three largest funds, with a combined $442.1 billion in assets as of mid-2008, calculate their projected liabilities based on rates of return of between 7.5 percent and 8 percent. These assumptions yield a relatively modest $55.4 billion gap, easily covered by adjusting annual contributions. But this rosy scenario begins to look implausible when you consider that it requires fund managers to beat the 5.3 percent annual rate of return that U.S. stocks rang up in the 20th century. The Stanford researchers used a far more conservative and -- given both distant and recent history -- realistic rate of 4.14 percent, roughly what the funds would earn if invested in risk-free U.S. Treasury securities. The result was an estimated unfunded liability 10 times bigger than the official figure.
To be sure, there is absolutely nothing illegal or improper about the way California's pension funds do the math now. The vast majority of states and local governments calculate their liabilities similarly. It is, in fact, perfectly permissible to do so under guidelines set by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), the official body that sets norms in this area. But that's just the problem: Everybody does it. According to research by Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern University, doing the same calculation for the rest of the states that Stanford did for California yields an estimated $3.92 trillion nationwide shortfall for the period 2008-2023.
It's no mystery why states got into this fix. Politicians want to court public employee unions with generous promises without having to ask taxpayers for more money. Pretending that investment income will solve the equation helps them avoid hard choices -- though it gives fund managers a strong perverse incentive to take excessive risks in hopes of meeting unrealistic targets. The GASB has been considering a change in its standards to bring them closer into line with requirements in the private sector. The California study provides another strong argument in favor of reform.

Upcoming Elections

Here is a useful list, and summary of the upcoming elections this year around the world:


COUNTRY DATE ELECTION TYPE
Sudan April 11, 2010 Presidential First Round
Hungary April 11, 2010 Parliamentary First Round
Sudan April 11, 2010 Legislative
Sudan April 11, 2010 Subnational - Legislative
Ethiopia May 23, 2010 Parliamentary
United Kingdom June 7, 2001 Parliamentary
Mauritius May 5, 2010 Parliamentary
Kenya May 2010 Referendum (Tentative)
Solomon Islands April 2010 Parliamentary
Nauru April 24, 2010 Parliamentary (Snap)

Period in review: April 2-8, 2010

United Kingdom (Apr 09, 2010)

British Prime Minister Gordon BROWN on Thursday promised far-reaching electoral reforms if voters return his Labour Party to power, but critics say the promise is too little too late. Spokespeople for the Liberal Democrats, the UK's third largest party, and major electoral reform groups argue BROWN should have sought legislation authorizing a promised 2011 referendum before calling elections scheduled for May 6. Some media have reported that the pledge is meant to woo Liberal Democrats into a coalition government in the event that voters seat a hung Parliament. BROWN'S proposals include switching from plurality elections to the Alternative Vote, mandating fixed four-year terms for Members of Parliament, replacing the House of Lords with an elected Senate, and formalizing the British constitution. The Conservative Party opposes said changes, opting instead for reform of boundary delimitation rules. Next month's election is likely to be the UK's most competitive since 1992, with opinion polls suggesting no clear winner.

Kenya (Apr 02, 2010)

Kenya's National Assembly has approved a draft constitution that would impose checks on Presidential power, among other reforms, if ratified at a yet-to-be-called referendum this year. The new document would create a Senate, a permanent Supreme Court, legislative oversight of Cabinet appointments, legislative impeachment powers, elected county governments, an expanded bill of rights, prohibition on joint membership of Parliament and the Cabinet, and other checks-and-balances. The draft is the result of 12 months of deliberations by a Committee of Experts. Institutional reform has been a key issue in Keyna for nearly two decades, with the last such referendum failing in 2005. Violence rocked the country after a disputed 2007 election, culminating in the creation of a Prime Ministership, which went to opposition Presidential candidate Raila ODINGA.

Congressional Newsletter: Pennsylvania 12

This week our Congressional Newsletter analyses Pennsylvania's 12th district, an area once dominated by the coal industry now seeking new avenues for economic development. This seat has been dominated by democrats since the New Deal, but John McCain narrowly won this district in the 2008 Presidential Election.







Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District


District Background (CQPolitics)

“The oddly contorted 12th hop scotches across nine southwestern Pennsylvania counties, eight of which are shared with other districts. Once a booming center of coal, steel and iron production, this area is attempting to diversify in order to escape economic distress and industrial loss.

“Johnstown, the district’s most populous city, was once an industrial center, but floods, recession, coal and steel industry decline, and scarce opportunities in manufacturing left the region with skyrocketing unemployment by the late 1980s. The city and district have partly bounced back by attracting new biomedical research and health care companies, such as specialized care provider Conemaugh Health System, and a number of defense and research firms, such as KDH Defense Systems. Capitalizing on past hardships, the Johnstown Flood Museum also draws tourists to the area, and tourism now contributes nearly $150 million to the region each year. Despite these new industries, recent nationwide economic downturns have forced local businesses to cut jobs.

“On the other side of the district in the state’s southwestern corner, residents of rural Greene County — which borders West Virginia to its west and south and is the only county entirely within the 12th — continue to suffer. Just north of Greene, Washington County’s city of Washington took a hit in 2009 when a bankrupt title insurance company left its namesake office building at the center of a $100 million downtown revitalization project that included a new amphitheater, a hotel and a parking garage. The district also includes Washington and Jefferson College and has a small agriculture industry, producing corn, wheat and cattle.

“The 12th has been a Democratic stronghold since the New Deal. Like other Pennsylvania towns with an industrial past and aging residents, Johnstown is more socially conservative than the national Democratic Party and wants federal help. At the presidential level, Republican candidates can compete, and John McCain won the district with 49 percent of its vote in 2008.”[1]

Electoral History & the 2010 Elections

Representative John Murtha (D-PA) won a special election to represent this district in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, and held the office until his death at age 77 on February 8, 2010. He died of complications of gallbladder surgery. During his tenure, Murtha was one of the most power members of Congress, and served on the Subcommittee on Defense. Murtha had faced a primary challenger this year in Ryan Bucchianeri, but since Murtha’s death, the electoral process has become more complicated.[2]

The special election to finish the rest of Murtha’s term is scheduled for May 18, the same day as the primary elections for the state. So on the same day, voters will vote in the special election to decide who will serve the last eight months of Murtha’s term, and in the primary election to decide which candidate of each party will face off in the general election in November.[3] Mark Critz, Murtha’s district director, is the nominee for the Democratic Party in the special election, and Tim Burns, a businessman, had secured the nomination for the Republican Party. Whoever wins – Critz or Burns – will serve the remainder of Murtha’s term.[4]

Before Murtha’s death, the 12th District was listed as “likely Democratic” by the Cook Political Report, but has now been moved to a “tossup.” The Rothenberg Political Report now considers the 12th District one of the most competitive in the country.3

Candidates

Special Election (May 18) – determines who will serve remainder of Murtha’s term
Mark Critz (D) – Most recently served as Murtha’s district director, and was awarded the Patrick Henry Award by the National Guard Association of the United States.[5]
Tim Burns (R) – He has owned his own pharmacy technology company, been active in economic development projects, and has volunteered his time helping flood victims.[6]

Primary Elections (May 18) – determines which candidate of each party will face off in the General Election in November
Democrats
Mark Critz – (see above)
Ryan Bucchianeri – He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1997 and served on active duty for several years. He went onto study public policy with concentrations in international security, political economy, and human rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He then worked as a manager for Lockheed Martin.[7]
Ron Mackell, Jr. – He enlisted and served in the U.S. Air Force for four years, worked as a news and feature reporter at The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat for many years, and went onto become an attorney at law in Texas before deciding to run for public office.
Republicans
Tim Burns – (see above)
William Russell – Russell began his military career at West Point and went on to serve the U.S. Army for 28 years. He came the closest anyone has come to defeating Murtha in 2008 with 44% of the vote.[8]


The Issues

Mark Critz (D) –
“Will continue to fight for better highways and improved infrastructure which are key components to accomplishing his greatest goal – creating jobs and improving our economy.”
Supporter of 2nd Amendment rights
Believes in strong national defense and small businesses

Ryan Bucchianeri (D) –
Education – Education is critically important to our well-being as a nation and economy, and Bucchianeri believes in reforming education to include longer school days, community projects on Saturdays, including a more global perspective in curricula, fair pay for educators, etc.[9]
Regional Economy – The trend of economic decline in this district needs to be turned around. What is needed is a well-trained and well-educated workforce, infrastructure development, and job creation.[10]

Ron Mackell, Jr. (D) –
Change – It is time to see the end of politics as usual and elect a “trustworthy, credible, energetic, and well-educated hometown candidate” and not a political insider. After the passing of “an American Hero,” Rep. Murtha, the district needs someone who will not be a “no vote” in Washington.[11]

Tim Burns (R) –
Health Care – Congress just passed a health care bill which will “raise taxes, kill jobs, and bury our children in debt.” He will vote to repeal the bill and work on reform that will improve health care without hurting the economy.
Energy – Southwestern Pennsylvania relies on its coal and natural gas resources. He will vote down harmful legislation like cap and trade and work to bring energy jobs into the district.[12]

William Russell (R) –
Family Security – Russell is committed to pro-life, family-security legislation and wants an amendment to the Constitution recognizing the personhood of unborn children. He supports 2nd Amendment rights and the traditional definition of marriage.
Economic Security – Economic development does not happen when it is spearheaded by Washington, so there should be tax cuts, spending cuts, and legal reform. He supports a permanent ban on earmarks and the elimination of wasteful subsidies for companies.[13]
[1] “Politics in America District Profile” CQPolitics - http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=district-2010-PA-12#past_election
[2] “Rep. Murtha Dies,” Real Clear Politics - http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2010/02/08/rep-murtha-dies/
[3] “Murtha’s Special Election Seat,” Politico - http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33100.html
[4] “Pennsylvania – 12th District,” CQPolitics - http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=district-2010-PA-12#past_election
[5] “About Mark,” Mark Critz for Congress - http://www.critzforcongress.com/aboutmark.htm
[6] “Meet Tim Burns,” Tim Burns for Congress - http://www.timburnsforcongress.com/html/Meet_Tim_Burns.html
[7] “Meet Ryan Bucchianeri,” Ryan Bucchianeri for Congress - http://ryan2010.com/about.php
[8] “William Russell for Congress” - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=60332095257
[9] “Education,” Ryan Bucchianeri for Congress - http://ryan2010.com/issues/education.php
[10] “Regional Economy,” Ryan Bucchianeri for Congress - http://ryan2010.com/issues/regional_economy.php
[11] “Ron Mackell, Jr.” - http://www.ronmackell.com/default.asp
[12] “Time Burns on the Issues” - http://www.timburnsforcongress.com/html/issues.html
[13] “Issues,” Russell Brigade - http://russellbrigade.com/issues/

American Politics 4/1/2010

In this edition of the American Politics Newsletter, we find reactions to the potential retirement of Supreme Court Justice Stevens, strategies of the tea party movement, Financial reform debate in the senate, and Obama's plans for international nuclear deterrence.











American Politics:

At 89, Stevens Contemplates Law, and How to Leave It
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — “There are still pros and cons to be considered,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in his Supreme Court chambers on Friday afternoon, reflecting on his reluctance to leave a job he loves after almost 35 years. But his calculus seemed to be weighted toward departure, and he said his decision on the matter would come very soon.
“I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process,” he said. “The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”
Hints about Justice Stevens’s possible departure started in September, when he confirmed that he had hired only a single law clerk, instead of the usual four, for the term that will start this fall. In occasional public statements since then, Justice Stevens, the leader of the court’s liberal wing, said he had not yet made up his mind. But the White House is bracing for a summertime confirmation battle, the second of the Obama presidency.
Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 this month, said he did not like to give interviews “because it saves an awful lot of time if you don’t.” But he was courtly and candid in reviewing the trajectory of his tenure on the court and in summing up what he had learned about the role of the judge in American life.
Like last year’s selection of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to replace the retiring Justice David H. Souter, this change would be unlikely to remake the court’s ideological balance. But the matter would in some ways have more resonance, if only because of Justice Stevens’s seniority and mastery of the court’s machinery.
Appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, Justice Stevens was in those days considered a somewhat idiosyncratic moderate. These days, he is lionized by the left. But Justice Stevens rejected those labels on Friday, saying that his judicial philosophy was a conservative one.
“What really for me marks a conservative judge is one who doesn’t decide more than he has to in order to do his own job,” he said, relaxed in shirt sleeves and his signature bow tie in chambers floodlit by April sunshine. “Our job is to decide cases and resolve controversies. It’s not to write broad rules that may answer society’s questions at large.”
He is known for his fast and prolific writing, and for relying less on his law clerks than some other justices do.
“I write the first draft,” he said. “One of the tests I had for myself as to when I would retire was that if I ever got to the point that I stopped writing the first draft that would be a sign that I was no longer up to the job the way I think it should be done.”
That day, he said, has not yet come. “Everything that’s got my name on it, I wrote the first draft,” Justice Stevens said.
But he did acknowledge that he had a bad morning in January when he dissented from the bench in Citizens United, the blockbuster decision that said corporations may spend freely to support political candidates. He seemed weary and tripped over ordinary words.
“I did stumble in my oral statement,” he said. “I had been up early that morning writing that statement out, and I had played tennis that morning. Maybe I was tired, and of course I felt strongly about it, but that has never affected my ability to articulate orally what I wanted to say before. It was a novel experience.”
Should Justice Stevens step down, the court will lose its last member who served in World War II and is steeped in the values of that era.
“It really was a unique period of time, in the sense that the total country, with very few exceptions, was really united,” Justice Stevens said. “We were all on the same team, wanting the same result. You don’t like to think of war as having anything good about it, but it is something that was a positive experience.”
He was unapologetic in saying that the justices’ backgrounds necessarily shaped their approaches to the law.
“I’ve confessed to many people that I think my personal experience has had an impact on what I’ve done,” he said. “Time and time again, not only for myself but for other people on the court, during discussions of cases you bring up experiences that you are familiar with.”
He said his military service, as a Navy cryptographer, informed his dissent in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 decision that said the First Amendment protects flag burning. “I know it’s not the popular position, but I’m still totally convinced I was right,” he said. “I still think I was right, but I wouldn’t amend the Constitution or anything like that to straighten it out.”
His views have generally remained stable, he said, while the court has drifted to the right over time. “To the extent I look back at earlier situations,” he said, “I really don’t think I’ve changed all that much.”
Often, he added, the law requires a certain result, as in the court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed local governments to use the power of eminent domain to take private property for business development.
“The Kelo case was one of my most unpopular opinions, and that was one where I thought the law really was pretty well settled on the particular point,” he said.
Asked if he would have answered the question presented in the case differently had he instead been a legislator, Justice Stevens said probably yes.
“One of the nice things about this job is that you don’t have to make those decisions,” he added. “Very often you think, in this particular spot I don’t have to be deciding the really hard case about what should be done. Which is one of the reasons why the function is really quite different from what people often assume.”
In the area of capital punishment, though, he said his views had shifted.
“I certainly would not have expected during my first years on the court to have written an opinion like I did in Baze,” he said, referring to Baze v. Rees, the 2008 decision that rejected a challenge to lethal injections. Though Justice Stevens voted with the majority, he wrote that he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. He went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”
He explained Friday why he did not follow the approach of Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who adopted a practice of dissenting in every death penalty case.
“I’m still a member of the court, and I still have to work,” Justice Stevens said. “I never really agreed with Justice Brennan and Justice Marshall that your own personal view on the issue should prevent you from participating. You’re still a member of the team, and the team has to confront the problem.”
But that did not mean Justice Stevens, who in 1976 voted to reinstate the death penalty, was satisfied with the court’s capital jurisprudence.
“There are a number of death cases that troubled me,” he said. The Baze opinion, he added, “was really my reaction to the developing jurisprudence, which I think moved in a direction that I didn’t expect and is not correct.”
When the talk turned to balancing the pros and cons of moving on, Justice Stevens said the fact that he was still hard at work spoke volumes.
“It’s a wonderful job,” he said. “That’s perhaps the best evidence of it. I wouldn’t have hung around so long if I didn’t like the job and if I didn’t think I was able to continue to do it.”
On the con side, he said he was starting to feel his age. “I have to notice that I get arthritis in my left knee now and then,” he said. “That wasn’t bothering me before. I’m conscious of changes.”
Those changes have even shown up on the tennis court, he said with no little chagrin. “The game isn’t quite as good as it used to be, I have to confess,” he said.


Tea Party Groups Make Harry Reid Target No. 1
By KATE ZERNIKE

LAS VEGAS — The television cameras went 60 miles south, to where Sarah Palin kicked off the “Showdown in Searchlight.”
But come the midterm elections, what may be more significant is what is happening here, in a dark condominium where the Home Depot tags are still on the lawn chairs that double as indoor seating for guests.
The blinds drawn against the desert sun, this is the new burrow of Eric Odom, a chief organizer of the first nationwide Tea Parties last year. Mr. Odom moved here a few weeks ago with his fiancée and a blogger sidekick to mobilize the state’s Tea Party groups for the midterms. By training activists in get-out-the-vote tactics like the “voter bombs” that helped Scott Brown become the new Republican senator from Massachusetts, they are hoping to unseat Nevada’s senior senator and the Democratic leader, Harry Reid.
In a matter of weeks, this state has become ground zero for Tea Party members, who understand that as a symbol of the movement’s power, you cannot get much bigger than beating the Senate’s top Democrat.
The Tea Party Express kicked off its third cross-country bus tour last month in tiny Searchlight, Mr. Reid’s hometown. The group behind it, Our Country Deserves Better, which spent $350,000 in the last weeks of Mr. Brown’s campaign to elect him, has been steadily spending against Mr. Reid for a year. And Tea Party Nation, which sponsored the first Tea Party national convention in Nashville in February, plans to hold its second convention here in July.
Still, while polls suggest that Mr. Reid may lose his bid for re-election, it could be in spite of the Tea Party, not because of it.
There is no doubting the anti-Reid sentiment here. Above Searchlight looms a billboard almost as big as some nearby homes reading “Will Rogers never met Harry Reid,” a play on a famous saying by Rogers that he never met a man he did not like.
But before the Tea Party can claim a victory here, people have to figure out who the Tea Party candidate is. And “Anyone Butt Reid,” as other signs declare, is turning out to be not such an effective strategy.
Tea Party leaders had been planning on uniting behind the Republican candidate to defeat Mr. Reid. But there are 12 candidates in the primary in June, and not one seems to be attracting a majority of Tea Party support. One of the three front-runners, a former state Republican chairwoman, has clashed with a core Tea Party constituency in the past over her refusal to certify delegates for Ron Paul in the 2008 presidential race.
Then there is the problem of Scott Ashjian, an asphalt contractor who filed last month to run as the candidate of the Tea Party of Nevada. The Tea Party, at least elsewhere, is not a traditional political party, but a loose affiliation of groups. Conspiracy theory holds that Mr. Ashjian is a “progressive plant” thrown in by liberals to take votes away from the eventual Republican candidate and to help re-elect Mr. Reid.
“He took advantage of a situation and efforts made by other people,” said Debbie Landis, the leader of Anger Is Brewing, a Nevada Tea Party group. “He underestimated the Tea Party. We’re not going to pull a lever that says ‘Tea Party’ just because it’s the buzzword of the day.”
Maybe not. But with four independent candidates and two minor-party candidates also in the running, Tea Party leaders fear splitting the anti-Reid vote.
A poll by The Las Vegas Review Journal in February, before Mr. Ashjian filed as a candidate, showed a generic Tea Party candidate winning 18 percent of the vote, leaving the unspecified Republican nominee with 32 percent and Mr. Reid with 36 percent.
About 20 Tea Party leaders in the state have signed a letter saying that they do not endorse Mr. Ashjian and that they would not call anyone the “Tea Party candidate” anymore — the preferred term is now “grass roots.”
Mr. Odom, a former Republican consultant, also set about trying to get rid of Mr. Ashjian within a week of moving here from Chicago. He bought the rights to www.ashjian4senate.com, which now redirects visitors to a Web site accusing the candidate of abusing “the Tea Party brand.”
“He forgot to buy the domain name,” Mr. Odom said, wearing a Chicago Cubs cap as he sat in front of the computer terminals he uses to update a growing library of anti-Reid blogs and Web sites. “It’s campaign 101.”
Anger is Brewing joined the Independent American Party in filing suit to remove Mr. Ashjian from the ballot. Last week, the district attorney’s office filed felony charges against him for bouncing a $5,000 check. The head of the office’s bad check division happens to be a former state Republican chairman, though he insists that there was no political motive.
Our Country Deserves Better, run by Republican consultants in California, invested extensively in its Tea Party Express kickoff last month — hiring skywriters to etch phrases like “Vote Reid Out” and “No New Taxes” in the bright blue sky. It has now begun spending against Mr. Ashjian, with a television advertisement that tells him to “get lost.” “None of us has ever heard of you,” Mark Williams, the leader of Our Country Deserves Better, scolds.
The Tea Party movement rejects centralization — activists like to say, “we are all Tea Party leaders” — and some members recognize that Mr. Ashjian’s candidacy may be a hazard of that. “Everybody wants to be the Tea Party,” sighed Tony Warren of the National Precinct Alliance, an effort started by groups here to take over the Republican Party by installing Tea Party members in local committee positions.
People who turned out for the Tea Party Express rally in Searchlight were angry at Mr. Reid, but they did not have any preferred candidate to take him on. And they were just as angry at many Republicans, including the state’s other senator, John Ensign.
“They’re spending money like drug addicts,” said Jeff Church, 55, who had driven from his home in Reno with a “Reject Reid” bumper sticker on his Honda hybrid. “I don’t mean to insult drunken sailors. But drunken sailors, when they run out of money, they stop spending.”
Polls suggest the three front-runners are Sue Lowden, the former state Republican chairwoman; Danny Tarkanian, the son of the legendary former men’s basketball coach for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the owner of a small real-estate business; and Sharron Angle, a former state assemblywoman.
“If we had all informed voters, it would be Bill Parson that would be our candidate,” Mr. Warren said, referring to another Republican hopeful. “Unfortunately, not everybody pays attention.”
So he is hoping only the most active Tea Party — oops, grass-roots — voters come out.
“We’re telling people, if they don’t have an opinion, don’t guess,” he said. “Stay home.”


Summers expects financial overhaul to pass Senate
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's top economic adviser said Sunday he believes Congress will pass new oversight rules for the financial industry.
Lawrence Summers also said putting even more Americans back to work is a White House "preoccupation."
Saying the employment trend has turned, Summers cautioned that "to get back to the surface we've got a long way to go."
"It is the president's preoccupation to put people back to work," he said.
He also criticized Republicans who are holding up an extension of unemployment benefits, saying the economy still needs emergency action.
On the overhaul of the financial regulatory system, which Obama has said he wants to see passed in the Senate within two weeks, Summers said, "I expect that reform is going to pass."
He said he did not see how the measure could fail "given what we've been through" in the deepest recession in more than 50 years.
Summers predicted the economy will continue creating jobs but slowly and that the unemployment rate will decline slowly because more people will start trying to find work as the economy improves.
He spoke on ABC's "This Week" and CNN's "State of the Union."


Foreign Policy:


U.S. to Delay Chinese Currency Report

By SEWELL CHAN
The Obama administration said Saturday that it would delay a decision on whether to declare China a currency manipulator, but it vowed to press Chinese leaders on the politically charged issue of its currency valuation during a series of meetings through June.
The Treasury’s action seemed intended to send a reassuring message both to China and to Congress. It signaled to China that the administration prefers to resolve the dispute diplomatically, rather than force a showdown, but also pressed the case for a change in China’s policy, a position advocated by many United States lawmakers in both parties.
“China’s inflexible exchange rate has made it difficult for other emerging market economies to let their currencies appreciate,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in a statement. “A move by China to a more market-oriented exchange rate will make an essential contribution to global rebalancing.”
In his statement, Mr. Geithner said he had decided to delay the semiannual exchange rate report to Congress, which was to be due on April 15 and which many members of Congress had hoped would officially cite China as a currency manipulator.
But he made it clear that the United States believed that China has artificially undervalued its currency, the renminbi, which is also called the yuan. China had allowed the renminbi to appreciate from 2005 to 2008, but then resumed the practice of pegging its currency to a nearly fixed rate to bolster its export-oriented economy during the financial crisis.
“China’s continued maintenance of a currency peg has required increasingly large volumes of currency intervention,” Mr. Geithner said.
Mr. Geithner pledged to raise the issue at a series of forums: a meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 nations later this month; the annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the two countries in China in May; and a meeting of G-20 leaders and finance ministers in June. Mr. Geithner called these meetings “the best avenue for advancing U.S. interests at this time.”
Tensions between the nations have been easing, and China said on Thursday that President Hu Jintao would attend a nuclear security summit meeting in Washington this month.
Many economists believe the renminbi is now undervalued by as much as 40 percent. Some economists expect China to move on its own to adjust the value of the renminbi; by delaying the report the administration may be trying to give the Chinese some breathing room to do so.
Nicholas R. Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and an authority on the Chinese economy, said the delay made sense given China’s recent steps on other American priorities, including tougher sanctions against Iran and pressure on North Korea over nuclear weapons. “Delaying the currency report is a small price to pay for what we’ve gotten so far,” he said.
He said the statement “reflects the administration’s desire to address this on a multilateral basis rather than a bilateral basis.”
The United States has not found China to be a currency manipulator since 1994. Under successive administrations, officials have tried to persuade China that letting the renminbi appreciate would stimulate domestic demand and reduce reliance on exports. An appreciation would also stimulate private savings in the United States by making imports more expensive and exports less expensive.
Within the Chinese government there has been debate over the issue. The central bank has signaled that a gradual appreciation is in order, but the Commerce Ministry, which represents the interests of the country’s powerful exporters and manufacturers, has argued for maintaining the currency peg.
Last month, 130 House members urged the Obama administration to impose tariffs and other punitive measures on China in retaliation for the undervalued renminbi, and a handful of senators proposed legislation that would effectively threaten China with trade sanctions. Both efforts had bipartisan support.
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, also criticized the delay.
“Everyone knows China is manipulating the value of its currency to gain an unfair advantage in international trade,” he said. “If we want the Chinese to take us seriously, we need to be willing to say so in public.”
However, another influential lawmaker, Representative Sander M. Levin, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, endorsed the Treasury’s approach. “The announced delay is for a definite period and for a defined purpose,” Mr. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said in a statement. But he added that if a multilateral effort did not result in China’s making significant changes, “the administration and Congress will have no choice but to take appropriate action.”
Similarly, Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, one of the largest manufacturing unions, said he was comforted by the Treasury stance.
“Those are very positive statements,” he said. “We have an administration that’s finally talking about this issue. I’m not so bothered with the postponement if it’s going to bring about a positive direction and change in America.”

The Doomsday Dilemma

This Spring, Barack Obama will push toward his goal of a nuclear-free world. But the stiffest resistance may be at home.
For many years, America's master plan for nuclear war with the Soviet Union was called the SIOP—the Single Integrated Operational Plan. Beginning in 1962, the U.S. president was given some options to mull in the few minutes he had to decide before Soviet missiles bore down on Washington. He could, for instance, choose to spare the Soviet satellites, the Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe. Or he could opt for, say, the "urban-industrial" strike option—1,500 or so warheads dropped on 300 Russian cities. After a briefing on the SIOP on Sept. 14, 1962, President John F. Kennedy turned to his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and remarked, "And they call us human beings."
Ever since the dawn of the atomic age at Hiroshima in August 1945, American presidents have been trying to figure out how to climb off the nuclear treadmill. The urgency may have faded in the post–Cold War era, but the weapons are still there. By 2002, President George W. Bush was signing off on a document containing his administration's Nuclear Posture Review, an -analysis of how America's nuclear arms might be used. Bush scribbled on the cover, "But why do we still have to have so many?" According to a knowledgeable source who would not be identified discussing sensitive national-security matters, President Obama wasn't briefed on the U.S. nuclear-strike plan against Russia and China until some months after he had taken office. "He thought it was insane," says the source. (The reason for the delay is unclear; the White House did not respond to repeated inquiries.)
During his presidential campaign, Obama embraced a dream first articulated by President Reagan: the abolition of nuclear weapons. The idea is no longer all that radical. In January 2007, an op-ed piece calling for a nuclear-weapons-free world appeared in The Wall Street Journal, signed by Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz; Nixon's and Ford's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger; Clinton's secretary of defense Bill Perry; and Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and longtime wise man of the defense establishment. "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," as they were quickly dubbed, had gotten together to give cover to politicians. "We wanted the candidates of both parties to feel they could debate the issue freely," said Nunn.
So when Obama joined the cry for a world without nukes in his campaign, he wasn't taking a big political chance. His Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, did not seem to disagree. And yet, accomplishing this goal—or even taking some meaningful steps toward it—makes health-care reform look easy. As president, Obama the idealist has had to become Obama the realist: working for a nuclear-free world tomorrow, but at the same time, and at great cost, keeping up America's nuclear forces today.
In a speech in Prague last spring, Obama noted that "in a strange turn of history, the threat of global war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up." He warned that with more nations acquiring nuclear weapons, or wishing to, the scary but oddly stable reign of "mutual assured destruction" was giving way to a new disorder. "As more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold." Obama stated "clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." But, he added, "I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly—perhaps not in my lifetime." And he threw in an important caveat: "Make no mistake. As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure, and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies."
Nuclear policy will be front and center for Obama this spring, but in a way that may reveal more about limits than possibilities. On April 8, the president will sign an arms-control treaty with Russia that will set limits on numbers of warheads and launchers, lower than any previously agreed. Progress, to be sure. But it's not entirely clear that a polarized Congress will find the two-thirds majority to ratify the treaty. Its most impassioned opponent, Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, is already demanding to know whether the "New START" treaty represents "a new era in arms control or unilateral disarmament." For their part the Russians are still smarting from perceived humiliations at the end of the Cold War and are increasingly dependent on nuclear weapons as their conventional forces wither. They seem unlikely to go much further in cutting their arsenal.
The prospect of nuclear proliferation is anxiety-inducing for all presidents, especially as terrorists try to get their hands on loose nukes. Obama is convinced that nuclear terrorism now poses a greater threat than the remote possibility of a nuclear war. On April 12 and 13, he will host a Washington summit of more than 40 heads of government with the aim of getting tougher measures to secure the fissile material still lying unprotected around the world. He's set a deadline of four years for truly securing the most dangerous materials. His own advisers suspect he is being overambitious but see the summit as a "consciousness-raising exercise." Every five years, the signers of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meet to review progress, and in May they will meet again. The Obama team hopes to use the conference to push his no-nukes agenda, but he will be resisted by countries, like Iran, that resent American power. At the same time, Obama can't cut America's arsenal as much as he might like. Countries long under U.S. nuclear protection, like Japan, may decide they need their own nuclear arms as American power declines in the world. Countries choosing to stay under the nuclear umbrella will want reassurances that they can depend on it.
Obama's dream of a nuke-free world will encounter the stiffest resistance at home—from the people who make and safeguard nuclear weapons. America's nuclear systems are aging, raising questions about the reliability of bombs, planes, and missiles. The U.S. Senate never ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and though the White House has talked hopefully of getting a vote on the CTBT sometime in a first Obama term, congressional staff experts are skeptical. "The CTBT is going nowhere," says a staffer who declined to be named. "The Republicans are not going to go for it." The GOP rationale: the United States needs to at least preserve the option of testing the reliability of old weapons or developing new ones.
For the past 15 years, the United States has been pursuing what it calls "stockpile stewardship." Atomic labs have used elaborate computer simulations and chemical and physical testing to ascertain whether the aging bombs would still go off. But at some point, the older weapons may have to be seriously upgraded or replaced. The Obama administration is proposing to increase funding for nuclear-weapons work by some $5 billion over five years. The United States needs to train a new generation of nuclear-weapons scientists and build a new plant at Los Alamos to construct plutonium "pits," the fissile cores of U.S. warheads.
Some Obama supporters on the left are outraged. Last month in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a well-informed antinuke group, bitterly decried "one of the larger increases in warhead spending history." Even so, the sweeteners may not be enough. In January, the directors of America's three nuclear labs told Republicans in Congress that they couldn't be confident that stockpile stewardship would work indefinitely to guarantee America's arsenal.
Sometime this week, Obama is supposed to release a long-delayed Nuclear Posture Review. The hope is to lay out a "paradigm shift" in thinking—to move away from war planning and focus on steps toward a nuclear-free world. There will be ambitious plans to safeguard against proliferation, in part by strengthening the International Atomic Energy Agency; by providing nuclear fuel to countries that need it (so they don't try to enrich their own uranium); and by better securing nuclear materials from reactors around the world used for research and medicine, ingredients that might be used to build a "dirty bomb."
These are all sensible steps. But on the question of what Obama will do with America's own nuclear weapons, the president is sure to fall shy of his ambitions. Obama has rejected calls to scrap one leg of the "triad" of U.S. nuclear forces: missiles, submarines, and bombers. He does want to get away from the alert status known as "prompt launch," so there is talk of "repositioning" U.S. forces so they could not be quickly taken out by surprise. (The old standards were "launch on warning" or "launch under attack." Obama wants to avoid any kind of hasty response.) But the United States is likely to keep some ICBMs on alert against a Russian or Chinese missile attack.
Obama will call for improved communications with the Russian leadership to avoid what are tactfully called "misperceptions." Obama is also un-likely to make a "no first use" pledge, though the wording will be fudged. The new members of NATO—former Soviet satellites like the Baltic states—would be aghast at any such promise. As for future reductions, the United States has already removed all battlefield nukes from Europe. The Russians have not. Obama's advisers are hoping to trade some of America's "reserve force" of intercontinental weapons for those Russian tactical weapons.
But Obama is still faced with the age-old question of targeting America's strategic weapons. Will American missiles be aimed at Moscow or Beijing—or Tehran? No, cities are off-limits. But even if the targets are military forces, millions would still die. Obama is still pondering the dilemma; the matter is said by administration officials to be under secret review.



Opinion Pieces:

To battle Wall Street, Obama should channel Teddy Roosevelt
By Simon Johnson and James Kwak

In late February 1902, J.P. Morgan, the leading financier of his day, went to the White House to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt and Attorney General Philander Knox. The government had just announced an antitrust suit -- the first of its kind -- against Morgan's recently formed railroad monopoly, Northern Securities, and this was a tense moment for the stock market. Morgan argued strongly that his industrial trusts were essential to American prosperity and competitiveness.
The banker wanted a deal. "If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up," he offered. But the president was blunt: "That can't be done." And Knox succinctly summarized Roosevelt's philosophy. "We don't want to fix it up," he told Morgan, "we want to stop it."
Just over a century later, on March 27, 2009, 13 bankers were summoned to the White House. The global financial system was verging on collapse, in no small measure because of the bankers' concentrated power and their manifest inability to manage the risks of their "financial innovation." Banking had to be rescued -- no modern economy can function without credit, of course -- and only the Obama administration had the power to save the day.
But instead of specific new regulations or changes in the way they operate -- or even any constraints on their power -- what did these 13 bankers find waiting for them? On this day and in the months that followed, the administration provided generous expressions of unconditional financial and moral support, both explicit and implicit, along with gentle and nonbinding admonitions.
The headline quote from President Obama sounded tough: "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks," he told the meeting. But the reality was as mild as it could be: All 13 bankers, no matter how discredited, kept their jobs, their salaries, their bonuses, their pensions, their staff and, most remarkable given the near-complete breakdown of governance, even their boards of directors. Our leading bankers were saved by the generosity and magnanimity of our president.
Since that meeting, the country has seen no discernible changes in the financial management and incentive systems that for 30 years have given Wall Street the benefits of the upside and Main Street the costs of the downside. And politically, our financial titans have bitterly opposed the mild reforms that the Obama administration eventually proposed. Even Citi and Bank of America, which essentially spent 2009 as wards of the state, have engaged in egregious lobbying.
There is no way that Teddy Roosevelt would have stood for this. He saw finance and economics through the lens of political power. In his book, it did not matter how important you were, or claimed to be, to the economy. If you were too powerful, and if your actions were hurting other people in the economy, Roosevelt wanted to take you on -- and he instructed his lawyers accordingly.
Roosevelt did not launch the antitrust movement by gently tugging on some low-hanging fruit. He took on J.P. Morgan, the central figure in the burgeoning American financial system, and he won (though just barely, with the Supreme Court voting 5 to 4 to dissolve Northern Securities). And after many twists and turns, the new consensus regarding acceptable business practices led to the breakup of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil -- arguably the most powerful company in U.S. history to that date.
Of course, Roosevelt did have the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act on his side. But before 1902, that law had never been used against an industrial trust, and precedent suggested that there was no legal basis for reining in Morgan's ventures. Roosevelt's audacious move seemed against the odds, and it was very much against the advice of top figures in his Republican Party.
In the spring of 2009, Obama and his senior advisers did not seem terribly troubled by the dangerous concentration of power, wealth and hubris on Wall Street. The president thought it reasonable to find a way forward through amicable accommodation, assuming that Big Finance really could change. Yet, in memoirs and public statements, the bankers repeatedly submit their defense: The system -- the mechanics and incentives of Wall Street -- made them do it. Unfortunately, Wall Street and its intimate connections to Washington have not become any safer for the American economy since this crisis began.
In fact, the latest boom-bust-bailout cycle probably worsened matters. We can argue whether, before September 2008, the people running huge financial firms really thought they were "too big to fail." Lehman, after all, did go bankrupt; Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were rescued at the eleventh hour. But today, who thinks Goldman could fail?
In the moment of most intense crisis, Goldman became a bank holding company, subject to the supervision of the Federal Reserve and able to borrow from the Fed's official "discount window" -- effectively gaining government support. Yet today the firm is also allowed to carry out essentially the same activities (including securities and foreign-exchange trading, as well as real-estate-related transactions) as it did prior to the meltdown of 2008, when there was supposedly no government backing.
If you were exempt from paying speeding tickets, no matter how fast you drove, what would you do? Perhaps, immediately after observing a horrific crash or having a near-death experience, you would be more careful. But soon you would feel the need to get somewhere quickly. And you might even think that your special legal status merely reflected your advanced skills. How long until the next big accident?
Since Democrats lost the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January, the president has shown some new fire. In a major potential course correction, he proposed the "Volcker Rule," named after former Fed chairman and current Obama adviser Paul Volcker, which would constrain the risk-taking and the size of the largest U.S. banks. The move blind-sided Wall Street. In the sound bite of Jan. 21, Obama sounded just like Teddy: "If these folks want a fight," he said, "it's a fight I'm ready to have."
It is now time for that fight. Senate Democrats have proposed a financial overhaul that includes the Volcker Rule, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that passing regulatory reform by late May is realistic. But to make progress in this legislative cycle, the president needs to go all in, as he did with health-care reform. The potential political message here is powerful: If opponents of reform think they are "too big to fail," then we will prove them wrong.
It doesn't help that Wall Street has vast amounts of cash to spend on lobbying and political ads. Yet, if framed correctly, the reform message cuts across the political spectrum. If there is one thing that the left and the right agree upon, it is that a "get out of jail free" card distorts the free market. Massive banks have access to cheaper financing because the credit markets understand that the government stands behind them. This is unfair competition, pure and simple.
Will the administration stand up and fight now, before we have another crisis? Surely this is what Theodore Roosevelt would have done. He liked to act preemptively; when he saw excessive power, he took it on, creating his own moments of political opportunity.
Of course, there is always the other Roosevelt. When FDR took power in March 1933, he took aim at the banks. As historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in "The Coming of the New Deal" -- "No business was more proud and powerful than the bankers; none was more persuaded of its own rectitude; none more accustomed to respectful consultation by government officials. To be attacked as antisocial was bewildering; to be excluded from the formation of public policy was beyond endurance."
By the mid-1930s, Franklin Roosevelt had become skeptical of powerful financiers, but he was only able to translate those feelings into policy after a major global depression. Obama shouldn't wait for another one before pushing for the changes that matter.
Do informed voters make better choices? Not necessarily.
Knowledge is power -- except maybe when it comes to voting on ballot initiatives. Then it doesn't seem to matter so much.
That's the conclusion of an intriguing new study, "The Dilemma of Direct Democracy," by researchers Craig Burnett of the University of California at San Diego and Elizabeth Garrett and Matthew McCubbins of the University of Southern California. In exit polls after the 2008 election, they asked 1,002 voters in San Diego how they had voted on Proposition 7 -- a measure that would have required public utilities to generate at least half their energy from renewable sources by 2025. They also asked about the basic facts of the initiative, whether in general voters preferred that utilities produce more renewable energy and whether they knew if gas or electric companies had opposed or supported the initiative.
"Surprisingly, we discover that knowledge does not matter," the authors write. Regardless of whether voters were familiar with the facts of the initiative or knew the utility companies' positions, they tended to cast their votes in a manner consistent with their own underlying preferences. "We find no support for the expectation that better-informed voters . . . are more likely to make reasoned decisions than those who are, by our measure, uninformed," the researchers write.
Burnett, Garret and McCubbins nonetheless argue that, in a well-functioning democracy, voters should understand the issues on the ballot so that they can be confident they're translating their preferences into reasoned decisions. After all, about a third of those voting "yes" did so against their stated preference, and about 14 percent of those voting "no" did the same. So the authors propose offering voters more information at the "point of sale," i.e., on the ballot itself, and removing the responsibility of writing the ballot titles and summaries from political officials to a bipartisan commission.
Ironically, the only fact in the researcher's poll questions that was clearly stated on the ballot -- that half the energy generated would need to come from renewable sources by 2025 -- was the one that fewest voters (16.9 percent) knew.
The proposition lost, 65 percent to 35 percent.


It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Obama!
By FRANK RICH

NOT since Clark Kent changed in a phone booth has there been an instant image makeover to match Barack Obama’s in the aftermath of his health care victory. “He went from Jimmy Carter to F.D.R. in just a fortnight,” said one of the “Game Change” authors, Mark Halperin, on MSNBC. “Look at the steam in the man’s stride!” exclaimed Chris Matthews. “Is it just me, or does Barack Obama seem different since health care passed?” wrote Peter Beinart in The Daily Beast, which, like The Financial Times, ran an illustration portraying the gangly president as a newly bulked-up Superman.
What a difference winning makes — especially in America. Whatever did (or didn’t) get into Obama’s Wheaties, this much is certain: No one is talking about the clout of Scott Brown or Rahm Emanuel any more.
But has the man really changed — or is it just us? Fifteen months after arriving at the White House, Obama remains by far the most popular national politician in the country, even with a sub-50 percent approval rating. And yet he’s also the most enigmatic. While he is in our face more than any other figure in the world, we still aren’t entirely sure what to make of him.
Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)
No wonder that eight major new Obama books are arriving in the coming months, as Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post last week. And that’s just counting those by real authors, like Bob Woodward and Jonathan Alter, not the countless anti-Obama diatribes. There’s a bottomless market for these volumes not just because their protagonist remains popular but also because we keep hoping that the Obama puzzle might be cracked once and for all, like the Da Vinci Code.
The first of these books, out this week, is full of intriguing clues. Titled “The Bridge” and written by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, it portrays Obama as fairly steady in his blend of liberal and centrist views, however much they (like everyone else’s) may have evolved over decades. Even his cultural tastes combined the progressive with the cautious. In the apartment he shared with a roommate at Occidental College, the playlist at late-night parties ran the gamut from Bob Marley and the Talking Heads to “that not-so-great soft Grover Washington stuff,” a friend recalls with some disdain.
If Obama’s belief system was fairly consistent, his public persona was not. Remnick returns repeatedly to the notion that Obama is a “shape-shifter,” with a remarkable ability to come across differently to disparate constituencies. Some of that reflects his agility at shifting rhetorical gears when, say, speaking to a living-room gathering on Chicago’s Near North Side or at a black church — a talent not unknown to some white politicians, starting with Bill Clinton. But much of this has less to do with Obama’s performance style than with how various audiences respond to his complex, hard-to-pigeonhole poly-racial-cultural-geographical identity. As far back as 2004 — when Obama was still in the Illinois Senate — a writer at The Chicago Tribune, Don Terry, framed what remains the prevailing Obama takeaway to this day. “He’s a Rorschach test,” Terry wrote. “What you see is what you want to see.”
Last week, after I wrote about the role race plays in some of the apocalyptic right-wing hysteria about the health care bill, a friend who is a prominent liberal Obama supporter sent me an e-mail flipping my point. He theorized that race also plays a role in “the often angry and intemperate talk” he has been hearing from “left-liberal friends for the past many months about what a failure and a disappointment” the president has been. In his view, “Obama never said anything, while running, to give anyone the idea” that he was other than a “deliberate, compromise-seeking bipartisan moderate.” My friend wondered if white liberals who voted for Obama expected a “sweeping Republicans-be-damned kind of agenda” in part — and he emphasized “in part!” — because “they expect a black guy to be intemperate, impetuous, impatient” rather than “measured, deliberate, patient.”
That was one provocative expansion of Obama-as-Rorschach test I hadn’t encountered before, and I guess anything is possible, particularly when it involves race in America. But what is unquestionably true is my friend’s underlying premise — that the Obama we see now is generally consistent with the one he presented in the 2008 campaign. Many, if not all, of the positions that have angered liberals since he entered the White House line up with his positions then, including his stubborn and futile faith in the prospect of bipartisanship in Washington.
When the 2008 Obama called Afghanistan an essential war and vowed to take out terrorist havens in Pakistan, he wasn’t just posturing to prove he was as hawkish as Hillary Clinton — which is what some chose to hear. Though he nominally supported a public option as a plank of health care reform, it was not a high priority and he rarely mentioned it, according to a review of his campaign speeches, interviews and debates by Sam Stein of The Huffington Post. Obama never said anything to suggest that he was interested in economic interventionism as bold as, say, the potential nationalization of failing banks. He was unambiguous in his professed opposition to same-sex marriage and largely silent on gun control. And as Jake Tapper of ABC News chronicled last week, Obama had even opened the door to offshore oil drilling in the weeks before Election Day.
It’s not just the Tea Party right or some on the liberal left who see only the Obama they want to see. This phenomenon extends to moderate Republicans who refuse to believe that Obama agrees with them even when he does. Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, reacted to the news of the Christmas Day bomber with an over-the-top outburst accusing Obama of being soft on terrorism. Though Obama’s education reforms have increased Pell grants and nettled one liberal constituency, teachers’ unions, Lamar Alexander, the supposedly temperate senator from Tennessee, has characterized the president as pushing “a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything.” Mitt Romney has now started a full-tilt campaign to angrily challenge the indisputable reality that “Obamacare” resembles his own health care reform package in Massachusetts.
What’s clear is that Obama largely remains a fixed point even while the rest of us keep wildly revising our judgments, whether looking at him through the prism of partisan politics, race, media melodrama or any other we choose. It’s our recession-tossed country, not his presidency, that is rocked by violent mood swings.
That doesn’t mean his presidency will be successful. Being consistent is not the same as being a forceful leader. If there’s been an overarching, nonideological failing so far in Obama, it’s been his execution of the levers of power. Whether in articulating his health care bottom line, or closing Guantánamo Bay, or moving forward on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he has often seemed tardy or unfocused, at times missing deadlines he has set himself. The narrative that might link his presidential policies into a clear, mobilizing vision for the country remains murky, which in turn facilitates the caricature of his views from all sides.
But in the immediate aftermath of his health care victory, at least, there does seem to be real, not imagined, change in Obama’s management modus operandi. Whether challenging Karzai and Bibi, or pushing through 15 recess appointments, or taunting those who would repeal the health care law to “go for it,” this is a far more energized executive than the sometimes tentative technocrat we’ve often seen thus far. The pace has picked up — if not to faster-than-a-speeding-bullet Superman velocity, then at least as much as the inherent sclerosis of Washington will allow.
And not a moment too soon. The speed with which Obama navigates out of the recession, as measured by new jobs and serious financial reform, remains by far the most determinative factor in how he, his party and, most of all, the country will fare in the fractious year of 2010. If he succeeds in that all-important challenge — or, for that matter, if he fails — the enigmatic, Rorschach-test phase of Obama’s still young relationship to the American people may rapidly draw to a close. It will be the moment of clarity that allows us to at last judge him, as we should all presidents, on what he’s actually done rather than on who we imagine he is.


Polls:

President Obama Job Approval
Approve
47.5
Disapprove
46.1
Spread +1.4

Congressional Job Approval
Approve
18.5
Disapprove
76.2
Spread -57.7

Generic Congressional Vote
Republicans
45.6
Democrats
43.4
Republicans +2.2

Direction of Country
Right Direction
34.4
Wrong Track
59.6
Spread -25.2