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