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USA > History > 2010 > Politics > White House / President (III)

Obama Returns

to End-of-Life Plan

That Caused Stir

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

Congressional supporters of the new policy, though pleased, have kept quiet. They fear provoking another furor like the one in 2009 when Republicans seized on the idea of end-of-life counseling to argue that the Democrats’ bill would allow the government to cut off care for the critically ill.

The final version of the health care legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, authorized Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations, or wellness visits. The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit.

Under the rule, doctors can provide information to patients on how to prepare an “advance directive,” stating how aggressively they wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.

While the new law does not mention advance care planning, the Obama administration has been able to achieve its policy goal through the regulation-writing process, a strategy that could become more prevalent in the next two years as the president deals with a strengthened Republican opposition in Congress.

In this case, the administration said research had shown the value of end-of-life planning.

“Advance care planning improves end-of-life care and patient and family satisfaction and reduces stress, anxiety and depression in surviving relatives,” the administration said in the preamble to the Medicare regulation, quoting research published this year in the British Medical Journal.

The administration also cited research by Dr. Stacy M. Fischer, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who found that “end-of-life discussions between doctor and patient help ensure that one gets the care one wants.” In this sense, Dr. Fischer said, such consultations “protect patient autonomy.”

Opponents said the Obama administration was bringing back a procedure that could be used to justify the premature withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from people with severe illnesses and disabilities.

Section 1233 of the bill passed by the House in November 2009 — but not included in the final legislation — allowed Medicare to pay for consultations about advance care planning every five years. In contrast, the new rule allows annual discussions as part of the wellness visit.

Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, which describes itself as “a pro-life Christian educational ministry,” said she was concerned that end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death.

“The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Ms. Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”

Several Democratic members of Congress, led by Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, had urged the administration to cover end-of-life planning as a service offered under the Medicare wellness benefit. A national organization of hospice care providers made the same recommendation.

Mr. Blumenauer, the author of the original end-of-life proposal, praised the rule as “a step in the right direction.”

“It will give people more control over the care they receive,” Mr. Blumenauer said in an interview. “It means that doctors and patients can have these conversations in the normal course of business, as part of our health care routine, not as something put off until we are forced to do it.”

After learning of the administration’s decision, Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated “a quiet victory,” but urged supporters not to crow about it.

“While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. “This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

Moreover, the e-mail said: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists, even if they are ‘supporters’ — e-mails can too easily be forwarded.”

The e-mail continued: “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

In the interview, Mr. Blumenauer said, “Lies can go viral if people use them for political purposes.”

The proposal for Medicare coverage of advance care planning was omitted from the final health care bill because of the uproar over unsubstantiated claims that it would encourage euthanasia.

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, led the criticism in the summer of 2009. Ms. Palin said “Obama’s death panel” would decide who was worthy of health care. Mr. Boehner, who is in line to become speaker, said, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.” Forced onto the defensive, Mr. Obama said that nothing in the bill would “pull the plug on grandma.”

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the idea of death panels persists. In the September poll, 30 percent of Americans 65 and older said the new health care law allowed a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare. The law has no such provision.

The new policy is included in a huge Medicare regulation setting payment rates for thousands of services including arthroscopy, mastectomy and X-rays.

The rule was issued by Dr. Donald M. Berwick, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a longtime advocate for better end-of-life care.

“Using unwanted procedures in terminal illness is a form of assault,” Dr. Berwick has said. “In economic terms, it is waste. Several techniques, including advance directives and involvement of patients and families in decision-making, have been shown to reduce inappropriate care at the end of life, leading to both lower cost and more humane care.”

Ellen B. Griffith, a spokeswoman for the Medicare agency, said, “The final health care reform law has no provision for voluntary advance care planning.” But Ms. Griffith added, under the new rule, such planning “may be included as an element in both the first and subsequent annual wellness visits, providing an opportunity to periodically review and update the beneficiary’s wishes and preferences for his or her medical care.”

Mr. Blumenauer and Mr. Rockefeller said that advance directives would help doctors and nurses provide care in keeping with patients’ wishes.

“Early advance care planning is important because a person’s ability to make decisions may diminish over time, and he or she may suddenly lose the capability to participate in health care decisions,” the lawmakers said in a letter to Dr. Berwick in August.

In a recent study of 3,700 people near the end of life, Dr. Maria J. Silveira of the University of Michigan found that many had “treatable, life-threatening conditions” but lacked decision-making capacity in their final days. With the new Medicare coverage, doctors can learn a patient’s wishes before a crisis occurs.

For example, Dr. Silveira said, she might ask a person with heart disease, “If you have another heart attack and your heart stops beating, would you want us to try to restart it?” A patient dying of emphysema might be asked, “Do you want to go on a breathing machine for the rest of your life?” And, she said, a patient with incurable cancer might be asked, “When the time comes, do you want us to use technology to try and delay your death?”

Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/politics/26death.html

A Firmly Drawn Presidential Line

Between Work and Play

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

KAILUA, Hawaii — If there is one thing President Obama craves during his leisure time, it is privacy.

Mr. Obama arrived on the island of Oahu in the middle of the night as Wednesday turned into Thursday and slipped on a green lei as he descended the steps of Air Force One. Then he sped off in an S.U.V. toward this laid-back residential community on the windward side of the island, far from the bustle of Waikiki Beach, where the bulk of his traveling White House stays, in Honolulu, the city he lived in as a boy.

Then, the most visible man in America promptly dropped out of sight.

Mr. Obama’s disappearance behind the palm trees reveals much about his presidential style, and also his thinking about how to balance work and play. He tends to separate the two, as much as any president can. Other presidents, especially those who owned secluded homes or vacation retreats, often mixed them, using their homes outside Washington as tools of the presidency — another means of advancing their goals and agendas.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, dangled invitations to his ranch in Crawford, Tex., as perks to favored foreign leaders. Lyndon B. Johnson often hosted members of Congress at his Texas ranch. Theodore Roosevelt turned Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., into the “Summer White House”; he invited diplomats from Russia and Japan there to begin talks to end war between their nations, thus earning for himself the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. Obama has a home in Chicago but no vacation place; he stays here in a luxury beachfront rental. Yet even if he did have his own hideaway, there is little indication that he would turn it into an extension of his White House. He rarely goes to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, and when he does, it is not to conduct business. After Democrats took a drubbing in the midterm elections, though, Mr. Obama hinted that may change; he said he intended to meet with leaders of both parties more frequently, “including at Camp David.”

This surprised even allies, some of whom think Mr. Obama could use his free time to greater political effect. “It’s a great idea,” said Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, who recalled spending time with President Bill Clinton at Camp David. “It’s a setting that is quieter and slower and a perfect environment for relationship building.”

Yet Mr. Obama is not a politician who uses circumstances and relationships to cajole. He is not one to say, “Let’s have a couple of drinks and hash this out.” He does not confuse his work friends with his real friends. He jealously guards his time with his wife and daughters and the tight circle of intimates like Eric Whitaker and Martin Nesbitt from Chicago, who are with him here. And he is perfectly content to leave his public persona at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and slip, however briefly, into private life.

“Hawaii is a place that is extraordinarily special to him, so being able to come here and spend time with his family is something that really recharges him,” said Bill Burton, Mr. Obama’s deputy press secretary, who is here as well. “Even something as simple as getting into the ocean is really important to him. The goal is to spend as much time with his family and his friends as he possibly can.”

That is not to say Mr. Obama is not working. He receives his daily intelligence and economic briefings as usual, and on Thursday he called President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia to talk about the New Start arms pact. On Saturday, he dropped by the Marine base during Christmas dinner. But he has no public events scheduled and managed to duck television cameras, despite the networks’ best efforts, when he left his compound to play golf.

“I think it speaks volumes about the man’s temperament,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “He doesn’t crave the spotlight the way some of these other presidents have. They needed to be constantly in the eye of the public; it propelled them into politics in the first place. Obama is less that way; he is more of a self-contained person, someone who can genuinely spend time by himself with his family.”

He is not the first. Ronald Reagan played host to the queen of England at his mountaintop ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., but he rarely invited members of his own cabinet there. He regarded it as “his and Nancy’s special place,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, his former chief of staff, and he resented the photographers with their long lenses who angled for a shot of him on horseback.

“It bothered Reagan that he couldn’t just go off camera for a while,” Mr. Duberstein said.

Still, the urge to seclude oneself can get a president in trouble, as Mr. Obama discovered last year when the authorities thwarted an effort by a Nigerian man to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. The president did not emerge to address the nation until two days later — a serious public relations blunder. By that time, his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, had drawn ridicule for saying “the system worked,” and it was up to Mr. Obama to repair the damage.

Mr. Duberstein says, “There is no such thing as seclusion and the president in the same sentence.” But here in Kailua, Mr. Obama can come close. The place oozes “live and let live.” Boys with tousled, sun-bleached hair tuck surfboards under their arms as they skateboard home from the beach.

At Island Snow, Mr. Obama’s favorite shave-ice shop, where the flavors include koolau lychee and maunawili mango, all the locals knew precisely where he stays. But as Dawn Horn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who lives here, said, “Hawaiians’ perspective is that we like to let our visitors, especially if they are well known, have some space.”

Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who knew Mr. Obama’s parents when they were students in Honolulu, says that what the president finds here is not so much privacy but “acceptability” — the protective cocoon that comes with being in the warm embrace of a familiar place, where people regard him as “ohana,” Hawaiian for “extended family.”

“He’s not living in isolation; he’s living in the middle of the Kailua neighborhood,” the governor said. “So what I mean by acceptability, rather than privacy, is that everybody accepts that concept of ohana and family, and that it extends to him, most especially to him. We consider him a keiki o ka aina, a child of the land.”

A Firmly Drawn Presidential Line Between Work and Play, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/politics/26memo.html

Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir

December 25, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan That Caused Stir, NYT, 25.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us/politics/26death.html

Arms Talks Now Turn to Short-Range Weapons

December 24, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Fresh from winning Senate approval for a new strategic arms treaty, President Obama plans to return to the negotiating table with Russia next year in hopes of securing the first legal limits ever imposed on the smaller, battlefield nuclear weapons viewed as most vulnerable to theft or diversion.

This time around, though, Mr. Obama may have an easier time with the Senate Republicans who tried to block ratification of the new treaty, known as New Start, than he will with the Russians who were his partners in writing it.

As part of their case against the treaty, Senate Republicans complained vociferously that it did not cover tactical nuclear weapons, short-range bombs that have never been addressed by a Russian-American treaty. To press their point, Republicans pushed through a side resolution calling on Mr. Obama to open new talks with Russia on such weapons within a year.

That was always Mr. Obama’s long-stated plan for following up New Start, so now he has the added advantage of a virtual Republican mandate to negotiate a new arms limitation agreement with Russia. The challenge next time will actually be Russia, which has many more of these tactical bombs deployed in Europe than the United States does, and in its strategic doctrine deems them critical to defending against a potential conventional attack by NATO or China.

“The good news is, with Senate approval of New Start, the administration achieved the essential precondition to getting Russia to consider reductions in tactical nuclear forces,” said Stephen Young, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an arms control advocacy group. “The Russians, however, will try to insist on limitations on U.S. missile defense, which is something the administration is both not inclined to do and couldn’t get through the Senate if it did.”

The White House said after the Senate voted 71-to-26 on Wednesday to approve New Start that it would move forward on tactical weapons. “We will carry out the requirements of the resolution by seeking to initiate negotiations with Russia on tactical nukes within one year of New Start’s entry into force,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

Mr. Vietor said the administration was seeking to enlist Russia in collaborating with the United States and NATO on a European missile defense system rather than trying to obstruct it. “We have a robust schedule of consultations on missile defense cooperation with Russia planned for the early part of the new year,” he said.

The new arms control treaty, like its predecessors, placed limits on strategic nuclear weapons, meaning those that can be delivered long distances, but not on shorter-range bombs. Tactical weapons generally refer to those with ranges of 300 or 400 miles or less — some quite small and therefore particularly worrisome to officials responsible for guarding against terrorists obtaining such destructive weapons.

In 1991, as the cold war was coming to an end and the Soviet Union was near collapse, the first President George Bush announced that he would unilaterally withdraw most tactical nuclear weapons from forward positions. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union then reciprocated. Experts estimate that thousands of tactical bombs were withdrawn or eliminated.

Today, the United States retains about 500 tactical weapons, according to the figures released this year, and experts say about 180 of them are still stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. Russia has between 3,000 and 5,000 of them, depending on the estimate, and American officials have said Moscow moved more of them closer to NATO allies as recently as last spring in response to the deployment of American missile defense installations closer to its territory.

“In the 21st century, there is no plausible military, political or deterrent justification for the Russian government to deploy several thousand such weapons,” said Frank Miller, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush and now part of the American Security Project, which advocates for arms control.

The imbalance animated Republican opponents of the New Start treaty during the Senate debate. “Remember, the Russians have a 10-to-1 ratio of tactical nuclear weapons over us — 3,000 to 300 — not talked about in this treaty, an important issue,” said Senator George LeMieux, Republican of Florida, who inserted the provision calling for new talks in the resolution of ratification accompanying the treaty.

But other experts warned that it would be hard to persuade Russia to give up its advantage without getting something in return. If not a concession on missile defense, these experts said Russia would certainly want to talk about paring back the large stockpiles of stored strategic weapons that are also not covered by the New Start treaty.

In that category of weapons, the United States has the advantage. It reported having about 2,600 strategic warheads in reserve, while experts estimate that Russia has 1,000. At least some of the weapons to be removed as a result of New Start would simply go into storage.

Steven Pifer, a former arms control official at the State Department, said one way to devise a deal would be to negotiate an overall cap on all nuclear weapons of perhaps 2,500 each. Then both sides would have to reduce the weapons they have the most of, but precise parity in each category would not be required.

Mr. Pifer said any agreement would test whether Republicans were serious when they criticized New Start for neglecting tactical weapons. “Will they support it, or will it turn out the lack of limits on tactical nukes was merely a pretext for saying no to New Start?” he asked.

Baker Spring, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation and a critic of New Start, said it would be better not to get into a new round of talks. “The imbalance in tactical nuclear weapons is very worrisome,” he said, “but I do not think the U.S. should enter into negotiations on these weapons, because it has no cards to play.”

In the end, Mr. Spring said, Russia would probably force each side to withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons to its own national territory in exchange for any reductions. Russia, and its weapons, would still be near NATO allies, while the United States would have to withdraw its small force from Europe. “What’s not for Russia to like?” he said.

Jamie Fly, executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a conservative research group, said that an American withdrawal from Europe would probably cost Mr. Obama any Republican support. “Such a move by the Obama administration would not enhance their credibility with Senate Republicans, given the common perception that the Russians got the better of us on several key issues during the New Start negotiations,” he said.

Arms Talks Now Turn to Short-Range Weapons, NYT, 24.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/world/europe/25start.html

Obama Gamble Pays Off With Approval of Arms Pact

December 22, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The final approval of a new arms control treaty with Russia may have been a foregone conclusion by the time senators stepped onto the floor on Wednesday. But that was not the way it looked one afternoon last month when White House officials rushed to the Oval Office to tell President Obama that his treaty might be dead.

The president and his team had built their entire strategy for obtaining approval of the treaty on winning over a single Republican senator deputized by his caucus to negotiate an accord — and that Republican, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, had just shocked the White House by pulling the plug on a deal for the year.

Some aides counseled Mr. Obama to stand down. Losing a treaty vote, as one put it, would be “a huge loss.” But Mr. Obama decided that afternoon to make one of the biggest gambles of his presidency and demand that the Senate approve the treaty by the year’s end. “We’ve just got to go ahead,” he told aides, who recounted the conversation on Wednesday.

Along the way, he had to confront his own reluctant party leadership and circumvent the other party’s leadership. He mounted a five-week campaign that married public pressure and private suasion. He enlisted the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, asked Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to help and sent a team of officials to set up a war room of sorts on Capitol Hill. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had at least 50 meetings or phone calls with senators.

When a wavering Republican senator told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the president needed to address concerns about missile defense, the senator quickly received a letter from Mr. Obama reaffirming his commitment to develop the system.

Other senators who were worried about the condition of the nation’s nuclear stockpile received a letter from the president vowing to stick by a 10-year, $85 billion modernization plan.

Even in the final 10 days, the effort appeared in danger of collapsing. The insistence of Democrats on passing unrelated legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military upset the Republican conference and may have cost the White House five or more votes on the arms treaty. Administration officials worried last week that they did not have the required two-thirds majority in the Senate, and as late as Sunday, the president’s aides wondered whether to call off the vote.

In the end, the gamble paid off on Wednesday with a 71-to-26 vote in the Senate to approve the treaty, called New Start, with Russia, culminating what turned out to be the biggest battle over arms control in Washington in more than a decade.

No Russian-American arms treaty submitted for a Senate vote ever squeaked through by a smaller margin. But for a president seeking his way after a crushing midterm election, it was welcome validation that he could still win a battle.

“The president made a gutsy decision that he was willing to lose it, and that was a gutsy decision,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was Mr. Obama’s chief ally in the Senate. “Everybody said it wasn’t going to happen. Even colleagues on our side said it wasn’t going to happen.”

The treaty took on such importance to Mr. Obama because he had invested so much in it.

While it will not reduce nuclear weapons as much as previous treaties have, he has made it the centerpiece of his foreign policy — “the Jenga piece,” as one aide puts it, critical to a variety of priorities, including a better relationship with Russia, international solidarity against Iran’s uranium enrichment program and the president’s larger vision of eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

The challenge of Senate approval always played into the administration’s thinking, even while the treaty was being negotiated with the Russians. At several pivotal moments, American officials like Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Under Secretary of State Ellen O. Tauscher; Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller; and Michael McFaul, the president’s Russia adviser, used the need to win Senate approval to leverage Russian negotiators into making concessions.

Even before Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia signed the treaty in April, the administration had tried to woo Mr. Kyl, the No. 2 Republican and his party’s leading conservative voice on arms control. The White House strategy was to meet Mr. Kyl’s concerns on modernizing the nuclear complex, knowing that if he embraced the treaty, it would sail to approval.

Mr. Obama was coming under pressure from multiple sides as the end of the year neared. During a meeting in Japan in mid-November, Mr. Medvedev pressed Mr. Obama on the treaty. “Are you going to get Start done?” the Russian president asked, according to an administration official, who like others interviewed insisted on anonymity to share private moments.

Soon after Mr. Obama returned, his negotiations with Mr. Kyl suddenly disintegrated. On Nov. 16, the senator issued a statement saying he did not think there was enough time to deal with the issues surrounding New Start before the end of the year. That would mean waiting until the new Senate took office with five more Republicans.

White House officials learned about Mr. Kyl’s statement shortly after noon when a reporter sent it by e-mail. They instantly realized the peril. Mr. Biden; Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser; his deputies Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes; and the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, informed Mr. Obama.

“There were people here who thought that was it, we were going to call it a day,” recalled one White House official. There was no Plan B. But Mr. Obama, who often disappoints supporters by not responding to Republicans more aggressively, decided this was a moment to fight. “He decided that he would settle on nothing short of full Senate ratification,” said another official.

Starting in that meeting, they laid out a strategy. Mr. Biden was supposed to meet two days later with several Republican luminaries. Instead, Mr. Obama would host the meeting and make a public pitch for the treaty. The White House ripped up plans for the weekly radio and Internet address to make it about New Start. Then Mr. Obama flew to Lisbon for a NATO meeting, where he encouraged European leaders to speak out for the treaty.

Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry decided to show nothing but public respect for Mr. Kyl and to stick by the offer to spend $85 billion modernizing the nuclear weapons complex. But they gave up hope of winning over Mr. Kyl, who said he felt “jammed” by the White House. Instead, they began bypassing him to work with other Republicans. The assiduous efforts by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Biden to accommodate Republican concerns proved critical.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee was one important target. He said in an interview that he had “multiple, multiple, multiple calls” with Mr. Biden and also heard from Mrs. Clinton and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military endorsements were particularly important. “For folks who are looking for additional support, that’s powerful,” Mr. Corker said. “For all the secretaries of state to say the things they said, that is powerful.”

Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio, another Republican who received attention, said the more he learned about the treaty, the more comfortable he felt. “As people were able to gain more and more information about it and started to pay attention to the people who were supportive of it, its validity and need became more apparent,” he said.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who voted for the treaty, said Republican pressure by Mr. Kyl and others produced a better result. “Even most senators who vote against the treaty would say both the treaty and the nuclear modernization program are better as a result of this,” he said.

But Mr. Obama had problems with Democrats more focused on immigration and gays in the military. Mr. Obama had to call Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, to emphasize how important the treaty was to him, and even then, the decision to call a vote on the gay rights bill last weekend provoked a reaction among Republicans who thought they had been misled.

“Biden about had a heart attack” when Mr. Reid scheduled the vote, said a senator who talked with him. At that point, the senator said it appeared there were 78 to 80 votes for the treaty. Mr. Alexander said that anger over unrelated legislation cost the treaty 5 to 10 votes.

“It was very tricky, and it almost broke it apart,” Mr. Kerry said. “That was part of the overall high-stakes poker. A lot was hanging on different things.”

On Sunday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, joined Mr. Kyl in declaring that they would vote against the treaty. At the White House, there was worry. “People think this means we’re dead,” one White House aide said in an e-mail message to colleagues.

Mr. Donilon convened a conference call with Mr. Biden and White House officials to talk about whether to file a motion to end the debate. Once the motion was filed, there was no turning back. “As you know, there are some doubts,” Mr. Donilon told Mr. Biden, according to notes taken by a participant.

Mr. Biden cut him off. “We’ve got the votes,” he said. “Period.”

Other aides expressed doubts.

“Look,” Mr. Biden said, “I’m not saying I think we have the votes. I’m telling you, we have the votes. I have personally spoken to 12 Republican senators yesterday or today. Personally. One on one. We have the votes.”

And so they did. With Mr. Biden in the presiding officer’s chair and Mr. Kerry on the floor, the vote was called. Afterward, Mr. Obama gathered his team again in the Oval Office. This time he toasted them with Champagne.

Obama Gamble Pays Off With Approval of Arms Pact, NYT, 22.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/world/23start.html

The Tax-Cut Deal

December 18, 2010
The New York Times

As it became clear last week that Congress would pass the tax-cut deal he made with Republicans, President Obama said it “proves that both parties can in fact work together to grow our economy and look out for the American people.” It proves no such thing.

Mr. Obama himself described the talks that led to the $858 billion deal as a hostage negotiation. The Bush-era “middle class” tax cuts were extended for two years, along with other tax cuts that both sides wanted; the cost is high — $485 billion — but the breaks will support consumer spending while the economy is weak.

Mr. Obama knows, however, that significant parts of the deal — especially the two-year, $139 billion extension of the high-end Bush-era tax cuts and the generous new estate tax provisions for multimillionaires and billionaires — will generate relatively little new growth. And because excessive tax cuts worsen the deficit, they actually threaten Americans by creating pressure to cut spending on other programs that actually are needed.

In exchange for high-end tax breaks, Mr. Obama won a 13-month extension of federal jobless benefits, a modest one-year cut in payroll taxes and other temporary measures for businesses and low-income families. All other things being equal, those measures could help to raise economic growth by as much as a percentage point. All other things, however, will not remain equal.

New stimulus spending is undermined if it is offset by cuts in existing spending — and, in the next Congress, Republicans will clamor for immediate budget cuts. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, praised the tax-cut deal last week, precisely because he believes it will begin to force spending cuts. John Boehner, the incoming House speaker, has called for a spending level in 2011 that is more than $100 billion lower than President Obama wanted, though he has not said which programs he would cut to achieve those savings.

So the fight has just begun, and only one thing is sure. Unless Mr. Obama finds his voice and develops a plan to rebut calls for premature spending cuts, the tax-cut deal will not do as much good as he says it will.

For starters, he needs to say “no” to spending cuts that would undermine the stimulus in the tax-cut deal. If genuine compromise requires cuts in 2011, they must come from programs that serve a marginal public purpose. Among the first on our list would be subsidies for corn ethanol and other farm products, which have long been untouchable but no longer can be.

Through it all, Mr. Obama must explain that deficits are a serious, long-term problem. They have exceeded $1 trillion a year for the past three years, largely because of the recession, and will shrink in the near term as the economy recovers. But by the end of the decade, they will breach the $1 trillion mark again, even if the economy is performing well, mainly because of chronically low taxes and rapidly rising health care costs.

Deficits are not as pressing a problem as economic recovery. A stronger recovery must not only come first, but is the best way to begin to heal the budget. Fighting to uphold health care reform is also crucial, because, in the long run, that is key to taming the deficit.

Further, near-term stimulus must be paired with a credible plan to reduce deficits as the economy recovers — including tax reform that raises revenue through various changes, like a simplified income tax, a new value added tax and a financial transactions tax. Even though he agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts through 2012, Mr. Obama must educate the public on their ruinous effects: They account for roughly 40 percent of today’s deficit, a share that will grow over time.

When deficit reduction begins in earnest, tax increases and cuts in big-ticket programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense — will be the focus. Before that, Mr. Obama must not be drawn into nickel-and-dime cuts that will not solve the deficit problem — and will impede recovery. He made a deal with the Republicans. Now he has to get them to live with it.

The Tax-Cut Deal, NYT, 18.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/opinion/19sun1.html

With New Tax Bill, a Turning Point for the President

December 17, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — With the stroke of a pen, President Obama on Friday enacted the largest tax cut in nearly a decade and, in the process, took a big step toward reinventing himself as a champion of compromise in a politically fractured capital.

When he first struck the deal two weeks ago, a sour Mr. Obama announced it by himself, lamented his own agreement and testily denounced his Republican partners as “hostage takers” and his liberal critics as “sanctimonious.” By the time he signed it into law on Friday, little more than six weeks after an electoral debacle for him and his party, he stood with the Senate Republican leader and celebrated the package as a hallmark of cooperation.

“The final product proves when we can put aside the partisanship and the political games, when we can put aside what’s good for some of us in favor of what’s good for all of us, we can get a lot done,” Mr. Obama said buoyantly at a bill-signing ceremony in the White House complex. “I’m also hopeful that we might refresh the American people’s faith in the capability of their leaders to govern in challenging times.”

One leader in particular. Mr. Obama’s embrace of compromise comes as he tries to find his footing after midterm elections that cost the Democratic Party control of the House and pared its majority in the Senate. As the weeks have passed, the president who has emerged appears increasingly more confident than chastened, eager to revive his campaign image as a postpartisan leader who can work across party lines even at the cost of alienating his own supporters.

Such an identity is hardly new to Mr. Obama, but it has largely eluded him in his first two years in office. As a candidate, he managed to come across as diametrically opposite to different supporters, the leader of a new progressive movement to some and a reasoned pragmatist who could bridge the divide in Washington to others. If the first identity dominated his opening two years, the second may come to the fore in his next two.

“These two aspects of his persona have existed side by side from the very beginning,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist who in 2008 worked for Mr. Obama’s opponent for the presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton. However imperfect, the tax deal “spoke to a deep feeling in the country about the need to work across party lines to get things done,” he said.

It remained unclear whether Mr. Obama can, or would want to, sustain such an approach. The tax deal may be a one-off situation where a looming end-of-the-year deadline forced action to avoid tax cuts expiring across the board. And in reality, of course, it is much easier for politicians to agree about cutting taxes and adding the bill to the national debt than, say, cutting spending or other much tougher choices to come.

“Sometimes the lessons take a while to sink in, particularly if you’re a person of great arrogance, as he is,” said Peter H. Wehner, who was a top White House aide to President George W. Bush and is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. “But he’s not suicidal, and it’s beginning to kick in.”

Still, Mr. Wehner said, “it may be seen as an anomaly rather than the beginning of a trend.”

Indeed, Mr. Obama has made it clear that he will press advantages where he sees them, and he has chosen an energetic agenda for a lame-duck session beyond taxes and other issues that had to be addressed because of deadlines.

He decided to wage a full-fledged fight to push his arms control treaty with Russia through the Senate before it returns next month with five more Republicans. And he has given no ground in the legislative battle to end the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.

“His strong resolve was we were not going to meekly limp out of this year not having accomplished what he needed to accomplish,” David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, said in an interview.

But Friday’s tableau of the Democratic president flanked by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader and his prime nemesis on Capitol Hill, served as a portrait of the change in his presidency. While Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both George Bushes advanced top priorities in tandem with the opposition party, this was the first time in Mr. Obama’s presidency that he forged a major bipartisan compromise on a signature issue — and it was Mr. McConnell’s first time at a major White House bill signing under this president.

The $858 billion package Mr. Obama signed extends Bush-era tax cuts for two years, pares back payroll taxes for a year, lowers the scheduled tax rate for the largest estates, extends jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed for 13 months and continues a series of other tax cuts benefiting businesses, parents and students.

The entire cost will be added to the federal debt, and arguably Mr. Obama has succeeded mainly in buying a temporary truce by delaying a final reckoning on the fundamental questions of who deserves to pay how much in taxes. But for the moment, the plan has polled well and the White House has fended off protests from Mr. Obama’s party.

Mr. Axelrod, who once referred to the parts of the tax plan benefiting the wealthiest Americans as “odious,” said this was not a day to focus on the negatives. “This is something to celebrate,” he said. “The fact that we got this done is something to celebrate.”

At the ceremony, Mr. Obama gave a nod to criticism from the left, noting that “there are some elements of this legislation that I don’t like.” But, he added, “that’s the nature of compromise,” and focused on what he considered the benefits of the accord, particularly the expectation that it will stimulate economic growth.

“It’s a good deal for the American people,” the president said. “This is progress. And that’s what they sent us here to achieve.”

He added, “There will be moments, I am certain, over the next couple of years in which the holiday spirit won’t be as abundant as it is today.” But, reviving a phrase used on the campaign trail, he said, “I don’t believe that either party has cornered the market on good ideas.”

With New Tax Bill, a Turning Point for the President, NYT, 17.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/us/politics/18obama.html

Voting for an Odious Tax Deal

December 7, 2010
The New York Times

Liberal Democrats are in revolt at the tax deal that President Obama struck with Republicans on Monday, and it is not hard to understand why. By temporarily extending income tax breaks for the richest Americans, and cutting estate taxes for the ultrawealthy, the deal will redistribute billions of dollars from job creation to people who do not need the money.

But the Democrats should vote for this deal, because it is the only one they are going to get. Mr. Obama made that case — strongly — on Tuesday, summoning an eloquence that is often elusive, as it was on Monday when he first announced the deal. Without this bargain, income taxes on the middle class would rise. Unemployment insurance for millions of Americans would expire. And many other important tax breaks for low- and middle-income workers — including a 2 percent payroll tax cut and college tuition credits — would not be possible.

If angry Democrats blow up the deal, they will be left vainly groping for something better in a new Congress where they will have far less influence than they have now. The middle class and the unemployed would be seriously hurt.

The president, and particularly Congressional Democrats, might not be in this bind if they had fought harder against the high-end tax cuts before the midterm elections. But that moment has passed. The real responsibility for what’s wrong with the tax deal lies with Republicans. They coldly insisted on the high-end tax cuts at all costs, no matter the pain they might inflict further down the income ladder or what staggering cost they might impose in years to come.

President Obama was right to use the metaphor of hostage-taking to describe the Republicans’ tactics. Using the parliamentary rules of the Senate, 42 Republican senators threatened to raise middle-class taxes if Democrats let tax cuts expire on the richest 2 percent of Americans. That left the White House and the Democrats little room to maneuver. “I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed,” Mr. Obama said at his news conference on Tuesday.

Some of the provisions won by the president could act as a new stimulus to the economy, particularly the extension of the unemployment benefits for 13 months and the cut to the payroll tax, though the full stimulative effect is uncertain. The cut only applies to wages and salaries up to $106,800 — people who really need it.

There remains much to dislike in the package, including the pressure that its deficit spending will create to cut important programs in the years to come. Mr. Obama was clearly not thrilled at the compromises he had to make, and neither are we. But at least he acted in what he believed are the best interests of the country.

When are the Republicans going to step up and do the same? There is no legitimate national interest in opposing the New Start nuclear arms treaty with the Russians, which most military and foreign leaders agree would make the world a safer place. There is no legitimate national interest in clinging to the discrimination against gay members of the military, which the Pentagon’s leaders want to end. There will be no sound economic reason to make the tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers permanent in two years.

The only reason for Republican recalcitrance on these issues is to deny the Democrats an accomplishment, to stymie Mr. Obama’s re-election and appeal to the most retrograde elements of the party’s base.

President Obama will face a liberal whirlwind for the compromise he made on taxes. It is time for Republicans to show that they are strong enough to take on their base for their country’s benefit.

Voting for an Odious Tax Deal, NYT, 8.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/opinion/08wed1.html

Obama Seeking Aid for Jobless in Deal on Tax Cuts

December 2, 2010
The New York Times

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is holding out for an extension of unemployment assistance and of a variety of expiring tax breaks for low-wage and middle-income workers as part of a deal with Congressional Republicans to extend all the Bush-era tax cuts.

But it is unclear how much leverage the White House has in the tax negotiations, given the drubbing Democrats took in the midterm elections, the tight Congressional calendar and a threat by Senate Republicans to block any legislation until the tax fight is resolved.

In a symbolic nod to President Obama’s pledge to let the tax cuts on upper-income brackets expire on Dec. 31, as scheduled by law, the House on Thursday approved a bill to continue the lower tax rates enacted during the Bush administration for Americans they described as “middle class.” The vote was 234 to 188, with three Republicans joining 231 Democrats in favor; 20 Democrats and 168 Republicans were opposed.

The bill, however, has no chance of passage in the Senate, where even some Democrats say the tax cuts should be extended for everyone, at least temporarily, given the continued weakness in the economy.

Senate Democratic leaders scheduled their own symbolic votes for Saturday, intending to demonstrate their desire to end the tax cuts for the rich.

Republicans, meanwhile, expressed dismay at the posturing by Democrats, which they said was delaying the inevitable and even getting in the way of a potential deal on aid for millions of unemployed Americans whose benefits have started to run out.

Administration officials said no deal was at hand, and negotiators from the administration and the two parties in Congress met only briefly on Thursday. It is possible that the parties will be unable to reach a compromise, in which case tax rates will revert at the end of this year to their pre-2001 levels, meaning an across the board tax increase. However, the Treasury could be directed to keep the current rates while negotiations continue.

But the sense within both parties was that Democrats were essentially negotiating the terms of their major retreat on an issue that they once considered a slam-dunk on both substantive and political levels.

Senior Senate Republican aides said that an extension of all the income tax cuts was a foregone conclusion, but that a deal on jobless aid was possible if Democrats agreed to cover the cost. Democrats expressed indignation that Republicans were insisting on finding spending cuts to offset the unemployment benefits while being perfectly willing to add to the national debt the $700 billion cost of continuing the tax cuts on the highest incomes for the next decade.

“This is so grossly unfair,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said in a floor speech urging passage of the so-called middle-class tax package.

While the House bill has no chance of becoming law, it holds enormous symbolism for Democrats, who used the debate to accuse Republicans of standing for the rich. In an indication of the tensions between the parties on the issue, the House Republican leader and soon-to-be speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, derided the Democratic maneuver to force a vote on the bill as “chicken crap.”

Even as lawmakers were debating the bill on the House floor, negotiators, including the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, were meeting in talks that all sides expected to end in a temporary extension of the tax rates for all income levels, perhaps for two or three years.

At the White House, administration officials outlined a list of their demands for an extension of expiring tax breaks, including the $800-per-couple “Making Work Pay” tax credit for about 110 million households, a tuition tax credit for 8 million college students, and the earned-income tax credit and child tax credit for 15 million low-income families. They also listed expiring tax breaks for small businesses. They said those tax credits would have a greater impact on the economy than continuing the Bush tax cuts on upper income levels.

And with federal unemployment aid having expired on Tuesday for two million Americans, Mr. Obama is seeking a one-year extension. Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked an effort by Democrats to take up a bill extending the benefits.

More Americans have been out of work beyond the 26-week period typically covered by state unemployment assistance than at any time in the decades since the government began keeping records. The unemployment assistance at issue is federal emergency aid for people who are unemployed beyond six months.

About 6.2 million Americans have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Mr. Obama’s Council on Economic Advisers reported on Thursday that nearly seven million Americans could lose benefits through next November as more people remained out of work for long periods.

Talks at the Capitol involving senior lawmakers from both parties, Mr. Geithner and the White House budget director, Jacob Lew, are expected to continue into next week.

But in the meantime, the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said he would bring the House bill to the Senate floor on Saturday and would hold votes on that measure, as well as on an alternative Democratic proposal to raise the threshold at which the lower rates expire to $1 million.

Democrats had hoped to hold those votes on Friday, as well as votes on two Republican proposals for extending the tax breaks, but late Thursday a single Republican senator registered an objection stopping those votes.

That prompted Mr. Reid to note that even after agreeing to take up the tax issue before anything else, he was encountering Republican obstruction.

“I think everybody remembers that famous letter that was written to me saying until we get tax cuts resolved, funding the government, we’re not going to let you do anything legislatively,” he said at a news conference late Thursday. “We’re at a new one tonight. They are not going to let us do anything with tax cuts or funding the government.”

The Republican alternatives include one from the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that would indefinitely extend all of the Bush-era income tax cuts. None of the measures is expected to win the 60 votes needed to advance.

Congressional Democrats expressed deepening frustration with the White House, which they said had made numerous missteps that gave Republicans the upper hand. Some Democratic aides said that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had been asked to attend a caucus meeting to defend the White House negotiating stance. A spokesman said Mr. Biden had a previous commitment.

Congressional Democrats also voiced worries that the administration was ready to give in quickly to Republican demands, in a bid to preserve time on the Senate calendar for ratification of an arms control treaty with Russia known as New Start.

Separately, the Senate approved a 15-day extension of the temporary spending measure that has financed the federal government since Oct. 1 and was set to run out on Friday.

Obama Seeking Aid for Jobless in Deal on Tax Cuts, NYT, 2.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/03cong.html

Obama Forces Showdown With G.O.P. on Arms Pact

November 18, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Just two weeks after an election that left him struggling to find his way forward, President Obama has decided to confront Senate Republicans in a make-or-break battle over arms control that could be an early test of his mettle heading into the final two years of his term.

He is pushing for a vote on a signature issue despite long odds, daring Republicans to block an arms-control treaty at the risk of disrupting relations with Russia and the international coalition that opposes Iran’s nuclear program. If he succeeds, Mr. Obama will demonstrate strength following the midterm election debacle. If he fails, he will reinforce the perception at home and abroad that he is a weakened president.

“It’s really high stakes,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a former national security aide to President Ronald Reagan and a scholar at the Nixon Center, a research group in Washington. “I would say it’s the biggest gamble he’s taken so far, certainly on foreign policy.”

After months of quiet negotiations blew up this week, Mr. Obama on Thursday escalated ratification of the agreement, the so-called New Start treaty, into a public showdown, enlisting former Republican officials and assigning Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to work on it “day and night.” An allied group, the American Values Network, kicked off a television and e-mail campaign.

“It is a national security imperative that the United States ratify the New Start treaty this year,” said Mr. Obama, flanked by Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III and Brent Scowcroft, all of whom served Republican presidents. “There is no higher national security priority for the lame-duck session of Congress.”

But Mr. Obama has no clear path to approval of the treaty without Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the lead Republican negotiator, who declared this week that there was no time to reach agreement this year on a nuclear modernization program that he wanted as the price for ratification.

The White House has only one Republican supporter, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. A survey of 14 other Senate Republicans who were considered possible supporters found none who were willing to publicly back the treaty. Ten of them said they were undecided or were waiting for the same assurances as Mr. Kyl, and four did not respond, suggesting that approval may depend on changing Mr. Kyl’s mind.

Among those who agreed with Mr. Kyl that the issue should wait until next year was Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, one of three Republicans to vote for the treaty in committee in September. In an interview, he said that the treaty and modernization program needed to be “fully digested, fully explained” and that there was no reason to rush during the lame-duck session. “I’m very skeptical that it’s the right thing to do and very skeptical that it can be done this December,” he said.

Moreover, 10 newly elected Republican senators who will take office in January signed a letter objecting to a lame-duck vote. “Out of respect for our states’ voters, we believe it would be improper for the Senate to consider the New Start treaty or any other treaty in a lame-duck session,” said the letter, which was released by Senator-elect Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Mr. Kyl showed no signs of backing down after meeting with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But Mr. Kerry expressed hope afterward that a deal was still possible, and the White House released new details of its commitment to Mr. Kyl to spend $84 billion over the next 10 years to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Because treaties require a two-thirds majority, the White House needs 67 votes. Senator-elect Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, will be sworn in Nov. 29 to replace a Democrat, so the White House will need to keep all 58 remaining members of the Democratic caucus and win over nine Republicans. If it waits until next year, it will need at least 14 Republican votes because of the party’s gains.

Gary Samore, the top White House arms-control official, said Thursday he feared that putting off the treaty until next year would mean it “could be delayed indefinitely.” As a result, the United States and Russia would not resume nuclear inspections that lapsed last year, which he said would fuel distrust and lead to “a greater likelihood you could get into an arms race.”

He also said a failure to ratify the treaty would undercut Russian support for the campaign to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program. “To do that, we really need the Russians with us,” he told a forum at the Nixon Center. And he suggested that Mr. Kyl might not get his modernization money because Democrats and conservative Republicans in the next Congress would not go along. “Support for that could evaporate if the treaty is not approved,” he said.

Critics of the treaty have said the administration is overstating the consequences of delay and have questioned its seriousness about nuclear modernization because it provided Mr. Kyl with its latest spending proposal only last Friday. Mr. Corker and others noted that there were still no guarantees that Congress would fully finance the program. He said insisting on a vote before the next Congress “creates an air of distrust.”

At this point, the Democratic strategy is to keep pressing for a deal with Mr. Kyl and to respond to every Republican question in an effort to minimize any pretext for opposition. Democrats would then take the treaty to the floor in December for up to seven days of debate and force Republicans to choose sides. They are banking that Mr. Kyl has been surprised that Mr. Obama is choosing to turn the issue into a public fight.

At the same time, by making it a test of his presidency, Mr. Obama risks making Republicans more reluctant to hand him a victory. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has said his top priority is to deny Mr. Obama a second term.

Mr. Samore described the impact in more dire terms. “If we fail to act,” he said, “I think it will damage the U.S. reputation as a country that’s willing to lead.”

Obama Forces Showdown With G.O.P. on Arms Pact, NYT, 18.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/world/europe/19start.html

Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations

November 9, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

JAKARTA, Indonesia — President Obama, renewing his call for better relations between the United States and the Muslim world, used a long-awaited homecoming trip to this island nation to make a symbolic visit on Wednesday morning to the largest mosque in southeast Asia — even as he declared that “much more work needs to be done” to fulfill the promise he made 17 months ago in Cairo of a “new beginning.”

Indonesia is the world’s largest majority Muslim nation, and Mr. Obama, on a 10-day, four-country trip through Asia, used his brief stay here to hold it up as an example of diversity, tolerance and democracy.

He closed his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday evening with the Muslim greeting “salaam aleikum” and said he intended to reshape American relations with Muslim nations so they were not “focused solely on security issues,” but rather on expanded cooperation across a broad range of areas, from science to education.

In a speech on Wednesday morning to an enthusiastic audience of 6,500 people at the University of Indonesia, he also harked back to his Cairo message.

“I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust,” Mr. Obama said. “But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress.”

Earlier, at the Istiqlal Mosque, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, followed the Islamic custom of removing their shoes; Mrs. Obama wore a head shawl with beads. They walked along a courtyard on a pale blue carpet escorted by the grand imam, who told Mr. Obama that there was a church next door and that during Christmas parishioners use the mosque’s parking lot because the church does not have enough space.

Mr. Obama turned to reporters and said, “That is an example of the kind of cooperation” between religions in Indonesia.

For Mr. Obama, who suffered a backlash at home this year when he said he favored the right of Muslims to build a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan — and whose personal history makes him the target of anti-Muslim sentiment — the outreach effort is a delicate one. Jakarta is the place that has given rise to many of the myths about Mr. Obama, including the rumor that he is Muslim (he is Christian); that he attended a madrasa that was connected to radical Islam (he attended two schools here, one Roman Catholic and one secular, although most of the students were Muslim); and that he was not born in the United States (he was born in Hawaii).

In his speech, Mr. Obama tried to correct the misperceptions and he spoke about Indonesia’s ability to bridge religious and racial divides. “As a Christian visiting a mosque on this visit,” he said, “I found it in the words of a leader who was asked about my visit and said: ‘Muslims are also allowed in churches. We are all God’s followers.’ ”

The last time Mr. Obama was in Indonesia, in 1992, he spent a month holed up in a rented beachside hut in Bali, where he swam each morning and spent afternoons writing “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that later became a best seller. In it, he shared memories of his life here as a boy, “running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking into the cool, wet mud, part of a chain of other brown boys chasing after a tattered kite.”

He has chased after a few other things since then — notably the presidency — and when he returned here, he got the kind of rock-star welcome he no longer receives in the United States.

When Air Force One touched down on Tuesday in a typical Jakarta afternoon thunderstorm, a huge cheer went up inside the State Palace complex — not from average Indonesians, but from the local press corps, watching on television. “Finally, he arrived!” exulted Glenn Jos, a cameraman.

After descending the steps of his plane, Mr. Obama, in a dark suit, accompanied by his wife walked the red carpet that had been laid out for them and stepped into a black Cadillac limousine. He poked his head out the door to give a short wave.

“Yes!” the reporters shouted.

Indonesians have prepared three times previously for a visit from the president, only to be disappointed. Last year, the White House hinted that Mr. Obama might tuck in an Indonesia stop on a November trip to Asia, but it did not materialize.

Then, in March, Mr. Obama, his wife and daughters canceled a trip at the last minute so that he could shepherd his health care bill through Congress. In June, another Indonesia trip was canceled, this time so the president could deal with the BP oil spill.

And once Mr. Obama finally arrived, a cloud of volcanic ash played havoc with his schedule, forcing him to leave a few hours earlier than planned on Wednesday so that he could make it to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the Group of 20 conference of economic powers.

Mr. Obama spent four years, from ages 6 to 10, in Indonesia, living here with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. In his memoir he writes richly of the experience. He described the markets: “the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.”

He wrote of his introduction to the food: “dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).” And the menagerie in his backyard: “chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo and finally two baby crocodiles.”

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he had come to “focus not on the past but the future,” but Indonesians seemed to have both in mind. At a state dinner, Mr. Obama was served Indonesian dishes he said he loved as a boy. And in a gesture that Mr. Obama said left him “deeply moved,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presented him with a gold medal in honor of his mother, who worked here for years as an anthropologist and pioneer in microcredit for the poor.

Jakarta has undergone a transformation since Mr. Obama first moved here in 1967. The tallest building he remembered, a shopping mall, has been eclipsed by skyscrapers. Mr. Obama recalled riding on “little taxis, but you stood in the back and it was very crowded” or on bicycle rickshaws.

“Now,” he lamented, “as president I can’t even see all the traffic, because they block all the streets.”

At the university, Mr. Obama sprinkled his speech with Indonesian phrases, mimicking the sing-song sounds of street vendors. Then, in this country’s native tongue, he said, “I’m home.”

Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations, NYT, 9.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/asia/10prexy.html

In India, Obama Courts Corporate America

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and VIKAS BAJAJ

MUMBAI, India — President Obama, fresh off a stinging electoral defeat for Democrats, opened a 10-day tour of Asia on Saturday with a courtship of corporate America, including private meetings with American business executives who are here for his visit and an announcement that he will lift longstanding restrictions on exports of closely held technologies to India.

After an election season dominated by voter dissatisfaction with his management of the economy, the president is casting the four-nation trip, which will also take him to Indonesia, South Korea and Japan, as an economic mission. His agenda is heavy on taking steps to open foreign markets to American goods; he hopes to come home from South Korea, for instance, with a renegotiated free trade pact.

Here in Mumbai, Mr. Obama lavished attention on American business leaders who coordinated their visit with the White House. He announced that, as part of the trip, American and Indian companies signed or are about to sign 20 deals worth about $10 billion that will help create more than 50,000 jobs at home, although many of the deals have been in negotiations for some time and some have yet to be completed despite 11th-hour negotiations before his trip.

In addition, the easing of the so-called “dual use” restrictions, which bar American export of technologies that might be used to build weapons, represents a policy change that is a high priority for companies here and in the United States.

“As we look to India today, the United States sees an opportunity to sell our exports in one of the fastest-growing markets in the world,” Mr. Obama told a gathering of political leaders and Indian and American executives. “For America, this is a jobs strategy.”

Accompanied by his wife, Michelle, Mr. Obama began his day here on a somber note, paying homage to victims and survivors of the 2008 terrorist siege in Mumbai carried out by Pakistani militants. But the president failed to mention the terror threat to India that emanates from Pakistan — an omission that drew some criticism in the media here. He also made a brief stop at the home, now a museum, where Mahatma Gandhi stayed while fighting for his country’s independence.

But such symbolic acts quickly gave way to Mr. Obama’s diplomatic and business agenda, aimed at strengthening ties between the two nations at a time in which China is more aggressively pursuing power in the region.

India has operated under the high-tech export barriers since its nuclear test in 1998, and has long sought a loosening of the export restrictions more for political reasons than economic ones — the country does not want to be viewed as a rogue state.

Indians have argued the restrictions became outdated when they signed a groundbreaking civil nuclear cooperation deal with the United States when President George W. Bush was in office. That deal ended a long moratorium on providing India with the fuel and technology for desperately needed nuclear power plants.

Mr. Obama is also taking Indian defense research and space agencies off the United States’ “entities list,” clearing the way for greater cooperation. Executives here welcomed the moves.

“It is a signal, No. 1, about India as an ally, and No. 2, it has a business potential,” Anand Mahindra, managing director of the Indian conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra, said in an interview. “Both of these are important.”

Still, Mr. Obama seemed mostly to be aiming his message at American business leaders. Many executives during the recent political campaign accused the White House of being antibusiness and poured money into the coffers of Republican candidates and groups that aimed to defeat the Democrats.

More than 200 American executives timed a business conference here to coincide with Mr. Obama’s arrival in Mumbai — and the president worked hard to reciprocate.

The chief executive officer of Boeing, Jim McNerney, who also leads the President’s Export Council, greeted Mr. Obama when Air Force One touched down, and then was whisked downtown aboard the presidential helicopter. Later, Mr. Obama met privately with American chief executives, among them Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric, who has been critical of the White House in the past.

“It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Immelt said in an interview, praising Mr. Obama for talking up trade, a politically risky move for a Democrat. “I don’t remember President Bush ever having a mission like this. I think it’s quite rare and I hope the first of many.”

Mr. Obama decided early on that his predecessor had not paid enough attention to Asia, and it is no coincidence that the four countries Mr. Obama is visiting are all democracies. It is also no coincidence that China is not on the agenda; by building ties with emerging economies, like India and Indonesia, and strengthening them with longtime allies like South Korea and Japan, the administration hopes to dilute China’s growing power in the region.

India’s economy is expected to grow at an annual rate of more than 8 percent through 2015, and with a population of 1.2 billion, the White House views it as a prime market for American goods.

“The United States sees Asia and especially India as a market of the future,” the president said in a speech to the U.S.-India Business Council. “We don’t simply welcome your rise as a nation and people, we ardently support it. We want to invest in it.”

In the afternoon, Mr. Obama met with a group of 25 Indian executives, including entrepreneurs who are working on startup companies involved in electric cars and water purifying companies. Mr. Obama told the group that he wanted to hear from them about new ideas that could help create jobs in the United States and emerging markets like India, said Shaffi Mather, a young Indian businessman who attended the meeting.

“He spoke in the background of the electoral pressures,” Mr. Mather said, “but he still clearly set the goal of economic growth not only of the U.S. but also of India.”

India is a politically delicate place for Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, given American concerns about outsourcing. As a candidate, Mr. Obama often lamented the tax incentives and lack of educational opportunities in the United States that, as he liked to say, forced children from Boston to compete for jobs with children from Bangalore. Here in Mumbai, he steered clear of the Boston-Bangalore analogy, as he made the case that investment overseas can create jobs at home.

“There still exists a caricature of India as a land of call centers and back offices that cost American jobs,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s a real perception. But these old stereotypes, these old concerns ignore today’s reality: In 2010, trade between our countries is not just a one-way street of American jobs and companies moving to India. It is a dynamic, two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth, and higher living standards in both our countries.”

Mr. Obama is spending an unusually long time — three days — in India, the longest amount of time he has spent in any foreign country as president.

Soon after Air Force One touched down early Saturday afternoon, he and the first lady headed to the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, which bore the brunt of the terror attacks on Nov. 26, 2008.

The president and his entourage are staying at the hotel, which is home to a memorial for the more than 160 people killed during the highly coordinated attacks over four days.

“To those who have asked whether this is intended to send a message, my answer is, simply, absolutely,” Mr. Obama said, after he and Mrs. Obama signed a guest book at the memorial and met briefly with victims of the attacks. “Ever since those horrific days two years ago, The Taj has been the symbol of the strength and resilience of the Indian people. So we use our visit here to send a very clear message that in our determination to give our people a future of security and prosperity, the United States and India stand united.”

Mr. Obama expressed similar sentiments in the guest book, writing that the United States “stands in solidarity with all of Mumbai and all of India in working to eradicate the scourge of terrorism, and we affirm our lasting friendship with the Indian people.”

He signed his name and the date; Mrs. Obama signed her name next to his. Each left behind a white rose.

In India, Obama Courts Corporate America, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/asia/07prexy.html

Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes Modern India

November 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JIM YARDLEY

NEW DELHI — Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the great Indian apostle of peace, democracy and nonviolent protest, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The postcard was a trinket of public diplomacy, a souvenir of the new president’s affinity for India. Now that Mr. Obama is visiting India for the first time, on a trip pitched as a jobs mission, his fascination with Gandhi is influencing his itinerary and his message as he tries to win over India’s skeptical political class.

“He is a hero not just to India, but to the world,” the president wrote in a guest book on Saturday in Gandhi’s modest former home in Mumbai, now the Mani Bhavan museum.

Yet if paying homage to Gandhi is expected of visiting dignitaries, Mr. Obama’s more personal identification with the Gandhian legacy — the president once named him the person he would most like to dine with — places him on complicated terrain.

Gandhi remains India’s patriarch, the founding father whose face is printed on the currency, but modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation, if it ever was one. His vision of a village-dominated economy was shunted aside during his lifetime as rural romanticism, and his call for a national ethos of personal austerity and nonviolence has proved antithetical to the goals of an aspiring economic and military power.

If anything, India’s rise as a global power seems likely to distance it even further from Gandhi. India is inching toward a tighter military relationship with the United States, once distrusted as an imperialist power, even as the Americans are fighting a war in nearby Afghanistan.

India also has an urbanizing consumer-driven economy and a growing middle class that indulges itself in cars, apartments and other goods. It is this economic progress that underpins India’s rising geopolitical clout and its attractiveness to the United States as a global partner.

Gandhi is still revered here, and credited with shaping India’s political identity as a tolerant, secular democracy. But he can sometimes seem to hover over modern India like a parent whose expectations are rarely met.

Mr. Obama, too, has experienced the clash of those lofty expectations with political realities. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he was conducting two wars, he described himself as “living testimony to the moral force” of the nonviolent movement embodied by Dr. King and Gandhi.

“But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation,” he continued, “I cannot be guided by their examples alone.”

That paradox was on vivid display on Saturday when Mr. Obama arrived in Mumbai, an event carried live on national television, celebrating Gandhi’s legacy but also selling military transport planes and bringing along 200 American business leaders.

India’s political establishment, if thrilled by the visit, is also withholding judgment. Mr. Obama was faulted in New Delhi for some early missteps, including his comment that China should play an active role in South Asia. His battering in the midterm elections has raised concerns about his political viability. And many Indian officials still hold a torch for former President George W. Bush, who was popular for pushing through a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries.

Mr. Obama’s visit is intended to dispel those doubts and deepen a partnership rooted in shared democratic values. Since taking office, he has already met several times with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as with other delegations of Indian officials. On several occasions, he has cited his deep admiration for Gandhi, perhaps as evidence of his fondness for India.

“The impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express, a leading English-language newspaper, adding that the repeated references struck some officials as platitudinous.

In praising Gandhi, Mr. Obama has often cited the influence of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns on the civil rights movement in the United States. Dr. King visited India in 1959, more than a decade after Gandhi’s death, seeking to draw from the taproot of his moral power, in a trip publicized in India and the United States.

“The trip for King was very much about laying claim to the Gandhian legacy,” said Nico Slate, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who has researched the linkage between the two men.

Unlike Mr. Obama, Dr. King and Gandhi had the advantage of never having to govern. And even Dr. King learned the limits of Gandhi’s influence in an India confronted with the realities of global politics. When he was invited to make an address on Indian radio, Dr. King condemned the cold war arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, suggesting that India should set a higher, Gandhian standard by demilitarizing. Indian officials quickly rejected the idea.

“It was very Gandhian, but in many ways very unrealistic, at least from the vantage point of the Indian establishment,” Mr. Slate said. “Even King came to realize that India, in some ways, was never Gandhian.”

Dr. King also visited Gandhi’s home in Mumbai and, like Mr. Obama, signed the guest book. “Pretty cool,” Mr. Obama said Saturday when a museum administrator showed him Dr. King’s entry. “Nineteen-fifty-nine. What a great book.”

On Sunday, Mr. Obama will fly to New Delhi and, like Dr. King, visit the Rajghat, the black marble memorial on the spot where Gandhi was cremated after his assassination in 1948. Today, the Rajghat attracts about 10,000 visitors a day and is a requisite stop for visiting foreign leaders, regardless of political ideology: Mr. Bush and former President Bill Clinton have visited. So has the Dalai Lama. But so has the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin; the president of authoritarian China, Hu Jintao; and, more recently, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, the leader of the ruling military junta in Myanmar.

Ramachandra Guha, a Gandhi biographer, said Indian officials approached him three months ago seeking suggestions for Gandhi-related sites for Mr. Obama’s visit. Mr. Guha recommended an ashram in rural central India where Gandhi once lived, a suggestion rejected because of concerns over security and distance, he said.

To Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a grandson of Gandhi, the fact that his grandfather inspired the American president demonstrated the continued vibrancy of Gandhi’s message. If he bemoaned the corruption and money contaminating Indian politics, he said Gandhi’s spirit could still be found among the Indian civil society groups helping the poor and protecting the environment.

“Today, the need for a practical idealism is recognized throughout the world,” he said.

The word practical seemed especially relevant.

Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes Modern India, NYT, 6.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/world/asia/07gandhi.html

Exporting Our Way to Stability

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By BARACK OBAMA

AS the United States recovers from this recession, the biggest mistake we could make would be to rebuild our economy on the same pile of debt or the paper profits of financial speculation. We need to rebuild on a new, stronger foundation for economic growth. And part of that foundation involves doing what Americans have always done best: discovering, creating and building products that are sold all over the world.

We want to be known not just for what we consume, but for what we produce. And the more we export abroad, the more jobs we create in America. In fact, every $1 billion we export supports more than 5,000 jobs at home.

It is for this reason that I set a goal of doubling America’s exports in the next five years. To do that, we need to find new customers in new markets for American-made goods. And some of the fastest-growing markets in the world are in Asia, where I’m traveling this week.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Asia to our economic future. Asia is home to three of the world’s five largest economies, as well as a rapidly expanding middle class with rising incomes. My trip will therefore take me to four Asian democracies — India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan — each of which is an important partner for the United States. I will also participate in two summit meetings — the Group of 20 industrialized nations and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation — that will focus on economic growth.

During my first visit to India, I will be joined by hundreds of American business leaders and their Indian counterparts to announce concrete progress toward our export goal — billions of dollars in contracts that will support tens of thousands of American jobs. We will also explore ways to reduce barriers to United States exports and increase access to the Indian market.

Indonesia is a member of the G-20. Next year, it will assume the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — a group whose members make up a market of more than 600 million people that is increasingly integrating into a free trade area, and to which the United States exports $80 billion in goods and services each year. My administration has deepened our engagement with Asean, and for the first eight months of 2010, exports of American goods to Indonesia increased by 47 percent from the same period in 2009. This is momentum that we will build on as we pursue a new comprehensive partnership between the United States and Indonesia.

In South Korea, President Lee Myung-bak and I will work to complete a trade pact that could be worth tens of billions of dollars in increased exports and thousands of jobs for American workers. Other nations like Canada and members of the European Union are pursuing trade pacts with South Korea, and American businesses are losing opportunities to sell their products in this growing market. We used to be the top exporter to South Korea; now we are in fourth place and have seen our share of Korea’s imports drop in half over the last decade.

But any agreement must come with the right terms. That’s why we’ll be looking to resolve outstanding issues on behalf of American exporters — including American automakers and workers. If we can, we’ll be able to complete an agreement that supports jobs and prosperity in America.

South Korea is also the host of the G-20 economic forum, the organization that we have made the focal point for international economic cooperation. Last year, the nations of the G-20 worked together to halt the spread of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. This year, our top priority is achieving strong, sustainable and balanced growth. This will require cooperation and responsibility from all nations — those with emerging economies and those with advanced economies; those running a deficit and those running a surplus.

Finally, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Japan, I will continue seeking new markets in Asia for American exports. We want to expand our trade relationships in the region, including through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to make sure that we’re not ceding markets, exports and the jobs they support to other nations. We will also lay the groundwork for hosting the 2011 APEC meeting in Hawaii, the first such gathering on American soil since 1993.

The great challenge of our time is to make sure that America is ready to compete for the jobs and industries of the future. It can be tempting, in times of economic difficulty, to turn inward, away from trade and commerce with other nations. But in our interconnected world, that is not a path to growth, and that is not a path to jobs. We cannot be shut out of these markets. Our government, together with American businesses and workers, must take steps to promote and sell our goods and services abroad — particularly in Asia. That’s how we’ll create jobs, prosperity and an economy that’s built on a stronger foundation.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States.

Exporting Our Way to Stability, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/opinion/06obama.html

Deep Rifts Divide Obama and Republicans

November 3, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — President Obama and newly empowered Republican leaders professed a desire Wednesday to work together but yielded little ground on deep policy differences, foreshadowing the profound challenge of turning around a flagging economy under a divided government.

After what Mr. Obama described as an electoral “shellacking” for his party, the two sides gingerly explored the reshaped political terrain and sought to define Tuesday’s results. Republicans claimed a mandate to reverse Mr. Obama’s agenda while the president cast the vote as a cry of frustration that he has not moved fast enough.

“Over the last two years, we’ve made progress,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference intended to reassert his leadership as Republicans celebrated their capture of the House and gains in the Senate. “But, clearly, too many Americans haven’t felt that progress yet, and they told us that yesterday. And as president, I take responsibility for that.”

More conciliatory than contrite, Mr. Obama used that phrase, “take responsibility,” six times but rejected the suggestion that his policies were moving the country in the wrong direction. He conceded that legislation to limit greenhouse gases was dead and said he was “absolutely” willing to negotiate over the extension of tax cuts, including for the wealthy. But he drew the line at any major retreat from signature priorities, saying he would agree to “tweak” his health care program, not “relitigate arguments” over its central elements.

While Republicans also called for more cooperation, they suggested that Democrats might not have fully absorbed the lessons of their drubbing.

“Their view is that we haven’t cooperated enough,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader. “I think what the American people were saying yesterday is that they appreciated us saying no to the things that the American people indicated they were not in favor of.”

The trials awaiting a fractured capital could arrive swiftly when the departing Democratic-controlled Congress returns in lame-duck session this month with contentious issues like tax cuts, the federal debt limit, unemployment insurance, an arms control treaty with Russia and gay men and lesbians in the military all on the table.

As Washington awoke to the new order on Wednesday, Republicans had picked up at least 60 seats in the House, with 11 races undecided, the biggest swing since the 1948 elections under President Harry S. Truman. They took at least six seats in the Senate, falling short of control, with two races undecided.

In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet, the Democrat, won, while in Washington Senator Patty Murray led her Republican challenger by one percentage point. In Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski, who ran as a write-in after losing the Republican primary, appeared poised to surpass both party nominees. If the incumbents hang onto their seats, The Democratic caucus will have a majority of 53 to 47.

The election results immediately played out on Capitol Hill as House Republicans began a leadership shuffle and Democrats awaited a decision by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California on whether she intended to remain as her party’s leader in the minority. Ms. Pelosi told Diane Sawyer of ABC News that she would talk with her family “and pray over it” before deciding but added that she had “no regrets” and blamed the economy for her party’s losses.

“Nine and a half percent unemployment is a very eclipsing event,” she said. “If people don’t have a job, they’re not too interested in how you intend for them to have a job. They want to see results.”

Their rise to power means Republicans have more leadership positions to fill. With Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio slated to become speaker and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia expected to become majority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who was active in recruiting candidates this year, announced he would seek the No. 3 job of majority whip.

Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, formerly leader of a bloc of House conservatives, is seeking the No. 4 slot, conference chairman. He could face a challenge from Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Tea Party favorite.

Making his debut as speaker in waiting, Mr. Boehner predicted that he would be able to work well with the incoming conservative class elected on Tuesday. “What unites us as Republicans will be the agenda of the American people,” he said. “And if we’re listening to the American people, I don’t see any problems incorporating members of the Tea Party, along with our party, in a quest that’s really the same.”

Mr. Boehner could find that unity tested, probably early next year, when the House must vote on raising the federal debt ceiling. Most Republicans in recent years have refused to support such increases, and many candidates this year ran on a platform opposing any increase in red ink. But as the party soon to be in charge of the House, Republicans run the risk of triggering a government default and a financial crisis should they refuse to increase federal borrowing power.

Mr. Boehner had no ready answer for how Republicans would handle the potentially explosive issue. “We’ll be working that out over the next couple of months,” he said.

Except for early in President George W. Bush’s tenure, when a party switch briefly handed control of the Senate to Democrats, this will be the first time Congress has been split between the parties since the 1986 election. The Senate may prove useful to Mr. Obama in killing Republican initiatives he opposes but it remains unclear whether he will be able to play off a Republican House heading into 2012 the way President Bill Clinton used a Republican-controlled Congress as a foil for his re-election in 1996.

The divide between the two chambers was evident as Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, having survived an election scare, emerged to argue that the lesson of the election was that voters want more cooperation from the parties. The onus, he said, is on Republicans.

“Republicans must take their responsibility to solve the problems of ordinary Americans,” Mr. Reid said in a conference call with reporters. “No is not the answer. It has to be yes. Not our yes, but a combined yes, something we work out, a consensus yes. The time for politics is over.”

Weakened by the election results, Mr. Obama sought Wednesday to occupy the public stage and take his punishment without surrendering stature. He announced no staff shuffle or new direction, as presidents sometimes do when they get in trouble. But he called the defeat “humbling” and said “it feels bad” to see so many allies go down for voting for his program.

“This is something that I think every president needs to go through,” he said. “In the rush of activity, sometimes we lose track of, you know, the ways that we connected with voters that got us here in the first place.”

Living in the White House, he said, “it is hard not to seem removed.”

But he quickly added, to laughter: “Now, I’m not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I did last night. I’m sure there are easier ways to learn these lessons.”

Still, his analysis of that shellacking differed sharply from that of the Republicans and many independent strategists. He agreed that many voters felt government was growing too large and intrusive. But he maintained his were still the right policies.

“It would be hard to argue that we’re going backwards,” he said. “I think what you can argue is we’re stuck in neutral.”

Where he conceded a misstep was in failing to follow through on promises to reform the way Washington works out of a need to confront the economic crises he inherited: “We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done. And I think that frustrated people.”

Mr. Obama said he was “very eager to sit down” with Republicans and laid out “a whole bunch of areas where we can agree,” including job creation, deficit reduction, energy independence, education reform and infrastructure investment. While a carbon cap cannot pass “this year or next year or the year after,” he said, he suggested that he and Republicans could collaborate to promote natural gas, electric cars and nuclear energy.

He specifically embraced a proposal by Mr. Cantor to impose a moratorium on special Congressional spending items known as earmarks. Asked if there was anything in the Republicans’ Pledge to America campaign manifesto that he could support, he mentioned its promises to reform how Washington works.

“I do believe there is hope for civility,” he said. “I do believe there’s hope for progress.”

Megan Thee-Brenan, Michael Luo and Joseph Berger contributed reporting.

Deep Rifts Divide Obama and Republicans, NYT, 3.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/us/politics/04elect.html

How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms

November 2, 2010
11:59 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

If I were one of the big corporate donors who bankrolled the Republican tide that carried into office more than 50 new Republicans in the House, I would be wary of what you just bought.

For no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism. And for that, he paid a terrible political price.

Suppose you had $100,000 to invest on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated. Why bet on a liberal Democrat? Here’s why: the presidency of George W. Bush produced the worst stock market decline of any president in history. The net worth of American households collapsed as Bush slipped away. And if you needed a loan to buy a house or stay in business, private sector borrowing was dead when he handed over power.

As of election day, Nov. 2, 2010, your $100,000 was worth about $177,000 if invested strictly in the NASDAQ average for the entirety of the Obama administration, and $148,000 if bet on the Standard & Poors 500 major companies. This works out to returns of 77 percent and 48 percent.

But markets, though forward-looking, are not considered accurate measurements of the economy, and the Great Recession skewed the Bush numbers. O.K. How about looking at the big financial institutions that keep the motors of capitalism running — banks and auto companies?

The banking system was resuscitated by $700 billion in bailouts started by Bush (a fact unknown by a majority of Americans), and finished by Obama, with help from the Federal Reserve. It worked. The government is expected to break even on a risky bet to stabilize the global free market system. Had Obama followed the populist instincts of many in his party, the underpinnings of big capitalism could have collapsed. He did this without nationalizing banks, as other Democrats had urged.

Saving the American auto industry, which has been a huge drag on Obama’s political capital, is a monumental achievement that few appreciate, unless you live in Michigan. After getting their taxpayer lifeline from Obama, both General Motors and Chrysler are now making money by making cars. New plants are even scheduled to open. More than 1 million jobs would have disappeared had the domestic auto sector been liquidated.

“An apology is due Barack Obama,” wrote The Economist, which had opposed the $86 billion auto bailout. As for Government Motors: after emerging from bankruptcy, it will go public with a new stock offering in just a few weeks, and the United States government, with its 60 percent share of common stock, stands to make a profit. Yes, an industry was saved, and the government will probably make money on the deal — one of Obama’s signature economic successes.

Interest rates are at record lows. Corporate profits are lighting up boardrooms; it is one of the best years for earnings in a decade.

All of the above is good for capitalism, and should end any serious-minded discussion about Obama the socialist. But more than anything, the fact that the president took on the structural flaws of a broken free enterprise system instead of focusing on things that the average voter could understand explains why his party was routed on Tuesday. Obama got on the wrong side of voter anxiety in a decade of diminished fortunes.

“We have done things that people don’t even know about,” Obama told Jon Stewart. Certainly. The three signature accomplishments of his first two years — a health care law that will make life easier for millions of people, financial reform that attempts to level the playing field with Wall Street, and the $814 billion stimulus package — have all been recast as big government blunders, rejected by the emerging majority.

But each of them, in its way, should strengthen the system. The health law will hold costs down, while giving millions the chance at getting care, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Financial reform seeks to prevent the kind of meltdown that caused the global economic collapse. And the stimulus, though it drastically raised the deficit, saved about 3 million jobs, again according to the CBO. It also gave a majority of taxpayers a one-time cut — even if 90 percent of Americans don’t know that, either.

Of course, nobody gets credit for preventing a plane crash. “It could have been much worse!” is not a rallying cry. And, more telling, despite a meager uptick in job growth this year, the unemployment rate rose from 7.6 percent in the month Obama took office to 9.6 today.

Billions of profits, windfalls in the stock market, a stable banking system — but no jobs.

Of course, the big money interests who benefited from Obama’s initiatives have shown no appreciation. Obama, as a senator, voted against the initial bailout of AIG, the reckless insurance giant. As president, he extended them treasury loans at a time when economists said he must — or risk further meltdown. Their response was to give themselves $165 million in executive bonuses, and funnel money to Republicans this year.

Money flows one way, to power, now held by the party that promises tax cuts and deregulation — which should please big business even more.

President Franklin Roosevelt also saved capitalism, in part by a bank “holiday” in 1933, at a time when the free enterprise system had failed. Unlike Obama, he was rewarded with midterm gains for his own party because a majority liked where he was taking the country. The bank holiday was incidental to a larger public works campaign.

Obama can recast himself as the consumer’s best friend, and welcome the animus of Wall Street. He should hector the companies sitting on piles of cash but not hiring new workers. For those who do hire, and create new jobs, he can offer tax incentives. He should finger the financial giants for refusing to clean up their own mess in the foreclosure crisis. He should point to the long overdue protections for credit card holders that came with reform.

And he should veto, veto, veto any bill that attempts to roll back some of the basic protections for people against the institutions that have so much control over their lives – insurance companies, Wall Street and big oil.

They will whine a fierce storm, the manipulators of great wealth. A war on business, they will claim. Not even close. Obama saved them, and the biggest cost was to him.

How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms, NYT, 2.11.2010, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/how-obama-saved-capitalism-and-lost-the-midterms/

Obama’s Remarks on U.S.-Bound Explosives

October 29, 2010
The New York Times

The following is a transcript, provided by the White House, of President Obama’s remarks on Friday about the suspicious packages originating in Yemen and bound for the United States:

Good afternoon, everybody. I want to briefly update the American people on a credible terrorist threat against our country, and the actions that we’re taking with our friends and our partners to respond to it.

Last night and earlier today, our intelligence and law enforcement professionals, working with our friends and allies, identified two suspicious packages bound for the United States — specifically, two places of Jewish worship in Chicago. Those packages had been located in Dubai and East Midlands Airport in the United Kingdom. An initial examination of those packages has determined that they do apparently contain explosive material.

I was alerted to this threat last night by my top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. I directed the Department of Homeland Security and all our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our citizens from this type of attack. Those measures led to additional screening of some planes in Newark and Philadelphia.

The Department of Homeland Security is also taking steps to enhance the safety of air travel, including additional cargo screening. We will continue to pursue additional protective measures for as long as it takes to ensure the safety and security of our citizens.

I’ve also directed that we spare no effort in investigating the origins of these suspicious packages and their connection to any additional terrorist plotting. Although we are still pursuing all the facts, we do know that the packages originated in Yemen. We also know that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terrorist group based in Yemen, continues to plan attacks against our homeland, our citizens, and our friends and allies.

John Brennan, who you will be hearing from, spoke with President Saleh of Yemen today about the seriousness of this threat, and President Saleh pledged the full cooperation of the Yemeni government in this investigation.

Going forward, we will continue to strengthen our cooperation with the Yemeni government to disrupt plotting by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to destroy this Al Qaeda affiliate. We’ll also continue our efforts to strengthen a more stable, secure and prosperous Yemen so that terrorist groups do not have the time and space they need to plan attacks from within its borders.

The events of the past 24 hours underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism. As usual, our intelligence, law enforcement and Homeland Security professionals have served with extraordinary skill and resolve and with the commitment that their enormous responsibilities demand. We’re also coordinating closely and effectively with our friends and our allies, who are essential to this fight.

As we obtain more information we will keep the public fully informed. But at this stage, the American people should know that the counterterrorism professionals are taking this threat very seriously and are taking all necessary and prudent steps to ensure our security. And the American people should be confident that we will not waver in our resolve to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to root out violent extremism in all its forms.

Thank you very much.

Obama’s Remarks on U.S.-Bound Explosives, NYT, 29.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/30/us/30obama-text.html

In ‘Daily Show’ Visit, Obama Defends Record

October 27, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — If you are president of the United States and you take your campaign get-out-the-vote blitz to a fake news program, do you get tweaked, or do you get a pass?

You get tweaked, as President Obama discovered Wednesday, when he made his first appearance as president on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. As the host, Jon Stewart, needled him, the president declared that he never promised transformational change overnight.

“You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, ‘Please baby, one more chance,’ ” Mr. Stewart said at one point. At another, he wondered aloud whether Mr. Obama had traded the audacity of 2008 for pragmatism in 2010, offering a platform of “Yes we can, given certain conditions.”

Mr. Obama paused for a moment. “I think I would say, ‘Yes we can, but —— ”

Mr. Stewart, laughing, cut him off. The president pushed ahead, finishing his sentence: “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The gentle ribbing was perhaps a price the White House was willing to pay for the opportunity to reach Mr. Stewart’s valuable audience — young people who turned out in droves for the president, but who are deeply dissatisfied with him. Mr. Obama is spending the waning days of the election season trying to motivate that crowd to get to the polls, and he closed the interview by urging them to do just that, telling Mr. Stewart he wanted to make “a plug just to vote.”

Mr. Stewart, for his part, pressed the president with the standard liberal critique, accusing him of pursuing a legislative agenda that “felt timid at times” — a characterization Mr. Obama fiercely disputed.

The president wound up defending his health bill, members of Congress and even members of his administration. When Mr. Stewart asked why Mr. Obama, after promising to shake things up, had brought in old Democratic hands like Lawrence H. Summers, the Clinton Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama offered what, for Mr. Summers, was perhaps an unfortunate reply.

“In fairness,” he said, “Larry Summers did a heck of a job.”

Late-night television has come a long way since Bill Clinton, then a presidential candidate, played his saxophone for Arsenio Hall in 1992. The lines between entertainment and news are increasingly blurred — in part because Mr. Obama has been willing to take his presidential platform to settings his predecessors might have viewed as unconventional.

Mr. Obama has appeared as president on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Show with David Letterman”; over the summer, he dished with the doyennes of daytime television on ABC’s “The View.” (“I wanted to pick a show that Michelle actually watches,” he told them.)

“The Daily Show” interview was taped in the run-up to a rally Mr. Stewart and his fellow Comedy Central host, Stephen Colbert, are hosting Saturday on the National Mall. It went longer than anticipated — so long, in fact, that the show’s producers decided to cut the original introduction Mr. Stewart taped, which featured a riff of the host fiddling with a pen and tapping his fingers as he pretended to make the president wait in the wings, and his introduction of Mr. Obama as “White House chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee’s boss.”

In the interview, Mr. Obama conceded that he understands the feeling among his supporters that he has not fundamentally changed the way Washington does business.

“When we promised during the campaign ‘change you can believe in,’ it wasn’t ‘change you can believe in in 18 months,’ ” he said. “It was ‘change you can believe in — but we’re going to have to work for it.’ ”

In ‘Daily Show’ Visit, Obama Defends Record, NYT, 27.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/us/politics/28obama.html

Obama Strains to Get Liberals Back Into Fold

October 5, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — With four weeks until Congressional elections that will shape the remainder of his term, President Obama is increasingly focused on generating enthusiasm within the base that helped put him in the White House two years ago, from college students to African-Americans.

But Mr. Obama has aimed much of his prodding — and not a small amount of personal pique — at the liberals most deflated by the first two years of his presidency. Assuming that many independents are out of reach, White House strategists are counting on Mr. Obama to energize, cajole, wheedle and even shame the left into matching the Tea Party momentum that has propelled Republicans this year.

As he holds rallies aimed at college students and minority groups, sends e-mail to his old list of campaign supporters and prepares to host a town hall-style meeting on MTV, the president essentially is appealing to his liberal base to put aside its disappointment in him. Without offering regrets for policy choices that have angered liberals, Mr. Obama argues that the Republican alternative is far worse.

“You can’t sit it out,” he told a conference call of college student journalists last week. “You can’t suddenly just check in once every 10 years or so, on an exciting presidential election, and then not pay attention during big midterm elections where we’ve got a real big choice between Democrats and Republicans.” He added that “the energy that you were able to bring to our politics in 2008, that’s needed not less now, it’s needed more now.”

At times, though, the message has come across as scolding and testy, in the view of some Democrats. Mr. Obama told Rolling Stone magazine that Democrats “need to buck up” because it would be “inexcusable” for them to stay home. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told a fund-raiser recently that the base should “stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives.”

The White House may be making progress closing the so-called enthusiasm gap with Republicans, according to Democratic strategists who point to improving poll numbers and fund-raising. But the fact that Mr. Obama needs to make such a concerted effort highlights the depth of disaffection among liberals over what they see as his failure to aggressively push for the change he promised.

“It’s great that President Obama is showing a fighting spirit in the weeks before an election, but what his former voters need to see is that same fighting spirit when he’s governing,” said Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group started last year to advocate for liberal goals and candidates.

David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, said the appeal to the base stemmed entirely from political reality. “It’s not frustration at all,” he said. “It’s fundamental. Almost the entire Republican margin is based on the enthusiasm gap, and if Democrats come out in the same turnout as Republicans, it’s going to be a much different election.”

He added: “There are millions of voters who came out in 2008 who were first-time voters who came out because of the president and who aren’t continuing midterm voters. Our challenge is to make them understand this is a consequential election and we need them to participate.”

The focus on the left underscores the White House conclusion that it will be harder to convince independents to turn out for Democrats this year. “The nature of independents is they’re independent and they tend to vote against the majority party,” Mr. Axelrod said. “I think that is true here.”

Recent polls show that Republicans hold an edge among voters likely to turn out on Election Day, while Democrats pull ahead if all registered voters are counted.

But the White House strategy has generated qualms among some Democratic moderates.

Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats, produced a study showing that liberals are the smallest share of the electorate and not enough to keep Congress in Democratic hands. Citing Gallup polling data, the study said self-described conservatives made up 42 percent of the electorate, compared with moderates who make up 35 percent and liberals who make up 20 percent, a shift of several points to the right in the last two years.

In 16 of 21 hotly contested states, Democratic candidates who simply match Mr. Obama’s overall 2008 performance still will not have enough votes to win, according to the group’s study. Instead, the study said, the candidates must outperform Mr. Obama among moderates.

“Even if Democrats close the enthusiasm gap with their base, they still have another enthusiasm gap to close with moderates,” said Anne Kim, domestic policy program director for the group. “Democrats don’t have the luxury of leaning on their base to deliver wins because there simply aren’t enough liberals.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden have stepped up their campaign efforts significantly in recent weeks. Mr. Obama will appear at fund-raisers in New Jersey on Wednesday and Illinois on Thursday before holding the second of four large rallies on Sunday, this one in Philadelphia. Aiming at younger voters, he will hold a webcast town hall meeting next Tuesday and two days later another town hall on MTV and five other channels. He has other big rallies scheduled in Columbus and Las Vegas.

Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said that it had taken a while for Mr. Obama to find a coherent message but that he finally seemed to have done so.

“I see the enthusiasm,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “I’m out there. I’m doing door knocks. They are focused on things. They understand the importance of this election.”

Jim Dean, chairman of the liberal group Democracy for America, said activists were willing to put aside any squabbles with the president for now.

“We’re soldiering on,” he said. “We’re going to do this one way or the other. We’re going to work to keep the majority. At the end of the day, whatever issues we have with what the White House says, we can have that conversation on Nov. 3.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

Obama Strains to Get Liberals Back Into Fold, NYT, 5.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/us/politics/06obama.html

Obama, in Iowa, Hears Barbed Questions in a Subdued Backyard

September 29, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

DES MOINES — President Obama returned Wednesday to Iowa, the state that put him on the presidential map, this time fighting to keep his Democratic Party in power and confronting skeptical voters who challenged him on policies from tax cuts to health care.

Continuing his tour of American backyards, Mr. Obama received a reception that was polite and friendly, but also pointed, when he visited Sandy Clubb, the athletic director at Drake University, and her husband, Jeff, a middle school social studies teacher, in the upscale, leafy Beaverdale neighborhood here.

About 70 people awaited him in the backyard, where Mr. Obama got an earful. One woman told him that her 24-year-old son had “campaigned furiously for you and was very inspired by your message of hope,” but is now out of college and struggling to find a job.

Another said she had “great concerns about your health care bill.” A priest told of an unemployed parishioner. A small-business owner expressed irritation with the president’s plan to raise taxes for people earning more than $250,000, to which Mr. Obama, showing his own flash of own irritation, replied: “Your taxes haven’t gone up in this administration.”

The questions were so downbeat that at the end of the hour-long session, Mr. Obama tried to pick up the mood.

“As I listen to the questions,” he said, “it’s a good reminder we’ve got a long way to go, but I do want everyone to be encouraged about our future.”

With just five weeks to go before Election Day, Mr. Obama is trying to gin up enthusiasm among beleaguered Democrats and reconnect with American voters who are deeply concerned about his stewardship of the economy, all the while drawing sharp contrasts between Democrats and Republicans.

He arrived here Tuesday night, after a raucous get-out-the-vote rally on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and promptly dropped in on his favorite Des Moines haunt, the Baby Boomers Cafe, to visit privately with friends and supporters. (The cafe bakes a chocolate chunk cookie that became a favorite of the president during his campaign; locals call it the “Obama Cookie.”)

Mr. Obama carried Iowa with 54 percent of the vote in 2008. But a poll in The Des Moines Register this week found that 55 percent of likely voters in Iowa disapproved of the president’s performance — numbers that are not much different from elsewhere in the country.

Wednesday morning’s question-and-answer session at the Clubb home was the fifth in a series of “backyard conversations” Mr. Obama has been holding. Each has had a theme: health care in Falls Church, Va., last week; education in Albuquerque on Tuesday; the middle class Wednesday morning in Des Moines. In each, Mr. Obama took on Republicans, who last week released their Pledge to America agenda.

Mr. Obama has been using the backyard events to draw a contrast between the two parties, and has been accusing Republicans of proposing $700 billion in tax cuts for the rich without offering specifics on how to pay for them. In Des Moines on Wednesday, he told voters that the Republican lawmakers “didn’t really speak honestly to the American people about how we’re going to get this country on track.”

Later in the day, Mr. Obama took that message to Richmond, Va., straight to the home district of one of his chief Republican detractors, Representative Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, for another backyard conversation. But this one was moved to a local recreation center to escape the rain.

Obama, in Iowa, Hears Barbed Questions in a Subdued Backyard, NYT, 29.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/us/politics/30obama.html

Shady Secrets

September 29, 2010
The New York Times

A midnight filing by the Obama administration on Friday, asking a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit because of the so-called state secrets doctrine, again raises a troubling question. Why do the White House and Justice Department continue to invoke this severe legal tool essentially as prior administrations have used it, in the face of a considerable body of opinion that it has been abused and should be significantly reformed?

Everyone recognizes that there are secrets that must be protected, but the doctrine has been used to cover up illegal and embarrassing acts or to avoid needed public discussion of policies. Federal trial judges sometimes fail to make the government justify its use of the privilege.

Despite President Obama’s promises of reform in this area, the public still cannot reliably distinguish between legitimate and self-serving uses of the national security claims. Worse, some of the administration’s claims clearly have fallen on the darker side of that line.

The lawsuit was filed by the father of Anwar al-Awlaki to stop the government from killing his son, who is believed to be planning attacks for the branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen, where he is said to be in hiding. Charlie Savage reported in The Times that there is wide agreement in the administration “that it is lawful to target Mr. Awlaki,” but disagreement about the basis for requesting dismissal of the lawsuit. In the end, “a more expansive approach” won out.

Given the cloud of doubt hanging over the doctrine — for 57 years, really, since the Supreme Court established it and for the past decade, especially, because the Bush administration abused it to conceal torture — it’s time for the Obama administration to air these differences and explain the full extent of its thinking.

The court established the secrets privilege in 1953, in United States v. Reynolds. It said the government could withhold evidence if revealing it would jeopardize national security. In that case, the government suppressed a 51-page report about the crash of an Air Force plane on which electronic equipment was being tested.

The privilege turned out to be conceived in sin: the now-declassified report contains no secrets. Instead, it recounts how the engine failure that led to the crash might have been avoided. A lawyer involved said the report “expressly finds negligence” by the Air Force.

In the past 20 years, use of the privilege has increased considerably. It is now used to dismiss lawsuits outright, as in the Awlaki case, even where plaintiffs could prove their case without protected information.

Last September, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said the administration would follow new procedures “to strengthen public confidence that the U.S. Government will invoke the privilege in court only when genuine and significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake and only to the extent necessary to safeguard those interests.” He said that it wouldn’t be used to cover up illegal or embarrassing actions.

Those commitments distinguish the Obama approach from that of his predecessor, but they came after Mr. Holder rushed to uphold Bush administration claims in two major cases involving illegal detention and torture. In one case, it had long been shown conclusively in public that the United States abducted an innocent man and sent him to Syria, where he was tortured.

Mr. Holder’s assurances haven’t strengthened public confidence because they can’t. That will not happen until there is an independent and trusted mechanism for scrutinizing efforts to use the secrecy claim, and to address judges’ deference to a secrecy-oriented executive.

Shady Secrets, NYT, 29.9.2010,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/opinion/30thu1.html

With Warning, Obama Presses China on Currency

September 23, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama increased pressure on China to immediately revalue its currency on Thursday, devoting most of a two-hour meeting with China’s prime minister to the issue and sending the message, according to one of his top aides, that if “the Chinese don’t take actions, we have other means of protecting U.S. interests.”

But Prime Minister Wen Jiabao barely budged beyond his familiar talking points about gradual “reform” of China’s currency policy, leaving it unclear whether Mr. Obama’s message would change Beijing’s economic or political calculus.

The unusual focus on this single issue at such a high level was clearly an effort by the White House to make the case that Mr. Obama was putting American jobs and competitiveness at the top of the agenda in a relationship that has endured strains in recent weeks on everything from territorial disputes to sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

Democrats in Congress are threatening to pass legislation before the midterm elections that would slap huge tariffs on Chinese goods to undermine the advantages Beijing has enjoyed from a currency, the renminbi, that experts say is artificially weakened by 20 to 25 percent.

Mr. Obama’s aides said he was embracing the threat of tariffs and new trade actions against China at the World Trade Organization to gain some leverage over the Chinese, but was also trying to head off any action that would lead to a destructive trade war.

Jeffrey Bader, the senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, told reporters that the two men engaged in “a lengthy discussion about the impact and the politics of the issue.” One Chinese official speculated Thursday that Mr. Obama’s insistence on spending so much time on the issue was motivated by pre-election politics, suggesting that the pressure might abate after early November.

While the United States has been pressing China for years to lift the strict controls on its currency, which keep Chinese exports competitive and more factory workers employed, American voters and lawmakers have only recently seized on exchange rates as a potent political issue. Mr. Obama pressed much harder on Thursday than during a visit to Beijing last year, perhaps because a Chinese commitment several months ago to allow the value of the currency to rise has resulted in a change of less than 2 percent.

The meeting with Mr. Wen came as the United States appeared to lean toward its longtime ally, Japan, in an increasingly heated standoff between China and Japan over who has claim on territory near the South China Sea.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that China and Japan should sort out the issue themselves, but that “We would fulfill our alliance responsibilities,” a term that clearly referred to the American military alliance with Japan.

But the United States also tried not to inflame the dispute. It barely came up at the meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen, Mr. Bader said, adding that despite the talk of America’s obligation to back its military ally, “we have no expectation in any known universe that this would escalate to that kind of a level.”

Mr. Obama’s meeting with Mr. Wen, in a spare conference room usually used by members of the Security Council, came minutes after the president told the United Nations General Assembly that his efforts to engage friends and adversaries were beginning to bear fruit.

He called on Arab states to support fragile Middle East peace talks and warned Iran that it would face sustained international pressure if it did not negotiate seriously over its nuclear program.

Iranian officials have hinted they are prepared to resume talks, without setting a date.

“The door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to walk through it,” said Mr. Obama, who plans to address the Iranian people directly on Friday in an interview with BBC’s Persian service. “But the Iranian government must demonstrate a clear and credible commitment, and confirm to the world the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.”

If Iran fails to meet its obligations under international nonproliferation treaties, he added, it “must be held accountable.”

In June, the United Nations Security Council imposed its fourth round of sanctions against Iran, which were followed by harsher measures by the United States and European and Asian nations. On Wednesday, Russia made clear that it would not be fulfilling a contract to sell Iran an advanced missile system.

Mr. Obama also called on Israel to extend its partial freeze on building new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, construction that is one of the most contentious issues between Israelis and Palestinians.

The moratorium is set to expire this weekend, and hard-won talks could be stymied if the Israelis fail to extend it and the Palestinians decide to walk away from the table.

“Our position on this issue is well known,” Mr. Obama said. “We believe that the moratorium should be extended. We also believe that talks should press on until completed.”

Clashes on Wednesday between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem underscored the fragile state of affairs in the region and the potential for violent outbursts if the negotiations fall apart.

Mr. Obama acknowledged the possibility of “terror, or turbulence, or posturing or petty politics” to disrupt the negotiations, but exhorted world leaders to stand behind the peace process.

“When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations, an independent state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel,” he said.

Tonally, Mr. Obama’s speech to the General Assembly was dramatically different from the one he delivered last year, in his maiden appearance as a new president promising change not only at home, but in America’s dealings with the rest of the world. If the 2009 speech was about the promise of a new approach, and often interrupted by applause, this speech was far more about pressing countries to take up what he called their “responsibilities.”

“Last year he sought to signal that U.S. foreign policy was under new management and intended to work better with others, just what his audience wanted to hear,” James M. Lindsay, the director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote shortly after the speech was over. “This year he made clear he wants to get things done, and that will require others to do things they would prefer not to do.” He added, “He shouldn’t be surprised to discover that others are slow to follow.”

Mr. Obama, at turns sweeping and philosophical, told the delegates and world leaders that it was “our destiny” to endure a time of recession, war and conflict, and spoke out broadly in support of open governments and human rights.

With Warning, Obama Presses China on Currency, NYT, 23.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/world/24prexy.html

Disappointed Supporters Question Obama

September 20, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — It was billed as “Investing in America,” a live televised conversation on the state of the economy between President Obama and American workers, students, business people and retirees, a kind of Wall Street to Main Street reality check.

But it sounded like a therapy session for disillusioned Obama supporters.

In question after question during a one-hour session, which took place on Monday at the Newseum here and was televised on CNBC, Mr. Obama was confronted by people who sounded frustrated and anxious — even as some said they supported his agenda and proclaimed themselves honored to be in his presence.

People from Main Street wanted to know if the American dream still lived for them. People on Wall Street complained that he was treating them like a piñata, “whacking us with a stick,” in the words of Anthony Scaramucci, a former law school classmate of Mr. Obama’s who now runs a hedge fund and was one of the president’s questioners.

“I’m exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for,” said the first questioner, an African-American woman who identified herself as a chief financial officer, a mother and a military veteran. “I’ve been told that I voted for a man who was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class and I’m waiting sir, I’m waiting. I still don’t feel it yet.”

A 30-year-old law school graduate told Mr. Obama that he had hoped to pursue a career in public service — like the president — but complained that he could barely pay the interest on his student loans, let alone think of getting married or starting a family.

“I was really inspired by you and your campaign and the message you brought, and that inspiration is dying away,” he said, adding, “And I really want to know, is the American dream dead for me?”

The extraordinarily personal tone of the session, coupled with more substantive policy questions from the host, John Harwood of CNBC and The New York Times, reflects the erosion of support for Mr. Obama among the constituencies that sent him to the White House two years ago.

It was all the more compelling coming from such a friendly audience; one questioner, a small-business owner in Pennsylvania, began by praising the president for turning around the auto industry, then lamented: “You’re losing the war of sound bites. You’re losing the media cycles.”

As he leads his party into what many analysts expect to be a devastating midterm election for Democrats, the president faces overwhelming skepticism from Americans on his handling of the economy. A recent New York Times poll found 57 percent of respondents believed the president did not have a clear plan for fixing the nation’s broken economy.

Mr. Obama sought on Monday to address those concerns, telling his business critics that he was not antibusiness and his middle class questioners that “there are a whole host of things we’ve put in place to make your life better.” He cited his health care bill, a financial regulatory overhaul measure that imposed tough requirements on credit card companies; an education bill that increased the availability of student loans.

The president also laid down a challenge to the Tea Party movement, whose candidates have swept aside mainstream Republicans in recent primaries in Alaska and Delaware. He said it was not enough for Tea Party candidates to campaign on a theme of smaller government; he tried to put them in an uncomfortable box by prodding them to offer specifics about the programs they would cut.

“The challenge for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically: What would you do?” the president said. “It’s not enough to say get control of spending. I think it’s important for you to say, ‘I’m willing to cut veterans benefits, or I’m willing to cut Medicare or Social Security, or I’m willing to see taxes go up.’ ”

Mr. Obama hinted that he was open to considering a payroll tax holiday to spur job growth, saying he would be willing to “look at any idea that’s out there,” although he went on to say that some ideas that “look good on paper” are more complicated than they appear.

And he ducked a question from Mr. Harwood about whether he would be willing to debate the House Republican leader, John Boehner of Ohio, the way former President Bill Clinton had a debate 15 years ago with Newt Gingrich, who was then the House speaker.

“I think it’s premature to say that John Boehner’s going to be the speaker of the House,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama is stepping up his efforts to mobilize Democratic voters and find ways to improve the political climate for his party heading toward Election Day. He will begin trying to build enthusiasm among some of the voters who propelled him to victory in 2008, like college students, while Democratic strategists are considering ways to turn the increased prominence of the Tea Party movement to their advantage by characterizing positions taken by some Tea Party-backed Republican candidates as extreme.

The White House denied an article in The New York Times on Monday saying that Mr. Obama’s political advisers were considering national advertising to cast the Republican Party as having been all but taken over by the Tea Party movement.

“The story that led The New York Times yesterday was flat out wrong,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said in an e-mail message. “The White House has never discussed, contemplated or weighed such an ad campaign.”

Mr. Pfeiffer said the article “was based on the thinnest of reeds,” an anonymous source.

The Times stood by the report.

After his appearance on CNBC, the president flew to Philadelphia, where he appeared at two fund-raisers for Representative Joe Sestak, the Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, and raised $1 million for the Democratic National Committee.

If the televised session on Monday seemed to put Mr. Obama on the spot, he did not appear ruffled. Rather, he seemed resigned to the frustration of his questioners.

“My goal here is not to convince you that everything is where it needs to be,” the president said, “but what I am saying is that we are moving in the right direction.”

Disappointed Supporters Question Obama, NYT, 20.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/us/politics/21obama.html

Obama: Black Lawmakers Must Rally Voters Back Home

September 19, 2010
Filed at 1:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama implored black voters on Saturday to rekindle the passion they felt for his groundbreaking campaign and turn out in force this fall to repel Republicans who are ready to ''turn back the clock.''

In a fiery speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama warned that Republicans hoping to seize control of Congress want ''to do what's right politically, instead of what's right -- period.''

''I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, to go back to your workplaces, to go to the churches, and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops. And tell them we've got more work to do,'' Obama said to cheers from a black-tie audience at the Washington Convention Center. ''Tell them we can't wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now.''

His speech acknowledged what pollsters have been warning Democrats for months -- that blacks are among the key Democratic groups who right now seem unlikely to turn out in large numbers in November.

''It's not surprising given the hardships that we're seeing across the land that a lot of people may not be feeling very energized, very engaged right now,'' Obama said. ''A lot of folks may be feeling like politics is something that they get involved with every four years when there's a presidential election, but they don't see why they should bother the rest of the time.''

But he said he's just begun rolling back a devastating recession that's come down ''with a vengeance'' on African-American neighborhoods that were already suffering.

''We have to finish the plan you elected me to put in place,'' Obama said.

Summoning the joy many blacks felt at the election of the first African-American president and recalling the words of the late actor and activist Ossie Davis, he declared, ''It's not the man, it's the plan.''

Obama was treated to several standing ovations in the darkened cavernous center. But the hall grew quiet as Obama warned, ''Remember, the other side has a plan too. It's a plan to turn back the clock on every bit of progress we've made.''

Obama never spoke the name of the Republican Party, but repeatedly invoked its policies -- and did name its House leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, a favorite Obama target in recent days.

Members of ''the other side,'' Obama said, ''want to take us backward. We want to move America forward.''

With polls showing his party facing a wide ''enthusiasm gap'' with the GOP, Obama sought to rally an important constituency in his speech.

''What made the civil rights movement possible were foot soldiers like so many of you, sitting down at lunch counters and standing up for freedom. What made it possible for me to be here today are Americans throughout our history making our union more equal, making our union more just, making our union more perfect,'' Obama said. ''That's what we need again.''

The caucus is a group reeling from ethics charges against two leading members, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel of New York and Maxine Waters of California. Republicans are preparing TV ads spotlighting the cases, even though House trials are now not expected until after the November election.

Obama mentioned neither case in his 27-minute speech.

For Obama, the caucus dinner at the Washington Convention Center capped a week of concerted outreach to minority supporters, a traditional wellspring of Democratic strength.

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Online:

Congressional Black Caucus: http://www.cbcfinc.org/home.html

Obama: Black Lawmakers Must Rally Voters Back Home, NYT, 19.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/09/19/us/politics/AP-US-Obama-Black-Caucus.html

Obama Is Said to Be Preparing to Seek Approval on Saudi Arms Sale

September 17, 2010
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Obama is preparing to seek Congressional approval for a huge arms sale to Saudi Arabia, chiefly intended as a building block for Middle East regional defenses to box in Iran, according to administration and Pentagon officials.

The advanced jet fighters and helicopters for Saudi Arabia, long a leading customer for these weapons, could become the largest arms deal in American history, and one significant enough to shift the region’s balance of power over the course of a decade.

The key element of the sale would be scores of new F-15 combat aircraft, along with more than 175 attack and troop-transport helicopters and, if subsequent negotiations are successful, ships and antimissile defenses. The deal has been put together in quiet consultations with Israel, which has sought assurances that it will retain its technological edge over Saudi forces, even as Saudi Arabia improves its ability to face down a shared rival, the Iranians.

“We want Iran to understand that its nuclear program is not getting them leverage over their neighbors, that they are not getting an advantage,” a senior administration official said Friday, describing the Saudi sale as part of a broader regional strategy in which the United States has bolstered antimissle defenses in Arab states along the Persian Gulf. “We want the Iranians to know that every time they think they will gain, they will actually lose.”

Though the timing appears coincidental, Congress will likely be formally notified of the proposed sale in the coming days, during a visit to the United States by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad has used his annual visit to address the United Nations General Assembly as a moment to denounce the United States and proclaim that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful, though this month international weapons inspectors said they had been stonewalled on important questions about Iranian work on warhead designs.

When the arms sale plan is formally sent to Congress, that will start a 30-day clock for it to consider the issue. There is little question it will go forward — the administration is already talking about how many jobs it will create in Congressional districts around the country — but several members of Congress have already expressed reservations about whether it would erode Israel’s military edge.

Administration officials would not discuss the proposed sale on the record because the pre-notification negotiations with Congressional committees were still under way. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the deal on Tuesday, projected that the value could top $60 billion. But officials involved in the planning said a firm estimate remained impossible because the sale would unfold in phases and would be likely to change along the way as weapons packages, battlefield-management systems and service contracts were decided.

Saudi Arabia has over the decades been the largest purchaser of American arms, with a package for advanced-radar aircraft and associated command systems in the early 1980s worth about $7.5 billion. That was followed in the early 1990s by a deal for jet fighters and support systems that cost nearly $10 billion, according to government records. Another gulf partner that serves as a front line against Iran, the United Arab Emirates, has also purchased significant amounts of American weapons, in particular air-defense systems.

In the past, Israel has often regarded those sales with suspicion. But in recent years, the standoff with Iran has changed the regional dynamics. Officials from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates describe their perceptions of the threat from Iran in very similar terms.

Since coming to office, Mr. Obama and his top officials have hinted at extending the American defense umbrella over much of the Persian Gulf, in hopes of preventing other states in the region, including the Saudi Arabia, from seeking nuclear arms of their own. The sale of conventional weapons, the theory goes, helps persuade Saudia Arabia and other Arab states that they could deter Iranian ambitions, even without their own nuclear capability.

There is an added benefit for the American military, in addition to helping regional partners bolster their defenses with weapons that cannot be matched by Iran. The purchase of these American combat systems and related military support, including American trainers, would allow the United States armed forces to operate seamlessly in that part of the world, according to Pentagon officials.

“We are helping these allied and partner nations create their own containment shield against Iran,” said an American military officer. “It is a way of deterring Iran, but helpful to us in so many other ways.”

A senior Defense Department official said the proposed sale would include 84 new F-15s and an agreement to modernize 70 of Saudi Arabia’s older F-15s to that same upgraded configuration. The official said Saudi Arabia was expected to retire its older aircraft as the new and upgraded warplanes arrived, so that over the next 5 or 10 years the Saudi Air Force would be far more capable, but not larger in number.

In addition, the weapons package would include 70 Apache attack helicopters, 72 Black Hawk troop-transport helicopters and 36 Little Bird helicopters. The Little Bird is a small, agile helicopter used by American Special Operations forces for surveillance, as well as for inserting or extracting small numbers of combat troops quickly and surreptitiously.

Obama Is Said to Be Preparing to Seek Approval on Saudi Arms Sale, NYT, 17.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/world/18arms.html

Once Wary, Obama Relies on Petraeus

September 16, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER, DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER.

This article is by Helene Cooper, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON — When President Obama descended into the White House Situation Room on Monday for his monthly update on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the new top American military commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, ticked off signs of progress.

Come December, when the president intends to assess his Afghan strategy, he will be able to claim tangible successes, General Petraeus predicted by secure video hookup from Kabul, according to administration officials.

The general said that the American military would have substantially enlarged the “oil spot” — military jargon for secure area — around Kabul. It will have expanded American control farther outside of Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. And, the aides recalled, the general said the military would have reintegrated a significant number of former Taliban fighters in the south.

“He essentially promised the president very bankable results,” one administration official said. (Others in the room characterized the commander’s list more as objectives than promises.) Mr. Obama largely listened, asking a few questions, and two hours later, the White House sent an e-mail to reporters using language that echoed the general’s.

But even inside an administration that is pinning its hopes, both military and political, on the accuracy of the general’s report, there are doubters. Assessments from intelligence officials are far more pessimistic, and Mr. Obama regularly reviews maps that show how the Taliban have spread into areas where they had no major presence before.

And some military officers, who support General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy and say he readily acknowledges the difficulties ahead, caution that the security and governance crisis in Afghanistan remains so volatile that any successes may not be sustainable.

How that tension plays out in coming months — the guarded optimism of a popular general leading an increasingly unpopular war, and the caution of a White House that prides itself on a realism that it says President George W. Bush and his staff lacked — will probably define the relationship between Mr. Obama and his field commander. General Petraeus, who led the Iraq surge and was a favorite of Mr. Bush, has slowly worked himself into the good graces of a president who was once wary of him.

So far, the two men appear to be meshing well, advisers say. The men “are actually somewhat similar in temperament and style,” said Benjamin Rhodes, the National Security Council’s director of strategic communications. Both are meticulous, even-keeled and matter of fact, and both like to do their homework, studying detailed reports.

Since General Petraeus took on the commander’s job in June, several aides said, the president has struck a more deferential tone toward him than he used with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, General Petraeus’s predecessor. Often during pauses in meetings, one White House official said, Mr. Obama will stop and say, “Dave, what do you think?”

Like no other figure today, General Petraeus has stepped into Gen. Colin L. Powell’s shoes as the face of the military to ordinary Americans, particularly as the White House extols the end of the combat mission in Iraq, which was largely made possible by the troop surge that General Petraeus orchestrated.

For Mr. Obama, that may be a blessing and a curse. General Petraeus has made clear that he opposes a rapid pullout of troops from Afghanistan beginning next July, as many of the president’s Democratic allies would like. Some in the White House, with an eye on the 2012 presidential election, fear that the general may already be laying the foundation for keeping a large force in Afghanistan for a long while.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that the unresolved question was whether the “campaign plan” for Afghanistan was working.

“The evidence that General Petraeus is seeing so far suggests to him that it is, and both on the civilian and the military side, not just the military side,” Mr. Gates told reporters. “But he is cautious, and I will be cautious.”

The new alliance between Mr. Obama and General Petraeus holds risks for the general as well as the president. In taking on Afghanistan, he is risking his reputation as perhaps the greatest general of his generation on a war that many people think will end in a stalemate. Even if General Petraeus’s strategy is a solid one, few believe Mr. Obama will commit the time and resources — many years and hundreds of billions of dollars — needed to test the Petraeus thesis.

General Petraeus has a history of early optimistic assessments that proved largely correct; one dates back to the Iraq surge, over which he and Mr. Obama first butted heads. Military officials say that during the early days of the surge, General Petraeus cited what his staff termed “leading indicators” of progress, even when much of the private and public discussion of the war effort was still negative. (During one Senate hearing with General Petraeus, then-Senator Obama accused the Bush administration of setting “the bar so low that modest improvement in what was a completely chaotic situation” was considered success.)

While General Petraeus’s track record in Iraq may give added weight to his analysis on Afghanistan, the two wars are radically different in Mr. Obama’s mind, his aides said. During meetings at the White House, the general “always brings up Iraq,” one senior administration official said.

While Mr. Obama asked General Petraeus last fall to assemble the lessons learned in the Iraq surge that could be applied in Afghanistan, the president, by and large, “remains focused on Afghanistan,” the official said.

Some officials would speak only on background about interactions they had witnessed in confidential meetings.

In preparation for this fall’s review of the strategy in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama’s first request of General Petraeus was for new and better ways to measure success or setbacks; the general presented them on Monday.

He started with familiar measures: how many Afghan troops have been trained and how many operations have focused on Taliban strongholds in places like Kandahar and Helmand.

Then General Petraeus added three others: one looking at local security initiatives enacted by the Afghan police, another at the pace of “reintegration” of former members of the Taliban and a third looking at the successes of attacks by American Special Operations forces.

“These are more specific,” said one adviser to the president. “With McChrystal, it was ‘You’ll know victory when you see it.’ The president has asked for a lot more visibility into what’s happening.”

Mr. Obama gets a wider view from intelligence reports, chiefly from the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, that land on his desk weekly. They assess whether President Hamid Karzai’s government is preparing to survive on its own, or whether the Taliban can successfully retreat to their safe haven in Pakistan to prepare new attacks. Those longer-range assessments have been significantly more pessimistic than General Petraeus’s measures of battlefield progress.

Some national security experts say that the fate of General McChrystal — now on the lecture circuit making $60,000 a speech — and the fired general before him, Gen. David D. McKiernan, means Mr. Obama must make things work with General Petraeus, lest he appear unable to get along with his commanders.

“If they have a falling out, it’s not at all clear that the public would necessarily side with the president the way they did in the McChrystal incident,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official.

Added Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations: “They are joined at the hip, but the leverage lies with Petraeus. And Petraeus has made plain, publicly, that after July 2011, he doesn’t think there should be a rapid pullout.”

Once Wary, Obama Relies on Petraeus, NYT, 16.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/world/17prexy.html

Obama Urges Israel to Extend Settlement Moratorium

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama called Friday for Israel to extend its moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank as a good-will gesture to move peace talks with the Palestinians forward.

During a wide-ranging news conference at the White House, Mr. Obama said that while the politics of extending the moratorium would be difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, given his conservative government coalition, he had nonetheless asked Mr. Netanyahu to extend it when they met recently in Washington.

“What I’ve said to Prime Minister Netanyahu is that given, so far, the talks are moving forward in a constructive way, it makes sense to extend that moratorium,” Mr. Obama said, in remarks that took some administration officials by surprise.

Mr. Obama said he had also told Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, that he, too, had to make gestures to Israel to keep the peace talks going. The negotiations began last week in Washington.

“You’ve got to show the Israeli public that you are serious and constructive in these talks so that the politics for Prime Minister Netanyahu, if he were to extend the settlements moratorium, would be a little bit easier,” Mr. Obama said he had told Mr. Abbas.

Mr. Obama’s remarks on Friday were significant because the settlement construction moratorium, which is scheduled to expire Sept. 26, is looming as the first hurdle in the nascent peace talks. His comments surprised some administration officials because of a customary concern that the United States not appear to be pushing Israel.

But a member of the administration said American officials had already been privately prodding their Israeli counterparts to look for ways to extend the moratorium. In many ways, Mr. Obama was simply acknowledging an open secret.

Israeli officials have given no indication that they would extend the moratorium, and Mr. Abbas has said he would walk away from the negotiations if settlement construction resumed.

Mr. Obama acknowledged the pressures Mr. Abbas faced from those who opposed the talks.

“I think President Abbas came here despite great misgivings and pressure from the other side, because he understood the window for creating a Palestinian state is closing,” Mr. Obama said. “And there are a whole bunch of parties in the region who purport to be friends of the Palestinians, and yet do everything they can to avoid the path that would actually lead to a Palestinian state, would actually lead to their goal.”

During the news conference, Mr. Obama also acknowledged that the presence on the Central Intelligence Agency’s payroll of Afghan officials whom Western nations have accused of corruption sent a bad message, especially while the United States was pressing the Afghan government to curb corruption.

“Are there going to be occasions where we look and see that some of our folks on the ground have made compromises with people who are known to have engaged in corruption?” Mr. Obama said. “We’re reviewing all that constantly, and there may be occasions where that happens.”

The New York Times reported last month that an aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan who is at the center of a politically delicate corruption investigation is being paid by the C.I.A.

Mr. Obama said the United States had “got to make sure that we’re not sending a mixed message here.”

“So one of the things that I’ve said to my national security team,” he said, “is, ‘Let’s be consistent, in terms of how we operate, across agencies. Let’s make sure that our efforts there are not seen as somehow giving a wink and a nod to corruption. If we are saying publicly that that’s important, then our actions have to match up across the board.’ But it is a challenging environment in which to do that.”

Obama Urges Israel to Extend Settlement Moratorium, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/world/middleeast/11diplo.html

Obama Tries to Calm Tensions in Call for Tolerance

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama gave an impassioned call on Friday for tolerance and better relations between Muslims and non-Muslims at home and abroad, defending the “inalienable rights” of those who worship Islam to practice their religion freely.

Mr. Obama made his statements as protests and violence continued in Afghanistan, set off by a Florida pastor’s plans, now suspended, to burn Korans on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and against the backdrop of the controversy in New York over a proposed Islamic center near ground zero.

With relations between the United States and the Muslim world perhaps at their most frayed since the invasion of Iraq seven and a half years ago, the president sought to appeal to America’s core principles.

Mr. Obama said it was imperative for people in this country to distinguish between their real enemies and those who have the potential to become enemies because of continued vilification of Islam in the United States. At a time when polls suggest that a substantial number of Americans erroneously believe that Mr. Obama is Muslim, the president cited his own Christian faith at one point.

“We have to make sure that we don’t start turning on each other,” he said. “And I will do everything that I can, as long as I am president of the United States, to remind the American people that we are one nation, under God. And we may call that God different names, but we remain one nation. And, you know, as somebody who, you know, relies heavily on my Christian faith in my job, I understand, you know, the passions that religious faith can raise.”

Asked about the wisdom of building an Islamic center a few blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Obama reiterated his position that Muslims have the right to build a mosque on the site, without directly saying whether he thought doing so was a good idea.

“This country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights,” Mr. Obama said. “And what that means is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site.”

Urged on by their religious leaders, Afghans in many locations around the country poured out of their mosques and took to the streets Friday morning, and in most cases the demonstrations remained peaceful. But two of them turned violent, in both cases outside NATO reconstruction bases, and a total of at least 12 people were wounded, three of them critically, in addition to the one who was killed.

While Mr. Obama cast the issue in terms of American national security and the impact of assaults on Islam in this country on American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, he also said that security was not the only prism through which the issue should be viewed. “We’ve got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens, in this country,” Mr. Obama said. “They’re going to school with our kids. They’re our neighbors. They’re our friends. They’re our co-workers. And when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?”

This ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 has turned almost into a referendum on America’s ability to coexist with the multitude religions. Mr. Obama will be observing the anniversary at the Pentagon, while the first lady, Michelle Obama, will join the former first lady Laura Bush in Shanksville, Pa., the site where the fourth hijacked plane went down. Mr. Obama said that it was important to remember that Muslims are fighting with the United States in the two wars begun since the attacks.

“They’re out there putting their lives on the line for us,” Mr. Obama said. “And we’ve got to make sure that we are crystal clear for our sakes and their sakes: they are Americans and we honor their service. And part of honoring their service is making sure that they understand that we don’t differentiate between them and us.

“It’s just us.”

While New York City will observe the anniversary with familiar rituals — moments of silence, the reading of nearly 3,000 names — a new rancor will be on hand as supporters and opponents of the planned Islamic center near ground zero hold dueling rallies. The two rallies will unfold at roughly the same time in the afternoon near where the proposed mosque and Islamic center is to be built at 51 Park Place. On Friday night, about 2,000 supporters of the project gathered for a vigil near the site, saying they wanted to avoid entangling the mosque controversy and the Sept. 11 observance, according to The Associated Press.

A day after the pastor in Florida, Terry Jones, suspended his plan to burn Korans amid back-and-forth accounts of whether he had won an agreement to move the Islamic center to a new location — it turned out he had not — Daisy Khan, the wife of the center’s imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, and another person briefed on the conversation provided an account.

They said they never told Mr. Jones or the Florida imam who was acting as an intermediary, Muhammad Musri, that they would move, and only vaguely agreed to meet — at some point down the road.

Mr. Musri called Ms. Khan in “a bit of a panic,” Ms. Khan said, saying he wanted to give Mr. Jones an incentive not to burn Korans. Asked if they would change the location, Ms. Khan said, “No, of course not.” Her account was first reported by Think Progress and confirmed by Ms. Khan. She said she was a bit surprised when Mr. Jones said he would come to New York almost immediately.

Mr. Musri confirmed most of Ms. Khan’s version in an e-mail late Friday, although he recalled them agreeing that the meeting would be “very soon” and not down the road, as she had said.

He then went on to express frustration with Mr. Jones, saying in an e-mail that the pastor “did not speak the truth” when he announced that he had been told the mosque would move.

Mr. Jones got on a plane headed to New York, according to an acquaintance, K. A. Paul; the flight landed Friday night, The A.P. said. Mr. Jones has said he wants to meet with Mr. Rauf.

A half-hour after the conclusion of the ceremony near ground zero for the family members of those who died in the attacks, supporters of the proposed Islamic center were to gather for a rally at 1 p.m. at City Hall Park, about a block and a half from 51 Park Place. The opponents’ rally was to begin at 3 p.m. at Park Place and West Broadway.

Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Manny Fernandez and Anne Barnard from New York.

Obama Tries to Calm Tensions in Call for Tolerance, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/us/politics/11obama.html

Obama Warns Of Backlash on Koran Burning

September 10, 2010
The New York Times
Filed at 12:13 p.m. ET
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Friday he hopes a Florida pastor refrains from burning copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks and warned it could cause "profound damage" to U.S. interests.

"The idea that we would burn the sacred text of someone else's religion is contrary to what this country stands for," Obama told a news conference, warning it could lead to retaliation against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"This is a way of endangering our troops, our sons and daughters." he said. "It is in the age of the Internet something that can cause us profound damage around the world, so we've got to take it seriously."

The Florida pastor, Terry Jones, said on Friday he would not burn the Koran but could change his mind if a proposed meeting fails to take place on Saturday in New York with Muslim leaders planning to build an Islamic center and mosque near the site of the September 11 attacks.

"Right now we have plans not to do it (burn the Koran),"Jones told ABC's "Good Morning America" program. Jones has said a Florida imam had promised him a meeting with New York imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in exchange for canceling the Koran-burning.

Abdul Rauf is at the center of the controversy over the New York mosque.

Obama said the burning would be a recruiting tool for al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"We've got an obligation to send a very clear message that this kind of behavior or threats of action put our young men and women in harm's way," he said.

"My hope is that this individual (Jones) prays on it and refrains from doing it."

(Editing by Paul Simao)

Obama Warns Of Backlash on Koran Burning, NYT, 10.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/09/10/news/news-us-usa-muslims-obama.html

Obama Speaks Against Koran Burning

September 9, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:25 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is exhorting a Florida minister to ''listen to those better angels'' and call off his plan to engage in a Quran-burning protest this weekend.

Obama told ABC's ''Good Morning America'' in an interview aired Thursday that he hopes the Rev. Terry Jones of Florida listens to the pleas of people who have asked him to call off the plan. The president called it a ''stunt.''

''If he's listening, I hope he understands that what he's proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans,'' Obama said. ''That this country has been built on the notion of freedom and religious tolerance.''

''And as a very practical matter, I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is talking about pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women who are in uniform,'' the president added.

Said Obama: ''Look, this is a recruitment bonanza for Al Qaida. You could have serious violence in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan.'' The president also said Jones' plan, if carried out, could serve as an incentive for terrorist-minded individuals ''to blow themselves up'' to kill others.

''I hope he listens to those better angels and understands that this is a destructive act that he's engaging in,'' the president said of Jones.

Obama Speaks Against Koran Burning, NYT, 9.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/09/09/us/politics/AP-US-Quran-Burning-Obama.html

Debating the Economy

September 8, 2010
The New York Times

Americans are deeply worried about the economy and their jobs — and about whether their elected representatives in Washington have a real plan for digging out of this mess. They are right to be worried. But this week, at least, voters were given a clear choice about the direction the country can take in November and beyond.

President Obama — who took too long to engage this debate — gave two sensible and, finally, passionate speeches. He said that to create jobs and stabilize the economy, the federal government will have to help businesses invest more, and it will have to spend some more, for a while longer. And he said that the country will never be able to wrestle down the deficit if Congress gives in to Republican demands to extend $700 billion in unjustified and unaffordable tax breaks for the wealthy.

The speeches were a pointed rebuttal to Representative John Boehner, the House Republican leader, who has spearheaded his party’s implacable opposition. In a speech in Ohio last month, billed as the definitive Republican position on the economy, he declared that “the prospect of higher taxes, stricter rules and more regulations” was choking recovery.

The president was exactly right when he said that Mr. Boehner’s proposals were nothing more than a return to the past decade of economic mismanagement; the same policies that helped turn budget surpluses into crippling deficits nearly destroyed the financial system and cast millions of Americans into long-term joblessness.

“Do we return to the same failed policies that ran our economy into the ditch,” he asked on Wednesday.

The immediate battle is over President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of this year. Mr. Obama wants to make the tax cuts permanent for families that make less than $250,000 a year and let the tax cuts expire for those who make more — about 2 percent of taxpayers. Mr. Boehner says he wants to extend all of the tax cuts for two years — although there is little doubt that the goal of Republicans is to extend all of them permanently.

It makes good sense to extend the middle-class tax cuts temporarily because the weak economy needs the boost, but it makes no sense to extend them for the rich. Middle-class Americans spend tax breaks, while wealthy taxpayers generally save them. In the longer term, more revenue will be needed to keep rebuilding the economy and meet health care and other obligations.

We’re not surprised that Mr. Obama avoided that hard truth. But Mr. Boehner and his party’s position is an utter denial of reality. In the real world, it was lower taxes for the rich, lax rules and deregulation that hurt middle-class Americans and dragged the economy to this dangerous pass.

Mr. Boehner’s much professed concern for small businesses is misdirection. The tax cuts that Mr. Obama would let expire would affect very few owners of small businesses — how many do you know who make more than $250,000 a year? — by any common-sense definition of that term.

Mr. Boehner said he was fed up with “Washington politicians talking about wanting to create jobs as a ploy to get themselves re-elected while doing everything possible to prevent jobs from being created.” Amazingly enough, he was not talking to Republicans.

Mr. Obama did more than just rebut Mr. Boehner. He also offered some sound ideas — some that also had Republican support, at least until Mr. Obama raised them. He proposed on Wednesday to allow businesses to write off all the investments they make in 2011, rather than over several years, to close loopholes that reward businesses that send jobs overseas and to permanently extend a research and development tax credit.

Mr. Obama again called on Congress to pass legislation that would make more credit available to small businesses — legislation that Senate Republicans, for all their claims of concern for small businesses, have delayed passing.

If there is any good news from Mr. Boehner and other Republicans it is that they suddenly want to seem eager to shed their reputation as the Party of No. This week, they suggested that they might be open to some of Mr. Obama’s ideas, which include a $50 billion initial investment to create jobs improving roads, rail lines and airports — as long as those projects were not paid for by taxing billionaires, oil companies and other wealthy corporations. That, of course, is just how Mr. Obama intends to pay for them — and just how he should.

Mr. Obama’s speeches were a robust effort by the president to rally Democrats for the election. It has been a long time coming. And we wish that Democratic leaders in Congress could show the same clear thinking and the same willingness to go head to head with the Republicans. Some commentators are likely to say that Mr. Obama should not have given a national stage to Mr. Boehner, a relative unknown despite his immense power in Congress and his ambition to be the next speaker of the House. But that is just what he needed to do.

For far too long, Mr. Boehner and others have been dominating the political debate with insincere sound bites, Jedi mind games and plain bad economics. How can they claim to care about the deficit and insist on more tax cuts?

The answer, unfortunately, is that they can, and they have, because Mr. Obama has sat on the sidelines and most Congressional Democrats have run for the hills. We are glad to see Mr. Obama fully in the fight.

Debating the Economy, NYT, 8.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09thurs1.html

Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs

September 6, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

MILWAUKEE — President Obama, looking to stimulate a sluggish economy and create jobs, called Monday for Congress to approve major upgrades to the nation’s roads, rail lines and runways — part of a six-year plan that would cost tens of billions of dollars and create a government-run bank to finance innovative transportation projects.

With Democrats facing an increasingly bleak midterm election season, Mr. Obama used a speech at a union gathering on Labor Day, the traditional start of the campaign season, to outline his plan. It calls for a quick infusion of $50 billion in government spending that White House officials said could spur job growth as early as next year — if Congress approves.

That is a big if. Though transportation bills usually win bipartisan support, hasty passage of Mr. Obama’s plan seems unlikely, given that Congress has only a few weeks of work left before lawmakers return to their districts to campaign and that Republicans are showing little interest in giving Democrats any pre-election victories.

Central to the plan is the president’s call for an “infrastructure bank,” which would be run by the government but would pool tax dollars with private investment, the White House says. Mr. Obama embraced the idea as a senator; with unemployment still high despite an array of government efforts, the concept has lately been gaining traction in policy circles and on Capitol Hill.

Indeed, some leading proponents of such a bank — including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican of California; Gov. Ed Rendell, Democrat of Pennsylvania; and Michael R. Bloomberg, the independent mayor of New York — would like to see it finance a broader range of projects, including water and clean-energy projects. They say such a bank would spur innovation by allowing a panel of experts to approve projects on merit, rather than having lawmakers simply steer transportation money back home.

“It will change the way Washington spends your tax dollars,” Mr. Obama said here, “reforming the haphazard and patchwork way we fund and maintain our infrastructure to focus less on wasteful earmarks and outdated formulas, and more on competition and innovation that gives us the best bang for the buck.”

But the notion of a government-run bank — indeed, a government-run anything — is bound to prove contentious during an election year in which voters are furious over bank bailouts and over what many perceive as Mr. Obama pursuing a big government agenda. Even before the announcement Monday, Republicans were expressing caution.

“It’s important to keep in mind that increased spending — no matter the method of delivery — is not free,” said Representative Pat Tiberi, an Ohio Republican who is on a Ways and Means subcommittee that held hearings on the bank this year. He warned that “federally guaranteed borrowing and lending could place taxpayers on the hook should the proposed bank fail.”

The announcement comes after weeks of scrambling by a White House desperate to give a jolt to the lackluster recovery, and is part of a broader package of proposals that Mr. Obama intends to introduce on Wednesday during a speech in Cleveland. The transportation initiative would revise and extend legislation that has lapsed.

Specifically, the president wants to rebuild 150,000 miles of road, lay and maintain 4,000 miles of rail track, restore 150 miles of runways and advance a next-generation air-traffic control system.

The White House did not offer a price tag for the full measure or say how many jobs it would create. If Congress simply reauthorized the expired transportation bill and accounted for inflation, the new measure would cost about $350 billion over the next six years. But Mr. Obama wants to “frontload” the new bill with an additional $50 billion in initial investment to generate jobs, and vowed it would be “fully paid for.” The White House is proposing to offset the $50 billion by eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

After months of campaigning on the theme that the president’s $787 billion stimulus package was wasteful, Republicans sought Monday to tag the new plan with the stimulus label. The Republican National Committee called it “stimulus déjà vu,” and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, characterized it as “yet another government stimulus effort.”

But Governors Rendell and Schwarzenegger, and Mayor Bloomberg, who in 2008 founded a bipartisan coalition to promote transportation upgrades, praised Mr. Obama. And in policy circles, the plan, especially the call for the infrastructure bank, is generating serious debate.

“This is a very ripe policy question now,” said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, who has been working for several years on blueprints for a bank.

On Capitol Hill, Representatives James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota and chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has been developing his own bill, as has Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut.

Ms. DeLauro’s plan would create an infrastructure bank that would be part of the United States Treasury, where it would attract money from institutional investors, then channel the funds to projects selected by a panel. The program, which would make loans much like the World Bank, would finance projects with the potential to transform whole regions, or even the national economy, the way the interstate highway system and the first transcontinental railway once did.

The outside investors would expect a competitive return on their money, so many of the completed projects would have to charge fees, taxes or tolls. In an interview, Ms. DeLauro said she would be “looking at a broader base,” meaning the bank would finance not just roads and rails, but also telecommunications, water, drainage, green energy and other large-scale works.

But if the projects did not raise enough money, the Treasury might get stuck paying back the investors, a prospect that gave pause to so-called deficit hawks like Mr. Tiberi. In an e-mail last week, he said he agreed the nation’s road and communications networks needed to be improved but was concerned about creating another company like Fannie Mae that might need a bailout.

Inside the White House, the idea for a transportation initiative, and in particular an infrastructure bank, is one that the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has been promoting. It was not included in the original $787 billion stimulus program because the administration and Congressional Democratic leaders wanted to pass that package as quickly as possible.

There is no shortage of projects in search of money. The problem, analysts say, is that Congress, which would create the bank, is not known for its ability to single out strategic priorities for growth. Instead, it traditionally builds broad support by giving a little something to everybody — Montana, for instance, would get a small amount of Amtrak money in return for its support for improvements along the Northeast corridor.

“We don’t prioritize,” Mr. Puentes said. “We take this kind of peanut butter approach of spreading investment dollars around very thinly, without targeting them.”

Samuel Staley, director of urban growth and land-use policy for the Reason Foundation, a libertarian research group, said the best way to spend money efficiently would be to establish the bank as a revolving loan fund so that money for new projects would not become available until money for previous projects had been repaid.

Mr. Staley expressed concern that in their zeal to spur growth and create jobs, Congress and the Obama administration would not impose such limits.

“With the $800 billion stimulus program, they were literally just dumping money into the economy,” he said. “There was little legitimate cost-benefit analysis.”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Milwaukee and Mary Williams Walsh from New York.

Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs, NYT, 6.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/us/politics/07obama.html