History > 2011 > USA > Politics > President / White House (III)

Robert Ariail

Herald-Journal

Spartanburg, SC

Cagle

18 August 2011

After Struggle on Detainees,

Obama Signs Defense Bill

December 31, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

HONOLULU — President Obama, after objecting to provisions of a military spending bill that would have forced him to try terrorism suspects in military courts and impose strict sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, signed the bill on Saturday.

He said that although he did not support all of it, changes made by Congress after negotiations with the White House had satisfied most of his concerns and had given him enough latitude to manage counterterrorism and foreign policy in keeping with administration principles.

“The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,” Mr. Obama said in a statement issued in Hawaii, where he is on vacation. “I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

The bill authorizes $662 billion in military spending through 2012. It is a smaller amount than the Pentagon had asked for, but it does not impose the radical cuts that the military faces in coming years.

The White House had said that the legislation could lead to an improper military role in overseeing detention and court proceedings and could infringe on the president’s authority in dealing with terrorism suspects. But it said that Mr. Obama could interpret the statute in a way that would preserve his authority.

The president, for example, said that he would never authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens, because “doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a nation.” He also said he would reject a “rigid across-the-board requirement” that suspects be tried in military courts rather than civilian courts.

Congress dropped a provision in the House version of the bill that would have banned using civilian courts to prosecute those suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda. It also dropped a new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its allies.

Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, still oppose the law, in part because of its authorization of military detention camps overseas. But Mr. Obama’s signature is likely to settle, at least for now, the battle between the White House and Congress over executive authority in the treatment of detainees.

The White House also wrestled with Congress over requirements that the United States punish foreign financial firms that purchase Iranian oil, including through Iran’s central bank. Such a step would greatly increase the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program.

But the administration feared that if the measures were imposed too hastily, they could disrupt the oil market, driving up prices and alienating countries, including close allies, that the United States is seeking to enlist in its pressure campaign against Iran.

Under the terms of the bill, Mr. Obama can delay sanctions by six months to assess their impact on oil prices. The president can also apply to Congress for a waiver exempting a country’s financial firms from sanctions, if he determines that the country significantly reduced its purchases of Iranian oil in the preceding 180 days. Or he can apply for a waiver exempting a country on national security grounds.

Senate Republicans, who pushed for the tougher sanctions, said it would be difficult for Mr. Obama to invoke a waiver, since it could make him look weak on Iran in an election year. But the administration said it was committed to imposing the sanctions.

“We have to do it in a timely way and phased way to avoid repercussions to the oil market, and make sure the revenues to Iran are reduced,” said an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But we believe we can do that.”

    After Struggle on Detainees, Obama Signs Defense Bill, NYT, 31.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-signs-military-spending-bill.html

The Middle-Class Agenda

December 19, 2011
The New York Times

Earlier this month, President Obama delivered his first unabashed 2012 campaign speech. Unlike his opponents, Mr. Obama acknowledged the ravages of income equality, the hollowing out of the American middle class. There is no hyperbole in the urgency he conveyed about “a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”

The challenge for Mr. Obama is to translate the plight of the middle class into an agenda for broad prosperity. Congress’s inability to cleanly extend even emergency measures though 2012 — including the temporary payroll tax cut and federal unemployment benefits — underscores the difficulty. The alternative is continued decline.

Recent government data show that 100 million Americans, or about one in three, are living in poverty or very close to it. Of 13.3 million unemployed Americans now searching for work, 5.7 million have been looking for more than six months, while millions more have given up altogether. Even a job is no guarantee of middle-class security. The real median income of working-age households has declined, from $61,600 in 2000 to $55,300 in 2010 — the result of abysmally slow job growth even before the onset of the recession.

Economic growth alone, even if it accelerated, would not be enough to restore the middle class. Mr. Obama refuted the Republican notion that market forces alone can ensure broad prosperity, when the economic health of American families also depends on government action.

It was a speech that called out for a plan. Here are the elements that matter most:

 

CREATING GOOD JOBS Despite Republican obstructionism, Mr. Obama must continue to offer stimulus bills that include spending for public works, high-tech manufacturing and an infrastructure bank. He must stress that obstruction costs jobs — the bill recently filibustered by Republicans would have created an estimated 1.9 million jobs in 2012. The Republican stance also endangers future prosperity by denying needed infrastructure upgrades and making it likely that international competitors will outstrip America in jobs and technology.

In particular, Mr. Obama needs to debunk the notion that job creation is at odds with environmental protection. Republicans have portrayed opposition to the Keystone XL oil pipeline as a job killer. The truth is, oil addiction and the failure to invest in new energy sources will be far bigger job killers. What’s needed is a plan to create millions of clean energy jobs and to link those jobs to workers in fossil fuel industries who otherwise would be displaced. The climate bill that died in 2010 would have begun that transformation; the need to try again only becomes more pressing with each passing year.

At the same time, Mr. Obama cannot ignore that most of the fast-growing occupations in America are lower-paying service jobs, like home health care and food service, in which it’s all but impossible to make a living. To lift wages requires generous tax credits for low earners, a higher minimum wage, and guaranteed health care so that wages are not consumed by medical costs. Job training efforts must also focus on the service sector, helping to build so-called career ladders, say, from home health aid to licensed vocational nurse.

 

STOPPING FORECLOSURES In his Kansas speech, Mr. Obama said banks “should be working to keep responsible homeowners in their homes.” That’s too weak. The banks have never made an all-out effort to help homeowners and unless compelled to do so, they never will, because, in many cases, they can make more by foreclosing rather than by modifying troubled loans.

Federal agencies can keep working with some state attorneys general and try to settle with banks over foreclosure abuses in exchange for a commitment from them to modify some $20 billion worth of troubled loans, or they can conduct a thorough federal investigation into the banks’ conduct during the mortgage bubble, looking for a far bigger settlement. The market is beset with $700 billion of negative equity; potential bank abuses are unexplored; the public is demanding accountability. Mr. Obama should opt for a thorough federal inquiry.

In the meantime, an antiforeclosure plan that is up to the scale of the problem would include unrelenting political pressure for principal write-downs of underwater loans, expanded refinancings for borrowers in high-rate loans, and forbearance for unemployed homeowners.

 

REGULATING THE BANKS Mr. Obama said banks are fighting the Dodd-Frank reform “every inch of the way.”

The question is what he will do to fight back. A good start would be for him to tell the American public whether the law is capable of performing as intended. Is he confident that a major bank on the verge of failure could be successfully dismantled? Is he sure that risky bank trading will be sufficiently curtailed? If he is not confident that the law can work as intended, he must ensure better implementation or call for a revamp of the statute itself.

He can also personally advance specific Dodd-Frank provisions. Republicans are intent on destroying the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Mr. Obama should try to recess appoint his nominee to lead the bureau, Richard Cordray, whom Republicans recently filibustered. Mr. Obama must make clear that he supports a strong Dodd-Frank disclosure rule on the ratio of the pay of chief executives to that of rank-and-file employees. Such disclosure is crucial to changing the corporate norms that have allowed for unjustifiably vast pay discrepancies.

 

RAISING TAXES, REDUCING THE DEFICIT Tax reform is essential. But there is no way to build public consensus for broad reform without first reversing the lavish tax breaks for the rich. In addition to letting the high-end Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of 2012, Mr. Obama could call for all forms of income to be taxed at the same rates, rather than allowing lower rates for investment income, which flows mostly to wealthy Americans. Income tax rates also need to be adjusted at the top of the scale, so that the affluent, say, couples with taxable income of $400,000 a year, are not paying the same top rate as multimillionaires.

Mr. Obama should also drop his opposition to a financial transactions tax. That stance may have made sense when the banks were reeling from the financial crisis, but it is now at odds with a stated desire to rein in the financial sector and raise needed revenue.

Mr. Obama has more than established his willingness to cut the deficit, agreeing to spending cuts that, in fact, are too deep for the weak economy. Now he needs to dominate the deficit debate, not by trying to meet Republican demands for ever more spending cuts, but by explaining that more cuts would undermine the recovery. In the near term, high-end tax increases are a better way to control the deficit. They are less of a drag on economic activity than broad tax increases or federal spending cuts.

More jobs. Fewer foreclosures. Less financial risk. Progressive taxation. Those policies will give the middle class a fighting chance. But the list is not exhaustive. The pillars of a healthy middle class also include public education, Social Security, unions, child care, affirmative action and, not least, campaign finance reform, since inequality is reinforced by the political power of the wealthy.

    The Middle-Class Agenda, NYT, 19.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/opinion/the-middle-class-agenda.html

Life Goes On, and On ...

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES ATLAS

A FRIEND calls from her car: “I’m on my way to Cape Cod to scatter my mother’s ashes in the bay, her favorite place.” Another, encountered on the street, mournfully reports that he’s just “planted” his mother. A third e-mails news of her mother’s death with a haunting phrase: “the sledgehammer of fatality.” It feels strange. Why are so many of our mothers dying all at once?

As an actuarial phenomenon, the reason isn’t hard to grasp. My friends are in their 60s now, some creeping up on 70; their mothers are in their 80s or 90s. Ray Kurzweil, the author of “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” believes that we’re close to unlocking the key to immortality. Perhaps within this century, he prophesies, “software-based humans” will be able to survive indefinitely on the Web, “projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality.” Neat, huh? But for now, it’s pretty much dust to dust, the way it’s always been — mothers included. (Most of our fathers are long gone, alas. Women live longer than men.)

It’s the ones who aren’t dead who should baffle us. My own mother, for instance, still goes to the Boston Symphony and attends a weekly current events class at Brookhaven, her “lifecare living” center (can’t we find a less technocratic word?) near Boston. She writes poems in iambic pentameter for every occasion. At 94, she’s hardly anomalous: there are plenty of nonagenarians at Brookhaven. Ninety is the new old age. As Dr. Muriel Gillick, a specialist in geriatrics and palliative care at Harvard Medical School, says, “If you’ve made it to 85 then you have a reasonable chance of making it to 90.” That number has nearly tripled in the last 30 years. And if you get that far... it’s been estimated that there will be eight million centenarians by 2050.

It won’t end there. Scientists are closing in on the mechanism of what are called “senescent cells,” which cause the tissue deterioration responsible for aging. Studies of mice suggest that targeting these cells can slow down the process. “Every component of cells gets damaged with age,” Leonard Guarente, a biology professor at M.I.T., explained to me. “It’s like an old car. You have to repair it.” We’re not talking about immortality, Professor Guarente cautions. Biotechnology has its limits. “We’re just extending the trend.” Extending the trend? I can hear it now: 110 is the new 100.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? On the debit side, there’s the ... debit. The old-age safety net is already frayed. According to some estimates, Social Security benefits will run out by 2037; Medicare insurance is guaranteed only through 2024. These projected shortfalls are in part the unintended consequence of the American health fetish. The ad executives in “Mad Men” firing up Lucky Strikes and dosing themselves with Canadian Club didn’t have to worry. They’d be dead long before it was time to collect.

Then there’s the question of whether reaching 5 score and 10 is worth it — the quality-of-life question. Who wants to end up — as Jaques intones in “As You Like It” — “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”? You may live to be as old as Methuselah, who lasted 969 years, but chances are you’ll feel it.

Worse — it’s no longer a rare event — you can outlive your children. Reading the obituary of Christopher Ma, a Washington Post executive who had been a college classmate of mine, I was especially sad to see that Chris was survived by his wife, a daughter, a son, a brother, two sisters and “his mother, Margaret Ma of Menlo Park, Calif.” Can anything more tragic befall a parent than to be predeceased by a child?

These are the perils old people suffer. What about us, the boomers, now ourselves elderly children? One challenge my entitled generation faces is that many of our long-lived parents are running through their retirement money, which leaves the burden of supporting them to us. (To their credit, it’s a burden that often bothers our parents, too.) And the cost of end-stage health care is huge — a giant portion of all medical expenses in this country are incurred in the last months of life. Meanwhile, our prospects of retirement recede on the horizon.

Also, elder care is stressful and time consuming. The broken hips, the trips to the E.R., the bill paying and insurance paperwork demand patience. A paper titled “Personality Traits of Centenarians’ Offspring” suggests this cohort scores high marks “extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.” But even the well-adjusted find looking after old parents tough.

In the mid-’80s, when the idea of the “sandwich generation” was born — boomers saddled with the care of aging parents while raising their own children — it seemed like a problem we would eventually outgrow. Twenty-five years later, we’re still sandwiched, and some of those caught in the middle feel the squeeze.

So what’s the good part? Time spent with an elderly parent can offer an opportunity for the resolution of “unfinished business,” a chance to indulge in last-act candor. A college classmate writes in our 40th-reunion book of ministering to her chronically ill mother and being “moved by how the twists and turns of complicated health care have deepened our relationship.” I hear a lot about late-in-life bonding between parent and child.

My mother needs a minor operation. “I’ve outlasted my time,” she says as she’s wheeled into surgery. “Anyway, you’re too old to have a mother.” Thanks, Ma. What about Rupert Murdoch? His mother is 102. Also, if I’m too old to have a mother, why do I still feel like a child?

Two weeks later, Mom comes to Vermont to recuperate. My father, who died a decade ago at 87, is buried in the field behind our house (hope this is legal). His gravestone reads “Donald Herman Atlas 1913-2001,” and it has an epitaph from his favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, carved in italics: “I grow old ... I grow old .../ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Mom likes to visit him there. Standing over Dad’s grave, she carries on a dialogue of one. “I thought I’d have joined you by now, Donny, but I’m a tough old bird.” As she heads back up to the house, she turns and waves. “À bientôt.” See you soon.

Not so fast, Mom. I still have issues.

 

James Atlas is the author of “My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale.”

    Life Goes On, and On ..., NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/old-age-life-goes-on-and-on.html

Iraq, a War Obama Didn’t Want, Shaped His Foreign Policy

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — President Obama has made good on his campaign pledge to end the Iraq war, portraying the departure of the last troops as a chance to turn to nation-building at home.

But from Afghanistan to the Arab Spring, from China to counterterrorism, the lessons of that war still hang over the administration’s foreign policy — shaping, and sometimes limiting, how the president projects American power in the world.

The war that Mr. Obama never wanted to fight has weighed on internal debates, dictated priorities and often narrowed options for the United States, according to current and former administration officials.

Most tangibly, the swift American drawdown in Iraq will influence how the United States handles the endgame in Afghanistan, where NATO forces have agreed to hand over security and pull out by 2014. The fact that the troops are leaving Iraq without a wholesale breakdown in security, some analysts said, may embolden a war-weary administration to move up the timetable for getting out of Afghanistan.

It has also shifted the balance of power in Washington, from the military commanders, who were desperate to leave a residual force of soldiers in Iraq, toward Mr. Obama’s civilian advisers, who are busy calculating how getting them all home by Christmas might help their boss’s re-election bid.

“There used to be a hot debate over even setting a timetable,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. While he cautioned that Iraq is not a perfect precedent for Afghanistan, “there should be no doubt about our commitment to follow through on the timelines we set in Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr. Rhodes, who wrote Mr. Obama’s foreign policy speeches during his 2008 campaign, said Iraq was a “dramatically underrepresented element of the way in which people look at Obama’s foreign policy.” As a candidate whose opposition to the war helped define him, Mr. Rhodes said, “Senator Obama constructed an entire argument of foreign policy, based on Iraq.”

His argument had two central pillars: that Iraq had taken the United States’ eye off the real battle in Afghanistan, and that it had diminished the United States’ standing in the world. This led directly to two of the administration’s most significant foreign policy and national security projects: Mr. Obama’s lethal counterterrorism strategy and his recent series of diplomatic and military initiatives in Asia.

The drone strikes and commando raids that the president recently boasted had killed “22 out of 30 top Al Qaeda leaders,” including Osama bin Laden, were honed in the night raids by American troops on militants in Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s emphasis on restoring the United States’ place in Asia grew out of a post-Iraq “strategic rebalancing” pushed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon. The war, they contend, sucked American time and resources from other parts of the world, allowing China to expand its sway throughout much of the Pacific Rim.

In the early days of his presidency, as Mr. Obama weighed more troop deployments in Afghanistan, he was still heavily influenced by commanders like Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was fresh off his successful “surge” in Iraq and pressed for an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

“Here was a general who, in Petraeus’s case, had turned around a situation dramatically in Iraq, and was offering to do it again,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who ran the White House’s initial policy review on Afghanistan.

By 2011, however, Mr. Obama had developed his own views about the use of military force. His reluctant intervention in Libya — only after receiving the imprimatur of the Arab League, and then with limited military engagement — bore the hallmarks of a post-Iraq operation. In Syria, where a dictator in the Baathist tradition of Saddam Hussein has killed his own people, the United States has not considered a no-fly zone, let alone broader military intervention.

“The larger legacy of Iraq was that the U.S. military cannot shape outcomes,” said Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser in the State Department. “That led to skittishness on our part about using the military.”

Mr. Obama made much of his commitment to a multilateral foreign policy, in contrast to President George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq. That, his advisers say, grew out of a conviction the United States needed to work with others and forge consensus to restore its moral standing.

But it also reflects a sober economic reality: with more than $800 billion in costs from the Iraq war — and nearly $450 billion from Afghanistan — the United States can no longer afford another big, go-it-alone military campaign.

“The impulse toward multilateralism is more complicated,” said Dennis B. Ross, who until last month was one of Mr. Obama’s senior Middle East advisers. “There is a desire, understandably, for our actions to have greater legitimacy on the world stage. But there is also an interest in burden-sharing and sharing the cost as well.”

Some analysts argue that the administration’s multilateral approach owes less to Iraq than it does to traditional Democratic Party philosophy.

“No doubt, Iraq contributed to his view that we should wield power less, should not act without U.N. resolutions and multilateral support, and should try to ‘engage’ with hostile regimes, but I suspect the president held those views years earlier,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked in the George W. Bush and Reagan administrations.

“That’s pretty standard stuff on the left,” he added. “Iraq made them more central to his actions as president, but I doubt it taught him much.”

The Bush administration had hoped that Iraq would be a catalyst for democratic change across the Arab world. But there is little evidence that Iraq prepared the United States for the political changes that swept over the Middle East and North Africa this spring, eight years after American troops toppled Mr. Hussein.

The Obama administration’s initial response to the upheaval in Egypt and elsewhere was halting, as it balanced its support for the protesters with its fear of losing strategic allies. Mr. Rhodes said Iraq’s legacy was visible in the administration’s insistence on homegrown, rather than externally imposed, democratic change. That is likely to mean coming to terms with rulers it views as less than ideal, like the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties, which made striking gains in Egypt’s recent parliamentary elections.

“Iraq has taught us we can live with Islamists,” Mr. Nasr said. “We can live with a Maliki in Egypt,” he said, referring to Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “Iraq exorcised the way we latched on to secular dictators.”

    Iraq, a War Obama Didn’t Want, Shaped His Foreign Policy, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/us/politics/iraq-war-shaped-obamas-foreign-policy-white-house-memo.html

Obama Praises Troops as He Ends the War He Opposed

December 14, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — President Obama observed the end of the war in Iraq on Wednesday before an audience of those who fought in it, telling a crowd of returning war veterans that the nearly nine years of conflict in Iraq, a war now indelibly imprinted on the national psyche, had come to a close.

“As your commander in chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I’m proud to finally say these two words,” Mr. Obama told a crowded hangar at this famed North Carolina army base that is home to the 82nd Airborne Division: “Welcome home.”

Calling it a “historic moment,” Mr. Obama, who has over the years of his presidency had his ups and down with his own military leaders, if not the enlisted men and women, infused his remarks with far more accolades for the military than the usual few that he dispenses to local politicians at the beginning of most of his standard speeches.

This time, he thanked the “legendary” 82nd Airborne Division. He thanked senior enlisted leaders. And the Sky Dragons of the 18th Airborne Corps. And the Special Operations Forces. And military families. In fact, the president wrapped himself in all of the storied patriotism and history of the country’s armed forces, congratulating the assembled troops for the job they did in Iraq — a war which he himself never approved.

It was a tough balance to strike. Mr. Obama had to speak of legendary battles in places like Falluja without referencing the weapons of mass destruction that were never found; he noted the sectarian violence without bringing up the years of fear that gripped the United States and the rest of the world back in 2004, 2005 and 2006, when it looked as if the American invasion of Iraq would engulf an already volatile region.

“We remember the early days — the American units that streaked across the sands and skies of Iraq,” Mr. Obama said. “In battles from Nasiriya to Karbala to Baghdad, American troops broke the back of a brutal dictator in less than a month.”

And yet, Mr. Obama said, “we know too well the heavy costs” of the Iraq War: “Nearly 4,500 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice, including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg. 202.”

The speech was the latest in a series of public appearances orchestrated by the White House to signal the end of the conflict and to drive home the point that Mr. Obama fulfilled one of his 2008 presidential campaign promises. At times somber, at times ebullient — there were plenty of “Hooahs” during his speech — the president tried to project an understanding of what the people, who have seen their family members go off to fight a war that most Americans came to oppose, have been through.

“There have been missed birthday parties and graduations,” Mr. Obama said. “There are bills to pay and jobs that have to be juggled with picking up the kids. For every soldier that goes on patrol, there are the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters praying that they come back.”

Mr. Obama made the trip to Fort Bragg, his first since taking office, as both the commander in chief who has brought soldiers home and as a presidential candidate. He brought along his wife, Michelle, who has been working with veterans’ families since Mr. Obama took office. At times, the visit seemed like a campaign swing.

While he eschewed any of the usual criticism of Republicans and never even mentioned the names of either of the front-runners in the Republican primaries, Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama spent a long 20 minutes after his speech pressing the flesh. He plunged deep into the crowd of army fatigues and burgundy berets — signifying active-duty service members — seeming determined to shake hands with each and everyone there.

Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers see North Carolina, a traditionally red state that Mr. Obama unexpectedly won in 2008, as a potential key to the president’s re-election path.But Fort Bragg and neighboring Fayetteville, with its large African-American population full of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, will need to join urban areas like Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh-Durham in turning out for Mr. Obama if the president is to have a chance of repeating that unlikely victory next year.

On Tuesday, Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, presented reporters with a slide show mapping out several Obama pathways to victory next year. One crucial path, he said, included winning North Carolina and Virginia — both states that John Kerry lost in 2004, but that Mr. Obama won in 2008. Already, the Obama campaign has opened up operations in North Carolina, and it is banking on the state’s changed demographics, including an influx of young, college-educated people. The Obama campaign is also hoping for high turnout among African-Americans, who make up 22 percent of the state’s population and 41 percent of Fayetteville’s population.

Charlotte will host the Democratic National Convention next September. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has already taken out television advertisements here in North Carolina, including one that ran this week, targeting Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

Mr. Obama has been working hard to get credit for ending the Iraq war, a promise that was a centerpiece of his 2008 campaign. But it remains to be seen whether his successful completion of his promise to end the war will have much resonance next year, as the country continues to struggle through the fragile economic recovery.

Fort Bragg is home to a variety of troops, including the Army Special Operations, the 18th Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne Division. Fort Bragg soldiers have been in the thick of the fighting in the Iraqi theater from Day 1 of the American invasion in 2003.

“For all of the challenges that our nation faces, you remind us that there’s nothing that we Americans can’t do when we stick together,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s why the United States military is the most respected institution in our land. It’s why you, the 9/11 generation, have earned your place in history.”

He concluded with “I am proud of you.”

    Obama Praises Troops as He Ends the War He Opposed, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/us/at-fort-bragg-obama-showers-praise-on-troops-back-from-iraq.html

Obama in Osawatomie

December 6, 2011
The New York Times

After months of Republican candidates offering a cascade of bad ideas about the economy, President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Tuesday came as a relief. He made it clear that he was finally prepared to contest the election on the issues of income inequality and the obligation of both government and the private sector to enlarge the nation’s shrinking middle class.

The economic downturn, combined with ideological gridlock, has created a “make-or-break moment” for the middle class and for those trying to enter it, he said. Mr. Obama correctly framed the choice for voters: The country can return to policies that stacked the deck for the wealthy and left everyone else to fend for themselves, creating what he called “you’re on your own economics.” Or elected officials can step in to keep competition fair and ensure the government has enough money to protect the vulnerable and invest in education and research.

The speech felt an awfully long time in coming, but it was the most potent blow the president has struck against the economic theory at the core of every Republican presidential candidacy and dear to the party’s leaders in Congress. The notion that the market will take care of all problems if taxes are kept low and regulations are minimized may look great on a bumper sticker, but, he said: “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” Not before the Great Depression, not in the ’80s, and not in the last decade.

The president repeated his calls for the rich to pay higher taxes, for financial institutions to be more closely regulated and for education to become a national mission. What set this speech apart was the newly forceful explanation of why those policies are necessary. Incomes of the top 1 percent, he noted, have more than doubled in the last decade while the average income has fallen by 6 percent.

The chances of a poor child making it into the middle class have severely diminished since World War II, he said. That, he said, “flies in the face of everything that we stand for.”

It is rare for a president to be so explicit about a national income gap, but it is hardly “un-American” to think about it, as Newt Gingrich said recently. In fact, it is a pressing issue that goes back more than a century. Mr. Obama spoke in the same town where Theodore Roosevelt issued his call for a square deal in 1910. In demanding “a new nationalism,” Roosevelt supported strong government oversight of business, a “graduated income tax on big fortunes,” an inheritance tax and the primacy of labor over capital. For that, he was called a socialist and worse, as Mr. Obama observed, having endured the same.

Mr. Obama was late to Roosevelt’s level of passion and action on behalf of the middle class and the poor, having missed several opportunities to make the tax burden more fair and demand real action on the housing crisis from the big banks that he excoriated so effectively in his speech.

But he has fought energetically for a realistic plan to put Americans back to work and has been stymied at every step by Republicans. That seems to have burned away his old urge to conciliate and compromise, and he is now fully engaged against the philosophy of his opponents.

Tuesday’s speech, in fact, seemed expressly designed to counter Mitt Romney’s argument that business, unfettered, will easily restore American jobs and prosperity. Teddy Roosevelt knew better 101 years ago, and it was gratifying to hear his fire reflected by President Obama.

    Obama in Osawatomie, NYT, 6.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/opinion/president-obama-in-osawatomie.html

Obama Strikes Populist Chord

With Speech on G.O.P. Turf

December 6, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER

OSAWATOMIE, Kan. — Laying out a populist argument for his re-election next year, President Obama ventured into the conservative heartland on Tuesday to deliver his most pointed appeal yet for a strong governmental role through tax and regulation to level the economic playing field.

“This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share and when everyone plays by the same rules,” Mr. Obama said in an address that sought to tie his economic differences with Republicans into an overarching message.

Infusing his speech with the moralistic language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Mr. Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class and, “gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try.”

“This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class,” Mr. Obama told the crowd packed into the gym at Osawatomie High School.

“At stake,” he said, “is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”

Mr. Obama purposefully chose this hardscrabble town of 4,500 people, about 50 miles south of Kansas City, Kan., where Theodore Roosevelt once laid out the progressive platform he called “the New Nationalism” to put forth his case for a payroll tax cut and his broader arguments against the Republican economic agenda in what his aides hoped would be viewed as a defining speech.

Though it was lacking in specific new policy prescriptions, the hourlong speech, and the days of buildup that preceded it, marked the president’s starkest attack on what he described as the “breathtaking greed” that contributed to the economic turmoil still reverberating around the nation. At one point, he noted that the average income of the top 1 percent — adopting the marker that has been the focus of the Occupy movement — has gone up by more than 250 percent, to $1.2 million a year.

The new tack reflected a decision by the White House and the president’s campaign aides that — with the economic recovery still lagging and Republicans in Congress continuing to oppose the president’s jobs proposals — the best course for Mr. Obama is to try to present himself as the defender of working-class Americans and Republicans as defenders of a small elite.

Republicans, though, portrayed the visit to Osawatomie (pronounced oh-suh-WAHT-ah-mee) as an effort by the president to paper over his failed stewardship of the national economy. Though unemployment levels dropped to 8.6 percent last month, they remain higher than the level at which any president has been re-elected since the Great Depression.

Mitt Romney, one of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, dismissed the president’s address. “I thought, ‘In what way is he like Teddy Roosevelt?’ ” Mr. Romney said. “Teddy Roosevelt founded the Bull Moose Party. One of those words applies when the president talks about how he’s helped the economy.”

The trip was Mr. Obama’s third out of Washington in as many weeks to press for passage of the payroll tax break, which would reduce the how much employees pay for Social Security to 3.1 percent from the already reduced level of 4.2 percent. Under the Democratic proposal, which Republicans have blocked, the cut that would go to most working Americans would be offset in the budget by a 1. 9 percent surtax on those with modified adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million. If Congress takes no action, the tax will revert back to 6.2 percent next month.

In Washington, the two parties remained at an impasse in their efforts to write legislation to extend the tax cut, with Senate Republicans rejecting the latest Democratic proposal and House Republicans still writing their own plan.

Though the earlier speeches on the payroll tax took place in swing states, the fact that the president brought the message to one of the most reliably Republican states in the country shows that he and his party are increasingly confident that they have found a message that resonates with voters.

This speech, however, was cast in broad historical terms, with Mr. Obama declaring that that after a century of struggle to build it, the middle class has been steadily eroded, even before the current economic turmoil, by Republican policies intended to reduce the size and scope of government — ranging from tax cuts for the wealthy to deregulation of Wall Street.

“Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefited from that success,” he said. “Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before. But everyone else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t — and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt.”

Mr. Obama sought to pre-empt a Republican response that he was engaging in class warfare. “This isn’t about class warfare,” he said. “This is about the nation’s welfare.”

The visit was unusual for its setting in a state that he lost decisively despite his own family roots — his mother was born in Kansas. The vast majority of his visits as president have been to swing states like Pennsylvania that are expected to play an important role in next year’s election. But it was here, 101 years ago, that Theodore Roosevelt laid the intellectual framework for his unsuccessful bid for a third term after leaving the Republican party. That speech, which Mr. Obama referred to repeatedly, touched on many of the same themes — often in similar language — like concentration of wealth and the need for government to ensure a level playing field. Central to progress, Mr. Roosevelt said, was the conflict between “the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.”

Mr. Obama, to laughter from those familiar with attacks against him, noted: “For this, Roosevelt was called a radical, he was called a socialist, even a communist.”

After the speech, one woman in the audience, Debra Harrison said the president put voice to her concerns about this community, which has been eroded by job losses and depopulation.

“We’re doing what the middle class has always done in this country,” said Ms. Harrison, 51, who works at a nearby bank, shaking her head. “We work hard. We teach our kids to work hard. But it’s very hard for us to keep our heads above water these days. And it’s even harder for our kids.”

 

Helene Cooper and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

    Obama Strikes Populist Chord With Speech on G.O.P. Turf, NYT, 6.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/us/politics/
    obama-strikes-populist-chord-with-speech-in-heartland.html

Text: Obama’s Speech in Kansas

December 6, 2011
The New York Times


Following is a text of President Obama’s prepared remarks in Osawatomie, Kan.,
as released by the White House on Tuesday:

Good afternoon. I want to start by thanking a few of the folks who’ve joined us today. We’ve got the mayor of Osawatomie, Phil Dudley; your superintendent, Gary French; the principal of Osawatomie High, Doug Chisam. And I’ve brought your former governor, who’s now doing an outstanding job as our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.

It is great to be back in the state of Kansas. As many of you know, I’ve got roots here. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Obamas of Osawatomie. Actually, I like to say that I got my name from my father, but I got my accent – and my values – from my mother. She was born in Wichita. Her mother grew up in Augusta. And her father was from El Dorado. So my Kansas roots run deep.

My grandparents served during World War II — he as a soldier in Patton’s Army, she as a worker on a bomber assembly line. Together, they shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over a Depression and fascism. They believed in an America where hard work paid off, responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, where you came from, or how you started out.

These values gave rise to the largest middle class and the strongest economy the world has ever known. It was here, in America, that the most productive workers and innovative companies turned out the best products on Earth, and every American shared in that pride and success — from those in executive suites to middle management to those on the factory floor. If you gave it your all, you’d take enough home to raise your family, send your kids to school, have your health care covered, and put a little away for retirement.

Today, we are still home to the world’s most productive workers and innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people. Fewer and fewer of the folks who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefitted from that success. Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments than ever before. But everyone else struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t – and too many families found themselves racking up more and more debt just to keep up.

For many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over the harsh realities of this new economy. But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now: Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or sometimes even understand them. Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risk and selling it off. Huge bets – and huge bonuses – made with other people’s money on the line. Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this, but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all.

It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility across the system. And it plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover. It claimed the jobs, homes, and the basic security of millions – innocent, hard-working Americans who had met their responsibilities, but were still left holding the bag.

Ever since, there has been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity; balance and fairness. Throughout the country, it has sparked protests and political movements – from the Tea Party to the people who have been occupying the streets of New York and other cities. It’s left Washington in a near-constant state of gridlock. And it’s been the topic of heated and sometimes colorful discussion among the men and women who are running for president.

But this isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.

Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

Well, I’m here to say they are wrong. I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.

You see, this isn’t the first time America has faced this choice. At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress.

Theodore Roosevelt disagreed. He was the Republican son of a wealthy family. He praised what the titans of industry had done to create jobs and grow the economy. He believed then what we know is true today: that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It’s led to a prosperity and standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world.

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can. It only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open, and honest. And so he busted up monopolies, forcing those companies to compete for customers with better services and better prices. And today, they still must. He fought to make sure businesses couldn’t profit by exploiting children, or selling food or medicine that wasn’t safe. And today, they still can’t.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt came here, to Osawatomie, and laid out his vision for what he called a New Nationalism. “Our country,” he said, “…means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy…of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

For this, Roosevelt was called a radical, a socialist, even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight hour work day and a minimum wage for women; insurance for the unemployed, the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.

Today, over one hundred years later, our economy has gone through another transformation. Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world. And many of you know firsthand the painful disruptions this has caused for a lot of Americans.

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where the workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. These changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the internet. Today, even higher-skilled jobs like accountants and middle management can be outsourced to countries like China and India. And if you’re someone whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don’t have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages and benefits – especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, they argue, that’s the price of liberty.

It’s a simple theory – one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.

Remember that in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history, and what did they get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class – things like education and infrastructure; science and technology; Medicare and Social Security.

Remember that in those years, thanks to some of the same folks who are running Congress now, we had weak regulation and little oversight, and what did that get us? Insurance companies that jacked up people’s premiums with impunity, and denied care to the patients who were sick. Mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes they couldn’t afford. A financial sector where irresponsibility and lack of basic oversight nearly destroyed our entire economy.

We simply cannot return to this brand of your-on-your-own economics if we’re serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country. We know that it doesn’t result in a strong economy. It results in an economy that invests too little in its people and its future. It doesn’t result in a prosperity that trickles down. It results in a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.

Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top one percent has gone up by more than 250%, to $1.2 million per year. For the top one hundredth of one percent, the average income is now $27 million per year. The typical CEO who used to earn about 30 times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more. And yet, over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about six percent.

This kind of inequality – a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression – hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom. America was built on the idea of broad-based prosperity – that’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they made. It’s also why a recent study showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

Inequality also distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them – that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.

More fundamentally, this kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise at the very heart of America: that this is the place where you can make it if you try. We tell people that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, hard work can get you into the middle class; and that your children will have the chance to do even better than you. That’s why immigrants from around the world flocked to our shores.

And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk. A few years after World War II, a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50-50 chance of becoming middle class as an adult. By 1980, that chance fell to around 40%. And if the trend of rising inequality over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a 1 in 3 chance of making it to the middle class.

It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.

Fortunately, that’s not a future we have to accept. Because there’s another view about how we build a strong middle class in this country – a view that’s truer to our history; a vision that’s been embraced by people of both parties for more than two hundred years.

It’s not a view that we should somehow turn back technology or put up walls around America. It’s not a view that says we should punish profit or success or pretend that government knows how to fix all society’s problems. It’s a view that says in America, we are greater together – when everyone engages in fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.

So what does that mean for restoring middle-class security in today’s economy?

It starts by making sure that everyone in America gets a fair shot at success. The truth is, we’ll never be able to compete with other countries when it comes to who’s best at letting their businesses pay the lowest wages or pollute as much as they want. That’s a race to the bottom that we can’t win – and shouldn’t want to win. Those countries don’t have a strong middle-class. They don’t have our standard of living.

The race we want to win – the race we can win – is a race to the top; the race for good jobs that pay well and offer middle-class security. Businesses will create those jobs in countries with the highest-skilled, highest-educated workers; the most advanced transportation and communication; the strongest commitment to research and technology.

The world is shifting to an innovation economy. And no one does innovation better than America. No one has better colleges and universities. No one has a greater diversity of talent and ingenuity. No one’s workers or entrepreneurs are more driven or daring. The things that have always been our strengths match up perfectly with the demands of this moment.

But we need to meet the moment. We need to up our game. And we need to remember that we can only do that together.

It starts by making education a national mission – government and businesses; parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. Their income is twice as high as those who don’t have a high school diploma. We shouldn’t be laying off good teachers right now – we should be hiring them. We shouldn’t be expecting less of our schools – we should be demanding more. We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college – we should be a country where everyone has the chance to go.

In today’s innovation economy, we also need a world-class commitment to science, research, and the next generation of high-tech manufacturing. Our factories and their workers shouldn’t be idle. We should be giving people the chance to get new skills and training at community colleges, so they can learn to make wind turbines and semiconductors and high-powered batteries. And by the way – if we don’t have an economy built on bubbles and financial speculation, our best and brightest won’t all gravitate towards careers in banking and finance. Because if we want an economy that’s built to last, we need more of those young people in science and engineering. This country shouldn’t be known for bad debt and phony profits. We should be known for creating and selling products all over the world that are stamped with three proud words: Made in America.

Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world. That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do. They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools – all the things other countries are already doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.

Yes, businesses, not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we have always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed. Historically, that hasn’t been a partisan idea. Franklin Roosevelt worked with Democrats and Republicans to give veterans of World War II, including my grandfather, the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, a proud son of Kansas, who started the interstate highway system and doubled-down on science and research to stay ahead of the Soviets.

Of course, those productive investments cost money. And so we’ve also paid for these investments by asking everyone to do their fair share. If we had unlimited resources, no one would ever have to pay any taxes and we’d never have to cut any spending. But we don’t have unlimited resources. And so we have to set priorities. If we want a strong middle class, then our tax code must reflect our values. We have to make choices.

Today that choice is very clear. To reduce our deficit, I’ve already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law, and proposed trillions more – including reforms that would lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

But in order to actually close the deficit and get our fiscal house in order, we have to decide what our priorities are. Most immediately, we need to extend a payroll tax cut that’s set to expire at the end of this month. If we don’t do that, 160 million Americans will see their taxes go up by an average of $1,000, and it would badly weaken our recovery.

But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math.

So far, most of the Republicans in Washington have refused, under any circumstances, to ask the wealthiest Americans to go the same tax rates they were paying when Bill Clinton was president.

Now, keep in mind, when President Clinton first proposed these tax increases, folks in Congress predicted they would kill jobs and lead to another recession. Instead, our economy created nearly 23 million jobs and we eliminated the deficit. Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century. This isn’t like in the early 50s, when the top tax rate was over 90%, or even the early 80s, when it was about 70%. Under President Clinton, the top rate was only about 39%. Today, thanks to loopholes and shelters, a quarter of all millionaires now pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1%. One percent.

This is the height of unfairness. It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay a higher tax rate than somebody pulling in $50 million. It is wrong for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. And he agrees with me. So do most Americans – Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. And I know that many of our wealthiest citizens would agree to contribute a little more if it meant reducing the deficit and strengthening the economy that made their success possible.

This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare. It’s about making choices that benefit not just the people who’ve done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get to the middle class, and the economy as a whole.

Finally, a strong middle class can only exist in an economy where everyone plays by the same rules, from Wall Street to Main Street. As infuriating as it was for all of us, we rescued our major banks from collapse, not only because a full blown financial meltdown would have sent us into a second Depression, but because we need a strong, healthy financial sector in this country.

But part of the deal was that we would not go back to business as usual. That’s why last year we put in place new rules of the road that refocus the financial sector on this core purpose: getting capital to the entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and financing to millions of families who want to buy a home or send their kids to college. We’re not all the way there yet, and the banks are fighting us every inch of the way. But already, some of these reforms are being implemented. If you’re a big bank or risky financial institution, you’ll have to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail, so that taxpayers are never again on the hook for Wall Street’s mistakes. There are also limits on the size of banks and new abilities for regulators to dismantle a firm that goes under. The new law bans banks from making risky bets with their customers’ deposits, and takes away big bonuses and paydays from failed CEOs, while giving shareholders a say on executive salaries.

All that is being put in place as we speak. Now, unless you’re a financial institution whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers, or making risky bets that could damage the entire economy, you have nothing to fear from these new rules. My grandmother worked as a banker for most of her life, and I know that the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals want to do right by their customers. They want to have rules in place that don’t put them at a disadvantage for doing the right thing. And yet, Republicans in Congress are already fighting as hard as they can to make sure these rules aren’t enforced.

I’ll give you one example. For the first time in history, the reform we passed puts in place a consumer watchdog who is charged with protecting everyday Americans from being taken advantage of by mortgage lenders, payday lenders or debt collectors. The man we nominated for the post, Richard Cordray, is a former Attorney General of Ohio who has the support of most Attorneys General, both Democrat and Republican, throughout the country.

But the Republicans in the Senate refuse to let him do his job. Why? Does anyone here think the problem that led to our financial crisis was too much oversight of mortgage lenders or debt collectors? Of course not. Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student, or a senior citizen, or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can’t afford – something that happens all the time. Financial institutions have plenty of lobbyists looking out for their interests. Consumers deserve to have someone whose job it is to look out for them. I intend to make sure they do, and I will veto any effort to delay, defund, or dismantle the new rules we put in place.

We shouldn’t be weakening oversight and accountability. We should be strengthening them. Here’s another example. Too often, we’ve seen Wall Street firms violating major anti-fraud laws because the penalties are too weak and there’s no price for being a repeat offender. No more. I’ll be calling for legislation that makes these penalties count – so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business.

The fact is, this crisis has left a deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. And major banks that were rescued by the taxpayers have an obligation to go the extra mile in helping to close that deficit. At minimum, they should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home. We’re going to keep pushing them to provide more time for unemployed homeowners to look for work without having to worry about immediately losing their house. The big banks should increase access to refinancing opportunities to borrowers who have yet to benefit from historically low interest rates. And they should recognize that precisely because these steps are in the interest of middle-class families and the broader economy, they will also be in the banks’ own long-term financial interest.

Investing in things like education that give everybody a chance to succeed. A tax code that makes sure everybody pays their fair share. And laws that make sure everybody follows the rules. That’s what will transform our economy. That’s what will grow our middle class again. In the end, rebuilding this economy based on fair play, a fair shot, and a fair share will require all of us to see the stake we have in each other’s success. And it will require all of us to take some responsibility to that success.

It will require parents to get more involved in their children’s education, students to study harder, and some workers to start studying all over again. It will require greater responsibility from homeowners to not take out mortgages they can’t afford, and remember that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

It will require those of us in public service to make government more efficient, effective, and responsive to people’s needs. That’s why we’re cutting programs we don’t need, to pay for those we do. That’s why we’ve made hundreds of regulatory reforms that will save businesses billions of dollars. That’s why we’re not just throwing money at education, but challenging schools to come up with the most innovative reforms and the best results.

And it will require American business leaders to understand that their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel put it best: “There’s another obligation I feel personally,” he said, “given that everything I’ve achieved in my career and a lot of what Intel has achieved…were made possible by a climate of democracy, an economic climate and investment climate provided by…the United States.”

This broader obligation can take different forms. At a time when the cost of hiring workers in China is rising rapidly, it should mean more CEOs deciding that it’s time to bring jobs back to the United States – not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s good for the country that made their business and their personal success possible.

I think about the Big Three Auto companies who, during recent negotiations, agreed to create more jobs and cars in America; who decided to give bonuses, not just to their executives, but to all their employees – so that everyone was invested in the company’s success.

I think about a company based in Warroad, Minnesota called Marvin Windows and Doors. During the recession, Marvin’s competitors closed dozens of plants and let go hundreds of workers. But Marvin didn’t lay off a single one of their four thousand or so employees. In fact, they’ve only laid off workers once in over a hundred years. Mr. Marvin’s grandfather even kept his eight employees during the Depression.

When times get tough, the workers agree to give up some perks and pay, and so do the owners. As one owner said, “You can’t grow if you’re cutting your lifeblood – and that’s the skills and experience your workforce delivers.” For the CEO, it’s about the community: “These are people we went to school with,” he said. “We go to church with them. We see them in the same restaurant. Indeed, a lot of us have married local girls and boys. We could be anywhere. But we are in Warroad.”

That’s how America was built. That’s why we’re the greatest nation on Earth. That’s what our greatest companies understand. Our success has never just been about survival of the fittest. It’s been about building a nation where we’re all better off. We pull together, we pitch in, and we do our part, believing that hard work will pay off; that responsibility will be rewarded; and that our children will inherit a nation where those values live on.

And it is that belief that rallied thousands of Americans to Osawatomie – maybe even some of your ancestors – on a rain-soaked day more than a century ago. By train, by wagon, on buggy, bicycle, and foot, they came to hear the vision of a man who loved this country, and was determined to perfect it.

“We are all Americans,” Teddy Roosevelt told them that day. “Our common interests are as broad as the continent.” In the final years of his life, Roosevelt took that same message all across this country, from tiny Osawatomie to the heart of New York City, believing that no matter where he went, or who he was talking to, all would benefit from a country in which everyone gets a fair chance.

Well into our third century as a nation, we have grown and changed in many ways since Roosevelt’s time. The world is faster. The playing field is larger. The challenges are more complex.

But what hasn’t changed – what can never change – are the values that got us this far. We still have a stake in each other’s success. We still believe that this should be a place where you can make it if you try. And we still believe, in the words of the man who called for a New Nationalism all those years ago, “The fundamental rule in our national life – the rule which underlies all others – is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”

I believe America is on its way up. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

    Text: Obama’s Speech in Kansas, NYT, 6.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/us/politics/text-obamas-speech-in-kansas.html

The Wonky Liberal

December 5, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

Republicans have many strong arguments to make against the Obama administration, but one major criticism doesn’t square with the evidence. This is the charge that President Obama is running a virulently antibusiness administration that spews out a steady flow of job- and economy-crushing regulations.

In the first place, President Obama has certainly not shut corporate-types out of the regulatory process. According to data collected by the Center for Progressive Reforms, 62 percent of the people who met with the White House office in charge of reviewing regulations were representatives of industry, while only 16 percent represented activist groups. At these meetings, business representatives outnumbered activists by more than 4 to 1.

Nor is it true that the administration is blindly doing the bidding of the liberal activist groups. On the contrary, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and its administrator, Cass Sunstein, have been the subject of withering attacks from the left. The organization Think Progress says the office is “appalling.” Mother Jones magazine is on the warpath. The Huffington Post published a long article studded with negative comments from unions and environmental activists.

If you step back and try to get some nonhysterical perspective, you come to the following conclusion: This is a Democratic administration. Many of the major agency jobs are held by people who come out of the activist community who are not sensitive to the costs they are imposing on the economy. President Obama has a political and philosophical incentive to restrain their enthusiasm. He has, therefore, supported a strong review agency in the White House that does rigorous cost-benefit analyses to review proposed regulations and minimize their economic harm.

This office, under Sunstein, is incredibly wonky. It is composed of career number-crunchers of no known ideological bent who try to measure the trade-offs inherent in regulatory action. Deciding among these trade-offs involves relying on both values and data. This office has tried to elevate the role of data so that every close call is not just a matter of pleasing the right ideological army.

Over all, the Obama administration has significantly increased the regulatory costs imposed on the economy. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind.

During the final year of their administrations, presidents generally issue tons of new rules. Nineteen-eighty-eight, under Ronald Reagan, 1992, under George H.W. Bush and 2008, under George W. Bush, were monster years for new regulations. In his first years, Obama has not increased regulatory costs more than Reagan and the Bushes did in their final years.

Data collected by Bloomberg News suggest that the Obama White House has actually reviewed 5 percent fewer rules than George W. Bush’s did at a similar point in his presidency. What has increased is the cost of those rules.

George W. Bush issued regulations over eight years that cost about $60 billion. During its first two years, the Obama regulations cost between $8 billion and $16.5 billion, according to estimates by the administration itself, and $40 billion, according to data collected, more broadly, by the Heritage Foundation.

That’s a significant step up, as you’d expect when comparing Republican to Democratic administrations, but it is not a socialist onslaught.

Nor is it clear that these additional regulations have had a huge effect on the economy. Over the past 40 years, small business leaders have eloquently complained about the regulatory burden. And they are right to. But it’s not clear that regulations are a major contributor to the current period of slow growth.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics asks companies why they have laid off workers. Only 13 percent said regulations were a major factor. That number has not increased in the past few years. According to the bureau, roughly 0.18 percent of the mass layoffs in the first half of 2011 were attributable to regulations.

Some of the industries that are the subject of the new rules, like energy and health care, have actually been doing the most hiring. If new regulations were eating into business, we’d see a slip in corporate profits. We are not.

There are two large lessons here. First, Republican candidates can say they will deregulate and, in some areas, that would be a good thing. But it will not produce a short-term economic rebound because regulations are not a big factor in our short-term problems.

Second, it is easy to be cynical about politics and to say that Washington is a polarized cesspool. And it’s true that the interest groups and the fund-raisers make every disagreement seem like a life-or-death struggle. But, in reality, most people in government are trying to find a balance between difficult trade-offs. Whether it’s antiterrorism policy or regulatory policy, most substantive disagreements are within the 40 yard lines.

Obama’s regulations may be more intrusive than some of us would like. They are not tanking the economy.

    The Wonky Liberal, NYT, 5.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/opinion/brooks-the-wonky-liberal.html

White House Shooting Suspect’s Path to Extremism

November 20, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

IDAHO FALLS — A referee lifted Oscar Ortega’s hand high into the clear Rocky Mountain night last summer. Mr. Ortega had not yet been accused of trying to kill the president. He had not yet told the world he was Jesus Christ. Not until the next morning would all the blows to his body make him urinate blood.

That July night at the rodeo grounds in Pocatello, with 2,000 people watching beneath the dry Western sky, the lazy kid who used to smoke too much dope was lucid and devastating in his debut as a mixed martial arts fighter. For the first time anyone could remember, he was an undisputed winner.

It was his first bout, and it would be his last.

“When his hand was raised in that ring,” said Eric King, who helped train Mr. Ortega at the Y.M.C.A. here, “I think that was one of the brightest moments of his life.”

The fight ended in the second round, with Mr. Ortega astride his prone opponent in what is called a full mount, pummeling him in the face. Technical knockout, the referee ruled. Mr. Ortega carried his infant son, Israel, in triumph.

Now he may spend the rest of his life in prison. The government says that on Nov. 11, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, 21, rode past the Ellipse in Washington in a black Honda Accord he bought with money he earned waiting tables at his family’s small chain of Mexican restaurants here. Investigators say he slowed down as he passed the White House and fired a semiautomatic rifle from the passenger window. Bullets struck the White House near the residential quarters. The president and Michelle Obama were out of town.

The federal charges accuse Mr. Ortega of attempting to assassinate President Obama. They say acquaintances claim that Mr. Ortega was trying to kill Mr. Obama because he considered him “the Antichrist.”

That a religious extremist from a small town in Idaho would try to kill a black Democratic president might seem like cinematic stock. The state has long been stereotyped as violently antigovernment and racist. Remember the white supremacists of Hayden Lake? Remember Ruby Ridge? But many people here in Idaho Falls say the cliché is empty this time.

Mr. Ortega is a Mexican-American whose family knows the sound of ethnic slurs and worries mostly about its restaurant business, not politics. People here say that the only thing that could have motivated Mr. Ortega was mental illness — but that they did not realize the severity of it until it was too late.

“I kind of thought we should sit down and talk with him,” said Mr. Ortega’s sister, Yesenia Hernandez, “but then he was already gone.”

The family reported Mr. Ortega missing on Oct. 31, eight days after he left on what he said was a vacation to Utah; instead, it was a trip to the East Coast. His family never heard from him, and still has not.

Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.

They said that he could not have truly wanted to kill the president, but that he may have wanted a larger audience. He read his speech to anyone who would listen. In September, Mr. Ortega made a video in which he asked Oprah Winfrey to let him appear on television with her.

“You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he says. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.”

Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.

Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.

“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Mr. Ortega, he acknowledged, is accused of going much further than pestering a guard or climbing a wall.

“I can guarantee you that in his mind, it all makes perfect sense,” Dr. Torrey said. “If he’s Christ, Obama’s the Antichrist.”

Mr. Ortega had a lengthy arrest record in and near Idaho Falls, but the charges were mostly misdemeanors, like under-age drinking, and rarely involved violence.

“He really did fly under the radar,” said Joelyn Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Falls Police Department.

Now the entire town knows who he is.

“He seemed like a nice guy, but when he started talking, it was like, wow,” said Ramon Bailey, a student at Idaho State University who made the video of Mr. Ortega in September, after they met at the gym. Mr. Bailey was among several people traveling to Washington this week to testify before a grand jury.

Jake Chapman is also scheduled to make the trip to Washington. The AK-47 that Mr. Ortega is accused of using to fire on the White House was registered to Mr. Chapman, who said in an interview that he is known to friends as “the gun guy.” He said that he sold the gun to Mr. Ortega in March for $550 and that he believed it was the first gun Mr. Ortega owned.

Mr. Chapman, 21, said he had not heard Mr. Ortega talk of taking violent action. But more than a year ago, he recalled, Mr. Ortega and others watched an antigovernment film on the Internet called “The Obama Deception,” which was written, directed and produced by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conservative talk show host who has espoused a number of conspiracy theories involving the federal government.

Ms. Hernandez, who is two years older than her brother, said their family’s house was popular when they were children because they had a trampoline and lots of video games. She described her brother as friendly but said he began getting into trouble in his teens and dropped out of high school in 10th grade.

After several of what she and their mother, Maria Hernandez, said were aimless years, Mr. Ortega seemed to be maturing last year. He returned from a long visit with relatives in Mexico shortly before the birth of his son last year. He and his girlfriend, the boy’s mother, separated several months ago. In a brief interview, the girlfriend requested anonymity, saying only, “I love him, and I know who he truly is.”

In addition to his son, whom friends and family say he doted on, Mr. Ortega was devoted to mixed martial arts. He started training about a year ago and learned quickly, developing strong stand-up fighting skills and often volunteering to help others.

After years of eating junk food and caring little about his health, he started paying close attention to his diet, drinking protein shakes and eating more fruit and meat. Like other mixed martial arts fighters, when it came time to fight, he quickly dropped weight, getting to 154 from about 165 in a few days, in order to qualify for a lighter division, his trainers said.

He had let his hair and beard grow long in the last year. He told some people that it was part of his fighting identity, meant to intimidate. More recently, he said it was because he was Jesus.

“You ever heard of Andrei Arlovski, the fighter?” asked Mr. King, the trainer. “Oscar looked like him. But he also looked like Jesus.”

    White House Shooting Suspect’s Path to Extremism, NYT, 20.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/us/oscar-ortega-white-house-shooting-suspect-struggled-with-mental-illness.html

In Gunshots, a Trail of Threats Is Reported

November 17, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday charged a 21-year-old Idaho man with attempting to assassinate President Obama — saying he had told one friend that the president was “the Antichrist” and that he “needed to kill him,” according to a complaint filed in federal court.

The man, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, who is accused of spraying bullets from an assault rifle at the residential floors of the White House last week, was also “convinced the federal government is conspiring against him” and had become “increasingly more agitated” before he disappeared from Idaho last month, the complaint said.

The complaint was filed in conjunction with a brief appearance by Mr. Ortega-Hernandez in a federal courthouse in Pittsburgh on Thursday afternoon. He had been arrested on Wednesday at a hotel near the town of Indiana, Pa., and officials intend to bring him back to the District of Columbia to face the assassination charge, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez was shackled and dressed in a white prison-issue jumpsuit. He spoke only briefly during the hearing, muttering “yes ma’am” when asked by a magistrate judge if he understood his legal rights.

Law enforcement officials had been hunting for Mr. Ortega-Hernandez since Friday night, after discovering evidence linked to his identity in a black Honda Accord with an Idaho license plate. The car was found abandoned on the lawn of the United States Institute of Peace, about seven blocks west of the White House and near a bridge over the Potomac River.

Minutes earlier, at least two witnesses had seen the car pause on Constitution Avenue in front of the Ellipse — a grassy field between the White House and the Washington Monument — as gunshots were fired out of its passenger window, after which the vehicle sped away, according to the complaint.

A search of the car found a Romanian-made semiautomatic rifle with a “large scope” mounted on its top, nine spent cartridges, and large amounts of ammunition of the same size as a bullet later found at the White House. Two of Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s acquaintances in Idaho said he owned such a weapon, the complaint said.

On Wednesday, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the area around the White House and located “several confirmed bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second story,” where the first family’s residential quarters are located.

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, were out of town at the time of the shooting, just after 9 p.m.; it is not clear if the authorities have evidence showing whether Mr. Ortega-Hernandez believed that the president was at home. The Secret Service has declined to say whether the Obamas’ daughters, Sasha and Malia, were in the residence.

The president, who is in Bali, Indonesia, declined to answer a reporter’s shouted question about the shooting during an appearance on Friday morning. He walked out of a room without responding. Aides traveling with the president have referred all questions to the Secret Service.

It was not clear why it took so long to discover the bullets. But Daniel Bongino, a former Secret Service agent with the presidential protection division, said in an interview that the search for bullet damage on the building and grounds would have been like looking for “a needle in a haystack” and was most likely conducted slowly and methodically to avoid missing or damaging any evidence.

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s family had reported him missing in Idaho Falls last month, after he drove away in the Honda Accord, the complaint said. The Secret Service has said it did not have Mr. Ortega-Hernandez on record as having made any threats against the president. But after the shooting, several acquaintances said he had been fixated on Mr. Obama.

Besides the one friend who told investigators that Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had said he believed the president was the “Antichrist” and that he needed to kill him, another friend said he stated “President Obama was the problem with the government,” was “the devil,” and that he “needed to be taken care of.” The second friend also said he appeared to be “preparing for something.”

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez has had legal problems in Idaho, Texas, and Utah, including charges related to drug offenses, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, officials have said. He is said to be heavily tattooed, with the word “Israel” on his neck and pictures of rosary beads and hands clasped in prayer on his chest.

Investigators searching the car found, in addition to the rifle and ammunition, brass knuckles, a baseball bat, a sales receipt from a purchase at a Wal-Mart in northern Virginia about four hours before the shooting, and a black hooded jacket with “LA” written in the style of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ team logo.

The complaint said Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had been photographed at least twice earlier that day wearing the jacket — on a surveillance tape at the Wal-Mart, and when the police in nearby Arlington County, Va., had stopped him a few hours earlier because someone reported that he was acting suspiciously. He was on foot and unarmed, and the police let him go.

Mr. Bongino, who left the Secret Service in May and is now running for a United States Senate seat in Maryland, said the agency was very likely now conducting an “exhaustive review” of its security procedures on the outer edge of the White House complex.

He predicted that the review would focus more on the agency’s response — how it was that the gunman had been able to get away rather than being apprehended quickly — than on how someone had managed to shoot at the White House in the first place.

“The Secret Service’s job is not to prevent every bad thing from happening,” he said. “You can’t prevent bad people from doing bad things. What you can do is stop bad outcomes. And that’s what they did — the structure did what it was supposed to do, and stopped that round.”

Officials have said that reinforcements on the building and its windows stopped the bullets from penetrating the interior. Still, one of the bullets apparently struck a window overlooking the Truman balcony, where the Obamas sometimes go outside to relax.

Mr. Bongino noted, however, that Mr. Obama was not home and no one was on the balcony, so there would have been a lower level of security.

 

Leah Welch contributed reporting from Pittsburgh,

and Jackie Calmes from Bali, Indonesia.

    In Gunshots, a Trail of Threats Is Reported, NT, 17.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/us/attempted-assassination-charge-in-shooting-at-white-house.html

President to Ease Student Loan Burden

for Low-Income Graduates

October 25, 2011
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

President Obama will announce new programs Wednesday to lower monthly loan payments for some students graduating next year and thereafter and to let borrowers who have a mix of direct federal loans and loans under the old Federal Family Education Loan Program consolidate them at a slightly lower interest rate.

At a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said the president would use his executive authority to expand the existing income-based repayment program with a “Pay as You Earn” option that would allow graduates to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 20 years and have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven. That plan would start next year.

Most of the 450,000 low-income student-loan borrowers currently enrolled in income-based payment must pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for 25 years before having their debt forgiven, although terms are easier for those in public service.

The lower caps of the new program were scheduled to go into effect for new borrowers in 2014, but, Ms. Barnes said, “because we know the frustration of crushing loan burdens, we have to act now.”

Ms. Barnes noted that over the last month, more than 30,000 people had signed a petition on the We the People platform at whitehouse.gov, asking for relief on student debt.

“It’s a message heard loud and clear,” she said.

The high cost of college and the growing debt burden of student loans have become increasingly potent political issues in recent years, high on the agenda of Occupy Wall Street and related protests across the country.

And the annual College Board reports on college prices and student aid, to be released Wednesday, make it clear that with the weak economy, the college affordability problem is getting worse.

At public universities and community colleges, costs for the current academic year increased more than 8 percent, lifted in part by steep tuition increases in California, according to the “Trends in College Pricing 2011” report.

While California’s whopping increases — 21 percent at the four-year universities and 37 percent at the community colleges — were extreme, declining state support for higher education has brought hefty tuition increases at many public universities nationwide. Arizona and Washington, for example, increased their in-state tuition and fees by 17 percent and 16 percent.

This is the fifth consecutive year in which the public universities that serve most students raised their tuition at a faster rate than the far more expensive private universities. And over the last three decades, the report found, the average tuition at four-year state universities almost quadrupled.

“It is not surprising, but we do have issues we have to face,” said Sandy Baum, the economist who is co-author of the report. “Families are struggling because their incomes are not increasing, but states are struggling too.”

Adjusted for inflation, state appropriations per full-time student are about 23 percent lower than they were a decade ago.

“Families and students are paying more but they’re getting less,” said Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Cost Project, “because what we’re willing to invest in this generation is less than what we were willing to invest in my generation.”

At Tuesday’s press briefing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan estimated that the debt-consolidation program could help 6 million borrowers who carry both direct federal loans and loans made under the Federal Family Education Loan program, which ended last year. Under that program, private lenders received federal subsidies to make federally guaranteed loans to students; despite lobbying by the banking industry, the Obama Administration killed the program, redirecting billions of dollars of subsidies into expanded Pell grants for low-income students.

Between January and June, Mr. Duncan said, borrowers making payments on both kinds of loans can consolidate them and get a half-percent interest-rate cut. The savings to pay for the lower loan rate, he said, would come from the lower cost of administering the combined loan.

Further information on the new programs will be available at 1-800-4fedaid (1-800-433-3243) or studentaid.ed.gov.

The Obama administration has taken other steps toward college affordability. The American Opportunity Tax Credit, introduced in 2009, expanded the tax benefits for college costs. According to the College Board’s new “Trends in Student Aid 2011,” report, higher education tax credits and deductions grew to $14.7 billion in 2009, from $6.6 billion in 2008. People with adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 to $180,000 got 26 percent of those tax savings, compared with 18 percent a year earlier. At the other end of the spectrum, the credits are available even to those who owe no taxes.

According to the College Board, average in-state tuition at public universities this year is $8,244, up from $7,613 last year; with room and board, the average total charge is $17,131, up from $16,162 last year. But the averages mask enormous variation from state to state: the University of New Hampshire’s tuition is more than $13,500, compared with $2,600 in Puerto Rico and $4,100 in Wyoming.

At private nonprofit four-year colleges, the average tuition is $28,500 this year, a 4.5 percent increase on last year’s $27,265. With room and board, the average total charges are $38,589, up from $36,971 last year. And at community colleges, the average tuition and fees are $2,963, up 8.7 percent from last year’s $2,727.

Only about a third of full-time students pay for college without some grant aid, whether in the form of a federal Pell grant, a state scholarship or aid from the college itself.

Net tuition —the amount a student actually pays, after grants and tax savings— is often sharply lower than the published price. In fact, the College Board report said, net tuition at community colleges was low enough that, when grants and tax savings are taken into account, the average student can pay nothing out of pocket and have $810 left over for books and living expenses.

This year, the report said, full-time students at state universities receive an average of about $5,750 in grants and tax benefits, while students at private nonprofit colleges get about $15,530 and those at community colleges about $3,770.

    President to Ease Student Loan Burden for Low-Income Graduates, NYT, 25.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/education/26debt.html

Obama Says Facts Support Accusation of Iranian Plot

October 13, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama vowed on Thursday to push for what he called the “toughest sanctions” against Iran, saying that the United States had strong evidence that Iranian officials were complicit in an alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

In his first public remarks on the assassination scheme, Mr. Obama sought to counter skepticism about whether Iran’s Islamic government directed an Iranian-American car salesman to engage with a Mexican drug cartel to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States and carry out other attacks. Mr. Obama insisted that American officials “know that he had direct links, was paid by, and directed by individuals in the Iranian government.”

“Now those facts are there for all to see,” Mr. Obama said. “We would not be bringing forward a case unless we knew exactly how to support all the allegations that are contained in the indictment.”

The president did not lay out any specific new sanctions against Iran; his administration is considering a number of measures, but has limited leverage and would have to muster international support to impose anything with real teeth.

While Mr. Obama made his remarks during a news conference in the White House East Room with the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, the State Department said that United States officials had been in direct contact with the government of Iran over the accusations.

The State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, would provide no details. But Thursday night a White House official said the contact had been made by the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, who gave a letter to her Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Khazaee.

In her remarks about the alleged plot, Ms. Nuland said: “When you look at these details, it seems like something out of a movie. But as you begin to give more detail on what we knew and when we knew it and how we knew it, it has credibility.”

Mr. Obama said that the administration had reached out to allies and the international community to build support. “We’ve laid the facts before them,” he said. “And we believe that after people have analyzed them, there will not be a dispute that this is in fact what happened.”

The president got some support from some allied governments on Thursday. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told reporters at a news conference in Vienna that “this dastardly act reflects the policies of Iran.” The Saudi government has not yet decided whether to withdraw its ambassador from Tehran in protest, he said.

In London, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, told the House of Commons that the suspected plot “would appear to constitute a major escalation in Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism outside its borders,” British news agencies reported. He added that the British government was “in close touch with the U.S. authorities and will work to agree an international response, along with the U.S., the rest of the E.U. and Saudi Arabia.”

Iran escalated its rebuttal of the American charges, saying the claims about the alleged plot were so ludicrous that even politicians and the media in the United States were expressing skepticism about them.

Iran’s state-run media was dominated on Thursday by rejections of the American charges. The foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, called the charges part of a “new propaganda campaign.” The official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as saying: “Repeating stupid and useless methods by hopeless Western policy makers to create Iranophobia will not be fruitful and they will fail again.”

While Mr. Obama echoed assertions by other administration officials that Iranian officials were complicit in the alleged plot, he did not go as far as some officials did on Wednesday when they told reporters that they had concluded that the operation had been discussed at the highest levels of the Iranian government.

Appearing next to the South Korean president, Mr. Lee, who was in Washington for a state visit, Mr. Obama promised to “apply the toughest sanctions and continue to mobilize the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and pays a price for this kind of behavior.” He said that all options were on the table — a diplomatic signal that he would not rule out military strikes — but administration officials privately say it is highly unlikely that the United States would respond with force.

Instead, the administration will try to persuade Russia, China, Europe and India to endorse tougher sanctions against Tehran. Thus far, the United States has prodded its international partners to put in place limited sanctions against Iranian officials involved in the country’s nuclear program, as part of the international effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

But that strategy has, so far, had limited success, with Russia and China in particular wary about going too far in a direction that officials say could hurt commercial interests in those countries.

The United States does virtually no business with Iran, and that leaves American officials with few meaningful options for unilateral action. Some lawmakers in the United States are calling for Mr. Obama to try to increase pressure on Iran by punishing Russian and Chinese companies that do business with Iran’s energy industry. But the administration has resisted such a move, which would undoubtedly deeply anger Moscow and Beijing.

White House officials said they were still weighing what additional sanctions they would push for in light of the alleged plot. One possibility, administration officials said, would be to target Iran’s central bank. But that likely would provoke resistance because it would entangle other countries or entities that do business with the central bank. Another possibility would be to focus on members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps who are involved in the country’s oil industry. But that could affect global oil markets.

Standing next to Mr. Obama in the White House East Room Thursday, Mr. Lee gave him a measured vote of confidence on the suspected plot.

“We were deeply shocked when we read the reports on the attempt to harm the Saudi envoy here in Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Lee said. “I and the Korean people strongly condemn all forms of terrorism.”

 

Artin Afkhami contributed reporting from Boston, Steven Lee Myers from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

    Obama Says Facts Support Accusation of Iranian Plot, NYT, 13.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/obama-calls-for-iran-sanctions-following-alleged-plot.html

The Other War Haunting Obama

October 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MARVIN KALB

Marvin Kalb is a former network correspondent and is an emeritus professor at Harvard and a co-author of “Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.”

TEN years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.

When the United States loses to a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country,” as Lyndon B. Johnson described his North Vietnamese foe, the loss leaves an unshakable legacy. There is no escape from history. Every president since Gerald R. Ford has had to weigh the consequences of the Vietnam defeat when he considers committing troops to war.

Ford, for example, was concerned that the United States might be seen as a “paper tiger” after the Communist victory in Vietnam on April 30, 1975. And so, two weeks later, he decided to use overwhelming military force against a handful of Cambodian boats that had seized an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, in an act that Ford denounced as “piracy.” In 1979, when Soviet troops swept into Afghanistan, an angry Jimmy Carter organized an unofficial alliance to give the Soviets “their Vietnam” (which Afghanistan became).

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after 241 American servicemen were murdered in their Beirut barracks by Islamic fanatics, he told a friend that the American people had been “spooked” by Vietnam and that he didn’t want a similar experience in the Middle East. By 1990, President George Bush was willing to send a half-million-strong army to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but he did so under the Powell Doctrine, drawn from the Vietnam experience: get Congress to approve; use huge firepower; get in and out on a timetable of your choosing.

Of all the presidents since Vietnam, Mr. Obama may be the most fascinating, because — unlike Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — he was too young to have fought in Vietnam or to have gamed the system and avoided service in it (as both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush did).

Barack Obama was 3 when Johnson escalated the war, and 13 when Ford ordered Americans to leave Saigon. As David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s political advisers, explained, “the whole debate about Vietnam — that was not part of his life experience.” Nevertheless, time and again, he has found himself entangled in its complexities.

During his presidential campaign, he visited Iraq and Afghanistan accompanied by two senators. What did they discuss on the long flights to and from the war zones? Mr. Obama kept asking: What could we learn about Vietnam that should now be applied in Afghanistan?

At his first National Security Council meeting, in January 2009, he stressed that “Afghanistan is not Vietnam.” Nevertheless, it echoed. Recent intelligence had suggested that only an increase in American military aid could eliminate the chance of a Taliban triumph. Mr. Obama, a Democrat who had never served in the military, did not want to be saddled with a defeat. He ramped up American troop strength, linked the problems in Afghanistan to those in Pakistan and ordered a total review of America’s war strategy. Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who wrote the review, kept running into the Vietnam legacy wherever he turned. “Vietnam,” he recalled, “walked the halls of the White House.” And none of the president’s close advisers saw Vietnam more as a cautionary tale than the late Richard C. Holbrooke, a diplomat who had gripping memories of Saigon in the early 1960s, when he worked there as a young Foreign Service officer.

In the summer of 2009, when the president ordered another review of his war strategy, it was marked by bitter leaks and obvious distrust between the White House and the Pentagon. At the heart of the disagreement was an old argument about Vietnam, emerging from two radically different books. “Lessons in Disaster,” by Gordon Goldstein, served as a lesson for the White House: America blundered and lost because the president and his advisers knew nothing about Vietnam. At the Pentagon, the best seller was Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War,” which argued that Vietnam could have been won — if only the White House had not lost heart and Congress had not cut funding.

As President Obama was considering a deeper American commitment to Afghanistan, he would occasionally slip into an aide’s office, lean on his desk and wonder aloud whether he was making the same mistakes Johnson had made. Finally, under enormous pressure, he decided to send more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan while also announcing a July 2011 date to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan. In, but at the same time out.

Vietnam was like a terrier snapping at his heels. In his televised speech announcing his decision, he made the point three times that any comparison between Vietnam and Afghanistan was a “false reading of history,” and yet he was the one raising the comparison.

That changed a bit as he began his re-election bid last spring: he dropped explicit references to Vietnam, but it made little difference in his message. He and his senior advisers still had Vietnam in the bloodstream of their calculations, as they showed with code words or phrases.

When Mr. Obama announced that American troops now had a “clear mission,” he evoked a time nearly 40 years ago when they didn’t. When he stressed the need for an “exit strategy” in Afghanistan, he knew there had been none in Vietnam. When he promised Americans that their nation’s military action against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya would be measured “in days, not weeks,” he signaled that he knew the dangers of “mission creep.” And, when, months later, with the United States still militarily engaged in Libya, Congress raised the question of whether he was in violation of the 1973 War Powers Act, the real issue was unchecked presidential power during wartime. Nixon had gotten away with it in Vietnam. Now Mr. Obama was in Libya.

Journalists also used code words, like “quagmire” or “over-committed.” The resonance was plain.

Up to Vietnam, the United States had never lost a war. The defeat was a humiliation, and it stripped the country of its illusions of omnipotence. From boundless self-confidence, Americans descended into self-doubt. Though politicians still talk of American “exceptionalism” and “uniqueness,” and although the United States remains a great power with enviable resources and talents, it lives in a post-Vietnam world — grappling with the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that L.B.J.’s “fourth-rate country” had routed it from Saigon in unquestioned defeat.

Vietnam took a high toll, but perhaps, as the current anguished calculations about Afghanistan indicate, it left the United States a more mature, sensible and smarter country. Perhaps.

    The Other War Haunting Obama, NYT, 8.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/the-vietnam-war-still-haunting-obama.html

Obama Obliquely Warns Pakistan

About Long-Term Relations

October 6, 2011
The New York Times
By RICK GLADSTONE

President Obama cast some doubt on the long-term relationship between the United States and Pakistan on Thursday, saying his administration was concerned about the Pakistani government’s commitment to American interests because of ties between anti-American militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s own intelligence agents.

At a news conference in Washington focused mostly on the American economy, Mr. Obama said he was thankful for cooperation from Pakistan, which has allowed the United States to use drones to strike at Qaeda cells ensconced along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. But he also obliquely criticized Pakistan over its position regarding Afghanistan, where efforts to stabilize the country and wind down the American-led war have been frustrated by what American and Afghan officials have described Pakistan’s support for insurgent groups, including the Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network.

“I think that they have hedged their bets in terms of what Afghanistan would look like,” Mr. Obama said. “And part of hedging their bets is having interactions with some of the unsavory characters who they think might end up regaining power in Afghanistan after coalition forces have left.”

The United States would “constantly evaluate” Pakistan’s cooperation, Mr. Obama said. He added: “But there’s no doubt that, you know, we’re not going to feel comfortable with a long-term strategic relationship with Pakistan if we don’t think that they’re mindful of our interests as well.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks seemed to call into question whether the United States could continue supplying Pakistan with billions of dollars in military and civilian aid, as it has since 9/11, if its intelligence service could not be persuaded to drop its support for militant groups long used as proxies against India and Afghanistan.

Asked if he would be willing to cut off aid to Pakistan, recently ravaged by flooding, Mr. Obama hesitated, however. The United States had a “great desire to help the Pakistani people strengthen their own society and their own government,” he said. “And so you know, I’d be hesitant to punish flood victims in Pakistan because of poor decisions by their intelligence services.”

His remarks came against a backdrop of already heightened American tensions with Pakistan, since Adm. Mike Mullen, the just-retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate panel last month that the Haqqani network, a potent part of the insurgency battling American forces in Afghanistan, was a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s spy agency. Admiral Mullen also accused the agency of supporting an attack by Haqqani militants on the United States Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Mr. Obama said “what we’ve tried to persuade Pakistan of is that it is in their interest to have a stable Afghanistan, that they should not be feeling threatened by a stable, independent Afghanistan. We’ve tried to get conversations between Afghans and Pakistanis going more effectively than they have been in the past. But we’ve still got more work to do.”

    Obama Obliquely Warns Pakistan About Long-Term Relations, NYT, 6.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/obama-obliquely-warns-pakistan-about-long-term-relations.html

A Closed-Mouth Policy Even on Open Secrets

October 4, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Speaking hours after the world learned that a C.I.A. drone strike had killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, President Obama could still not say the words “drone” or “C.I.A.”

That’s classified.

Instead, in an appearance at a Virginia military base just before midday Friday, the president said that Mr. Awlaki, the American cleric who had joined Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, “was killed” and that this “significant milestone” was “a tribute to our intelligence community.”

The president’s careful language was the latest reflection of a growing phenomenon: information that is public but classified.

The older and larger drone program in Pakistan, for instance, is a centerpiece of American foreign policy, discussed daily in the news media — but it cannot be mentioned at a public Congressional hearing. The State Department cables published by WikiLeaks can be found on the Web with a few mouse clicks and have affected relations with dozens of countries — but American officials cannot publicly discuss them.

Underlying these paradoxes is a problem that government officials, notably including Mr. Obama, have acknowledged and complained of for years: the gross overclassification of information.

The security agencies have become a mammoth secrets factory, staffed today by 4.2 million people who hold security clearances — a total disclosed for the first time last month, and far higher than even the biggest previous estimates. Their incentives are so lopsided in favor of secrecy that a new report proposes a surprising remedy: cash prizes for government workers who challenge improper classification.

The secrecy compulsion often merely makes the government look silly, as when obvious facts were excised from recent memoirs by former intelligence officers. But it can also hinder public debate of some of government’s most hotly contested actions.

Long before Friday’s drone strike, officials say, lawyers at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Justice Department and the White House painstakingly considered the legal justification for what amounted to the execution of an American citizen without trial. But even since the strike, officials have been willing to give only a brief summary of the government’s reasoning, refusing to make public the classified written opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the authoritative arbiter of the law.

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who has tracked government classification policies for two decades, said such secrecy about a disputed policy is “a kind of self-inflicted autism that cuts decision makers off from the input they need, both from inside the government and outside.” After last week’s strike, he added, “any justification for withholding the O.L.C. memo went away.”

The same closed-mouth approach has long applied to the drone campaign in Pakistan, which is old news but remains a top-secret covert action program. In June, at David H. Petraeus’s Senate confirmation hearing to become C.I.A. director, Senator Roy D. Blunt, Republican of Missouri, told Mr. Petraeus, the retiring Army general: “I want to talk a little bit about drones for a minute and the use of drones.”

There was a murmur of concern; C.I.A drones, though common knowledge, are unmentionable by government officials in public. Mr. Petraeus deftly dodged the issue by speaking of the military’s drones in Afghanistan, whose existence is not classified.

Administration officials said the drones are an especially delicate subject today because they are entangled with the United States’ complex relations with the governments of Pakistan and Yemen. But the same cannot be said of the Justice Department’s decade-old legal opinion justifying the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants.

Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian, asked for that opinion two years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. In August, he finally got a few sentences of the 21-page opinion, written by John C. Yoo of the Bush Justice Department. The rest was blanked out and remains secret.

Nor is the secrecy limited to counterterrorism. Jeffrey Richelson, an author of books on intelligence, asked the C.I.A. last year for any reports by its Center on Climate Change and National Security, which had drawn criticism from Republicans in Congress. The agency said last month that all such material “is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety.”

In a report on overclassification to be released on Wednesday, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school concludes that unnecessary classification has jeopardized national security by hindering information sharing inside the government, and corroded democratic government by stifling debate.

The report finds that the thousands of officials who classify information err on the side of secrecy, to play it safe or to avoid public scrutiny of policies. Among the remedies the report proposes, in addition to $50 or $100 prizes for successfully challenging a secrecy ruling, is requiring officials to explain in writing why they are classifying a document and asking agency inspectors general to perform spot audits and punish improper classification.

The Obama administration’s record on transparency is mixed; it has set a record for prosecuting leaks of classified information to the news media but has also moved to reverse the tide of secrets. In December 2009, Mr. Obama ordered agencies to update their rules to avoid overclassification, and Mr. Aftergood said there were glimmers of progress.

For instance, he said, the Defense Department has canceled some 82 outdated “classification guides,” written instructions on what should be secret. That turns out to be only 4 percent of the department’s classification guides, he said, but the review is not over.

“It’s movement,” Mr. Aftergood said. “Instead of the perennial growth of the classification system, it’s shrinkage. It’s a start.”

    A Closed-Mouth Policy Even on Open Secrets, NYT, 4.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/politics/awlaki-killing-is-awash-in-open-secrets.html

Supreme Court Is Asked to Rule on Health Care

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear a case concerning the 2010 health care overhaul law. The development, which came unexpectedly fast, makes it all but certain that the court will soon agree to hear one or more cases involving challenges to the law, with arguments by the spring and a decision by June, in time to land in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The Justice Department said the justices should hear its appeal of a decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, that struck down the centerpiece of the law by a 2-to-1 vote.

“The department has consistently and successfully defended this law in several courts of appeals, and only the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled it unconstitutional,” the Justice Department said in a statement. “We believe the question is appropriate for review by the Supreme Court.

“Throughout history, there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation, such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed,” the statement continued. “We believe the challenges to the Affordable Care Act — like the one in the 11th Circuit — will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.”

On Monday, the administration announced that it would not seek review from the full 11th Circuit. Its Supreme Court petition was not due until November.

The administration did not explain why it did not take routine litigation steps that might have slowed the progress of the challenges enough to avoid a decision in the current Supreme Court term. It did say in its brief that the 11th Circuit’s decision striking down the central piece of a comprehensive regulatory scheme created “a matter of grave national importance.”

The political calculus is complicated. A decision striking down President Obama’s signature legislative achievement only months before the election would doubtless be a blow. But a decision from a court divided along ideological lines could further energize voters already critical of last year’s 5-to-4 campaign finance decision, Citizens United.

A decision upholding the law might also both help and hurt Mr. Obama’s chances. It would represent vindication, but it could also spur some voters to redouble their efforts to elect candidates committed to repealing it.

The three federal courts of appeal that have issued decisions on the law so far have all reached different conclusions, with one upholding it, a second — the 11th Circuit— striking it down in part, and a third saying that threshold legal issues barred an immediate ruling. A fourth challenge to the law was heard last week by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The views of the appeals court judges have not uniformly tracked the presumed views of the presidents who appointed them. Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, appointed by President George W. Bush, joined the majority in a 2-to-1 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, which upheld the law. Judge Frank M. Hull of the 11th Circuit was appointed by President Bill Clinton and was an author of its majority opinion.

Also on Wednesday, two sets of plaintiffs who had won on the core issue in the 11th Circuit filed their own requests for Supreme Court review.

“Time is of the essence,” wrote Paul D. Clement, a former United States solicitor general who represents 26 states that are challenging the law. “The grave constitutional questions surrounding the A.C.A. and its novel exercise of federal power will not subside until this court resolves them.”

The 11th Circuit, in a decision issued in August, ruled that a part of law requiring the purchase of insurance — the so-called individual mandate — was an unconstitutional exercise of Congressional power.

The majority decision, written by Chief Judge Joel F. Dubina and Judge Hull, said, “We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated Congressional powers.”

The United States solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., disputed that analysis in the administration’s brief. The law, he wrote, requires most people to buy insurance “rather than rely on a combination of attempted self-insurance and the back-stop of care paid for by other market participants.” The individual mandate, he went on, “like the act as a whole, thus regulates economic conduct that substantially affects interstate commerce.”

The 11th Circuit ruled against the 26 states and the other plaintiffs on two points. It said its ruling on the individual mandate did not require “wholesale invalidation” of the law, and it upheld the law’s expansion of the Medicaid program.

The petition from the 26 states and a second one, from the National Federation of Independent Business and two individuals, sought review on the issues they had lost in the 11th Circuit. The administration’s brief and those of the plaintiffs mostly addressed different questions and talked past one another. Each side now has a chance to respond and tell the court its views about whether the issues identified by its adversaries warrant review.

But almost all of the usual signs indicate that the court will agree to hear at least one challenge to the law: a federal appeals court has struck down a major piece of federal legislation, the lower courts are divided about its constitutionality, and all sides, including the federal government itself, agree that review is warranted.

It is less clear which case the justices will agree to hear. Also pending before the justices is a petition from several individuals and the Thomas More Law Center, which describes itself as a defender of “America’s Christian heritage and moral values,” seeking review of the Sixth Circuit decision.

Nor is it clear which issues the justices will focus on. Simply agreeing to hear a case does not guarantee that the Supreme Court will decide whether Congress had the power under the Constitution’s commerce clause to enact the individual mandate, the question at the heart of the challenges.

The court could agree with some lower courts that some or all of the plaintiffs lack standing to sue or that the central issue is not yet ripe for decision. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., for instance, ruled this month that it was premature to decide the central question, citing a federal law allowing suits only after certain taxes and penalties are due. The administration found itself in an awkward position on this question before the Supreme Court, as it had initially pressed but later abandoned the argument.

In Wednesday’s brief, Mr. Verrilli said the administration did not think it should win on the Fourth Circuit’s theory. It nonetheless suggested that the court consider the issue and perhaps appoint a lawyer to present arguments in favor of it, as the court occasionally does when the parties agree on a significant issue that could alter the outcome of the eventual decision.

    Supreme Court Is Asked to Rule on Health Care, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/justice-dept-asks-supreme-court-for-health-care-ruling.html

Obama Turns Some Powers of Education Back to States

September 23, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

With his declaration on Friday that he would waive the most contentious provisions of a federal education law, President Obama effectively rerouted the nation’s education history after a turbulent decade of overwhelming federal influence.

Mr. Obama invited states to reclaim the power to design their own school accountability and improvement systems, upending the centerpiece of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, a requirement that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014.

“This does not mean that states will be able to lower their standards or escape accountability,” the president said. “If states want more flexibility, they’re going to have to set higher standards, more honest standards that prove they’re serious about meeting them.”

But experts said it was a measure of how profoundly the law had reshaped America’s public school culture that even in states that accept the administration’s offer to pursue a new agenda, the law’s legacy will live on in classrooms, where educators’ work will continue to emphasize its major themes, like narrowing student achievement gaps, and its tactics, like using standardized tests to measure educators’ performance.

In a White House speech, Mr. Obama said states that adopted new higher standards, pledged to overhaul their lowest-performing schools and revamped their teacher evaluation systems should apply for waivers of 10 central provisions of the No Child law, including its 2014 proficiency deadline. The administration was forced to act, Mr. Obama said, because partisan gridlock kept Congress from updating the law.

“Given that Congress cannot act, I am acting,” Mr. Obama said. “Starting today, we’ll be giving states more flexibility.”

But while the law itself clearly empowers Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to waive its provisions, the administration’s decision to make the waivers conditional on states’ pledges to pursue Mr. Obama’s broad school improvement agenda has angered Republicans gearing up for the 2012 elections.

On Friday Congressional leaders immediately began characterizing the waivers as a new administration power grab, in line with their portrayal of the health care overhaul, financial sector regulation and other administration initiatives.

“In my judgment, he is exercising an authority and power he doesn’t have,” said Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota and chairman of the House education committee. “We all know the law is broken and needs to be changed. But this is part and parcel with the whole picture with this administration: they cannot get their agenda through Congress, so they’re doing it with executive orders and rewriting rules. This is executive overreach.”

Mr. Obama made his statements to a bipartisan audience that included Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a Republican, Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, an independent, and 24 state superintendents of education.

“I believe this will be a transformative movement in American public education,” Christopher Cerf, New Jersey’s education commissioner under Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, said after the speech.

The No Child law that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 was a bipartisan rewrite of the basic federal law on public schools, first passed in 1965 to help the nation’s neediest students. The 2002 law required all schools to administer reading and math tests every year, and to increase the proportion of students passing them until reaching 100 percent in 2014. Schools that failed to keep pace were to be labeled as failing, and eventually their principals fired and staffs dismantled. That system for holding schools accountable for test scores has encouraged states to lower standards, teachers to focus on test preparation, and math and reading to crowd out history, art and foreign languages.

Mr. Obama’s blueprint for rewriting the law, which Congress has never acted on, urged lawmakers to adopt an approach that would encourage states to raise standards, focus interventions only on the worst failing schools and use test scores and other measures to evaluate teachers’ effectiveness. In its current proposal, the administration requires states to adopt those elements of its blueprint in exchange for relief from the No Child law.

Mr. Duncan, speaking after Mr. Obama’s speech, said the waivers could bring significant change to states that apply. “For parents, it means their schools won’t be labeled failures,” Mr. Duncan said. “It should reduce the pressure to teach to the test.”

Critics were skeptical, saying that classroom teachers who complain about unrelenting pressure to prepare for standardized tests were unlikely to feel much relief.

“In the system that N.C.L.B. created, standardized tests are the measure of all that is good, and that has not changed,“ said Monty Neill, executive director of Fair Test, an antitesting advocacy group. “This policy encourages states to use test scores as a significant factor in evaluating teachers, and that will add to the pressure on teachers to teach to the test.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said her union favored evaluation systems that would help teachers improve their instruction, whereas the administration was focusing on accountability. “You’re seeing an extraordinary change of policy, from an accountability system focused on districts and schools, to accountability based on teacher and principal evaluations,” Ms. Weingarten said.

For most states, obtaining a waiver could be the easy part of accepting the administration’s invitation. Actually designing a new school accountability system, and obtaining statewide acceptance of it, represents a complex administrative and political challenge for governors and other state leaders, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, which the White House said played an important role in developing the waiver proposal.

Only about five states may be ready to apply immediately, and perhaps 20 others could follow by next spring, Mr. Wilhoit said. Developing new educator evaluation systems and other aspects of follow-through could take states three years or more, he said.

Officials in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and in at least eight other states — Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Idaho, Minnesota, Virginia and Wisconsin — said Friday that they would probably seek the waivers.

    Obama Turns Some Powers of Education Back to States, NYT, 23.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/education/24educ.html

Obama Says Palestinians Are Using Wrong Forum

September 21, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

Correction Appended

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama declared his opposition to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood through the Security Council on Wednesday, throwing the weight of the United States directly in the path of the Arab democracy movement even as he hailed what he called the democratic aspirations that have taken hold throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

“Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” Mr. Obama said, in an address before world leaders at the General Assembly. “If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now.”

Instead, Mr. Obama said, the international community should keep pushing Israelis and Palestinians toward talks on the four intractable issues that have vexed peace negotiations since 1979: borders of a Palestinian state, security for Israel, the status of Palestinian refugees and the fate of Jerusalem, which both sides claim for their capital.

For Mr. Obama, the challenge in crafting the much-anticipated General Assembly speech was how to address the incongruities of the administration’s position: the president who committed to making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians a priority from Day One, now unable to get peace negotiations going after two and a half years; the president who opened the door to Palestinian state membership at the United Nations last year, now threatening to veto that membership; the president determined to get on the right side of Arab history but ending up, in the views of many Arabs, on the wrong side of it on the Palestinian issue.

The Arab Spring quandary, in particular, has been troublesome for Mr. Obama. White House officials say that he has long been keenly aware that he, like no other American president, stood as a potential beacon to the Arab street as the ultimate symbol of the hopes and rewards of democracy. But since he is the president of the United States, he has had to put American interests first.

So Mr. Obama’s 35-minute address appeared, at times, an effort to balance support for democratic movements against support for Israel, America’s foremost ally. From the start, everything he said seemed directed to the theme of what he called “peace in an imperfect world.”

Mr. Obama called this year “a time of transformation.” This year, he said, “more individuals are claiming their universal right to live in freedom and dignity.”

He congratulated the democratic movements in Ivory Coast, Tunisia and South Sudan. He congratulated the Egyptians and Libyans who toppled their autocrats. He sided with the protesters in Syria.

But, he said, Palestinians must make peace with Israel before gaining statehood themselves. Israelis and Palestinians, he said, have grievances and the United Nations must be an arbiter.

“This body, founded, as it was, out of the ashes of war and genocide; dedicated, as it is, to the dignity of every person, must recognize the reality that is lived by both the Palestinians and the Israelis,” he said. “We will only succeed in that effort if we can encourage the parties to sit down together, to listen to each other and to understand each other’s hopes and fears. That is the project to which America is committed, and that is what the United Nations should be focused on in the weeks and months to come.”

Several times as Mr. Obama spoke, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the audience, put his forehead in his hand. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the speech a “badge of honor.”

Three times under Mr. Obama’s tenure, the General Assembly meeting has put the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into stark relief.

In 2009, on Mr. Obama’s first visit as president, he abandoned his call for a freeze of settlements in the West Bank, meeting immovable resistance from Israel. The pivot was viewed as major setback in American efforts toward resumed peace talks.

Then last year, Mr. Obama delivered an impassioned call for Palestinian statehood within the next year, to be recognized, he said, in the United Nations.

Mr. Obama tried to acknowledge the shift, recalling his pledge and his belief that then, as now, “the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own.”

“But what I also said,” he added, “is that genuine peace can only be realized between Israelis and Palestinians themselves.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.

Correction: September 21, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the length of President Obama's speech.

    Obama Says Palestinians Are Using Wrong Forum, NYT, 21.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/obama-united-nations-speech.html

Obama Rebuffed as Palestinians Pursue U.N. Seat

September 21, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

UNITED NATIONS — A last-ditch American effort to head off a Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations faltered. President Obama tried to qualify his own call, just a year ago, for a Palestinian state. And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach.

The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking.

Even before Mr. Obama walked up to the General Assembly podium to make his difficult address, where he declared that “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” American officials acknowledged that their various last-minute attempts to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with help from European allies and Russia had collapsed.

American diplomats turned their attention to how to navigate a new era in which questions of Palestinian statehood are squarely on the global diplomatic agenda. There used to be three relevant players in any Middle East peace effort: the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. But expansions of settlements in the West Bank and a hardening of Israeli attitudes have isolated Israel and its main backer, the United States. Dissension among Palestinian factions has undermined the prospect for a new accord as well.

Finally, Washington politics has limited Mr. Obama’s ability to try to break the logjam if that means appearing to distance himself from Israel. Republicans have mounted a challenge to lure away Jewish voters who supported Democrats in the past, after some Jewish leaders sharply criticized Mr. Obama for trying to push Israel too hard.

The result has been two and a half years of stagnation on the Middle East peace front that has left Arabs — and many world leaders — frustrated, and ready to try an alternative to the American-centric approach that has prevailed since the 1970s.

“The U.S. cannot lead on an issue that it is so boxed in on by its domestic politics,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator in the government of Ehud Barak. “And therefore, with the region in such rapid upheaval and the two-state solution dying, as long as the U.S. is paralyzed, others are going to have to step up.”

Mr. Obama himself seemed to forecast this back in May when, speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he warned that events in the Middle East could lead to a challenge to the status quo if the Israelis and Palestinians did not move quickly toward a peace deal.

“There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations,” Mr. Obama said then. “They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab world, in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.”

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, delivered on the threat. He announced last Friday his plans to go to the Security Council in a quest for Palestinian membership in the United Nations and international legal recognition of statehood, putting Mr. Obama in the position of having to stand in the way. Israel and its allies in Congress, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel enjoys broad influence, were sharply opposed.

So on Wednesday, Mr. Obama “did exactly what he had to do,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He made a clear statement for what is a clear U.S. position and put himself squarely as a champion of the status quo.”

Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Rothkopf said, “has managed to read the U.S. political situation perfectly, making Obama acutely aware that he could be losing part of his base, and that, I think, in turn is what has locked Obama in.”

The Palestinians have never fully trusted the United States to serve as an honest broker with Israel. But its credibility with the Palestinians has crumbled with the recognition that Mr. Obama may not have the clout to press the Israelis into a peace deal that requires significant compromises.

“The president in his speech at the U.N. today admitted that the U.S. somehow failed in bridging the gap between the two sides,” the Palestinian representative in Washington, Maen Rashid Areikat, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He said that he feels frustration and he understands the frustration of everybody. That’s good, but I think it goes much deeper. I think what the U.S. administration needs to say is why it failed.”

He acknowledged the administration’s efforts — with the appointment of George J. Mitchell Jr. as special envoy to the region and Mr. Obama’s own speeches, especially in Cairo — but said the momentum of his early presidency flagged as the administration bound itself so closely to the Israelis and their supporters in the United States, especially Congress. The Palestinians ultimately decided that the best hope for breaking an impasse with the Israelis rested with making their case to a larger international forum.

“One big reason for losing that momentum,” he said, “was the failure of the administration to use its leverage with an Israeli government that adamantly was opposed to the efforts of the United States to bridge the gap in the Middle East.”

After Mr. Obama laid out his defense of the peace process, Mr. Sarkozy took to the same podium in a forceful disavowal of Mr. Obama’s position. “Let us cease our endless debates on the parameters,” he said, calling instead for a General Assembly resolution that would upgrade the Palestinians to “observer status” as a bridge toward statehood. “Let us begin negotiations, and adopt a precise timetable.”

The outcome of the Palestinian bid for membership remains uncertain. The administration still hopes that the process of considering the Palestinian bid at the Security Council could provide a fresh opportunity for new talks. The move puts new pressure on Mr. Netanyahu’s government, reeling from setbacks to its security from the turmoil of the Arab Spring, with results that analysts say are hard to forecast. But a quick return to the status quo, when the United States dictated the terms of talks, seems unlikely, given strong Russian and French support for a new approach by the Palestinians.

Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, told reporters after Mr. Sarkozy’s speech that the United States “cannot do it alone” in negotiations for a Middle East peace, and that a collective approach was needed. Mr. Juppe said he thought this time that the five permanent Security Council members should have a direct role in shepherding talks.

Somewhat incongruously, Mr. Sarkozy visited Mr. Obama’s hotel on Wednesday afternoon for a previously scheduled meeting with the president, and was effusive, in front of the cameras before the meeting, in his praise for Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama, for his part, refused to engage with reporters assembled for the photo op. “Do you support the French one-year timeline?” one reporter asked. Mr. Obama responded, “I already answered a question from you before.”

Another reporter asked Mr. Obama if he agreed with the French position on Palestine. Mr. Obama smiled and replied, “Bonjour.” A third reporter queried if that response constituted a “no comment.” The president’s response: “No comment.”

 

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.

    Obama Rebuffed as Palestinians Pursue U.N. Seat, NYT, 21.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/obama-rebuffed-as-palestinians-pursue-un-seat.html

Obama’s Plan to Raise Taxes on the Rich

September 20, 2011
The New York Times


To the Editor:

Re “President’s Plan on Deficit Mixes Cuts and Taxes” (front page, Sept. 19):

Republicans like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin have branded President Obama’s proposal to have the wealthy pay modestly more in federal income taxes “class warfare.” But what are Republicans willing to ask of the affluent to help resolve our fiscal problems?

I can’t come up with one thing. Not one.

When Mr. Ryan and his colleagues say we face fiscal collapse and ask sacrifice of everyone except those who make the most and have the most, that is class warfare. And it’s being waged by his own party.

DANIEL A. SIMON
New York, Sept. 20, 2011

To the Editor:

Should we increase taxes during a recession? Probably not, but are we in a recession? That depends on which economy we are looking at, because we have two now.

The upstairs economy is flying high. Wealth is piling upon wealth, and luxury goods are flying out of the boutiques.

But the economy down here is seriously hemorrhaging, and needs help badly. Our course should be clear: Increase taxes on the upstairs economy, and cut taxes downstairs.

ALLAN R. SHICKMAN
St. Louis, Sept. 20, 2011

To the Editor:

Re “Obama Confirms New Hard Stand With Debt Relief” (front page, Sept. 20):

Just once, I’d like to hear an honest discussion of taxes.

Just once, I’d like a Democrat to acknowledge that there is a progressive income tax in this country, and that many of the so-called rich pay the highest marginal rate every year.

I’d also like to hear an admission that a shockingly large number of the middle class pay little or nothing.

Just once, I’d like to hear a Republican acknowledge that the tax code is riddled with corporate and individual tax breaks that make no sense, and that the favored treatment for hedge fund profits and carried interest is nothing short of outrageous.

Just once, I’d like to hear any politician call for simplification of the tax code and really mean it. I’d like an admission that the impenetrable mass of current tax law is a paean to lobbyists, and guaranteed job security for an army of lawyers, accountants and Internal Revenue Service bureaucrats.

Just one time.

CHUCK OKOSKY
Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Sept. 20, 2011

To the Editor:

Speaker John A. Boehner’s response to President Obama’s speech typifies the disconnect between the reality I and many of my friends inhabit and the land where corporations get welfare without waiting in a single line.

Mr. Boehner referred to “this administration’s insistence on raising taxes on job creators.” Job creators? Those of us who pay attention to the monthly unemployment reports would beg to differ.

President Obama has finally shown some of the leadership and spark that captured the imagination of the American public. His comment “This is not class warfare. It’s math” resonates with the strength he displayed in his run for the presidency. Welcome back, Mr. President. We’ve missed you sorely.

GRETCHEN S. ADAMEK
East Hartford, Conn., Sept. 20, 2011

    Obama’s Plan to Raise Taxes on the Rich, NYT, 20.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/opinion/obamas-plan-to-raise-taxes-on-the-rich.html

Obama Praises Libya’s Post-Qaddafi Leaders at U.N.

September 20, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama met Libya’s transitional leader for the first time on Tuesday, and extolled what he called the Libyan people’s successful struggle to depose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. The meeting came on the first of two days of annual meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, during which the most vexing issue confronting Mr. Obama will be the Palestinian quest for full membership.

“Just as the world stood by you in your struggle to be free, we will stand with you in your struggle to realize the peace and prosperity that freedom can bring,” the president said at a meeting on Libya’s future, which included other world leaders and emissaries from the Transitional National Council, the group of former Libyan rebels whose forces ended Colonel Qaddafi’s four decades of absolute rule last month. Before the meeting, Mr. Obama met privately with the leader of the council, Mustafa Abdel Jalil.

In his remarks at the meeting, Mr. Obama warned the Libyans that it “will take time to build the institutions needed for a democratic Libya — there will be days of frustration.” But he said the successful overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, with aid from a NATO bombing campaign, had demonstrated that the world should “not underestimate the aspirations and will of the Libyan people.”

Mr. Obama announced that the United States was officially reopening its embassy in Tripoli, which was closed in the early days of the conflict. An advance military team has been in the Libyan capital for the past week to prepare for the reopening.

Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan later on Tuesday, but it was not clear whether that meeting would take place because of the assassination in Kabul of the head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, former President Burhanuddin Rabbani. Mr. Karzai was making arrangements on Tuesday to cut short his visit to the Assembly and fly home, aides to Mr. Karzai said in Kabul.

Much of the diplomatic activity at the United Nations this week surrounded the contentious question of the Palestinian bid for full membership as a state, which the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, announced publicly last Friday before traveling to New York. Israel and the United States have expressed strong opposition to the plan, saying that Palestinian statehood should come from direct negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. But many, if not most, other members of the United Nations have expressed support for Mr. Abbas’s approach.

 

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

    Obama Praises Libya’s Post-Qaddafi Leaders at U.N., NYT, 20.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/world/obama-meets-with-world-leaders-at-united-nations.html

Obama Rejects Obamaism

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

When the president said the unemployed couldn’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

I liked Obama’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course I’m a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.

Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away. He whispered about seriously reforming Medicare but then opted for changes that are worthy but small. He talks about fundamental tax reform, but I keep forgetting that he has promised never to raise taxes on people in the bottom 98 percent of the income scale.

That means when he talks about raising revenue, which he is right to do, he can’t really talk about anything substantive. He can’t tax gasoline. He can’t tax consumption. He can’t do a comprehensive tax reform. He has to restrict his tax policy changes to the top 2 percent, and to get any real revenue he’s got to hit them in every which way. We’re not going to simplify the tax code, but by God Obama’s going to raise taxes on rich people who give to charity! We’ve got to do something to reduce the awful philanthropy surplus plaguing this country!

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. I’m a sap.

    Obama Rejects Obamaism, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/brooks-obama-rejects-obamaism.html

A Call for Fairness

September 19, 2011
The New York Times

This time, President Obama did not compromise with himself beforehand, or put out a half measure in hopes of luring nonexistent Republican support. This time, he issued an unabashed call for economic fairness in cutting the federal deficit, asking as much from those on the economy’s upper rungs as from those lower down whose programs may be trimmed.

And this time, standing in the Rose Garden on Monday, he seemed to speak directly to a public that has been parched for farsighted leadership in Washington. The one troubling note of the day was Mr. Obama’s failure to provide enough specifics on some of his proposals, and his aides’ inexplicable continued faith in the idea of Congress working out a sensible middle ground on taxes.

But the president’s plan to cut $3.6 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years is a well-proportioned mix. It proposes about 60 percent spending cuts (including winding down two wars that his predecessor started fighting off the books with the eager support of the supposedly fiscally responsible Republicans in Congress) and 40 percent tax increases on the wealthy and corporations.

It pays for the desperately needed jobs plan he sent to Congress last week without more mindless hacking at government programs, and would be a much better alternative to the $1.2 trillion in across-the-board spending cuts that loom if Congress does not pass a debt plan this year.

Republicans will, of course, mount obdurate opposition in Congress, since they have no intention of allowing the government to ask anything from the wealthy and corporations. Even before the plan was announced, the party’s leaders had rolled out their rusted artillery, calling an increase in taxes on high earners “class warfare” and insisting that it would fatally wound “job creators.” (In fact, less than 2 percent of the nation’s small businesses would be affected by the tax increases.)

For once the president did not let that predictable line of argument stop him, and even had a good rejoinder: “This is not class warfare. It’s math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.” It could come from the middle class, from the elderly and the poor, by asking them to give up benefits from programs like Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps — as many Republicans are advocating. It could come by pulling money from road building, schools, food inspection and other vital government services.

Those are unacceptable choices, he said, particularly if the rich give up nothing, and he made it clear he would veto any plan that cut Medicare but did not raise revenue from the rich. He called for Congress to rewrite the tax code to ensure that the rich pay the same effective tax rate on their income as the middle class. (He referred to Warren Buffett, who famously said on our Op-Ed page that his secretary pays a higher rate than he does.) It’s time Washington fought as hard for the middle class, he said, as lobbyists fight for billionaires and corporations.

That’s the kind of language Mr. Obama needs for the campaign trail next year, to draw a strong comparison with Republicans who may well start to be seen as fighting for the interests of a small moneyed elite.

But the president would have done better to tell Congress precisely how the Buffett Rule should work, instead of laying out broad principles and hoping a divided and leaderless group of lawmakers would figure it out themselves. As he did during the debt ceiling fight, he called for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 (which would bring in $866 billion over a decade) and limiting the same group’s itemized deductions (saving $410 billion). But as Mr. Buffett has pointed out, most millionaires benefit from an extremely generous 15 percent tax rate on investment income. Mr. Obama should have explicitly called for an increase in that rate.

White House aides have said the president is open to other methods of equalizing the burden, including changing the alternative minimum tax — which now affects many middle-class taxpayers — to apply specifically to millionaire-level income, and at a much higher rate.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the administration did not want to give Congress a detailed road map of tax reform, but that will leave the field to special-interest lobbying, partisan fear-mongering and dithering. Raising capital-gains taxes is the most reliable way to make sure the richest Americans don’t avoid taxes.

On the spending side, the president’s plan takes a sensible approach toward saving money in Medicare and Medicaid. More than 90 percent of the $248 billion in Medicare cuts over 10 years would come from reducing payments to drug companies and health care providers that are unnecessarily high. The effect on the elderly would be limited, with higher premiums for high-income beneficiaries starting in 2017, and increased deductibles for new beneficiaries. Mr. Obama proposed a modest cut of $66 billion in Medicaid over a decade, well below the Republicans’ proposed $770 billion cut.

Mr. Obama also asked military retirees to pay increased contributions for health benefits, bringing that expensive system more in line with private-sector plans.

After nearly three years of destructive compromise and concession on the budget, this plan was far too late in coming. But the public is listening now, and has demanded shared sacrifice. The burden is now on Mr. Obama to sell his plan, and on Congress to buy it.

    A Call for Fairness, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/opinion/a-call-for-fairness.html

    Related > http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/jointcommitteereport.pdf

Obama Draws New Hard Line on Long-Term Debt Reduction

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — With a scrappy unveiling of his formula to rein in the nation’s mounting debt, President Obama confirmed Monday that he had entered a new, more combative phase of his presidency, one likely to last until next year’s election as he battles for a second term.

Faced with falling poll numbers for his leadership and an anxious party base, Mr. Obama did not just propose but insisted that any long-term debt-reduction plan must not shave future Medicare benefits without also raising taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers and corporations.

He uncharacteristically backed up that stand with a veto threat, setting up a politically charged choice for anti-tax Republicans — protect the most affluent or compromise to attack deficits. Confident in the answers most voters would make, Mr. Obama plans to hammer on that choice through 2012, reflecting the fact that the White House has all but given up hopes of a “grand bargain” with Republicans to restore fiscal balance for years to come.

“I will not support — I will not support — any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans. And I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share,” Mr. Obama said. “We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable.”

Mr. Obama also seems to have given up on his strategy of nearly a year, beginning when Republicans won control of the House last November, of being the eager-to-compromise “reasonable adult” — in the White House’s phrasing — in his relations with them. He had sought to build a personal relationship with Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, a man the White House saw as a possible partner across the aisle, in the hopes of making bipartisan progress and simultaneously winning points with independent voters who disdain partisanship. Even if the efforts produced few agreements with Republicans, the White House figured, independents would give Mr. Obama credit for trying.

Instead, the president was unable to close his deal with Mr. Boehner and has only lost independents’ support and left Democrats disillusioned, raising doubts about his re-election prospects.

So after his initial two years of dealing with an economic and financial crisis while pursuing an activist social agenda with Democrats in control of the House and Senate, and then a frustrating third year sharing power with Republicans, Mr. Obama now begins writing a third chapter for his final 15 months that is not the one he had in mind.

“It is fair to say we’ve entered a new phase,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director. But he disputed what he called the conventional wisdom behind the president’s shift.

“The popular narrative is that we sought compromise in a quixotic quest for independent votes. We sought out compromise because a failure to get funding of the government last spring and then an extension of the debt ceiling in August would have been very bad for the economy and for the country,” Mr. Pfeiffer added. “We were in a position of legislative compromise by necessity. That phase is behind us.”

In this new phase, Mr. Obama must solidify support among Democrats by standing pat for progressive party principles, while trusting that a show of strong leadership for the policies he believes in will appeal to independents. Polls consistently suggest that perhaps the only thing that unites independents as much as their desire for compromise is their inclination toward leaders who signal strength by fighting for their beliefs.

“The president laid down a marker today that is true to his beliefs,” said Jacob J. Lew, director of Mr. Obama’s Office of Management and Budget. In response, Mr. Boehner said in a statement that Mr. Obama by his deficit-reduction plan “has not made a serious contribution” to the work of a bipartisan joint Congressional committee, which has two months to reach agreement on cutting deficits by at least $1.5 trillion in 10 years.

“The administration’s insistence on raising taxes on job creators and its reluctance to take the steps necessary to strengthen our entitlement programs are the reasons the president and I were not able to reach an agreement previously,” Mr. Boehner said. “And it is evident today that these barriers remain.”

Mr. Obama’s plan to reduce annual deficits up to $4 trillion over a decade does call for subtracting $320 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, building on savings required in his health care law.

But those proposals are far from the overhaul and reductions that Republicans are demanding in the two popular entitlement programs, whose growth because of the aging of the population and ever-rising medical costs is driving the long-term projections of unsustainable debt.

And Mr. Obama removed Social Security from the table, as well as a proposal to slowly raise the eligibility age for Medicare to 67 from 65. He put both forward in July, to the chagrin of many Democrats, in private negotiations with Mr. Boehner that fell apart when the speaker balked at agreeing to higher revenues. Administration officials say Mr. Obama is not ruling out either proposal if Republicans were to show significant give on taxes.

But the White House does not expect Republicans to do so. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s new tack in pressing the deficit-reduction framework and $447 billion jobs-creation plan that he wants — not trimmed to draw Republicans’ votes — reflects the conclusion he has drawn from the past 10 months: Republicans will oppose almost anything he proposes, even tax cuts. And Mr. Boehner is unable to deliver his uncompromisingly anti-tax Republicans for any compromise that includes tax revenues.

Mr. Obama believed he had built a good working relationship with Mr. Boehner based on a shared desire for a deal modeled on proposals of past bipartisan panels, which called for a mix of new revenues and changes in entitlement programs.

But their relationship was severely strained after Mr. Boehner abandoned their budget talks in July, came back and then walked out a second time. And after what the White House saw as a third strike this month — Mr. Boehner’s humiliating public rejection of Mr. Obama’s requested date for an address to a joint session of Congress — the Obama team called Mr. Boehner out.

Their breach was evident in Mr. Obama’s remarks. He singled out Mr. Boehner in his criticism of Republicans as unwilling to compromise, a break from the past when Mr. Obama typically criticized Republicans in general but mentioned Mr. Boehner only to praise him as a constructive partner. Not this time.

“Unfortunately, the speaker walked away from a balanced package,” Mr. Obama said, referring to their earlier talks. “What we agreed to instead wasn’t all that grand.”

Then he mocked Mr. Boehner for a speech last week in which the speaker said only spending cuts could be part of a budget deal.

“So the speaker says we can’t have it ‘my way or the highway’ and then basically says, ‘My way — or the highway,’ ” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not smart. It’s not right.”

    Obama Draws New Hard Line on Long-Term Debt Reduction, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/obama-vows-veto-if-deficit-plan-has-no-tax-increases.html

In Deficit Plan, Obama Drops Compromise for Confrontation

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

WASHINGTON — The details of President Obama’s plan to reduce federal deficits by more than $3 trillion over 10 years, which he laid out Monday morning, underscore a strategic White House shift away from the pursuit of compromise toward a more partisan confrontation.

The key points of the plan read like a mirror image of the priorities espoused by House Republicans. The president proposed raising taxes by $1.5 trillion, mostly on the wealthy, while making only modest cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and walling off Social Security from any changes. The plan also would reduce military spending by more than $1 trillion.

Mr. Obama delivered his proposal just days after Speaker John A. Boehner declared that Republicans would not support tax increases as part of any new deficit reduction plan and just hours after top Republicans assailed Mr. Obama for promoting tax increases for the wealthy in what they described as an effort to win political points that amounted to class warfare.

“This is not class warfare,” Mr. Obama countered Monday in his Rose Garden remarks. “It is math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.”

The new hard line reflects a change in the administration’s negotiating strategy after the president’s failure to close a grand bargain on deficit reduction with Mr. Boehner earlier this year, a series of talks that left some Democrats in the administration and in Congress with the view that Mr. Obama had made significant concessions only to get the cold shoulder from Republicans reluctant to see the president score a victory.

This time, rather than trying to identify common ground, the administration is entering the negotiations in the same kind of tough position that Republicans adopted during the debt-ceiling debate, emphasizing the traditional financial priorities of the Democratic Party.

The White House still is hoping that a deal with Republicans can emerge from the work of a joint House-Senate committee that will meet over the next two months. If a deal is not enacted by Nov. 23 and quickly approved by Congress, broad cuts would be imposed on government agencies starting in 2013, after the 2012 elections.

However, if a deal cannot be reached, the president’s plan also amounts to a campaign platform, clearly defining the priorities around which he hopes to rally voters and setting up a sharp contrast with Republicans.

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama expressly promised to veto any legislation that sought to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and did not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy.

    In Deficit Plan, Obama Drops Compromise for Confrontation, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/in-deficit-plan-obama-drops-compromise-for-confrontation.html

Obama Proposes $320 Billion

in Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Over 10 Years

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s budget director said Monday that the president’s new deficit-reduction plan would impose “a lot of pain,” and that is clearly true of White House proposals to cut $320 billion from projected spending on Medicare and Medicaid in the coming decade.

Mr. Obama proposed higher premiums and deductibles for many Medicare beneficiaries and lower Medicare payments to teaching hospitals and rural hospitals. He would start charging co-payments to frail homebound older people who receive home health services. And he would reduce the growth of federal payments to states for treating low-income people under Medicaid.

The White House said Mr. Obama’s proposals would cut $248 billion from the projected growth of Medicare in the next 10 years, while shaving $72 billion from Medicaid and other health programs. A large share of the Medicare savings would, in effect, be used to pay doctors, who would otherwise face deep cuts in the fees they receive for treating Medicare patients.

The proposals are part of a package to reduce deficits by more than $3 trillion over 10 years, beyond the $1 trillion in savings already assumed under the debt limit law that Mr. Obama signed in early August. The package includes tax changes intended to raise $1.5 trillion in revenue over 10 years.

Mr. Obama would also allow the Postal Service to cut its losses by ending Saturday mail delivery. He would reduce farm subsidies by $31 billion over 10 years, require federal employees to contribute more to their pension plans, force military retirees to pay more for prescription drugs and charge higher fees to air travelers for “aviation security.”

Jacob J. Lew, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, rejected suggestions that the White House was going after rich people.

“If you look at the details of what’s in the plan that the president is sending to the Congress,” Mr. Lew said, “there is a lot of pain, and it’s spread — it’s spread broadly and we think fairly.”

Medicare and Medicaid insure more than 100 million people and account for nearly one-fourth of all federal spending. The proposed savings, which provoked predictable protests from health care providers, represent less than 3 percent of what the government expects to spend on the programs in the next 10 years.

Speaking in the Rose Garden on Monday, Mr. Obama said his plan — in the form of recommendations to a bipartisan Congressional committee on deficit reduction — “includes structural reforms to reduce the cost of health care in programs like Medicare and Medicaid.”

The proposal would require new beneficiaries to pay higher deductibles before Medicare coverage of doctors’ services and other outpatient care kicks in. The deductible, now $162 a year, is already adjusted for inflation. Mr. Obama would increase it further by $25 in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

In addition, the White House would increase Medicare premiums by about 30 percent for new beneficiaries who buy generous private insurance to help fill gaps in Medicare.

Many beneficiaries choose these private Medigap policies because they want the financial security they get from the extra insurance. But the White House said this protection “gives individuals less incentive to consider the costs of health care and thus raises Medicare costs.”

Mr. Obama would raise $20 billion over 10 years by charging higher premiums to higher-income beneficiaries and by freezing the income thresholds so more people would have to pay the surcharges.

About 5 percent of the 48 million Medicare beneficiaries now pay the higher premiums. The proportion would eventually rise to 25 percent under the proposal.

Starting in 2017, Mr. Obama would require certain new beneficiaries to pay co-payments for home health care, which is now exempt from such charges. The co-payment would be $100 per episode, defined as a series of five or more home health visits not preceded by a stay in a hospital or a skilled nursing home.

Howard J. Bedlin, vice president of the National Council on Aging, a service and advocacy group, said such co-payments would “significantly increase out-of-pocket costs for many low-income widows with multiple chronic conditions.” Likewise, Mr. Bedlin said, “The Medigap proposal would shift costs onto Medicare beneficiaries.”

Mr. Obama also proposed these changes:

¶ Require drug companies to provide additional discounts, or rebates, to Medicare for prescription drugs bought by low-income beneficiaries. This proposal, opposed by drug makers, would save the government $135 billion over 10 years.

¶ Squeeze $42 billion over 10 years from Medicare payments to nursing homes, home health agencies and rehabilitation hospitals. Cut Medicare payments to nursing homes with large numbers of patients hospitalized because they did not receive appropriate care in the nursing home.

¶ Require doctors to get approval from Medicare for the most expensive imaging services.

¶ Revise the formula for calculating Medicaid payments to states, saving $15 billion over 10 years. Restrict states’ ability to finance their share of costs by imposing taxes on care providers.

¶ Cut $3.5 billion over 10 years from a prevention and public health fund created by the new health care law.

Another White House proposal would save $20 billion over 10 years by reducing Medicare payments to hospitals and other providers for bad debts that result when beneficiaries fail to pay deductibles and co-payments.

    Obama Proposes $320 Billion in Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Over 10 Years, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/medicare-and-medicaid-face-320-billion-in-cuts-over-10-years.html

Obama Vows Veto if Deficit Plan Has No Tax Increases

September 19, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama called on Monday for Congress to adopt his “balanced” plan combining entitlement cuts, tax increases and war savings to reduce the federal deficit by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, and said he would veto any approach that relied solely on spending reductions to address the fiscal shortfall.

“I will not support any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans,” he said. “And I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share.

“We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable,” he continued.

His plan, presented in a speech in the Rose Garden of the White House, is the administration’s latest move in the long-running power struggle over deficit reduction. It comes as a joint House-Senate committee begins work in earnest to spell out, at the least, a more modest savings plan that Congress could approve by the end of the year in keeping with the debt deal reached this summer. If the committee’s proposal is not enacted by Dec. 23, draconian automatic cuts across government agencies could take effect a year later.

Mr. Obama is seeking $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy and corporations, through a combination of letting Bush-era income tax cuts expire on wealthier taxpayers, limiting the value of deductions taken by high earners and closing corporate loopholes. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. In a briefing previewing the plan, administration officials said on Sunday that the Medicare savings would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age.

Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from ending the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama’s threat to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone without raising taxes puts him on a collision course with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who said last week that he would not support any revenue increases in the form of higher taxes. But the White House has compromised several times over the last year after making stern demands of Congress that were not met.

Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to receive sharp criticism from Congressional Republicans, who on Sunday were already taking apart one element of the proposal that the administration let out early: the so-called Buffett Rule. The rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, who has complained that he is taxed at a lower rate than his employees — calls for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers.

That proposal, which was disclosed on Saturday, was met with derision Sunday by Republican lawmakers, who said it amounted to “class warfare” and was a political tactic intended to portray his opponents as indifferent to the hardships facing middle-class Americans.

But Mr. Obama spent much of his talk in the Rose Garden making an impassioned plea for what he called fairness in taxation, on the premise that “middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires.”

“This is not class warfare,” he said. “It’s math.”

Nonetheless, Republicans made clear on Sunday that higher taxes on the wealthy were not acceptable to them. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said: “It’s a bad thing to do in the middle of an economic downturn. And of course the economy, some would argue, is even worse now than it was when the president signed the extension of the current tax rates back in December.”

Under Mr. Obama’s proposal, $800 billion of the $1.5 trillion in tax increases would come from allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire as scheduled for wealthier taxpayers, while extending them for individuals making less than $200,000 a year and families making less than $250,000. He won election on that promise and tried, but failed, to get Congress to go along with that earlier in his term. Now, it appears that he wants to campaign once again on that difference with Republicans.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said after Mr. Obama spoke that the scale of his proposal — $3 trillion, on top of $1 trillion already agreed to in the summer debt deal — was not an arbitrary figure, but was just big enough to be a real turning point in the deteriorating fiscal trends that otherwise portend a long-term crisis in the making.

“That’s what you need to bring the deficit down to a level we can sustain over time, to a level where the debt as a share of the economy as a whole is no longer growing, stabilizes, starts to come down,” Mr. Geithner said.

Jacob J. Lew, the White House budget director, said that letting some Bush tax cuts expire while extending others — part of what the White House calls its “balanced” approach — could bring the annual deficit and the cumulative national debt into a reasonable range as a percentage of the economy.

“A balanced approach will give you the ability to let the middle-class tax cuts continue and, if you enact the entire program that we’ve proposed, bring our deficit down to the low twos, like 2.3 percent of G.D.P., at the end of this period, and keep the debt as a percentage of G.D.P. in the low 70s instead of climbing up into a very dangerous range.”

Mr. Obama’s plan will hover over Congressional budget-cutting negotiations that are under way over the next two months. A bipartisan Congressional committee is charged with coming up with its own proposal by Nov. 23; unless passed by Congress by Dec. 23, $1.2 trillion in cuts to defense and entitlement programs will go into effect automatically in 2013.

Mr. Obama, however, is challenging the Congressional committee to go well beyond its mandate, which is to find $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in savings. “He’s showing them where they could find the savings,” one administration official said.

The Obama proposal has little chance of becoming law unless Republican lawmakers bend. But by focusing on the wealthiest Americans, the president is sharpening the contrast between Republicans and Democrats with a theme he can carry into his bid for re-election in 2012.

Mr. Obama’s proposal is also an effort to reassure Democrats who had feared that he would agree to changes in programs like Medicare without forcing Republicans to compromise on taxes. Indeed, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive center, warned in a statement that the president should not raise the Medicare eligibility age, advice that Mr. Obama, so far, seems to have heeded.
 

Brian Knowlton contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 19, 2011

An earlier version of this article, and a headline on the Web, mistakenly referred to a figure of more than $3 trillion as the amount of federal government spending that President Obama's plan would cut. The $3 trillion figure should have referred to the amount the plan would reduce the deficit over 10 years; $1.5 trillion of that deficit reduction will come from tax increases, not spending cuts. The article also gave an incorrect date for the deadline for the bipartisan Congressional committee to come up with its own cuts. It is Nov. 23, not Dec. 23. The article also included a reference to the scale of the proposal that incorrectly described it as a $3 billion plan on top of the $1 billion cut over the summer — the figures should have been $3 trillion and $1 trillion.

    Obama Vows Veto if Deficit Plan Has No Tax Increases, NYT, 19.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/politics/obama-vows-veto-if-deficit-plan-has-no-tax-increases.html

Obama Plan to Cut Deficit Will Trim Spending by $3 Trillion

September 18, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama will unveil a deficit-reduction plan on Monday that uses entitlement cuts, tax increases and war savings to reduce government spending by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, administration officials said.

The plan, which Mr. Obama will lay out Monday morning at the White House, is the administration’s opening move in sweeping negotiations on deficit reduction to be taken up by a joint House-Senate committee over the next two months. If a deal is not struck by Dec. 23, cuts could take effect automatically across government agencies.

Mr. Obama will call for $1.5 trillion in tax increases, primarily on the wealthy, through a combination of closing loopholes and limiting the amount that high earners can deduct. The proposal also includes $580 billion in adjustments to health and entitlement programs, including $248 billion to Medicare and $72 billion to Medicaid. Administration officials said that the Medicare cuts would not come from an increase in the Medicare eligibility age.

Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on some of the details of Mr. Obama’s proposal said that the plan also counts a savings of $1.1 trillion from the ending of the American combat mission in Iraq and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy.

That veto threat will put the president on a direct collision course with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who said last week that he would not support any legislation that included revenue increases in the form of higher taxes.

Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to receive sharp criticism from Congressional Republicans, who on Sunday were already taking apart one element of the proposal that the administration let out early: the so-called Buffett Rule. The rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, who has complained that he is taxed at a lower rate than his employees — calls for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers.

That proposal, which was disclosed on Saturday, was met with derision Sunday by Republican lawmakers, who said it amounted to “class warfare” and a political tactic intended to portray his opponents as indifferent to the hardships facing middle-class Americans.

Representative Paul D. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and a leading proponent of cutting spending on benefit programs like Medicare, said the proposal would weigh heavily on a stagnating economy.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Ryan said it would add “further instability to our system, more uncertainty, and it punishes job creation.”

“Class warfare,” he said, “may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”

Administration officials said Sunday night that they were not including any revenue from the Buffett Rule in Mr. Obama’s overall $3 trillion proposal, adding that it was more of a guiding principle the president will adopt as budget negotiations with Congress advance.

Mr. Obama has been citing Mr. Buffett as he promotes his separate $447 billion jobs-creation plan. He proposes to offset the cost of that plan and to reduce future budget deficits through higher taxes on the wealthy and on corporations after 2013, when the economy will presumably be healthier.

Nonetheless, Republicans made clear on Sunday that higher taxes on the wealthy were not acceptable to them. Appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said “it’s a bad thing to do in the middle of an economic downturn. And of course the economy, some would argue, is even worse now than it was when the president signed the extension of the current tax rates back in December.”

Under Mr. Obama’s proposal, $800 billion of the $1.5 trillion in tax increases would come from allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire. The other $700 billion, aides said, would come from a combination of closing loopholes and limiting deductions among individuals making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000.

Mr. Obama’s plan will hover over Congressional budget-cutting negotiations that are under way over the next two months. A bipartisan Congressional committee is charged with coming up with its own cuts by Dec. 23; otherwise $1.2 trillion in cuts to defense and entitlement programs will go into effect automatically in 2013.

Mr. Obama, however, is challenging the Congressional committee to go well beyond its mandate. “He’s showing them where they could find the savings,” one administration official said.

Liberal-leaning organizations were rallying behind Mr. Obama’s proposals on Sunday.

“The report that the president is planning to ask millionaires and billionaires to pay taxes at a higher rate than their secretaries pay is welcome news that will be wildly popular with voters,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive center, in a statement. “We applaud the president for heeding the advice from progressives that he go big on his jobs plan.”

The Obama proposal has little chance of becoming law unless Republican lawmakers bend. But by focusing on the wealthiest Americans, the president is sharpening the contrast between Republicans and Democrats with a theme he can carry into his bid for re-election in 2012.

Mr. Obama’s proposal is also an effort to reassure Democrats who had feared that he would agree to changes in programs like Medicare without forcing Republicans to compromise on taxes. Indeed, Mr. Hickey warned in his statement that the president should not raise the Medicare eligibility age, advice that Mr. Obama, so far, seems to have heeded.

 

Brian Knowlton contributed reporting.

    Obama Plan to Cut Deficit Will Trim Spending by $3 Trillion, NYT, 18.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/us/politics/obama-plan-to-cut-deficit-will-trim-spending.html

Leadership Crisis

September 17, 2011
The New York Times


As the economy faces the risk of another recession, and the 2012 campaign looms, President Obama has been groping for a response to the biggest crisis of his career. All he has to do is listen to the voters.

The Times and CBS News released a new poll on Friday, and once again we were impressed that Americans are a lot smarter than Republican leaders think, more willing to sacrifice for the national good than Democratic leaders give them credit for, and more eager to see the president get tough than Mr. Obama and his conflict-averse team realize.

So long as the politicians keep reinforcing their misconceptions — and listening only to themselves — the country has little chance of getting what the voters want most: jobs and a growing economy.

Despite what the Republicans loudly proclaim, Americans do not buy into economic theories that were disproved 25 years ago. What the new poll and others show is that most do not see the deficit and “big government” as the main problem, and they do not buy the endless calls for slashing spending and reckless deregulation.

A solid majority said creating jobs should be the highest priority for the government now and that payroll taxes should be cut to help with that. A whopping 8 in 10 think building bridges, roads and schools is important, which means — gasp — spending money.

Many Democrats are so gun shy that they don’t dare even to talk about raising taxes on the rich. But 71 percent of those polled said any plan to reduce the budget deficit should include both spending cuts and tax increases. And Americans understand that there are choices to be made; 56 percent said the wealthier should pay higher taxes to reduce the federal deficit.

It bears repeating that this is all entirely rational, and what the Republicans and some Democrats are proposing is absurd. The country has tried reckless deregulation and overly deep tax and spending cuts before. It brought more than one recession in the last century; caused the near collapse of the financial system and another recession in this one; and helped pile up the current deficit.

Mr. Obama has been making many of those points for months. But he has been doing it with speeches that, while eloquent, are often too long and nuanced, and then lack the kind of relentless repetition that is needed to drown out catchy but false Republican talking points.

He has wasted far too much time trying to puzzle out how he can shave policies down far enough to get the Republicans to cooperate. The answer has long been clear: He can’t. Since he was elected, the Republicans have openly said they would not work with him, and a year ago, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said explicitly that the Republicans’ goal was simply to deny Mr. Obama a second term. The new Times poll showed that Americans do not believe bipartisanship is achievable. Six in 10 Democrats want the president to challenge Republicans more. He should not worry about voters thinking he is being mean. What he should worry about is that he is not showing them that he is fighting all out for their interests.

Mr. Obama has done more for the country than many voters realize. The stimulus program so demonized by Republicans was too small, but it saved the economy from a complete collapse. Mr. Obama’s maligned decision to bail out the car companies saved large numbers of jobs. The huge benefits of his health care reform, which Republicans have vowed to repeal, will become clearer to Americans in the years ahead.

That is not enough. The president has done far too little for far too long to help struggling homeowners, and he must do more to put Americans back to work. That is why it is so important and welcome that he has finally begun to take on Congress. His speech to the joint session outlining a significant jobs program was followed by the sound demand that it be paid for with tax revenue increases.

The question is whether he will now fight hard for that program. To get there, he does not need the entire G.O.P. caucus, just a few members, but he also needs to show more strength in leading his own less than courageous caucus. And, win or lose, he needs to stay out of the bargaining backroom and keep making his case to the public.

There is so much noise out there that we are not sure most voters know how much they agree with the president. It is up Mr. Obama to show them.

    Leadership Crisis, NYT, 17.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/opinion/sunday/leadership-crisis.html

White House Weighs Limits of Terror Fight

September 15, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s legal team is split over how much latitude the United States has to kill Islamist militants in Yemen and Somalia, a question that could define the limits of the war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to administration and Congressional officials.

The debate, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, centers on whether the United States may take aim at only a handful of high-level leaders of militant groups who are personally linked to plots to attack the United States or whether it may also attack the thousands of low-level foot soldiers focused on parochial concerns: controlling the essentially ungoverned lands near the Gulf of Aden, which separates the countries.

The dispute over limits on the use of lethal force in the region — whether from drone strikes, cruise missiles or commando raids — has divided the State Department and the Pentagon for months, although to date it remains a merely theoretical disagreement. Current administration policy is to attack only “high-value individuals” in the region, as it has tried to do about a dozen times.

But the unresolved question is whether the administration can escalate attacks if it wants to against rank-and-file members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen, and the Somalia-based Shabab. The answer could lay the groundwork for a shift in the fight against terrorists as the original Al Qaeda, operating out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, grows weaker. That organization has been crippled by the killing of Osama bin Laden and by a fierce campaign of drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan, where the legal authority to attack militants who are battling United States forces in adjoining Afghanistan is not disputed inside the administration.

One senior official played down the disagreement on Thursday, characterizing it as a difference in policy emphasis, not legal views. Defense Department lawyers are trying to maintain maximum theoretical flexibility, while State Department lawyers are trying to reach out to European allies who think that there is no armed conflict, for legal purposes, outside of Afghanistan, and that the United States has a right to take action elsewhere only in self-defense, the official said.

But other officials insisted that the administration lawyers disagreed on the underlying legal authority of the United States to carry out such strikes.

Robert Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the laws of war, said the dispute reflected widespread disagreement about how to apply rules written for traditional wars to a conflict against a splintered network of terrorists — and fears that it could lead to an unending and unconstrained “global” war.

“It’s a tangled mess because the law is unsettled,” Professor Chesney said. “Do the rules vary from location to location? Does the armed conflict exist only in the current combat zone, such as Afghanistan, or does it follow wherever participants may go? Who counts as a party to the conflict? There’s a lot at stake in these debates.”

Counterterrorism officials have portrayed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — which was responsible for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009 — as an affiliate of Al Qaeda that may be more dangerous now than the remnants of the original group. Such officials have also expressed worry about the Shabab, though that group is generally more focused on local issues and has not been accused of attacking the United States.

In Pakistan, the United States has struck at Al Qaeda in part through “signature” strikes — those that are aimed at killing clusters of people whose identities are not known, but who are deemed likely members of a militant group based on patterns like training in terrorist camps. The dispute over targeting could affect whether that tactic might someday be used in Yemen and Somalia, too.

The Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh C. Johnson, has argued that the United States could significantly widen its targeting, officials said. His view, they explained, is that if a group has aligned itself with Al Qaeda against Americans, the United States can take aim at any of its combatants, especially in a country that is unable or unwilling to suppress them.

The State Department’s top lawyer, Harold H. Koh, has agreed that the armed conflict with Al Qaeda is not limited to the battlefield theater of Afghanistan and adjoining parts of Pakistan. But, officials say, he has also contended that international law imposes additional constraints on the use of force elsewhere. To kill people elsewhere, he has said, the United States must be able to justify the act as necessary for its self-defense — meaning it should focus only on individuals plotting to attack the United States.

The fate of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, hangs heavily over the targeting debate, officials said. In several habeas corpus lawsuits, judges have approved the detention of Qaeda suspects who were captured far from the Afghan battlefield, as well as detainees who were deemed members of a force that was merely “associated” with Al Qaeda. One part of the dispute is the extent to which rulings about detention are relevant to the targeting law.

Congress, too, may influence the outcome of the debate. It is considering, as part of a pending defense bill, a new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda and its associates. A version of the provision proposed by the House Armed Forces Committee would establish an expansive standard for the categories of groups that the United States may single out for military action, potentially making it easier for the United States to kill large numbers of low-level militants in places like Somalia.

In an interview, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said that he supported the House version and that he would go further. He said he would offer an amendment that would explicitly authorize the use of force against a list of specific groups including the Shabab, as well as set up a mechanism to add further groups to the list if they take certain “overt acts.”

“This is a worldwide conflict without borders,” Mr. Graham argued. “Restricting the definition of the battlefield and restricting the definition of the enemy allows the enemy to regenerate and doesn’t deter people who are on the fence.”

    White House Weighs Limits of Terror Fight, NYT, 15.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/us/white-house-weighs-limits-of-terror-fight.html

At Arlington, Obama Pays Tribute to US War Dead

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — President Barack Obama and first lady Michele Obama have visited Arlington National Cemetery where they paid tribute to members of the military killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One day before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Obamas made a pilgrimage to Section 60 of the cemetery. The White House says that's the burial ground for military personnel killed in those two wars. Those conflicts have claimed 6,213 military personnel.

At one gravesite, the Obamas stopped to talk with members of a family who appeared to be visiting a grave. The Obamas chatted a few minutes, posed for pictures and gave out handshakes and hugs.

Then the Obamas, hand in hand, strolled along one of the rows between identical white tombstones, pausing at some markers.

    At Arlington, Obama Pays Tribute to US War Dead, NYT, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/10/us/AP-US-Sept-11-Obama-Arlington.html

Despite Talk of Taming Partisanship,

a Show of It for President’s Remarks

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — It was, for a moment, Bizzaro World, with Republicans giving the president of the United States a standing ovation, while Democrats, in large part, remained firmly fixed in their seats as he expressed his desire for new trade agreements.

And it was a brief respite for Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader. He had spent much of the day talking about the need for conciliation, but had, for the previous 20 minutes, become more and more agitated as the speech went on, furiously taking notes as President Obama ticked off a list of tax cuts and programs he claimed that Republicans had supported.

For all the talk about the need to tame partisanship, both chambers of Congress put on a relatively full display of it Thursday night, with Democrats hooting and clapping at Mr. Obama’s remarks about taxes, entitlement programs and teachers, and Republicans leading the charge when the talk turned to veterans and regulations.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was first into the chamber, wearing a lavender tie, tan and bright white smile. He was followed by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who was immediately set upon by a freshman Democrat, followed by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, who stood with his hands folded in front of him, pensive, speaking to few.

Unlike the State of the Union, when Democrats and Republicans sat together to show good will and cheer, members sat largely by party this time, as the room braced with anticipation for the speech. Oddly, former Representative David Wu of Oregon, a Democratic who resigned under the cloud of scandal before the August recess, sat with a young girl toward the back of the chamber, as others more or less avoided him.

Republicans were divided between those who criticized the president before he had uttered a word and those who reached with tentative hands toward an olive branch, citing the exhaustion of the American public with perpetual partisanship.

After the speech, Mr. Cantor said he liked some of the president’s proposals, including one to provide tax relief to small businesses, and would try to “peel off” such elements and pass them separately.

However, Mr. Cantor criticized Mr. Obama for not specifying how he would pay for the new initiatives. He also complained that the president had offered his proposals on a “take it or leave it” basis, presumably referring to Mr. Obama’s pledge to take his case “to every corner of this country,” beginning with Mr. Cantor’s hometown, Richmond, on Friday.

Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, hailed that part of the speech, saying it would “energize the base” of the Democratic Party and enhance the president’s prospects for re-election.

Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, also had election plans in mind on Thursday, but with a different twist. Mr. Sessions sent a plan to all Republican House candidates, declaring the start of the 2012 campaign season and encouraging them to criticize the president often.

A handful of House and Senate Republicans decided the president’s speech did not merit their attendance at all, even though Speaker John A. Boehner discouraged boycotts.

“I have encouraged my colleagues to come tonight and to listen to the president,” Mr. Boehner told reporters. “He is the president of the United States and I believe that all members ought to be here to do this. Doesn’t mean they’re going to.”

There were some notable guests on hand though, many of them corporate chief executives — the presumed creators of jobs.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, invited Henry Juszkiewicz, the chief executive of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, to highlight the fact that two Gibson work sites had been raided by federal agents apparently in search of illegal, partly finished, wooden guitar fingerboard blanks from India. Since the visit, Mr. Juszkiewicz has become a walking, breathing, Republican talking point against excessive regulation.

The first lady, Michelle Obama, invited her own business people including Kenneth I. Chenault, the chairman of American Express.

The Republicans presented no official response to the president’s speech, with Mr. Boehner suggesting that his party did not want to get in the way of the desire of many Americans to watch the first game of the N.F.L season rather than be “forced to watch some politician they don’t want to listen to.”

Mr. Reid had scheduled a post-speech vote on a Republican resolution to disapprove the increase to the debt limit. It failed on its first procedural vote, with 52 Democrats opposed. The inconvenient vote had an icing-on-the-cake quality for Mr. Reid, as it forced Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, to stay in Washington rather than flee to his home state to watch the Saints-Packers N.F.L. season opener, as he had said he would.

 

Robert Pear contributed reporting.

    Despite Talk of Taming Partisanship, a Show of It for President’s Remarks, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09scene.html

For Obama,

a ‘Moment’ Speech at a Time of Great Obstacles to Change

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Enshrined in the mythology of the American presidency, there is something called a moment speech, an address to the nation so forceful and eloquent that it changes the way the country feels about its leadership and even itself.

Long before Barack Obama took office, many of his supporters and even a few of his critics thought he would be the kind of president who could give those kinds of speeches. Ever since he took office there have been many wondering why these kinds of speeches have not been coming, and whether the president’s hallmark reliance on calm, rational explanation needs more fire to galvanize the nation and persuade his adversaries. Thursday night’s address to Congress on job creation, coming as the prospect of a double-dip recession looms, seemed to be another chance for an address that would do those things.

But a moment speech is less about the speech than it is about the moment. And as interviews with political historians and citizens around the country on Thursday made clear, Mr. Obama was approaching the lectern in a moment that offered more obstacles than opportunities for bringing about real change.

Even in the strictest sense, the timing of the speech was inauspicious. After a partisan standoff over scheduling with the House speaker, Representative John A. Boehner, who asked the president to move his address from Wednesday night, the speech took place in a pre-prime-time slot shoved up against the start of the N.F.L. season.

But in more momentous ways, the president was facing serious disadvantages, some of his own making.

Speeches, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, are about context. Some of the most memorable and praised speeches — by Mr. Obama after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, for example, or by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks — were delivered in moments of pronounced national grief or anxiety, when the country longed for a voice of reassurance.

Thursday’s jobs speech, on the other hand, comes after a season of nasty partisanship, a time where the country’s biggest threat seemed not to come from outside enemies or natural disasters but the inability of its own political leadership to get basic things done. The economy that the president is addressing is in crisis, but a crisis that has been excruciatingly prolonged, beaten out in a tiresome tempo of starts and stalls.

“The economy is a mess,” said Becky Wallard, 71, a retired teacher in Atlanta. “There’s no speech that can hide that.”

Even Mr. Obama’s defenders acknowledge that the political reality in Washington, with the committed opposition of a Republican Congress, makes the likelihood of bold action on the president’s part very slim.

“At this point, his speeches haven’t really been earth-shattering or made a major difference,” said Lily Wolk, 59, who was sitting at a Starbucks in Los Angeles and who said she was hopeful nonetheless. “I think that he’s got his hands tied.”

Some political historians and polling experts suggested that this was not a problem particular to Mr. Obama and that anyone maintaining that the president has lost some special magic, or was choosing not to use it, is simply misreading history.

Despite the insta-polls insta-punditry that usually follow on a big speech, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that addresses like this do not have a major impact on public opinion over the short or long term. There has been little major polling movement after other speeches in Mr. Obama’s presidency, including the State of the Union addresses and his speech on health care, and few think a speech on the economy would be an exception.

“It’s just illusory to think that presidents can provide a narrative that can make unemployment sound acceptable,” said George C. Edwards, a professor of political science at Texas A & M University and author of “On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit.”

Professor Edwards pointed out further that the kind of people who have not made up their minds about the president or his policies are the kind of people who are least likely to watch speeches like this. These voters would be moved almost exclusively by tangible results.

In this sense, Mr. Obama’s reputation as an orator could backfire among those who believe that his word-action ratio was askew, or that his famed professorial approach was unsuited to the dire times at hand.

“Supposedly the best way to convince Obama of anything is to say it’s the consensus of experts,” said David Morrell, 62, a library custodian in Atlanta who described himself as a dispirited Democrat, and who voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. “Everything that has been disastrous in this country has had a ton of experts behind it.”

Mr. Morrell added, “It doesn’t seem to be in his nature to bring up anything other than superficialities.”

Jean Garber, 75, a retiree in Denver put it more succinctly: “Too many speeches. Every time you turn around!”

Still, there are others, mainly supporters of the president, who believed that a strong voice of reassurance was more important than the policy details and that Mr. Obama was capable of delivering that reassurance.

“I think he recognizes that the country is so worried right now,” said Jonathan Lee, a physician from Norwood, Mass. “It’s more a matter of saying, ‘I recognize there is immense trouble.’ ”

Dr. Lee said the would not change his opinion: he was a committed backer of the president. Anyway, he added, he was probably going to watch the Red Sox game instead.

 

Reporting was contributed by Abby Goodnough, Ian Lovett, Dan Frosch, Robbie Brown, Emily S. Williams and Adrienne Hilbert.

    For Obama, a ‘Moment’ Speech at a Time of Great Obstacles to Change, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09voters.html

Plan’s Focus

on Social Security Taxes Reflects Its Modest Ambitions

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

WASHINGTON — The centerpiece of President Obama’s job-creation plan, a proposal to further reduce Social Security taxes, is emblematic of a package of modest measures that some economists describe as helpful but not sufficient to lift the economy from its malaise.

In his speech on Thursday night, Mr. Obama asked Congress to cut the amount that workers must contribute toward Social Security benefits, extending an existing measure, and to reduce, for the first time, the matching payments that employers are required to make.

The cuts, which would deprive the government of about $240 billion in revenues next year, are the largest items in the president’s $447 billion job-creation plan, which includes payments to unemployed workers, incentives for companies that hire workers and increased federal spending on infrastructure. All of the measures will require the support of Congressional Republicans.

Cutting taxes is a time-honored strategy for stimulating growth. The formula is simple: Workers will spend more money when their paychecks grow, and companies will respond to that increased demand by hiring more workers, creating a cycle that increases the pace of growth.

Preliminary analyses of the White House plan estimate that the tax cuts could create more than 50,000 jobs a month, a significant boost considering that employment climbed by 35,000 jobs, on average, in each of the last three months. But even if Congress immediately agreed to pass the president’s entire plan, the economy is likely to continue to struggle. Companies must increase payrolls by about 100,000 people every month to keep pace with population growth.

Still, Joel Prakken, senior managing director at Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, said that the benefits of creating more than half a million jobs next year should not be minimized. “It’s going to make the unemployment rate lower than it otherwise would be,” he said.

The other elements of Mr. Obama’s plan, however, highlight the challenges of doing more. Economists regard benefits for unemployed workers as among the most effective means of increasing growth because people without jobs tend to spend the money quickly. But Republicans generally oppose increased spending on social programs.

Infrastructure spending, by contrast, enjoys bipartisan support, but breaking ground on new projects can take a long time, delaying the impact on the economy.

The administration’s focus on payroll tax cuts, which became more ambitious in the days leading up to the speech, is an exercise in the art of the possible. While economists regard other kinds of measures as potentially more effective, the cuts would put money directly in the hands of consumers, and Republican leaders have indicated they are willing to consider the proposal.

Seeking to exploit that potential opening, the White House decided to considerably expand the scope of the cuts in the latter stages of planning.

The Social Security tax is paid in equal shares by workers and their employers. Both pay 6.2 percent of a worker’s annual income up to $106,800. The president’s plan would reduce the amount that workers pay by half, a savings of $1,500 for an employee who makes $50,000.

The current tax cut, set to expire in December, has reduced the tax to a rate of 4.2 percent. The new proposal would further reduce it to 3.1 percent in 2012.

In the present climate, however, there are significant reasons to doubt that consumers are honoring the predictions of economic models by taking that money and racing out to spend it.

Families are devoting a larger share of income to paying debts, which is important for the economy’s long-term health but does nothing to stimulate growth. Concern about future earnings also is weighing on many households, reducing their willingness to spend. A recent study found that 62 percent of households expect their income to stay the same or decline over the next year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the lowest level of confidence in 30 years.

“One striking aspect of the recovery is the unusual weakness in household spending,” the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Thursday in Minneapolis.

There is also broad disagreement among economists about the president’s companion proposal to give companies a tax break, too.

The plan is divided in two parts. The amount employers must pay also would be reduced by half on payrolls up to $5 million, a condition that the White House said would focus the benefits on small businesses. And the plan would waive all payroll taxes on increased spending on salaries — either for new hires or raises — up to the first $50 million in increased wages.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that a tax cut for employers would have a greater impact than a tax cut for workers. The nonpartisan office reported that every dollar in reduced taxes on employers would generate up to $1.20 in economic activity, while every dollar in reduced taxes on workers would generate up to 90 cents because workers tend to save a portion of their additional income.

Some independent economists, however, doubt that the tax cut will persuade companies to make significant hires because the primary issue remains a lack of demand. If a company cannot sell more sofas, it does not need more workers to make them, whether the cost of each new worker is $106,200, including employer payroll taxes, or only $100,000, if the tax cut is enacted. As a result, they argue, companies are even more likely than consumers to refrain from spending the money.

Mark Thoma, a University of Oregon economist, said that company tax cuts should be tied to hiring: “If they don’t spend the money on employees, you don’t get a demand-side effect.”

Studies of similar tax cuts in other countries suggest the truth lies in between. A 2008 study by the Government Institute for Economic Research in Finland, for example, found that companies shared about half the money from a payroll tax cut with workers in the form of higher wages.

The study also found, however, that there were “no significant effects on employment.”

Cutting payroll taxes does not affect the government’s obligation to pay benefits to older Americans. Indeed, the White House plan specifies that amounts not paid by workers and companies must be paid to Social Security from other sources of government revenue.

But some advocates, noting that temporary tax cuts have a history of becoming permanent, worry that reducing direct Social Security revenues could undermine political support for the program by making it seem more like a form of welfare.

The Social Security tax “creates a stake for every American working person in the system,” said Nancy Altman, co-director of the Social Security Works coalition. “If you start meddling with that you start to pull apart the political contract.”

    Plan’s Focus on Social Security Taxes Reflects Its Modest Ambitions, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09tax.html

The Jobs Speech

September 8, 2011
The New York Times

With more than 14 million people out of work and all Americans fearing a double-dip recession, President Obama stood face to face Thursday night with a Congress that has perversely resisted lifting a finger to help. Some Republicans refused to even sit and listen. But those Americans who did heard him unveil an ambitious proposal — more robust and far-reaching than expected — that may be the first crucial step in reigniting the economy.

Perhaps as important, they heard a president who was lately passive but now newly energized, who passionately contrasted his vision of a government that plays its part in tough times with the Republicans’ vision of a government starved of the means to do so.

The president’s program was only a start, and it was vague on several important elements, notably a direct path to mortgage relief for troubled borrowers. And some of the tax cuts for employers may prove ineffective. Nonetheless, at $447 billion, the plan is large enough to potentially lower the unemployment rate and broad enough to be a significant stimulus.

As Mr. Obama pointed out, virtually every proposal on his agenda has been accepted over the years by Democrats and an earlier generation of Republicans that was not reflexively opposed to a recession-fighting fiscal policy. This generation is different, and the president’s challenge to purely partisan resistance was forceful and clear.

“The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy,” he said.

Though he went on too long, he was authoritative in demanding that Congress pass his plan quickly and in laying out its benefits for average Americans. He directly, even mockingly, challenged the increasingly nihilistic Republican view that government’s very presence is noxious. Just as Lincoln helped start the transcontinental railroad and land-grant colleges, he said, the two parties must together push the country past its economic crisis. Waiting for the next election will waste valuable time, he said.

“The people who sent us here — the people who hired us to work for them — they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months,” he said. “Some of them are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, even day to day. They need help, and they need it now.”

At the core of his plan are two cuts in the payroll tax — one for employers and one for employees — that have long been embraced by Republicans. The employee cut would reduce the tax to 3.1 percent of income instead of the 4.2 percent negotiated last year. (It was 6.2 percent originally.) Although it could have been better targeted to low- and middle-income families, it will put money in people’s pockets quickly and increase consumer demand.

For employers, the plan would halve the payroll tax for most small and medium-size businesses and would provide an incentive for hiring by temporarily removing the tax for new employees (and on raises for existing ones). Companies would also get a $4,000 tax credit for hiring anyone out of work for more than six months. Unemployment insurance would be extended for five million people. Though Mr. Obama said more Americans would be able to refinance their homes at low interest rates, he did not say how.

The plan would provide $35 billion in state aid to prevent up to 280,000 teacher layoffs while hiring tens of thousands more, along with additional police officers and firefighters. It would create jobs to modernize 35,000 schools across the country. And it would accelerate $50 billion in improvements for highways, railroads, transit and aviation.

Though the plan would be paid for by more deficit reduction, he left those vital details until later. It was gratifying to hear him call for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but his warning of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid — lifelines to the most vulnerable — raised concerns about trading one important program for another.

We hope Mr. Obama keeps his promise to take his proposals all over the country. The need to act is urgent.

    The Jobs Speech, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/president-obamas-jobs-speech.html

Obama Challenges Congress on Job Plan

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Mixing politically moderate proposals with a punchy tone, President Obama challenged lawmakers on Thursday to “pass this jobs bill” — a blunt call on Congress to enact his $447 billion package of tax cuts and new government spending, designed to revive a stalling economy and his own political standing.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Obama ticked off a list of measures that he emphasized had been supported by both Republicans and Democrats in the past. To keep the proposals from adding to the swelling federal deficit, Mr. Obama also said he would encourage a more ambitious target for long-term reduction of the deficit.

“You should pass this jobs plan right away,” the president declared over and over in his 32-minute speech, in which he eschewed his trademark soaring oratory in favor of a plainspoken appeal for action, stiffened by a few sarcastic political jabs.

With Republicans listening politely but with stone-faced expressions, Mr. Obama said, “The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy.”

Though Mr. Obama’s proposals — including an expansion of a cut in payroll taxes and new spending on public works — were widely expected, the package was substantially larger than predicted, and much of the money would flow into the economic bloodstream in 2012. The pace would be similar to that of the $787 billion stimulus package passed in 2009, which was spread over more than two years. Analysts said that, if passed, the package would likely lift growth somewhat.

While Republicans did not often applaud Mr. Obama,, party leaders greeted his proposals with uncharacteristic conciliation. Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and other Republicans signaled a willingness to consider at least some of the measures, reflecting what some have described as anger in their home districts over the political dysfunction in Washington.

“The proposals the president outlined tonight merit consideration,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement. “We hope he gives serious consideration to our ideas as well.”

Still, analysts said it was unlikely that the White House would win Congressional approval for many elements of the package.

For Mr. Obama, burdened by the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, the address crystallized the multiple challenges he faces, among them reviving a torpid economy with a Republican House that, however receptive some of its leaders appeared Thursday, has staked out a relentlessly confrontational course with the White House. The president must also shake off a perception, after so many speeches on the economy, that he has not delivered on the promise of his oratory.

After weeks on the defensive, however, Mr. Obama seemed to get off his back foot. He framed the debate over the economy as a tug-of-war between mainstream American values and a radical, antigovernment orthodoxy that holds that “the only thing we can do restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.”

With a difficult re-election bid looming, Mr. Obama declared that his vision would appeal to more voters. “These are real choices we have to make,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure I know what most Americans would choose. It’s not even close.”

At times, he edged into sarcasm. Promoting the extension in the payroll tax cut to Republicans, Mr. Obama said: “I know some of you have sworn oaths never to raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away.”

The centerpiece of the bill, known as the American Jobs Act, is an extension and expansion of the cut in payroll taxes, worth $240 billion, under which the tax paid by employees would be cut in half through 2012. Smaller businesses would also get a cut in their payroll taxes, as well as a tax holiday for hiring new employees. The plan also provides $140 billion for modernizing schools and repairing roads and bridges — spending that Mr. Obama portrayed as critical to maintaining America’s competitiveness.

The president insisted that everything in the package would be paid for by raising the target for long-term spending cuts to be negotiated by a special Congressional committee. He did not go through the arithmetic, but said he would send a detailed proposal to Congress in a week. Senior White House officials said the amount of increased spending cuts would hinge on how much of the plan gets through Congress.

Mr. Obama said most of his proposals had support from both parties, a contention that Republican leaders rejected. “There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation,” he said. “Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by Democrats and Republicans.”

After a summer consumed by bitter debate over how to reduce the debt and deficit, Mr. Obama kept his focus squarely on the need to create jobs. He acknowledged that the government’s role in fixing the problem was limited, but rejected the Republican argument that Washington’s major contribution would be to eliminate regulations.

“Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers,” he said. “But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.”

Still, even if every one of the proposals were passed by Congress — something that is extremely unlikely to happen — the measures would not solve the economy’s problems, forecasters say, though they would likely spur some growth.

And that encapsulates the quandary for Mr. Obama: so long as there is no evidence of improvement in the job market, his economic call to arms — backed by a familiar list of proposed remedies — may not resonate with an American public grown weary of stagnation and an unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 percent.

Even the scheduling of the speech set off a tempest when Mr. Boehner rejected Mr. Obama’s request to address Congress on Wednesday, the night of a Republican presidential debate. At Mr. Boehner’s request, the White House agreed to move the date to Thursday, which meant Mr. Obama had to wrap up his remarks before the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers kicked off the N.F.L. season. As Mr. Obama was entering the chamber, microphones caught him assuring a lawmaker that his speech would not interfere with the game.

In setting out his program, Mr. Obama was, in effect, daring Republicans not to pass measures that enjoy support among independent voters and business leaders. If the Republicans refuse to embrace at least some of the measures, administration officials said, Mr. Obama will take them directly to the American public, portraying Congress as do-nothing and obstructionist.

“Maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box,” Mr. Obama told the lawmakers. “But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here — the people who hired us to work for them — they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months.”

    Obama Challenges Congress on Job Plan, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09payroll.html

Transcript: Obama’s Speech to Congress on Jobs

September 8, 2011
The New York Times


The following is a transcript of President Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress about jobs and the economy, as provided by the White House.

MR. OBAMA: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, and fellow Americans:

Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse.

This past week, reporters have been asking, “What will this speech mean for the President? What will it mean for Congress? How will it affect their polls, and the next election?”

But the millions of Americans who are watching right now, they don’t care about politics. They have real-life concerns. Many have spent months looking for work. Others are doing their best just to scrape by -- giving up nights out with the family to save on gas or make the mortgage; postponing retirement to send a kid to college.

These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.

For decades now, Americans have watched that compact erode. They have seen the decks too often stacked against them. And they know that Washington has not always put their interests first.

The people of this country work hard to meet their responsibilities. The question tonight is whether we’ll meet ours. The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy. (Applause.) The question is -- the question is whether we can restore some of the fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning.

Those of us here tonight can’t solve all our nation’s woes. Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers. But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.

I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans -- including many who sit here tonight. And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything. (Applause.)

The purpose of the American Jobs Act is simple: to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working. It will create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed. (Applause.) It will provide -- it will provide a tax break for companies who hire new workers, and it will cut payroll taxes in half for every working American and every small business. (Applause.) It will provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services. You should pass this jobs plan right away. (Applause.)

Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin. And you know that while corporate profits have come roaring back, smaller companies haven’t. So for everyone who speaks so passionately about making life easier for “job creators,” this plan is for you. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill -- pass this jobs bill, and starting tomorrow, small businesses will get a tax cut if they hire new workers or if they raise workers’ wages. Pass this jobs bill, and all small business owners will also see their payroll taxes cut in half next year. (Applause.) If you have 50 employees -- if you have 50 employees making an average salary, that’s an $80,000 tax cut. And all businesses will be able to continue writing off the investments they make in 2012.

It’s not just Democrats who have supported this kind of proposal. Fifty House Republicans have proposed the same payroll tax cut that’s in this plan. You should pass it right away. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and we can put people to work rebuilding America. Everyone here knows we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over the country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. It’s an outrage.

Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us a economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America? (Applause.)

There are private construction companies all across America just waiting to get to work. There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. A public transit project in Houston that will help clear up one of the worst areas of traffic in the country. And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating. How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart? This is America. Every child deserves a great school -- and we can give it to them, if we act now. (Applause.)

The American Jobs Act will repair and modernize at least 35,000 schools. It will put people to work right now fixing roofs and windows, installing science labs and high-speed Internet in classrooms all across this country. It will rehabilitate homes and businesses in communities hit hardest by foreclosures. It will jumpstart thousands of transportation projects all across the country. And to make sure the money is properly spent, we’re building on reforms we’ve already put in place. No more earmarks. No more boondoggles. No more bridges to nowhere. We’re cutting the red tape that prevents some of these projects from getting started as quickly as possible. And we’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly a construction project is needed and how much good it will do for the economy. (Applause.)

This idea came from a bill written by a Texas Republican and a Massachusetts Democrat. The idea for a big boost in construction is supported by America’s largest business organization and America’s largest labor organization. It’s the kind of proposal that’s been supported in the past by Democrats and Republicans alike. You should pass it right away. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and thousands of teachers in every state will go back to work. These are the men and women charged with preparing our children for a world where the competition has never been tougher. But while they’re adding teachers in places like South Korea, we’re laying them off in droves. It’s unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get extra tax credits if they hire America’s veterans. We ask these men and women to leave their careers, leave their families, risk their lives to fight for our country. The last thing they should have to do is fight for a job when they come home. (Applause.)

Pass this bill, and hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged young people will have the hope and the dignity of a summer job next year. And their parents -- (applause) -- their parents, low-income Americans who desperately want to work, will have more ladders out of poverty.

Pass this jobs bill, and companies will get a $4,000 tax credit if they hire anyone who has spent more than six months looking for a job. (Applause.) We have to do more to help the long-term unemployed in their search for work. This jobs plan builds on a program in Georgia that several Republican leaders have highlighted, where people who collect unemployment insurance participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills while they look for a permanent job. The plan also extends unemployment insurance for another year. (Applause.) If the millions of unemployed Americans stopped getting this insurance, and stopped using that money for basic necessities, it would be a devastating blow to this economy. Democrats and Republicans in this chamber have supported unemployment insurance plenty of times in the past. And in this time of prolonged hardship, you should pass it again -- right away. (Applause.)

Pass this jobs bill, and the typical working family will get a $1,500 tax cut next year. Fifteen hundred dollars that would have been taken out of your pocket will go into your pocket. This expands on the tax cut that Democrats and Republicans already passed for this year. If we allow that tax cut to expire -- if we refuse to act -- middle-class families will get hit with a tax increase at the worst possible time. We can’t let that happen. I know that some of you have sworn oaths to never raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live. Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away. (Applause.)

This is the American Jobs Act. It will lead to new jobs for construction workers, for teachers, for veterans, for first responders, young people and the long-term unemployed. It will provide tax credits to companies that hire new workers, tax relief to small business owners, and tax cuts for the middle class. And here’s the other thing I want the American people to know: The American Jobs Act will not add to the deficit. It will be paid for. And here’s how. (Applause.)

The agreement we passed in July will cut government spending by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. It also charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I am asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act. And a week from Monday, I’ll be releasing a more ambitious deficit plan -- a plan that will not only cover the cost of this jobs bill, but stabilize our debt in the long run. (Applause.)

This approach is basically the one I’ve been advocating for months. In addition to the trillion dollars of spending cuts I’ve already signed into law, it’s a balanced plan that would reduce the deficit by making additional spending cuts, by making modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and by reforming our tax code in a way that asks the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share. (Applause.) What’s more, the spending cuts wouldn’t happen so abruptly that they’d be a drag on our economy, or prevent us from helping small businesses and middle-class families get back on their feet right away.

Now, I realize there are some in my party who don’t think we should make any changes at all to Medicare and Medicaid, and I understand their concerns. But here’s the truth: Millions of Americans rely on Medicare in their retirement. And millions more will do so in the future. They pay for this benefit during their working years. They earn it. But with an aging population and rising health care costs, we are spending too fast to sustain the program. And if we don’t gradually reform the system while protecting current beneficiaries, it won’t be there when future retirees need it. We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it. (Applause.)

I am also -- I’m also well aware that there are many Republicans who don’t believe we should raise taxes on those who are most fortunate and can best afford it. But here is what every American knows: While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and most profitable corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary -- an outrage he has asked us to fix. (Laughter.) We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake and where everybody pays their fair share. (Applause.) And by the way, I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.

I’ll also offer ideas to reform a corporate tax code that stands as a monument to special interest influence in Washington. By eliminating pages of loopholes and deductions, we can lower one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. (Applause.) Our tax code should not give an advantage to companies that can afford the best-connected lobbyists. It should give an advantage to companies that invest and create jobs right here in the United States of America. (Applause.)

So we can reduce this deficit, pay down our debt, and pay for this jobs plan in the process. But in order to do this, we have to decide what our priorities are. We have to ask ourselves, “What’s the best way to grow the economy and create jobs?”

Should we keep tax loopholes for oil companies? Or should we use that money to give small business owners a tax credit when they hire new workers? Because we can’t afford to do both. Should we keep tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires? Or should we put teachers back to work so our kids can graduate ready for college and good jobs? (Applause.) Right now, we can’t afford to do both.

This isn’t political grandstanding. This isn’t class warfare. This is simple math. (Laughter.) This is simple math. These are real choices. These are real choices that we’ve got to make. And I’m pretty sure I know what most Americans would choose. It’s not even close. And it’s time for us to do what’s right for our future. (Applause.)

Now, the American Jobs Act answers the urgent need to create jobs right away. But we can’t stop there. As I’ve argued since I ran for this office, we have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future -- an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security. We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth. (Applause.)

And this task of making America more competitive for the long haul, that’s a job for all of us. For government and for private companies. For states and for local communities -- and for every American citizen. All of us will have to up our game. All of us will have to change the way we do business.

My administration can and will take some steps to improve our competitiveness on our own. For example, if you’re a small business owner who has a contract with the federal government, we’re going to make sure you get paid a lot faster than you do right now. (Applause.) We’re also planning to cut away the red tape that prevents too many rapidly growing startup companies from raising capital and going public. And to help responsible homeowners, we’re going to work with federal housing agencies to help more people refinance their mortgages at interest rates that are now near 4 percent. That’s a step -- (applause) -- I know you guys must be for this, because that’s a step that can put more than $2,000 a year in a family’s pocket, and give a lift to an economy still burdened by the drop in housing prices.

So, some things we can do on our own. Other steps will require congressional action. Today you passed reform that will speed up the outdated patent process, so that entrepreneurs can turn a new idea into a new business as quickly as possible. That’s the kind of action we need. Now it’s time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements that would make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama and Colombia and South Korea -– while also helping the workers whose jobs have been affected by global competition. (Applause.) If Americans can buy Kias and Hyundais, I want to see folks in South Korea driving Fords and Chevys and Chryslers. (Applause.) I want to see more products sold around the world stamped with the three proud words: “Made in America.” That’s what we need to get done. (Applause.)

And on all of our efforts to strengthen competitiveness, we need to look for ways to work side by side with America’s businesses. That’s why I’ve brought together a Jobs Council of leaders from different industries who are developing a wide range of new ideas to help companies grow and create jobs.

Already, we’ve mobilized business leaders to train 10,000 American engineers a year, by providing company internships and training. Other businesses are covering tuition for workers who learn new skills at community colleges. And we’re going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America. (Applause) If we provide the right incentives, the right support -- and if we make sure our trading partners play by the rules -- we can be the ones to build everything from fuel-efficient cars to advanced biofuels to semiconductors that we sell all around the world. That’s how America can be number one again. And that’s how America will be number one again. (Applause.)

Now, I realize that some of you have a different theory on how to grow the economy. Some of you sincerely believe that the only solution to our economic challenges is to simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations. (Applause.)

Well, I agree that we can’t afford wasteful spending, and I’ll work with you, with Congress, to root it out. And I agree that there are some rules and regulations that do put an unnecessary burden on businesses at a time when they can least afford it. (Applause.) That’s why I ordered a review of all government regulations. So far, we’ve identified over 500 reforms, which will save billions of dollars over the next few years. (Applause.) We should have no more regulation than the health, safety and security of the American people require. Every rule should meet that common-sense test. (Applause.)

But what we can’t do -- what I will not do -- is let this economic crisis be used as an excuse to wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades. (Applause.) I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy. (Applause.) We shouldn’t be in a race to the bottom, where we try to offer the cheapest labor and the worst pollution standards. America should be in a race to the top. And I believe we can win that race. (Applause.)

In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own -- that’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.

Yes, we are rugged individualists. Yes, we are strong and self-reliant. And it has been the drive and initiative of our workers and entrepreneurs that has made this economy the engine and the envy of the world.

But there’s always been another thread running throughout our history -- a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party. But in the middle of a civil war, he was also a leader who looked to the future -- a Republican President who mobilized government to build the Transcontinental Railroad -- (applause) -- launch the National Academy of Sciences, set up the first land grant colleges. (Applause.) And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.

Ask yourselves -- where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the G.I. Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance? (Applause.)

How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? (Applause.) How many Americans would have suffered as a result?

No single individual built America on their own. We built it together. We have been, and always will be, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all; a nation with responsibilities to ourselves and with responsibilities to one another. And members of Congress, it is time for us to meet our responsibilities. (Applause.)

Every proposal I’ve laid out tonight is the kind that’s been supported by Democrats and Republicans in the past. Every proposal I’ve laid out tonight will be paid for. And every proposal is designed to meet the urgent needs of our people and our communities.

Now, I know there’s been a lot of skepticism about whether the politics of the moment will allow us to pass this jobs plan -- or any jobs plan. Already, we’re seeing the same old press releases and tweets flying back and forth. Already, the media has proclaimed that it’s impossible to bridge our differences. And maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box.

But know this: The next election is 14 months away. And the people who sent us here -- the people who hired us to work for them -- they don’t have the luxury of waiting 14 months. (Applause.) Some of them are living week to week, paycheck to paycheck, even day to day. They need help, and they need it now.

I don’t pretend that this plan will solve all our problems. It should not be, nor will it be, the last plan of action we propose. What’s guided us from the start of this crisis hasn’t been the search for a silver bullet. It’s been a commitment to stay at it -- to be persistent -- to keep trying every new idea that works, and listen to every good proposal, no matter which party comes up with it.

Regardless of the arguments we’ve had in the past, regardless of the arguments we will have in the future, this plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it. (Applause.) And I intend to take that message to every corner of this country. (Applause.) And I ask -- I ask every American who agrees to lift your voice: Tell the people who are gathered here tonight that you want action now. Tell Washington that doing nothing is not an option. Remind us that if we act as one nation and one people, we have it within our power to meet this challenge.

President Kennedy once said, “Our problems are man-made –- therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.”

These are difficult years for our country. But we are Americans. We are tougher than the times we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been. So let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work, and let’s show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth. (Applause.)

Thank you very much. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

    Transcript: Obama’s Speech to Congress on Jobs, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/us/politics/09text-obama-jobs-speech.html

A Bad Call on Ozone

September 2, 2011
The New York Times

President Obama’s decision not to proceed with stronger air-quality standards governing ozone is a setback for public health and the environment and a victory for industry and its Republican friends in Congress.

In a terse, three-paragraph statement Friday morning, the president said he did not want to burden industry with new rules at a time of great economic uncertainty, and he pledged to revisit the issue in two years. But since the proposed rules would not have begun to bite for several years, his decision seemed driven more than anything else by politics and his own re-election campaign.

Ozone is the main component of smog, a leading cause of respiratory and other diseases. The standards governing allowable ozone levels of ozone in communities across the country have not changed since 1997. In 2008, the Bush administration proposed a new standard that was a good deal weaker than the recommendations of the E.P.A.’s science advisers and were promptly challenged in courts by state governments and environmental groups.

This summer, Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent a new and stronger standard to the White House — igniting a fierce lobbying campaign by industry groups asserting that the standards would require impossibly costly investments in new pollution controls and throw people out of work. Industry has made these arguments before. They almost always turn out to be exaggerated.

The president sought to assuage Ms. Jackson by reminding her that a host of other environmental rules approved or in the works — including mandating cleaner cars and fewer power plant emissions of mercury and other pollutants — would do much to clean the air. All true. But there is still no excuse for compromising on public health and allowing politics to trump science.

    A Bad Call on Ozone, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/a-bad-call-on-ozone.html

Obama Administration Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules

September 2, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — President Obama abandoned a contentious new air pollution rule on Friday, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Business groups and Republicans in Congress had complained that meeting the new standard, which governs emissions of so-called ground-level ozone, would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The White House announcement came barely an hour after another weak jobs report from the Labor Department and in the midst of an intensifying political debate over the impact of federal regulations on job creation that is already a major focus of the presidential campaign.

The president is planning a major address next week on new measures to stimulate employment. Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail have harshly criticized a number of the administration’s environmental and health regulations, which they say are depressing hiring and forcing the export of jobs.

The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion. The change would have thrown hundreds of American counties out of compliance with the Clean Air Act and required a major enforcement effort by state and local officials, as well as new emissions controls at industries across the country.

The administration will try to follow the more lenient Bush administration standard set in 2008 until a scheduled reconsideration of acceptable pollution limits in 2013. Environmental advocates vowed on Friday to challenge that standard in court, saying it is too weak to protect public health adequately.

Ozone, when combined with other compounds to form smog, contributes to a variety of ailments, including heart problems, asthma and other lung disorders.

Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, has pushed hard for a tougher ozone standard, telling associates that it was one of the most important regulatory initiatives she would handle during her tenure. But she found herself on the losing end of a fight with top White House economic and political advisers, who were persuaded by industry arguments that the 2008 ozone rule was due to be reviewed in two years anyway and who were concerned about the impact on state, local and tribal governments that would bear much of the burden of compliance.

The impact would have been felt heavily in a band of Midwest and Great Plains states that are not themselves major sources of ozone pollution and that will be critical 2012 electoral battlegrounds.

In a statement, the president reiterated his commitment to environmental concerns, but added: “At the same time, I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover. With that in mind, and after careful consideration, I have requested that Administrator Jackson withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards at this time.”

In words of reassurance directed at Ms. Jackson and the agency she heads, the president said that his commitment to the work of the agency was “unwavering.”

“And my administration will continue to vigorously oppose efforts to weaken E.P.A.’s authority under the Clean Air Act or dismantle the progress we have made,” he said.

Ms. Jackson accepted the White House decision with a terse statement: “We will revisit the ozone standard, in compliance with the Clean Air Act.”

She pointed with pride to the administration’s record of establishing a range of other air quality safeguards for power plants, manufacturing facilities and vehicles that will also help to reduce ozone pollution across the country.

Ms. Jackson had made clear her intention to follow her scientific advisers and set a new standard within the more restrictive range by the end of this year. She has told associates that her success in addressing this problem would be a reflection of her ability to perform her job. The agency sent the now-rejected standards to the White House in July with the expectation that they would be issued by Aug. 31.

While some senior agency officials expressed disappointment with the decision, they also said they understood that it was their job to offer their best technical advice to the White House and that the ultimate decision rested with the president, who has to stand for re-election and consider other factors.

Reaction from environmental advocates ranged from disappointment to fury, with several noting that in just the past month the administration had tentatively approved drilling in the Arctic, given an environmental green light to the 1,700-mile Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Texas and opened 20 million more acres of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling.

Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said, “Today’s announcement from the White House that they will retreat from implementing the much-needed — and long-overdue — ozone pollution standard is deeply disappointing and grants an item on Big Oil’s wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm.” The center is a liberal research group with close ties to the White House.

Bill McKibben, an activist leading a two-week White House protest against the pipeline project which has resulted in more than 1,000 arrests, said that the latest move was “flabbergasting.”

“Somehow we need to get back the president we thought we elected in 2008,” he said.

Cass R. Sunstein, who leads the White House office that reviews all major regulations, said he was carefully scrutinizing proposed rules across the government to ensure that they are cost efficient and based on the best current science. He said in a letter to Ms. Jackson that the studies on which the E.P.A.’s proposed rule is based were completed in 2006 and that new assessments were already under way.

The issue had become a flashpoint between the administration and Republicans in Congress, who held up the proposed ozone rule as a test of the White House’s commitment to regulatory reform and job creation. Imposing the new rule before the 2012 election would have created political problems for the administration and for Democrats nationwide seeking election in a brittle economy.

Leaders of major business groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and the Business Roundtable — met with Ms. Jackson and with top White House officials this summer seeking to moderate, delay or kill the rule. They told William M. Daley, the White House chief of staff, that the rule would be very costly to industry and would hurt Mr. Obama’s chances for a second term.

John Engler, a former governor of Michigan and chairman of the Business Roundtable, said Friday in a statement: “Creating U.S. jobs and providing more economic certainty for all Americans, especially on the heels of today’s news that the U.S. unemployment rate remains persistently high, is our greatest challenge. If President Obama’s speech next week is as positive as this decision was today, it will be a success.”

Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader, said this week that the House would review the ozone rule, which he called the most onerous of all proposed regulations.

“This effective ban or restriction on construction and industrial growth for much of America is possibly the most harmful of all the currently anticipated Obama administration regulations,” Mr. Cantor wrote. He said that the impact would be felt across the economy and cost as much as $1 trillion and millions of jobs over the next decade.

 

Leslie Kaufman contributed reporting from New York.

    Obama Administration Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html

With Katrina in Mind,

Obama Administration Says It’s Ready for Irene

August 27, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — Determined to avoid any comparisons with the federal government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina, the Obama administration made a public display Saturday of the range of its efforts to make sure officials in the storm-drenched states had whatever help they needed from Washington.

President Obama, who returned to Washington a day early from his summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, visited the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency shortly after noon. While there, he checked in on the National Response Coordination Center, a 24-hour command center based at FEMA, where dozens of federal employees from a range of agencies were assembled around the clock to help orchestrate the response to Hurricane Irene.

On wall-size television monitors, they keep track of the storm’s progress and are able to turn up or down the volume of the federal government’s response, by directing the various federal agency representatives who are there to pass on updates to their bosses.

“You guys are doing a great job, obviously,” Mr. Obama said during his brief visit. “This is obviously going to be touch and go.”

Even before the storm made landfall, Mr. Obama had declared a federal emergency for Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Virginia, clearing the way for federal financing and support to respond to the hurricane.

While still at FEMA headquarters, Mr. Obama joined a video conference of state and local officials in the regions expecting to be hit by the storm.

“It’s going to be a long 72 hours,” Mr. Obama said during the conference.

The bulk of the responsibility in advance of any hurricane rests with local and state governments, which are in charge of evacuation orders and preparations for flooding or other storm damage. But federal agencies must be ready in advance to provide any requested assistance, as they ultimately did in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina. But during that storm, they were often unable to quickly answer the requests.

To avoid such a repeat on Saturday, FEMA had 18 disaster incident response teams in place in coastal states and had stockpiles of food, water and mobile communications equipment ready to go. The Coast Guard had more than 20 rescue helicopters and reconnaissance planes in East Coast air stations ready to take off.

The Defense Department has another 18 helicopters in the Northeast set aside for response, and it has coordinated with states along the storm path to ensure that about 101,000 National Guard members are available, if necessary.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a “prepare to deploy” order for 6,500 active duty military on Saturday to support the hurricane response. No troops have yet been deployed, as the National Guard, under the command of state officials, typically is the first called out to help in disasters.

As of Friday, the American Red Cross had positioned more than 200 emergency response vehicles and tens of thousands of ready-to-eat meals in areas in the path of the storm.

FEMA has moved onto the Internet and into social media in a big way, too, with Craig Fugate, the FEMA director, posting several times an hour from his account, @CraigatFEMA, to deliver updates on the agency’s response and the status of the storm.

“The category of the storm does not tell the whole story,” Mr. Fugate wrote Saturday morning, after Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a Category 1 storm but was still considered dangerous. “Some of our nation’s worst flooding came from tropical storms.”

The agency even released new software for Android cellphones that allows the public to monitor information on how to prepare for a hurricane, and if necessary, to apply for disaster assistance, which bogged down in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At a news conference Saturday morning at FEMA headquarters in Washington, the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said that as the storm was making its first contact on the East Coast, she knew of no outstanding requests to the federal government for assistance from state or local governments.

“None of them have reported any unmet needs right now,” she said. “But we really are at the beginning of this storm response. We are basically at the end of the preparation phase.”

Ms. Napolitano urged people along the path of the storm to heed warnings to evacuate, even though the storm continued to lose some of its intensity.

“Irene remains a large and dangerous storm,” she said. “People need to take it seriously. People need to be prepared.”

Mr. Fugate, the FEMA director, said that the heavy rains and tornadoes that might accompany Hurricane Irene were not reflected in its Category 1 status, so people should not let down their guard.

“Until we actually get the impacts, we are not going to know how bad areas are getting hit,” Mr. Fugate said.

Mr. Fugate said the early reports of widespread power failures — as of 1 p.m. on Saturday an estimated 400,000 homes and businesses were without power, The Associated Press reported — suggested that federal agencies would be called on to help out.

Bill Read, the director of the National Hurricane Center, said that as of Saturday morning the storm was moving north-northeast at about 15 miles per hour and that he expected to see a storm surge along the coasts of between 5 and 9 feet — more than enough to cause severe flooding.

Mr. Read said there could also be as much as 15 inches of rain in North Carolina before the storm clears and 5 to 10 inches of rain across the Mid-Atlantic and into New England, which could cause major flooding and tree damage, even inland, as the ground is already saturated from recent heavy rains.

    With Katrina in Mind, Obama Administration Says It’s Ready for Irene, NYT, 27.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/us/28obama-1.html

Obama Tries to Reclaim Momentum With Midwest Bus Tour

August 15, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

CANNON FALLS, Minn. — For most of the summer, President Obama has been under siege in the White House. On Monday, he became a road warrior, kicking off a three-day bus tour of the Midwest that provided him campaign-style opportunities to strike back at Republicans in a region vital to his re-election.

Traveling in a black bus with dark tinted windows and flashing red and blue lights that looked like something out of a “Mad Max” movie, the president urged audiences in Minnesota and Iowa to tell their elected officials they would no longer tolerate the partisan gridlock on display in the recent debt-ceiling talks.

“You’ve got to send a message to Washington that it is time for the games to stop,” he told a crowd of 500 under a canopy of elm and black walnut trees here.

“It’s time to put country first,” he said, recycling a line used by his Republican opponent in the 2008 presidential race, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

The tour did not quite match the jaunty charm of bus trips by would-be presidents, including Mr. Obama himself. But in his appearance here, and later at a more freewheeling one at an Iowa seed exchange, he struck themes intended to appeal to moderate and independent voters, while drawing sharp contrasts with Republicans.

“I’m here to enlist you in a fight,” said Mr. Obama, tieless and in shirt-sleeves. He called on the crowd to demand leaders who choose “the next generation over the next election.”

When Congress reconvenes next month, he said, he hoped it would move swiftly to lift the nation’s fragile economy.

The three-state swing, which included impromptu stops at a school and a coffee shop where Mr. Obama loaded up on apple and pumpkin pie, is an effort to reclaim the initiative after a dismal summer in which the president was stymied on the debt talks and then rebuked with a downgrade of the country’s credit rating.

At his first stop in Iowa, Mr. Obama said he would have work ready for Congress when it returned from its recess.

“I’ll be putting forward when they come back in September a very specific plan to boost the economy, to create jobs and to control our deficit,” he said. “And my attitude is get it done.”

The Midwest trip is also putting Mr. Obama center stage in places where the Republican campaign for the presidency is heating up, and at a time when the president’s approval ratings are at an all-time low. Republicans held a straw poll Saturday in Ames, Iowa, that was won by Representative Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota, and on Monday Gov. Rick Perry of Texas stumped in Iowa.

The president took a few shots at the Republican field, noting with an incredulous tone that none of the candidates, when asked at a debate, said they would support a deficit-reduction plan that included one dollar of tax increases for every $10 of spending cuts. “That’s just not common sense,” he said.

Mr. Obama also obliquely criticized Mitt Romney, noting that Republicans had supported health-care plans that contained individual mandates — as Mr. Romney did while governor of Massachusetts, and as Mr. Obama’s health-care plan does — only to disavow them later in what he described as a case of “amnesia.”

The president’s itinerary is giving him a homespun backdrop for his hard-edged message, taking him past family farms and through fly-speck towns like Peosta, Iowa, (population 1,377) and Alpha, Ill. (pop. 671) .

Standing before a red barn bathed in a rosy evening sun in Decorah, Iowa, Mr. Obama had a lively back-and-forth with a supportive, but often challenging, crowd. One young woman asked whether his backers could be confident he would not break their trust by cutting deals with Republicans on taxes and entitlements, given what she said were his negotiating tactics on the debt ceiling that “cut away at that trust.”

Mr. Obama replied that the collateral economic damage from a national default would simply have been too great for him not to find a compromise with Republicans.

Another woman quizzed him on how he planned to get his economic agenda through Congress in September, given the lack of Republican cooperation. Mr. Obama said he understood the public’s frustration with Washington because, he declared, “the other side is unreasonable.”

Other people were more sympathetic. In Cannon Falls, David Hauge, 77, a farmer, said, “People have got to remember how close we were to utter chaos” when Mr. Obama took office. Mr. Hauge said he was baffled by the no-new-taxes pledge taken by many Republicans, adding, “I can’t imagine what it’s like to negotiate with them.”

For a trip conceived as an economic tour, the choice of stops was curious. Cannon Falls and the other towns visited by Mr. Obama are faring better than much of the country, with lower unemployment rates.

White House officials said the point was to take the president to bucolic places not easily reached by Air Force One. Last week, they noted, he visited Michigan, a state that typifies the miseries of industrial America.

Certainly, this riverfront town hummed with excitement when Mr. Obama’s caravan rumbled through. Crowds lined the streets and massed in front of the Old Market Deli, where he had lunch with five military veterans. Smaller groups clustered in lawn chairs in Decorah.

At the Coffee Mill in Zumbrota, Minn., Mr. Obama approached the pie case with a finger pressed to his lips. His order included a coconut cream pie, which he handed off to an aide. He stopped again at an elementary school and posed for pictures with children in brightly colored shirts.

While the White House billed all this as a presidential visit, the line between that and a campaign event is fine: loudspeakers blared standard Obama campaign anthems by U2 and Brooks & Dunn. Mr. Obama also spent a lot of time promoting his administration’s commitment to rural America, talking about plans to develop alternative fuels, erect windmills and extend broadband networks to remote farms.

Still, those visions took a back seat to the shadows over the economy. The president pleaded for patience, saying that the United States had been dealt a string of bad luck but that the job market would recover in time.

He offered mostly familiar remedies like extending the reduction in payroll taxes and winning Congressional approval of free trade agreements. Officials played down hopes for major announcements on this trip.

“I know you’re frustrated,” Mr. Obama said, “and I’m frustrated, too.”

    Obama Tries to Reclaim Momentum With Midwest Bus Tour, NYT, 15.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/us/politics/16obama.html

Debt Fight Over, Obama Promises Action on Jobs

August 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER and JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — Having ceded considerable ground to Republicans in the debt ceiling fight, President Obama set out Tuesday to reclaim the initiative on the economy, promising a new effort to spur job creation while seeking to position himself as a proven voice of reason in an era of ideological overreach.

After being cloistered in Washington for a month haggling with Congressional leaders, Mr. Obama will embark on a bus tour of the Midwest the week of Aug. 15 — a chance to show his commitment to reviving the economy in a region of important electoral battlegrounds, and to turn the page from the tangled, often toxic, debate in the capital.

On the policy front, Mr. Obama shifted quickly to pushing Congress to adopt a raft of familiar measures to stimulate the flagging economy, including extending the payroll tax suspension for workers, beefing up benefits for the unemployed, approving trade agreements and investing in infrastructure projects.

“While deficit reduction is part of that agenda, it is not the whole agenda,” a grim-faced Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden moments after the Senate approved the debt limit deal. “Growing the economy isn’t just about cutting spending.” He later added: “That’s not how we’re going to get past this recession. We’re going to have to do more than that.”

But the debt ceiling plan, with its emphasis on cutting government spending, underscores the constrained atmosphere in which Mr. Obama is operating. While he promised on Tuesday to present new ideas to encourage companies to hire workers, a senior aide acknowledged that Mr. Obama had no “magic beads.”

And given the polarized climate on Capitol Hill, winning legislative approval of his initiatives, already daunting in most cases, will be that much more challenging.

Mr. Obama’s embrace of deficit reduction provides him an opportunity to help win back the independent voters who were crucial to his victory in 2008. But the president may need to do some repair work with Democrats angered by the deep cuts in the plan — and a perception, held by some liberals, that Mr. Obama was rolled by the Republicans in the House.

On Wednesday, he will attend a Democratic fund-raiser in Chicago on the eve of his 50th birthday, his first chance since the end of the debt showdown to frame a contrast with the Republicans in a purely political environment.

“There are parts of the base that are discouraged,” Ted Strickland, a former Democratic governor of Ohio, said in an interview. “I don’t know that it’s the result of any personal animosity toward the president, but going forward it’s going to be important for him to inspire us, lead us, challenge us and be a real leader.”

White House officials dispute that the president is in trouble with Democratic voters, whom they say support the debt compromise by solid margins. But there was considerable fence-mending among important Democratic constituency groups. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama met with leaders of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. at the White House, while other Democrats scrambled to explain the positive aspects of the deal to influence liberal groups.

Compared with previous landmark legislation, Mr. Obama was uncharacteristically low key in the wake of the Senate vote, in effect keeping the deal at arm’s length. He signed the bill, known as the Budget Control Act of 2011, into law in the Oval Office, with only a few advisers watching and no Congressional leaders on hand. Only a White House photographer recorded the moment. Aside from his remarks in the Rose Garden, he gave no interviews.

While Mr. Obama is hitting the road, White House officials said he would not promote the deal, about which he himself has said he has qualms. If anything, he seems likely to let the matter drop for at least a few days. As one senior aide said, “You want to let the acid out of the air after it’s over.”

Still, heading into an election year, Mr. Obama’s advisers say he will be able to point to his role in the debt negotiations as proof of his ability to be a mature, responsible leader who is able to rise above Washington’s relentlessly partisan fray. The president alluded to that on Tuesday, saying it should not take a “timer ticking down” to disaster to get Republicans and Democrats to work together.

“Voters may have chosen divided government,” Mr. Obama said, “but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.”

David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, said the negotiations showed that “he’s been willing throughout the presidency to forgo scoring the cheap political point to serve the larger interest.”

After Labor Day, the White House also plans to hold town-hall-style meetings where Mr. Obama can talk about the issues, like Medicare and Medicaid, that dominated the recent fiscal debate and will resurface again when a Congressional committee convenes to hash out a second set of deficit-cutting measures. The president will also challenge Republicans to propose their own ideas for reviving the job market.

Mr. Obama’s willingness to engage in serious deficit reduction, aides said, could buy him credibility for his other economic proposals. But Mr. Obama is unlikely to unveil any major new stimulus proposals, since he has exhausted most of the obvious policy options.

“Did he just find a little bit of oxygen to pursue a portion of his economic agenda?” said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “He may be able to move some helpful things, but even if he can’t, he can certainly go out and push for them.”

The relief in the corridors of the West Wing that an economic calamity had been averted was palpable. But few officials disputed that the deadlock had been a costly distraction from the administration’s agenda. Party surveys show that Mr. Obama has been sullied — along with all politicians in Washington — with independent voters.

The vote tally in the House and the Senate, while stronger than many administration officials had expected only days ago, underscored deep divisions among Democrats across the country. In some states, there was a split between urban and rural legislators, while in other battleground states, entire delegations opposed the plan.

But Jim Messina, the manager of the president’s re-election bid, said the discord among Democrats in Washington did not reflect what campaign officials were hearing from rank-and-file supporters of the president through nightly telephone calls and door-knocking.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm, and I don’t see anything as contentious as this coming down the pike in terms of an intraparty situation,” said David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the president. “There will be a unified, motivated and very aggressive Democratic Party supporting the president next year.”

    Debt Fight Over, Obama Promises Action on Jobs, NYT, 2.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/us/politics/03obama.html

Obama administration to appeal healthcare ruling

ATLANTA | Wed Jun 8, 2011
1:24am EDT
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Lawyers for President Barack Obama will on Wednesday seek to stave off the biggest legal challenge yet to healthcare reform, his signature domestic policy achievement.

The administration will present oral arguments as it appeals a ruling by a Florida judge who declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, backing claims by 26 U.S. states that are seeking repeal.

A three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear oral arguments by both sides. While a Virginia appeals court heard a similar case in May, this case is significant because of the number of states backing it.

No ruling is expected for months and legal experts expect an appeal to the Supreme Court, regardless of which side wins.

The law aims to increase access to healthcare and slow the growth in costs. The White House views it as a cornerstone of Obama's presidency. Republicans say it will send costs soaring and represents intrusive government power especially because it mandates all individuals to buy health insurance.

They plan to make their campaign for repeal a pillar of efforts to defeat Obama at presidential elections in 2012.

"Opponents of reform claim that the law's individual responsibility provision exceeds Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce because it penalizes 'inactivity.' They are wrong," the White House said on its blog on Tuesday.

"Individuals who choose to go without health insurance are actively making an economic decision that affects all of us," it said of the provision to fine Americans who do not buy insurance, which comes into effect in 2014.

The 2010 law also allows young people to remain on their parents' health insurance into their twenties and prevents insurers from denying coverage for preexisting medical conditions.

Florida District Judge Roger Vinson ruled in January the entire law "must be declared void" because its requirement to buy insurance is unconstitutional, but put the ruling on hold pending appeal.

"The nation needs healthcare reform that's pursued constitutionally and in a way that does not harm our economy and our taxpayers," Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.

Chief Judge Joel Dubina, Judge Frank Hull and Judge Stanley Marcus will hear the appeal. Analysts will watch their questions closely for clues as to how they might rule.

Dubina was appointed by President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, while the other two were appointed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Senior administration lawyer Neal Katyal will argue for the government, while former Solicitor General Paul Clement will present Florida's case.

The case is State of Florida et al v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al. Its number is 11-11021.

 

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

    Obama administration to appeal healthcare ruling, R, 8.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/us-usa-healthcare-idUSTRE7570UI20110608

Obama urges Bahrain hold rights abusers accountable

WASHINGTON | Tue Jun 7, 2011
6:54pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged Bahrain's rulers to hold accountable those responsible for human rights abuses in a crackdown on pro-democracy protests and pressed for compromise between the government and the opposition.

Obama, in a White House meeting with Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, voiced support for moves toward a national dialogue and insisted the stability of the Gulf kingdom "depends upon respect for universal human rights," the White House said.

The meeting came after King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, whose Sunni Muslim family rules over the majority Shi'ite population, offered on May 31 to open a dialogue on reform and on June 1 lifted a state of emergency used to break up protests inspired by uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world.

Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, called in security forces from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries in March to quash the demonstrations, accusing the protesters of having a sectarian agenda and help from Shi'ite power Iran. The opposition deny this.

Critics have said the United States and other Western nations reacted too softly to the crackdown in Bahrain, which is seen as a vital U.S. ally facing Iran.

Bahraini Shi'ite clerics accused police on Tuesday of violating religious freedoms by breaking up weekend street festivals by majority Shi'ites that police said activists had turned into political protests against the government.

A White House statement said Obama welcomed the Bahraini king's decision to end martial law and the announcement that a national dialogue on reform would begin in July. Obama also said, "Both the opposition and the government must compromise to forge a just future for all Bahrainis."

"The president emphasized the importance of following through on the government's commitment to ensuring that those responsible for human rights abuses will be held accountable," the White House said.

Bahraini authorities unleashed a campaign of detention and dismissals during martial law that has affected thousands of people who took part in the protests, most of them Shi'ites. The opposition has expressed fear that repression will continue despite the lifting of the emergency decree.

The crown prince used his Washington visit to repeat his support for reform. "It is a great test but also a great opportunity to drive the nation forward," he told reporters as he met Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "We are committed to reform in both the political and economic spheres."

 

(Reporting by Alister Bull, Matt Spetalnick and Arshad Mohammed, editing by Cynthia Osterman)

    Obama urges Bahrain hold rights abusers accountable, R, 7.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/07/us-usa-obama-bahrain-idUSTRE75676220110607

Obama campaign sets goal of raising $60 million in quarter

CHICAGO | Wed Jun 1, 2011
7:29pm EDT
Reuters
By Eric Johnson

CHICAGO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's campaign on Wednesday set a goal of raising $60 million in the quarter to benefit Obama's reelection and the Democratic National Committee, a source involved in the reelection campaign said.

Dozens of Democratic Party operatives and supporters from across the country assembled in a downtown hotel on Wednesday for an early fundraising strategy session.

The group, which was to include White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and former Director of the White House National Economic Council Lawrence Summers, laid out their early strategy for raising more than $750 million to reelect the Democratic incumbent.

"There was talk about why the President deserves to be reelected and why it is important for us to make that happen," said a long-time Obama supporter who attended the meetings.

Campaign Manager Jim Messina made public part of their strategy in an email message to supporters on Wednesday.

"We decided we're ready to give for a second or third time -- if and only if you're willing to make your first donation to the campaign right now," the message said. "Right now there are thousands of folks willing to match whatever amount you decide to give," the message read.

The strategy follows the campaign's grassroots style, Messina said, adding that he recognizes easier paths to raking in campaign cash.

"Taking money from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs is the easy path -- and every single one of our prospective opponents is racing down it. That's not the kind of race we want to run."

Other fundraising meetings were held on Wednesday by Deputy Campaign Manager Julianna Smoot and Rufus Gifford, the Obama 2012 Finance Chairman.

Other top Chicago Obama supporters and fundraisers were in attendance, including real estate executive Penny Pritzker, who led fundraising for Obama in 2008, and her 2012 replacement, former Ambassador to Sweden Matthew Barzun.

Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, will formally announce on Thursday that he is in the race for the Republican Party's nomination in 2012. He tops many national polls among Republican candidates and has a solid fund-raising operation that raised $10 million in a single day in May.

 

(Editing by Greg McCune)

(This story was corrected to make clear the goal

is for the quarter and not the month of June)

    Obama campaign sets goal of raising $60 million in quarter, R, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/01/us-campaign-obama-idUSTRE7507M820110601

Analysis: Economy shadows Obama 2012 re-election hopes

WASHINGTON | Wed Jun 1, 2011
5:21pm EDT
Reuters
By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Disappointing news on the economy -- the issue most important to American voters -- has cast a cloud over President Barack Obama's hopes of re-election next year.

Polls show the president favored to win the election, with his approval ratings buoyed by foreign policy successes, most notably the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Obama has also benefited from the Republicans' failure so far to assemble a field of strong presidential candidates, which has given him a head start on building his campaign apparatus and raising millions of dollars to pay for it.

But the economy remains the major downside for Obama's 2012 prospects, with U.S. economic growth at a tepid 1.8 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2011.

Economists do not foresee a sharp decline in the country's financial fortunes before the November 2012 election, but a double-dip in home prices, the impact of high gasoline prices on consumers and a slowdown in regional manufacturing are raising concerns the current soft patch could become protracted.

"The economy is always part and parcel of people's general psyche as they walk into the voting booth," said Neera Tanden, who was director of domestic policy for Obama's 2008 campaign against Republican challenger John McCain.

Even an economic upturn, if it is not strong, might not be enough to boost the Democrats, said Tanden, who is now with the Center for American Progress in Washington.

"What's tricky about a recovering economy -- if we're in a time when we don't have particularly high growth rates but we have good trends -- that's more of a jump ball in terms of how people are approaching the option."

Private-sector payroll growth slowed sharply in May, falling to the lowest level in eight months.

The closely watched monthly jobs report on Friday is likely to show unemployment declined slightly to 8.9 percent in May from 9.0 percent in April.

"If economic growth slows, stays slow and unemployment is between 8.5 and 9 percent next fall, I'd hate to be running for re-election under those circumstances," said William Galston of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"Candidates and campaigns make a difference. But the candidates and campaigns are structures erected on top of the fundamentals, and next year you don't require a very clear crystal ball to see that the economic fundamentals will be the most important fundamentals," he said.

Economists say the window of opportunity for Obama to significantly bring down the 9 percent unemployment rate is narrowing. They say the economy must grow by at least 3 percent each quarter to lower the jobless rate and the first quarter's tepid growth rate is expected to be followed by a 2.5 percent to 3.3 percent rate in the second quarter.

WORRIES OVER DEFICIT

Voters also are concerned about the U.S. budget deficit, which is expected to hit $1.4 trillion this year and stay in the trillion-dollar range for several years. Experts do not expect an agreement from Washington on a long-term, comprehensive debt-reduction strategy before November 2012.

Vice President Joe Biden is leading talks with lawmakers over spending cuts that could be folded into an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, the legal U.S. borrowing limit, before August 2, when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has said the government will run out of money to pay its bills.

"The overarching theme is going to be the economy and probably linked to that is deficit reduction," Ipsos pollster Cliff Young said.

However, the deficit issue could cut both ways.

"The Republicans have a strong brand on budget cutting, and voters are worried that it is going to go too far," said Ryan McConaghy, director of the economic program at the centrist Third Way think tank. "They are concerned the Republicans will slash and burn the budget, but they are not quite sold that Democrats will go far enough."

A Democrat won what had been a Republican-held seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election in New York State last week, largely due to voter concerns about a Republican plan to scale back the government's Medicare health insurance for the elderly.

Republicans in Congress who swept to power in 2010 on promises that they would steer the economy better than Obama and other Democrats have done since he took office in 2009 could also suffer if the financial picture is weak.

"The challenge for Republicans is that people believe that they actually control part of the government now, and they no longer have the luxury of the free ride that they had in the first two years," Tanden said.

However, voters typically hold the president more accountable for the health of the economy, which means that Obama will face more pressure to show that his policies can boost employment. And Obama's fortunes will set the tone for his party.

(Additional reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Alistair Bell and Paul Simao)

    Analysis: Economy shadows Obama 2012 re-election hopes, R, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/01/us-usa-campaign-obama-idUSTRE7505PU20110601

Employment Data May Be the Key to the President’s Job

June 1, 2011
The New York Times
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

WASHINGTON — No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.

Seventeen months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that President Obama must defy that trend to keep his job.

Roughly 9 percent of Americans who want to go to work cannot find an employer. Companies are firing fewer people, but hiring remains anemic. And the vast majority of economic forecasters, including the president’s own advisers, predict only modest progress by November 2012.

The latest job numbers, due Friday, are expected to provide new cause for concern. Other indicators suggest the pace of growth is flagging. Weak manufacturing data, a gloomy reading on jobs in advance of Friday’s report and a drop in auto sales led the markets to their worst close since August, and those declines carried over into Asia Thursday.

But the grim reality of widespread unemployment is drawing little response from Washington. The Federal Reserve says it is all but tapped out. There is even less reason to expect Congressional action. Both Democrats and Republicans see clear steps to create jobs, but they are trying to walk in opposite directions and are making little progress.

Republicans have set the terms of debate by pressing for large cuts in federal spending, which they say will encourage private investment. Democrats have found themselves battling to minimize and postpone such cuts, which they fear will cause new job losses.

House Republicans told the president that they would not support new spending to spur growth during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

“The discussion really focused on the philosophical difference on whether Washington should continue to pump money into the economy or should we provide an incentive for entrepreneurs and small businesses to grow,” said Eric Cantor, the majority leader. “The president talked about a need for us to continue to quote-unquote invest from Washington’s standpoint, and for a lot of us that’s code for more Washington spending, something that we can’t afford right now.”

The White House, its possibilities constrained by the gridlock, has offered no new grand plans. After agreeing to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and reducing the payroll tax last December, the administration has focused on smaller ideas, like streamlining corporate taxation and increasing American exports to Asia and Latin America.

“It’s a very tough predicament,” said Jared Bernstein, who until April was economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Is there any political appetite for something that would resemble another large Keynesian stimulus? Obviously no. You can say that’s what we should do and you’d probably be right, but that’s pretty academic.”

More than 13.7 million Americans were unable to find work in April; most had been seeking jobs for months. Millions more have stopped trying. Their inability to earn money is a personal catastrophe; studies show that the chance of finding new work slips away with time. It is also a strain on their families, charities and public support programs.

The Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, has the means and the mandate to reduce unemployment by pumping money into the economy.

As financial markets nearly collapsed in 2008, the Fed unleashed a series of unprecedented programs, first to arrest the crisis and then to promote recovery, investing more than $2 trillion. The final installment, a $600 billion bond-buying program, ends in June.

Now, however, the leaders of the central bank say they are reluctant to do more. The Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said in April that more money might not increase growth, but there was a growing risk that it would accelerate inflation.

Congress charged the Fed in 1978 with minimizing unemployment and inflation. Those goals, however, are often in conflict, and the Fed has made clear that inflation is its priority. Fed officials argue in part that maintaining slow, steady inflation forms a basis for enduring economic expansion.

Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said in a recent interview that the Fed had reached the limits of responsible policy.

“We’ve done things that are quite unusual. We’re using tools that we have less experience with,” Mr. Rosengren said. “Most of the criticism has been that we’re being too accommodative. That is a concern that we have to put some weight on.”

Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group, said that the Fed was being too cautious about inflation and too callous about joblessness.

“We have a massive unemployment problem in this country right now. It is festering. It’s not good for our economy. It’s not good for our society. And we have the tools to fix it,” she said. “We certainly need to be concerned about what happens down the road, but shouldn’t we first be concerned about getting the U.S. economy back on track?”

Ten presidents have stood for re-election since Mr. Roosevelt. In four instances the unemployment rate stood above 6 percent on Election Day. Three presidents lost: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. But Ronald Reagan won, despite 7.2 percent unemployment in November 1984, because the rate was falling and voters decided he was fixing the problem.

The Obama administration hopes to tell a similar story.

“We have undertaken some of the biggest policy actions to create jobs that any administration has ever done,” said Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, which advises the president on economic policy. Mr. Furman said that the economy was still benefiting from last year’s tax cuts, and from the dollop of federal stimulus spending that Democrats pushed through in 2009.

The White House is pursuing a number of smaller initiatives, like persuading China to buy more American goods and services; increasing business confidence in the health of the economy, to spur new investment; and striking a deal with Republicans to overhaul corporate taxation.

It is also pushing to renew federal financing for transportation projects with an important twist: The six-year plan would be front-loaded so that $50 billion would be spent in the first year.

But Christina Romer, who headed the president’s Council of Economic Advisers until fall 2010, said in a recent speech at Washington University in St. Louis that no part of the government was addressing unemployment with sufficient urgency or hope.

“Urgency, because unemployment is a tragedy that should not be tolerated a minute longer,” she said. “And hope, because prudent and possible policies could make a crucial difference.”

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.

    Employment Data May Be the Key to the President’s Job, NYT, 1.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/business/economy/02jobs.html