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

Rob Rogers

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania

Cagle

25 August 2010

http://www.cagle.msnbc.com/news/ObamaReligion/4.asp

Cartoon 1 > R: US president Barack Obama

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Pledge of Allegiance

The Pledge of Allegiance of the United States

is an oath of loyalty to the national flag

and the republic of the United States of America,

originally composed by Francis Bellamy in 1892.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

16th President of the United States from March 1861

until his assassination in April 1865.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/abrahamlincoln

Founding Fathers of the United States

The Founding Fathers of the United States

were the political leaders

who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States
http://archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_founding_fathers.html

US Constitution >  Bill of Rights    1791

First Amendment - Religion and Expression

Congress shall make no law

respecting an establishment of religion,

or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;

or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,

and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment01/
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/billofrights.html
http://archives.gov/exhibits/charters/

Obama Says

Iraq Combat Mission Is Over

August 31, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER
and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared an end on Tuesday to the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq, saying that the United States has met its responsibility to that country and that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.

In a prime-time address from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama balanced praise for the troops who fought and died in Iraq with his conviction that getting into the conflict had been a mistake in the first place. But he also used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues — and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer.

“We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home,” Mr. Obama said. “Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.”

Seeking to temper partisan feelings over the war on a day when Republicans pointed out that Mr. Obama had opposed the troop surge generally credited with helping to bring Iraq a measure of stability, the president offered some praise for his predecessor, George W. Bush. Mr. Obama acknowledged their disagreement over Iraq but said that no one could doubt Mr. Bush’s “support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.”

Mr. Obama spoke for about 18 minutes, saying that violence would continue in Iraq and that the United States would continue to play a key role in nurturing a stable democracy there. He celebrated America’s fighting forces as “the steel in our ship of state,” and pledged not to waver in the fight against Al Qaeda.

But he suggested that he sees his role in addressing domestic issues as dominant, saying that it would be difficult to get the economy rolling again but that doing so was “our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.”

With his party facing the prospect of losing control of Congress in this fall’s elections and his own poll numbers depressed in large part because of the lackluster economy and still-high unemployment, he said the nation’s perseverance in Iraq must be matched by determination to address problems at home.

Over the last decade, “we have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas,” he said. “And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy and grit and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad.”

Mr. Obama acknowledged a war fatigue among Americans who have called into question his focus on the Afghanistan war, now approaching its 10th year. He said that American forces in Afghanistan “will be in place for a limited time” to give Afghans the chance to build their government and armed forces.

“But, as was the case in Iraq, we cannot do for Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves,” the president said. He reiterated that next July he would begin transferring responsibility for security to Afghans, at a pace to be determined by conditions.

“But make no mistake: this transition will begin, because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s,” he said.

This was no iconic end-of-war moment with photos of soldiers kissing nurses in Times Square or victory parades down America’s Main Streets.

Instead, in the days leading to the Tuesday night deadline for the withdrawal of American combat troops, it has appeared as if administration officials and the American military were the only ones marking the end of this country’s combat foray into Iraq. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are all in Baghdad for the official ceremony on Wednesday.

The very sight of Mr. Obama addressing Americans from the Oval Office — from the same desk where Mr. Bush announced the beginning of the conflict — shows the distance traveled since the Iraq war began. On the night of March 20, 2003, when the Army’s Third Infantry Division first rolled over the border from Kuwait into Iraq, Mr. Obama was a state senator in Illinois.

Mr. Bush was at the height of his popularity, and the perception at home and in many places abroad was that America could achieve its national security goals primarily through military power. One of the biggest fears among the American troops in the convoy pouring into Iraq that night — every one of them suited in gas masks and wearing biohazard suits — was that the man they came to topple might unleash a chemical weapons attack.

Seven years and five months later, the biggest fears of American soldiers revolve around the primitive, basic, homemade bombs and old explosives in Afghanistan that were left over from the Soviet invasion. In Iraq, what was perceived as a threat from a powerful dictator, Saddam Hussein, has dissolved into the worry that as United States troops pull out they are leaving behind an unstable and weak government that could be influenced by Iran.

On Tuesday, a senior intelligence official said that Iran continues to supply militant groups in Iraq with weapons, training and equipment.

“Much has changed since that night,” when Mr. Bush announced the war in Iraq, Mr. Obama said. “A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives; tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested.”

The withdrawal of combat forces represents a significant milestone after the war that toppled Mr. Hussein, touched off waves of sectarian strife and claimed the lives of more than 4,400 American soldiers and more than 70,000 Iraqis, according to United States and Iraqi government figures.

“Operation Iraqi Freedom is over,” Mr. Obama said, using the military name for the mission, “and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.”

As Mr. Obama prepared to observe the end of one phase of the war, he called Mr. Bush from Air Force One, as he was en route to Fort Bliss in Texas to meet with American troops home from Iraq.

The two spoke “just for a few moments,” Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told reporters aboard the plane, declining to give any additional details.

American troops reached Mr. Obama’s goal for the drawdown early — last week Gen. Ray Odierno, the American commander in Iraq, said that the number of troops had dropped to 49,700, roughly the number that would stay through next summer.

That is less than a third of the number of troops in Iraq during the surge in 2007. Under an agreement between Iraq and the United States, the remaining troops are to leave by the end of 2011, though some Iraqi and American officials say they think that the agreement may be renegotiated to allow for a longer American military presence.

The remaining “advise and assist” brigades will officially concentrate on supporting and training Iraqi security forces, protecting American personnel and facilities, and mounting counterterrorism operations.

Still, as Mr. Obama himself acknowledged Tuesday, the milestone came with all of the ambiguity and messiness that accompanied the war itself.

A political impasse, in place since March elections, has left Iraq without a permanent government just as the government in Baghdad was supposed to be asserting more control.

Republican critics of the president were quick to point out Tuesday that Mr. Obama opposed the troop surge that they credit for decreased violence in Iraq.

“Some leaders who opposed, criticized, and fought tooth-and-nail to stop the surge strategy now proudly claim credit for the results,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, told veterans at the national convention of the American Legion in Milwaukee.


Carl Hulse and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

Obama Says Iraq Combat Mission Is Over, NYT, 31.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01military.html

President Obama’s Address on Iraq

August 31, 2010
The New York Times

The following is the text, as prepared for delivery, of President Obama’s address from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, provided by the White House:

Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home.

I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty for many Americans. We have now been through nearly a decade of war. We have endured a long and painful recession. And sometimes in the midst of these storms, the future that we are trying to build for our nation — a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity may seem beyond our reach.

But this milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment. It should also serve as a message to the world that the United States of America intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership in this young century.

From this desk, seven and a half years ago, President Bush announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq. Much has changed since that night. A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives; tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested.

These are the rough waters encountered during the course of one of America’s longest wars. Yet there has been one constant amidst those shifting tides. At every turn, America’s men and women in uniform have served with courage and resolve. As commander in chief, I am proud of their service. Like all Americans, I am awed by their sacrifice, and by the sacrifices of their families.

The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people. Together with Iraqis and coalition partners who made huge sacrifices of their own, our troops fought block by block to help Iraq seize the chance for a better future. They shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi security forces; and took out terrorist leaders. Because of our troops and civilians — and because of the resilience of the Iraqi people — Iraq has the opportunity to embrace a new destiny, even though many challenges remain.

So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country.

This was my pledge to the American people as a candidate for this office. Last February, I announced a plan that would bring our combat brigades out of Iraq, while redoubling our efforts to strengthen Iraq’s security forces and support its government and people. That is what we have done. We have removed nearly 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq. We have closed or transferred hundreds of bases to the Iraqis. And we have moved millions of pieces of equipment out of Iraq.

This completes a transition to Iraqi responsibility for their own security. U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq’s cities last summer, and Iraqi forces have moved into the lead with considerable skill and commitment to their fellow citizens. Even as Iraq continues to suffer terrorist attacks, security incidents have been near the lowest on record since the war began. And Iraqi forces have taken the fight to Al Qaeda, removing much of its leadership in Iraqi-led operations.

This year also saw Iraq hold credible elections that drew a strong turnout. A caretaker administration is in place as Iraqis form a government based on the results of that election. Tonight, I encourage Iraq’s leaders to move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative, and accountable to the Iraqi people. And when that government is in place, there should be no doubt: the Iraqi people will have a strong partner in the United States. Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.

Going forward, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq with a different mission: advising and assisting Iraq’s security forces; supporting Iraqi troops in targeted counterterrorism missions; and protecting our civilians. Consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all U.S. troops will leave by the end of next year. As our military draws down, our dedicated civilians — diplomats, aid workers, and advisers — are moving into the lead to support Iraq as it strengthens its government, resolves political disputes, resettles those displaced by war, and builds ties with the region and the world. And that is a message that Vice President Biden is delivering to the Iraqi people through his visit there today.

This new approach reflects our long-term partnership with Iraq — one based upon mutual interests, and mutual respect. Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission. Extremists will continue to set off bombs, attack Iraqi civilians and try to spark sectarian strife. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals. Iraqis are a proud people. They have rejected sectarian war, and they have no interest in endless destruction. They understand that, in the end, only Iraqis can resolve their differences and police their streets. Only Iraqis can build a democracy within their borders. What America can do, and will do, is provide support for the Iraqi people as both a friend and a partner.

Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest — it is in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We have persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people — a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it is time to turn the page.

As we do, I am mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it is time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It’s well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.

The greatness of our democracy is grounded in our ability to move beyond our differences, and to learn from our experience as we confront the many challenges ahead. And no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against Al Qaeda.

Americans across the political spectrum supported the use of force against those who attacked us on 9/11. Now, as we approach our 10th year of combat in Afghanistan, there are those who are understandably asking tough questions about our mission there. But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, Al Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We will disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda, while preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists. And because of our drawdown in Iraq, we are now able to apply the resources necessary to go on offense. In fact, over the last 19 months, nearly a dozen Al Qaeda leaders — and hundreds of Al Qaeda’s extremist allies — have been killed or captured around the world.

Within Afghanistan, I have ordered the deployment of additional troops who — under the command of General David Petraeus — are fighting to break the Taliban’s momentum. As with the surge in Iraq, these forces will be in place for a limited time to provide space for the Afghans to build their capacity and secure their own future. But, as was the case in Iraq, we cannot do for Afghans what they must ultimately do for themselves. That’s why we are training Afghan security forces and supporting a political resolution to Afghanistan’s problems. And, next July, we will begin a transition to Afghan responsibility. The pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground, and our support for Afghanistan will endure. But make no mistake: this transition will begin — because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.

Indeed, one of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power — including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example — to secure our interests and stand by our allies. And we must project a vision of the future that is based not just on our fears, but also on our hopes — a vision that recognizes the real dangers that exist around the world, but also the limitless possibility of our time.

Today, old adversaries are at peace, and emerging democracies are potential partners. New markets for our goods stretch from Asia to the Americas. A new push for peace in the Middle East will begin here tomorrow. Billions of young people want to move beyond the shackles of poverty and conflict. As the leader of the free world, America will do more than just defeat on the battlefield those who offer hatred and destruction — we will also lead among those who are willing to work together to expand freedom and opportunity for all people.

That effort must begin within our own borders. Throughout our history, America has been willing to bear the burden of promoting liberty and human dignity overseas, understanding its link to our own liberty and security. But we have also understood that our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home. And the bedrock of that prosperity must be a growing middle class.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has shortchanged investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.

And so at this moment, as we wind down the war in Iraq, we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad. They have met every test that they faced. Now, it is our turn. Now, it is our responsibility to honor them by coming together, all of us, and working to secure the dream that so many generations have fought for — the dream that a better life awaits anyone who is willing to work for it and reach for it.

Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work. To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy. We must jump-start industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil. We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs. This will be difficult. But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.

Part of that responsibility is making sure that we honor our commitments to those who have served our country with such valor. As long as I am president, we will maintain the finest fighting force that the world has ever known, and do whatever it takes to serve our veterans as well as they have served us. This is a sacred trust. That is why we have already made one of the largest increases in funding for veterans in decades. We are treating the signature wounds of today’s wars post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, while providing the health care and benefits that all of our veterans have earned. And we are funding a post-9/11 G.I. bill that helps our veterans and their families pursue the dream of a college education. Just as the G.I. Bill helped those who fought World War II — including my grandfather — become the backbone of our middle class, so today’s servicemen and women must have the chance to apply their gifts to expand the American economy. Because part of ending a war responsibly is standing by those who have fought it.

Two weeks ago, America’s final combat brigade in Iraq — the Army’s Fourth Stryker Brigade — journeyed home in the predawn darkness. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of vehicles made the trip from Baghdad, the last of them passing into Kuwait in the early morning hours. Over seven years before, American troops and coalition partners had fought their way across similar highways, but this time no shots were fired. It was just a convoy of brave Americans, making their way home.

Of course, the soldiers left much behind. Some were teenagers when the war began. Many have served multiple tours of duty, far from their families who bore a heroic burden of their own, enduring the absence of a husband’s embrace or a mother’s kiss. Most painfully, since the war began 55 members of the Fourth Stryker Brigade made the ultimate sacrifice — part of over 4,400 Americans who have given their lives in Iraq. As one staff sergeant said, “I know that to my brothers in arms who fought and died, this day would probably mean a lot.”

Those Americans gave their lives for the values that have lived in the hearts of our people for over two centuries. Along with nearly 1.5 million Americans who have served in Iraq, they fought in a faraway place for people they never knew. They stared into the darkest of human creations — war — and helped the Iraqi people seek the light of peace.

In an age without surrender ceremonies, we must earn victory through the success of our partners and the strength of our own nation. Every American who serves joins an unbroken line of heroes that stretches from Lexington to Gettysburg; from Iwo Jima to Inchon; from Khe Sanh to Kandahar — Americans who have fought to see that the lives of our children are better than our own. Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be travelling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the predawn darkness, better days lie ahead.

Thank you. May God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America, and all who serve her.

    President Obama’s Address on Iraq, NYT, 31.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01obama-text.html

Confronting Multiple Problems, Obama Faces Tough Odds

August 31, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

President Obama is attempting a triple play this week that eluded his predecessors over the past two decades: simultaneous progress on the most vexing and violent problems in the Middle East — Israeli-Palestinian peace, Iraq and Iran — in hopes of creating a virtuous cycle in a region prone to downward spirals.

History shouts that all the odds are against him. White House officials, eager to show concrete progress on the hardest foreign policy challenges at a time when Mr. Obama is struggling with a variety of domestic issues, contend that that the president has changed the political climate in all three arenas and has the best shot in years at creating positive and interlocking results.

When President Bill Clinton tried a similar strategy, he argued that a comprehensive peace between the Israelis and Palestinians would make it easier for Arab nations to join in the “dual containment” of Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It turned out that the reverse was true as well: When one of those efforts fell apart, so did the other two.

A month before invading Iraq, President George W. Bush argued that toppling Saddam Hussein would create “a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region,” leading Arab countries “to support the emergence of a peaceful and democratic Palestine, and state clearly they will live in peace with Israel.” Instead, Iraq went up in flames and hopes for peace collapsed. Iran accelerated its drive for a nuclear capability.

Mr. Obama’s argument, which formed one subtext of his speech to the nation on Tuesday night about the end of the American combat mission in Iraq and which will play out Wednesday and Thursday as he gathers Israeli and Palestinian leaders for their first direct talks in two years, is more subtle about the linkage among the issues.

“There are three big chess pieces here, and in each of those places we are now poised for success,” Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff and a major voice in Middle East policy, said in an interview Tuesday. He argued that while the linkages are loose, “victory begets victory, and success will be reinforcing.”

While Mr. Obama’s thinking contains elements of the logic that drove his predecessors, there are also some critical differences, and success or failure hinges on how significant those turn out to be. Those differences include evidence that the United States is truly pulling out of Iraq, far tougher sanctions on Iran and the tentative emergence of a working Palestinian government in the West Bank.

The main problem is that success is not assured in any of the fronts in question, and the dynamic among them is unpredictable.

“It’s hard to make the case that progress in the peace process is going to resolve the political stalemate in Iraq, or force the Iranians to reconsider their nuclear program,” said Martin S. Indyk, who served as American ambassador to Israel and now is the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “But I think you can claim that success would help make headway in isolating Iran, and Iran’s claims to leadership in the region would be challenged. The risk — the one we forgot in the Clinton years — is that failure can also diminish your credibility.”

It is in Iraq, a war Mr. Obama campaigned to end, where he is claiming progress. While Iraq’s fractious politicians have still not agreed on a government nearly six months after an election and insurgents have landed some punishing recent attacks, overall violence has fallen and the withdrawal from combat missions happened a few weeks ahead of schedule. “It is clear in Iraq a genuine political process is under way,” said Dennis B. Ross, Mr. Obama’s top Middle East adviser.

Still, Mr. Obama is loath to declare anything resembling victory, and he said Tuesday that a “tough slog” remained. The question is whether the American public is willing to see more money and lives spent there while Iraqi politicians argue.

As Ryan C. Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, wrote recently in The National Interest: “Strategic patience is often in short supply in this country. It is not a new problem for us, and it is not limited to Iraq.”

While 50,000 American troops remain in Iraq for now, Mr. Obama made clear Tuesday night that he was intent on moving on from that war, proclaiming that his primary mission now was to jump-start the American economy and address domestic issues like energy and education.

But as the Iranians have learned in recent months, Mr. Obama also seems persistent in finding new ways to turn the screws, and that is another element of the strategy.

When Mr. Obama came to office, three successive sets of international sanctions against Iran had had little effect, and there was virtually no prospect of getting a fourth.

It took 17 months for Mr. Obama to build the case for another round, and to orchestrate far more damaging additional measures — enforced by Europe, Japan, Australia and even some Arab nations — that have cut gasoline imports into Iran, sliced access to most foreign banking, and made it enormously difficult for shippers to obtain the insurance they need to go in and out of foreign ports.

“We finally have leverage,” said Mr. Ross, noting that for the first time Iranian officials have started calling for resumed talks with the West.

But few believe that the pain will cause Iran to give up its nuclear enrichment program. In fact, Iran could respond by speeding it up. There is also the possibility, some believe the probability, that Iran will seek to do whatever it can to prevent the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians from becoming fruitful.

Still, Mr. Obama’s advisers argue that conditions have never been better for those talks: Attacks on Israel are down and the government of President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has brought infrastructure, policing and better living to the West Bank. Many in Israel and among the Palestinians say they want a two-state solution, although support is ebbing. But many analysts are pessimistic that either side is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve it.

The big question is whether the image of America pulling out of Iraq, and of the White House re-engaging in the peace process, will be enough.

“In none of these areas have we achieved success,” Mr. Ross said. “But now we have the possibility and the potential for significant progress.”

    Confronting Multiple Problems, Obama Faces Tough Odds, NYT, 31.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/middleeast/01assess.html

Obama Weighs Smaller Measures on the Economy

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama is weighing new steps to bolster the economy, he said Monday. But any measures he takes seem likely to be small ones, and his options are limited with Congress showing little appetite for more spending in a hotly contested midterm election year.

On his first workday back in Washington after a 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and a day trip on Sunday to New Orleans, Mr. Obama spent part of the morning huddled with his economic team, then emerged in the Rose Garden for a hastily arranged appearance that was troubled by microphone difficulties.

He chided Senate Republicans for engaging in “pure partisan politics” by holding up a jobs bill that would offer tax breaks to small businesses and ease credit with a $30 billion initiative to channel loans through community banks. “I ask Senate Republicans to drop the blockade,” Mr. Obama said.

The president also said he and his team were “hard at work in identifying additional measures,” including extending tax cuts for the middle class that are scheduled to expire this year, increasing government investment in clean energy and rebuilding more infrastructure.

None of those steps, however, will come close to the $787 billion stimulus measure that Democrats passed at the outset of the Obama presidency. With voters angry about government spending, and economists divided about just what approach is the correct one, such aggressive steps are by now out of the question.

“There’s a deep frustration among economists that they simply don’t know what to do under these circumstances, at least in terms of fiscal policy,” said Bruce Bartlett, an economist who advised Republican presidents.

“I think there are a lot of economists who, in principle, would support some new fiscal stimulus, perhaps a jobs program where people were directly employed by the government or something of that sort,” Mr. Bartlett said. “But politically it’s simply not possible to do anything remotely like that under the current circumstances.”

The House has already passed a bill offering tax breaks to small businesses, but the measure is not the same as the one being considered in the Senate. The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, has scheduled a series of procedural votes on the Senate bill for when lawmakers return from their recess on Sept. 13.

But passage “is not a foregone conclusion,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Mr. Reid. “We’re going to need Republican votes.”

Republicans countered that Democrats were the ones holding up the measure, by blocking Republican amendments to the bill and refusing to work with the minority party.

“Instead of growing jobs as promised, Washington Democrats have grown the size of the national debt, the federal government and the unemployment rate,” the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, wrote in an e-mail.

With unemployment above 9 percent, and some economists warning of a double-dip recession, Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats have been trying to make the case to voters that while the recovery is slow, the nation is moving in the right direction. But recent economic data have not cooperated: home sales in July dropped to their lowest level in a decade, and experts expect another bleak jobs report on Friday.

In his Rose Garden remarks, Mr. Obama sought to reassure nervous Americans that he is on top of the economy, reminding them that “it took nearly a decade to dig the hole that we’re in” and that it will “take longer than any of us would like to climb our way out.”

But as the president tried to deliver that message, he had to do several retakes, interrupting himself to make certain that his microphone was on. “Can you guys still hear us?” Mr. Obama asked. “O.K. Let me try this one more time.”

    Obama Weighs Smaller Measures on the Economy, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/politics/31obama.html

Biden in Iraq for Talks and Handover

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

BAGHDAD — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived in Baghdad on Monday to commemorate the official end of the United States combat mission and to meet with Iraqi political leaders, who have yet to form a government more than five months after elections.

“We are going to be just fine; they are going to be just fine,” Mr. Biden told reporters as he prepared to confer with James F. Jeffrey, the new American ambassador in Baghdad, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the departing American commander in Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, General Odierno’s successor, who will formally take command on Wednesday, and Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of Central Command, also attended the evening session with the vice president.

The Iraqi public is increasingly discontented with the political gridlock, and American military leaders are concerned that a prolonged stalemate could lead to an erosion of security gains.

In the past few months, insurgents have significantly increased the number of rocket and mortar attacks on the fortified Green Zone that houses the Iraqi government and on Baghdad’s international airport.

An aide to Mr. Biden said Iraq had a functioning caretaker government and sought to dispel any sense of crisis. But he acknowledged that the delay in seating a new government had made it hard for Iraq to address longstanding political, legal and economic problems, and to further develop its relationship with the United States. “To build a partnership, you need a partner,” said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. “The vice president is going to urge the leaders to bring this process to a conclusion.”

The Obama administration has been reported to be sympathetic to a compromise plan in which Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki might retain his post with somewhat more limited powers while a new council with binding authority would be established under Ayad Allawi, a former interim prime minister and leader of a political coalition that is a rival to Mr. Maliki’s.

Mr. Blinken said the United States did not have a plan for breaking the political logjam in Baghdad or a specific candidate for prime minister.

Still, he signaled that the Obama administration believed that both Mr. Maliki’s State of Law coalition and Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya coalition — the two leading blocs in the voting in March — should be part of “the foundation of the next government,” along with the Kurdish alliance.

Asked about the bloc of candidates loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite anti-American cleric, Mr. Blinken suggested that the United States did not see them as useful members of a new governing coalition — or, as he put it, the Iraqi government should include “coalitions that are interested in building a long-term partnership with the United States.”

Mr. Biden also plans to meet with Mr. Maliki; Mr. Allawi; President Jalal Talabani; Vice Presidents Tariq al-Hashimi and Adel Abdul Mahdi; and Ammar al-Hakim, the chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

Aides said Mr. Biden was previewing President Obama’s Tuesday speech with Iraqi leaders; it is intended to reinforce the message that the United States aims to follow through with its troop withdrawal but also wants a long-term relationship with Iraq.

Mr. Biden will attend the ceremony on Wednesday to formally commemorate the end of the combat mission in Iraq and the change of command.

The vice president’s trip to Baghdad in a C-17 cargo plane was cloaked in secrecy, reflecting the underlying concern about the security of visiting leaders.

Brig. Gen. Ralph Baker, the deputy commander of American forces in central Iraq, said the number of mortar and rocket attacks on the Green Zone and the international airport totaled around 60 in the past two months, compared with “two or three” in previous months.


Stephen Farrell contributed reporting.

    Biden in Iraq for Talks and Handover, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31biden.html

Obama to Make 2nd Oval Office Speech

August 30, 2010
The New ork Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — For only the second time since he took office, President Obama will speak to the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, in an address meant to convey that he has kept one of the central promises of his campaign: withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq.

Mr. Obama will steer clear of the “mission accomplished” tone that President George W. Bush struck so famously seven years ago — and that subsequently came back to haunt him as Iraq fell into further chaos. “You won’t hear those words coming from us,” said the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs.

But Mr. Obama will still strike a promises-kept theme, aides said, even as he seeks to reconcile his opposition to the Iraq war — and his opposition to the so-called troop surge, which Republicans and many military officials credit for the decrease in violence in Iraq — with his role as a wartime commander in chief seeking to credit his troops with carrying out a difficult mission. The president, his aides said, will seek to honor the American soldiers who served in Iraq.

On Monday, Mr. Obama made an unannounced trip to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington to visit with soldiers wounded in Iraq, and on Tuesday morning he will travel to Fort Bliss, Tex., to meet with American troops.

In his Oval Office address, Mr. Obama will also try to put into larger context “what this drawdown means to our national security efforts in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia and around the world as we take the fight to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Gibbs said. That means speaking to the country about the American presence in Afghanistan, a topic that the president has spoken about only in general terms since announcing his Afghanistan policy last December.

“I’m a general fan of how he’s handled the two wars,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But if there’s a consistent weakness, it’s the episodic quality in how we hear from him about the wars. He temporarily engages.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. O’Hanlon said, should use his Oval Office pulpit on Tuesday night to explain in clear terms exactly what American troops have been doing in Afghanistan over the past few months, and, looking forward, what his aims are over the next year.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived in Baghdad on Monday to commemorate the official end of the American combat mission in Iraq, which saw about seven years of fighting, and 4,400 American soldiers and countless Iraqis killed. But for all of the celebration in Washington and among American officials in Baghdad, this week’s commemorations come as Iraq is wrestling with a political stalemate that has been in place since an inconclusive general election about six months ago.

Administration officials have hastened to say that the stalemate simply means that — in Mr. Biden’s words — “politics has broken out in Iraq.”


Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Baghdad.

    Obama to Make 2nd Oval Office Speech, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31prexy.html

Obama Pledges Commitment to New Orleans

August 29, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

NEW ORLEANS — President Obama on Sunday sought to assure this city, battered by two catastrophic disasters in five years, that federal efforts to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina would not waver even as the city struggles with the aftermath of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaking at Xavier University on the fifth anniversary of the hurricane that took 1,800 lives, Mr. Obama emphasized the resilience of New Orleans residents.

The legacy of Katrina, Mr. Obama said, must be “not one of neglect, but of action; not one of indifference, but of empathy; not of abandonment, but of a community working together to meet shared challenges.”

“There are some wounds that do not heal,” the president acknowledged. “There are some losses that cannot be repaid. And for many who lived through those harrowing days five years ago, there is a searing memory that time will not erase.”

Mr. Obama’s trip to the gulf was his second in two weeks. The visits book-ended his family’s 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and served as a stark reminder of the challenges facing his presidency as Congressional Democrats and Republicans prepare for the midterm elections in November.

The excruciatingly slow effort to plug the BP oil spill — finally accomplished in July after 87 days — brought the president to the gulf numerous times in recent months as he sought to avoid the pitfalls that dogged the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Arne Duncan, the education secretary, announced Saturday on the White House blog a plan to award $1.8 billion to rebuild New Orleans schools.

And Shaun Donovan, the housing secretary, said Sunday on “State of the Union” on CNN that the Obama administration had made progress in the past 18 months in returning families to their homes. Mr. Donovan said that 40,000 families were in trailers or on emergency housing vouchers when Mr. Obama took office, and that now “98 percent of those families are in permanent housing.”

The city’s unemployment rate is 8.2 percent, compared with 9.5 percent nationally, but many of the jobs are in reconstruction. The unemployment rate dipped to 7.4 percent last year before creeping back up as the oil spill shuttered businesses and stalled livelihoods.

In an interview on Sunday with “NBC Nightly News,” Mr. Obama acknowledged the economic and other difficulties in New Orleans and throughout the entire Gulf Coast region, though he said there had been “steady progress.”

He added: “We’ve still got a long way to go. And part of the reason that I wanted to come down here today, to mark the fifth anniversary, was just to send a message to the people of New Orleans, but also the entire Gulf Coast.”

The region was “hit pretty good over the last several years,” he said. “And all of America, not just people here, not just folks in the White House, but all of America, remains concerned and remains committed to their rebuilding.”

Most of the signs held by protesters who braved rain and wind to await Mr. Obama’s arrival at Xavier on Sunday referred to the oil spill, which has been blamed for a drop in tourism, one of the city’s mainstays. The spill also hurt the commercial fishing industry along the Gulf Coast and damaged fragile wetlands and wildlife sanctuaries.

But many local officials have criticized Mr. Obama’s decision to impose a moratorium on deepwater offshore oil drilling. That moratorium is set to expire on Nov. 30.

Mr. Obama tacitly acknowledged that politicians could no longer talk about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina without including the aftermath of the oil spill. Much of his speech at Xavier was devoted to the spill and what his administration had been trying to do to limit the fallout.

“From the start, I promised you two things,” Mr. Obama said. “One is that we would see to it that the leak was stopped. And it has been. The second promise I made was that we would stick with our efforts, and stay on BP, until the damage to the gulf and to the lives of the people in this region was reversed. And this, too, is a promise that we will keep.”

Mr. Obama brought his family along to New Orleans on Sunday. Shortly after Air Force One touched down, the first family stopped for lunch at the Parkway Bakery and Tavern. Mr. Obama mingled with diners, and he and Mrs. Obama shook hands and took photos.

“We’re still here, and we’re just going to keep on building,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to keep on working, all right?”

As he worked the room, a voice over the loudspeaker boomed, “Barack, pick up,” signaling that the family’s lunch order was ready.

    Obama Pledges Commitment to New Orleans, 29.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/politics/30obama.html

Waiting for Mr. Obama

August 28, 2010
The New York Times

If President Obama has a big economic initiative up his sleeve, as he hinted recently, now would be a good time to let the rest of us in on it.

News on Friday confirmed that the economy was far weaker in the second quarter than originally believed, growing at 1.6 percent versus an initial reading of 2.4 percent. Grim reports on housing sales indicate that the slowdown has continued. In a normal recession, housing would lead the way up from the depths. Today, it appears to be leading the way back down.

Which brings us back to Mr. Obama. The fiscal stimulus of 2009, coupled with low interest rates and other Federal Reserve interventions, kept the recession from being much worse. But it has not been enough to revive hiring, without which a real recovery is impossible. In the meantime and even more ominously, economic policy making has all but ground to a halt.

Congress is gridlocked. For nearly two months, Republicans blocked an extension of unemployment benefits, a basic recovery measure. They are still holding up a bill to spur more lending to small businesses.

In a much-anticipated speech on Friday, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, reiterated his vow to do more to boost the economy if conditions worsened. He did not seem particularly convinced that anything the Fed could do would be enough.

The question then is whether Mr. Obama will lead. He cannot force Congress to act, but he could pre-empt Republicans’ diatribes — on the deficit, on small business, on taxes — with tough truths and a big mission that would tie together the strategies and the sacrifices that will be needed to put the economy right.

First, he needs to keep driving home that he is committed to addressing the deficit, and that he will call for widespread sacrifice to do so — starting with letting the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans expire at year end. Mr. Obama must tell Americans that claims from Republican leaders that the country can both cut taxes and tackle the deficit are absurd and cynical.

Next, he needs to explain why too much sacrifice, too soon, especially from the middle class, would do more harm than good while the economy is weak. More government support is needed until conditions improve.

Mr. Obama also needs to inspire Americans who have been ground down by the economic crisis and Washington’s small-bore sniping. He needs to rally the nation around a big idea — a project that is worth sacrificing for, worth paying for, worth working for. One that lets them know that there is more ahead than just a return to a status quo of lopsided growth in which corporate profits surge while jobs and incomes lag.

That mission could be the “21st century infrastructure,” that Mr. Obama mentioned on a multi-city trip this month, “not just roads and bridges, but faster Internet access and high-speed rail.” It could be energy independence, with high-tech green jobs and a real chance for addressing global warming. Either of the above would make sense, economically and politically.

Mr. Obama and his economic team had clearly hoped for an economic rebound in time for the midterm elections. They are not going to get it. The economic damage they inherited was too deep, and the economic stimulus they pushed through Congress, for all of the fight, was too small. Standing back is not doing the country or his party any good. We believe Americans are ready for hard truths and big ideas.

    Waiting for Mr. Obama, NYT, 28.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29sun1.html

For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War

August 28, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama rushed to the Oval Office when word arrived one night that militants with Al Qaeda in Yemen had been located and that the military wanted to support an attack by Yemeni forces. After a quick discussion, his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, told him the window to strike was closing.

“I’ve got two minutes here,” Mr. Brennan said.

“O.K.,” the president said. “Go with this.”

While Mr. Obama took three sometimes maddening months to decide to send more forces to Afghanistan, other decisions as commander in chief have come with dizzying speed, far less study and little public attention.

He is the first president in four decades with a shooting war already raging the day he took office — two, in fact, plus subsidiaries — and his education as a commander in chief with no experience in uniform has been a steep learning curve. He has learned how to salute. He has surfed the Internet at night to look into the toll on troops. He has faced young soldiers maimed after carrying out his orders. And he is trying to manage a tense relationship with the military.

Along the way, he has confronted some of the biggest choices a president can make, often deferring to military advisers yet trying to shape the decisions with his own judgments — too much at times for the Pentagon, too little in the view of his liberal base. His evolution from antiwar candidate to leader of the world’s most powerful military will reach a milestone on Tuesday when he delivers an Oval Office address to formally end the combat mission in Iraq while defending his troop buildup in Afghanistan.

A year and a half into his presidency, Mr. Obama appears to be a reluctant warrior. Even as he draws down troops in Iraq, he has been abundantly willing to use force to advance national interests, tripling forces in Afghanistan, authorizing secret operations in Yemen and Somalia, and escalating drone strikes in Pakistan. But advisers said he did not see himself as a war president in the way his predecessor did. His speech on Tuesday is notable because he talks in public about the wars only sporadically, determined not to let them define his presidency.

Where George W. Bush saw the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as his central mission and opportunities to transform critical regions, Mr. Obama sees them as “problems that need managing,” as one adviser put it, while he pursues his mission of transforming America. The result, according to interviews with three dozen administration officials, military leaders and national security experts, is an uneasy balance between a president wary of endless commitment and a military worried he is not fully invested in the cause.

“He’s got a very full plate of very big issues, and I think he does not want to create the impression that he’s so preoccupied with these two wars that he’s not addressing the domestic issues that are uppermost in people’s minds,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview. Mr. Obama, though, has devoted enormous time and thought to finding the right approaches, Mr. Gates added. “From the first, he’s been decisive and he’s been willing to make big decisions,” he said.

Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who sometimes advises Mr. Obama, said the president was grappling with harsh reality. “He came into office with a very sound strategic vision,” Mr. Reed said, “and what has happened in the intervening months is, as with every president, he is beginning to understand how difficult it is to translate a strategic vision into operational reality.”

A former adviser to the president, who like others insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly, said that Mr. Obama’s relationship with the military was “troubled” and that he “doesn’t have a handle on it.” The relationship will be further tested by year’s end when Mr. Obama evaluates his Afghanistan strategy in advance of his July deadline to begin pulling out. As one administration official put it, “His commander in chief role is about to get tested again, and in a very dramatic way.”

Beyond the Vietnam Debate

Mr. Obama was an 11-year-old in Hawaii when the last American combat troops left Vietnam, too young to have participated in the polarizing clashes of the era or to have faced the choices the last two presidents did about serving. “He’s really the first generation of recent presidents who didn’t live through that,” said David Axelrod, his senior adviser. “The whole debate on Vietnam, that was not part of his life experience.”

Running for president of a country at war, he had plenty to learn, even basics like military ceremonies and titles. His campaign recruited retired generals to advise him. But it still took time to adjust when he became president. The first time he walked into a room of generals, an aide recalled, he was surprised when they stood. “Come on, guys, you don’t have to do that,” he said, according to the aide.

Perhaps his most important tutor has been Mr. Gates, the defense secretary appointed by Mr. Bush and the first kept on by a president of another party. They are an unlikely pair, a 49-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer turned community activist and a 66-year-old veteran of cold war spy intrigues and Republican administrations. But they are both known for unassuming discipline, and they bonded through weekly meetings and shared challenges.

Mr. Obama has relied on Mr. Gates as his ambassador to the military and deferred to him repeatedly. When Mr. Gates wanted to force out Gen. David D. McKiernan in May 2009 as commander in Afghanistan in favor of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Mr. Obama signed off. Likewise, cognizant of Bill Clinton’s ill-fated effort to end the ban on gay and lesbian soldiers, Mr. Obama let Mr. Gates set a slow pace in overturning the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, even though it has disappointed gay rights advocates.

Even on his signature campaign promise to pull out of Iraq, Mr. Obama compromised in the early days of his tenure to accommodate military concerns. Instead of the 16-month withdrawal of combat forces he promised, he accepted a 19-month timetable, and he agreed to leave behind 50,000 for now rather than a smaller force.

But as he grows in the job, Mr. Obama has shown more willingness to set aside Mr. Gates’s advice. When General McChrystal got in trouble in June for comments by him and his staff in Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Gates favored reprimanding the commander. Mr. Obama decided instead to oust him and replace him with Gen. David H. Petraeus, who led the troop increase in Iraq.

“My first reaction was if McChrystal with his experience and his contacts and his knowledge were pulled out, that could have real consequence for the war,” Mr. Gates said. “It never even occurred to me — I kicked myself subsequently — to move Petraeus over there. When the president raised that with me in a private meeting, it was like a light bulb went on — yes, that will work.”

Just as keeping Mr. Gates provided political cover against the weak-on-defense Democratic image, Mr. Obama surrounded himself with uniformed officers. He kept Mr. Bush’s war coordinator, Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, and tapped Gen. James L. Jones as national security adviser. “Picking General Jones was in part inoculation,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who led Mr. Obama’s first Afghanistan review.

But they were not always in control. General Jones has often been eclipsed by younger foreign policy advisers with closer relationships with the president. Mr. Obama ended up pushing out Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence, and approved the Afghan troop increase despite the warnings of Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, his ambassador to Kabul.

Although General McChrystal was described in Rolling Stone as calling Mr. Obama intimidated in meeting with military commanders early in his tenure, other attendees disagreed. “He didn’t look to me like he was one bit intimidated,” Mr. Riedel said. “He did look like someone who was taking it all in and a bit frustrated that what seemed for him to be simple questions he was getting complicated answers to — like how many troops do you really need?”

Wars as a Distraction

With the economy in tatters and health care on his agenda, Mr. Obama was determined to keep the wars from becoming a major distraction. When he held a videoconference on Iraq on his first full day in office, officials recalled, he said: “Guys, before you start, there’s one thing I want to say to you and that is I do not want to screw this up.”

But while he had given much thought to ending the war in Iraq, he had not spent as much time contemplating Afghanistan despite a campaign promise to send more troops. When he took office, he found an urgent request to reinforce the flagging effort. Warned by the generals that he could not wait to study the issue, he overruled Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and sent 21,000 more troops. “Both he and I frankly thought at that point we were done,” Mr. Gates recalled. Within months, though, General McChrystal asked for 40,000 more troops. “I certainly was surprised when General McChrystal came in with the request,” he said, “and I think the president was as well.”

Reliant on Mr. Gates, Mr. Obama has made limited efforts to know his service chiefs or top commanders, and has visited the Pentagon only once, not counting a Sept. 11 commemoration. He ended Mr. Bush’s practice of weekly videoconferences with commanders, preferring to work through the chain of command and wary, aides said, of being drawn into managing the wars.

So General McChrystal’s request for even more reinforcements exposed the mutual mistrust, particularly after it was leaked to the news media. The president complained he was being boxed in while the military worried whether politics would drive the decision. At one point Denis R. McDonough, deputy national security adviser, pressed Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about stopping leaks by the military, according to people informed about the conversation. Admiral Mullen asked pointedly if that would also apply to the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who was skeptical of the troop increase request.

“If I had been in the White House, I would have been suspicious,” Mr. Gates said. “The leak of McChrystal’s assessment was obviously very damaging in the assessment process because it put the president on the spot.” He added: “My position was this is not a deliberate attempt to jam the president. It’s indiscipline.”

Last December, the president gave the military 30,000 more troops, but also a ticking clock. He would start pulling troops out in July, on the grounds that if there was not visible progress by then, it would mean the strategy was not working. Some saw that as a sop to his antiwar base. Others considered it his way of reasserting control over a military that knows how to outmaneuver the White House.

“He didn’t understand or grasp the military culture,” said Lawrence J. Korb, a former Pentagon official at the liberal Center for American Progress. “He got over that particular quandary and put them back in the box by saying, ‘O.K., I’m giving you 18 months.’ ”

One adviser at the time said Mr. Obama calculated that an open-ended commitment would undermine the rest of his agenda. “Our Afghan policy was focused as much as anything on domestic politics,” the adviser said. “He would not risk losing the moderate to centrist Democrats in the middle of health insurance reform and he viewed that legislation as the make-or-break legislation for his administration.”

White House officials reject the linkage, but said Mr. Obama believed that the wars should be judged against other priorities. Preparing to announce his decision last December, he read Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address and included a line in his own speech at West Point: “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

 

Hungry for Information

Mr. Obama has made a point of seeking his own information, scribbling questions in memo margins and scouring the Internet. At one meeting, he surprised the generals by citing a study of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers serving repeat tours.

“He reads a lot,” said General Jones, the national security adviser. “He studies issues before he comes to the table. That’s another thing the military mind, if there is such a thing, appreciates. When he sits down to talk about an issue, he’s done his homework.”

Facing relentless and elusive foes, Mr. Obama has turned increasingly to the sort of strikes he authorized in Yemen and the drones in Pakistan, a form of warfare with little risk to American lives even though critics question its wisdom, effectiveness or even morality.

But Mr. Obama also confronts the consequences of the direct combat he has ordered. Last year, he flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet soldiers’ coffins. During a later meeting with advisers, Mr. Obama expressed irritation at doubters of his commitment. “If I didn’t think this was something worth doing,” he said, “one trip to Dover would be enough to cause me to bring every soldier home. O.K.?”

In March, during his only trip to Afghanistan in office, he met a wounded soldier, maybe 19, who had lost three limbs. “I go into a place like this, I go to Walter Reed — it’s just hard for me to think of anything to say,” an emotional Mr. Obama told advisers as he left.

The moment stuck with him. Three months later, after ousting General McChrystal, Mr. Obama marched into the Situation Room and cited the teenage triple amputee as he reprimanded advisers for the infighting that had led to the general’s forced resignation. “We have a lot of kids on the ground acting like adults and we have a lot of adults in this room acting like kids,” he lectured.

The schisms among his team, though, are born in part out of uncertainty about his true commitment. His reticence to talk much publicly about the wars may owe to the political costs of alienating his base as well as the demands of other issues. Senior Pentagon and military officials said they understood that he presided over a troubled economy, but noted that he was not losing 30 American soldiers a month on Wall Street.

The sensitivities about calling attention to the unpopular war in Afghanistan, and particularly America’s problematic partner, played out when President Hamid Karzai visited last May. General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry wanted to take Mr. Karzai to Fort Campbell in Kentucky to honor troops leaving for Afghanistan, but the White House objected that it sent the wrong message, as if Americans were fighting for Mr. Karzai. They compromised by having Mr. Gates go as well, but without his Washington press corps.

“From an image point of view, he doesn’t seem to embrace it, almost like you have to drag him into doing it,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Bush adviser with military contacts. “There’s deep uncertainty and perhaps doubt in the military about his commitment to see the wars through to a successful conclusion.”

Much of the public too is confused about the president’s Afghan strategy, as White House aides and their critics acknowledge. “There have only been a few moments when he’s tried to focus the nation’s attention on Afghanistan because, quite frankly, it’s competing with the other priorities,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who opposes the strategy. “It’s probably one of the reasons public support has fallen, because they see the costs but they don’t know his thinking about it.”

If the flap over General McChrystal underscored the tensions, Mr. Obama’s response may have actually helped ease them. “Ironically enough, the McChrystal firing helped a lot because Obama handled it exactly the way most senior military officers would have handled it if they had been in his shoes,” said Stephen Biddle, a critic of Mr. Obama’s withdrawal deadline at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Perhaps more important was his selection of General Petraeus to take over. The choice brings Mr. Obama full circle. As a senator, he opposed the Iraq troop increase led by General Petraeus, and the two had a wary encounter in Baghdad when Mr. Obama visited as a candidate in 2008. After Mr. Obama came to the White House, General Petraeus no longer had the regular interactions he had with Mr. Bush.

But Mr. Obama came to appreciate General Petraeus’s intelligence and dedication. He invited the general to fly on Air Force One with him to West Point for his speech announcing the Afghanistan troop increase. Six months later, after ousting General McChrystal, the president sent his personal aide to find General Petraeus and bring him to the Oval Office for a one-on-one talk. The general accepted the appointment without even a chance to call his wife.

“It’s an extraordinary irony,” said Mr. Riedel, the former Obama adviser. “He, like Bush before him, has put all his bets down on the table on one guy — and it’s the same guy.”

    For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War, NYT, 28.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/world/29commander.html

Obama and Aides Discuss Ways to Spur Economy

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. — Amid the latest signs of a faltering recovery, President Obama held a lengthy conference call with his economic advisers on Wednesday morning to discuss a course of action.

The call, which included Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary; Christina Romer, the soon-departing chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Lawrence H. Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, came as the second report in as many days pointed to a softer-than-expected housing sector — a weakness that acts as a drag on the broader economy.

“The discussion focused on recent data reports, global markets and economic growth,” a White House statement said afterward. “The economic team provided an update on the next steps to keep the economy growing including assistance to small businesses and the extension of tax cuts to the middle class.”

The government reported on Wednesday that new-home sales fell unexpectedly in July, the first month in which buyers no longer could get a tax credit that was part of the government’s stimulus program. The news followed an industry report on Tuesday that sales of existing homes in July slid to the lowest level in a decade.

Together, the reports stoked concerns among more pessimistic forecasters of another recession, though most economists still expect the economy to recover, if more slowly than previously thought.

Also this week, the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, delivered a blistering attack on Tuesday of the administration’s stimulus policies to set the opposition’s tone for the campaign stretch. But on the same day, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the policies had increased growth in the second quarter by up to 4.5 percent.

Many economists, in fact, have reduced their growth forecasts partly because the administration’s two-year stimulus plan is winding down and Congress shows little sign of doing more.

There is not a lot that Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress can do in the short time between lawmakers’ return from their recess in September and their departure in October to campaign for re-election, especially given the opposition of Republicans, who are increasingly hopeful of winning enough seats in November to take control of the House and Senate.

In any case, nothing the Democrats do would have time to show results before the November elections.

The administration’s main initiative, which the President proposed at the start of the year to provide additional tax cuts to small businesses and to create a government-backed facility to increase lending to them, has been stalled by Republicans in the Senate. Mr. Obama has been publicly urging action, most recently in a statement as he departed on Thursday for his 10-day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

As the White House statement indicated, Congress must act by the end of the year if the Bush income tax cuts are to be extended beyond their Dec. 31 expiration. Mr. Obama wants to extend the tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans but the Republicans are insisting on extending all the tax cuts given the economy’s continued weakness.

The fight over tax cuts will probably dominate discussion in coming weeks, and the President and his economic and political teams have only begun to focus on their strategy.

Republicans say Democrats want to impose a big tax increase on successful small businesses while Democrats counter that Republicans are fighting for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, who do not need the money and would not spend it to stimulate the economy.

Yet while data show that fewer than 3 percent of small businesses would pay higher taxes if the top rates revert to their pre-2001 level, enough Democrats feel vulnerable to Republicans’ arguments about small businesses that the White House and Congressional leaders could end up postponing the issue until after the elections.

With the President on vacation, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been the administration’s public face this week. At a forum in a pizza restaurant in Washington on Wednesday, he said, “To extend those tax cuts costs $700 billion over 10 years at a time when we are worried about the economy, when long term we have to be worried about deficits.”

    Obama and Aides Discuss Ways to Spur Economy, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/business/26obama.html

In Iraq War, Soldiers Say They Had a Job to Do

August 19, 2010
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

BAGHDAD — Staff Sgt. Lucas C. Trammell, a tank gunner with the Third Infantry Division, fought his way into Baghdad in 2003. He was back in 2005, abandoning the tank for foot patrols in a very unsafe Ramadi, and again in 2007 as bodyguard for a battalion commander in Baghdad.

He has killed the enemy and lost friends. He has sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. (“The Army’s gotten a lot better about letting you put your hand up,” he explained.)

He is back in Iraq for a fourth time, part of a force of only 50,000 no longer engaged in combat as of Aug. 31. He is one of thousands of soldiers and officers for whom the legacy of Iraq, like Afghanistan, has been a recalibration of what it means to be an American at war today.

The Third Infantry Division has spent more than four years in all in a war that has lasted seven and a half — and may not yet be over. These soldiers, far more than any other Americans, bear the personal and professional burdens of a conflict that has lost what popular support it had at home.

To those fighting it, the war in Iraq is not a glorious cause or, as the old advertisement put it, an adventure.

These days it is no longer even a divisive national argument like Vietnam. It is a job.

Even with the formal cessation of combat operations this month, it is a job that remains unfinished — tens of thousands of troops will stay here for at least another year — and one that, like many jobs, inspires great emotion only among those who do it.

“A lot of people at home are tired of this,” said Staff Sgt. Trevino D. Lewis, sitting outside a gym at Camp Liberty, the dusty rubble-strewn base near Baghdad’s airport and coming to a point many soldiers made. The people back home can tune out; they cannot.

“The way I look at it, it’s my job,” he said, recounting and dismissing the shifting rationales for the war, from the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to the establishment of democracy in the Arab world. “It’s my career.”

The sense of duty among those who serve here, still strong, is nonetheless tempered by the fact that the war is winding down slowly — or, as one officer put it, petering out — with mixed results.

The invasion has left behind a democracy in an autocratic part of the world, but a troubled young one with uncertain control over its security and destiny.

“Do I think the kids running around here have a better future?” Sergeant Trammell said one evening in Camp Karbala, just outside the holy Shiite city of the same name.

“To be honest, I don’t really care,” he said. “As a nation, was it the right thing to do? In the end of the day, when I look back on it, I haven’t lost a soldier in my squad. That’s what’s important to me.”

For the soldiers and officers of the Army’s Third Infantry Division, the war in Iraq has become something no one really envisioned when the division crossed the Kuwaiti border on the night of March 19, 2003: a routine.

In Vietnam, draftees served for a year and went home; the professional soldiers of the all-volunteer military fought in Grenada, Panama or the Persian Gulf war with the knowledge they would return quickly, hailed as heroes.

These soldiers in Iraq just kept coming back. They are veterans of not one war, but in essence four, each shadowing the shifting arc of Iraq itself: from the “shock and awe” invasion to the bloody sectarian conflict that followed, from President Bush’s “surge” in 2007 to President Obama’s denouement.

Of dozens of soldiers interviewed over the course of their deployments, many said the war was worth the personal sacrifices they made — or the far greater sacrifices of those wounded or killed — but not all did.

For some, the war over time lost the sense of national purpose, or national sacrifice, that might help assuage the hardships of those being asked to fight it.

“I missed the birth of my kid,” Sgt. Christopher L. Schirmer said matter-of-factly as he stood guard outside the fortified town hall in Ash Shura, a village in northern Iraq where the embers of insurgency never fully died. He also said his marriage broke up.

Inside, his company commander drank tea and listened to a local official complain about politics, security, the perfidious media and the need for a bank.

Soldiers like Sergeant Schirmer are volunteers, banking their tax-free salaries and enjoying the most lucrative benefits any military has ever offered.

Most don’t seek sympathy, and they complain no more than anyone would who lived and worked in gravel-strewn camps in dust and searing heat.

Sergeant Schirmer wears a remembrance of the greater price others have paid: a bracelet engraved with the name of Sgt. First Class Paul R. Smith and the date he died, April 4, 2003, and earned the Medal of Honor. Sergeant Schirmer was there that day and spoke to him as he died.

“I want a normal life,” he said, “enjoy the things Iraq has paid for.”

From the intensity of combat during the invasion and the turbulent years that followed, the missions in Iraq today are far more peaceful, reflecting the shift from combat to the advisory role that 50,000 troops will still carry out until the end of 2011.

While soldiers still clear roads of improvised bombs and patrol rural areas in search of insurgents, today’s missions most often involve meetings with local officers or bureaucrats.

The military call them K.L.E.s, for “key leader engagements.”

“It’s almost not worth the trip,” said Staff Sgt. Rodney F. Martin, who is in Sergeant Schirmer’s squad, then based south of Mosul. “It’s more politics now.”

Sergeant Martin tried to leave the Army after his second tour in Iraq, but was forced to stay by the policy known as “stop loss.”

Third Infantry’s First Brigade was in fact the last unit in the Army to be exempted from the policy, which was rescinded as the personnel pressures on the military eased with the troop drawdown in Iraq, from a high of 170,000.

By the time Sergeant Martin could leave, though, he had re-enlisted — “The finances weren’t so good,” he explained — and now he’s back. “I think we’ve done all we can do now,” he said. “I’m a little burned out.”

Some of the younger soldiers complain, too. Roughly half of any of Third Infantry’s battalions are new recruits, coming to Iraq for the first time.

Some pine for the action of the invasion or the surge or Afghanistan, bored by the relative calm of today’s Iraq.

“I tell them, ‘How we got to this point wasn’t easy,’ ” Sergeant Martin said.

Even as the election gave way to a political stalemate that remains unresolved, the withdrawal proceeded apace.

By summer, Third Infantry’s First Brigade, the American force that seized Saddam Hussein International Airport in early April 2003, began to leave the bases that sprouted around Baghdad afterward and remain to this day.

The latest, in July, was Joint Security Station Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad in an area once known as the Triangle of Death.

Under strict orders, shaped by Congress, they had to inventory everything they took and everything they left behind: tents, generators, air-conditioners and even the blast walls.

“Four thousand nine hundred and eighteen,” Lt. Jonathan C. Baker said of the concrete barriers. He knew because he had to count them.

Among the things removed was a memorial to those sacrifices, which once stood outside the camp’s operations center, listing dozens of soldiers killed there since 2003.

The company’s orders were explicit: document all the memorials and ship home the ones that could be moved.

One unofficial memorial remained: fading paint on a blast wall commemorating two sergeants and four specialists from Troop E of the 108th Cavalry, part of the Georgia National Guard, who were killed there during the unit’s 2005-2006 deployment.

Time and the elements had worn the names all but illegible.

The wall could not be moved, but the orders were to erase any traces of the American military’s presence on what is now an Iraqi base.

Two days later a light blue patch covered it.

“From our vantage point, it’s a victory here,” Capt. Alex Zerio, a battalion staff officer overseeing the transfer, said, the base nearly deserted. “You can see. We’re out of here.”

For all the support of the nation’s leaders and the public for the uniform they wear, if not for the war itself, none of the soldiers who serve in Iraq have returned home to victory parades.

“It’s not going to be like V.E. Day or V.J. Day,” Master Sgt. Noel R. Sawyer said as he prepared to go on a patrol west of Mosul earlier this year.

“Rather than being a defining moment, it’s going to peter out,” he said of the end of the war. “In a way, it sucks, but it’s a good thing.”

As his armored vehicle rumbled out of the main American base in Mosul, Forward Operating Base Marez, a sign at the gate warned: “Complacency Kills. Stay Alert. Stay Alive.”

A blue sign on his MRAP, an armored vehicle designed to withstand improvised explosives planted on roadside — a vehicle that didn’t exist when the war began — said, “We’re on the road with the permission of the Iraqi police.”

Both signs were indications, symbols, of how much the war has changed, how much it has wound down already.

Iraq remains dangerous, with American soldiers at risk of attack every day, but since the fourth deployments began late last year, the Third Infantry has lost only 14 soldiers, mostly to accidents. Over all 44 American troops have died this year in Iraq, a fraction of the 4,415 killed since 2003.

With combat operations already largely over — with the exception of counterinsurgency raids by American and Iraqi special forces — the soldiers of the Third Infantry have served largely as trainers and advisers.

“It’s like, are you O.K.?” Sergeant Sawyer said, describing the gradual transition of passing authority to Iraq’s beleaguered security forces.

He stepped back, like a father taking his hands off a child’s bicycle, “Are you O.K.? Are you O.K.?”

He stepped back again, grinned widely and raised his thumbs.

The irony is that for many soldiers and officers, the end seems like a victory, if a subdued one, measured in the progress that has been made since the worst days of violence.

“We’re not doing this for a victory parade,” said Col. Roger Cloutier, commander of the First Brigade, which after the official end of combat will oversee security for much of Baghdad.

Even so, a parade of a sort was on his mind, his own sense of what has been accomplished after the worst bloodshed in 2006 and 2007.

“When I go to downtown Baghdad, and I’m stuck in traffic, and I’m not jumping curbs, and going against traffic, I’m driving in traffic like everyone else — and I’m looking to my left and right, and there’s a guy selling fish,” he said at Forward Operating Base Falcon, a base on Baghdad’s outskirts.

“He’s got a fish cart. He’s cooking fish. And there’s a watermelon stand and then there’s an electronic store right next to it, and people are everywhere. And I’m sitting in traffic and I’m going, ‘Man, this is unbelievable.’ That’s a victory parade for me.”

He then talked about his children, ages 9, 14 and 16, sounding very much like a father who had spent much of their young lives overseas.

“I want my family to be able to look at me and say, you know what — I’m getting emotional, guys — when America called, we as a family sacrificed,” he said.


Tim Arango contributed reporting.

    In Iraq War, Soldiers Say They Had a Job to Do, NYT, 19.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/world/middleeast/20legacy.html

3 Republicans Criticize Obama’s Endorsement of Mosque

August 14, 2010
The New York Times
By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — Three leading Republicans reacted negatively to President Obama’s statements in favor of a mosque and Muslim community center whose construction has been proposed for a building near the site formerly occupied by the World Trade Center.

John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is the House minority leader, said: ”The decision to build this mosque so close to the site of ground zero is deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it.”

“The American people certainly don’t support it,” Mr. Boehner said.

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, said that while the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, doing so needlessly offends too many people.

“President Obama is wrong,” Mr. King said. “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much. The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately the president caved into political correctness."

Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, also condemned the proposed mosque and the President’s comments.

“There is nothing surprising in the president’s continued pandering to radical Islam,” he said. “What he said last night is untrue and in accurate. The fact is this is not about religious liberty.”

Mr. Gingrich said the proposed mosque would be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism” and that building the mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

“It’s profoundly and terribly wrong,” he said.

    3 Republicans Criticize Obama’s Endorsement of Mosque, NYT, 14.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15reaction.html

Obama Enters Debate With Mosque Remarks

August 14, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Faced with withering Republican criticism of his defense of the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near ground zero, President Obama quickly recalibrated his remarks on Saturday, a sign that he has waded into even more treacherous political waters than the White House had at first realized.

In brief comments during a family trip to the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama said he was not endorsing the New York project, but simply trying to uphold the broader principle that government should “treat everybody equally,” regardless of religion.

“I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Mr. Obama said. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

But Mr. Obama’s attempt to clarify his remarks, less than 24 hours after his initial comments at a White House iftar, a Ramadan sunset dinner, pushed the president even deeper into the thorny debate about Islam, national identity and what it means to be an American — a move that is riskier for him than for his predecessors.

From the moment he took the oath of office, using his entire name, Barack Hussein Obama, as he swore to protect and defend the Constitution, Mr. Obama has personified the hopes of many Americans about tolerance and inclusion. He has devoted himself to reaching out to the Muslim world, vowing, as he did in Cairo last year, “a new beginning.”

But his “new beginning” has aroused nervousness in some, especially those who disagree with his counterterrorism policies, or those more comfortable with a vision of America as a white and largely Christian nation, and not the pluralistic melting pot Mr. Obama represents.

The debate over the proposed Islamic center in Manhattan only intensified on Saturday, as the conservative blogosphere lighted up with criticism of Mr. Obama, and leading Republicans — including Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker; Representative John A. Boehner, the House minority leader; and Representative Peter T. King of New York — forcefully rejected the president’s stance.

Mr. Gingrich accused the president of “pandering to radical Islam.” Mr. Boehner said the decision to build a mosque so close to ground zero was “deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it.” And Mr. King flatly said the president “is wrong,” adding that Mr. Obama had “caved in to political correctness.”

Indeed, the criticism was so intense that the White House ultimately issued an elaboration on the president’s clarification, insisting that the president was “not backing off in any way” from the comments he made Friday night.

“As a citizen, and as president,” Mr. Obama said then, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

The local issue of the mosque and the wider issues of Islam and religious freedom are just part of a divisive cultural and political debate that is percolating in various forms during this hotly contested election season. On Capitol Hill, for instance, some Republicans advocate amending the Constitution to bar babies born to illegal immigrants from becoming citizens — a move the president also opposes.

“I think it’s very important, as difficult as some of these issues are, that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about,” the president said here on Saturday.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, also held annual Ramadan celebrations and frequently took pains to draw a distinction between Al Qaeda and Islam, as Mr. Obama did Friday night. But Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Bush, has been accused of being a closet Muslim (he is Christian) and faced attacks from the right that he is soft on terrorists.

“For people who already fear the worst from Obama, this only confirms their fears,” said John Feehery, a Republican consultant who spent years as a top party aide on Capitol Hill. “This is not a unifying decision on his part; he chose a side. I understand why he did this, but politically I think it’s a blunder.”

White House aides say Mr. Obama was well aware of the risks. “He understands the politics of it,” David Axelrod, his senior adviser, said in an interview.

Few national Democrats rushed to Mr. Obama’s defense; party leaders, who would much prefer Mr. Obama to talk about jobs, were mostly silent. Two New York Democrats, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand and Representative Jerrold Nadler, however, did back Mr. Obama. But Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate for governor here, distanced herself, while Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican-turned-independent, defended the president.

“I think he’s right,” Mr. Crist told reporters during an appearance with the president at a Coast Guard station here.

Mr. Obama has typically weighed in on such delicate matters only when circumstances have forced his hand, as he did during his campaign for president, when he gave a lengthy speech on race in America in response to controversy swirling around his relationship with his fiery former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Debate about the Islamic center had been brewing for weeks, yet Mr. Obama had studiously sidestepped it.

But the Ramadan dinner seemed to leave the president little choice. Aides said there was never any question about what he would say.

“He felt that he had a responsibility to speak,” Mr. Axelrod said.


Edward Wyatt contributed reporting from Washington.

    Obama Enters Debate With Mosque Remarks, NYT, 14.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15mosque.html

Obama Says Mosque Upholds Principle of Equal Treatment

August 14, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — President Obama said on Saturday that in defending the right of Muslims to build a community center and mosque near Ground Zero he “was not commenting” on “the wisdom” of that particular project, but rather trying to uphold the broader principle that government should “treat everybody equally” regardless of religion.

Mr. Obama, who is visiting the Gulf Coast with his wife and younger daughter for a brief overnight stay, made his comments at the Coast Guard district station here. On Friday night, he used the White House iftar, a sunset dinner celebrating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, to weigh in on the mosque controversy. In clarifying his remarks, Mr. Obama was apparently seeking to address criticism that he is using his presidential platform to promote a particular project that has aroused the ire of many New Yorkers. And on Saturday at least three prominent Republicans spoke out against Mr. Obama’s stance.

White House officials said earlier in the day that Mr. Obama was not trying to promote the project, but rather sought more broadly to make a statement about freedom of religion and American values. “In this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion,” Mr. Obama said at the Coast Guard station. “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.

“And I think it’s very important as difficult as some of these issues are that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.”

At the dinner on Friday night, Mr. Obama had proclaimed that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

But the day after the dinner, John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is the House minority leader, was among those who criticized the president.

“The decision to build this mosque so close to the site of ground zero is deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it,” Mr. Boehner said. “The American people certainly don’t support it.”

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, said that while the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque, doing so needlessly offends too many people.

“President Obama is wrong,” Mr. King said. “It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. While the Muslim community has the right to build the mosque they are abusing that right by needlessly offending so many people who have suffered so much. The right and moral thing for President Obama to have done was to urge Muslim leaders to respect the families of those who died and move their mosque away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately the president caved into political correctness."

Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, also condemned the proposed mosque and the President’s comments.

“There is nothing surprising in the president’s continued pandering to radical Islam,” he said. “What he said last night is untrue and in accurate. The fact is this is not about religious liberty.”

Mr. Gingrich said the proposed mosque would be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism” and that building the mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

“It’s profoundly and terribly wrong,” he said.

Mr. Obama had spent weeks of avoiding the high-profile battle over the center — his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said last week that the president did not want to “get involved in local decision-making.” But on Friday night, he stepped squarely into the thorny debate.

“I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” Mr. Obama said. But, he continued: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.”

In hosting the iftar, Mr. Obama was following a White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson, who held a sunset dinner for the first Muslim ambassador to the United States. President George W. Bush hosted iftars annually.

Aides to Mr. Obama say privately that he has always felt strongly about the proposed community center and mosque, but the White House did not want to weigh in until local authorities made a decision on the proposal, planned for two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Last week, New York City removed the final construction hurdle for the project, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke forcefully in favor of it.

The community center proposal has led to a national uproar over Islam, 9/11 and freedom of religion during a hotly contested midterm election season.

In New York, Rick A. Lazio, a Republican candidate for governor and a former member of the House of Representatives, issued a statement responding to Mr. Obama’s remarks, saying that the president was still “not listening to New Yorkers.”

“With over 100 mosques in New York City, this is not an issue of religion, but one of safety and security,” he said.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008, has called the project “an unnecessary provocation” and urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject it.

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization, has also opposed the center.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama distinguished between the terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks and Islam. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam — it is a gross distortion of Islam,” the president said, adding, “In fact, Al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion, and that list includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.”

Noting that “Muslim Americans serve with honor in our military,” Mr. Obama said that at next week’s iftar at the Pentagon, “tribute will be paid to three soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq and now rest among the heroes of Arlington National Cemetery.”

Mr. Obama ran for office promising to improve relations with the Muslim world, by taking steps like closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and more generally reaching out. In a speech in Cairo last year, he vowed “a new beginning.”

But Ali Abunimah, an Arab-American journalist and author, said the president has since left many Muslims disappointed.

“There has been no follow-through; Guantánamo is still open and so forth, so all you have left for him to show is in the symbolic field,” Mr. Abunimah said, adding that it was imperative for Mr. Obama to “stand up to Islamophobia.”

Once Mr. Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.

“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.

Mr. Bloomberg, in a statement, said: “This proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime, and I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight.”

Sharif el-Gamal, the developer on the project, said, “We are deeply moved and tremendously grateful for our president’s words.”

A building on the site of the proposed center is already used for prayers, and some worshipers there on Friday night discussed the president’s remarks.

Mohamed Haroun, an intern at a mechanical engineering firm, said, “What he should have said was: ‘This is a community decision. Constitutionally, they have the right to do it, but it’s a community decision and we should see what the local community wants to do.’ ”


Anne Barnard and M. Amedeo Tumolillo contributed reporting from New York.

    Obama Says Mosque Upholds Principle of Equal Treatment, NYT, 14.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15islamcenter.html

Top Obama Adviser on Economics to Step Down

August 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Christina D. Romer is resigning as the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, the White House announced on Thursday night. She will be the second member this summer to leave an economic team that has steered the administration through the worst recession since the Depression.

Ms. Romer, the only woman in the inner circle of Mr. Obama’s economic advisers, early on had tense relations with Lawrence H. Summers, who, as director of his National Economic Council, coordinates the advice that goes to the president.

But according to the announcement, Ms. Romer wanted to return to her tenured position as an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in time for her son to begin high school in California this fall. Her resignation is effective Sept. 3.

Peter R. Orszag left last week as Mr. Obama’s budget director, citing personal reasons, and Ms. Romer’s announcement had been rumored for weeks.

It has been common in administrations for either budget directors or heads of the Council of Economic Advisers to serve less than two years, and those in the Obama administration have been under uncommon pressures.

Ms. Romer had a bigger role than many predecessors in her job but was said to express frustration that she did not have more direct access to the president, or more influence.

At some cost to her credibility, Ms. Romer was perhaps best known publicly for her early projection that unemployment would not top 8 percent if Mr. Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package became law; the spending was approved a month after his inauguration, but by year’s end the jobless rate hit 10 percent.

“Christy Romer has provided extraordinary service to me and our country during a time of economic crisis and recovery,” Mr. Obama said in the White House statement. “The challenges we faced demanded more of Christy than any of her predecessors, and I greatly valued and appreciated her skill, commitment and wise counsel.

“While Christy’s family commitments require that she return home, I’m gratified that she will continue to offer her insights and advice as a member of my Economic Recovery Advisory Board.”

Ms. Romer called it the “honor of a lifetime” to serve in the administration.

    Top Obama Adviser on Economics to Step Down, NYT, 5.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/business/06advise.html

Obama Pushes Through Agenda Despite Political Risks

July 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — If passage of the financial regulatory overhaul on Thursday proves anything about President Obama, it is this: He knows how to push big bills through a balky Congress.

But Mr. Obama’s legislative success poses a paradox: while he may be winning on Capitol Hill, he is losing with voters at a time of economic distress, and soon may be forced to scale back his ambitions.

The financial regulatory bill is the final piece of a legislative hat trick that also included the stimulus bill and the landmark new health care law. Over the last 18 months, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have made considerable inroads in passing what could be the most ambitious agenda in decades.

Mr. Obama has done what he promised when he ran for office in 2008: he has used government as an instrument to try to narrow the gaps between the haves and the have-nots. He has injected $787 billion in tax dollars into the economy, provided health coverage to 32 million uninsured and now, reordered the relationship among Washington, Wall Street, investors and consumers.

But as he has done so, the political context has changed around him. Today, with unemployment remaining persistently near double digits despite the scale of the stimulus program and the BP oil spill having raised questions about his administration’s competence, Mr. Obama’s signature legislation is providing ammunition to conservatives who argue that government is the problem, not the solution.

What Mr. Obama and his allies portray as progressive, activist government has been framed by his opponents as overreaching and profligate when it comes to the economy.

Even before the November elections, the White House is being forced to recalibrate. This week, Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats decided to press ahead with a scaled-back energy bill, having concluded after months of gridlock that the sweeping measure they once envisioned simply would not pass. It is a tactic that the president will likely have to employ more and more after the November elections, when Democrats will almost certainly lose seats — and may even lose control of the House or Senate.

“They clearly made a decision that political capital was something that should be used, not saved,” said Steven Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who worked for years as a senior leadership aide on Capitol Hill. “The reality is, he talked before the election about what he wanted to do, and he’s done it. He didn’t trim his sails, he didn’t change his philosophy. He didn’t compromise. The test will come in the fall: can he and Democrats in Congress make the case to the American people that what he did was the right thing to do?”

That is a difficult case to make, though Mr. Obama is trying. The latest CBS News poll found that while a majority of Americans supported increasing regulations on banks and financial institutions, nearly three-quarters said Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill had not improved the economy, and only a little more than a third approved of the health care law.

“You know, sometimes these pundits, they can’t figure me out,” the president said last week, campaigning in Kansas City, Mo., for the Democratic Senate candidate there. “They say, ‘Well, why is he doing that?’ That doesn’t poll well. Well, I’ve got my own pollsters, I know it doesn’t poll well. But it’s the right thing to do for America.”

It is an argument that sounds eerily similar to the one Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, made to justify an unpopular war in Iraq as he watched his own poll numbers sink lower. Mr. Bush and his aides often felt they could not catch a break; when the economy was humming along — or at least seemed to be humming along — the Bush White House never got credit for it, because the public was so upset about the war.

In Mr. Obama’s case, people are up in arms over the economy. Just 40 percent of Americans now approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy, the CBS News poll found. More than half said he was spending too little time on the economy. In one of the most striking findings, nearly two-thirds said the president’s economic policies had no effect on them personally — just 13 percent said they had helped them.

“Voters don’t have a checklist that they tick off, of what an elected official promised and then delivered,” said Charlie Cook, the editor of The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that tracks Congressional races. “They were enormously frustrated last year by the fixation on health care when they wanted a focus on the economy, with Democrats losing the messaging fight on whether what they did was right and effective or not.”

Part of the problem for Mr. Obama is that he came to Washington vowing to change the partisan tone in the capital, something he has thus far been unable to do. Just three Senate Republicans voted for the financial regulatory bill on Thursday, continuing a pattern that began early in Mr. Obama’s presidency when just three Republicans joined him on the stimulus bill.

At this point, relations between the president and the opposing party are no better than they were when Mr. Bush left office. Within hours of the bill’s passage on Thursday, Democrats including Mr. Obama were reminding voters that the House Republican leader, Representative John Boehner of Ohio, had called for its repeal. As Mr. Obama traveled to Michigan on Thursday to promote his economic policies, Mr. Boehner accused him of “a bunch of fuzzy math.”

If Republicans reclaim control of the House, the Senate or both, Mr. Obama will find himself in a situation similar to that of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who lost control of the House in 1994 in a historic realignment. Mr. Clinton responded by steering toward the center, searching for issues on which he could find Republicans to cooperate.

If Mr. Obama’s new tack on the energy bill is any guide, he may be willing to refashion himself as a pragmatist who will compromise in exchange for smaller victories. The coming elections may answer the question of how far the president, having had a taste of big things, is willing to bend.

“It could be a prescription for real gridlock, or it could be a prescription for great compromise,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, “and I don’t think we know the answer.”

    Obama Pushes Through Agenda Despite Political Risks, NYT, 15.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/business/16assess.html

Obama to Outline Plan to Cut H.I.V. Infections

July 11, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama will unveil a new national strategy this week to curb the AIDS epidemic by slashing the number of new infections and increasing the number of people who get care and treatment.

“Annual AIDS deaths have declined, but the number of new infections has been static and the number of people living with H.I.V. is growing,” says a final draft of the report, obtained by The New York Times.

In the report, the administration calls for steps to reduce the annual number of new H.I.V. infections by 25 percent within five years. “Approximately 56,000 people become infected each year, and more than 1.1 million Americans are living with H.I.V.,” the report says.

Mr. Obama plans to announce the strategy, distilled from 15 months of work and discussions with thousands of people around the country, at the White House on Tuesday.

While acknowledging that “increased investments in certain key areas are warranted,” the report does not propose a major increase in federal spending. It says the administration will redirect money to areas with the greatest need and population groups at greatest risk, including gay and bisexual men and African-Americans. The federal government now spends more than $19 billion a year on domestic AIDS programs.

On average, the report says, one person is newly infected with H.I.V. every nine and a half minutes, but tens of thousands of people with the virus are not receiving any care. If they got care, the report says, they could prolong their own lives and reduce the spread of the virus to others. By 2015 the report says, the United States should “increase the proportion of newly diagnosed patients linked to clinical care within three months of their H.I.V. diagnosis to 85 percent,” from the current 65 percent.

The first-ever national AIDS strategy has been in the works since the start of the administration. It comes in the context of growing frustrations expressed by some gay rights groups. They say that more money is urgently needed for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, and they assert that the White House has not done enough to secure repeal of the law banning military service by people who are openly gay or bisexual.

The report tries to revive the sense of urgency that gripped the nation in the first years after discovery of the virus that causes AIDS. “Public attention to the H.I.V. epidemic has waned,” the report says. “Because H.I.V. is treatable, many people now think that it is no longer a public health emergency.”

The report calls for “a more coordinated national response to the H.I.V. epidemic” and lays out specific steps to be taken by various federal agencies.

Mr. Obama offers a compliment to President George W. Bush, who made progress against AIDS in Africa by setting clear goals and holding people accountable.

The program begun by Mr. Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, “has taught us valuable lessons about fighting H.I.V. and scaling up efforts around the world that can be applied to the domestic epidemic,” the report says.

Mr. Obama’s strategy is generally consistent with policies recommended by public health specialists and advocates for people with H.I.V. But some experts had called for higher goals, more aggressive timetables and more spending on prevention and treatment.

The report makes these points:

¶Far too many people infected with H.I.V. are unaware of their status and may unknowingly transmit the virus to their partners. By 2015, the proportion of people with H.I.V. who know of their condition should be increased to 90 percent, from 79 percent today.

¶The new health care law will significantly expand access to care for people with H.I.V., but federal efforts like the Ryan White program will still be needed to fill gaps in services.

¶Federal spending on H.I.V. testing and prevention does not match the need. States with the lowest numbers of H.I.V./AIDS cases often receive the most money per case. The federal government should allocate more of the money to states with the highest “burden of disease.”

¶Health officials must devote “more attention and resources” to gay and bisexual men, who account for slightly more than half of new infections each year, and African-Americans, who account for 46 percent of people living with H.I.V.

¶The H.I.V. transmission rate, which indicates how fast the epidemic is spreading, should be reduced by 30 percent in five years. At the current rate, about 5 of every 100 people with H.I.V. transmit the virus to someone in a given year.

If the transmission rate is unchanged, the report says, “within a decade, the number of new infections would increase to more than 75,000 per year and the number of people living with H.I.V. would grow to more than 1.5 million.”

The report finds that persistent discrimination against people with H.I.V. is a major barrier to progress in fighting the disease.

“The stigma associated with H.I.V. remains extremely high,” it says. “People living with H.I.V. may still face discrimination in many areas of life, including employment, housing, provision of health care services and access to public accommodations.”

The administration promises to “strengthen enforcement of civil rights laws” protecting people with H.I.V.

One political challenge for the administration is to win broad public support for a campaign that will focus more narrowly on specific groups and communities at high risk for H.I.V. infection.

“Just as we mobilize the country to support cancer research whether or not we believe that we are at high risk of cancer and we support public education whether or not we have children,” the report says, “fighting H.I.V. requires widespread public support to sustain a long-term effort.”

    Obama to Outline Plan to Cut H.I.V. Infections, NYT, 11.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/health/policy/12aids.html

Obama Asks Court to Reinstate Ban on Deepwater Drilling

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has asked a federal court in Louisiana to reinstate the ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the moratorium was a rational response to the unparalleled emergency of the BP oil spill.

In a court filing late Tuesday, the Interior Department said that the six-month ban on drilling in more than 500 feet of water, imposed in late May, was necessary to allow time to adopt stricter safety and environmental regulation of deepwater wells.

The action has put hundreds of people who operate and service deepwater wells out of work and has brought long-term uncertainty to the Gulf Coast economy. Politicians all along the coast have called the moratorium a case of federal overkill that threatens the livelihood of the region.

The moratorium was challenged in court by Hornbeck Offshore Services, a Louisiana firm that provides goods and services to offshore drilling and pumping platforms, and by other oil service firms. Judge Martin L. C. Feldman of the United States District Court in New Orleans agreed with the company, and on June 22 issued an order blocking enforcement of the moratorium. He said the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium” on deepwater oil and gas drilling.

The May moratorium order halted 33 exploratory drilling projects in deep water and suspended new permits but did not affect platforms that were already in production. Despite Judge Feldman’s ruling reversing the moratorium, work on the wells has not resumed pending appeals.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to issue new guidelines for the drilling ban by the end of the week that may allow some deepwater drilling or well maintenance activity to start again, an agency official said Wednesday.

In replying on Tuesday to Judge Feldman’s order, the Interior Department, joined by the Justice Department, stated that the continued suspension of drilling was required because continued operations without new safety measures threatened irreparable harm to the marine and coastal environment across the gulf. The government also said that the BP oil spill had taxed the resources available to respond to and clean up the mess and that government and industry could not cope with a second blowout.

“Because this deepwater spill has been impossible to fully contain,” the government reply said, “Interior had to take immediate action to minimize the risk of another spill, especially while efforts to contain and clean up this one are ongoing. The stakes are even higher now that it is hurricane season.”

The Interior Department, which oversees oil and gas exploration on public lands and offshore, is charged with the “prudent and safe” management of those resources, the court filing said.

“A short-term suspension of deepwater drilling while safety regulations are updated is necessary to achieve that goal,” the document stated.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, will hear arguments in the case on Thursday.

    Obama Asks Court to Reinstate Ban on Deepwater Drilling, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/us/08drill.html

Obama Promises Push on Trade Pacts

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama, who vowed in his State of the Union address to double American exports over the next five years, said on Wednesday that he would renew his efforts to renegotiate long-stalled free trade agreements with Panama and Colombia and persuade Congress to adopt them.

The two trade pacts, and a third one with South Korea, were negotiated by the administration of former President George W. Bush, but all three have languished in Congress because of deep opposition from Democrats. Mr. Obama said in Toronto last month that he intended to make a new push for the South Korean agreement, and on Wednesday he pledged to press ahead with the two Latin American pacts as well.

“For a long time, we were trapped in a false political debate in this country, where business was on one side and labor was on the other,” Mr. Obama said in the East Room of the White House, at an event intended to highlight his administration’s efforts to promote exports. “What we now have an opportunity to do is to refocus our attention where we’re all in it together.”

Trade is a particularly difficult issue for many Democrats, especially in an election year when jobs are already scarce, because of a widespread view that American workers suffer disproportionately when the United States lowers trade barriers.

On the South Korea pact, for instance, Democrats have expressed concerns about that country’s restrictions on automobile and beef imports from the United States — concerns that Mr. Obama has vowed to address before sending the agreement to Congress for passage.

But Mr. Obama, who has been under pressure from business leaders, does have some Democratic allies on the issue. After the president’s announcement in Toronto, Representative Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic leader, called for Mr. Obama to renegotiate all three stalled pacts and send them to Congress.

The president made his call as part of a broader push to increase American exports under conditions that he said would “keep the playing field level” for American companies that send their products overseas. He appointed 18 corporate and labor leaders — including the chief executives of Ford Motor and Walt Disney — to a council to advise him.

The White House said there has been a 17 percent increase in American exports during the first four months of this year, compared with the same period from last year.

“We’re upping our game for the playing field of the 21st century,” Mr. Obama said. “But we’ve got to do it together. We’ve got to all row in the same direction.”

    Obama Promises Push on Trade Pacts, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/us/politics/08exports.html

The Constitution Trumps Arizona

July 7, 2010
The New York Times

The Obama administration has not always been completely clear about its immigration agenda, but it was forthright Tuesday when it challenged the pernicious Arizona law that allows the police to question the immigration status of people they detain for local violations. Only the federal government can set or enforce immigration policy, the government said in its lawsuit against the state, and “Arizona has crossed this constitutional line.”

There is nothing terribly complicated about this principle, which is based on several aspects of the Constitution, acts of Congress, and Supreme Court decisions over the years. A patchwork of state and local immigration policies would cause havoc.

As the Justice Department points out in its complaint, the Arizona law will divert resources from the government’s pursuit of dangerous aliens, including terrorists, spies and violent criminals. It will harass authorized immigrants, visitors and citizens who might not be carrying their papers when stopped by the police. It will ignore the country’s cherished protections of asylum and will interfere with national foreign policy interests. (Already several Mexican governors are refusing to meet with their American counterparts in Arizona, a sign of the diplomatic disarray produced by the law.)

The courts have repeatedly made these fundamental ideas clear. A federal court in 1997 struck down Proposition 187 in California, which would have denied social benefits to illegal immigrants and turned state employees into enforcement agents because it was pre-empted by federal authority. (Appeals in the case were dropped.) The Supreme Court has said federal authority can pre-empt state law when the federal interest is dominant and where there already exists a system of federal regulations. The government has done a poor job enforcing its immigration rules, to say the least, but they do exist, and clearly fall under what the Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.”

Though private lawsuits have done so, the government’s suit does not allege any discrimination or civil rights violations in the law, in part because that case is difficult to make until the law goes into effect on July 29.

The current Supreme Court, fortunately, has not been as active in recognizing state power as was the Rehnquist court, but it is not always easy to predict its direction on a volatile issue like this one. Should the case reach the court, those justices with a constructionist bent might take note of Justice Hugo Black’s words from 1941, quoted by the Justice Department on Tuesday in support of its lawsuit: “The supremacy of the national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including power over immigration, naturalization and deportation, is made clear by the Constitution, was pointed out by authors of The Federalist in 1787, and has since been given continuous recognition by this Court.”

The court has already taken a related Arizona case for its next term. It challenges a 2007 law penalizing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The administration has urged the court to strike down that law for many of the same reasons it cited on Tuesday, and we hope the court uses that case to undermine the notion that states can set their own immigration policy.

In the meantime, there are steps President Obama can take. He can deny Arizona access to federal databases of immigration status and refuse to allow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to cooperate with state officials in handling people detained under the law. The government should end the misguided program allowing local deputies to enforce immigration law after taking an educational course.

Most important, the president can follow through on his recent promise to end the chaos of the immigration system with a comprehensive reform bill. Stamping out unjust laws like Arizona’s is a good place to start.

    The Constitution Trumps Arizona, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/opinion/08thu1.html

Obama to Bypass Senate to Name Health Official

July 6, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama will bypass Congress and appoint Dr. Donald M. Berwick, a health policy expert, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the White House said Tuesday.

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the “recess appointment” was needed to carry out the new health care law. The law calls for huge changes in the two programs, which together insure nearly one-third of all Americans.

Mr. Pfeiffer said the president would appoint Dr. Berwick on Wednesday. Mr. Obama decided to act because “many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

As a recess appointee, Dr. Berwick will have all the powers of a permanent appointee. But under the Constitution, his appointment will expire at the end of the next session of Congress, in late 2011.

In April, Mr. Obama nominated Dr. Berwick to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency has been without a permanent administrator since October 2006.

The recess appointment was somewhat unusual because the Senate is in recess for less than two weeks and senators were still waiting for Dr. Berwick to submit responses to some of their requests for information. No confirmation hearing has been held or scheduled.

Although hospital executives who have worked with Dr. Berwick describe him as a visionary, inspiring leader, he would have faced a long, difficult struggle to win Senate confirmation.

The president’s action will give the administration a strong voice to defend provisions of the new law that have come under almost daily attack from Republicans in Congress and in political campaigns around the country.

Dr. Berwick, a pediatrician, is president and co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit organization in Cambridge, Mass. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Republicans have used the nomination to revive their arguments against the new health care law, which they see as a potent issue in this fall’s elections.

In two decades as a professor of health policy and as a prolific writer, Dr. Berwick has championed the interests of patients and consumers. At the same time, he has spoken of the need to ration health care and cap spending, has supported efforts to “reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care” and has expressed great admiration for the British health care system.

Under the new law, Medicare will be a testing ground for many innovations that reward high-quality care and penalize providers of poor care. The law will expand Medicaid to cover 16 million more people with low incomes.

Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said that, far from trying to delay a confirmation hearing, Republicans had wanted a forum where Dr. Berwick could explain his views.

“This recess appointment proves the Obama administration did not have the support of a majority of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and sought to evade a hearing,” Mr. Roberts said.

But Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal-leaning consumer group, welcomed the appointment, saying “it augurs well for the implementation of health care reform.”

One of Dr. Berwick’s first tasks will be to work with Congress to avert a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors, scheduled to occur late this year.

The American Medical Association has praised Dr. Berwick, saying he is “widely known and respected” for his efforts to improve the quality and safety of care. But cuts in Medicare payments could damage the quality of care and prompt doctors to turn away new Medicare patients, doctors say.

    Obama to Bypass Senate to Name Health Official, NYT, 6.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/health/policy/07recess.html

Mr. Obama’s Immigration Promise

July 1, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama’s first major speech on immigration had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national debate. In declaring the welcome of strangers a core American value, in placing immigrants at the center of the nation’s success and future, Mr. Obama’s exhortation was worthy of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose memory he respectfully summoned on Thursday. “Anybody can help us write the next great chapter in our history,” he said, regardless of blood or birth.

Mr. Obama was just as clear on why the immigration system is failing and how to fix it. Our nation “has the right and obligation to control its borders,” he said, but sealing off that vast space with troops and fences alone is a fantasy. And no amount of security at the border does anything about the undocumented 11 million who have already crossed it. Mr. Obama called for enabling these potential Americans to “get right with the law,” and for fixing the system of legal immigration, which is too inefficient for the country’s own good.

The president took particular notice of the extremism of Arizona, where a law, to take effect on July 29, compels its police to check the papers of anyone they suspect to be an illegal immigrant. It makes a crime out of being a foreigner in the state without papers — in most cases a civil violation of federal law. This is an invitation to racial profiling, an impediment to effective policing and a usurpation of federal authority, Mr. Obama said, evoking a future where “different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country.”

In promising to end the chaos into which immigration has collapsed (“this administration will not just kick the can down the road,” he said), Mr. Obama has laid out an ambitious goal. He urged Congress to help him pass a bill, particularly Republicans who supported bipartisan reform under President George W. Bush but who now have a united front against reform.

But Mr. Obama’s call to action applies not just to Congress but to himself as well. He neatly defined the obstacles to a comprehensive bill: the Republican senators who have abandoned bipartisanship and taken the extreme position of opposing any immigration reform that is common-sense and practical.

But Mr. Obama has presidential powers, and he should use them. He has given the border more troops. Now he should seek to lift the burden of fear from peaceable immigrant communities. His administration is widely expected to bring a lawsuit soon challenging the deeply unjust Arizona law. Mr. Obama, a constitutional scholar, could have written the complaint himself, but his address did not mention a lawsuit.

Mr. Obama should not suspend all enforcement against illegal immigrants. But he can reset the administration’s enforcement priorities to focus on dangerous and convicted criminals and rein in the operations that his Department of Homeland Security has promoted that enable local law enforcement to engage in the racial profiling he rightly denounces.

Mr. Obama appealed to middle of the debate, to Americans who crave lawfulness but reject the cruelty symbolized by Arizona’s new law. We hope his words spur the beginning of Congressional action. But in the hot summer to come, when police officers in Arizona start pulling people over, and tension grows and other states follow its bad example, let’s hope his administration also is ready to show the determination to protect the resented newcomers whose rights and dignity he so powerfully defended on Thursday.

    Mr. Obama’s Immigration Promise, NYT, 1.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opinion/02fri1.html

In Week of Tests, Obama Reasserts His Authority

June 25, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

After two months in which an oil gusher seemed to underscore the limits of his powers, President Obama spent the last week trying to reassert control over a triumvirate of forces that almost always test a new president’s authority: the military, the markets and the lobbyists.

Mr. Obama’s much-needed victories, nearly a year and a half into a presidency that was saddled from the start by two wars and a terrifying financial plunge, may not prove to be lasting.

His firing of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal for what appeared to be an attitude of disrespect and disdain for the civilian chain of command does not make success in Afghanistan any more likely. The financial regulatory bill that was agreed upon in Congress on Friday reverses two decades of increasingly blind faith in the ability of financial markets to regulate themselves, but few think it will stop Wall Street’s constant effort to route around Washington in pursuit of profits.

Still, add those together with the use of raw presidential power to force BP to set up a $20 billion fund for victims of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the conclusion is unmistakable. George Bush and Dick Cheney may have left the White House, but the argument for an extraordinarily strong executive lives on.

“This is a clear respite from the theme that Obama had lost control,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official who wrote the definitive history of the National Security Council, the organization American presidents have used for 60 years to assert authority around the country and the world. “He sent a loud and clear message to the generals about who is in charge. And he has engineered a pivot-point in U.S. economic history, an end, or at least a big change, to the ‘leave it to the markets’ era.”

The White House certainly has an enormous interest in portraying Mr. Obama as a president who has grown comfortable with his powers and is unafraid to exercise them. They conceded that Mr. Obama had no legal basis to force BP to create the $20 billion fund; they said he was making a moral argument, and used the jawboning power of the presidential pulpit to push the company.

One top national security aide noted to a reporter on Wednesday that the decision to oust General McChrystal and replace him with Gen. David A. Petraeus was “considered, decided and executed in less than 36 hours” and sent a message that the president would not tolerate what he called “division” in the ranks of his team after he had set strategy.

And the financial regulatory bill, they argued, got stronger in the last few weeks, leading Mr. Obama to boast at the White House that it was “the toughest financial reform since the one we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression.”

He can rightly claim that the bill actually got stronger as it worked its way through Congress rather than having the legislation eroded as one lobbyist after another found a way to carve exceptions. (The exception to that rule was the handling of derivatives, a business the banks get to keep, even if they have to operate under new restrictions.)

“I think we used this week or so not only for a reassertion of executive authority, but as an demonstration that, when presidential power is judiciously applied, you can get a lot done,” said Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, who argued for a more confrontational approach to BP and for General McChrystal’s ouster. He described financial reform legislation as one of five pillars of “a new foundation” for the economy, after the stimulus package, the health care overhaul and the re-engineering of college aid. (The fifth, an energy bill, may prove the hardest.)

Yet Mr. Rothkopf and even some of the president’s aides caution against confusing short-term reassertion of authority with a long-term ability to shape events. Wars and markets have a curious way of taking on a momentum of their own. With his victories this week, Mr. Obama owns, even more than before, America’s future in Afghanistan and the government’s running war to rein in big market players without squashing innovation or growth.

The messy encounter with General McChrystal forced Mr. Obama to reassert his faith in a strategy in Afghanistan (a troop surge, a counterinsurgency strategy that exposes American forces to significant danger, and the eventual transfer of recaptured territory to Afghan government hands) that so far has shown little signs of working. The left remains deeply apprehensive about his growing commitment to the war; the right argues that his 18-month deadline to begin withdrawing troops is a sign of absence of commitment.

When Mr. Obama declared, “I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” it amounted to an unspoken acknowledgment that his national security team remained split, and never really ended the argument over whether the current approach to the war was the right one. Even without General McChrystal, the argument seems bound to flare again in December, when it is up for a major review.

The financial reform bill was a different expression of presidential influence and power and a bill Mr. Obama clearly wanted in his pocket before he left Friday for Canada and his third meeting of the Group of 20 nations, the organization that has risen in power largely because of the financial crisis.

At the first G-20 in his presidency in London last year, Mr. Obama got an earful about how lax American regulation was responsible for the huge lapses in judgment and the greed that prompted the crisis. He promised changes that would directly address the causes of the 2008 collapse, but when the health care debate diverted Congress, many foreign officials said during visits to Washington that they feared the reforms would wither, just as they had in past crises.

Mr. Obama insisted on a series of consumer protections that would assure government regulation of, say, subprime mortgages even if the loans were not issued by a bank. (Countrywide Financial, one of the biggest offenders in the subprime market, was not a bank and thus not subject to the usual rules.)

He got that, but the regulatory powers do not rest with the president himself. The bill relies more on the powers of the Fed and independent boards, insulating Mr. Obama a bit from the argument that he has centered more regulatory power in the White House.

Mr. Obama must now make the argument that he is serious about enforcement and that if regulations are to work in a global economy, banks around the globe will have to adhere to the same regulations. Otherwise, evading the new American rules will pose little challenge to financial institutions that have learned long ago the art of crossing borders to take new risks.

    In Week of Tests, Obama Reasserts His Authority, NYT, 25.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26assess.html

Obama Says Afghan Policy Won’t Change After Dismissal

June 23, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday fired his top Afghanistan war commander after only a brief meeting in the Oval Office, replacing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal with his boss and mentor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and sending a clear signal that the current war strategy will continue despite setbacks and growing public doubts.

Two hours later, an angry Mr. Obama privately reprimanded members of his bickering national security team, adopting a “stern” tone during a meeting in the Situation Room and ordering them to put aside “pettiness,” and not to put “personalities or reputation” ahead of American troops who have been put in harm’s way, administration officials said.

Speaking in the Rose Garden to reporters, Mr. Obama said he did not fire General McChrystal for critical comments about him and his staff in Rolling Stone magazine, nor “out of any sense of personal insult.” Rather, the president cited the need for his team to unite in pressing the war effort.

“I don’t think we can sustain that unity of effort and achieve our objectives in Afghanistan without making this change,” he said.

Even by the standards of a capital that has seen impeachment and scandals in recent years, the drama surrounding the firing of a wartime commander was palpable.

Generals have come and gone in disputes over policy and execution — indeed, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates fired General McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, just a year ago. But the removal of General McChrystal culminated a remarkable public waiting game, with White House and top military officials trying to guess what the president would do, and Mr. Obama keeping his cards close to his vest until the very end.

While publicly rebuking him Tuesday, Mr. Obama had said he would not decide the general’s fate until they met face to face. But as early as Monday night, officials said, when Mr. Obama first learned of the Rolling Stone article in which General McChrystal and his staff criticized administration officials, the president and his advisers were discussing the likelihood that the general would have to go.

“A lot of us were arguing that the message of letting McChrystal’s comments roll off our backs would be enormously harmful,” one administration official said.

By Tuesday, when the president met with the general’s biggest supporter and a powerful one, Secretary Gates, White House and Pentagon officials were already discussing General Petraeus as the most likely replacement.

It has been nearly 60 years since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the midst of the Korean War, the last time a president directly stepped in to remove the senior commander in a war zone for disrespect toward the White House. For Mr. Obama, this was a MacArthur moment, a reassertion of civilian control.

The president also used the moment to emphasize that the policy in Afghanistan would not change, even as his own party and international allies display strong doubts about the way forward, including whether the United States can ever navigate a troubled relationship with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.

General Petraeus is taking a step down. As head of United States Central Command, he has oversight for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the entire region. He has supported General McChrystal’s point of view during internal administration strategy debates. His appointment is meant in part to calm the nerves of NATO allies and Mr. Karzai.

Mr. Obama called Mr. Karzai Wednesday to try to get the Afghan president on board — Mr. Karzai made a personal appeal to Mr. Obama on Tuesday night to keep General McChrystal — and Mr. Obama received at least an initial public statement that “President Karzai respects President Obama’s decision.”

Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, whom one of General McChrystal’s aides had dismissed in the article as a “clown,” called his counterparts in Europe to assure them that Mr. Obama was not abandoning his approach. He repeated Mr. Obama’s line that this was a change in personnel, not in policy.

The president chose General Petraeus, a media-savvy, ambitious officer, instead of lesser-known figures who might have had more trouble stepping in to such a volatile situation. “The one person you could have inserted in there to calm those nerves was Dave Petraeus,” said one senior administration official.

General Petraeus will have to relinquish the top job at Central Command to assume command in Afghanistan. White House officials said no decision had been made on who would succeed him.

General Petraeus, while intimately familiar with Afghanistan and its myriad problems, is inheriting direct command at a particularly fraught moment. Seven months into President Obama’s surge of forces, there is little evidence that the addition of tens of thousands of troops has beaten back the Taliban, or that Mr. Karzai’s government will soon be able to hold and administer territory the United States helps it retake.

Mr. Obama admitted as much indirectly on Wednesday in the Rose Garden when he said: “We have a clear goal. We are going to break the Taliban’s momentum.” They were the same words he used seven months ago at West Point in announcing the surge, and as one senior official said, “The president was acknowledging that a third of the way into the surge, the momentum has not been broken.”

One senior administration official noted that General McChrystal and Mr. Karzai “just came off the most constructive week we’ve had in a while with Karzai” when the two men traveled through Kandahar, the site of the next big counterinsurgency push. General McChrystal reported back that Mr. Karzai finally seemed deeply engaged in the details of the effort to regain control over the sprawling city, one of the Taliban’s home bases, administration officials said.

General Petraeus will now be responsible for executing the Kandahar offensive into the spiritual heart of the Taliban. White House and Congressional officials say they expect he will be confirmed quickly — probably by the end of next week.

General McChrystal had already prepared his brief resignation letter when he walked into the meeting with Mr. Obama; he left quickly afterward, saying nothing to the reporters who converged near him. Relieved of his post, he did not attend a regularly scheduled National Security Council meeting that included all the same administration officials whom he or his staff disparaged in the article.

“I welcome debate, but I won’t tolerate division,” the president said afterward. He said that it was crucial for American troops and military officers to observe a “strict adherence to the military chain of command and respect for civilian control over that chain of command.”

In the Rolling Stone article, General McChrystal and his aides belittled many of their civilian counterparts on the Afghanistan strategy team.

In a typical response from other military officials, one Army officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan expressed anger at the lack of discipline displayed by General McChrystal and his inner circle. But he warned that it was symptomatic of wider problems with Mr. Obama’s strategy and among his national security advisers.

“They brought this upon themselves and embarrassed the entire military as an institution,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid any punishment for criticizing his chain of command.

“Hopefully, the president uses this as an opportunity to refine his policy and objectives, and also to shuffle the rest of his Af-Pak team, as well,” he said, using the abbreviation for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. “McChrystal isn’t the only one who probably needs to move elsewhere.”

The major criticism of the United States strategy is that its success relies on support from an Afghan government that so far has been unwilling or unable to exert control and eliminate widespread corruption.

Lawmakers from both parties as well as senior military officers in Afghanistan and in Washington expressed regret at General McChrystal’s departure, but strongly supported Mr. Obama’s decision. And while the change in four-star commanders is unlikely to cause any change in strategy, they said General Petraeus might subtly alter the ways it is carried out.

“The overall strategy is not going to change, but like anyone, Petraeus will go back and check the assumptions, the vantage from Kabul, the personal dynamics and interpersonal relationships,” Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a telephone interview. “There will be shifts in emphasis and tone. Petraeus’s leadership style is reaching out, going down to the troop level, reaching out to allies and to the civilian leadership.”

In Kabul, Afghanistan, senior officers spent most of Wednesday anxiously waiting for news out of Washington, watching the BBC for leaked reports about their boss’s fate. One military official in Kabul described the mood at General McChrystal’s headquarters as a “mix of despondency and anger.”

“People are shocked,” he said. “People are upset.”


Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

    Obama Says Afghan Policy Won’t Change After Dismissal, NYT, 23.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/politics/24mcchrystal.html

Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone

June 23, 2010
The  New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — By the time he woke up Wednesday morning, President Obama had made up his mind.

During the 36 frenetic hours since he had been handed an article from the coming issue of Rolling Stone ominously headlined “The Runaway General,” the president weighed the consequences of cashiering Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, whose contemptuous comments about senior officials had ignited a firestorm.

Mr. Obama, aides say, consulted with advisers — some, like Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who warned of the dangers of replacing General McChrystal, others, like his political advisers, who thought he had to go. He reached out for advice to a soldier-statesman, Colin L. Powell. He identified a possible successor to lead the war in Afghanistan.

And then, finally, the president ended General McChrystal’s command in a meeting that lasted only 20 minutes. According to one aide, the general apologized, offered his resignation and did not lobby for his job.

After a seesaw debate among White House officials, “there was a basic meeting of the minds,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff and a major player in the deliberations. “This was not good for the mission, the military and morale,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Obama has forced out officials before, including the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair; the White House counsel, Gregory Craig; even General McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan.

But this is the highest profile sacking of his presidency. The time between Mr. Obama’s first reading of the Rolling Stone article and his decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation offers an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress: He appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive.

In a subsequent meeting with his Afghan war council, Mr. Obama delivered a tongue-lashing, instructing his advisers to stop bickering among themselves.

“The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness; that this was not about personalities or reputations — it’s about our men and women in uniform,” said a senior administration official, who like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity in offering an account of the last two days.

The drama began on Monday afternoon, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was flying home from Illinois to Andrews Air Force Base, took an unsettling call from General McChrystal.

The phone connection was scratchy, and the conversation lasted barely two minutes. General McChrystal told the vice president there was an article coming out that he would not like. Baffled, Mr. Biden asked his staff to investigate, and when he landed, aides handed him the article.

After digesting it back at his residence in Washington, Mr. Biden put in a call to Mr. Obama at 7:30 that evening. Hours earlier, the White House had itself gotten wind of the article, and a young press aide named Tommy Vietor distributed copies to all the top officials in Mr. Obama’s national security circle.

The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, walked a copy of it to the president in the private quarters. After scanning the first few paragraphs — a sarcastic, profanity-laced description of General McChrystal’s disgust at having to dine with a French minister to brief him about the war — Mr. Obama had read enough, a senior administration official said. He ordered his political and national security aides to convene immediately in the Oval Office.

It was already clear then, this official said, that General McChrystal might not survive. Mr. Obama was leaning toward dismissing him, another administration official said, though he said the president was willing to wait until the general explained his actions, and those of his aides.

At the Oval Office meeting on Monday, Mr. Obama asked that General McChrystal be summoned home from Kabul. Before leaving Afghanistan, the general held an already scheduled meeting with Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, who was visiting with other United Nations diplomats.

In a one-on-one meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Gates, who had pushed to make General McChrystal the commander in Afghanistan, pleaded with Mr. Obama to hear him out, an official said. Mr. Gates warned that removing the commander would be hugely disruptive. He worried in particular about “continuity, momentum, and relations with allies,” said a senior official, who was involved in the meetings.

Still, even as Mr. Gates advocated for General McChrystal, the Pentagon began drawing up a list of potential replacements. Mr. Obama, this official said, was immediately drawn to the idea of turning to Gen. David H. Petraeus — an architect of the counterinsurgency strategy, a politically skilled commander and a replacement who would address Mr. Gates’s concerns.

As it happened, General Petraeus was close at hand. That day, he had traveled to a secret site in Northern Virginia to convene a meeting of the Counterterrorism Executive Council, a group of military and intelligence officials who gather regularly to discuss operations.

General Petraeus was not offered the job until he walked into the White House on Wednesday, soon after the president’s meeting with General McChrystal, a senior aide said.

On Tuesday, while General McChrystal was making the 14-hour flight to Washington, the White House was involved in a whirl of meetings about his fate. Along with Mr. Gates, aides say, four other senior officials were influential: Vice President Biden; the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Mike Mullen; and Mr. Emanuel.

Mr. Emanuel’s opinion and that of other advisers swung back and forth, a senior official said. Mr. Obama seemed inclined toward dismissing the general, but heard out the debate. By Tuesday night, officials said, they ended up hoping that the general would simply resign.

Meanwhile, General McChrystal was busy placing calls to apologize to people who were belittled in the article. One of those he called was Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He was very respectful and apologetic, and I think, obviously understood he’d made a mistake and he wasn’t making any excuses,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview, noting that General McChrystal made no case for keeping his job. “He was being pretty direct and upfront.”

The general had some high-profile defenders, including President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan. But in the end, Mr. Obama decided that he had to go.

After meeting with General McChrystal, he held a 40-minute meeting with General Petraeus and a broader session with his war council and then stepped into the Rose Garden to explain his decision to the American public.

“He likes Stan and thinks Stan is a good man, a good general and a good soldier,” Mr. Emanuel said. “But as he said in his statement, this is bigger than any one person.”


Reporting was contributed by David E. Sanger, Jackie Calmes, Thom Shanker and Helene Cooper from Washington. Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

    Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone, NYT, 23.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/us/politics/24decide.html

White House to Appeal Ruling Against Drilling Ban

June 22, 2010
Filed at 2:40 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Tuesday it will immediately appeal a federal judge's ruling against the Obama administration's moratorium on new deepwater drilling.

A New Orleans judge on Tuesday blocked the six-month ban imposed in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, saying the Interior Department had failed to provide adequate reasons for it.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, defended the moratorium and promised an immediate appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Gibbs said President Barack Obama believes strongly that drilling at such depths -- without knowing what happened to cause the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to explode -- does not make any sense and puts the safety of workers ''at a danger that the president does not believe we can afford.''

Obama wanted the moratorium to be in place until a commission he appointed could complete a six-month investigation.

    White House to Appeal Ruling Against Drilling Ban, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/22/us/politics/AP-US-Gulf-Oil-Spill-White-House.html

Judge Blocks Deep-Water Drilling Moratorium

June 22, 2010
Filed at 2:45 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A federal judge struck down the Obama administration's six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, saying the government rashly concluded that because one rig failed, the others are in immediate danger, too.

The White House promised an immediate appeal. The Interior Department had halted approval of any new permits for deepwater drilling and suspended drilling of 33 exploratory wells in the Gulf.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama believes strongly that drilling at such depths does not make sense and puts the safety of workers ''at a danger that the president does not believe we can afford.''

Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore drilling rigs asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans to overturn the moratorium.

They argued it was arbitrarily imposed after the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers and blew out the well 5,000 feet underwater. It has spewed anywhere from 67 million to 127 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

Feldman sided with the companies, saying in his ruling the Interior Department assumed that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger.

''The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster,'' he wrote. ''What seems clear is that the federal government has been pressed by what happened on the Deepwater Horizon into an otherwise sweeping confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a universal threat of irreparable harm.''

His ruling prohibits federal officials from enforcing the moratorium until a trial is held. He did not set a trial date.

The Interior Department said it needed time to study the risks of deepwater drilling. But the lawsuit filed by Hornbeck Offshore Services of Covington, La., claimed there was no proof the other operations posed a threat.

Company CEO Todd Hornbeck said after the ruling that he is looking forward to getting back to work.

''It's the right thing for not only the industry but the country,'' he said.

Earlier in the day, executives at a major oil conference in London warned that the moratorium would cripple world energy supplies. Steven Newman, president and CEO of Transocean Ltd., owner of the rig that exploded, called it an unnecessary overreaction. BP PLC was leasing the rig.

''There are things the administration could implement today that would allow the industry to go back to work tomorrow without an arbitrary six-month time limit,'' Newman told reporters on the sidelines of the conference.

The moratorium was declared May 6 and originally was to last only through the month. Obama announced May 27 that he was extending it for six months.

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal and corporate leaders said that would force drilling rigs to leave the Gulf of Mexico for lucrative business in foreign waters.

They said the loss of business would cost the area thousands of lucrative jobs, most paying more than $50,000 a year. The state's other major economic sector, tourism, is a largely low-wage industry.

Tim Kerner, the mayor of Lafitte, La., cheered Feldman's ruling.

''I love it. I think it's great for the jobs here and the people who depend on them,'' said Kerner, whose constituents make their living primarily from commercial fishing or oil.

But in its response to the lawsuit, the Interior Department said the moratorium is needed as attempts to stop the leak and clean the Gulf continue and new safety standards are developed.

''A second deepwater blowout could overwhelm the efforts to respond to the current disaster,'' the Interior Department said.

The government also challenged contentions the moratorium would cause long-term economic harm. Although 33 deepwater drilling sites were affected, there are still 3,600 oil and natural gas production platforms in the Gulf.

Catherine Wannamaker, a lawyer for environmental groups that intervened in the case and supported the moratorium, called the ruling ''a step in the wrong direction.''

''We think it overlooks the ongoing harm in the Gulf, the devastation it has had on people's lives,'' she said. ''The harm at issue with the Deepwater Horizon spill is bigger than just the Louisiana economy. It affects all of the Gulf.''

------

Associated Press Writer Pauline Arrillaga in Lafitte, La., contributed to this report.

    Judge Blocks Deep-Water Drilling Moratorium, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/22/us/AP-US-Gulf-Oil-Spill.html

Obama Says Health Law Shouldn’t Be Excuse to Raise Rates

June 22, 2010
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama, whose vilification of insurers helped push a landmark health care overhaul through Congress, warned industry executives at the White House on Tuesday not to use the bill “as an opportunity to enact unjustifiable rate increases that don’t boost care and inflate their bottom line.”

Mr. Obama made his remarks in the East Room of the White House after a private meeting with executives of leading health insurance companies and with state insurance commissioners who regulate them. As the new law is being implemented, the White House wanted to issue a pointed reminder to insurers — and the public — that the president intends to monitor the industry’s behavior.

“There are genuine cost drivers that are not caused by insurance companies,” Mr. Obama said. “But what is also true is that we’ve got to make sure that this new law is not being used as an excuse to simply drive up costs.”

Mr. Obama convened the White House session mark the 90th day (Tuesday was actually the 91st) since he signed the health bill into law. He also used the occasion to unveil what his administration is calling “a new Patient’s Bill of Rights” — a set of regulations governing how the industry implements some of the most consumer-friendly provisions of the health care bill.

The rules, which take effect Sept. 23, prevent insurers from refusing to cover children with pre-existing conditions; impose strict limits on insurers’ ability to cap coverage during any given year; end lifetime coverage caps; and end the practice known as rescission, in which companies, citing minor paperwork mistakes, cancel coverage for people who get sick.

Under the new regulations, companies will be prohibited from rescinding coverage except in cases involving fraud or intentional misrepresentation of facts.

The White House is concerned that health insurers will blame the new law for increases in premiums that are intended to maximize profits rather than cover claims. The administration is also closely watching investigations by a number of states into the actuarial soundness of double-digit rate increases.

“Our message to them is to work with this law, not against it; don’t try and take advantage of it or we will work with state authorities and gather the authority we have to stop rate gouging,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview. “Our concern is that they not try and, under the cover of the act, get in under the wire here on rate increases.”

The law does not grant the federal government new authority to regulate health care premiums, which remains the province of state insurance departments. But with important provisions taking effect this summer and fall, the Obama administration has repeatedly reminded insurers — and the public — that it will expose industry pricing to what the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, has called a “bright spotlight.”

The White House meeting follows the release on Monday of a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health policy research group, finding that premiums for the policies most recently bought by individuals had increased by an average of 20 percent.

“The survey shows that the steep increases we have been reading about over the last several months are not just extreme cases,” said Drew Altman, the foundation’s president.

Mr. Obama’s message to insurers puts the industry on notice and positions the White House politically in case voters start to link premium increases to the new law. With the law expected to play a significant role in the midterm elections, the president has been using his platform to sell the bill’s most immediate benefits and, by extension, to defend Democrats in Congress who risked their careers to vote for it.

The insurers have attributed this year’s increases to skyrocketing medical costs and to the economic downturn, which has prompted healthier consumers to forgo health insurance, leaving a sicker and costlier pool to cover.

“Our companies are receiving rate increase requests from hospitals across the country of 40, 50 and 60 percent,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group. “That has a direct impact on the cost of health care coverage.”

But a report released Monday by Health Care for America Now, a coalition that supports the new law, stressed that the growth in premiums in the first eight years of this decade had far exceeded medical inflation — 97 percent to 39 percent.

The new law requires the health secretary to work with states to establish a process for annual reviews of “unreasonable increases in premiums.” Administration officials said Monday that they were still writing regulations to define “unreasonable increases.”

Mr. Obama’s approach to the health insurance industry has rarely been subtle, starting with his campaign, when he spoke of his dying mother’s struggle to persuade her insurer to cover her cancer treatments.

In March, with his health bill hanging by a thread in Congress, Mr. Obama ducked into a White House meeting with insurance executives to deliver a letter from an Ohio cancer survivor who had dropped her coverage after learning her premiums were rising 40 percent.

But for all of Mr. Obama’s browbeating, the new health care law stopped short of giving the administration the power to reject or limit rate increases. Instead, it established the annual reviews, starting next year, and makes available $250 million in grants to states to implement the review process.

States that accept the grants must recommend whether insurers with patterns of excessive pricing should be allowed to market policies through newly created exchanges, which will help individuals and businesses shop for coverage starting in 2014. Insurers also will be required to justify increases deemed unreasonable on their Web sites.

In the closing weeks of the health care debate, the White House offered a proposal to give the health secretary authority to deny unreasonable increases. It did not make it into the final legislation, but Senate Democrats have reintroduced it as a standalone bill.

The regulatory clout of state insurance departments varies widely, with some having minimal power to block rate increases. But in recent months, several states have taken unusually assertive steps.

In California, state regulators announced that they would order independent reviews of increases being sought by four large health insurers. That move came after the department discovered miscalculations in rate requests by Anthem Blue Cross, prompting the company to withdraw its plan to raise premiums by as much as 39 percent.

In Massachusetts, the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, used long-untapped power to deny 9 of 10 rate increases requested by the state’s insurers, provoking a lawsuit from the industry. A court in Maine recently upheld a smaller rate increase for that state’s largest insurer — 10.9 percent instead of 18.1 percent — that had been ordered by the insurance superintendent.

In New York, Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, signed legislation this month giving the state power to block unreasonable rates. And in Pennsylvania, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, also a Democrat, announced two weeks ago that his insurance commissioner, Joel Ario, would investigate large increases by the state’s biggest insurers.

“The plans are cherry-picking the best risk,” Mr. Ario, who will attend the White House session, said in an interview.

The federal law, which will require that most Americans obtain insurance, includes a number of provisions intended to slow the growth of premiums. For instance, insurance companies soon will have to spend at least 80 percent of revenue from premiums on claims, as opposed to administration and profit.

Insurers have warned since early in the debate that the overhaul might result in increased premiums for many consumers. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found otherwise, projecting that it would have minimal effect on group premiums, which account for 83 percent of the market. Their analysis forecast that premiums for individual policies would rise faster than they would without the new law, but that the increases would largely be offset by government subsidies.

Whatever the law’s ultimate effect, many of this year’s most egregious rate increases were announced well before it was clear the bill would pass.


Reed Abelson contributed reporting from New York.

    Obama Says Health Law Shouldn’t Be Excuse to Raise Rates, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/health/policy/23health.html

Gay Workers Will Get Time to Care for Partner’s Sick Child
 

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama will soon expand the rights of gay workers by allowing them to take family and medical leave to care for sick or newborn children of same-sex partners, administration officials said Monday.

The policy will be set forth in a ruling to be issued Wednesday by the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, the officials said.

Under a 1993 law, people who work for a company with 50 or more employees are generally entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or for a spouse, son or daughter with “a serious health condition.”

The new ruling indicates that an employee in a same-sex relationship can qualify for leave to care for the child of his or her partner, even if the worker has not legally adopted the child.

The ruling, in a formal opinion letter, tackles a question not explicitly addressed in the 1993 law. It is one of many actions taken by the Obama administration to respond to the concerns of gay men and lesbians within the constraints of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman as husband and wife.

In April, Mr. Obama announced plans to grant hospital visiting rights to same-sex partners, and the Justice Department concluded that the Violence Against Women Act protects same-sex partners.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama plans to welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights advocates to a White House reception celebrating June as “LGBT Pride Month.”

The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, worked with the administration to develop the policy on family leave.

Jennifer W. Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, another advocacy group, estimated that one million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families were raising two million children.

The upshot of the Labor Department policy, she said, is that “if you act like a parent, do the work of a parent and raise a child like a parent, then you are a parent for the purpose of the Family and Medical Leave Act.”

Federal law does not recognize same-sex relationships. But Labor Department lawyers have concluded that people in such relationships may nevertheless qualify for family and medical leave when they act as parents, sharing the care and support of a child.

The 1993 law, the Family and Medical Leave Act, allows employees to take time off for certain family and medical needs, including the care of a son or daughter with health problems.

Under the law, “the term ‘son or daughter’ means a biological, adopted or foster child, a stepchild, a legal ward or a child of a person standing in loco parentis.” The law does not define “in loco parentis.” But the relevant federal regulations say, “Persons who are ‘in loco parentis’ include those with day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support a child.”

Moreover, the rules say, “A biological or legal relationship is not necessary.”

State laws on adoption by same-sex couples vary widely. In some states, it is allowed. In others, it is not. And in many states, the law is unclear.

The 1993 law cannot be used to care for a partner or spouse of the same sex because federal law does not recognize same-sex relationships.

But many employers, including scores of large companies, provide benefits more comprehensive than those required by federal law. The benefits may include time off to care for domestic partners.

Among those who might have benefited from the new policy are Nazanin Meftah, 38, a real estate broker in Tucson, and her partner, Dr. Lydia Bañuelos, a pediatric ophthalmologist.

In 2007, Ms. Meftah said, she developed a wound infection after the delivery of her son by Caesarean section, and in 2009 she had complications during and after a second pregnancy.

“Lydia could not take time off from work to be with us and provide support when we needed it,” Ms. Meftah said.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill that would amend the 1993 law to allow workers to take leave to care for a domestic partner or a same-sex spouse. The bill would expand the definition of “spouse” to include “a same-sex spouse as determined under applicable state law.”

At present, said Ms. Chrisler, a lesbian and mother of twin boys in Massachusetts, “states have a hodgepodge of laws on same-sex couples and their relationships to their children.”

    Gay Workers Will Get Time to Care for Partner’s Sick Child, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/politics/22rights.html

As Law Takes Effect, Obama Gives Insurers a Warning

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama, whose vilification of insurers helped push a landmark health care overhaul through Congress, plans to sternly warn industry executives at a White House meeting on Tuesday against imposing hefty rate increases in anticipation of tightening regulation under the new law, administration officials said Monday.

The White House is concerned that health insurers will blame the new law for increases in premiums that are intended to maximize profits rather than covering claims. The administration is also closely watching investigations by a number of states into the actuarial soundness of double-digit rate increases.

“Our message to them is to work with this law, not against it; don’t try and take advantage of it or we will work with state authorities and gather the authority we have to stop rate gouging,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said in an interview. “Our concern is that they not try and, under the cover of the act, get in under the wire here on rate increases.”

The law does not grant the federal government new authority to regulate health care premiums, which remains the province of state insurance departments. But with important provisions taking effect this summer and fall, the Obama administration has repeatedly reminded insurers — and the public — that it will expose industry pricing to what the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, has called a “bright spotlight.”

The White House meeting coincides with Monday’s release of a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health policy research group, that found that premiums for the policies most recently bought by individuals had increased by an average of 20 percent.

“The survey shows that the steep increases we have been reading about over the last several months are not just extreme cases,” said Drew Altman, the foundation’s president.

Mr. Obama’s message to insurers will serve to put the industry on notice and position the White House politically should voters start to link premium increases to the new law. With the law expected to play a significant role in the midterm elections, the president has been using his platform to sell the bill’s most immediate benefits and, by extension, to defend Democrats in Congress who risked their careers to vote for it.

He will do so again Tuesday; after his private meeting, Mr. Obama will appear in the East Room, where he will highlight new regulations to protect consumers from discriminatory insurance practices, end lifetime limits on coverage and ban unjustified revocations of coverage.

Mr. Axelrod likened them to “essentially a patients’ bill of rights, the strongest in history.”

White House officials said Tuesday’s attendees will include top executives from 13 leading health insurers, as well as Karen M. Ignagni, the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group. Five state insurance commissioners also are expected to attend.

The insurers have attributed this year’s increases to skyrocketing medical costs and to the economic downturn, which has prompted healthier consumers to forgo health insurance, leaving a sicker and costlier pool to cover.

“Our companies are receiving rate increase requests from hospitals across the country of 40, 50 and 60 percent,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the trade group. “That has a direct impact on the cost of health care coverage.”

But a report released Monday by Health Care for America Now, a coalition that supports the new law, stressed that the growth in premiums in the first eight years of this decade had far exceeded medical inflation — 97 percent to 39 percent.

The new law requires the health secretary to work with states to establish a process for annual reviews of “unreasonable increases in premiums.” Administration officials said Monday that they were still writing regulations to define “unreasonable increases.”

Mr. Obama’s approach to the health insurance industry has rarely been subtle, starting with his campaign, when he spoke of his dying mother’s struggle to persuade her insurer to cover her cancer treatments.

In March, with his health bill hanging by a thread in Congress, Mr. Obama ducked into a White House meeting with insurance executives to deliver a letter from an Ohio cancer survivor who had dropped her coverage after learning her premiums were rising 40 percent.

But for all of Mr. Obama’s browbeating, the new health care law stopped short of giving the administration the power to reject or limit rate increases. Instead, it established the annual reviews, starting next year, and makes available $250 million in grants to states to implement the review process.

States that accept the grants must recommend whether insurers with patterns of excessive pricing should be allowed to market policies through newly created exchanges, which will help individuals and businesses shop for coverage starting in 2014. Insurers also will be required to justify increases deemed unreasonable on their Web sites.

In the closing weeks of the health care debate, the White House offered a proposal to give the health secretary authority to deny unreasonable increases. It did not make it into the final legislation, but Senate Democrats have reintroduced it as a standalone bill.

The regulatory clout of state insurance departments varies widely, with some having minimal power to block rate increases. But in recent months, several states have taken unusually assertive steps.

In California, state regulators announced that they would order independent reviews of increases being sought by four large health insurers. That move came after the department discovered miscalculations in rate requests by Anthem Blue Cross, prompting the company to withdraw its plan to raise premiums by as much as 39 percent.

In Massachusetts, the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, used long-untapped power to deny 9 of 10 rate increases requested by the state’s insurers, provoking a lawsuit from the industry. A court in Maine recently upheld a smaller rate increase for that state’s largest insurer — 10.9 percent instead of 18.1 percent — that had been ordered by the insurance superintendent.

In New York, Gov. David A. Paterson, a Democrat, signed legislation this month giving the state power to block unreasonable rates. And in Pennsylvania, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, also a Democrat, announced two weeks ago that his insurance commissioner, Joel Ario, would investigate large increases by the state’s biggest insurers.

“The plans are cherry-picking the best risk,” Mr. Ario, who will attend the White House session, said in an interview.

The federal law, which will require that most Americans obtain insurance, includes a number of provisions intended to slow the growth of premiums. For instance, insurance companies soon will have to spend at least 80 percent of revenue from premiums on claims, as opposed to administration and profit.

Insurers have warned since early in the debate that the overhaul might result in increased premiums for many consumers. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found otherwise, projecting that it would have minimal effect on group premiums, which account for 83 percent of the market. Their analysis forecast that premiums for individual policies would rise faster than they would without the new law, but that the increases would largely be offset by government subsidies.

Whatever the law’s ultimate effect, many of this year’s most egregious rate increases were announced well before it was clear the bill would pass.


Reed Abelson contributed reporting from New York.

    As Law Takes Effect, Obama Gives Insurers a Warning, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/health/policy/22health.html

Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT Obama is not known for wild pronouncements, so it was startling to hear him liken the gulf oil spill to 9/11. Alas, this bold analogy, made in an interview with Roger Simon of Politico, proved a misleading trailer for the main event. In the president’s prime-time address a few days later, there was still talk of war, but the ammunition was sanded down to bullet points: “a clean energy future,” “a long-term gulf coast restoration plan” and, that most dreaded of perennials, “a national commission.” Such generic placeholders, unanimated by details or deadlines, are Washingtonese for “The buck stops elsewhere.”

The speech’s pans were inevitable, but in truth it was doomed no matter what the words or how cool or faux angry the performance. The president had it right the first time — this is a 9/11 crisis — and only action will do. The sole sentence that really counted on Tuesday night was his prediction that “in the coming weeks and days, these efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well.” He will be judged on whether that’s true. The sole event that mattered last week was his jawboning of BP for a $20 billion down payment of blood money — to be overseen, appropriately enough, by Kenneth Feinberg of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.

That action could be a turning point for Obama if he builds on it. And he must. In this 9/11, it’s not just the future of the gulf coast, energy policy or his presidency that’s in jeopardy. What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. The current crisis in that faith predates this disaster. In the short history of the Obama White House, two of its most urgent projects, reducing unemployment and pacifying Afghanistan, have yet to yield persuasive results. The dividends on the third, health care reform, won’t be in the mail for years.

Given that record of incompletes, the government’s failure to police BP and the administration’s seeming impotence once disaster struck couldn’t have been more ill-timed. And there’s no miracle fix. Obama can’t play Aquaman in the gulf, he can’t coax a new jobs program out of a deficit-fixated Congress, and he can’t quit Harmid Karzai. Indeed, if the president had actually outlined new energy policies Tuesday night, they would have been dismissed as more empty promises from a government that can’t even measure the extent of the spill.

While Obama ended his speech with an exhortation for prayer, hope for divine intervention is no substitute for his own intercession. He could start running his administration with a 9/11 sense of urgency. And he could explain to the country exactly what the other side is offering as an alternative to his governance — non-governance that gives even more clout to irresponsible corporate giants like BP. As our most popular national politician, Obama still has power, within his White House and with the public, to effect change — should he exercise it.

Some exposure to the voluminous investigative reporting incited by this crisis might move him to step up his game. After all, the muckraking of McClure’s magazine a century ago, some of it aimed at Standard Oil, helped fuel Teddy Roosevelt’s activism. T.R. called it “torrential journalism,” and a particularly torrential contemporary example is a scathing account of Obama’s own Interior Department by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone, a publication often friendly to this president. Dickinson’s findings will liberate Obama from any illusions that the systemic failure to crack down on BP was the unavoidable legacy of the derelict Minerals Management Service he inherited from Bush-Cheney.

In Rolling Stone’s account, the current interior secretary, Ken Salazar, left too many “long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge” at M.M.S. even as he added to their responsibilities by raising offshore drilling to record levels. One of those Bush holdovers was tainted by a scandal that will cost taxpayers as much as $53 billion in uncollected drilling fees from the oil giants — or more than twice what Obama has extracted from BP for its sins so far.

Dickinson reports that Salazar and M.M.S. continued to give BP free rein well after Obama took office — despite the company’s horrific record of having been “implicated in each of the worst oil disasters in American history, dating back to the Exxon Valdez in 1989.” Even as the interior secretary hyped himself as “a new sheriff in town,” BP was given a green light to drill in the gulf without a comprehensive environmental review.

Obama has said he would have fired Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, but his own managers have not been held so accountable. The new director of M.M.S. installed by Salazar 10 months ago has now walked the plank, but she doesn’t appear to have been a major player in lapses that were all but ordained by policy imperatives from above. The president has still neither explained nor apologized for his own assertion in early April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills” — a statement that is simply impossible to square with Salazar’s claim that the administration’s new offshore drilling policy, supposedly the product of a year’s study, was “based on sound information and sound science.”

The president must come clean and clean house not just because it’s right. He must rebuild confidence in his government for that inevitable day when the next crisis hits the fan. That would be Afghanistan, and the day is rapidly arriving. Already Obama’s chosen executive there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — “a bleeding ulcer.” And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.

The president’s shake-up of his own governance can’t wait, as tradition often has it, until after the next election. The Tea Party is at the barricades. When Obama said yet again on Tuesday that he would be “happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party,” you wanted to shout back, Enough already! His energy would be far better spent calling out in no uncertain terms what the other party’s “ideas and approaches” are. The more the Fox-Palin right has strengthened its hold on the G.O.P. during primary season, the sharper and more risky its ideology has become.

When Rand Paul defended BP against Salazar’s (empty) threat to keep a boot on the company’s neck, he was not speaking as some oddball libertarian outlier. His views are mainstream in his conservative cohort. Traditional Republican calls for limited government have given way to radical cries for abolishing many of modern government’s essential tasks. Paul has called for the elimination of the Department of Education, the Federal Reserve and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The newest G.O.P. star — Sharron Angle, the victor in this month’s Republican senatorial primary in Nevada — has also marked the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Social Security and Medicare for either demolition or privatization.

Pertinently enough, Angle has also called for processing highly radioactive nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. If Americans abhor poorly regulated deepwater oil drilling, wait until they get a load of nuclear waste on land with no regulatory agency in charge at all. The choice between inept government and no government is no choice at all, of course. But there would be a clear alternative if the president could persuade the country that Washington, or at least its executive branch, can be reformed — a process that demands him to own up fully to his own mistakes and decisively correct them.

While the greatest environmental disaster in our history is a trying juncture for Obama, it also provides him with a nearly unparalleled opening to make his and government’s case. The spill’s sole positive benefit has been to unambiguously expose the hard right, for all its populist pandering to the Tea Partiers, as a stalking horse for its most rapacious corporate patrons. If this president can speak lucidly of race to America, he can certainly explain how the antigovernment crusaders are often the paid toadies of bad actors like BP. Such big corporations are only too glad to replace big government with governance of their own, by their own, and for their own profit — while the “small people” are left to eat cake at their tea parties.

When Joe Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revived Rand Paul’s defense of BP last week by apologizing on camera to Hayward for the “tragedy” of the White House’s “$20 billion shakedown,” the G.O.P. establishment had to shut him down because he was revealing the party’s true loyalties, not because it disagreed with him. Barton was merely echoing Michele Bachmann, who labeled the $20 billion for gulf victims a “redistribution-of-wealth fund,” and the 100-plus other House members whose Republican Study Committee had labeled the $20 billion a “Chicago-style shakedown” only a day before Barton did.

These tribunes of the antigovernment right and their Tea Party auxiliaries are clamoring for a new revolution to “take back America” — after which, we now can see, they would hand over America to the likes of BP. Let Deepwater Horizon be ground zero for a 9/11 showdown over the role of government. There couldn’t be a riper moment for Obama, as a man once said, to bring it on.

    Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/opinion/20rich.html

The Thrill Is Gone

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

President Obama’s relationship with America, like many a young marriage, is growing sour.

That’s my surmise after reviewing recent polling and watching the carping that followed his Oval Office speech (which I thought was just fine, by the way).

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the magic has drained away. Even among his most ardent supporters, there now exists a certain frustration and disillusionment — not necessarily in the execution of his duties, but in his inability to seize moments, chart a course and navigate the choppy waters of public opinion.

What’s left for many is a big plume of disappointment and sadness lurking just beneath the surface.

Desperate to escape eight-years of an abusive relationship with a reckless cowboy and scared by a calculating John McCain who chose a feckless running mate, America was charmed by Obama’s supernal speeches and inspired by his vision of a happier ever after.

But once the marriage was official, reality set in and Obama tried to lower expectations. Life would not be lit by the soft glow of an eternal sunrise. Change would come slowly; pain would be felt presently; things would get worse before they got better.

In addition, he had to make tough choices (and not always the right ones) to steer us out of our darkest hour and secure a better future. He wasn’t always elegant in method or clear in message, and that allowed the more cynical side of America to find a footing and feed its fear.

This has left many on the left duking it out in a death match of finger-pointing, back-biting and navel-gazing. They have gone from applauding to defending, a turn many secretly resent and increasingly reject. A USA Today/Gallup poll released earlier this week found that 73 percent of Democrats thought that the president had not been tough enough in dealing with BP in regards to the oil spill. That was the same as the percentage of Republicans who thought so.

So this is where the rubber meets the road, for Obama and the country. Wooing and being wooed was the fun part. But everyone knows that maintaining a healthy and positive relationship always requires work.

The first step is acknowledgement: There is blame on both sides.

On one side is America — fickle and excitable, hotheaded and prone to overreaction, easily frightened and in constant need of reassurance.

On the other side stands Obama — solid and sober, rooted in the belief that his way is the right way and in no need of alteration. He’s the emotionally maimed type who lights up when he’s stroked and adored but shuts down in the face of acrimony. Other people’s anxieties are dismissed as irrational and unworthy of engagement or empathy. He seems quite comfortable with this aspect of his personality, even if few others are, and shows little desire to change it. It’s the height of irony: the presumed transformative president is stymied by his own unwillingness to be transformed. He would rather sacrifice the relationship than be altered by it.

Add to this tension the fact that conservative Blue Dog Democrats are doing everything they can to keep their jobs and Republicans are doing everything they can to make Obama lose his, and it only aggravates the situation.

As NPR’s Ron Elving wrote about a recent NPR poll that held a dire prediction for the Democrats in November: “The House Democratic majority is, as always, a struggle between the ‘sitting pretty’ faction that’s safe (this year as always) and the more fragile ‘scaredy cat’ faction that could be carried off by even the gentlest of anti-incumbent breezes.” The “scaredy cats” are the Blue Dogs.

In the Senate, Democrats are struggling to get Republicans to play ball. For instance, a Gallup poll released this week found that about 60 percent of Americans approve of Congress passing new legislation this year that would increase spending in order to create jobs and stimulate the economy. However, the same day that the president wrestled $20 billion from BP for a fund to be used to compensate those affected by the oil spill, Senate Democrats trimmed nearly $20 billion from the already-trimmed jobs bill in an effort to woo Republicans. Didn’t work. On Thursday, the Senate voted to block the bill.

The next step is compromise. Both sides will have to give a little.

America has to grow up and calm down. Expectations must be better managed. On balance, this president is doing a good job — not perfect, but good — particularly in light of the incredible mess he inherited. The Web site PolitiFact.com is tracking more than 500 promises Obama made on the campaign trail. Of the 168 promises where action has been completed, they judge Obama to have broken only 19. That’s not bad, and it must be acknowledged. We have to stop waiting for him to be great and allow him to be good.

For Obama’s part, he needs to forget about changing the culture and climate of American politics. That’s a lost cause. The Republicans and their Tea Party stepchildren are united in their thirst for his demise. Furthermore, a May Gallup report stated that Obama’s “first-year ratings were the most polarized for a president in Gallup history,” and his “approval ratings have become slightly more polarized thus far in his second year.” The U.S.S. Harmony has sailed. The president should instead re-evaluate the composition of his inner circle (which could use a shake-up) and the constitution of his inner self (which could use a wake-up). Allowing himself space to grow and change does not have to undermine his basic view of himself. There is a lot of space between a caricature and a man of character.

In other words, the president must accept the basic fact that he, as the agent of change, must himself be open to change.

    The Thrill Is Gone, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/opinion/19blow.html

Obama Urges Europe Not to Drop Stimulus Measures Yet

June 18, 2010
The New Yok Times
By SEWELL CHAN

WASHINGTON — President Obama signaled on Friday that countries in Europe should not withdraw their extraordinary spending programs too quickly.

In a public letter to other leaders of the Group of 20 nations in advance of a summit in Toronto next week, Mr. Obama wrote, “Our highest priority in Toronto must be to safeguard and strengthen the recovery.”

Mr. Obama also wrote, “We must be flexible in adjusting the pace of consolidation and learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn and resulted in renewed economic hardships and recession.”

That statement represented a signal to Germany and other European countries, which have moved in recent weeks to pare spending, mindful of the wrenching consequences of excessive public debts in Greece, Portugal and Spain.

The United States is trying to pare its own massive deficits: Mr. Obama reiterated a pledge to cut the deficit, now about 10 percent of gross domestic product, in half by the 2013 fiscal year, and to 3 percent of G.D.P. by the 2015 fiscal year, a level he said would “stabilize the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio at an acceptable level” by then.

But American officials are concerned that fiscal retrenchment by too many countries at once could imperil the global recovery.

Mr. Obama warned of the risks of a double-dip recession, which most economists consider unlikely but not impossible.

“In fact, should confidence in the strength of our recoveries diminish, we should be prepared to respond again as quickly and as forcefully as needed to avoid a slowdown in economic activity,” he wrote.

The G-20 leaders’ summit in Toronto marks a critical turning point for the group, which was convened in the final months of President George W. Bush’s administration to respond to the worldwide economic meltdown.

At subsequent meetings in London and Pittsburgh last year, the G-20 agreed to increase government spending, reform their financial systems, work toward more balanced global growth, and avoid protectionist trade measures.

Balanced growth refers in the first instance to the large external surplus enjoyed by China, whose economy has grown enormously but remains strongly reliant on foreign consumers. Even as Chinese incomes have risen, workers there have continued to save instead of spend, in large part because the social safety net has frayed.

While trying not to appear as pressuring the Chinese, the Americans have urged China to develop domestic consumption, in part by allowing the renminbi to appreciate, which would give Chinese consumers more spending power.

Mr. Obama also repeated his support for free-market currency exchange rates, a signal that China should let its currency, the renminbi, strengthen.

The letter did not mention countries or regions by name, but the implications of its language were clear. Mr. Obama wrote that “market-determined exchange rates are essential to global economic vitality” — a signal to the Chinese, who have been accused of holding down the value of the renminbi to stimulate their export-oriented economy.

Anger in Congress has been mounting over China’s currency, trade and industrial policies. At the same time, many economists doubt that China will move to let its currency appreciate right away, because the recent decline in the value of the euro has effectively caused the renminbi to gain in value.

    Obama Urges Europe Not to Drop Stimulus Measures Yet, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/business/global/19summit.html

Obama Twists Arms at BP, Setting Off a Debate on Tactics

June 17, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — First there was General Motors, whose chief executive was summarily dismissed by the White House shortly before the government became the company’s majority shareholder. Chrysler was forced into a merger. At the banks that received government bailouts, executive pay was curbed; at insurance companies seeking to jack up premiums, scathing criticism led to rollbacks.

But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”

With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.

To Mr. Obama, this is all about rebalancing the books after two decades in which multinationals sometimes acted like mini-states beyond government reach, abetted by a faith in markets that, as Mr. Obama put it at Carnegie Mellon University a few weeks ago, “gutted regulations and put industry insiders in charge of industry oversight.” When Representative Joe L. Barton, the Texas Republican, opened hearings Thursday about the gulf oil gusher by accusing Mr. Obama of an unconstitutional “shakedown” of BP to create a “slush fund,” he was giving voice to an alternative narrative, a bubbling certainty in corporate suites that Mr. Obama, whenever faced with crisis that involves private-sector players, reveals himself to be viscerally antibusiness.

The reality, not surprisingly, is more complex.

Mr. Obama clearly sees his presidency as far more than a bully pulpit — he has cast himself as a last line of defense against market excesses that take many different forms. “In the past, corporate America was not only at the table, they owned the table and the chairs around it,” Mr. Obama’s combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said in an interview Thursday. “Obama doesn’t start off confrontational, but he will be confrontational if there is resistance to the notion that there are other equities.”

But at the same moment, as his critics on the left have pointed out, Mr. Obama has been warding off calls for far more stringent regulations of the banks, hoping to win at least a modicum of business support — and to defuse the notion that he is at war with American-style capitalism.

Each of his confrontations with corporate executives had its own rationale. G.M. had become so uncompetitive, Mr. Obama argued, that its imminent collapse was threatening the jobs of millions of workers; the only way to save the company from its own worst instincts was to become its temporary owner and bring new blood into the boardroom. (It will take years to determine if that worked, but on Thursday, though it was overshadowed by the grilling of BP’s chief executive on Capitol Hill, G.M. announced it was forgoing its usual summer shutdown of most of its plants so it could meet renewed demand.)

The Wall Street executives who needed the government to prop them up, but still thought their services were worth millions a year, were cast by Mr. Obama as a shameless privileged class. Toyota was described as seeking profits over safety; Wellpoint, the insurance giant, was castigated for seeking to insulate itself from the new health care legislation by taking actions that the law will soon prohibit.

Against that backdrop, forcing BP to take a $20 billion bath — even before the inevitable lawsuits are filed — seemed an easy decision. Mr. Obama had no legal basis for the demand, but concluded he did not need one. “He had a power other presidents have used — you call it jawboning,” Mr. Emanuel said.

The question is whether the cumulative effects of these actions create an impression that, over the long run, may make it harder to persuade both American and foreign corporations to cooperate with Mr. Obama’s program to reinvest and reinvigorate the American economy.

“He’s walking a very fine line here,” said Jeffrey Garten, a professor of trade and international finance at the Yale School of Management and a former top official in the Clinton administration’s Commerce Department. “He is taking each case on the merits as he sees it, but he runs the risk of sowing a level of mistrust about all big companies. And it’s those companies — not small businesses — that he will need to invest and innovate for the kind of recovery he wants.”

Mr. Obama is betting that Republicans are also walking a fine line. That became evident Thursday as Republican leaders distanced themselves from Representative Barton’s outburst, which included the charge that Mr. Obama was acting illegally by applying “some sort of political pressure that in my words amounts to a shakedown.”

Mr. Obama’s aides clearly relished the idea of a Texas Republican dependent on donors from the energy industry who was actually apologizing to BP. As a political strategy, they appear to be adapting the course taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who seized on a mood of distrust when, in the closing days of the 1936 campaign, he said: ”I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.” When the applause subsided, he added: “I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.”

It is in the “master” role, however, that Mr. Obama and his advisers know he is on dangerous ground. He has responded to his critics by making the case that every time American business predicted ruin from government intervention — that “Social Security would lead to socialism, and that Medicare was a government takeover” — American capitalism survived.

It did. But just as Mr. Obama’s fortunes last year depended on a G.M. turnaround, his fortunes this year depend on demonstrating that the health care legislation that he pushed through both reduces costs for the consumers and saves taxpayers money.

And his fortunes over the next two years depend, in part, on showing that he can both turn off the spigot of oil in the gulf and turn on the spigot of aid — out of the coffers of BP’s shareholders. Along the way, he will have to avoid painting with such a broad brush that foreign and domestic investors come to view the United States as a too risky place to do business, a country where big mistakes can lead to vilification and, perhaps, bankruptcy.

    Obama Twists Arms at BP, Setting Off a Debate on Tactics, NYT, 17.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/us/18assess.html

Obama Helps Buoy U.S. Popularity Abroad

June 17, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN — Struggling at home, President Obama has maintained much of his high popularity abroad after more than a year in office, a new global survey has found, receiving high marks for his handling of the economic crisis and the lowest for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to a survey of nearly 25,000 people in 22 countries published Thursday by the Pew Research Center, the popularity of the United States has risen most notably over the past year among respondents in Russia and China. Both countries are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and are essential to American efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The United States continues to have the most difficulty improving its image in Muslim countries. In Egypt, where Mr. Obama gave a much-heralded address in Cairo in June 2009, only 17 percent of those surveyed said they had a favorable view of the United States, the lowest rating in the five years Egyptians had been polled. Last year, 27 percent of those polled said they had a favorable view.

Not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reined in some of the enthusiasm generated by Mr. Obama’s election in November 2008. Analysts said that enthusiasm was often based on expectations placed on a popular candidate that a president pursuing American interests would not be able to fulfill.

“People around the world are starting to realize that not everything is going to change under Obama,” said Johannes Thimm, an expert on American foreign policy at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “But it’s remarkable that the general bounce back from the Bush administration in the negative standing of the United States has held up.”

“Now the big challenge is for Obama to meet the expectations that he’s created around the world,” Mr. Thimm said.

The Global Attitudes survey was conducted in April and early May both by telephone and through face-to-face interviews by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization in Washington. Interviews were conducted nationwide in each country except China, India and Pakistan, in which samples were disproportionately urban. Margins of sampling error ranged from 3 to 5 percentage points.

Positive attitudes toward Mr. Obama himself remain overwhelmingly strong among America’s West European allies, according to the survey, with 90 percent of Germans, 87 percent of French and 84 percent of Britons expressing confidence in Mr. Obama to do the right thing in world affairs, compared with 65 percent of Americans surveyed.

Despite recent concerns about the euro in the midst of the European debt crisis, two-thirds of German and French people surveyed said that they wanted to keep the euro, with 62 percent and 64 percent respectively saying that they saw the European Union in a favorable light.

Among the more surprising results of the survey was the substantial improvement in Russian attitudes toward the United States. Of those surveyed, 57 percent said they had a favorable view of the United States, an increase of 13 percentage points over the previous year. Among Russians who say their country has an enemy, more than one third, 35 percent, name the United States as its biggest enemy.

After sometimes difficult negotiations, Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia signed an arms-control treaty in Prague on April 8. The representative survey of 1,001 Russian adults was conducted between April 7 and May 1.

Among Chinese respondents, 58 percent said that they had a favorable view of the United States, a number that has risen for three straight years from just 34 percent in 2007. The more than 3,000 respondents in China were disproportionately urban, with a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points.

At a moment of economic stagnation and instability around the world, Chinese confidence and optimism stood out, with 91 percent of the mostly urban respondents saying that they thought their national economy was in good shape, and 87 percent saying that they were satisfied with national conditions. That compared to just 30 percent of respondents nationwide in the United States and 26 percent of respondents nationwide in France who said that they were satisfied with national conditions.

    Obama Helps Buoy U.S. Popularity Abroad, NYT, 17.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/world/18pewpoll.html

The Boring Speech Policy

June 16, 2010
The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS

On Monday night in Ohio, a 62-foot-tall statue of Jesus got hit by lightning and burned to the ground. (The adult bookstore across the street was unscathed.) Less than 12 hours later, Gen. David Petraeus — who is not God, although certain members of Congress have been known to worship at his altar — semifainted at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Then Bravo announced that the White House gate-crashers were getting a TV show. Al and Tipper remained in Splitsville. And the oil kept on spilling.

So you sort of knew from the portents that President Obama’s big Oval Office speech was not going to be a terrific game-changer. The way things had been going, the president was lucky that a man-eating pterodactyl didn’t come crashing through the window during his opening remarks.

Still, it was a disappointment. I was hoping for a call to arms, a national mission as great as the environmental disaster that inspired it. After the terrorist attack, George W. Bush could have called the country to a grand, important new undertaking in which everyone sacrificed personal or regional advantage for the common good. The fact that he only told us to go shopping was the one unforgivable sin of his administration.

O.K., also attacking the wrong country. And creating the deficit. But I digress.

All we got from President Obama was a vague call for some sort of new energy policy. Plus a Gulf Coast Restoration Plan, an oil spill study commission, a reminder that the secretary of energy won a Nobel Prize in physics and 17 references to God, prayer, blessings or faith.

We wanted him to declare war on the oil companies! Every day it becomes clearer that these guys are even more feckless than we imagined. At the ritual Congressional lashing of C.E.O.’s this week, we learned that none of the major oil companies have any idea how to control a spill like this, and that their faux plans for handling one in the gulf were made up of boilerplate so undigested that several had sections on protecting walruses — mammals that have not been seen in the area since the Ice Age. “It’s unfortunate that walruses were included,” admitted Exxon Mobil’s chief.

The way things have been going, you can’t be too careful. If the portents keep piling up, it’s easy to envision a headline like: “Lone Tourist in Pensacola Eaten by Visiting Walrus Herd.”

Obama held back on Tuesday. Then, on Wednesday, he and the BP chairman announced that the company — which is, in theory, only liable for $75 million in economic damage payments — was forgoing its dividend and setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate the workers and businesses who have been harmed by the spill.

In the negotiations, Obama said, he had stressed that for many of the small business owners, families and fishing crews “this is not a matter of dollars and cents, that a lot of these folks don’t have a cushion.” His brief remarks were more effective than his 18-minute effort the night before, particularly when coupled with all that cash.

“He is frustrated because he cares about the small people,” said the chairman of BP, who is Swedish. The word choice made the president sound as if he was working on an environmental disaster in Munchkinland.

We are frustrated, too, and it’s possible that Obama may never be able to give the speech that will make us feel better. He may never really lace into the oil companies or issue the kind of call to arms on energy that the environmentalists are yearning for.

That’s because it won’t get him anywhere. Unlike Bush, he has no national consensus to build upon. He’d barely finished his muted remarks on Tuesday before the House minority leader, John Boehner, accused him of exploiting the crisis “to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small business.” Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman, claimed that the president was “manipulating this tragic national crisis for selfish political gain.” And the ever-popular Representative Michele Bachmann denounced the BP restitution fund as “redistribution of wealth” and “one more gateway for government control.”

As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.

Ironic. The man we elected because we hoped his feel-good campaign speeches might translate into achievement is actually a guy who is going to achieve, even if his presidential speeches leave us feeling blah.

    The Boring Speech Policy, NYT, 17.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opinion/17collins.html

In Oval Office Speech, Obama Calls for New Focus on Energy Policy

June 15, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama summoned Americans on Tuesday to a “national mission” to move away from reliance on oil and develop alternative sources of energy, casting the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as an imperative for Congress to act quickly to overcome “a lack of political courage and candor.”

Speaking to a national television audience for the first time from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama also promised a long-term plan to make sure that the gulf states suffering from the oil spill are made whole again. He said he was appointing Ray Mabus, the secretary of the Navy and the former governor of Mississippi, to develop a Gulf Coast restoration plan in cooperation with states, local communities, tribes, fishermen, conservationists and gulf residents.

Even as Mr. Obama was preparing his speech, the government on Tuesday released a new estimate of the amount of oil flowing from the well. It said as much as 60,000 barrels could be spewing into the Gulf of Mexico each day, a sharp increase over the estimate last week of 25,000 to 30,000 barrels a day.

The new estimate, reflecting the increased oil flow that began after a pipe was deliberately cut to help capture some of the oil coming from the well, continues a pattern in which every new estimate has been sharply higher than the one before. With the broken well’s owner, BP, capturing roughly 15,000 barrels a day, the new estimate suggests that as much as 45,000 barrels a day is escaping into the gulf, punctuating the scale of the substantive and political problems facing Mr. Obama.

“Today, as we look to the gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude,” Mr. Obama said. “We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now.”

Mr. Obama’s 18-minute address, delivered at his desk, took place in an atmosphere far different from the crowded campaign rallies and international university halls where he has produced some of his most soaring speeches. This time, Mr. Obama, wearing a dark blue suit and light blue tie, struck a solemn but hopeful tone, invoked military terminology to create a sense of urgency around his response to the crisis, and spoke of the American ingenuity he said was needed to help the country rein in its reliance on oil.

He said he had authorized the use of 17,000 National Guard members to help with the cleanup effort, but only a small number have actually been dispatched by the governors in the region even though Mr. Obama has said that BP will pick up the cost. He also continued to strike an adversarial tone toward BP.

“We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes,” he said. “We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused. And we will do whatever is necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

Seizing on the widening calamity in the Gulf of Mexico to push for legislation he has advocated since his campaign, Mr. Obama said he was willing to look at approaches from Republicans as well as Democrats, including raising efficiency standards for buildings as well as cars and trucks.

He said progress had been blocked time and time again by “oil industry lobbyists,” and he suggested that achieving energy independence was an issue of national security, saying the time has come for the United States to “seize control of our own destiny.”

But, he warned: “The one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet.”

Mr. Obama delivered the speech the evening before he was to meet at the White House with the top executives of BP to demand that they agree to establish an independently administered escrow account of billions of dollars to pay claims stemming from the disaster.

He said he would inform the chairman of BP’s board, Carl-Henric Svanberg, “that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness.”

Lawyers at the White House and for BP have been negotiating for days about an escrow account. While Mr. Obama has not put a figure on the account, Senate Democrats have called for $20 billion.

BP released a statement after Mr. Obama’s address. “We share the president’s goal of shutting off the well as quickly as possible, cleaning up the oil and mitigating the impact on the people and environment of the Gulf Coast,” the company said from London. “We look forward to meeting with President Obama tomorrow for a constructive discussion about how best to achieve these mutual goals.”

Mr. Obama also moved to address one of the weaknesses exposed by the spill, lax oversight from the agency with the most direct authority to regulate offshore drilling, the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. He said he had named Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department prosecutor and inspector general, to restructure the agency to make it a tougher regulator.

Administration officials said the speech marked “an inflection point” in the nearly two-month-old crisis: the end of a phase in which BP tried and failed to stop the leak using the quickest available options, and the beginning of the “new reality” that plugging the leak could take months and the cleanup months or even years past that.

The new estimate for the amount of oil spewing from the well is far above the figure of 5,000 barrels a day that the government and BP clung to for weeks after the spill began. It reflects a possible increase in the flow rate that occurred after BP cut an underwater pipe called a riser on June 3 to install a new device to capture part of the oil.

It is based on new information, including high-resolution video made after the riser cut, and on pressure readings taken by a device that was inserted this week into the equipment at the sea floor. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, was personally involved in using those pressure readings to help make the latest calculation.

“This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP’s well,” Secretary Chu said in a statement. “As we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change.”

The company has proven in recent days that it can capture roughly 15,000 barrels of oil a day, though the operation was interrupted briefly on Tuesday by a small fire after the Discoverer Enterprise drilling ship was apparently struck by lightning.

BP has outlined plans to deploy new equipment so that it can capture a minimum of 40,000 barrels a day by the end of June, and a minimum of 60,000 barrels a day by mid-July.

If the new range of flow estimates proves correct, and if BP is ultimately found guilty of gross negligence in actions it took that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that would mean the company could be assessed fines of up to $258 million a day. Those fines could come on top of payments for cleanup costs and economic damage to Gulf Coast businesses.

Fearful that the spill could ultimately cost BP tens of billions of dollars, investors have driven the company’s market valuation down by 48 percent since the spill began, erasing $91 billion of shareholder value. BP shares rose more than 2 percent during regular trading on Tuesday, but then gave up all that gain and more in after-hours trading.

Mr. Obama has said all along that BP will pay for everything. People close to BP said that as asset-rich as the global oil giant is, its holdings are not so liquid that it can instantly set aside as many billions of dollars as the White House and leaders in Congress are seeking. Also being worked out are the terms by which BP would have to replenish the fund as it is drawn down.

BP officials are adamant that the company should not be liable for the lost wages of oil workers laid off because of the six-month moratorium that the Obama administration imposed on deepwater offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire. But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and other administration officials repeatedly have cited idled oil workers as among those who could press claims.


Justin Gillis contributed reporting from New York.

    In Oval Office Speech, Obama Calls for New Focus on Energy Policy, NYT, 15.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16obama.html

Obama Will Take to Oval Office With a Familiar Theme

June 14, 2010
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — The venue says it all. By choosing to speak to the nation on Tuesday night for the first time from the Oval Office, where his predecessors have spoken of wars and disasters, President Obama is conveying the gravity of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet his theme should feel familiar to the millions of Americans who tune in. Aides say Mr. Obama will describe the eight-week-old oil spill as a slow-motion crisis, resistant to the best efforts and billions of dollars from government and industry. Ultimately, he will say, the nation will recover, just not soon.

Sound like the economy?

In the year and a half since Mr. Obama became president at the height of the worst recession since the Great Depression, he has repeatedly tried to balance a message of hope, amid signs that the economy is mending, with a frank concession that recovery will continue to be painfully slow.

Now the president must strike the same sort of balance in talking to the nation about the oil spill. And he has chosen to do so from the familiar office that Americans since the dawn of the television age have come to associate with big moments — for them, and for presidents.

In the nearly two months since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, BP and government scientists have tried and failed at the quick options for plugging the spewing leak in the gulf. Now they are left with the slowest but surest solution, drilling a relief well a mile down. As with the economy, Americans have grown uncertain and fearful about the spill’s environmental and economic impact, and even more skeptical that government is competent enough to do anything about it — a sentiment that, more broadly, is roiling this midterm election year and threatening Democratic majorities in Congress.

It is Mr. Obama’s goal, advisers say, to acknowledge the uncertainties and what one called “the new reality,” allay people’s fears and give reason to hope.

“We now can give people a very frank assessment of what this is going to be like over the next several months and the steps the federal government is going to take to ensure full recovery and restoration for the region,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.

Among the memorable Oval Office addresses, President Ronald Reagan consoled the country on the night of Jan. 28, 1986, after the Challenger space shuttle exploded that morning on liftoff, killing its crew of seven, including Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first ordinary American in space. And President George W. Bush sought to reassure the nation on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, as the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon smoldered.

“This is inherently different than those events,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “It’s not an event; it’s an ongoing crisis, and you treat it differently.”

Administration officials describe an approach resonant of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats amid the Depression. As he toured the coastlines of Mississippi and Alabama on Monday, Mr. Obama made remarks that hinted at the possible flavor of his planned 15-minute speech.

At a staging site for cleanup efforts in Theodore, Ala., Mr. Obama referred to the fishermen, shrimpers, oystermen and others he had met in four visits to the Gulf Coast and described their fear that the spill “can have a long-term impact on a way of life that has been passed on for generations.”

“And I understand that fear,” he said.

Mr. Obama contrasted the still-unfolding disaster with the region’s experience with Hurricane Katrina: “It’s not simply one catastrophic event. It’s an ongoing assault whose movements are constantly changing.”

Then he struck the familiar balance of realism and hope.

“Now I can’t promise folks that the oil will be cleaned up overnight,” Mr. Obama said. “It will not be.” More businesses will be hurt and people will be angry. “But I promise you this, that things are going to return to normal.”

    Obama Will Take to Oval Office With a Familiar Theme, NYT, 14.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/us/politics/15obama.html

Obama, Visiting Gulf, Tries to Lift Economy and Mood

June 14, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and HENRY FOUNTAIN

THEODORE, Ala. — President Obama on Monday stepped up his efforts to limit the economic fallout from the oil spill, announcing steps to assure consumers that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is safe and promoting tourism in the region as BP, under pressure from the White House, agreed to accelerate the cleanup.

On his fourth trip to the region since the rig explosion that set off the leak, Mr. Obama visited Mississippi and Alabama, a day before he was to deliver an address from the Oval Office in his most visible step yet to show that his administration is in command of what he has called the nation’s worst environmental disaster.

Responding to a request by the administration over the weekend, BP announced a plan to siphon 40,000 to 53,000 barrels of oil a day from its leaking well by the end of June, up from the current 15,000 barrels a day.

Under the plan, which essentially pushes BP’s containment schedule forward by two weeks, the company will also bring in more vessels and other backup equipment to cope with bad weather or unforeseen problems. BP’s optimism about its previous efforts to deal with the situation has frequently proven unfounded.

BP’s board met on Monday to consider a White House demand that it establish an account to pay spill claims, as investors and officials raised questions about the company’s long-term financial strength.

The board did not make a final decision about the account, pending a meeting between its chairman and Mr. Obama in Washington on Wednesday.

The company’s $10.5 billion annual dividend has become a point of contention, with a host of critics in the United States saying that it should not be paying out profits to stockholders when huge cleanup costs still loom and when fishermen, oil workers and small-business owners say they are having trouble getting compensation from the company. While BP has billions of dollars in cash flow that presumably can cover the costs, there is concern about its future.

Internal BP documents, including an e-mail message calling the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon a “nightmare,” show a pattern of risky choices made to save time and money in the weeks before the disastrous April 20 blowout, according to a letter sent to the oil company by the leaders of a House committee on Monday.

The committee leaders cited five areas in which the company had made decisions that “increased the danger of a catastrophic well,” including choosing the design of the well, preparing for and testing the cement job and assuring that the well was properly sealed on the top.

Taken together, the documents offer the strongest case yet that BP bears much of the responsibility for the explosion that killed 11 workers and the still-unchecked leaking of millions of gallons of oil into the gulf.

Some of the decisions appeared to violate industry guidelines and were made despite warnings from BP’s own employees and outside contractors, said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, the leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. They sent their letter to BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, in advance of his testimony on Thursday before the committee.

An investigation suggested that delays in completing the well “created pressure to take shortcuts,” the letter said.

After a meeting with Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana in Gulfport, Miss., Mr. Obama urged Americans to come down to visit the area’s beaches, many of which were virtually deserted on Monday. “There’s still a lot of opportunity for visitors to come down here,” Mr. Obama said after the meeting at the Coast Guard station in Gulfport.

The president made a point of eating local seafood for a lunch in Gulfport, where he chatted with a hotel owner who told him that her business was down 40 percent, and then again for dinner in Orange Beach, Ala., where he ordered crab claws, crawfish tails, ribs and nachos.

“Seafood from the gulf today is safe to eat,” he said earlier in Theodore, where he said government agencies were increasing their monitoring of seafood processors and of fish caught outside of areas where fishing has already been banned because of the spill. “But we need to make sure it stays that way.”

Mr. Hayward, the BP executive, is sure to come under intense questioning on Thursday when he appears before a subcommittee of the House energy and commerce committee.

The committee leaders said that shortly before the blowout, BP engineers chose a faster, less expensive design for the final string of casing, the steel pipe that lines the well. The design that was chosen, which used a so-called tapered string, cost about $7 million to $10 million less than another method. But the tapered string afforded less protection if the cementing job were poor and gas were to rise up the well, the congressmen wrote. The New York Times reported on the casing design previously.

In an exchange of e-mail messages in the week before the blowout, BP drilling engineers discussed the casing plans, with one, Brian P. Morel, asking another for a quick review of one schematic diagram. “Sorry for the late notice,” Mr. Morel wrote, “this has been nightmare well which has everyone all over the place.”

Time and money were both concerns, the House chairmen wrote, because the well was behind schedule. A problem in March had forced the company to apply for a “bypass,” in which the well is drilled around the problem area. By the day of the blowout, the Deepwater Horizon, leased by BP from Transocean for about half a million dollars a day plus contractors’ fees, was 43 days late for its next drilling location, the chairmen wrote.

The choice of a tapered string meant that the well had only two barriers to upward gas flow that could cause a blowout: cement near the bottom of the well and a seal assembly near the top.

In a letter to Rear Adm. James A. Watson, the government’s on-scene commander of the spill cleanup, Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said that by Tuesday a drill ship, the Q4000, would be able to burn 5,000 barrels to 10,000 barrels of oil a day collected through pipes connected to the so-called choke line at the wellhead.

That would bring its capacity to 20,000 barrels to 28,000 barrels a day. A team of scientists assembled by the government has estimated the flow rate at 25,000 barrels to 30,000 barrels a day, but the team is working on new estimates that may be higher.

By the end of the month, Mr. Suttles wrote, BP will add to the capacity by connecting a large flexible pipe to a second line at the wellhead, called the kill line. This oil would be collected by a ship that can handle 20,000 barrels to 25,000 barrels a day, bringing the total number of barrels collected daily to 40,000 to 53,000.


Helene Cooper reported from Alabama, and Henry Fountain from New York.

    Obama, Visiting Gulf, Tries to Lift Economy and Mood, NYT, 14.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/us/15spill.html

The Separation of Politics and State

June 11, 2010
The New York Times
By RICHARD PAINTER

Minneapolis

PRESIDENT OBAMA has made some headway in government ethics reform by imposing new restrictions on those who join his administration from the private sector, moving to exclude lobbyists from presidential boards and commissions, and suggesting legislation that might lessen the influence of corporate campaign spending on federal elections.

It’s unfortunate, then, that his White House staff remains so deeply immersed in partisan politics, as demonstrated by the administration’s offering a presidential appointment to try to dissuade Representative Joe Sestak from running in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary against Senator Arlen Specter. There were similar discussions with Andrew Romanoff, a former speaker of the Colorado House, who is challenging Senator Michael Bennet.

Despite what some Republicans might claim, such politicking is not illegal; in fact, this sort of thing has been business as usual in presidential administrations for a very long time. Nonetheless, these recent incidents should prompt us to rethink whether overtly partisan work has a legitimate place in the White House and, if so, who should be doing it.

Federal employees’ participation in partisan political activity is governed by the Hatch Act of 1939, which was put into place after accusations that New Deal programs were being used by party bosses to influence Congressional elections. The statute prohibits government officials from engaging in political activity using official titles, at government expense or while on duty. And it prohibits them from using their official capacities to sway an election.

The Hatch Act has a few big exceptions, however: not only the president and vice president but also political appointees, including cabinet members and many senior White House staff members, may do both government and political work in the same office, provided they distinguish between the two.

For instance, White House officials usually use separate BlackBerrys, cellphones and computers for their partisan activities. That way, political calls and e-mail messages coming from White House officials are not legally coming from the White House at all. They are instead “personal capacity” communications by people who happen to be White House staff members — including, in this administration, the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and his deputy.

This is not the Hatch Act’s only legal distinction with little grounding in reality: the regulations also allow government employees to speak at partisan fund-raising events, provided they do not explicitly ask for money.

The employees of the White House Office of Political Affairs, which was established under Ronald Reagan to offer advice on the political viability of administration policies, thus spend an enormous amount of their “personal time” moonlighting for the president’s political party.

These distinctions between official work and personal political work are nonsensical. When White House staff members send a message, everyone knows where they work. When they speak at campaign events, everyone knows who they are. Calling partisan political activity by White House staff “personal” rather than “official” is a legal fiction.

There is also no way of knowing how much time is spent on politics instead of official duties because time records for senior political employees are not required. Little is known, for example, about how many trips are taken by the staff of the political affairs office and who pays for them.

Then there are the conflicts of interest that inevitably and frequently arise. Suggestions made to government employees by candidates, contributors and political operatives can easily influence White House policy, whether it be political concerns about a United States attorney or a Senate candidate who is getting in the way. But what is best for a political party does not often reflect what is best for the country — and what is best for the country should be the top priority of full-time federal employees.

Congress should amend the Hatch Act, or the president should issue an executive order, to prohibit all White House staff members from participating in partisan political activity in any capacity during the relatively short time they serve in government. (The act already imposes similar restrictions on federal employees in intelligence and some areas of law enforcement.)

The president and vice president, the only two elected officials in the executive branch, should still be permitted to engage in partisan politics while holding office. But in their partisan duties, they should be supported only by the staff of their political party, and not that of the White House.

Incidents like the Pennsylvania and Colorado primary controversies might still occur even if the White House staff is barred from partisan politics, but they would occur less often. Expanding the Hatch Act would be a change in keeping with the ethics reform that the Obama administration has promised the American people.


Richard W. Painter, a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, was the chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007.

    The Separation of Politics and State, NYT, 11.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/opinion/14painter.html

The President’s Moment

June 11, 2010
The New York Times

If ever there was a test of President Obama’s vision of government — one that cannot solve all problems, but does what people cannot do for themselves — it is this nerve-racking early summer of 2010, with oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and far too many Americans out of work for far too long.

The country is frustrated and apprehensive and still waiting for Mr. Obama to put his vision into action.

The president cannot plug the leak or magically clean up the fouled Gulf of Mexico. But he and his administration need to do a lot more to show they are on top of this mess, and not perpetually behind the curve.

It is well within Mr. Obama’s power to keep his administration and Congressional Democrats focused on what the economy needs: jobs and stimulus. Voters are anxious about the deficit. But the president needs to tell them the truth — that without more spending the economy could remain weak for a very long time.

Unless Mr. Obama says it, no other politician will. Just the other day, the House passed an unemployment benefits extension from which Democrats, not Republicans, had stripped vital measures that would have helped lots of Americans, but did not close a tax loophole for billionaires.

Americans need to know that Mr. Obama, whose coolness can seem like detachment, is engaged. This is not a mere question of presentation or stagecraft, although the White House could do better at both. (We cringed when he told the “Today” show that he had spent important time figuring out “whose ass to kick” about the spill. Everyone knew that answer on Day 2.)

Any assessment of the 44th president has to start with the fact that he took office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President George W. Bush’s ineptness and blind ideology. He has faced a stone wall of Republican opposition. And Mr. Obama has had real successes. He won a stimulus bill that helped avert a depression; he got a historic health care reform through Congress; the bitter memory of Mr. Bush’s presidency is fading around the world.

But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.

It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP for its inadequate response and failure to inform the public about the size of the spill. (Each day, it seems, brings new revelations about the scope of the disaster.) It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.

He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world.

These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr. Obama to decisively show both.

    The President’s Moment, NYT, 11.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13sun1.html

Obama's Greenhouse Gas Rules Survive Senate Vote

June 11, 2010
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:53 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a boost for the president on global warming, the Senate on Thursday rejected a challenge to Obama administration rules aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other big polluters.

The defeated resolution would have denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to move ahead with the rules, crafted under the federal Clean Air Act. With President Barack Obama's broader clean energy legislation struggling to gain a foothold in the Senate, the vote took on greater significance as a signal of where lawmakers stand on dealing with climate change.

''If ever there was a vote to find out whose side you are on, this is it,'' said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The vote was 53-47 to stop the Senate from moving forward on the Republican-led effort to restrain the EPA.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., predicted the vote would ''increase momentum to adopt comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year.''

But Obama still needs 60 votes to advance his energy agenda, and Democrats don't have them yet. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said the vote made clear that a majority in the Senate back either a delay or an outright ban on ''the Obama EPA's job-killing, global warming agenda.''

Republicans, and the six Democrats who voted with them to advance the resolution, said Congress, not bureaucrats, should be in charge of writing climate change policy. They said the EPA rules would drive up energy costs and kill jobs.

But Democrats, referring frequently to the Gulf oil spill, said it made no sense to undermine efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dependence on oil and other fossil fuels.

The effort to block the rules ''is an attempt to bury our heads in the sand and ignore reality,'' said Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M.

Obama said the vote was another reminder of the need to pass legislation to reduce the country's reliance on oil. The White House had issued a veto threat this week, saying the resolution would block efforts to cut pollution that could harm people's health and well-being.

''Today the Senate chose to move America forward, towards that clean energy economy -- not backward to the same failed policies that have left our nation increasingly dependent on foreign oil,'' he said.

The EPA crafted standards on greenhouse gas emissions by big polluters after the Supreme Court ruled that those emissions could be considered a danger to human health and thus could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The rules are to go into effect next January.

The poor chances of the anti-EPA measure overcoming a veto and becoming law did not deter fierce debate.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called the new regulations a ''blatant power grab by the administration and the EPA.'' With a broad energy bill unlikely to pass this year, ''the administration has shifted course and is now trying to get done through the back door what they haven't been able to get done through the front door,'' he said.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called the blocking measure, ''a great big gift to big oil'' that would ''increase pollution, increase our dependence on foreign oil and stall our efforts to create jobs'' in clean energy.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that he anticipated the Senate taking up a broader energy bill in the next several weeks ''and hopefully we can get something done before Congress adjourns this year.''

The sponsor of Thursday's resolution, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of oil-rich Alaska, said her intent was to protect the authority of Congress, not the interests of the oil industry. ''It should be up to us to set the policy of this country, not unelected bureaucrats within an agency,'' she said.

Her Democratic allies used similar arguments. ''The regulatory approach is the wrong way to promote renewable energy and clean energy jobs in Arkansas and the rest of the country,'' said Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who faces a difficult re-election campaign this summer.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who opposed the resolution, agreed that Congress should not cede its authority to the executive branch but expressed concern the measure would reverse progress made in such areas as vehicle emissions. He said he supported a bill that would suspend EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources for two years.

Murkowski, too, said Congress should be working harder to come up with an energy bill. The issue was whether a consensus was possible this year.

''Here's the real rub,'' said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has worked with Democrats on possible energy legislation. ''If we stop them (the rules), are we going to do anything?''

''This is going to be the great hypocrisy test,'' said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., cosponsor of a major clean energy proposal. He asked whether those demanding that Congress act first would actually vote for change.

There were other disputes about the consequences of the Murkowski resolution. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and the White House said the resolution would force the EPA to rescind the standards for emissions from future-model cars and light trucks it came up with earlier this year with the Transportation Department. The result, she said, would be a need for the country to consume an extra 455 million barrels of oil.

Murkowski and others countered that Transportation has long been able to set fuel efficiency standards without the help of the EPA.

Jackson also denied the argument of critics that the EPA rules would impose devastating costs on small businesses and farmers, resulting in major job losses. The EPA added a provision that exempts small sources of pollution from the regulations for six years.

------

The bill is S.J. Res. 26.

Online:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov.

    Obama's Greenhouse Gas Rules Survive Senate Vote, 11.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/11/us/politics/AP-US-Greenhouse-Gases.html

Obama Cancels Asia Trip as Concern on Spill Mounts

June 4, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama canceled his trip to Australia, Indonesia and Guam late Thursday night as oil continued to stream into the Gulf of Mexico in what he has called the worst environmental disaster in American history.

His decision came as officials reported progress containing the oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Mr. Obama is to visit the Gulf Friday to assess the situation and meet with officials responding to the crisis. While the White House statement offered no reason for scratching the Asia trip this time, officials in recent days had grown increasingly convinced that it was untenable for the president to leave the country for a week with the oil spill still unchecked.

Mr. Obama telephoned Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia to tell them he could not come after all, the White House said in a statement issued at midnight.

“President Obama expressed his deep regret that he has to postpone his trip to Asia that was scheduled for later this month,” the statement said. “The president looked forward to rescheduling so that he can visit both countries soon.”

In the Gulf, officials reported making some headway in the latest effort to place a cap over the well that would funnel at least some of the oil and gas to a ship at the surface. Earlier Thursday, 20-foot-long shears were used to snip the damaged riser pipe at the wellhead, and technicians began to lower the cap over it.

Late Thursday, Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who is commanding the federal response to the disaster, announced that the cap had been put in place, but warned that “it will be some time before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment.”

Among the concerns was that the cap would not fit tightly and would allow seawater into the oil. That could lead to the formation of icelike hydrates that could block the flow. But the cap was outfitted with pipes for injecting methanol, which acts as a kind of antifreeze to prevent hydrates from forming.

Live video feeds from the sea bed appeared to show oil spewing from valves at the top of the cap, as planned. As oil gradually begins to flow up through a pipe to the drillship, these valves would be closed. “It’s looking hopeful,” a BP spokesman said.

Mr. Obama’s decision to cancel his Asia trip underscored the way the oil spill is forcing the White House to recalibrate plans for this summer. BP and the government have given up trying to plug the leak and are focusing now on siphoning or containing it until relief wells can be completed, perhaps by August. As a result, the president faces another two months in crisis management before he can even turn his focus exclusively to cleanup and recovery.

White House officials said they will not let the focus on the oil spill detract from the rest of the president’s economic, legislative and foreign agenda, pointing out that he still seems likely to sign financial regulation reform by next month, push through his Supreme Court nominee and win sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council.

“The American people don’t elect somebody, I think, that they don’t believe can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters earlier Thursday. “Sometimes it feels like we walk and chew gum and juggle on a unicycle all at the same time. I get that.”

But, he added, “there’s a whole lot of people working on a whole lot of things in the White House, and we’re able to do more than several things at once.”

To get through the crisis without letting it detract from the rest of the president’s agenda, the White House plans to try to wall off those dealing with the spill from the rest of Mr. Obama’s team, particularly John Brennan, the homeland security adviser, and Carol Browner, the energy and climate adviser. The White House is counting on a strong jobs report on Friday to reassure Americans that its programs are bolstering the economy.

Yet the president’s time and energy are finite and every day devoted to the oil spill is one that he cannot focus as much of his own resources on other issues. The juggling of his schedule Friday showed the complexities in store for the White House over the next two months – the president will visit a commercial truck dealership and truck parts supplier in Maryland to highlight the jobs report in the morning, then fly to New Orleans to assess the latest efforts to combat the spill in the afternoon.

This was the second time Mr. Obama has scrubbed the trip to Australia and Indonesia. He was originally scheduled to travel there in March but canceled at the last minute to stay in Washington to lobby for passage of his health care legislation. He also had passed up a trip to Indonesia in connection with a regional summit meeting held in Singapore in November 2009.

The White House announced no date for rescheduling the Australia-Indonesia trip. But Julian Aldrin Pasha, the spokesman for the Indonesian president, told the financial newspaper Bisnis Indonesia that it had been rescheduled for November.

At a separate event on Thursday, Mr. Obama announced he will visit India in November.

The Australia-Indonesia trip is the most prominent example so far of what will have to be sacrificed on the president’s agenda as a result of the spill. While not the highest foreign policy priority, the trip was considered important by administration officials because Australia is one of America’s strongest allies and because Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Mr. Obama also spent several years of his youth in Indonesia.

In its statement, the White House signaled that it was not abandoning its allies: “President Obama underscored his commitment to our close alliance with Australia and our deepening partnership with Indonesia. He plans to hold full bilateral meetings with Prime Minister Rudd and President Yudhoyono on the margins of the G-20 meeting in Canada.” The Group of 20 major industrial nations will be meeting in Toronto in late June.

But Mr. Obama has called the spill his “highest priority” and the White House understands it will absorb a considerable portion of the president’s time this summer. The failure to stop the leak after more than six weeks has fed concern about the administration’s powerlessness in the face of this crisis, and the White House has been determined to show that it is fully engaged.

Earlier on Thursday, the White House announced that it had sent a $69 million bill to BP for the first installment of clean up costs. The White House has made a point of criticizing BP lately and the Justice Department has opened criminal investigation into what caused the April 20 explosion that ultimately sank the Deepwater Horizon rig, killed 11 workers and touched off the leak.

Mr. Obama, who has also been confronted by questions about his cool public reaction, said Thursday night that he is “furious at this entire situation” but does not show it because it does not accomplish anything.

“I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people,” he said on “Larry King Live” on CNN. “But that’s not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem and ultimately this isn’t about me and how angry I am. Ultimately, this is about the people down in the Gulf who are being impacted and what am I doing to make sure that they’re able to salvage their way of life.”

    Obama Cancels Asia Trip as Concern on Spill Mounts, NYT, 4.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/us/politics/05obama.html

Backward at Bagram

May 31, 2010
The New York Times

One of the most vital jobs of the federal courts is to check excessive claims of presidential power. The courts have stepped up to the task at important times since President George W. Bush embarked on a campaign after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to create an imperial presidency. Sadly, a recent ruling by a federal appeals court on the American military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan was not one of those times.

What makes the ruling especially distressing is that the extravagant claim of executive power upheld by the court — to create a law-free zone at the Bagram lockup — was dreamed up by Mr. Bush and subsequently embraced by President Obama. The appellate court ruled that there was no right to federal court review for the detainees, who say they were captured outside of Afghanistan, far from any battlefield, and then shipped to Bagram to be held indefinitely in harsh conditions.

The decision overturns a narrowly focused 2009 ruling by Judge John Bates of the Federal District Court. His decision was based on the 2008 Supreme Court decision that granted prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal court review of their detention. Judge Bates extended the Supreme Court ruling to non-Afghan detainees at Bagram who had been held for more than six years — a small slice of the 600 to 800 prisoners there.

Judge Bates recognized that Bagram is in an active theater of war, and habeas corpus traditionally has not applied to detainees abroad in zones of combat. But his ruling also recognized that the logic of exempting prisoners of war from judicial review cannot apply to a detainee who is imported to the war zone.

The appellate panel found that the process for sorting prisoners at Bagram was even flimsier than the one at Guantánamo, which the Supreme Court said was inadequate. To justify overruling Judge Bates, the appellate judges overestimated the practical difficulty of affording court access and underestimated American control in Bagram. They also dusted off a precedent from 1950 to suggest that granting habeas corpus rights to a small number of Bagram detainees would somehow “hamper the war effort, and bring aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Actually, military commanders and Mr. Obama himself have argued that ensuring fair treatment of detainees advances national security interests by denying Al Qaeda and the Taliban an effective recruiting tool.

On a positive note, the appellate court left open the possibility of a different result in a case where there is a clear showing that the government transferred detainees into an active combat zone in order to evade judicial review of detention decisions. The ruling was deeply unconvincing in suggesting, however, that this did not apply to the case before it.

It would be comforting to think that detainee treatment issues at Bagram have been resolved. But just a week before the panel’s ruling, the Red Cross confirmed the existence of an American-run prison facility at Bagram, where some detainees allege they were abused.

Under the pressure of a lawsuit, the administration in January provided the names of detainees at the notorious Bagram prison. But it still resists disclosing vital details, including their citizenship, the locations and circumstances of their capture, and how long they have been held. Further, it has yet to release salient details about how the newly revised military process for reviewing the validity of detentions is working in practice. We await the administration’s accounting.

    Backward at Bagram, NYT, 31.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/opinion/01tue1.html

White House Struggles as Criticism Over Leak Mounts

May 30, 2010
The New York Times
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES

This article is by Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder and Jackie Calmes.

HOUSTON — The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.

“We are prepared for the worst,” said Carol M. Browner, President Obama’s climate change and energy policy adviser. “We have been prepared from the beginning.”

Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak — severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser — could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.

“This is obviously a difficult situation,” Ms. Browner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “but it’s important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.”

“We have been directing BP to take important steps,” including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.

The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled.

But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC’s “This Week” that the administration must move in quickly with “decisive force and demonstrate that it’s doing everything that it can do.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on “Meet the Press,” again criticized the administration’s efforts, saying: “We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency.”

The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.

BP engineers are now working on several containment plans, with the first being implemented over the next few days.

“According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday or Tuesday,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement on Sunday.

Using submarine robots, technicians intend to sever the riser pipe on top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-high stack of pipes above the well that failed to shut off the leak when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. A funnel-like containment device will be fitted above the cut riser to draw the escaping oil through tubing attached to a drilling ship.

But BP officials acknowledged that there was no certainty that this attempt would work. Robert Dudley, BP’s managing director, appearing on “This Week,” also said that if it did work, some oil would still seep out until relief wells provided “an end point” in August.

The failure of the most recent effort — known as a top kill, which BP officials expressed great optimism about before trying it — has underlined the gaps in knowledge and science about the spill and its potential remedies. Ever since the explosion and the resulting leak, estimates of how much oil is escaping have differed by thousands of barrels a day. Both government and BP officials said on Sunday that they had no accurate idea of how much oil was spilling into the gulf.

“We honestly do not know,” Mr. Dudley said on “Meet the Press.” “We’ve always found this a difficult oil to measure because of the huge amounts of gas in the oil.”

“The one thing about this method that we’re about to go into — it will and should measure the majority of the flow,” he said.

Mr. Dudley said that the original estimates by the government and BP officials of 5,000 barrels a day were based on satellite pictures and that the current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels was “issued without an actual flow measurement.” If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 — four months after the accident — it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.

After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids — and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber — into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.

In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.

The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season.

Officials from BP and the administration announced on Saturday that the top kill was a failure and had been abandoned, and that engineers were once again trying to solve the problem with a containment cap. A similar operation was tried nearly four weeks ago, but it failed because a slush of icy water and gas, known as hydrates, filled the large containment device, blocking the escaping oil from entering it. This time, engineers will pump hot sea water around the new, smaller device to keep hydrates from forming, and there will be far less space between the cap and the well for any hydrates that do form to flow in.

BP officials expressed optimism on Sunday about the new operation, though one technician working on the project warned that there were concerns that hydrates could again stymie the containment effort. The technician and outside experts also warned that by cutting the riser, the engineers may increase the flow of escaping oil.

Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, said that he thought BP’s next plan had a good chance of succeeding, but that there was also a risk of increasing the flow of escaping oil by 10 percent.

“Then it just makes the situation worse for longer,” he said, unless the containment cap succeeds in collecting a substantial amount of oil.


Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, John M. Broder from Washington and Jackie Calmes from Chicago.

    White House Struggles as Criticism Over Leak Mounts, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html

Obama to Send Up to 1,200 Troops to Border

May 25, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES — President Obama will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek increased spending on law enforcement there to combat drug smuggling after demands from Republican and Democratic lawmakers that border security be tightened.

The decision was disclosed by a Democratic lawmaker and confirmed by administration officials after Mr. Obama met on Tuesday with Republican senators, several of whom have demanded that troops be placed at the border. The lawmakers learned of the plan after the meeting.

But the move also reflected political pressure in the president’s own party with midterm election campaigns under way and with what is expected to be a tumultuous debate on overhauling immigration law coming up on Capitol Hill.

The issue has pushed Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, into something of a corner. As governor of Arizona, she demanded that Guard troops be put on the border. But since joining the Obama administration, she has remained noncommittal about the idea, saying as recently as a month ago that other efforts by Mr. Obama had made the border “as secure now as it has ever been.”

The troops will be stationed in the four border states for a year, White House officials said. It is not certain when they will arrive, the officials said.

The troops will join a few hundred members of the Guard already assigned there to help the police hunt for drug smugglers. The additional troops will provide support to law enforcement officers by helping observe and monitor traffic between official border crossings. They will also help analyze trafficking patterns in the hope of intercepting illegal drug shipments.

Initial word of the deployment came not in a formal announcement from the White House — indeed, it was left to administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to fill in some details — but from a Democratic member of the House from southern Arizona who is running in what is expected to be a competitive race for re-election.

“The White House is doing the right thing,” the congresswoman, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said in a statement announcing the decision. “Arizonans know that more boots on the ground means a safer and more secure border. Washington heard our message.”

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican whose opponent in a coming primary has relentlessly criticized him on immigration, said Tuesday that he welcomed Mr. Obama’s move but that it was “simply not enough.”

Mr. McCain called for the introduction of 6,000 National Guard troops to police the Southwestern border, with 3,000 for Arizona alone. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, two Obama administration officials said that the proposal infringed on his role as commander in chief and overlooked gains in border security.

Calls for sending the Guard to the border grew after the shooting death of an Arizona rancher in March that the police suspect was carried out by someone involved in smuggling. Advocates of the controversial Arizona state law giving the police a greater role in immigration enforcement played up what they described as a failure to secure the border as a reason to pass the law.

Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican who is running for a full term, has requested Guard troops at the border but decided not to use her authority to do it herself, citing the state’s tattered finances. The governors of New Mexico and Texas also pleaded for troops.

From 2006 to 2008, President George W. Bush made a larger deployment of Guard troops under a program called Operation Jump Start. At its peak, 6,000 Guard troops at the border helped build roads and fences in addition to backing up law enforcement officers.

Those Guard troops contributed to the arrest of more than 162,000 illegal immigrants, the rescue of 100 people stranded in the desert and the seizure of $69,000 in cash and 305,000 pounds of illicit drugs.

The soldiers will not directly make arrests of border crossers and smugglers, something they are not trained to do.

Rick Nelson, a senior fellow who studies domestic security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the additional spending could improve security over the long term but that the National Guard deployment was not sufficient for “an overwhelming change that will change the dynamics on the border.”

“This is a symbolic gesture,” he said. “At the end of the day, the face of border security is still going to be Customs and Border Protection, the law enforcement community. It’s not going to be the National Guard.”

Democrats and Republicans who agreed with the move rushed to take credit for it, including Ms. Brewer, who said her signing of the new Arizona law had pushed the administration.

“I am pleased that President Obama has now, apparently, agreed that our nation must secure the border to address rampant border violence and illegal immigration without other preconditions, such as passage of ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’ ” she said.

Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general and a Democrat running for governor, released a statement with the headline “Goddard Secures Administration Commitment for $500 million for National Guard, Border Security.” In an interview, Mr. Goddard said, “I think it is a good indication that the administration is taking us seriously.”

But some Democrats were skeptical.

Representative Harry E. Mitchell of Arizona, a Democrat facing re-election in a Republican-leaning district, said it was “going to take much more to secure the border.” He proposed a minimum of 3,000 troops.

Some Republicans said the deployment of the troops should not overshadow the need for a comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem.

“Arizona and other border states are grateful for the additional resources at the border,” said Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona. “But I hope that this is merely the first step in a process that culminates in Congress passing comprehensive immigration reform.”

Obama administration officials had resisted sending Guard troops to the border but had never ruled it out. They pointed to a variety of improvements at the border, including a record seizure of drug-related cash and guns, falling or flat rates of violent crime in border towns, and record lows in the flow of illegal immigrants across the border. Analysts give the dismal economy much of the credit for that.

In his meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said improving border security alone would not reduce illegal immigration and reiterated that a reworking of the immigration system could not be achieved without more Republican support.


Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

    Obama to Send Up to 1,200 Troops to Border, NYT, 25.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/26border.html

Officials Back to Gulf as Frustration on Spill Spreads

May 23, 2010
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Under increasing criticism for not moving more aggressively to halt the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, President Barack Obama sent three cabinet members to the area, examined possible new remedies and formed a special commission to investigate the disastrous leak and “make sure it never happens again.”

But the commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, said Sunday that the access that the BP oil conglomerate has to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.

“They have the eyes and ears that are down there,” the admiral said on CNN’s “State of the Union" television news program. “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved.”

With some Louisiana islands now fouled by layers of heavy crude, and species like the brown pelican increasingly endangered, anger has been mounting against both the government and BP, which is legally responsible for the cleanup.

Lisa P. Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was meeting with frustrated Louisiana residents on Sunday, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were heading to the region on Monday.

Adm. Allen said that the latest attempt to cap the flow, by pumping heavy mud into the well in an operation known as a “top kill,” had been pushed back from the weekend to Tuesday.

“It’s taking time to get everything set up,” said Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman. “It’s never been done before. We’ve got to make sure everything is right.” But with layers of rust-colored oil invading fragile marshlands, damaging fishing grounds and playing havoc with tourism, the region has lost patience.

Adm. Allen said government engineers were examining a proposal, vigorously pressed by Louisiana state officials, to build an artificial array of 80 miles of protective sand berms beyond the natural barrier islands. But he said that could take a year, and quicker solutions were needed.

The admiral and BP officials said Sunday that everything was being done to plug the well before August, when relief wells being drilled to help stanch the flow should be completed.

Meantime, a tube inserted into a leaking pipe near the sea floor was recovering just 1,360 barrels a day, BP said Sunday. That is down from a high of 5,000 last week, clearly far from the entire flow.

Should the “top kill” fail, Adm. Allen said, the next step would be to install a new blowout preventer — the huge valve at the sea floor meant to allow a quick cutoff of oil — above the one that failed after the April 20 explosion that destroyed the oil rig Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 workers.

“We will keep trying to shut off this well,” Bob Dudley, managing director of BP, said on a television news program on CNN. “We’re not going to wait until August.”

But even oil-spill experts who had been somewhat more optimistic are sounding a grimmer tone, saying it is becoming clear that it could take years for the Gulf and the wildlife it supports to recover. “I’m afraid we’re just seeing the beginning of what is going to be a long, ugly summer,” Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor, told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

On Friday, Mr. Obama established a bipartisan national commission to investigate the spill and find ways to prevent a repetition.

He named two prominent former officials to lead the commission — Bob Graham, the former senator from Florida, and William K. Reilly, the former EPA administrator — and gave them six months to come up with a plan to revamp federal regulation of offshore drilling.

“I want to know what worked and what didn’t work in our response to the disaster, and where oversight of the oil and gas industry broke down,” Mr. Obama said on Saturday. “We know, for example, that a cozy relationship between oil and gas companies and agencies that regulate them has long been a source of concern.”

Mr. Obama said he would hold both the government and BP accountable. But he did not retreat from his plan to expand offshore oil drilling and in fact portrayed the commission as a means to make that possible.

“Because it represents 30 percent of our oil production, the Gulf of Mexico can play an important part in securing our energy future,” the president said. “But we can only pursue offshore oil drilling if we have assurances that a disaster like the BP oil spill will not happen again.”

Environmental groups welcomed the establishment of the commission.

Adm. Allen rejected the notion of a too-cozy relationship between the government and BP, saying the government was closely overseeing the company’s efforts.

Asked on CNN whether he trusted BP, the admiral referred to the company’s chief executive, saying: “I trust Tony Hayward. When I talk to him, I get an answer.” But he took exception with Mr. Hayward’s comment, in an interview with Sky News in Britain, that the environmental impact of the leak was likely to be “very, very modest.”

The admiral said that it would be wrong to suggest that the problem was anything short of “potentially catastrophic for this country.”

The accident has put some advocates of offshore drilling in an awkward position. But the woman who brought the phrase “Drill, baby, drill,” into the political lexicon, the former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, insisted on Sunday that her views had not changed.

“I’m a supporter of offshore drilling,” she said on Fox News Sunday, while adding that “the oil companies have got to be held accountable.” But Mrs. Palin suggested that oil-company donations to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign might help explain why it took him “so doggone long,” in her view, to respond to the spill.

Mr. Obama has come under increasing fire for not being more aggressive. Cable channels are filled with commentators asking why the federal government has left so much to BP to handle.

The same complaints are heard on the Gulf Coast.

Adm. Allen said that he understands the deep discontent of Gulf Coast residents. "Nobody likes to have a feeling that you can’t do something about a very big problem,” said the admiral, who helped lead the recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina.

But “we’re on entirely new ground here,” he said on CNN. “This is an entirely new world.”


Peter Baker contributed reporting.

    Officials Back to Gulf as Frustration on Spill Spreads, NYT, 23.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/us/24spill.html

President Lays Out Security Strategy Based in Diplomacy

May 22, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WEST POINT, N.Y. — President Obama outlined a new national security strategy rooted in diplomatic engagement and international alliances on Saturday as he repudiated his predecessor’s emphasis on unilateral American power and the right to wage pre-emptive war.

Eight years after President George W. Bush came to the United States Military Academy here to set a new course for American security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Obama used the same setting to offer a revised doctrine, one that vowed no retreat against enemies while seeking “national renewal and global leadership.”

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system,” the president told graduating cadets. “But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”

Mr. Obama said the United States “will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well” while also trying to “build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions.” He added: “This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times.”

The president’s address was intended not just for the 1,000 young men and women in gray and white uniforms in Michie Stadium who could soon face combat in Afghanistan or Iraq as second lieutenants in the Army, but also for an international audience that in some quarters grew alienated from the United States during the Bush era.

The contrasts between Mr. Bush’s address here in 2002 and Mr. Obama’s in 2010 underscored all the ways a wartime America has changed and all the ways it has not. This was the ninth class to graduate from West Point since hijacked passenger jets destroyed the World Trade Center and smashed into the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. Most of those graduating on Saturday were 12 at the time.

When Mr. Bush addressed their predecessors, he had succeeded in toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan and victory of sorts appeared at hand, even as he was turning his attention to a new front in Iraq. Forecasting a new generation of threats, Mr. Bush vowed not to stand by as they gathered. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize,” he said then, “we will have waited too long.”

As Mr. Obama took the stage on a mild, overcast day, the American war in Iraq was finally beginning to wind down as combat forces prepare to withdraw by August, but Afghanistan has flared out of control and tens of thousands of reinforcements are flowing there. Terrorists have made a fresh effort to strike on American soil as a new president tries to reformulate the nation’s approach to countering them.

“This war has changed over the last nine years, but it’s no less important than it was in those days after 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. Recalling his announcement here six months ago to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he forecast difficult days ahead, but said, “I have no doubt that together with our Afghan and international partners, we will succeed in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Obama all but declared victory in Iraq, crediting the military but not Mr. Bush, who sent more troops in 2007. “A lesser Army might have seen its spirit broken,” Mr. Obama said. “But the American military is more resilient than that. Our troops adapted, they persisted, they partnered with coalition and Iraqi counterparts, and through their competence and creativity and courage, we are poised to end our combat mission in Iraq this summer.”

Mr. Obama attributed the failures of an effort to blow up a passenger jet approaching Detroit in December and of a car intended to explode in Times Square this month to the intense pursuit of radical groups abroad. “These failed attacks show that pressure on networks like Al Qaeda is forcing them to rely on terrorists with less time and space to train,” he said.

And he defended efforts to revise counterterrorism policies that have generated sharp criticism that he is weakening America’s defenses. “We should not discard our freedoms because extremists try to exploit them,” he said. “We cannot succumb to division because others try to drive us apart.”

    President Lays Out Security Strategy Based in Diplomacy, NYT, 22.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/us/politics/23obama.html

Obama Sketches Energy Plan in Oil

May 21, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — There is very little upside for the Obama administration in the ecological and economic disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. The government has come under sharp criticism for underestimating the size of the discharge and for coddling the oil industry for too long.

Until now, perhaps distracted by the critics or because it did not appear that his overall energy agenda was moving forward, President Obama has not made use of the disaster in an overtly political way.

But on Friday — a full month after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon — he made clear that he also was not going to let the moment go to waste, announcing plans to impose stricter fuel-efficiency and emissions standards on cars and, for the first time, on medium- and heavy-duty trucks.

He said the oil gushing from the crippled BP well in the gulf highlighted the need to move away from dirty and dangerous fossil fuels toward a cleaner energy future. And he signaled that he intended to use the accident to continue to push his broader policy priorities, including legislation that would put a price on climate-altering emissions and increased federal aid for American industries in the global race to dominate the clean energy technology sector.

“We know that our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and our economy,” Mr. Obama said in a Rose Garden announcement. “And the disaster in the gulf only underscores that even as we pursue domestic production to reduce our reliance on imported oil, our long-term security depends on the development of alternative sources of fuel and new transportation technologies.”

Put more starkly: the road Mr. Obama is sending us on to his dreamed-of carbon-free future will be slick with oil for many years to come.

Friday’s announcement extended rules on exhaust reduction for cars and light-duty trucks and proposed new greenhouse gas pollution limits for medium- and heavy-duty trucks. The new rules build on an agreement the administration reached with automakers a year ago. Mr. Obama was able to broker that deal by taking advantage of existing executive authority and the near-desperate desire of the struggling auto companies for a single national fuel-efficiency standard, rather than a patchwork of conflicting state and federal rules.

Mr. Obama faces a much steeper path to an agreement limiting carbon dioxide emissions from other sectors of the economy, including electric power companies and heavy manufacturers. That will require a negotiated deal with a variety of regulation-averse industries like coal and oil and the lawmakers who represent their interests.

There is no Rose Garden ceremony in sight for that fundamental remaking of the American economy.

There are limits to what the president can do unilaterally, and, as the president himself has acknowledged, getting 60 votes to pass a sweeping energy bill through the Senate will require significant concessions on nuclear power, coal and, yes, offshore drilling.

“This is a small but commendable step,” said Michael Levi, an energy and climate change expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The president should indeed be using the moment to focus people on the need to reduce U.S. dependence on oil, foreign and domestic,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

“Big political moves, though, will require more,” Mr. Levi continued. “They will require sustained and focused advocacy from the president. People will not make any intuitive link between the tragedy in the gulf and legislation that raises electricity prices. For most Americans, the oil spill is tragic, but jobs and the economy are still the clear number one. The oil spill can help focus people’s attention, but it will take something else to close the deal.”

The president’s Friday announcement came against a backdrop of an administration scrambling to both respond to the crisis in the gulf and to appear to be responding to the crisis. There has been a daily drumbeat of press releases, conference calls, denunciations of BP and announcements of investigations and reorganizations intended to showcase the vigor of the government’s action.

Yet even as the oil has continued to gush beneath the gulf, the administration has not been shy about acknowledging the reality that a third of domestically produced crude oil comes from offshore and that undersea reserves will continue to be an important source of American energy for decades. On March 31, Mr. Obama announced a significant expansion of offshore oil development, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, a policy shift long in the making and unfortunate in the timing.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, charged with both leasing the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling and protecting it from the ravages of oil development, reminded Congress this week that the administration was pursuing what he called a “balanced” energy strategy for the future that included substantial and expanded offshore exploration.

“Offshore development is a necessary part of that future,” Mr. Salazar told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this week. But he emphasized that new safety and environmental safeguards would have to be put in place before extensive new drilling was permitted.

Thus the president’s options are both defined and limited. There will be more offshore drilling, but the rules of the game have now changed.

As Mr. Obama put in on March 31, “Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable homegrown energy.”

    Obama Sketches Energy Plan in Oil, NYT, 21.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/science/earth/22assess.html

Obama Vows End to ‘Cozy’ Oversight of Oil Industry

May 14, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — President Obama angrily denounced the finger-pointing among the three companies involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a “ridiculous spectacle,” and vowed on Friday to end what he called the “cozy relationship” between the government and the oil industry that has existed for a decade or more.

In sharp remarks during an appearance in the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama announced a review of environmental safeguards for oil and gas exploration to prevent future spills. He said that he “will not tolerate any more finger-pointing or irresponsibility” from the industry or the government over who made the mess or how to fix it.

“This is a responsibility that all of us share,” Mr. Obama said. “The oil companies share it. The manufacturers of this equipment share it. The agencies and the federal government in charge of oversight share that responsibility.”

Mr. Obama said that he, too, feels the “anger and frustration” expressed by many Americans, and particularly by residents and business people in the gulf region.

“We know there’s a level of uncertainty,” Mr. Obama said, over just how much oil is gushing into the gulf from the undersea well that was left damaged and leaking by an explosion and fire that sank a drilling rig in April. He added that his administration’s response has always been “geared toward the possibility of a catastrophic event.”

Reacting to reports that federal regulators allowed extensive offshore drilling without first demanding the required environmental permits, the White House and the Interior Department said Friday that there would be a review of all actions taken by the Minerals Management Service, the agency responsible for offshore rigs, under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The law, enacted after the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969, mandates that federal agencies must complete a thorough environmental assessment before approving any major project, especially one including offshore drilling.

The minerals service short-circuited the process when it granted hundreds of recent drilling permits, according to documents and current and former government officials. The BP well that blew in the gulf last month was granted an exemption from the assessment process because company officials assured regulators that it carried little hazard. Officials went along with the company and granted the permit.

The administration said it would study the way oil regulators apply the environmental law and make changes if necessary.

A review of the overall environmental policy procedures for the Minerals Management Service is an important part of the comprehensive and thorough investigation of the explosion and the resulting leak, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “But it also continues the reform effort that we have been undertaking at M.M.S. and throughout Interior,” he added.

    Obama Vows End to ‘Cozy’ Oversight of Oil Industry, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/us/politics/15obama.html

Obama Is Said to Select Kagan as Justice
 

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER and JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — President Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan as the nation’s 112th justice, choosing his own chief advocate before the Supreme Court to join it in ruling on cases critical to his view of the country’s future, Democrats close to the White House said Sunday.

After a monthlong search, Mr. Obama informed Ms. Kagan and his advisers on Sunday of his choice to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. He plans to announce the nomination at 10 a.m. Monday in the East Room of the White House with Ms. Kagan by his side, said the Democrats, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the decision before it was formally made public.

In settling on Ms. Kagan, the president chose a well-regarded 50-year-old lawyer who served as a staff member in all three branches of government and was the first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School. If confirmed, she would be the youngest member and the third woman on the current court, but the first justice in nearly four decades without any prior judicial experience.

That lack of time on the bench may both help and hurt her confirmation prospects, allowing critics to question whether she is truly qualified while denying them a lengthy judicial paper trail filled with ammunition for attacks. As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.

Perhaps as a result, some on both sides of the ideological aisle are suspicious of her. Liberals dislike her support for strong executive power and her outreach to conservatives while running the law school. Activists on the right have attacked her for briefly barring military recruiters from a campus facility because the ban on openly gay men and lesbians serving in the military violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy.

Replacing Justice Stevens with Ms. Kagan presumably would not alter the broad ideological balance on the court, but her relative youth means that she could have an influence on the court for decades to come, underscoring the stakes involved.

In making his second nomination in as many years, Mr. Obama was not looking for a liberal firebrand as much as a persuasive leader who could attract the swing vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and counter what the president sees as the rightward direction of the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Particularly since the Citizens United decision invalidating on free speech grounds the restrictions on corporate spending in elections, Mr. Obama has publicly criticized the court, even during his State of the Union address with justices in the audience.

As he presses an ambitious agenda expanding the reach of government, Mr. Obama has come to worry that a conservative Supreme Court could become an obstacle down the road, aides said. It is conceivable that the Roberts court could eventually hear challenges to aspects of Mr. Obama’s health care program or to other policies like restrictions on carbon emissions and counterterrorism practices.

With all signs pointing to a Kagan nomination, critics have been pre-emptively attacking her in the days leading up to the president’s announcement. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, writing on The Daily Beast, compared her to Harriet E. Miers, whose nomination by President George W. Bush collapsed amid an uprising among conservatives who considered her unqualified and not demonstrably committed to their judicial philosophy.

M. Edward Whelan III, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, wrote on National Review’s Web site that even Ms. Kagan’s nonjudicial experience was inadequate. “Kagan may well have less experience relevant to the work of being a justice than any entering justice in decades,” Mr. Whelan wrote.

Ms. Kagan defended her experience during confirmation hearings as solicitor general last year. “I bring up a lifetime of learning and study of the law, and particularly of the constitutional and administrative law issues that form the core of the court’s docket,” she testified. “I think I bring up some of the communications skills that has made me — I’m just going to say it — a famously excellent teacher.”

Ms. Kagan was one of Mr. Obama’s runners-up last year when he nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the court, and she was always considered the front-runner this year. The president also interviewed three other candidates, all federal appeals court judges: Merrick B. Garland of Washington, Diane P. Wood of Chicago and Sidney R. Thomas of Montana.

Ms. Kagan had several advantages from the beginning that made her the most obvious choice. For one, she works for Mr. Obama, who has been impressed with her intelligence and legal capacity, aides said, and she worked for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was a senator. For another, she is the youngest of the four finalists, meaning she would most likely have the longest tenure as a justice.

Ms. Kagan was also confirmed by the Senate just last year, albeit with 31 no votes, making it harder for Republicans who voted for her in 2009 to vote against her in 2010.

The president can also say he reached beyond the so-called “judicial monastery,” although picking a solicitor general and former Harvard law dean hardly reaches outside the Ivy League, East Coast legal elite. And her confirmation would allow Mr. Obama to build on his appointment of Justice Sotomayor by bringing the number of women on the court to its highest ever (three, with Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg).

Moreover, in his selection of finalists, Mr. Obama effectively framed the choice so that he could seemingly take the middle road by picking Ms. Kagan, who correctly or not was viewed as ideologically between Judge Wood on the left and Judge Garland in the center.

Judge Garland was widely seen as the most likely alternative to Ms. Kagan and the one most likely to win easy confirmation. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, he had a number of conservatives publicly calling him the best they could hope for from a Democratic president. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, privately made clear to the president that he considered Judge Garland a good choice, according to people briefed on their conversations.

But Mr. Obama ultimately opted to save Judge Garland for when he faces a more hostile Senate and needs a nominee with more Republican support. Democrats expect to lose seats in this fall’s election, so if another Supreme Court seat comes open next year and Mr. Obama has a substantially thinner margin in the Senate than he has today, Judge Garland would be an obvious choice.

As for Ms. Kagan, strategists on both sides anticipate a fight over her confirmation but not necessarily an all-out war. The White House hopes the Senate Judiciary Committee can hold hearings before July 4, but some Congressional aides were skeptical. Either way, Democrats want Ms. Kagan confirmed by the August recess so she can join the court for the start of its new term in October.

A New Yorker who grew up in Manhattan, Ms. Kagan earned degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Harvard Law School, worked briefly in private practice, clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, served as a Senate staff member and worked as a White House lawyer and domestic policy aide under President Bill Clinton. She was nominated for an appeals court judgeship in 1999, but the Senate never voted on her nomination.

She has been a trailblazer along the way, not only as the first woman to run Harvard Law School but also as the first woman to serve as solicitor general. Her inexperience as a judge makes her a rarity in modern times, but until the 1970s many Supreme Court justices came from outside the judiciary, including senators, governors, cabinet secretaries and even a former president.

If the Senate confirms Ms. Kagan, who is Jewish, the Supreme Court for the first time will have no Protestant members. In that case, the court would be composed of six justices who are Catholic and three who are Jewish. It also would mean that every member of the court had studied law at Harvard or Yale.

Like her former boss, Justice Marshall, who was the last solicitor general to go directly to the Supreme Court, Ms. Kagan may be forced to recuse herself during her early time on the bench because of her participation in a number of cases coming before the justices. Tom Goldstein, publisher of ScotusBlog, a Web site that follows the court, estimated that she would have to sit out on 13 to 15 matters. Mr. Whelan argued that it would be significantly more than that.

    Obama Is Said to Select Kagan as Justice, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10court.html

White House Says Pakistan Taliban Behind NY Bomb

May 9, 2010
Filed at 4:16 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Saying they obtained new evidence, senior White House officials said Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban were behind the failed Times Square bombing.

The attempt marks the first time the group has been able to launch an attack on U.S. soil. And while U.S. officials have downplayed the threat -- citing the bomb's lack of sophistication -- the incident in Times Square and Christmas Day airline bomber indicate growing strength by overseas terrorist groups linked to al-Qaida even as the CIA says their operations are seriously degraded.

The finding also raises new questions about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which is widely known to have al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operating within its borders.

Concerning the Pakistani Taliban, Attorney General Eric Holder said: ''We know that they helped facilitate it; we know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.''

John Brennan, the president's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, made similar remarks, linking the bomber to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.

Neither official said what the new evidence was.

Faisal Shahzad, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, is believed to have spent five months in Pakistan before returning to the United States in February and preparing his attack.

Shahzad has told investigators that he trained in the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan, where both al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban operate. He was arrested aboard an Emirates Airlines jet in New York just minutes before it was scheduled to take off for Dubai.

After the attack, U.S. officials said they were exploring potential links to terrorist groups overseas but said it was likely that Shahzad was acting alone and that it was an isolated incident.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, told NBC News that ''at this point I have no information that it's anything other than a one-off.'' Gen. David Petraeus told The Associated Press that Shahzad apparently operated as a ''lone wolf.''

Brennan on Sunday rejected suggestions that that the attempted bombing shows that terrorist groups overseas were gaining strength.

''They now are relegated to trying to do these unsophisticated attacks, showing that they have inept capabilities in training,'' he said.

The link between an attack on U.S. soil and terrorist groups operating inside Pakistan opens up a new chapter in relations between the two countries. Until recently, administration officials have said they thought Islamabad was doing all it could.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington expects more cooperation from Pakistan in fighting terrorism and warned of ''severe consequences'' if an attack on U.S. soil were successful and traced back to the South Asian country.

Brennan said Islamabad was being very cooperative in the investigation but that the U.S. wants to know exactly who may have been helping Shahzad.

''There are a number of terrorist and militant groups operating in Pakistan,'' he said. ''And we need to make sure there's no support being given to them by the Pakistani government.''

Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, who last week said he doubted the Pakistani Taliban had anything to do with the failed bombing, declined to comment Sunday. He said representatives of the country's civilian government should respond. They were not available for comment.

Brennan would not say whether Shahzad may be connected to fugitive al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, other than to acknowledge his Internet sermons are popular among extremist Muslims.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Pakistan has recently stepped up efforts to root out extremist militants.

''The Pakistanis have been doing so much more than 18 months or two years ago any of us would have expected,'' Gates told reporters at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., this week.

He referred to Pakistani Army offensives, dating to spring 2009, against Taliban extremists in areas near the Afghan border, including in south Waziristan.

Gates said the Obama administration is sticking to its policy of offering to do as much training and other military activity inside Pakistan as the Pakistani government is willing to accept.

''It's their country,'' Gates said. ''They remain in the driver's seat, and they have their foot on the accelerator.''

Brennan spoke on CNN's ''State of the Union,'' ''Fox News Sunday'' and CBS' ''Face the Nation.'' Holder spoke on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' and ABC's ''This Week.'' Clinton's interview with CBS' ''60 Minutes'' is set to air Sunday.

------

Associated Press writer Asif Shahzad in Islamabad contributed to this report.

    White House Says Pakistan Taliban Behind NY Bomb, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/09/us/politics/AP-US-Times-Square-Probe.html

Obama Asks Graduates to Close Education Gap

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

HAMPTON, Va. — President Obama on Sunday for the first time as president delivered a commencement address to a historically black college, Hampton University, telling graduates that they have “a separate responsibility” to become mentors to other young African-Americans to help close a persistent gap in educational achievement.

Mr. Obama, clad in a “Hampton blue” robe, said the 1,072 graduates were better poised to enter an economy still recovering from recession and facing global competition than Americans without a college degree, who have an unemployment rate twice as high as those with a degree.

“I don’t have to tell you that too many folks back home aren’t as well prepared,” he said. “By any number of different yardsticks,” he added, “African-Americans are being outperformed by their white classmates, as are Hispanic-Americans. Students in well-off areas are outperforming students in poorer rural or urban communities, no matter what skin color. Globally, it’s not even close.”

Mr. Obama said all Americans have a responsibility “to change this, to offer every single child in this country an education that will make them competitive in our knowledge economy.”

But, he told the graduates, “all of you have a separate responsibility -- to be role models for your brothers and sisters, to be mentors in your communities and, when the time comes, to pass that sense of an education’s value down to your children.”

Recalling Hampton University’s start as a trade and agricultural school for freed slaves after the Civil War in a state that had outlawed education for free and enslaved blacks, Mr. Obama said the founders of the school and others like it “knew, of course, that inequality would persist long into the future.”

“But they also recognized the larger truth, a distinctly American truth,” he said. “They recognized, Class of 2010, that the right education might allow those barriers to be overcome, might allow our God-given potential to be fulfilled.”

Mr. Obama, himself a product of two Ivy League universities, Columbia and Harvard, was enthusiastically received by an audience that packed the field and bleachers of the school’s stadium on a sunny, breezy morning. He spoke a day after his wife, Michelle, an alumna of Princeton, addressed graduates at another historically black college, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

Her husband, as is typical for him, did not mention his own place in history as the first African-American president. But Mrs. Obama on Saturday cited the “improbable endeavor” of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign in recalling examples of those who had had surmounted challenges.

Dr. William R. Harvey, Hampton’s president for 32 years, also noted Mr. Obama’s historic achievement in getting elected. But he said the focus instead should be on Mr. Obama’s work since then, including his success where other presidents had failed in winning passage of a law for expanded health care.

The university president gave Mr. Obama a seedling from the university’s Emancipation Oak, under which former slaves who had sought refuge at a Union fortress were educated by a free black woman in violation of Virginia law in 1861, seven years before Hampton was founded.

To applause, Dr. Harvey said Mr. Obama promised the seedling would be planted at the White House. Other presidents have planted trees there; two magnolias from Andrew Jackson still flank the South Portico.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama reiterated a theme of his graduation address the previous weekend at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor – that an often argumentative and politically polarizing media culture posed a threat to democracy without well-educated citizens with open minds.

“Information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than a means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you, it is putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy,” Mr. Obama said.

“With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult at times to sift through it all,” he said. “Let’s face it,” he added, “even some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction. I’ve had some experience in that regard.

“The elemental test of any democracy,” Mr. Obama said, is “whether people with differing points of view can learn from each other and work with each other and find a way forward together.”

    Obama Asks Graduates to Close Education Gap, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10obama.html

Texas 'Terrorist' Posts Death Threat Against Obama

April 29, 2010
Filed at 1:58 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DALLAS (AP) -- A Dallas man describing himself as a terrorist threatened to kill President Barack Obama in an online posting because he was upset about health care reform, according to a criminal complaint.

Brian Dean Miller, 43, faces one count of making threats against the president, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He is scheduled for arraignment in federal court Friday.

His public defender and his mother did not return phone messages Thursday.

According to a criminal complaint, Miller made the death threats March 21 on Craigslist under a posting titled ''Obama must die.'' The posting said he was following through on a promise to become a terrorist if the federal health care bill passed.

''I am dedicating my life to the death of Obama and every employee of the federal government,'' the posting said. It ended with a call to arms: ''This is war. Join me. Or don't. I don't care. I'm not laying down anymore.''

He said, ''Today I become a terrorist.''

In a separate post the same night, Miller essentially dared others to turn him in to the Secret Service, according to the complaint. He allegedly wrote that others should ''feel free to notify them if it helps you sleep better tonight. You should tell them I threatened to kill the president and destroy the U.S. government. Maybe you would like to quote the post as your evidence.''

A resident of Arlington, Texas, reported the threats to the Secret Service. Agents tracked down Miller at his Dallas home, where he lives with his mother, according to the complaint. Police arrested Miller and seized his computer. They found no weapons in the residence.

Miller's mother told agents her son is ''frequently depressed, prone to verbal outbursts and may be suicidal,'' according to the complaint. Her son initially refused to answer questions, then acknowledged he made the threats. He said everything posted on Craigslist was ''fictional.''

According to the complaint, when the agents asked if Miller wanted to kill the president, he told them: ''Yes, I would kill him, if I were a different person. I would kill them all.''

Miller was previously arrested in 1993 on a charge of telephone harassment, according to Dallas County records. He was sentenced to probation, which eventually was revoked.

    Texas 'Terrorist' Posts Death Threat Against Obama, NYT, 29.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/29/us/AP-US-Obama-Threats.html

Civil Rights Leader Is Eulogized by Obama

April 29, 2010
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama eulogized civil rights leader Dorothy Height on Thursday as a “drum major for freedom,” describing the civil rights and women’s rights leader as an American icon who pursued justice tirelessly.

Ms. Height, who died April 20 at 98, had an “unambiguous record of righteous work,” Mr. Obama said during Ms. Height’s funeral at Washington National Cathedral. Mr. Obama drew frequent chuckes from the audience with a fondly humorous portrait of the feisty Ms. Height.

“When you have a nephew who’s 88, you’ve lived a full life,” Mr. Obama said.

“We did come to know her during the early days of my campaign, and we came to love her as so many loved her,” the president said. “We loved her stories, and her smile, and those hats.”

He said that Ms. Height was a constant presence at the White House. “She came by not once, not twice,” he said. “Twenty-one times she stopped by the White House.”

Ms. Height, who even in the last months of her life took part in health care discussions at the White House, had been scheduled to come by in February for a meeting between Mr. Obama and civil rights leaders, he recalled.

Even though Washington was buried by a blizzard, he said, Ms. Height wanted to come anyway. “She was not about to let just a bunch of men in this meeting. It was only when the car literally could not get to the driveway that she decided not to come.”

Ms. Height was widely viewed as one of the last links to the social activism of the New Deal era. Her civil rights career spanned almost a century, from anti-lynching protests to culminate with the inauguration of President Obama. She has recounted for reporters first meeting Martin Luther King when he was 15 years old, and was on the stage when Dr. King delivered his historic “I have a dream” speech in 1963.

Mr. Obama ordered American flags to be flown at half-staff on Thursday in Ms. Height’s honor.

    Civil Rights Leader Is Eulogized by Obama, NYT, 29.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/us/politics/30height.html

Obama Issues Sharp Call for Reforms on Wall Street

April 22, 2010
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama is traveling to the shadow of Wall Street on Thursday to counter what he calls “the furious efforts of industry lobbyists” trying to weaken or kill new financial regulations that he says are needed to stave off a second Great Depression.

As the Senate debates how to rewrite rules governing the financial industry, Mr. Obama will lay out the elements he insists must be in any legislation to get his signature. Among them are more consumer protections, limits on the size of banks and the risks they can take, reforms on executive compensation and greater transparency for controversial securities known as derivatives.

In flying to New York City, the president wants to confront the financial industry more directly through a sharp speech just a few minutes’ subway ride from Wall Street, and with some of its leading corporate titans in the audience. After castigating their “failure of responsibility” in recent years, he intends to call on them to stop resisting tighter regulation through the army of lobbyists now staked out on Capitol Hill.

“I am sure that many of those lobbyists work for some of you,” Mr. Obama plans to say, according to excerpts of the speech provided by the White House for release on Thursday morning. “But I am here today because I want to urge you to join us, instead of fighting us in this effort. I am here because I believe that these reforms are, in the end, not only in the best interest of our country, but in the best interest of our financial sector.”

The fight for tougher regulation of the financial industry has become the president’s top legislative priority since he signed his health care program into law, and both parties are jockeying for position on the issue with midterm Congressional elections just six months away. The president and his allies have eagerly portrayed Republicans as handmaidens of Wall Street, while the Republicans have accused Democrats of trying to strangle the financial markets and even institutionalize the idea of bailouts in tough times.

The tensions appeared to ease somewhat in recent days as both sides predicted an eventual bipartisan compromise. A Senate committee on Wednesday sent to the floor a bill imposing tougher rules on derivatives, the complex securities at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, and one key Republican senator joined Democrats in advancing the legislation.

In an interview with CNBC and The New York Times on Wednesday, and in the speech excerpts released ahead of the Thursday event, Mr. Obama avoided incendiary language attacking Republicans, suggesting he was angling for a deal with them. But in addition to setting demands for what to include in the bill, he included tough talk about the industry that he accused of putting profit ahead of propriety.

“Some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is a family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business, or save for retirement,” he says in the excerpts released by the White House. “What happens here has real consequences across our country.”

The president’s address at Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan will circle back to another speech he gave at the same location in March 2008 warning of financial manipulation, market bubbles and the concentration of economic power. He repeats some of the same lines he gave two years ago and casts himself as a prescient forecaster before the collapse later that year.

“I take no satisfaction in noting that my comments have largely been borne out by the events that followed,” he says in the excerpts. “But I repeat what I said then because it is essential that we learn the lessons of this crisis, so we don’t doom ourselves to repeat it. And make no mistake — that is exactly what will happen if we allow this moment to pass — an outcome that is unacceptable to me and to the American people.”

In the address, Mr. Obama plans to embrace both the financial regulation bill passed by the House last year and the version now emerging in the Senate. The White House said that Mr. Obama in the speech will lay out five elements that “must be included” in the final bill:

¶Instituting a system to ensure that “American taxpayers are protected in the event that a large firm begins to fail.”

¶Imposing the so-called Volcker Rule, named after Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who proposed limits on the freewheeling trading and risks taken by banks.

¶Setting new transparency rules for derivatives “and other complicated financial instruments.”

¶Assuring “strong consumer financial protections.”

¶Instituting “pay reforms” to give investors and pension holders “a stronger role in determining who manages the companies in which they’ve placed their savings.”

The White House said Thursday’s audience would include leaders from the financial industry, members of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, consumer advocates, local elected officials, representatives of those affected by the economic downturn, and Cooper Union students and faculty members. Among those expected to attend, a White House spokeswoman said, is Gary D. Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week over fraud allegations — but not Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive.

    Obama Issues Sharp Call for Reforms on Wall Street, NYT, 22.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/business/economy/23prexy.html

Obama Health Team Turns to Carrying Out Law

April 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The success of the new health care law depends to a large degree on a handful of Obama administration officials, who are scrambling to make the transition from waging political war on Capitol Hill to managing one of the most profound changes in social policy in generations.

For these officials, the task of carrying out the law may be as much of a challenge as getting it enacted.

Jay Angoff, a longtime consumer advocate and nemesis of the insurance industry, will lead efforts to regulate insurers and insurance markets.

Jeanne M. Lambrew, an idealistic veteran of the Clinton White House, is carrying out provisions of the law aimed at expanding coverage.

And Phyllis C. Borzi, a top Labor Department official, will police the conduct of employers, who provide health benefits to more than 150 million Americans.

Their task is to translate the promise of the law into reality, with help from the private sector, if possible.

Joseph R. Antos, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, asked: “After spending so many months trashing the health insurance industry, will officials be able to calm down enough to be able to talk to the industry and the experts who will be running the new system? You need their input. It’s essential to get technical insights from people in the industry who were largely ignored in the political process.”

Here are profiles of three top members of the Obama team.

 

Jay Angoff

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1973 and Vanderbilt Law School in 1978, Mr. Angoff began his career as an antitrust lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission and then worked as a lobbyist at Congress Watch, a Ralph Nader organization.

Michael Pertschuk, a former chairman of the trade commission, wrote admiringly of Mr. Angoff in “Giant Killers,” his 1986 book about public interest lobbyists. He described Mr. Angoff as “tough, prickly, righteous, slow to compromise.”

Mr. Angoff worked for a nonprofit group, the National Insurance Consumer Organization, before moving to New Jersey, where he was a deputy insurance commissioner and health policy adviser to Gov. Jim Florio, a Democrat.

As director of the Missouri Insurance Department from 1993 to 1998, Mr. Angoff got to know Kathleen Sebelius, who was the insurance commissioner and then the governor of Kansas.

Ms. Sebelius, now the secretary of health and human services, recruited him to be director of a new Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

Mr. Angoff said effective regulation of insurers “could have a greater impact on costs and coverage” than the public insurance option liberals championed unsuccessfully.

And Mr. Angoff has made it clear that he means to be aggressive in setting “marketplace rules.” He will enforce a section of the law that requires insurers to file detailed justifications for any “unreasonable increases in premiums.” One of his first tasks is to define “unreasonable.”

A former law partner, Cyrus Mehri, said: “Having been a state insurance commissioner, Jay can see through the games insurance companies play. He will put teeth into the law. He will create a whole new federal regulatory regime to rein in the abuses and excesses of the industry.”

As a Missouri official, Mr. Angoff won a legal battle with the state’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan, which agreed to help set up an independent charitable foundation after it switched from nonprofit to for-profit status. As a lawyer in private practice, he secured tens of millions of dollars for consumers in class-action lawsuits against insurers.

Calvin W. Call, executive director of the Missouri Insurance Coalition, a trade association, said Mr. Angoff’s appointment did not bode well for health insurers.

“The industry’s survival is probably limited in time, and Jay will be right there to watch it perish,” Mr. Call said. “Here in Missouri, Jay seemed to be a proponent of confrontation and almost invited litigation to decide issues that could have been resolved in the General Assembly or through compromise.”

On the other hand, Mr. Call said: “Jay kept us challenged every day. He may have made the industry better, more attuned to detail.”

 

Jeanne M. Lambrew

When President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal health insurance collapsed in 1994, many Democrats, exhausted and disillusioned, turned to other issues. Ms. Lambrew never wavered. She kept plugging away at efforts to expand coverage.

In Mr. Clinton’s second term, she worked at the White House, as senior health analyst at the National Economic Council and as an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. In those roles, she was an architect of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

During the Bush administration, Ms. Lambrew refined her ideas as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a sort of government in exile for liberal policy experts. She became an associate professor at the University of Texas and collaborated with former Senator Tom Daschle on a book that laid out many ideas incorporated in the new health care law.

Ms. Lambrew is leading efforts to expand coverage as director of the Office of Health Reform established by Ms. Sebelius. Ms. Lambrew is racing to meet a deadline set by the new law: Within 90 days, every state must have an insurance pool where uninsured people with medical problems can buy coverage at reduced rates.

Even people who disagree with her politics say Ms. Lambrew is a pragmatist, focused on results, not ideological purity.

Ms. Lambrew picked up her interest in health care from her father, Dr. Costas T. Lambrew, a cardiologist in Maine; her mother, Patricia, a nurse; and her maternal grandfather, Dr. James Travers, a family doctor in New York.

While working at academic medical centers, her father said, “I ran clinics for people who could not afford private care.”

In 2003, Ms. Lambrew helped local officials overhaul the health care system in Maine, her home state. “Jeanne has a passion for the uninsured,” said Trish Riley, director of the Office of Health Policy and Finance in Maine.

 

Phyllis C. Borzi

Ms. Borzi, an assistant secretary of labor, has been working on employee benefits for 35 years, since she answered a job advertisement on a bulletin board at Catholic University while attending law school.

For 16 years, from 1979 to 1995, she worked for House Democrats on the subcommittee responsible for pensions and employee health benefits. She was a research professor at George Washington University and has extensive practical experience as a lawyer advising multiemployer health benefit plans.

Ms. Borzi said her goal now was to write regulations that provide clear guidance to employers without being “overly prescriptive.”

“I am committed to preserving the employment-based system and encouraging employers to keep their health plans in place,” Ms. Borzi said.

Though she is a Democrat with pro-employee sympathies, Ms. Borzi is respected by Republicans and employer groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce. They describe her as one of the nation’s leading experts on the law that governs workplace benefits, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, known as Erisa.

Mark J. Ugoretz, president of the Erisa Industry Committee, a trade association of big companies, said Ms. Borzi knew as much about employee health benefits as anyone in the field. But he said he worried that her agency would be tempted to over-regulate health plans.

“If the regulations become too stringent, too burdensome, too costly, it could strangle the system,” Mr. Ugoretz said. “Employers would retreat from providing innovative, comprehensive health benefits, just as many companies have dropped traditional pension plans in favor of 401(k) plans.”

    Obama Health Team Turns to Carrying Out Law, NYT, 18.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/health/policy/19health.html

White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S.

April 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.

The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said.

That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective.

Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances.

Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies.

“For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

In the post-9/11 era, Muslims and Arab-Americans have posed something of a conundrum for the government: they are seen as a political liability but also, increasingly, as an important partner in countering the threat of homegrown terrorism. Under President George W. Bush, leaders of these groups met with government representatives from time to time, but said they had limited interaction with senior officials. While Mr. Obama has yet to hold the kind of high-profile meeting that Muslims and Arab-Americans seek, there is a consensus among his policymakers that engagement is no longer optional.

The administration’s approach has been understated. Many meetings have been private; others were publicized only after the fact. A visit to New York University in February by John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, drew little news coverage, but caused a stir among Muslims around the country. Speaking to Muslim students, activists and others, Mr. Brennan acknowledged many of their grievances, including “surveillance that has been excessive,” “overinclusive no-fly lists” and “an unhelpful atmosphere around many Muslim charities.”

“These are challenges we face together as Americans,” said Mr. Brennan, who momentarily showed off his Arabic to hearty applause. He and other officials have made a point of disassociating Islam from terrorism in public comments, using the phrase “violent extremism” in place of words like “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism.”

While the administration’s solicitation of Muslims and Arab-Americans has drawn little fanfare, it has not escaped criticism. A small but vocal group of research analysts, bloggers and others complain that the government is reaching out to Muslim leaders and organizations with an Islamist agenda or ties to extremist groups abroad.

They point out that Ms. Jarrett gave the keynote address at the annual convention for the Islamic Society of North America. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas. The society denies any links to terrorism.

“I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism analyst who advises government officials. “These are the wrong groups to legitimize.” Mr. Emerson and others have also objected to the political appointments of several American Muslims, including Rashad Hussain.

In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.

Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”

Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.

“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.

“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

It was notably different during Mr. Obama’s run for office. In June 2008, volunteers of his campaign barred two Muslim women in headscarves from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit, eliciting widespread criticism. The campaign promptly recruited Mazen Asbahi, a 36-year-old corporate lawyer and popular Muslim activist from Chicago, to become its liaison to Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Bloggers began researching Mr. Asbahi’s background. For a brief time in 2000, he had sat on the board of an Islamic investment fund, along with Sheikh Jamal Said, a Chicago imam who was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Mr. Asbahi said in an interview that he had left the board after three weeks because he wanted no association with the imam.

Shortly after his appointment to the Obama campaign, Mr. Asbahi said, a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions about his connection to the imam. Campaign officials became concerned that news coverage would give critics ammunition to link the imam to Mr. Obama, Mr. Asbahi recalled. On their recommendation, Mr. Asbahi agreed to resign from the campaign, he said.

He is still unsettled by the power of his detractors. “To be in the midst of this campaign of change and hope and to have it stripped away over nothing,” he said. “It hurts.”

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. He gave his first interview to Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language television station based in Dubai. Muslims cautiously welcomed his ban on torture and his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year.

In his Cairo address, he laid out his vision for “a new beginning” with Muslims: while America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to Muslims.

Back at home, Muslim and Arab-American leaders remained skeptical. But they took note when, a few weeks later, Mohamed Magid, a prominent imam from Sterling, Va., and Rami Nashashibi, a Muslim activist from Chicago, joined the president at a White-House meeting about fatherhood. Also that month, Dr. Faisal Qazi, a board member of American Muslim Health Professionals, began meeting with administration officials to discuss health care reform.

The invitations were aimed at expanding the government’s relationship with Muslims and Arab-Americans to areas beyond security, said Mr. Hussain, the White House’s special envoy. Mr. Hussain began advising the president on issues related to Islam after joining the White House counsel’s office in January 2009. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech and accompanied him on the trip. “The president realizes that you cannot engage one-fourth of the world’s population based on the erroneous beliefs of a fringe few,” Mr. Hussain said.

Other government offices followed the lead of the White House. In October, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with Arab-Americans and Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to discuss challenges facing small-business owners. Also last fall, Farah Pandith was sworn in as the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities. While Ms. Pandith works mostly with Muslims abroad, she said she had also consulted with American Muslims because Mrs. Clinton believes “they can add value overseas.”

Despite this, American actions abroad — including civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and the failure to close Guantánamo — have drawn the anger of Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Even though their involvement with the administration has broadened, they remain most concerned about security-related policies. In January, when the Department of Homeland Security hosted a two-day meeting with Muslim, Arab-American, South Asian and Sikh leaders, the group expressed concern about the emergency directive subjecting passengers from a group of Muslim countries to additional screening.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, pointed out that the policy would never have caught the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is British. “It almost sends the signal that the government is going to treat nationals of powerless countries differently from countries that are powerful,” Ms. Khera recalled saying as community leaders around the table nodded their heads.

Ms. Napolitano, who sat with the group for more than an hour, committed to meeting with them more frequently. Ms. Khera said she left feeling somewhat hopeful.

“I think our message is finally starting to get through,” she said.

    White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S., NYT, 18.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/us/politics/19muslim.html

Obama Weighs Supreme Court Nominees, and Each Potential Battle

April 16, 2010
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — As President Obama’s advisers consider Supreme Court nominees, White House officials and political activists are focusing on the vulnerabilities that conservatives could exploit to portray them as so-called liberal judicial activists, according to interviews and a review of documents.

Richard Viguerie, a conservative fund-raiser who is developing direct-mail and Internet campaigns about the coming nominee, said conservatives relished the prospect of a fight with Democrats over the Supreme Court before the November election.

“The more material he gives us to work with, the easier the battle will be,” Mr. Viguerie said. “The more quickly we can identify that person as an ideological liberal, the easier it is for us to communicate to the American people how radical the president is and the nominee is.”

White House aides have said they were considering as many as 10 potential nominees to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, but three contenders have drawn the most attention: Solicitor General Elena Kagan and two federal appeals court judges, Diane P. Wood and Merrick B. Garland.

Conservatives activists say they have already conducted opposition research into Judge Wood and Ms. Kagan because they were finalists for the seat filled by Sonia Sotomayor last year. Some of those files, obtained by The New York Times, show that if Mr. Obama nominates Judge Wood, conservatives would seek to portray her as an abortion-rights extremist who is hostile to Christians. Should the pick go to Ms. Kagan, conservatives are likely to accuse her of subordinating national security to a gay rights agenda.

Conservatives say they have yet to find as much potential ammunition in Judge Garland’s record, so there is debate over how aggressively to attack him if he is nominated. Still, some say, there might be enough material to portray him as a proponent of Big Government regulations who wants to give greater rights to people accused of terrorism.

Defenders of the potential nominees argue that portraying any of them as ideologues would be a misleading caricature, one that relies on the premise that nearly all Democratic appointees are “out of the mainstream.”

“No matter who the president nominates, we fully expect that many Republicans will oppose the nominee and attempt to brand him or her as ‘outside the mainstream,’ ” said Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman. He said Mr. Obama would pick “someone who has a rigorous legal intellect, respects the limits of the judicial role and has a keen understanding of how the law impacts the daily lives of Americans.”

Still, opposition research files compiled by conservative activist groups suggest that Judge Wood would be the riskiest choice. M. Edward Whelan III, a former Bush administration lawyer who blogs for the conservative National Review, has called her “a hard-left judicial activist and aggressor on culture-war issues.” And this month, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, said Judge Wood’s “record shows she places her pro-abortion ideology above her judicial duty.”

Conservatives point to several cases in which she voted to strike down laws restricting abortion, including a ban on the procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion and an “informed consent” law similar to one the Supreme Court had previously upheld. She was also twice reversed by the Supreme Court in a long-running civil lawsuit, in which she approved applying extortion laws to an aggressive group of abortion clinic protesters.

Judge Wood could also find herself attacked as hostile to religion. She voted to allow people to challenge a Bush administration program that gave taxpayer money to religious groups and the Indiana House of Representatives’ practice of opening sessions with sectarian prayers. And she sided with a public university that revoked the status of a Christian club because it denied membership to gay people.

Judge Wood’s defenders say that she has a lengthier record on social issues than other potential nominees only because more such cases came before her court. Moreover, they say, in many of those cases, including several involving abortion, Republican appointees — often including the renowned conservative Judge Richard Posner — voted the same way she did.

There is less potential fodder in Ms. Kagan’s record. Still, as former dean of Harvard Law School, she earned conservative enmity by limiting the access of military recruiters to campus because of the Pentagon’s policy of not allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly. The law school had long restricted military recruiters under its antidiscrimination policy, but in 2002, Ms. Kagan’s predecessor had lifted that ban after the Pentagon, invoking a statute known as the Solomon Amendment, threatened to cut off federal aid to universities that blocked military recruiting.

But in 2004, Ms. Kagan briefly reinstated the recruiting restrictions because an appeals court had called the legality of that statute into question. She dropped it again a semester later — while denouncing the military’s policy of discriminating against gay men and lesbians as “deeply wrong” — after the Pentagon again threatened Harvard’s financing. In addition, when the Supreme Court reviewed an appellate ruling over the issue, Ms. Kagan signed a “friend of the court” brief arguing that universities could bar military recruiters without losing their financing, so long as their antidiscrimination policy did not single out the military. But the court unanimously upheld the statute.

Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice, said her handling of the recruiting matter would generate criticism on both national security and gay rights grounds. And Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and a former student of Ms. Kagan’s, recently declared in a Fox News discussion about her that “not allowing the military to recruit on campus clearly was very radical.”

Defenders of Ms. Kagan note that the recruiting restrictions had been a longstanding policy at Harvard and other schools. And, during her solicitor-general confirmation, she endorsed counterterrorism policies like holding Qaeda suspects without trial and declared that there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Less has come to light that could be used against Judge Garland. Still, some researchers have pointed to preliminary findings that could be fodder for attack.

For example, while Judge Garland has not often dealt with social issues, at a 2005 book event, he reportedly described the release of the papers of the late Justice Harry Blackmun — the author of the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision — as a “great gift to the country.”

Phillip Jauregui, the president of the conservative Judicial Action Group, said that remark sent an alarming signal to social conservatives. “The fact that he would use those words to describe Harry Blackmun’s papers is cause for concern,” he said.

Because the District of Columbia Circuit hears all challenges to federal agency regulations, Judge Garland also has a long record of voting to uphold such federal authorities — an issue that could resonate with the libertarian sentiment on display in the Tea Party movement.

Finally, Judge Garland has also several times sided with the rights of detainees. He voted to overturn the military’s determination that a Chinese Muslim detainee at Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba was an “enemy combatant.” He also voted to allow former detainees who had been held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to sue private contractors accused of being involved in abuses.

Still, defenders argue that Judge Garland has strong national security credentials; before becoming a judge, he was a prosecutor who oversaw the cases against Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber. He also sided against Guantánamo detainees in a 2003 case, later reversed by the Supreme Court.

And Walter Dellinger, a solicitor general in the Clinton administration, said that all three were respected by prominent conservative law professors and judges who, he said, would vouch for their “reputations for integrity, fairness and being open-minded” if they were nominated.

“This is an era where any nominee is going to be attacked,” Mr. Dellinger said. “But I think the attacks from the right are not credible about any of these three.”

    Obama Weighs Supreme Court Nominees, and Each Potential Battle, NYT, 16.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/us/politics/17court.html

President Signs Bill to Extend Jobless Aid

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Congress on Thursday approved legislation that would keep unemployment checks flowing to jobless Americans, and President Obama immediately signed it.

After the Senate resolved a stubborn impasse, deciding the $18 billion cost of the measure could be added to the deficit, the House quickly followed with approval of the measure on a bipartisan vote of 289 to 112.

The measure, which would continue added unemployment benefits and other expired federal programs through May, will restore aid to thousands of Americans who had exhausted their benefits or whose eligibility was expiring. The legislation means that those out of work can receive up to 99 weeks of unemployment pay in some states. It will restore benefits to anyone who may have lost pay during a two-week interruption in the program.

In the Senate, three Republicans joined Democrats in shutting off debate on the legislation that also continues health insurance subsidies for those out of work. In the House, 49 Republicans joined 240 Democrats in backing the measure. Joining Democrats in the vote of 59 to 38 in support of the bill were Republican Senators George V. Voinovich of Ohio and Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine.

Congressional Republicans argued that the spending cuts should be made in other federal programs to cover the costs of the measure, which Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, characterized as up to 17 months of unemployment “courtesy of the federal taxpayer.”

“What unemployed workers really want are jobs and paychecks, not almost two years of unemployment checks and more debt for our country,” he said.

Democrats said that many out of work Americans were unable to find jobs and that delaying what for some is their sole income in a political fight over spending was unconscionable. They say the money should be treated as an emergency expense.

“Holding unemployed Americans, hundreds of thousands of them, hostage to score what some think may be political points I think is reprehensible,” said Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Democrats hope to use the next few weeks to negotiate legislation to provide the added unemployment aid and other benefits through the end of the year so that they can avoid what has become a recurring fight over the handling of the costs of the program. The legislation also provided temporary extension of the federal flood insurance program and averted a 21 percent cut in doctor fees paid by Medicare.

    President Signs Bill to Extend Jobless Aid, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/politics/16cong.html

Obama Widens Medical Rights for Same-Sex Partners

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday ordered his health secretary to issue new rules aimed at granting hospital visiting rights to same-sex partners.

The White House announced the rule changes, which will also make it easier for gay men and lesbians to make medical decisions on behalf of their partners, in a memorandum released Thursday night. In it, the president said the new rules would affect any hospital that participates in Medicare or Medicaid, the government programs to cover the elderly and the poor.

“Every day, all across America, patients are denied the kindness and caring of a loved one at their sides,” Mr. Obama said in the memorandum, adding that the rules could also help widows and widowers who rely on friends and members of religious orders who care for one another. But he says gay men and lesbians are “uniquely affected” because they are often barred from visiting partners with whom they have spent decades.

Richard Socarides, who advised President Bill Clinton on gay rights issues, said that while the memorandum on its own did not grant any new rights, it did “draw attention to the very real and tragic situations many gays and lesbians face when a partner is hospitalized.”

Ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to find a better way to handle such situations, Mr. Socarides said, is “the kind of thing the gay community was hoping Obama would do right after he was inaugurated.”

Several states have tried to put an end to discrimination against same-sex couples, and Mr. Obama said he intended to build on those efforts. He said the new rules would make clear that designated visitors should enjoy visiting privileges that are no more restrictive than those enjoyed by immediate family members.

The rules will take time to draft and put in place, and so Mr. Obama’s order will have no immediate effect. Even so, gay rights groups called it a major advance for the families of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender individuals.

“It’s a huge deal,” said David Smith, vice president of policy for the Human Rights Campaign, which worked with the White House to develop the memorandum, in an interview Thursday night. “Nearly every hospital in the country will now be required to provide hospital visitation rights to LGBT families. It’s an enormous step. In the absence of equal marriage rights in most jurisdictions, this step provides an essential right to LGBT families for a gay person or a lesbian person to spend time with their partner in a critical situation.”

In some instances in the past, hospitals have barred bedside visits by the person who held the medical power of attorney for a patient.

Gay rights advocates said the rules change was inspired by one of those cases involving a same-sex couple, Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond, who were profiled in The New York Times last year. After Ms. Pond was stricken with a fatal brain aneurysm, Ms. Langbehn was denied visiting rights in 2007 by a Florida hospital. Although Ms. Langbehn had power of attorney and she and Ms. Pond were parents to four children they had adopted, the hospital refused for eight hours to allow her and the children to see Ms. Pond, her partner for 18 years. Ms. Pond died as Ms. Langbehn tried in vain to get to her side.

Ms. Langbehn, represented by Lambda Legal, a legal advocacy organization, brought suit against the hospital, Jackson Memorial in Miami, but lost. On Thursday night, Mr. Obama called her from Air Force One to say that he had been moved by her case.

“I was so humbled that he would know Lisa’s name and know our story,” Ms. Langbehn said in a telephone interview. “He apologized for how we were treated. For the last three years, that’s what I’ve been asking the hospital to do. Even now, three years later, they still refuse to apologize to the children and I for the fact that Lisa died alone.”

Mr. Obama campaigned saying he would fight for the rights of gay men and lesbians, but he has been under pressure since the beginning of his presidency to be a stronger advocate for their issues.

Many gay men and lesbians grew disenchanted with what they viewed as his foot-dragging on reversing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that bars them from serving openly in the military. The president said in his State of the Union address this year that he intended to move to overturn the policy, and his administration has been taking steps to do so.

The memorandum is intended to “help ensure that patients will be able to face difficult times in hospitals with compassion, dignity and respect,” a White House spokesman, Shin Inouye, said Thursday night. “By taking these steps, we can better protect the interests and needs of patients that are gay or lesbian, widows and widowers with no children, members of religious orders, or others for whom their loved ones are not always immediate relatives. Because all Americans should be able to have loved ones there for them in their time of need.”

    Obama Widens Medical Rights for Same-Sex Partners, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/politics/16webhosp.html

Reviewing Mine Safety, Obama Faults Company and the Government

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday ordered a fresh round of coal mine inspections and a far-reaching review of mine safety, and said the federal government was partly to blame for the explosion that claimed 29 lives at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia this month.

“There’s still a lot that we don’t know,” Mr. Obama said, during a brief appearance in the Rose Garden. “But we do know that this tragedy was triggered by a failure at the Upper Big Branch mine — a failure first and foremost of management, but also a failure of oversight and a failure of laws so riddled with loopholes that they allow unsafe conditions to continue.”

Officials of the Massey Energy Company, which operates the mine, took issue with Mr. Obama, calling his comments “regrettable.” The company issued a statement saying “We fear that the president has been misinformed about our record and the mining industry in general.”

“Unfortunately, some are rushing to judgment for political gain or to avoid blame,” the statement added.

The April 5 blast was the deadliest mining accident in the United States in four decades, and within days it became clear that the mine had previously been cited for hundreds of violations, many of them serious. Massey officials have contested many of the citations, a move that delayed their enforcement.

Meanwhile, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the federal oversight agency, has been roundly criticized as weak and inefficient. Massey officials said Thursday that the agency had presented the company with three “Sentinels of Safety” awards in 2009, the highest number of such awards ever received by a company in a single year.

Mr. Obama ordered a review; on Thursday, before his Rose Garden appearance, he met privately with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and top officials from the mine safety agency, who presented their preliminary findings. Their report found that the Upper Big Branch mine “experienced a significant spike in safety violations” in 2009; the mine safety agency issued 515 citations and orders at the mine that year, and 124 in 2010.

“In short, this was a mine with a significant history of safety issues,” the report said, “a mine operated by a company with a history of violations, and a mine and company that M.S.H.A. was watching closely.”

The review called for new authority for the mine safety agency, including changes that would make it easier to list mines as repeat offenders, grant subpoena power for its investigations and give it the ability to increase criminal penalties for violators.

In response, Mr. Obama said the government would move quickly to get more inspectors out to mines, and he directed Ms. Solis to work with Congress to strengthen federal laws and with the Justice Department to pursue leads in the investigation.

In a clear criticism of his predecessor, George W. Bush, he said that the mine safety agency had for too long been “stacked with former mine executives and industry players.” Mr. Obama has installed a team of former miners and health experts, including Joseph A. Main, the agency’s chief, who is a former safety official with the United Mine Workers of America. But he said the administration nonetheless needed to “take a hard look” at its own practices.

    Reviewing Mine Safety, Obama Faults Company and the Government, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/politics/16obama.html

Obama Calls for Joint Action to Safeguard Nuclear Stocks

April 13, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Saying that the prospect of nuclear terrorism had emerged as one of the greatest threats to global security, President Obama called on world leaders “not simply to talk, but to act” to secure or destroy vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear materials.

Mr. Obama, addressing a plenary session of the 47-nation nuclear security conference he had convened here, told fellow leaders Tuesday morning that it was time “not simply to make pledges, but to make real progress for the security of our people.”

“All this, in turn, requires something else, something more fundamental,” Mr. Obama continued. “It requires a new mindset — that we summon the will, as nations, as partners, to do what this moment in history demands.”

Seeking to lend force to his warning, Mr. Obama said that dozens of countries held nuclear materials that could be sold or stolen, and that a weapon fashioned from an apple-size piece of plutonium could kill or injure hundreds of thousands of people.

“Terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda have tried to acquire the material for a nuclear weapon, and if they ever succeed, they would surely use it. Were they to do so, it would be a catastrophe for the world.”

A day after Ukraine, Canada and Malaysia offered individual undertakings to tighten controls or reduce nuclear stocks, Mr. Obama said that “the problems of the 21st century cannot be solved by nations acting in isolation — they must be solved by all of us coming together.”

Joint undertakings toward that end will be spelled out in a communiqué from the group to be issued at day’s end, and more individual commitments are expected as well.

Mr. Obama also announced that there would be another nuclear security conference in two years, and that the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, had agreed to be the host. That would seem to ensure a particularly close focus on the North Korean nuclear program, just as Iran has drawn particular attention at this meeting.

On Monday, Mr. Obama secured a promise from President Hu Jintao of China to join negotiations on a new package of sanctions against Iran, administration officials said, but Mr. Hu made no specific commitment to backing measures that the United States considers severe enough to force a change in direction in Iran’s nuclear program.

In a 90-minute conversation here, Mr. Obama sought to win more cooperation from China by directly addressing one of the main issues behind Beijing’s reluctance to confront Iran: its concern that Iran could retaliate by cutting off oil shipments to China. The Chinese import nearly 12 percent of their oil from Iran.

Mr. Obama assured Mr. Hu that he was “sensitive to China’s energy needs” and would work to make sure that Beijing had a steady supply of oil if Iran cut China off in retaliation for joining in severe sanctions.

American officials portrayed the Chinese response as the most encouraging sign yet that Beijing would support an international effort to ratchet up the pressure on Iran and as a sign of “international unity” on stopping Iran’s nuclear program before the country can develop a working nuclear weapon.

On Tuesday, though, Chinese officials in Beijing seem to strike a more cautious note.

“We believe that the Security Council’s relevant actions should be conducive to easing the situation and conducive to promoting a fitting solution to the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiations,” Jiang Yu, a foreign ministry official, said at a regular news briefing in Beijing.

“China supports a dual-track strategy and has always believed that dialogue and negotiations are the optimal channels for resolving the Iranian nuclear issue. Sanctions and pressure cannot fundamentally resolve the issues.”

Iran’s state-financed Press TV satellite broadcaster highlighted news agency reports saying that China still favored diplomacy to resolve dispute over Tehran’s nuclear intentions.

The developments had distinct echoes of former President George W. Bush’s three efforts to corral Chinese support for penalties to be imposed on Iran by the United Nations Security Council. Those penalties were intended to make it prohibitively expensive for Iranian leaders to enrich uranium or to refuse to answer questions posed by international nuclear inspectors.

In those cases, former American officials said, the Chinese agreed to go along with efforts to address Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but then used Security Council negotiating sessions to water down the resolutions that were ultimately adopted.

Mr. Obama also used his meeting with Mr. Hu, the fourth face-to-face meeting between the leaders of the world’s largest economy and its biggest lender, to keep up the pressure on Beijing to let market forces push up the value of China’s currency. That is a critical political task for Mr. Obama, because the fixed exchange rate has kept Chinese goods artificially cheap and, in the eyes of many experts, handicapped American exports and cost tens of thousands of American jobs.

In anticipation of Monday’s meeting, Chinese officials told Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner last week that they were about to resume a controlled loosening of their exchange rate, which would increase the relative costs of Chinese exports.

Mr. Obama’s senior Asia adviser, Jeffrey A. Bader, told reporters after the meeting on Monday that Mr. Obama told Mr. Hu that a market-oriented exchange rate would be “an essential contribution” to a “sustained and balanced economic recovery.”

The session with Mr. Hu came just before the opening of the first summit meeting devoted to the challenges of keeping nuclear weapons and material out of the hands of terrorists. At a dinner Monday evening in the cavernous Washington Convention Center, Mr. Obama led a discussion of the nature of the threat and the vulnerability of tons of nuclear material that could be fashioned into a weapon.

Earlier in the day, John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, offered a sampling of Mr. Obama’s argument when he told reporters that the United States had continuing evidence of Al Qaeda’s interest in obtaining highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the only materials from which a nuclear weapon can be made, and that it would be used “to threaten our security and world order in an unprecedented manner.”

But he cited no incidents beyond the now-famous campfire conversations that Osama bin Laden held in August 2001 with two Pakistanis who had deep ties to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons laboratories. While Al Qaeda has tried repeated purchases, Mr. Brennan said, “fortunately, I think they’ve been scammed a number of times, but we know that they continued to pursue that. We know of individuals within the organization that have been given that responsibility.”

The main focus of Mr. Obama’s meeting is to obtain commitments from each of the 47 countries attending to lock up or eliminate nuclear material.

One such agreement was announced Monday with Ukraine which, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was, because of its remainder stockpiles of nuclear missiles and bombs, briefly the world’s third-largest nuclear power. It gave up the arsenal, but for the past 10 years had resisted surrendering its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, held at research reactors and another nuclear center.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit group that studies proliferation, has estimated Ukraine’s stockpile at about 360 pounds, or roughly enough for seven weapons.

According to a senior administration official, under the deal announced Monday the United States will pay to secure the highly enriched uranium, which will probably be sent to Russia for conversion into low-enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. As part of the deal, the United States will also help supply Ukraine with new low-enriched fuel and a new research facility.

But over all, it was Iran that dominated the day, because the administration has a goal of putting sanctions in place this spring, Mr. Obama said in an interview with The New York Times last week.

On Monday, Mr. Obama laid out the details of the sanctions package for Mr. Hu, according to a senior White House official familiar with the discussion. These are likely to include additional measures to deny Iran access to international credit, choke off foreign investment in Iran’s energy sector and punish companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which controls swaths of Iran’s economy, as well as its nuclear program.

The administration is betting that a large segment of Iranian society detests the Revolutionary Guards for its role in suppressing the protests that followed elections last June, and may welcome properly targeted sanctions.

“Until two weeks ago, the Chinese would not discuss a sanctions resolution at all,” the official said. But the Obama administration, in hopes of winning over Beijing, has sought support from other oil producers to reassure China of its oil supply. Last year, it sent a senior White House adviser on Iran, Dennis B. Ross, to Saudi Arabia to seek a guarantee that it would help supply China’s needs, in the event of an Iranian cutoff.

“We’ll look for ways to make sure that if there are sanctions, they won’t be negatively affected,” said the senior official.

There was little evidence in the meeting of the succession of spats that have soured Chinese-American relations over the last several months, American officials said. While Mr. Hu raised Chinese complaints about American weapons sales to Taiwan, an official said, he did so fleetingly. And he did not mention Mr. Obama’s decision to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.


Brian Knowlton, contributed reporting from Washington, Andrew Jacobs from Beijing and Alan Cowell from Paris.

    Obama Calls for Joint Action to Safeguard Nuclear Stocks, NYT, 14.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/world/14summit.html

Iran Derides Obama's ''cowboy'' Nuclear Stance

April 7, 2010
Filed at 12:04 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- U.S. allies on Wednesday lined up behind President Barack Obama's new policy aimed at reducing the likelihood of nuclear conflict. But Iran -- classified as a possible target under the guidelines -- dismissed it as a ''cowboy'' policy by a political newcomer doomed to fail.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in the Slovak capital Bratislava for an official visit, did not address the issue before leaving for Prague to sign a landmark treaty Thursday with Obama aimed at paring U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent. But Washington's supporters in Asia and Europe welcomed Obama's pledge Tuesday to reduce America's nuclear arsenal, refrain from nuclear tests and not use nuclear weapons against countries that do not have them.

North Korea and Iran were not included in that pledge because they do not cooperate with other countries on nonproliferation standards.

The U.S. considers them nuclear rogues -- Pyongyang for developing and testing nuclear weapons and Tehran because it is suspected of trying to do the same under the cover of a peaceful program, something Iran denies. Outlining the policy Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the focus would now be on terror groups such as al-Qaida as well as North Korea's nuclear buildup and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Addressing thousands in the country's northwest, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derided Obama over the plan.

''American materialist politicians, whenever they are beaten by logic, immediately resort to their weapons like cowboys,'' Ahmadinejad said in a speech before a crowd of several thousand in northwestern Iran.

''Mr. Obama, you are a newcomer (to politics). Wait until your sweat dries and get some experience. Be careful not to read just any paper put in front of you or repeat any statement recommended,'' Ahmadinejad said in the speech, aired live on state TV.

Ahmadinejad said Obama ''is under the pressure of capitalists and the Zionists'' and vowed Iran would not be pushed around.

''(American officials) bigger than you, more bullying than you, couldn't do a damn thing, let alone you,'' he said, addressing Obama.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- whose country is the only mideast nation considered to have nuclear weapons -- dismissed speculation that the Jewish state could come under pressure.

''I'm not concerned that anyone would think that Israel is a terrorist regime,'' he said. ''Everybody knows a terrorist and rogue regime when they see one, and believe me, they see quite a few around Israel.''

Washington's key European partners on its efforts to contain Iran's nuclear activities welcomed the Obama initiative.

British Defense Secretary Bob Ainsworth said it ''delivers strong progress'' on pledges first made a year ago, adding Britain ''looks forward to working closely with the US and other key allies and partners in the future.''

Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero of France, like Britain a nuclear weapons state that backs global disarmament efforts, said Obama's nuclear posture ''is convergent with our views.''

Hailing the U.S. policy review as a historic shift in U.S. nuclear strategy, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle urged Iran to see it -- and Thursday's planned Obama-Medvedev treaty signing -- as a sign that the international community is ''serious about disarmament.''

In Asia, key allies benefiting from being under the U.S. nuclear defense umbrella expressed support, suggesting the Obama statement helped defuse concerns that they would be left vulnerable by a change in Washington's policy.

''This is a first step toward a nuclear-free world,'' said Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. ''Deterrence is important, but so is reducing nuclear arsenals.''

Katsuya Okada, Japan's foreign minister, noted that Japan, which is located near North Korea, China and Russia but has decided not to develop nuclear weapons of its own, was concerned about how the policy will affect its security.

''The United States had assured its allies that this position will not endanger them,'' he said. ''This is important.''

In South Korea, the foreign and defense ministries issued a joint statement saying the new U.S. stance would strengthen Washington's commitment to its allies and pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons development.

''The government welcomes and supports'' Obama's announcement, they said. There was no immediate reaction to Obama's plan from North Korean state media.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key also welcomed the announcement.

''President Obama made good on his pledge a year ago to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security policies and set the world on a path to a nuclear-weapons-free world,'' he said in a statement. ''The review clearly states the long-term objective of U.S. policy is the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, and implements the first of the actions that will be needed to get there.''

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai refused to comment on the new U.S. nuclear defense policy, which also calls on China to explain its nuclear intentions more clearly.

''China's nuclear policy and China's strategic intentions are clear. Since the 1960s we have repeated our position on many occasions and our position has never been changed,'' Cui said, without elaborating. ''I believe people with fair and just minds will not question China's position.''

Beijing, which is said to have 100 nuclear warheads, has said it would not be the first to attack with nuclear weapons.

Chinese President Hu Jintao is to travel to Washington to take part in an April 12-13 nuclear summit that will focus on securing nuclear material to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. The meeting is expected to bring together about 46 leaders.

------

Jahn reported from Bratislava, Slovakia. Associated Press writers Anita Chang, Angela Charlton, Eric Talmadge, Geir Moulson. Matti Friedman and Danica Kirka and researcher Zhao Liang contributed to this report from Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

    Iran Derides Obama's ''cowboy'' Nuclear Stance, NYT, 7.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/07/world/AP-US-Nuclear-Policy-Reaction.html

Editorial

Mr. Obama’s Nuclear Policy

April 7, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama has spoken eloquently about his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. It is a lofty goal that will not be achieved during his presidency — or for years after that. But in a very dangerous time, he is taking important steps to make the world safer and bolster this country’s credibility as it tries to constrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea and others.

Two decades after the end of the cold war, the United States and Russia still have a combined total of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama has revived arms control negotiations, and later this week, he and President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia will sign a new agreement (the first since 2002) that will reduce the number of strategic warheads each side has deployed from 2,200 to 1,550.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama released his Nuclear Posture Review. It does not go as far as it should, but it is an important down payment on a saner nuclear policy.

The document substantially narrows the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons. The last review — done in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration — gave nuclear weapons a “critical role” in defending the country and its allies and suggested that they could be used against foes wielding chemical, biological or even conventional forces.

The new review says the “fundamental role” of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack on the United States and its allies, and it rules out the use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries, even if they attack the United States with unconventional weapons.

There is an important caveat. That assurance only goes to countries that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which leaves out North Korea and Iran. It would have been better if Mr. Obama made the “sole” purpose of nuclear weapons deterring a nuclear attack. No one in their right mind can imagine the United States ever using a nuclear weapon again. America’s vast conventional military superiority is more than enough to defend against most threats.

This formulation seems mainly intended to deter hard-line critics on Capitol Hill. But any loophole undercuts Washington’s arguments that nonnuclear states have no strategic reason to develop their own arms.

Mr. Obama has wisely made the prevention of nuclear terrorism and proliferation a central strategic priority. And the administration has rightly decided to lead by example. We were especially encouraged to see the review’s statement that the country “will not develop new nuclear warheads.” There is still some wiggle room, which we hope is not exercised. New nuclear warheads are not needed.

The review commits to pursuing further arms reductions with Russia. And it says that future talks must also focus on cutting back the 15,000 warheads, in total, that the United States and Russia keep as backup — the so-called hedge — and short-range nuclear weapons.

The United States has 500 tactical nuclear weapons, which are considered secure, but Russia has 3,000 or more that are far too vulnerable to theft. Any agreement will take years to complete, and Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev should start talking now. The review also commits to talking to China about its arsenal.

Mr. Obama has committed to maintaining the safety and security of America’s nuclear stockpile. He has already backed that up with an extra $624 million in next year’s budget for the nuclear labs and promised — far too generously, in our view — an additional $5 billion over the next five years to build up their aging infrastructure. Mr. Obama has also promised support for more advanced conventional arms.

None of those measures are likely to quiet his critics, who already are charging that Mr. Obama is weakening America’s defenses. They will likely get even louder when it comes time to ratify the New Start treaty with Russia and the long-deferred Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The stakes for this country’s security are high. And most Americans aren’t paying attention. Mr. Obama has a strong argument. He will need to push back hard.

    Mr. Obama’s Nuclear Policy, NYT, 7.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/opinion/07wed1.html