A Blue View

The Paradox Of American Financial Exceptionalism

NY Times:

The Debtor the World Still Bets On

For decades — through political upheaval and wars and wild bouts of deficits or inflation — the debt of the United States has always been rated AAA, the gold standard of creditworthiness by which all nations are compared.

That was true before President Obama published his budget on Monday, with its projections of huge American deficits over the next decade and beyond. Astoundingly or not, it was as true after those estimates were published. Of course, had it been the United States Widget Company projecting red ink as far as the eye could see, no one would lend it a dime.

The closest thing Washington got to a brush-back pitch was a warning from Moody’s, an investor service that rates the sovereign debt of nations: Without action to cut the deficit or a faster-than-expected recovery, the projections for the decade “will at some point put pressure on the triple-A government bond rating.” Nobody blinked — not Congress, not the White House, not the investors around the world who keep buying Treasury bonds to finance this year’s $1.6 trillion shortfall, at low interest rates.

What explains this oddity? Why is the world betting that the United States will overcome its political deadlock and solve its problems — believing, it seems, in the truth of Churchill’s biting quip that America will always do the right thing, after exhausting every other alternative? And how long can this aura of invincibility last?

Maybe a long, long time. One of the many things that makes the United States different is that it prints the world’s most important currency and can always print more — one reason investors in government debt remain confident they will be repaid, even if in dollars devalued by inflation or by changing exchange rates.

There is also value in being the one nation on which the world still depends for security. That helps explain why foreign investors, including China, can denounce American politicians, Wall Street bankers and sleepwalking regulators for creating the current mess — and still buy at the next Treasury auction.

This paradox of American financial exceptionalism was unusually clear last week. When the stock market shuddered on Thursday because of worries about national defaults, it wasn’t Washington’s mountain of debt that got everyone rattled. It was the plight of a handful of profligate spenders in Europe — notably Greece, Spain and Portugal — whose comparative foothills of debt suddenly made them dubious credit risks.

Each of those countries knows the meaning of “imperial overstretch.” But it’s been a few centuries since Madrid and Lisbon were centers of vast empires, and a lot longer for the Greeks. What brought them down this time was not global ambition but local gridlock, in which politicians could not, or would not, cut spending at a time of high unemployment and social need. Making things worse, they now are on the euro — meaning they can no longer print their own way out of the problem, either. And it is unclear whether their partners in the euro bloc can afford either to bail them out or to let them default.

“They have no easy option,” said Prof. Simon Johnson of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. “They can cut spending or raise taxes.”

Their problems may be minor compared to those of Japan, a battered economic superpower that prints its own currency and whose newspapers, two decades ago, regularly published charts projecting when Japan might overtake America as the world’s biggest economy. The papers still run such charts, but now the question is when China will overtake Japan for the No. 2 spot (likely later this year).

Today, like Toyota, Japan’s government is having a braking problem — it can’t figure out how to slow spending on a rapidly aging population, and like everyone else has reacted to recession by hitting the spending accelerator.

But unlike America, Japan is no longer considered so indispensible.

Senator Shelby Gives Obama & The Dems A Gift: Will They Use It Wisely?

Wash Post:

The Obama administration received a rare political gift Friday that brought together a pair of issues the president is promising this election year to do something about -- pork and partisanship.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) announced that he would block administration nominees from Senate votes in an attempt to secure funding for two defense-related projects for his state. The use of the holding tool is often wielded anonymously. But Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) complained publicly about Shelby's effort to win tens of millions of dollars in federal money by delaying dozens of nominees from taking up government positions, including some in national security agencies.

In his State of the Union address, Obama identified Washington's partisan dysfunction as a key concern of economically distressed voters, and he has raised the issue at nearly every turn in recent days ...

Senior administration officials spared little time in pointing to Shelby's move as a sign of GOP intransigence, and the Democratic National Committee released a Web video Friday [above] suggesting that the Alabama senator's "blanket hold" is a threat to national security.

In a meeting with reporters, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, "If that's not the poster child for how this town needs to change the way it works, I fear there won't be a greater example of silliness throughout the entire year of 2010."

"It boggles the mind to hold up qualified nominees for positions that are needed to perform functions in a government because you didn't get two earmarks," Gibbs said ...

Shelby is seeking funds for the KC-135 Air Force tanker fleet, a project that could generate thousands of jobs in Alabama. He is also demanding that the administration restore funding cut from the budget for the FBI's Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, a facility to test defenses against the improvised bombs used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Shelby placed the hold because of "unaddressed national security concerns," according to a statement released by his office. He "has made the administration aware of these concerns and is willing to discuss them at any time." The statement said Shelby was holding up "several" nominees, but the White House and Reid's office placed the number at more than 70.

Regan Lachapelle, a spokeswoman for Reid, said "regardless of his concern, Shelby shouldn't have a hold on 70-plus nominees because of a parochial issue."

A Peek Behind The Curtain At How Washington Really Works

Though the Wash Post thinks the big news in this Propublica report is the suggestion that GE lied to investors about the condition of its short term debt, I found the most interesting thing to be how freely and how often Immault, GE's CEO, picked up the phone and spoke directly to Paulson, Bush's Sec of the Treasury. It is this unfair access (how many businesses do you know that have a direct line to the Treasury?), and the resultant ability to influence decisions as this story implies, that is the root of corporate & special interest control of our government.

As the financial crisis worsened toward the end of 2008, chief executive Jeffrey Immelt and other leaders at General Electric repeatedly assured the public there was no need to worry about the company's ability to access credit markets and refinance its massive debts as they came due.

But in private conversations that alarmed then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Immelt laid out a different picture of GE's credit situation, according to Paulson's new book about the crisis.

Instead, Paulson writes, Immelt on at least four occasions expressed worries about GE's short-term debt, known as commercial paper, and eventually lobbied for access to special government guarantees for such debt.

To take one example: On Sept. 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, Paulson says he was "startled" when Immelt came to his office and told him GE was finding it "very difficult" to sell short-term debt "for any term longer than overnight." A day earlier, GE sent investors a letter saying its ability to sell commercial paper was "robust."...

The New American "cult of selfishness ... the sour, us-first mood that’s settled over the country"

Gail Collins nails it. A must read column:

Last November, the Justice Department announced that the terror trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be held in Manhattan. Almost everyone in New York rallied around. This was seen as standing up to terrorism.

“It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center, where so many New Yorkers were murdered,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Now everything’s flipped. The politicians are running for the hills, and the issue has been repackaged as standing up to traffic jams.

“There are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive,” said Bloomberg.

And the Justice Department is backing down. The trial will happen somewhere else. [see KSM Trial: If Not Manhattan, Where?] People in Lower Manhattan will breathe a sigh of relief.

But this feels very wrong.

The Bloomberg rebellion fits right into the sour, us-first mood that’s settled over the country. It’s part of the same impulse that caused Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska to decree that a historic overhaul of the country’s messed-up health care system was not going to happen unless his home state got a special exemption from sharing the costs.

Or the Not-in-My-Backyard uprising that followed President Obama’s attempt to move the Guantánamo prisoners into American maximum-security lockups. No matter how remote the prison, local politicians said that the danger was too great to bear. Both of Montana’s Democratic senators immediately decreed that their entire state was a no-go zone.

Or the Republican race to the other side of the room any time the Obama administration proposes anything. Rudy Giuliani, who watched “in awe of our system” when terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted in a civilian court in Virginia, instantly attacked the plans for the Manhattan trial. Giuliani kept finding everything Obama did worse and worse until he finally flipped completely over the edge and claimed that there had been no terrorist attacks in the United States during the Bush administration.

It’s all part of a cult of selfishness that decrees it’s fine to throw your body in front of any initiative, no matter how important, if resistance looks more profitable.

The economy has a lot to do with this. So does Washington’s increasing confidence that Barack Obama can be rolled. We’re currently stuck in a place where people no longer feel as though they need to be part of the solution.

An Amazing Week In Post-Partisan America

Wednesday:

Friday:

Can We Have More Debates? "The next test for Obama and congressional leaders in both parties"

EJ Dione:

Ultimately, the event may have been most beneficial for Obama, who badly needs a boost. He has emerged as the most polarizing first-year president in history. In that year, unemployment hit 10 percent, his health-care initiative failed to pass the Congress, his poll numbers eroded, independents deserted the Democrats in major statewide elections and some members of his party hit the panic button after Republican Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts.

On Friday, however, Obama reminded his opponents of the singular power of the presidency, delivering a performance that easily eclipsed his State of the Union address. He was knowledgeable about GOP counterproposals. He was robust in his rebuttals without being peevish. He may not have won over his conservative critics, who snickered when he said he was not an ideologue, but he was able, repeatedly, to sound the call for bipartisanship and to challenge the opposition to help lower temperatures.

Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, said the message Obama delivered in Baltimore was consistent with one of the broad themes of his presidential campaign and therefore likely to enhance his standing with the public. "If the polls are correct -- and they are certainly consistent -- that Americans want a cease-fire if not a full-fledged truce, the event boosted his stock as a peacemaker," he said.

Obama's appearance before the House Republican policy retreat was part of a White House strategy that began with the State of the Union, designed to reconnect him with voters who have grown skeptical of his agenda and to identify himself with the anger that many Americans are expressing toward the way Washington is working.

The best indication that Republicans realized Obama had helped himself came late Friday. Initial reactions to the president by GOP House leaders had been generally civil. Then in the early evening, Boehner's office issued a release with the headline: "Rhetoric versus reality: President Obama repeats discredited talking points during dialogue with House GOP" ...

"Obama Budget Freezes Much Domestic Spending"

NY Times:

President Obama will send a $3.8 trillion budget to Congress on Monday for the coming fiscal year that would increase financing for education and for civilian research programs by more than 6 percent and provide $25 billion for cash-starved states, even as he seeks to freeze much domestic spending for the rest of his term.

The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which begins in October, will identify the winners and losers behind Mr. Obama’s proposal for a three-year freeze of a portion of the budget. Many programs at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department are in line for increases, along with the Census Bureau.

Among the losers would be some public works projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, two historic preservation programs and NASA’s mission to return to the Moon, which would be ended as the administration seeks to reorient the space program to use private companies for launchings. Mr. Obama is recycling some proposals from last year, including one to end redundant payments for land restoration at abandoned coal mines; Western lawmakers blocked it in 2009. Mr. Obama will propose a total of $20 billion in such savings for the coming fiscal year.

Exempted from the cuts, however, are national security, veterans programs, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — the most expensive and fastest-growing areas of the budget.

By filling in the details behind the freeze, the administration hopes to show critics that it used a scalpel rather than an ax to keep spending for the targeted domestic agencies to $447 billion through 2013.

The three-year freeze would save $250 billion over the coming decade, assuming the overall spending on the domestic programs is permitted to rise no more than the inflation rate for the remainder of the decade — an austerity that neither party has ever achieved in Washington. Even so, the $250 billion in savings would be less than 3 percent of the total deficits projected through 2020.

Criticism of the spending plan has ranged from arguments among liberals in Mr. Obama’s party and some economists that he should not be cutting spending when the economy needs hundreds of billions of dollars more in stimulus money, to complaints from Republicans that the savings are too paltry when annual trillion-dollar deficits are the largest since World War II.

The debate reflects the conflicting imperatives underlying the administration’s fiscal policies — between the demands to help a struggling economy create jobs and the need for long-term efforts to address the huge buildup of debt that threatens the nation’s future prosperity.

“There is a huge tension” between the goals, said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Pundit Reaction to #Questiontime

Kate Pickert:

It was amazing television - watchable, interesting, feisty and even a little dramatic. I was reminded of the campaign when, in a single speech in Philadelphia, Obama neutralized the Jeremiah Wright issue that could have sunk his candidacy. The environment and subject matter are obviously completely different now, but Obama proved again that he performs best when he's up against the wall. Today, at the caucus meeting, he went right after Republicans on their turf and, in my opinion, owned them.

Obama looked so compelling answering Republican questions and accusations that, as the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder quipped on Twitter, "How effective is this for POTUS: Fox News Channel just cut away from it."

David Brody of CBN:

The New Star of Must See TV: President Obama

Forget Jerry Seinfeld. Forget Friends. The new star of Must See TV night is President Obama. Call it whatever you want. Whether it was smart, dumb, a gamble, political calculating or all of the above, when President Obama appeared in front of hundreds of chomping at the bit Republicans with the cameras rolling on live TV he not only made for Must See TV, he also provided the much needed transparency jolt that voters want to see. The President passed the test with flying colors ...

First of all, he now has the ultimate trump card in transparency. To be able to field questions from the enemy on live TV takes guts. Talk about transparent. This is as naked politically as you can get. This could have been a colossal failure. The White House clearly wanted cameras in there for political reasons but don’t think for a second that this couldn’t have horribly backfired. Who’s to say that President Obama wouldn’t have been confronted with some sort of nasty, embarrassing, in your face question? Sort of like a “Joe Wilson on Steroids moment?” You think that wouldn’t have made the “Youtube” rounds and sent Robert Gibbs into defensive daily briefing mode? It’s a chance the President didn’t have to take but he did.

Secondly, to sit there and listen to a talking points question for three minutes and keep your composure showed President Obama at his level headed best. He looked grown up and mature. He gave as good as he received without this developing into a political food fight that only John Belushi could love. In short, he looked presidential.

Finally, this move by The White House to allow cameras in for the event played right into one of the President’s main strengths. In case you haven’t noticed, the guy is smart. Every time a Republican had a fact, the President had one to match.  While you may not agree with the President’s argument, he was able to argue his point but not come across as argumentative. That’s not easy. With all due respect to the President’s ability to give a good speech, he’s actually better without the teleprompter. It makes him less robotic and instead more real. Lofty rhetoric sounds nice but talking regular makes for more believability.

In a day and age where voters are angry and skeptical of politicians, a transparent and open dialogue between the President and his critics is needed in the worst way.  We can only hope that there are more of these to come. The American people want to see it. We deserve to have a front row seat. After all, we’re paying top dollar for it right?

While there was a political motive behind this ... that doesn’t change one simple fact: The President of the United States took a gamble. He showed up. He took the GOP’s best shot and while he probably didn’t leave the room with fewer critics, he left with something far more important: more credibility with the American people who want to see politicians stand up, start solving problems and act like grown ups rather than little children.

David Corn:

Obama campaigned to bring change to Washington. Regular public encounters between the president and the opposition party would be real change. (It might even have an impact on what sort of politician could consider becoming president.) NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd tweeted that Obama "will win tons of pundit plaudits but will policy come out of it?" Yet good debate can shape good policy. Here was an unfiltered exchange between the opposing camps of Washington. Citizens could watch and decide.

Mike Madden:

"What were the old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas (who Obama kept calling "Jim," for some reason). "You are soon to submit a new budget, Mr. President. Will that new budget, like your old budget, triple the national debt and continue to take us down the path of increasing the cost of government to almost 25 percent of our economy?"

The president laughed. "Jim, with all due respect, I've just got to take this last question as an example of how it's very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we're going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign," he said. "When we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. $1.3 trillion. So when you say that suddenly I've got ... a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true."

The whole thing basically went like that: Republican asks obnoxious question rooted in Glenn Beck-ian talking points; Obama swats it away, makes the questioner look silly, and then smiles at the end. It got so bad, in fact, that Fox News cut away from the event before it was over. Democratic operatives around Washington watching it had pretty much the same reaction: "Where the hell has this guy been?" One source said GOP aides probably wished they'd spoken to John McCain "about what happened to him in the presidential debates" before they broadcast the event. "It's quite a show," a White House official said, apparently going for the same deadpan tone the president was.

Yglesias:

Barack Obama is a lot smarter and better-informed than his antagonists. A lot. He very calmly and coolly dismantled them. To me, personally, it’s not a surprise. I debated policy with Mike Pence once and the guy is a stone-cold idiot. That was a years ago and I’ve been surprised since then to learn that conservatives consider him an unusually sharp policy mind and I take leading rightwingers at their word about that. But it’s the kind of thing that I think most Americans aren’t aware of. Obama knows what he’s talking about. A lot of the members of Congress you see on TV all the time talking smack don’t. That’s not always clear to people since the TV anchors interviewing them usually also don’t know what they’re talking about.

Ezra Klein:

Remember the old joke, "I was at a fight and a hockey game broke out?" Well, earlier this afternoon, I was at a photo opportunity and a policy debate broke out.

Obama's Q&A session with the House Republicans was transfixing. What should have been a banal exchange of talking points was actually a riveting reminder of how rarely you hear actual debate -- which is separate from disagreement -- between political players.

This was a surprise. The session was clearly proposed so that Obama could appear to be taking real steps to reach out to Republicans. That implied warm feelings and a studied unwillingness to cause offense. But that was not the event we just saw. Instead, Obama stood at a podium for an hour and hammered his assailants. That makes it sound partisan and disrespectful. But it wasn't. It was partisan, but respectful.

There's a value in proving that you understand the other side's ideas deeply enough to disagree with them. And that was the message of Obama's session. Not that the Republicans were right. But that he'd looked hard enough at their ideas to realize they were wrong. I'm willing to work on tort reform, Obama said, but it's not a credible way to rein in health-care spending. The GOP budget might save a lot of money in theory, he admitted, but it does that by voucher-izing Medicare and holding its spending constant even as health cost increase -- which means seniors will go without a lot of necessary care. And it's hard to take that proposal seriously coming from the party that spent the past few months saying slight decreases in Medicare Advantage reimbursement represented an unforgivable threat to seniors.

Yesterday, I interviewed David Axelrod and was struck by his inability to explain how the White House would highlight the the difference between disagreement and obstruction. Today's session, if it becomes a regular event rather than a one-off, provided part of the answer. He'll debate them directly. But that may be tough to do. Republicans are already spreading the word that they made a mistake allowing cameras into the event. Apparently, transparency sounds better in press releases than it does in practice.

Weekly Radio Address: "Reining in Budget Deficits"

WhiteHouse.gov:

The President pledges to rein the deficit, citing three specific steps to this end. He praises the Senate for restoring the pay-as-you-go law, discusses his proposal for a freeze in discretionary spending, and calls for a bipartisan Fiscal Commission to hammer out further concrete deficit reduction proposals.

President Obama's State Of The Union (full speech)

Transcript. Photo Gallery.

Obama: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president"

 

Best Obama quote on Washington & the Media's ways:

When your poll numbers drop, you are an idiot. When your poll numbers are high, you are a genius. If my poll numbers are low, then I am cool and cerebral, and cool and detached. If my poll numbers are high, boy, he’s calm and reasoned all right.

More Obama's First Year Cartoons

Obama's First Year Cartoons

"The fading dream of realignment"

To whet your appetite, here's an excerpt from an excellent Matt Bai piece on the fading of political (and brand) loyalty in America:

... The realigning swing of the pendulum is almost certainly a relic of another age, never to be replicated, or at least not in our lifetimes. One reason is that politics in the television (and now Internet) age are less transactional and more ideological than they were in the long period between the Civil War and civil rights ...

Even more consequential, though, is the fast-growing swath of voters who can summon no affinity for either party ... The most prevalent ideology of the era seems to be not liberalism nor conservatism so much as anti-incumbency, a reflexive distrust of whoever has power and a constant rallying cry for systemic reform.

And so the fundamental mistake that Republican and Democratic strategists each made after their respective takeovers was to believe that their victories represented an ideological shift among independent voters, the kind of sweeping philosophical reassessment — Hey, you know what? We really do need a big centralized government! — that would empower a party for generations to come. In fact, far from swinging wildly between conservatism and liberalism, a critical mass of dissatisfied Americans cast the exact same vote in 2006 as they did in 1994 — a vote against entrenched power in the Capitol. The only real difference between those two elections lay in which party happened to be holding the gavel at the moment of revolt.

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment also reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night. It was probably never very realistic for modern political thinkers of either party to dream of a 50-year reign. This century’s tectonic realignment is more likely to last 50 months or maybe 50 weeks, depending on how long it takes voters to seek out the latest offer or the newest best deal.

It isn’t only majority parties that will have to recalibrate their ideas of longevity in this new environment. It’s the individual politicians, too. <Continue reading.>

Obama Centralizes Campaign Control As He Assesses How To Move Forward

An interesting NY Times article about Obama's taking over the Democratic campaign system and how the White House is thinking about moving forward strategically. And by reading between the lines, you can also learn one of the reasons they think Martha Coakley lost: her campaign's polling was too optimistic, causing them to realize her troubles too late to turn the tide:

President Obama is reconstituting the team that helped him win the White House to counter Republican challenges in the midterm elections and recalibrate after political setbacks that have narrowed his legislative ambitions.

Mr. Obama has asked his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, to oversee House, Senate and governor’s races to stave off a hemorrhage of seats in the fall. The president ordered a review of the Democratic political operation — from the White House to party committees — after last week’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, aides said.

In addition to Mr. Plouffe, who will primarily work from the Democratic National Committee in consultation with the White House, several top operatives from the Obama campaign will be dispatched across the country to advise major races as part of the president’s attempt to take greater control over the midterm elections, aides said.

“We are turning the corner to a much more political season,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser, who confirmed Mr. Plouffe’s role. “We are going to evaluate what we need to do to get timely intelligence and early warnings so we don’t face situations like we did in Massachusetts.”

As Mr. Obama prepares to deliver his State of the Union address on Wednesday and lay out his initiatives for the second year of his presidency, his decision to take greater control of the party’s politics signals a new approach. The White House is searching for ways to respond to panic among Democrats over the possible demise of his health care bill and a political landscape being reshaped by a wave of populism.

Improving tactical operations addresses only part of his challenge. A more complicated discussion under way, advisers said, is how to sharpen the president’s message and leadership style.

The reinforcement of the White House’s political operation has been undertaken with a sense of urgency since Tuesday, when a Republican, Scott Brown ... The White House was caught off guard when it became clear that Democrats were in danger of losing it, and by the time alarm bells sounded from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, it was too late.

The president summoned Mr. Plouffe to the Oval Office hours before the polls closed and asked him to assume the new role because of the implications the midterm elections hold. Mr. Plouffe built a reputation in 2008 as a master of the nuts and bolts of campaigns, and will assemble a team to provide unfiltered information that serves as an early-warning system so the White House and party officials know if a candidate is falling behind ...

The party is trying to become less reliant on polls conducted by candidates, which can often paint a too-rosy picture of the political outlook. The president’s leading pollster, Joel Benenson, will be among those conducting research for Mr. Plouffe, aides said, along with others who will divide the country by regions ...

“Our own political operation will be more rigorously in communication with the other elements, so we can compare notes,” Mr. Axelrod said. “What we learned from Massachusetts is that we need to be more assiduous about getting our own data and our own information so we have a better sense of where things stand.”

The White House intends to send Mr. Obama out into the country considerably more in 2010 than during his first year in office, advisers said, to try to rekindle the relationship he developed with voters during his presidential campaign.

His first big chance will come when he delivers his State of the Union address. Rather than unveil a laundry list of new initiatives, advisers said, Mr. Obama will try to reframe his agenda and how he connects it with public concerns. In particular, he will focus on how his ideas for health care, energy and financial regulation all fit into the broader economic mission of creating what he calls a “new foundation” for the country, the key words being “rescue, restore and rebuild.”

While presidents typically experience rough patches, this one is particularly challenging for Mr. Obama. Liberals have grown disenchanted with what they see as his unwillingness to fight harder for their causes; independents have been turned off by his failure, in their view, to change the way Washington works; and Republicans have become implacably hostile.

The long and messy legislative fight over health care is a leading example of how Mr. Obama has failed to connect with voters, advisers say, because he appeared to do whatever it would take to get a bill rather than explain how people could benefit.

“The process often overwhelmed the substance,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “We need to find ways to try to rise above the maneuvering.”

The discussion inside the White House includes at least two distinct debates: Should Mr. Obama assume a more populist or centrist theme in his message? And should the White House do what it takes to pass compromise legislation or should it force votes, which even if unsuccessful can be used to carry an argument against Republicans in the fall?

Activist Judges Reversing Of Decades Old Precedent On Campaign Finance Laws "leaves Democrats with few options"

The activist judges on John-I'm-just-an-umpire-Robert's court have reversed 83 years worth of precedent and impacted equally long standing laws in 24 different states yet it's not clear what Congress can do about it. From the  Wash Post:

Frustrated Democrats began laying plans Friday to chip away at a landmark Supreme Court decision unleashing corporate expenditures in political campaigns, but the ruling's broad sweep will make it difficult to stem a tidal wave of new spending in this year's pivotal midterm elections.

Major corporations and advocacy groups immediately began devising ways to take advantage of the 5 to 4 decision, which concluded that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals and, therefore, can spend as much company money as they wish to oppose or support individual political candidates.

The ruling, announced Thursday, opens a significant new channel of funding for major corporations and their lobbyists in political campaigns. It is seen as particularly helpful for Republicans because of their party's traditional bonds with industry groups and its strong opposition to financial regulations proposed by the Obama administration. Labor unions, which strongly support Democrats, are also likely to take advantage of the ruling.

The decision further weakens the power of the major political parties, which must adhere to campaign restrictions enforced by the Federal Election Commission. Trade organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, by contrast, are now free to use money from their members to pay for ads explicitly targeting lawmakers who vote for legislation the groups do not like.

Rob Jordan, vice president for federal and state campaigns at the conservative FreedomWorks, said his Washington-based group could reap particular benefits from a portion of the ruling that threw out restrictions on running political ads in the weeks leading up to an election.

"We expect to have upside potential in the multimillions, and we expect to be major players," Jordan said of his group's plans for the midterms. "This will probably put ads on our radar screen more than they would have been."

Democrats hurried Friday to lay out possible legislative responses to the ruling, even while acknowledging that only a constitutional amendment -- which is exceedingly unlikely -- could strike at the heart of the decision. Most campaign finance experts agreed.

"There is not much that Congress can do," said Robert K. Kelner, a Republican lawyer at Covington & Burling. "It's hard for me to see any obvious route for campaign finance reformers to take aside from tinkering around the edges."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), the former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, are working with the White House to craft a new campaign finance bill. They are almost certain to call for strengthened disclosure requirements for companies that directly sponsor ad campaigns, and they may push for requiring shareholders to approve political expenditures by publicly traded companies. They are also studying ways to prohibit campaign spending by corporations such as American International Group or General Motors that received federal bailout money, as well as companies that have federal contracts or registered lobbyists.

Democrats are also eyeing restrictions on U.S. companies that are subsidiaries of foreign-owned corporations; they believe the public will be outraged by the possibility of foreign influence in U.S. election campaigns. The high court's majority opinion avoided addressing possible implications for foreign-owned firms, which are barred from direct participation in U.S. elections but can use their American subsidiaries to form political action committees.

The subsidiaries now appear free to spend as much as they wish on ads targeting specific U.S. election candidates, and critics said the opinion could be applied even more broadly ...

Opposing the ruling fits neatly into the Democrats' recent embrace of populist themes, including efforts to crack down on corporate excesses. "The voices of average Americans could be drowned out by Wall Street banks, big oil, health insurance companies and other special interests," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement this week.

Rep. Dan Lungren (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House committee that oversees federal elections, said his party has little to fear from such a message. "Republicans are on the side of the First Amendment," he said ...

Executives could expose themselves to shareholder lawsuits if they spend money in ways unrelated to their core business. "I think corporations are going to be very careful in using this," said Stanley Sporkin, a former federal judge and regulator who now advises corporations.

Schumer and Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) eventually hope to persuade Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a past sponsor of campaign finance reform with Feingold, to join the Democrats' effort. McCain issued a statement Thursday saying he was "disappointed" by the ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but his office declined to comment Friday on whether he would seek legislative redress.

Opponents of the decision hope that a bipartisan consensus will materialize.

"It may just be that this decision is so outrageous that it will be the catalyst to get the kinds of reforms we needed," said Mark McKinnon, a former campaign adviser to President George W. Bush who supports new restrictions.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman John B. Larson (Conn.) also has introduced a bill -- the Fair Elections Now Act -- that would set up a voluntary system in which congressional candidates would abide by certain restrictions in exchange for public financing of a portion of their campaigns. The measure has 126 House co-sponsors, and Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) has offered the same bill in his chamber.

Such a system would allow candidates to "run for office without any big money from Wall Street PACs or lobbyists," said David Donnelly, an official with the Public Campaign Action Fund.

Activist Supreme Court Decision: "Dramatic, sweeping, fundamental, seismic—all those adjectives apply to this alteration of the political landscape"

It's hard for me to believe that any news this week could be worse than what happened in Mass on Tuesday. Then the Supreme Court decided American democracy could be auctioned to the highest spender. At least the Mass setback will operate over a relatively short time frame, what the Supreme Court just did will impact us for decades, if not longer. What an unbelievably awful week.

From Katie Connelly:

It's hard to know just yet what the precise impact of the Supreme Court's landmark decision on campaign-finance reform this morning will be. But one thing is for sure: it will be huge. Dramatic, sweeping, fundamental, seismic—all those adjectives apply to this alteration of the political landscape. In all likelihood, Republicans will be the biggest beneficiaries. They've had a long history of taking care of their corporate buddies. And with the Administration today opening a new front in their battle on Wall Street, you can bet the financial industry will happily raid their bursting cash coffers to support Republicans in November.

The decision is a stunning display of judicial activism from a chief justice who promised to engage in anything but. Remember all his promises to respect precedent? Apparently he doesn't. As E.J. Dionne writes: "Remember Roberts saying judges were like umpires calling the balls and strikes? In this case, he and his colleagues canceled the game altogether and decided on their own what the final score would be." Roberts expanded the scope of the initial case before him, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, to take on a century's worth of campaign-finance regulation. Dahlia Lithwick describes it perfectly: "The court had to reach out far beyond any place it needed to go....This started off as a case about a single movie. It morphed into John Roberts's Golden Globe night."

For their part Republicans are defending the ruling as rolling back infringements of free speech. They're wrong. The First Amendment protects an individual's right to free speech. Corporations are not individuals, although in this ruling, the Supreme Court equates the two.

Ezra Klein: "Can Democrats govern?"

Ezra Klein:

It's worth taking a step back from health-care reform for a second. What Democrats are doing isn't just abandoning a particular policy issue. They're proving themselves unable to govern.

Democrats spent most of 2009 with 60 votes in the Senate and about 256 in the House. They had a popular new president who was following a disastrous Republican administration and a financial crisis. The opposition party was polling somewhere between foot fungus and spoiled meat. You don't get opportunities like this very often. The Senate majority, in fact, was larger than either party had enjoyed since the 1970s. And what have Democrats accomplished?

Well, not much. You can see a list here. A stimulus that was too small. Ted Kennedy's Serve America Act. Credit card regulations that were largely an acceleration of rules the Federal Reserve was going to impose anyway. I guess they almost passed a compromised health-care bill, but you don't go down in history for almosts.

If Democrats abandon health-care reform in the aftermath of Brown's victory, the lesson will be that they can't govern. No majority within the realm of reason will give them the votes to move their agenda swiftly and confidently. Even the prospect of the most significant legislative achievement in 40 years, an achievement that will save hundreds of thousands of lives, will not keep them from collapsing into chaos when they face adversity.

At that point, what's the pitch for voting for Democrats? That they agree with you? A plumber and I both agree that my toilet should work. But if he can't make it work, I'm not going to pay him any money or invite him into my home. Governance isn't just about ideology. It's also about competence and will. That's where Democrats are flagging.

You could argue that it's not fair to brand "Democrats" as at fault here. There's something to that. The leadership and the president would happily pass and sign legislation. But a party is as a party does. Democrats often run on the need to have enough votes to act. If they can't act even with those votes, then there's a real problem.

Would Republicans be so terrorized if they were in a similar circumstance? The GOP forged ahead with its attempts to impeach Bill Clinton even after voters cut them down for it in the 1998 election. Those were some odd priorities, but at least the party was committed to the agenda it ran on. Democrats may not want to go quite that far in terms of party discipline, but they need to get a whole lot further than they are now.

Paul Krugman To House Progressives: "Stop whining, and do what needs to be done"

Paul Krugman:

A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.

Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk.

Right now, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, says that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill. But there is no good alternative.

Some are urging Democrats to scale back their proposals in the hope of gaining Republican support. But anyone who thinks that would work must have spent the past year living on another planet.

The fact is that the Senate bill is a centrist document, which moderate Republicans should find entirely acceptable. In fact, it’s very similar to the plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts just a few years ago. Yet it has faced lock-step opposition from the G.O.P., which is determined to prevent Democrats from achieving any successes. Why would this change now that Republicans think they’re on a roll?

Alternatively, some call for breaking the health care plan into pieces so that the Senate can vote the popular pieces into law. But anyone who thinks that would work hasn’t paid attention to the actual policy issues ...

Reform won’t work unless all the essential pieces are in place. Suppose, for example, that Congress took the advice of those who want to ban insurance discrimination on the basis of medical history, and stopped there. What would happen next? The answer, as any health care economist will tell you, is that if Congress didn’t simultaneously require that healthy people buy insurance, there would be a “death spiral”: healthier Americans would choose not to buy insurance, leading to high premiums for those who remain, driving out more people, and so on.

And if Congress tried to avoid the death spiral by requiring that healthy Americans buy insurance, it would have to offer financial aid to lower-income families to make that insurance affordable — aid at least as generous as that in the Senate bill. There just isn’t any way to do reform on a smaller scale.

So reaching out to Republicans won’t work, and neither will trying to pass only the crowd-pleasing pieces of reform ... Finally, some Democrats want to just give up on the whole thing.

That would be an act of utter political folly. It wouldn’t protect Democrats from charges that they voted for “socialist” health care — remember, both houses of Congress have already passed reform. All it would do is solidify the public perception of Democrats as hapless and ineffectual.

And anyway, politics is supposed to be about achieving something more than your own re-election. America desperately needs health care reform; it would be a betrayal of trust if Democrats fold simply because they hope (wrongly) that this would slightly reduce their losses in the midterm elections.

Now, part of Democrats’ problem since Tuesday’s special election has been that they have been waiting in vain for leadership from the White House, where Mr. Obama has conspicuously failed to rise to the occasion.

But members of Congress, who were sent to Washington to serve the public, don’t have the right to hide behind the president’s passivity.

Bear in mind that the horrors of health insurance — outrageous premiums, coverage denied to those who need it most and dropped when you actually get sick — will get only worse if reform fails, and insurance companies know that they’re off the hook. And voters will blame politicians who, when they had a chance to do something, made excuses instead.

Ladies and gentlemen, the nation is waiting. Stop whining, and do what needs to be done.

"In a city that thrives on nonsense, we've heard more of it in the past few days than you normally do in a year"

Steven Pearlstein:

People, let's get a grip!

Okay, so Massachusetts voters elected a hunky, unknown Republican to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. That's no reason to ignore the result of a national general election, throw out a year's worth of hard work on a range of important issues and rush to embrace a bunch of simple-minded solutions meant to mollify an angry electorate.

Honestly, in a city that thrives on nonsense, we've heard more of it in the past few days than you normally do in a year.

One of my favorite bits of Monday morning quarterbacking is that President Obama should have put health care and Afghanistan and climate change and everything else on the back burner for the past year and insisted that he and everyone else focus exclusively on jobs, jobs, jobs. What do you call a $787 billion stimulus package of tax cuts and increased spending, a $50 billion auto industry bailout, a $1 trillion prop to the housing sector and nearly another $1 trillion in old-fashioned monetary stimulus -- chopped liver? And how exactly do you square the idea that the president and Congress should be working 24-7 to "create" jobs with that other nugget of conventional wisdom, that Americans are demanding smaller government, less spending and lower budget deficits?

Then there is the big question of what to do about health care now that the voters have allegedly turned against the president's proposal.

One reasonable-sounding idea is that the president should reduce it down to just a few of its most popular provisions, such as the one requiring that insurance companies be barred from refusing to cover people with preexisting conditions or charging them sky-high premiums.

The problem with that, of course, is that if you don't require everyone to buy insurance, then there will be lots of people who will wait to buy their policies until they get sick and then demand coverage at the "community" rate. That's a great way to drive up premiums, which in turn will drive even more healthy people to drop coverage, which will raise premiums even further.

To prevent this kind of debilitating "insurance spiral," you could add one more feature -- a mandate requiring everyone to buy at least a basic insurance package. Unfortunately, there are lots of low-income households for which the newly mandated premiums could eat up as much as a half of after-tax income, which hardly seems fair. So you'd probably want to make sure that there's enough competition among insurers to keep premiums down, which is what those government-supervised exchanges are all about. And you'd want to have some subsidies to limit the financial hit to low-income families. To pay for the subsidies, you'd either have to raise taxes or cut spending in other areas.

And that, basically, is the outline of Obama's health plan, just as it was Clinton's health plan and the Nixon plan before that. In fact, if you want a health-care system that's universal and affordable and based on a competitive market of private insurers and health-care providers, that's pretty much where you have to start. There is no simple solution to this puzzle ...

"President Obama mistakenly thought he could win Americans over with rational policy decisions and an even temperament"

More rational thought from Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Political Shift in D.C.
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Health Reform In Chaos. Dems Too.

As feared in Tuesday's Silver Lining, it looks like the Dems might be complete morons. From Politico:

Health care reform teetered on the brink of collapse Thursday as House and Senate leaders struggled to coalesce around a strategy to rescue the plan, in the face of growing pessimism among lawmakers that the president’s top priority can survive.

The legislative landscape was filled with obstacles: House Democrats won’t pass the Senate bill. Senate Democrats don’t want to start from scratch just to appease the House. And the White House still isn’t telling Congress how to fix the problem.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) both tried to put a good face on the obvious chaos on Thursday, promising to press on. “We have to get a bill passed,” Pelosi told reporters. “We know that.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said, “No way is it dead, because it’s so important for the country. And we will find a way to pass [it].”

But for the first time in the yearlong push, Democratic aides — and even some members — finally acknowledged privately that the fear of failure was real. And Congress recessed for the weekend without an obvious path forward as rank-and-file Democrats started splintering in different directions.

Democrats struggled all year to maintain a coalition in support of health care reform without any GOP votes. Republican Scott Brown’s improbable win in Massachusetts on Tuesday now looks like it has the potential to end that almost-impossible balancing act.

This post-Massachusetts confusion raises the stakes for President Barack Obama’s first official State of the Union address next week, which some now believe must be a last-ditch effort to get health care finished ...

Pelosi took one option off the table Thursday when she told reporters that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill unless it undergoes major changes. The White House had hoped to avoid a protracted health care fight by getting the House to adopt the Senate bill, despite deep misgivings among House Democrats.

That leaves two main options for moving forward:

Massachusetts, Two Days Later

As a way to process Tuesday's election results, I spent lots of time yesterday on lots of news sites and blogs. There are way too many to excerpt as is normally done, so instead, here is my index to the best commentary and analysis out there.

How did it happen

The only "exit" poll I know of, from Research 2000:

Mass. Voters Protested Against Weak Wall Street, Health Care Policies

Rick Holmes, a columnist for the suburban Boston Metro-West News thinks it was primarily Coakley's fault:

Martha's many mistakes

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) blames Obama for "health care's demise"

Weiner On Health Care's Demise: We Lacked Leadership From Obama

Michael Scherer of Time broadens that to encompass Obama's first year:

Five Ways Obama Went Wrong

Nate Silver of 538.com builds on David Leonhardt's idea that Obama has pleased no one (and worse, angered many) by not countering the perception he's a progressive even while he pursued centrist policies:

The bills before Congress are politically partisan and substantively bipartisan.

Mass Hysteria:

Jonathan Chait of TNR is seeing Mass Hysteria so he argues that the CW is missing the real forces at play in the Mass election and suggests Obama needs to be like George Bailey during the panicked run on his bank in It's A Wonderlife Life:

Why Democrats need to take a deep, deep breath. Maybe two.

Ezra Klein of the Wash Post uses a very different entertainment reference, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, to make the same point (and the comment a Republican submitted is also worth reading):

Sometimes a bunny is just a bunny

Jon Stewart hits the hysteria nail on the head:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - The Re-Changening
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Analysis of the results and what to do next:

Jonathan Chait next argues that no one should interpret the Mass results as any kind of referendum on health care:

We've got ours, and we don't want to pay for anybody else to enjoy this great system we have.

Steven Pearlstein of the Wash Post argues the same thing as Chait and believes it's not over:

GOP win doesn't mean health reform is dead

Ezra Klein suggests a radical way to move forward on health reform

Democrats could scrap the legislation and start over in the reconciliation process. But not to re-create the whole bill.

Ezra also warns the Dems if they abandon health care now, their base should rightly abandon them:

If Democrats let go of health care, there is no doubt that a demoralized Democratic base will stay home in November. And that's as it should be.

Tim Egan agrees the Dems need to get a spine and a much, much better mouth:

They can cowboy up, pass health care that helps right the major wrongs of the system, and then explain what they’re doing.

On a more serious note, The NY Times editorial board offers very pointed advice to Obama & the Dems:

It is indisputable that the Republicans have settled on a tactic of obstruction, disinformation and fear-mongering, but it is equally indisputable that the Democrats have not countered it well.

Amy Walter, writing in NationalJournal.com, suggests how the Dems can generally win back Independents:

Will Democrats Feel Voters' Pain?

What The Mass Results Mean: Throw The Bums Out

Here are the reasons I believe Scott Brown won:

• 10% unemployment
• an inept opponent
• 10% unemployment
• health reform sausage making, the GOP's ability to exploit fears and the Dems inability to cut throw that and explain the benefits
• 10% unemployment

Here is the reason he did not win (no matter how the GOP spins it):

• repudiation of the overall Obama agenda

The most recent Va, NJ, and Ma elections, in fact, now join the similar 2008 and 2006 ones: all were 'throw the bum out' elections.  The problem for the Dems is that they are now the bums. The Republicans should also check their unadulterated glee: they're the bums in plenty of places too.

"One year later assessing Obama: Testing the promise of pragmatism"

Wash Post:

A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama pinpointed one of the biggest challenges he would face as president ... At the time, Obama said he did not think his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism ushered in by President Ronald Reagan toward top-down government and social engineering by Washington.

"What we don't know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government; they're more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government," he said on that day in December 2008.

As Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday, that question remains one of the most politically charged of his presidency -- and central to the politics of this election year -- and will hinge on how Americans judge Obama and his policies.

Will the public conclude that his policies worked, however much they may cost and however much they may entail more government intervention in the economy? Or will they regard his agenda as intrusive and ineffective big government? What steps may Obama take to alleviate public discontent over these first-year decisions?

The stakes are sizable, with an early referendum coming Tuesday in a special Senate election in Massachusetts. Democrats are fighting to hold the seat once occupied by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a dramatic turnaround in a contest previously seen as an almost certain win. A Republican victory would imperil the administration's health-care initiative and cast a pall over already-nervous Democrats, who fear considerable losses in November's midterm elections.

Obama receives mixed reviews for his first-year performance, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. His approval rating stands at 53 percent, with 44 percent disapproving. Among independents, 49 percent approve, the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies.

Majorities disapprove of his handling of the major domestic issues -- the economy, health care and the federal budget deficit. But more approve than disapprove of his handling of terrorism and Afghanistan, and he has broad support for his response to the attempted terrorist bombing on Christmas Day ...

The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.

White House advisers maintain that many of Obama's actions are temporary and not a permanent enlargement of federal power at the expense of private industry. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said such actions as the bailouts of the banks and auto companies "were emergency interventions to stabilize" an economy on the edge of a depression.

The promise of change, which echoed so powerfully during his campaign, is now another source of division. At the time of his inauguration, three-fourths of the country said Obama would bring needed change to Washington. Today the nation is evenly divided on whether he has. Three-fourths of Democrats say yes; three-fourths of Republicans and a majority of independents say no.

Around the White House these days, the president's advisers draw analogies with Reagan to paint a hopeful portrait of Obama's weakened standing. Reagan, they note, had approval ratings around 50 percent at the end of his first year in office and ended up winning a landslide reelection victory in 1984. What they don't say so vocally is that Reagan's approval dipped into the 40s in the fall of 1982, and that his party suffered substantial losses in Congress that November ...

Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said the Obama team's analysis that America was ready for a sharp change in direction was not as misguided as many conservative critics contend. When the administration launched the stimulus and the health-care package, he said, "they thought the country was at a very different place ideologically -- and had reason to believe that it was at a different place."

Since then, Weber said, the country has reattached itself to its more centrist moorings, or even moved to the right.

"When the Clinton administration faced similar difficulty, they were quite adept at reorienting themselves to the center ideologically," Weber said. "Can this administration and this Congress do that? It's not clear to me how they do that."...

Growing partisanship

Obama begins his second year having failed to ease political polarization. "What I haven't been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the Inauguration," he told People magazine recently. "That's what's been lost this year."

"There may be no better place to measure the shifting fortunes of President Obama and the Democratic Party than" Massachusetts

NY Times:

There may be no better place to measure the shifting fortunes of President Obama and the Democratic Party than in the race being fought here this weekend for the Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy.

When Mr. Obama was inaugurated one year ago this week, he and his party had big majorities in the Senate and House, enjoyed the backing of much of the country and were confidently preparing to enact an ambitious legislative agenda. Republicans seemed directionless and the conservative movement exhausted.

This weekend, Democrats are struggling to hang on to a seat held by Mr. Kennedy for 46 years in one of the most enthusiastically Democratic states in the country. Conservatives are enjoying a grass-roots resurgence, and Republicans are talking about taking back the House in November.

As Mr. Obama prepares to come here on Sunday to campaign for the party’s beleaguered Senate candidate, Martha Coakley, Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Win or lose in Massachusetts, that a contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat could appear so close is evidence of what even Democrats say is animosity directed at the administration and Congress. It has been fanned by Republicans who have portrayed Democrats as overreaching and out of touch with ordinary Americans.

“It comes from the fact that Obama as president has had to deal with all these major crises he inherited: the banks, fiscal stimulus,” said Senator Paul G. Kirk Jr., the Democrat who holds the Massachusetts seat on an interim basis pending the special election. “But for many people it was like, ‘Jeez, how much government are we getting here?’ That might have given them pause.”

Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said the atmosphere was a serious threat to Democrats. “I do think there’s a chance that Congressional elites mistook their mandate,” Mr. Bayh said. “I don’t think the American people last year voted for higher taxes, higher deficits and a more intrusive government. But there’s a perception that that is what they are getting.”

Ms. Coakley, the state attorney general, could still defeat her Republican opponent, State Senator Scott Brown. Polls show the race as very close, and measuring public opinion in special elections is always difficult.

Support for the health care overhaul could grow if it is enacted into law and Americans decide that it has left them better off, as Mr. Obama says will happen. The economy could take a turn for the better by this summer, validating Mr. Obama’s policies in time to influence the midterm elections. And for all the national forces at play here, Ms. Coakley has, in the view of most Democrats, made things worse with a slow-starting and low-energy campaign marked by several high-profile errors.

Still, Mr. Obama’s decision to tear up his weekend schedule to come here reflects concern in the White House that a defeat of Ms. Coakley would be seen as a repudiation of the president’s first year. It would also raise the question of whether Mr. Obama squandered political capital by focusing so much on health care at a time of rising unemployment.

“If it works well, it was a good thing to do for the country here,” Mr. Bayh said. “But there’s definitely an opportunity cost. You could only spend political capital once; it now can’t be spent on other things.”

The Massachusetts campaign has neatly encapsulated the major themes that have come to deplete Mr. Obama’s popularity, themes that have fueled the rise of the Tea Party movement on the right and created an atmosphere where growing numbers of Democrats in conservative-leaning districts and states have decided not to run again.

Time To Dump The Obama Is "Too Cool & Detached" Meme

Greg Sargent:

You hear this line again and again from opinionmakers. Obama's approach to the Christmas Day terror plot was "too cool." He's too "detached." Not emotionally engaged. Doesn't give you the sense he's in charge. Isn't a "strong father," as Maureen Dowd put it.

But a raft of polls gives us more than enough info to call B.S. on this meme.

Yesterday's Gallup poll found Obama's rating on terror has actually inched up since the foiled plot. Yesterday's Quinnipiac poll said that 66 percent view Obama as a "strong leader." A CNN poll found that 64 percent like Obama's personality and leadership qualities.

That isn't all. A CBS poll found that 57 percent approve of Obama on terrorism. Still another poll found that 65 percent have confidence that Obama will protect them from terror. Got that?

These findings, to be clear, don't say much about the public's attitudes towards his actual policies, which have indeed taken a dip in the polls.

But they clearly show that the electorate is comfortable with his temperament and leadership tone. So it's time to junk the "Obama as Spock" meme. Wouldn't you say?

"For Obama, a tough year to get the message out"

Dan Balz:

In winning the White House, Barack Obama's team earned a reputation for skill and discipline in dominating the communications wars with opponents. In office, virtually the same team has struggled, spending much of the past year defending the administration's actions on the two biggest domestic issues -- the economy and health care.

The White House has sought to sell health-care reform as a way to make coverage affordable and accessible to middle-class families. But it was also presented at various times as a cost-containment measure, a restraint on greedy insurance companies, a moral imperative to cover the uninsured and, to Democratic lawmakers, as a "can't fail" enterprise. The president and his aides sent mixed signals on the "public option" as well, voicing support for a government-run plan while signaling their willingness to see it die to get a bill passed.

On the economy, administration officials put themselves at a disadvantage with faulty projections of the jobless rate and an overly rosy prediction of how many jobs the stimulus package would create or save. Once they had put in place policies to deal with the worst of the crises Obama inherited, they moved on to health care and later to Afghanistan. The result was a perceived loss of focus in addressing public unrest about unemployment that has prompted a shift back to the economy recently.

It is an axiom of political communication that the president wields the world's biggest megaphone and is therefore capable of setting an agenda and dominating a debate. Obama has used his rhetorical skills repeatedly to good effect, but officials acknowledge that there are limits.

"There is real power there," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said of the president's platform. "But it's not a magic wand. The bully pulpit does not put people to work."

Obama's advisers have learned what previous White House teams came to realize when they arrived in Washington, which is the vast difference between campaigning and governing. Asked what happened to the Obama team, Mark McKinnon, who was a media adviser to President George W. Bush, said, "They're human. They've walked into the propellers of the federal government."

Axelrod said the challenge of managing and controlling messages in a campaign and in the White House is "the difference between tick-tack-toe and three-dimensional tick-tack-toe. It's vastly more complicated." <Continue reading.>

Now, Senator Nelson Wants All States To Be Exempt ... Just Like Nebraska

Prescriptions:

Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, has been under fire in recent days for winning some plum provisions for his home state in exchange for voting for his party’s big health care legislation. But in a statement on Thursday, Mr. Nelson said he would fight for all states to get the same benefits as Nebraska — a move that some Senate colleagues had predicted as inevitable.

When Mr. Nelson was negotiating with the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, over whether he would support the health care bill, he demanded that the federal government pick up the total cost of a proposed Medicaid expansion in Nebraska, even though other states would eventually have to share the cost of expanding their Medicaid programs.

Mr. Reid agreed and inserted a provision for the federal government to pay Nebraska’s new Medicaid costs indefinitely. But that provision has had its own political cost, with Republicans accusing Democrats of bribing Mr. Nelson with a “sweetheart deal” to win his vote ...

Now Mr. Nelson says he will fight for California and other states to get the corn, too. And that could cost the federal government a whole bunch of beans.

“As a former governor, I’ve long fought against unfunded federal mandates, which force Washington rules on states with little or no money to pay for them,” Mr. Nelson said. “The current health care bill has an unfunded mandate for expanding Medicaid. While helping more Americans obtain health coverage is important, this mandate could burden state budgets in uncertain economic times ahead.”

He added: “I’ve been in serious discussions with Senate leaders and others to secure changes in the bill to treat all states equally. At the end of the day, whatever Nebraska gets will apply to all states.”

Of course, the Medicaid provisions now in the Senate bill are not an unfunded mandate for Nebraska. And federal officials have long contended that Medicaid is not in fact a classic unfunded mandate. Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for low-income Americans, has always been a partnership – with the federal government and states sharing the costs.

"In a political universe ruled by ideological yellers, [Obama] lacks both an ideology and the pipes"

Richard Cohen is worried. Are you?

Last month, no American soldiers were killed in Iraq. Last month, the unemployment rate dipped a bit, the stock market ended the year up, the financial system did not crater, Detroit's Big Three began to get a pulse -- and yet a consensus started to form that Barack Obama, who is either responsible for or merely presided over all this good stuff, is a failure.

What's more, the consensus came supported by numbers ... Obama began 2009 with 43 percent of Americans strongly approving of his performance and ended it with 26 percent feeling that way. Any way you measure the polls, Obama did not have a good year.

On the left, the president is being pummeled for health-care legislation that does not include a public option and that has not dispatched insurance executives to Guantanamo. On the right, he is being pummeled for socializing the economy, establishing death panels and allowing maniacal Nigerians to load their Calvins with boom-boom and fly into peaceful Detroit. It's a cartoon.

In foreign policy, Obama has sorely disappointed his fans on the left for escalating the war in Afghanistan and on the right for not escalating it enough. Guantanamo, which he vowed to close, is still open. He supports gay rights, but don't ask and don't tell about "don't ask, don't tell." He zigs, he zags. Change! Hope! But not much of the former and little of the latter.

To some, he's weak on the environment. To others, he's too strong on the environment. He is camouflaged in the incomprehensible, leaving no (carbon) footprint and quixotically tilting at energy-producing windmills. He confers too much with our allies, bows when he should shake and has not brought peace to the Middle East -- as, you will remember, George W. Bush did.

Much of this critique is asinine. If the Republican Party had its way -- and God sees to it that it doesn't -- the country would by now have reverted to the barter system and the unemployment rate would be around 25 percent. The GOP economic program simply does not exist, and even Bush knew this. When push came to shove, he tossed his ideology overboard and used government money to bail out financial institutions.

Still, the reason the GOP criticisms have started to stick is that Obama can be made into anything his critics want. He is a lean man of ideological clay who has let others mold his image. His bottom line is forever on the move. It's not that he's not good or smart; it's rather that in a political universe ruled by ideological yellers, he lacks both an ideology and the pipes.

The White House faces a major political problem. Obama's first year was not a bad one -- and yet he suffered. The coming year threatens to be much worse. Fatalities are going to increase in Afghanistan. Unemployment could fester. The debt is going to increase, and all over the country, state and municipal governments are going to go broke and look to Washington for help. The land will roil with anger, and Mr. Cool in the White House is not up to FDR-like fireside chats. He was born to blog.

Journalists like to believe that if they are getting criticism from both sides of the story, they must be doing something right. This is not true for journalists -- they may actually have gotten the story doubly wrong -- and it is certainly not true for political figures. In Obama's case, his misfortune is to be a leader without a cause.

He wanted a health-care bill. Why? To cover the uncovered. Maybe. To rein in the insurance companies. Maybe. To lower costs. Maybe. What mattered most was getting a bill, any bill. This is not a cause. It's a notch on a belt.

Obama could be a great president. He has already achieved much -- possibly saving the country from financial ruin, salvaging the auto industry, getting some sort of health-care reform. Possibly, possibly. Yet his numbers sink as his achievements rise. He is the Johnny Appleseed of cognitive dissonance, so utterly detached that when he wins it seems to be only for himself. Pollsters measure him but poets have described him. William Butler Yeats got it down years ago: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Xmas Bomber Cartoons

Defending The Filibuster

Though I'm as frustrated by what the Senate has done to vitiate health reform as the next progressive guy, Ross Douthat makes some compelling arguments in favor of keeping a selective use of the filibuster:

While liberal pundits — and a few liberal Senators — crusade against the filibuster, Jay Cost rises to its defense. His argument turns the usual case against the filibuster on its head: While critics charge that the rise of filibustering is the fruit of a poisonous polarization, Cost argues that supermajority requirements are actually our best protection against polarization run amok. The filibuster “is indeed an obstructionist tool,” he writes, “but it is also a way to promote moderate policies, even as the parties have become more ideologically extreme.” In the absence of a filibuster, a polarized political system would produce wild policymaking swings, with Al Franken writing legislation one session and Jim DeMint writing it the next. Its presence requires even the most ideologically-charged majority to cut some deals before it rams legislation through. If we “get rid of the filibuster to facilitate legislative policymaking,” Cost concludes, “we should brace ourselves for ideologically polarizing laws that will leave a third to a half of the country deeply unsatisfied.”

I’m of several minds on this issue. On the one hand, Cost is right that the major consequence of increased filibustering to date has been legislation tailored to the concerns of centrist Senators, rather than no legislation at all. The Bush tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare Part D all passed with Senate supermajorities, and the Bush-era legislative pushes that failed — Social Security reform and immigration reform chief among them — did so because lots of Senators decided they weren’t interested in voting for them, not because the bills got 58 votes but couldn’t get 60. In the Obama era, meanwhile, the Senate has already voted to pass the most expensive stimulus package in history, a sweeping reorganization of the American health care system, and a host of more modest legislative initiatives. In this environment, there’s something a little strange about the stridency of liberal complaints about the filibuster, given what they’ve accomplished — and are on the cusp of accomplishing — even with it as an impediment.

That said, using the filbuster to spike judicial nominees (as Democrats did in the Bush era) or to hold up routine votes (as the Republicans are doing now) does strike me as much more problematic than using it to shape or halt expensive new entitlement programs. And on a broader level, I’m more sympathetic than many conservatives to liberal complaints about America’s growing ungovernability. Unlike the left, I’m not worried about a liberal Congress’s inability to pass a public option — but I am worried that our political culture is ill-equipped to deal with the looming gulf between our projected revenues and our spending commitments.

Note that most of the bills listed above attracted supermajority support while either cutting taxes or hiking spending. (The pending health care legislation promises to pay for itself, but everyone, from the CBO on down, is taking that promise with a substantial grain of salt.) This trend can’t continue: In the next decade or so, we’ll need to either raise taxes, cut spending, or both, or else the American future will resemble the Californian present. And anyone who thinks that Congress is ready to make those kind of hard choices hasn’t been paying attention to our politics lately.

The question, though, is whether the filibuster, specifically, is really a major threat to America’s long-term solvency.

Change Comes To Government Secrecy

NY Times:

President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.

In an executive order and an accompanying presidential memorandum to agency heads, Mr. Obama signaled that the government should try harder to make information public if possible, including by requiring agencies to regularly review what kinds of information they classify and to eliminate any obsolete secrecy requirements ...

He also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to speed the process of declassifying historical documents by centralizing their review, rather than sending them in sequence to different agencies. He set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million-page backlog of such records that includes archives related to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama campaigned on a theme of making the government less secretive. But in office his record has been more ambiguous, drawing fire from advocates of open government by embracing Bush-era claims that certain lawsuits involving surveillance and torture must be shut down to protect state secrets.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed cautious optimism about Mr. Obama’s new order, saying it appeared to be “a major step forward” from the vantage point of those who believe the government is too secretive.

“Everything depends on the faithful implementation by the agencies,” Mr. Aftergood said, “but there are some real innovations here.”

Mr. Obama also suggested that his administration might undertake further changes, saying he looked forward to recommendations from a study that Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, is leading “to design a more fundamental transformation of the security classification system.”

The Idealist / Pragmatist Split Within The Democratic Party

NY Times:

Howard Dean ran for president in 2004 as the outsider ready to battle an entrenched establishment in Washington. And so, four years later, did Barack Obama.

Now, one year into Mr. Obama’s presidency, a sharp dispute between the president and Mr. Dean over the health care bill the Senate approved Thursday — Mr. Dean denounced it as a sellout, while Mr. Obama heralded it as a historic breakthrough — is illustrating the roots of the ideological breach within the Democratic party.

It is not just that the left wing of the party thinks that its centrists hold too much sway and are too quick to cave when faced with pressure from the right. It is also that this White House, stocked as it is with insiders, people whose view of politics is shaped by the compromises inherent in legislating, is confronting a liberal base made up largely of outsiders to the lawmaking process who are asking why they should accept politics as usual.

As much as Mr. Obama presented himself as an outsider during his campaign, a lesson of this battle is that this is a president who would rather work within the system than seek to upend it. He is not the ideologue ready to stage a symbolic fight that could end in defeat; he is a former senator comfortable in dealing with the arcane rules of the Senate and prepared to accept compromise in search of a larger goal. For the most part, Democrats on Capitol Hill have stuck with him.

By contrast, Mr. Dean, the former Democratic Party chairman who has long had strained relations with this administration, said the White House was slow to fight and quick to make concessions — particularly on creating a public insurance plan — and demanded that Democrats kill the Senate version of the health care bill.

That sentiment was echoed by liberal efforts that grew up around the Dean campaign, notably Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, which argued that Mr. Obama was not tough enough in staring down foes, be they insurance companies or Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-independent from Connecticut.

“He ran as someone who would fight against entrenched special interests on behalf of the little guy,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has emerged as one of Mr. Obama’s leading critics in recent days. “And what we learned in this debate is that he’s not willing to fight and exert pressure on entrenched special interests when it comes to big ideas.”

Of course, it is easier to be an outsider when you are on the outside, which is where Mr. Dean is these days, after making an unsuccessful effort to win a post in the Obama White House. And Mr. Dean’s longtime feud with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, was noted by many Democrats who were taken aback by the sharp tenor of Mr. Dean’s attack on others in the party. (Mr. Dean declined to comment.)

Still, Mr. Obama’s approach to this battle should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career or his campaign for the White House. He served in the United States Senate and in the Illinois Senate. His choice for chief of staff — Mr. Emanuel — was the No. 3 person in the House Democratic leadership, and many of his top West Wing aides came out of staff jobs in the Senate.

Mr. Obama may find it frustrating that it is impossible under Senate rules to get something through without 60 votes, but those are the rules and he is going to play by them. He was not about to go to Connecticut and to whip up the public against Mr. Lieberman, or to press for him to be relieved of his leadership positions in the Senate, as Mr. Green suggested he do.

“The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

All of this has come at a time of strains between Mr. Obama and the left. Mr. Obama has come under fire on several fronts, like health care, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure so far to make good on a campaign pledge to end the ban on open homosexuals in the military.

Mr. Obama has moved to the center on some issues since he became president, particularly on elements of national security. Still, he never presented himself as a doctrinaire liberal, and much of what he is doing as president tracks with what he talked about during the campaign.

Mr. Obama’s call to send more troops to Afghanistan is what he always talked about in the context of outlining his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s not like he woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s go fight a war in Afghanistan,’ ” Mr. Emanuel said. “He talked about it in the campaign.”

And Mr. Obama never exhibited the left’s passion for establishing a public insurance option as part of an overhaul of health care. He rarely talked about it during scores of debates, speeches and interviews during the campaign; instead he focused on expanding coverage, lowering costs and ending health insurance abuses.

During the campaign, many people saw in Mr. Obama what they wanted to see in him, and in the Democratic primaries he often appealed more directly to the left than did Hillary Rodham Clinton, his main rival for most of the contest. The question now is whether legislative and policy accomplishment — signing a health care bill, however imperfect in the eyes of liberals, steadying the economy, winding down the war in Iraq — will be enough, assuming Mr. Obama achieves them, to maintain the support and enthusiasm of those on the left who wanted even more from him.

Mr. Green said that Mr. Obama’s failure to push for the public option — or to enlist his network of grass-root supporters behind it — had sapped the energy out of the base and would have consequences for the 2010 elections. If Mr. Green is correct, that could be a real problem for Democrats, particularly given how energetic opposition to the health bill and the entire Obama agenda appears to be among Republicans.

But this could also prove to be a test of just how much power the outside voices in the left wing have over the insiders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The stinging attack from Mr. Dean and organizations on the left calling for the defeat of the health care bill failed to dissuade a single Senate Democrat from voting for it. And Mr. Axelrod said he was not worried that would hurt the party come November.

“When people focus on what this bill is and not what it isn’t and recognize what an enormous landmark achievement it is, progressive achievement, you’ll see folks rallying around this and not running away from it,” he said.

Legislating Is Ugly But Winning Is Winning

Ezra Klein:

On December 24th, in an early morning vote, the United States Senate voted to pass health-care reform. It was the first time the body had been in session on the 24th since 1963. That's fitting, as it's arguably the most important piece of legislation the body has passed since 1963.

It's become difficult to write these milestone posts. Health-care reform, by this point, has had a lot of milestones. It has cleared five committees. It has come through the House of Representatives. It has been merged into a single bill in the Senate. It has passed through the Senate. No previous health-care reform bill has come anywhere near this far. But there are more milestones left to achieve: The House and Senate need to agree on a bill. That bill has to pass both chambers again. And then the president has to sign the legislation.

Passing legislation, it turns out, is a long and ugly process. God, is it ugly. The compromises, both with powerful special interests and decisive senators. The trimming of ambitions and the budget gimmicks and the worship of Congressional Budget Office scores. By the end, you're passing a compromise of a deal of a negotiation of a concession.

Bad a system as it might be, it's the only one we've got, at least for now. This is what victory looks like. The slow, grinding, ineluctable advance of legislation that looks quite a bit like, albeit not exactly identical, to what you began with. It's not pretty, and it doesn't necessarily feel like winning is supposed to feel. But this bill will do most of the things we hoped it would do: Cover about 95 percent of all legal residents, regulate insurers, set up competitive exchanges, pretty much end risk selection, institute a universal structure that we can improve and enhance as the years go on, and vastly reduce both medical and financial risk for families.

It's been a long time since the legislative system did anything this big, and people have forgotten how awful the victories are. But these are the victories, and if they feel bad to many, they will do good for more.

Senate Health Care Vote "mark the culmination of more than a generation of polarization" Of American Politics

NY Times:

The vote on Monday, in the dead of night, was 60 to 40. The vote on Tuesday, just after daybreak, was 60 to 39. And the vote on Wednesday afternoon, at a civil hour but after less-than-civil debate, was 60 to 39 again — an immutable tally that showed Democrats unwavering in the march to adopt a far-reaching overhaul of the health care system over united Republican opposition.

The votes also marked something else: the culmination of more than a generation of partisan polarization of the American political system, and a precipitous decline in collegiality and collaboration in governing that seemed to move in inverse proportion to a rising influence of lobbying, money, the 24-hour news cycle and hostilities on talk shows and in the blogosphere.

The health care legislation is likely to be approved Thursday morning, with the Senate divided on party lines — something that has not happened in modern times on so important a shift in domestic policy, or on major legislation of any kind, lawmakers and Congressional historians said.

The Democrats flaunted their unity on Wednesday at a news conference with nearly their entire caucus in attendance.

Many senators said the current vitriol, which continued on the floor on Wednesday with a fight over when to cast the final health care vote, was unlike anything they had seen. “It has gotten so much more partisan,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia. “This was so wicked. This was so venal.”

Even in a bitter fight over President Bill Clinton’s budget in 1993, decided 51 to 50 with a rare tie-breaker vote by Vice President Al Gore, the partisanship was not as stark as it is today. Although no Republicans voted for Mr. Clinton’s budget, six Democrats joined them in what amounted to bipartisan opposition.

Mr. Rockefeller said the health bill had created an almost perfect storm of political and policy disagreements, so that some of the bitterness reflected basic philosophical disputes crystallized by President Obama’s agenda. “If there was ever a time for that kind of partisanship to come out, this was the bill to do it,” he said.

Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University and an expert on the history of the Senate, said that in earlier eras, senators would routinely cross party lines to vote in favor of major legislation on issues like civil rights and social welfare policy.

Obama Assesses His First Year & Rejects Criticism Of Health-Care Bill

Wash Post:

President Obama outlined Tuesday a first-year legislative record that he said rescued the economy and placed it on a path of long-term growth, even as he acknowledged that some unfinished items would probably be more difficult to achieve heading into a midterm election year.

In an Oval Office interview with The Washington Post, Obama rejected criticism that he has compromised too much to secure health-care reform or turned over too much authority to congressional leaders in pursuing his broad legislative agenda.

But some of Obama's signature initiatives, including cap-and-trade legislation and financial regulatory reform, remain unfulfilled heading into an election year likely to be shaped by what he achieved in Congress this year. Obama personally made the case for his legislative record at a time when his approval ratings are among the lowest of his presidency and as even some of his most ardent supporters are questioning the results of his congressional strategy.

"Overall, if you had a checklist of promises made, a lot of those promises have been kept," Obama said. "When those things are complete, and I think they will be, we will have achieved a fundamental shift in health care, energy, education and our financial regulatory system that will put this economy on a firmer footing to grow over the long term."

As the Senate prepares to pass its version of health-care reform legislation, Obama's advisers have portrayed a highly successful year pushing important bills through Congress, comparing his record to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. Presidential scholars offer a more cautious appraisal, even as they note that Obama is operating in a more partisan time in Washington than those Democratic predecessors had.

Obama's legislative record includes the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February, a mix of tax cuts, infrastructure spending and aid to state and local governments that was the largest of its kind. It also includes a variety of bills addressing issues of particular interest to his political base that had been languishing for years.

Although Obama noted in the interview that "the most important thing we did this year was to ensure that the financial system did not collapse," health-care reform dominated his agenda and will stand as at least one pillar of the legacy he leaves behind. He has come under sharp criticism for the size and shape of the legislation, including from former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean ...

In the interview, Obama vigorously defended the legislation, saying he is "not just grudgingly supporting the bill. I am very enthusiastic about what we have achieved."

"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama said. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill."

In listing those priorities, he cited the 30 million uninsured Americans projected to receive coverage, estimated savings of more than $1 trillion over the next two decades, a "patients' bill of rights on steroids," and tax breaks to help small businesses pay for employee coverage.

New NBC Poll: Tea Party Tops Democrats And Republicans

The same poll posted about in "For Democrats, the red flags are flying at full mast", also found this (as reported by the Wall St Journal):

The loosely organized group made of up mostly conservative activists and independent voters that’s come to be known as the Tea Party movement currently boasts higher favorability ratings than either the Democratic or Republican Parties, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll coming out later today.

More than four in 10, 41%, of respondents said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of the Tea Party movement, while 24% said they had a somewhat or very negative view of the group. The Tea Party movement gained notoriety over the summer following a series of protests in Washington, D.C. and other cities over government spending and other U.S. economic policies.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which controls both the White House and Congress, has a 35% positive rating compared with a 45% negative rating.

The Republican Party identifies closest to the Tea Party movement’s ideology, but the group has also caused splits within the GOP. Republicans currently hold a 28% favorability rating compared with a 43% negative one.

Poll: Majority Wants Lieberman Thrown Out Of Democratic Caucus. Cap-and-Trade A Reason To Keep Him?

Marc Ambinder:

A Research 2000 poll confirms what we assumed to be true: Democrats are not happy with Joe Lieberman.

In fact, 81 percent of Democrats want Lieberman stripped of his Senate Homeland Security Committee chairmanship if he joins with Republicans to block health care reform, compared to only 10 percent who think he should retain it. See the full results here.

Independents agree, 43 percent to 30 percent; all voters also agree, 47 percent to 32 percent. 802 voters were polled by Research 2000 for the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which has commissioned polling on moderate Democratic senators averse to ambitious health care reform since the debate heated up over the summer.
Lieberman came close to having his chairman's gavel stripped after the election, and it was assumed that he retained it because of 1) the conciliatory signals sent by then-President-elect Obama, and 2) the fact that Democrats needed his vote on critical pieces of President Obama's agenda--like, for instance health care reform ...

If Lieberman is a solid "no" on health care, the only thing preventing the caucus from removing him as chairman is his vote on climate change legislation. He's working on cap-and-trade legislation with Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC); the three released a general framework for legislation last week, but The Washington Post noted that it showed they hadn't agreed to much yet. Lieberman's stance on cap-and-trade appears aggressive: in releasing that framework, Lieberman stressed that the bill will be intended to "punish" polluters, and he took the lead on cap-and-trade legislation in the last Congress.

Whether that's enough to keep him in Democrats' good graces--or whether he'd stop working on cap-and-trade if his removed as chairman--is anyone's guess.

NY Times Analysis Of The Obama Doctrine (aka The Nobel Speech)

NY Times:

President Obama used his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday to defend the idea that some wars were necessary and just, remind the world of the burden the United States had borne in the fight against oppression and appeal for greater international efforts for peace.

“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflicts in our lifetimes,” Mr. Obama said, addressing the paradox of receiving an award for peace as commander in chief of a nation that is escalating the war in Afghanistan as it continues to fight in Iraq. “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

He delivered a mix of realism and idealism, implicitly criticizing both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as inadequately appreciating the dangers of the world, and President George W. Bush as too quick to set aside fundamental American values in pursuit of security. And he embraced the concept of American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States has a special role as a defender of liberty, even as he promoted multilateralism.

In that way, he continued a pattern evident throughout his public career of favoring pragmatism over absolutes.

The address — delivered at once to a European audience that has grown skeptical about American power and to a domestic audience watching closely to see how he would handle the acceptance of an award that even he acknowledged he did not yet deserve — represented one of the broadest declarations of his foreign policy doctrine. He said that others deserved the award more, noting that his “accomplishments are slight,” but he accepted the prize with a strong endorsement of America’s place in the world.

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this,” Mr. Obama said. “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

The Nobel lecture, a 36-minute address that the president and his aides completed on an overnight flight from Washington, carried echoes of several American presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Mr. Bush, but Mr. Obama singled out one above all: John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Obama cited Mr. Kennedy’s focus on “not a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.”

Mr. Obama called for more robust international sanctions against nations like Iran and North Korea that defy demands for them to curtail their nuclear programs.

Weeks after being criticized for not speaking out more publicly in defense of human rights while in China, he suggested that quiet diplomacy was sometimes the most productive path, even if it “lacks the satisfying purity of indignation.” ...

The Nobel chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, opened the ceremony by explaining how the committee came to its decision two months ago. He said Mr. Obama’s leadership had been a “call to action for all of us.” As he invoked the story of Dr. King, the winner of the prize in 1964, he turned to Mr. Obama, saying, “Dr. King’s dream has come true.” ...

Mr. Obama’s speech was sober, with his remarks only sparingly interrupted by applause. He was applauded when he renewed his pledge to ban torture and close the prison at the American base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend,” Mr. Obama said. “And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

To a European audience of academics, diplomats and Nobel laureates, he said there was “a deep ambivalence about military action today,” which he said he suspected was rooted in “a reflexive suspicion of America.” But he offered a forceful defense of the United States, saying the lessons of history should ease those suspicions. And he urged his audience to envision a hopeful future.

“Let us reach for the world that ought to be,” he said, “that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”

He did not dwell on the specifics of his announcement last week that he would send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. But that decision, which attracted scores of peaceful demonstrators here, set the framework that Mr. Obama returned to again and again as he sought to explain his policy as an extension of the post-World War II system that contained the cold war.

“A decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats,” Mr. Obama said. “The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsize rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.”

Obama's Post-Imperial Presidency

Newsweek's cover story this week by Fareed Zakiaria is excellent and well worth reading.  Here's an excerpt:

{12:30 UPDATE: the speech Obama gave at the Nobel ceremony is a must watch complement to what Zakaria is arguing here}

... Here lies the tension in Barack Obama's policy. He wants a clearer, more discriminating foreign policy, one that pares down the vast commitments and open-ended interventions of the Bush era, perhaps one that is more disciplined even than Bill Clinton's approach to the world. (On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly invoked George H.W. Bush as the president whose foreign policy he admired most.) But America is in the midst of a war that is not going well, and scaling back now would look like cutting and running. Obama is searching for a post-imperial policy in the midst of an imperial crisis. The qualified surge—send in troops to regain the momentum but then draw down—is his answer to this dilemma. This is an understandable compromise, and it could well work, but it pushes off a final decision about Afghanistan until the troop surge can improve the situation on the ground. Eighteen months from now, Obama will have to answer the core question: is a stable and well-functioning Afghanistan worth a large and continuing American ground presence, or can American interests be secured at much lower cost?

This first year of his presidency has been a window into Barack Obama's world view. Most presidents, once they get hold of the bully pulpit, cannot resist the temptation to become Winston Churchill. They gravitate to grand rhetoric about freedom and tyranny, and embrace the moral drama of their role as leaders of the free world. Even the elder Bush, a pragmatist if there ever was one, lapsed into dreamy language about "a new world order" once he stood in front of the United Nations. Not Obama. He has been cool and calculating, whether dealing with Russia, Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan. A great orator, he has, in this arena, kept his eloquence in check. Obama is a realist, by temperament, learning, and instinct. More than any president since Richard Nixon, he has focused on defining American interests carefully, providing the resources to achieve them, and keeping his eyes on the prize.

In 1943 the columnist Walter Lippmann defined foreign policy as "bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." Only then could the United States achieve strategic stability abroad and domestic support at home. Consciously or not, President Obama was channeling Lippmann when he said, "As president I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests." In his speech he quoted only one person, a president of the opposite party, Dwight Eisenhower, who said of national-security challenges, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs." Obama added that "over the past several years, we have lost that balance." He is hoping to restore some equilibrium to American foreign policy.

"In the end," said the president last week, "our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms." He explained that America's economic and technological vigor underpinned its ability to play a world role. At a small lunch with a group of columnists (myself included) last week, he made clear that he did not want to run two wars. He seemed to be implying that these struggles—Iraq and Afghanistan—were not the crucial path to America's long-term security. He explained that challenges at home—economic growth, technological innovation, education reform—were at the heart of maintaining America's status as a superpower.

It is now clear that Obama is attempting something quite ambitious—to reorient American foreign policy to-ward something less extravagant and adversarial. That begins with narrowing the war on terror; scaling back the conflict with the Islamic world to those groups and countries that pose serious, direct threats to America; and reaching out to the rest. He has also tried to develop a better working relationship between America and other major powers like Russia and China, setting aside smaller issues in hopes of cooperating on bigger ones. This means departing from a bipartisan approach in which Washington's role was to direct the rest of the world, pushing regimes large and small to accept American ideas, and publicly chastising them when they refused. Obama is trying to break the dynamic that says that when an American president negotiates with the Chinese or Russians, he must return with rewards or concessions—or else he is guilty of appeasement ...

Ultimately, however, one hopes that President Obama will keep another lesson of Vietnam firmly in mind.

Obama's Successful Asian Trip--Though You Wouldn't Know It From The MSM

James Fallows has really taken the MSM to task for their inept coverage and analysis of Obama's Asian trip. Here's just one from Fallows to give you a sense:

When does an official part of the chattering class -- one of the weekend talkers, someone from the leading newspapers -- look back on these past two weeks in journalism's effort to represent reality and ask how the dominant narrative could have been so wrong, and wrong in a way that was easily noticeable at the time? Just curious. The guiding motto for the inquiry should be the deathless subhead on Tish Durkin's article: "Even through a veil of censorship and propaganda, the Chinese people managed a clearer view of Obama's visit than the US media did."

Andrew Sullivan provides a nice summary of what Fallows has been writing:

You won't find the results or analysis in the MSM which is why we have Jim Fallows at the Atlantic. If you did not read his brilliant dismemberment of lazy MSM reporting during the Asian tour, you can reprise the best here, here, here, here, here and here. If you haven't come away from this series of posts without a deeper and much better understanding of what Obma moved forward on this trip, then by all means return to watching cable news. But let's just look at the more recent headlines:

Item One:

Item Two:

Item Three:

President Obama's "most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far"

Wash Post:

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don't have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

Under the policy, which is being phased in over the coming months, none of the more than 13,000 lobbyists in Washington would be able to hold seats on the committees, which advise agencies on trade rules, troop levels, environmental regulations, consumer protections and thousands of other government policies.

"Some folks have developed a comfortable Beltway perch sitting on these boards while at the same time working as lobbyists to influence the government," said White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen, who disclosed the policy in a September blog posting on the White House Web site. "That is just the kind of special interest access that the president objects to."

But lobbyists and many of the businesses they represent say K Street is being unfairly demonized by a White House intent on scoring political points with scandal-weary voters. They warn that the latest policy will severely handicap federal regulators, who rely heavily on advisory boards for technical advice and to serve as liaisons between government and industry ...

According to the most recent estimates from the General Services Administration, 52 government agencies use 915 advisory committees organized under the law, with a total membership of more than 60,000. Other estimates put the figure at about 1,000 panels. Federal officials say they do not know how many panel members are lobbyists.

Most committee members receive no pay for their participation. They often are urged to take part by companies, trade groups or advocacy organizations that hope to sway government decisions to their advantage. While their operations vary, the panels tend to hold open meetings and issue reports and recommendations, and they often wield significant influence with policymakers because of their expertise in arcane subjects, from nuclear plant safety to wild burro management.

Administration lawyers determined that they couldn't ban lobbyists from advisory committees directly because most of the panels are overseen by individual agencies rather than the White House; so Eisen encouraged -- rather than ordered -- the prohibition. Nonetheless, administration officials said, most Cabinet secretaries have implemented the recommendation, usually by barring renewals or new appointments for lobbyists.

Lobbyists up in arms

The reaction from the lobbying community has been swift and overwhelmingly negative. Some of the loudest criticism has come from the Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITACs), a collection of more than a dozen panels that provide policy advice and technical assistance to the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative ...

The panel on automotive equipment and capital goods, for example, stands to lose at least seven of its two dozen members, including lobbyists for the National Association of Manufacturers and the auto supplier Delphi, when the committee is reconstituted early next year ...

Administration officials remain sanguine, saying the criticism is overblown and arguing that top corporate officers are free to sit on advisory panels as long as they aren't lobbyists. Eisen, in a response letter to the ITAC leaders last month, wrote that "arguments that only lobbyists can bring requisite experience to provide wise counsel . . . are unconvincing on their face."

And though lobbyists are unhappy, some good-government advocates say the policy is sound.

"You may lose a lot of expertise, but these people are also paid to have a point of view; they have an agenda," said Mary Boyle, a vice president at Common Cause. "We support what the administration is doing to get deep-seated special interests out of the business of running our government, so this seems like a step in the right direction."

How's Obama Doing?

Joe Klein thinks it's too early to tell (me too):

Over the past few weeks, Barack Obama has been criticized for the following: He didn't go to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the Wall's coming down. He didn't make a forceful enough statement on the 30th anniversary of the U.S. diplomats' being taken hostage in Iran. He didn't show sufficient mournfulness, at first, when the Fort Hood shootings took place, and he was namby-pamby about the possibility that the shootings were an act of jihad. He has spent too little time focusing on unemployment. He bowed too deeply before the Japanese Emperor. He allowed the Chinese to block the broadcast of his Shanghai town-hall meeting. He allowed the Chinese President to bar questions at their joint press conference ... He didn't come back with any diplomatic victories from Asia. He allowed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters to be tried in the U.S. criminal-justice system rather than by the military. He has dithered too long on Afghanistan. He has devoted too much attention to — and given congressional Democrats too much control over — health care reform, an issue that is peripheral to a majority of Americans.

And all this has led to a dangerous slippage in the polls, it is said, a sense that his presidential authority is ebbing. 

As a fully licensed pundit, I have the authority to weigh in here ... but I demur. Oh, I could sling opinions about every one of the events cited above — some were unfortunate — but it would matter only if I could discern a pattern that illuminates Obama's presidency. The most obvious pattern, however, is the media's tendency to get overwrought about almost anything.

Why, for example, is the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall demolition so crucial that it requires a President's presence? Which recent U.S. President has gotten the Chinese to agree to anything big? (In fact, Obama has secured significant diplomatic cooperation from the Chinese on North Korea, Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Was his deep bow indicative of anything other than his physical fitness? ...

Stepping back a bit, I do see a metapattern that extends over the 40 years since Richard Nixon's Southern strategy began the drift toward more ideological political parties: Democrats have tough first years in the presidency. Of the past seven Presidents, the two Bushes rank at the top in popularity after one year, while Obama and Bill Clinton rank at the bottom, with Jimmy Carter close by. There is a reason for that. Democrats come to office eager to govern the heck out of the country. They take on impossible issues, like budget-balancing and health care reform. They run into roadblocks — from their own unruly ranks as well as from Republicans. They get lost in the details. A tax cut is much easier to explain than a tax increase. A foreign policy based in bluster — railing against an "axis of evil" — is easier to sell than a foreign policy based in nuance. Of course, external events count a lot: the ratings of Bushes I and II were bolstered, respectively, by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the flattening of the World Trade Center. Reagan's rating — 53% and headed south — was dampened by a deepening recession. 

So it is way too early to make pronouncements on Obama's fate. One pattern that can be limned from the recent overseas controversies is that this President has a tendency to err in the direction of respect toward other countries. This is a witting reaction to the Bush Administration's tendency to diss our allies and insult — or invade — our enemies. It is a long game, which will yield results, or not, over time. After a first year spent demonstrating a new comity, Obama has gained the global credibility to get tough — on Iran, for example — in his second year. But the real evaluation of Obama's debut must wait for the results of the two biggest problems he's tackling: his decision on Afghanistan and the congressional attempt to pass health care reform. And even here, it will be difficult to render judgment immediately — as difficult as it was to judge Clinton's decision to spend his political capital on deficit reduction in his 1993 economic plan, a triumph that didn't become apparent for nearly five years.

Obama's Decision Making Style Now Clear: Head Over Gut

Wash Post:

President George W. Bush once boasted, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, "You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions."

Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

"He's establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration," says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was "cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive."

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: "He's not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn't go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable." Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one."

But to his critics, Obama's prolonged Afghanistan review suggests weakness rather than wisdom. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney lobbed the "dithering" accusation last month. Then last week, former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) said on his radio show that Obama has waited so long to decide on an Afghanistan strategy that the war is now lost. "The president does not have the will and determination to do what's necessary to win it. His heart's not in it, and never has been," Thompson said.

Obama's style has been attacked from his left flank as well. Liberals have zinged him as being too cautious, too much of a compromiser. Some of his supporters would like to see him show more fire in the belly and recapture the energy that propelled him to victory last year.

"I think the Obama we've seen as president is a very different Obama than we saw during the campaign. He doesn't seem to be connected, he doesn't seem to have the passion, he doesn't seem to be conveying the grand and inspiring vision," says the progressive historian Allan Lichtman of American University. "If you want to be a transformational president, you've got to take the risks."

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. "They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn't happen," he says. "People were comparing the candidate to Abraham Lincoln before he served a day of his presidency. Nobody can live up to that."...

Obama's Approach Goes Against The American Grain For Immediate Gratification

NY Times:

President Obama’s scramble for a health care overhaul, like his dash across Asia last week, obscures an irony of his first year in office. As he tries to effect his agenda, the politician who campaigned on “the fierce urgency of now” plays for time to demonstrate the benefits of policies that, if they work, will not work quickly.

Mr. Obama, backed by some independent economists, believes that his stimulus plan has helped pull the economy into recovery. But he is at least months away from being able to make that case by pointing to a decline in joblessness.

Mr. Obama returned from Asia to lobby Congress on his health policy goals, and won a significant preliminary victory in the Senate over the weekend. Many changes would not even be in place until 2013 — including such popular provisions as subsidies for buying coverage and prohibitions against insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

His initiative to curb global warming by limiting carbon emissions may raise energy costs long before Americans perceive environmental or economic benefits, if they ever do. The most demonstrable near-term result of his forthcoming Afghanistan strategy will be more troops for an unpopular war.

In Asia, Mr. Obama pushed to “rebalance” the world economy through policy shifts in Beijing that he hoped would benefit Americans via more exports to China. The world’s oldest continuous major civilization showed no sign of a quick pivot.

The president’s challenge is pursuing far-reaching changes in a political and media culture centered on short-term consequences. He has disdained the values of the “24-hour news cycle” and vowed to ignore day-to-day fluctuations in polls, financial markets and cable-TV chatter.

“I’ve got to be looking at the horizon,” Mr. Obama said in a January interview. That becomes harder to afford with an approaching election ...

White House aides bristled at news media reviews suggesting Mr. Obama had failed to secure diplomatic victories in China. “This isn’t an immediate gratification business,” said David Axelrod, the presidential adviser.

But midterm elections arrive in 11 months. For Congressional Democrats — facing politically risky votes on Mr. Obama’s health care, energy, budget and immigration initiatives — the horizon is approaching rapidly.

For their sake and its own, Team Obama is not ignoring that reality.

A White House “jobs summit” will explore near-term steps to accelerate job creation, even though the administration is loath to widen the budget deficit and additional spending may not reduce unemployment rapidly anyway.

To ensure that voters see immediate benefits from health legislation, Democrats have included quick-trigger provisions to bar insurers from putting lifetime caps on benefits and to help expensive-to-cover patients buy insurance through government “high-risk pools.” Weeks before visiting Beijing, Mr. Obama nodded to the anxieties of American workers by imposing tariffs on Chinese tires.

Mr. Obama enjoys thicker political insulation than Democrats in Congress; polls show that voters like him personally, and he does not face re-election until 2012. But he feels the pressures of his strategy, nonetheless.

Before returning to Washington, he took solace in the timelessness of the Great Wall. “It gives you a good perspective on a lot of the day-to-day things,” he mused. “They don’t amount to much in the scope of history.”

As Obama's Challenges Mount, He "clearly recognizes the constraints on his actions"

Wash Post:

President Obama retreated briefly to the serenity of Camp David this weekend, leaving behind seven days that showcased both the promise and the limits of his presidency.

The respite lasted fewer than 24 hours, and his return to the White House was marked by a victory for the ambitious agenda he has embraced. His allies in Congress had secured -- if only by a hair -- a historic milestone on the march toward comprehensive health-care reform.

"Moments like this are why they sent us here," Obama said, back in the Rose Garden Sunday afternoon. "To finally meet the challenges that Washington has put off for decades."

A year after his election, the health-care vote in the House was a reminder of the power that he still wields to shape the country's future, cajoling change that he promised as a candidate over the objections of a nearly unified GOP and a sharply divided party of his own.

But the victory came on the heels of sobering evidence that even a president as popular as he remains is subject to the shifting public mood, an economy struggling to recover and events that are beyond his direct control.

Obama clearly recognizes the constraints on his actions -- the narrow range of choices in Afghanistan, the shrunken group of political moderates that might have accelerated his agenda, the decades of policy prescriptions that would take years to unravel.

The president has hardly shied away from confronting those challenges. But the almost naively hopeful "Yes, we can!" spirit of his campaign is harder to see with the more realistic Barack Obama in the White House.

"Given the heated and often misleading rhetoric surrounding this legislation, I know that this was a courageous vote for many members of Congress," Obama said Sunday, a nod to the 39 Democrats who voted against him. "Now it falls on the United States Senate to take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line."

If he needed any reminder of how difficult that remains, the week began with a blunt message for his party from voters, who resoundingly rejected two Democratic candidates for governor and sent a shock through members of Congress who are up for reelection next year.

Turns Out, Transformational Elections Are A Lot Easier To Pull Off Than Transformational Presidencies

NY Times:

For a president elevated to power on the back of history, the tears and euphoria of Grant Park feel like a thousand years ago. It has been just one year, of course, since Barack Obama’s election, a year since that moment when supporters felt everything was possible amid lofty talk of “remaking this nation” and determined chants of “Yes, we can.”

Some White House aides are wistful for the days right after Mr. Obama won office, when everything seemed a lot simpler.

A year later, as a few smaller elections yielded a more critical judgment, the hope and hubris have given way to the daily grind of governance, the jammed meeting schedule waiting in the morning, the thick briefing books waiting at night, the thousand little compromises that come in between. The education of a president is complicated, and as Mr. Obama has spent the last 12 months learning more about wielding power, his country has learned more about him.

Given the enormousness of the crises he inherited and the scope of the economic package he pushed through in his early weeks in office, it might seem odd to suggest that the hardest and most defining choices are only now confronting Mr. Obama.

But as he reaches the endgame in his campaign to remake the health care system and determines whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan, he will have to decide how much he is willing to lead, how much of the political capital earned in Grant Park he will expend to push a nation outside of its comfort zone.

The tough calls could help fill in the emerging picture of just what kind of president Mr. Obama has become. So far, it is safe to say he is an activist with an appetite for transformative ideas even as he avoids defining them, or himself, too sharply.

He is a study in dichotomy, bold yet cautious, radical yet pragmatic, all depending on whose prism you use. He has discovered that the oratory that proved so powerful on the campaign trail does not as easily move votes on Capitol Hill or stir souls in the Kremlin. His faith in his ability to bring people together has foundered in a polarized capital, as has his interest in trying.

After tackling the deepest recession in generations, Mr. Obama now presides over an economy finally growing again but still bleeding jobs and piling on debt. He looks likely to get a health care program through, an achievement that has eluded presidents for decades, and yet none of the options for Afghanistan offer any guarantee of success. Then, beyond those issues loom Iran, climate change, Guantánamo Bay, immigration and financial regulations, among others.

“The central question that emerges after these months is can he make it all work?” said Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman who in recent years helped lead commissions on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Iraq war.

“These problems look simpler when you’re talking to an audience like that” in Grant Park in Chicago, Mr. Hamilton said. “But they’re much harder than that. I think he’s learned that governing is harder than campaigning, and I think he’s learned it with a vengeance.”

Thousands Rally Against "Big Government" And Separately For Health Reform

The Wash Post on the anti-government rally:

Tens of thousands of conservative protesters, many complaining that the nation is racing toward socialism, massed outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, angrily denouncing President Obama's health-care plan and other initiatives as threats to the Constitution.

The demonstrators are part of a loose-knit movement that is galvanizing anti-Obama sentiment across the country, stoking a populist dimension to the Republican Party, which has struggled to find its voice since the 2008 elections.

With Democrats in control of Congress, battling the president legislatively has been difficult. But after a spring of anti-tax rallies and summer health-care protests proved to be effective, a growing number of GOP leaders are dropping their wariness and seeing the political possibilities of latching onto this freewheeling coalition. Others are cautious about embracing views that can be seen as extremist. [see Tough Line For The GOP To Walk: Identify With Protesters Without Becoming Identified With The Nut Cases] ...

The huge turnout indicated the growing frustration with Obama among conservative activists and showed that his nationally televised speech Wednesday did little to move his political opponents on health care.

Although it is unclear whether the demonstrators represent a large segment of voters or even of Republicans, Saturday's march illustrated that activists, some of whom are not enthusiastic about the GOP, have been galvanized.

The White House declined to comment on the demonstration, but Democrats said the rally and other protests in recent months represent a small minority of voters and will not slow Obama's proposals.

"There is a lot of intensity on the far right to defeat the president's agenda, but I am not sure that holding up signs that say we have to bury health reform with Senator Kennedy will go over well with moderates and independent voters," said Doug Thornell, an adviser to Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).

The NY Times on the pro health reform rally:

Thousands of roaring supporters turned out Saturday to rally behind President Obama’s call to overhaul the nation’s health care system, packing a basketball arena here as Mr. Obama warned that nearly half of all Americans under 65 could lose their insurance at some point during the next decade.

“It can happen to anyone,” the president said.

The rally, at the Target Center, was the first of what the White House said would be a series of similar events intended to whip up public support for a health overhaul. One of the biggest obstacles the president faces is winning support from middle-class workers who already have insurance, so he is stepping up his warnings that people could lose coverage at any time.

On a day when demonstrators crammed onto the west lawn of the Capitol to protest what they regard as Mr. Obama’s brand of big government, including his health plan, the images of screaming, cheering Obama supporters here provided a welcome visual counterpoint for the White House.

The White House estimated that 15,000 people attended the rally here; the applause was thunderous when the president bounded onto the stage, shirtsleeves rolled up, as he revived an old campaign rallying cry: “Are you fired up?”

The crowd roared back with another Obama favorite: “Yes we can!”

See the rest of the speech

A Full Throated Defense Of Liberalism

Rachel Maddow discusses the importance of how President Obama ended his address to Congress last night (watch him deliver it):

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy