While President Obama mingled with Florida Democrats at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Miami Thursday night, thousands of Tea Partiers stood across from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to protest "Tax Day." Mr. Obama admitted to his supporters that the anti-tax rallies "amused" him.
The president went over the laundry list of tax cuts instituted in Washington over the past year.
"In all, we passed 25 different tax cuts last year. And one thing we haven't done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- another promise that we kept," he told supporters at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. "So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes. You would think they would be saying thank you."
The president argued that America is on the road to recovery and headed in the right direction -- something an overwhelming number of Tea Partiers disagree with.
However, Mr. Obama submitted that "the true measure of our progress is the progress that the American people feel in their lives -- and there's still a lot of hurt out here."
He said that while he is doing everything he can to accelerate private-sector job creation in the short term, he is also trying to create a new foundation for the middle class. While some are warning that anger over administration policies will endanger some Democrats in the midterm elections, Mr. Obama said, "elections will take care of themselves" if politicians stay true to their principles and do what's right for the American people.
"One of the great things about running for president," Mr. Obama said, "is it gives you a little perspective because you realize that these things go in cycles, the mood of the media and how things get portrayed. And so you're like a genius for about a month and then you're an idiot for about six months. Then, you know, you're smart again for -- you're not as smart as you were, but you're a little smarter than they thought you were, then you're an idiot again."
People shouldn't focus on the day-to-day politics and polls, he said.
"What you've got to focus on is that true North, that lodestar, which is, are the things we're doing over the long term going to help not just this generation but the next generation? Is this going to make America stronger?," he said.
Ex-mentor: Sharpton is Obama's link to the streets
By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press Writer Verena Dobnik, Associated Press Writer Sat Apr 17, 8:33 pm ET
NEW YORK – The Rev. Al Sharpton is a "lightning rod" for President Barack Obama on inner city streets, Obama's former Harvard mentor and friend said Saturday at a forum in Harlem.
But Sharpton, who led the event, told The Associated Press that America's first black president "has to work both for us and for others," and that if Obama were to push a race-based agenda, "that would only organize the right against him."
Sharpton spoke on the last day of an annual conference organized by his National Action Network. Speakers included three members of Obama's Cabinet and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, as well as Charles Ogletree, the president's Harvard Law School professor, now a friend.
"Al Sharpton has become the lightning rod in moving Obama's agenda forward," Ogletree told the AP, describing Sharpton as a conduit between the disadvantaged and powerful leaders. "And he has access to both the streets and the suites, to make sure that the people who are voiceless, faceless and powerless finally have some say."
Standing at the back of a balcony overlooking Harlem's ornate First Corinthian Baptist Church, the 57-year-old lawyer said that some black Americans may be disappointed the president they helped elect isn't doing more for them.
"And President Obama expected to do a lot more," said Ogletree, referring to the challenges Obama faces in two wars and the struggling economy. Still, he predicted, the new health care law would affect uninsured black Americans more than any other segment of the population.
But clearly, Sharpton was at the center of this forum. Saturday, the front page of The Washington Post featured a photo of him with a headline that read: "Activist Al Sharpton takes on new role as administration ally."
Sharpton chuckled at the notion.
"I've been as much in this White House as I was in George (W.) Bush's — it's only when Bush invited me to the White House, it was him reaching out; when Obama invites me, all of a sudden, we're allies," Sharpton joked during a break, sitting in a pew on the altar that served as a high-tech stage.
Amid a heated national debate over whether black leaders should align themselves with the president, Sharpton has defended Obama against criticism from television host Tavis Smiley that "black folk are catching hell" and Obama should do more to help them.
Black Americans, Sharpton said, "need to solve our own problems."
Sharpton told the AP that he is working to expand his Harlem-based organization to 100 cities from the current 42, with about 200,000 members, "and to really deliver against unemployment that is disproportionate in the black community, and for health care and education reform."
The four-day conference, focusing on a 12-month plan of action for black leadership, brought together prominent figures from dozens of fields, tackling topics as diverse as finding jobs for men leaving prison and federal subsidies for black farmers.
Sharpton's "12-month action plan" to better life for black Americans measures its success by individual goal-setting — "every day, every week, every month," said Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia.
Nutter has a big goal: to reach and teach a half million adults in his city who are considered "low-literate," which means they can read, technically, but have difficulty understanding a newspaper article or even a utility bill.
"It is impossible for parents to help their children if they can't read," said Nutter, who leads the largest American city with a black mayor. "It is almost impossible to lift yourself out of poverty if you can't function at a high enough level."
As President Obama contemplates his first year in office, he might be forgiven for recalling the words of Queen Elizabeth II, looking back on a year rife with royal scandal: an annus horribilus, she called it, and you don't need six years of Latin to translate her sentiments.
Mr. Obama has suffered the steepest decline in job approval of any first year president since they started keeping such data: in most surveys, he is barely at, or under fifty per cent. His health-care plan, the signature effort of his first year in office, has grown steadily less popular and its survival, as one Congressional Democrat put it, "Hangs by a thread."
It may, in fact, be doomed on the precise one-year anniversary of his Inaugural, if Massachusetts voters send a Republican to the U.S. Senate today to fill the seat held for nearly half a century, by Edward Kennedy, the patron saint of liberal health care.
The coming year does not appear to hold out hope for better times: the jobless rate is likely to remain at or above ten percent, and the real unemployment rate -- which includes those who've given up looking and those working part-time who want full time jobs -- is at 17 percent. And historically, no president in modern times has significantly improved his approval numbers in his second year -- a gloomy atmosphere in which to move into midterm elections.
What's happened: "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan," John Kennedy famously said -- but political trouble also has a thousand diagnosticians, each offering (sometimes contradictory) notions.
One of the most commonly heard refrains -- one that makes a lot of sense -- is the broad appeal that was Mr. Obama's political strength became a governing liability. As he himself once said, he was a vessel into which people poured their own political desires. He was the tribune of progressivism, the man to redeem the promise of Robert Kennedy. No, he was the post-conflict president, the candidate who promised to "turn the page" on the wearisome conflicts of the past.
Because so many people expected Mr. Obama to do so many different, conflicting things, he could not possibly hold those who voted for him together. More important, he did not come to office with a strong sense of where he was going.
To take the most obvious contrast, when President Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, it was of a piece with who he was: a staunch conservative, suspicious of the power of public employee labor unions, determined to strike back hard on an organizing explicitly violating federal law. Like him or not, no one could say, "wait a minute! This is not the guy we thought he was!"
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
When Obama put in power a number of figures who had played significant roles in the financial meltdown, and when Wall Street emerged from the disaster apparently richer than ever, Mr. Obama's supporters on the Left were dismayed. When he presided, however necessarily, over stimulus programs that will add trillions to the national debt, his less liberal backers saw it as a lurch to the Left. And while he campaigned on health care, the twists and turns of the details -- an individual mandate he'd opposed on the stump, a tax on high-cost health care plans that could the middle-class -- wound up producing far more doubt than hope.
I'd like to suggest other explanations for the president's difficulties. One we'll call, for want of a better term, is "The Lack Of Fear Factor."
Put bluntly, who's afraid of Barack Obama? Who in the political arena frets over what might happen if he or she crosses the president? After the 2008 election, much was written about Mr. Obama's massive social network -- the millions or people tied to him through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail -- ready to be mobilized on behalf of his agenda.
If there is any evidence that this army, now under the "Organizing for America" umbrella, has had any impact on any wavering Democrat, it's harder to find than those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Congressional Democrats can threaten to scuttle health care if their parochial concerns aren't met; Congressional Republicans can refuse any accommodation with the president; and there is no political price to be paid.
Ronald Reagan used to say of the California legislature, and then of the Congress, "if they can't see the light, maybe they'll feel the heat." But there seems to be no heat that can move a wary member of Congress to Mr. Obama's side in his key battles. (We'll have a test of this hypothesis when and if the president tries to move his environmental agenda through the Congress this year; labor and industry alike may well push back on new regulations; who, if anyone, will be pushing for Mr. Obama's ideas?)
Then there's the false interpretation given to the electoral results of 2008. We heard much about the big Democratic majorities in the House, and about the prospects of a "filibuster proof" Senate once Al Franken won the Minnesota seat. But that notion confuses the United States with a parliamentary system of government like Britain's, where virtually every member of the majority is expected to vote for the prime minister's program.
Here, members of the House, and especially members of the Senate, are perfectly prepared to defy their president -- at least, Democrats are. (Recall that in 1993, with big majorities in both houses, President Clinton got his budget through by one vote in each chamber). And now that virtually every key piece of legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, Mr. Obama had no margin of error from the get-go.
Finally, there's this almost "un-American" idea: that some of that Mr. Obama faced was simply not susceptible to any good answer. Given that the financial meltdown was moving at warp speed when he took office, Mr. Obama's options were….what?
Everyone, including every decision-maker in the Bush Administration, said that without a huge influx of money, hundreds of billions of dollars worth, the financial system would collapse. That decision meant that a huge federal deficit was inevitable. Given that, apparently inevitable outpouring, nothing that followed would be without real pain: turn off the tap and you risk another recession, maybe a depression. Raise taxes and economic activity slows; print money and the ugly specter of inflation looms.
To put it in stark terms, it just may be that barnyard full of chickens, some forty years' worth, are coming home to roost, bringing with them grim times.
As the 2008 election was nearing its end, I suggested that by Inauguration Day, the victor might be demanding a recount. That was a joke. On this anniversary, maybe not so much.
'Blame Bush' Strategy Wears Thin as Obama Enters Second Year
FOXNews.com
Whether it's the economy, national security or America's reputation abroad, President Obama and his top advisers have been pinning the blame on the prior administration, directly or obliquely, ever since Obama's inauguration a full year ago -- including at least seven times since last Tuesday's upset in the Massachusetts Senate election.
President Obama listens to former President George W. Bush in the Rose Garden of the White House Jan. 16. (Reuters Photo)
One year into his administration, President Obama might want to consider dropping the "blame Bush" page from his playbook.
Whether it's the economy, national security or America's reputation abroad, the president and his top advisers have been pinning the blame on the prior administration, directly or obliquely, ever since Obama's inauguration a full year ago. They've done so, in fact, at least seven times since last Tuesday's stunning upset in the Massachusetts Senate election.
While the loss of the late Ted Kennedy's longtime seat forced Democrats to acknowledge shortcomings in persuading Americans to support their health care reform plan, it didn't stop them from continuing to invoke the failings of the George W. Bush administration -- though Obama had just completed his first year in office.
Some Republicans, and even some Democrats, say it's time to choose a different strategy in selling and defending the Obama agenda, noting that the anti-Bush demographic just isn't as energized now as it was when Bush was in office.
"What you have the last two cycles is the angry voters, the ones most motivated to turn out, were Democrats, who did not like Bush. They didn't like his policies ... You saw it, what we call the surge voters," said former Rep. Tom Davis, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
"Bush is gone now -- they're all asleep," Davis said.
But Obama appears to be trying to wake them up.
In the first presidential postmortem on the Massachusetts race last week, Obama invoked Bush right away in an interview with ABC News.
"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," Obama said. "People are angry, and they're frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."
He and his top staff referenced the Bush years later in the week as they unveiled new proposals for regulating Wall Street. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Thursday said the country can't go without stiff financial regulation, or else "we get into the same type of situation that we found ourselves in in September of 2008."
Obama, in a Saturday statement backing the creation of a deficit-tackling commission, referred to the "economic downturn we inherited," the "years of failing to pay for new policies," and the "trillions of dollars in deficits" the Bush administration created.
Those themes were bundled up on the Sunday morning talk shows when top advisers took to the airwaves with a coordinated Bush-centered message in discussing the administration's economic approach.
"What we inherited when we walked in the door was an economic situation that was far worse than anybody ever knew," Gibbs said on "Fox News Sunday." "The hole we inherit and the hole that we have to fill is very, very deep."
Senior Adviser David Axelrod, on CNN's State of the Union" and ABC News' "This Week," stressed the huge deficit Obama inherited from Bush.
"When the president walked in the door, he was handed the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a financial crisis that held out the prospect of the collapse of the financial system and a fiscal crisis," Axelrod said on "This Week." "President Clinton left a $237 billion surplus; President Obama received a $1.3 trillion deficit."
Obama contributed to that deficit with his $787 billion stimulus package and other programs, but his former campaign manager David Plouffe nevertheless urged his party not to "accept any lectures on spending" from the GOP.
Plouffe, who is signing on as a White House political adviser, wrote in a Washington Post column Sunday that "Republicans' fiscal irresponsibility has never been matched in our country's history."
But while the Bush administration did in fact turn a projected Clinton-era surplus into a deficit, Obama has not taken any major steps to rein in the spending. He signed pork-filled omnibus packages and is pursuing another jobs-creation bill.
Republican strategist Andrea Tantaros said Monday that Democrats should not "run against George Bush."
"This is about a very distracted, unfocused president," she said.
Politico.com reported that some Democratic strategists are also starting to reconsider that rhetorical tack -- given that efforts by Democrats to link their GOP opponents to Bush failed in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, and the Massachusetts Senate race.
"What a stupid strategy that was," former Obama campaign aide Steve Hildebrand told Politico.com.
White House caught in Dem crossfire By: Glenn Thrush and Jake Sherman and Lisa Lerer January 22, 2010 04:45 AM EST
Congressional Democrats — stunned out of silence by Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts — say they’re done swallowing their anger with President Barack Obama and ready to go public with their gripes.
If the sentiment isn’t quite heads-must-roll, it’s getting there.
Hill Democrats are demanding that Obama’s brain trust — especially senior adviser David Axelrod and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — shelve their grand legislative ambitions to focus on the economic issues that will determine the fates of shaky Democratic majorities in both houses.
And they want the White House to step up — quickly — to help shape the party’s message and steer it through the wreckage of health care reform.
“The administration has got to be in the forefront now, instead of throwing some meat on the track and seeing what the House can work out,” said New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, expressing the frustrations also voiced by about two dozen Democratic elected officials and aides interviewed by POLITICO.
“I haven’t seen Rahm Emanuel except on television. We used to see him a lot; I’d like him to come out from behind his desk and meet with the common folk,” added Pascrell.
“What happened was they got so caught up in all these other issues like health care and cap and trade and all this other stuff, that because of that they maybe didn’t put enough focus on the economy,” said Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, a moderate who represents a conservative, rural district hard-hit by the economic crisis.
The White House would not comment for this story.
Administration officials say they get it — with Axelrod recently admitting that Obama’s team is recalibrating and refocusing on the economy. Emanuel, for his part, is now pushing for a stripped-down health care bill that could be passed within a few weeks and force Republicans, for a change, to take a few tough votes.
That may mollify some Democratic moderates, but it will further infuriate the liberals, who insist that the lesson of Massachusetts is that Obama has come on too weak, not too strong. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman captured the left’s winter of discontent Thursday with a blog post in which he wrote that he’s “pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.”
Despite the criticism, Obama is still popular on the Hill, and most Democrats acknowledge the enormity of the problems he faced when he took office.
“At this point, the challenge that they have had, and we have had, is that there were so many problems that were dumped in their lap when they took over,” said Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow. “They have been moving quickly on a hundred different points, so I think that’s their biggest challenge.”
But the Brown loss has exposed deep resentment about Obama’s all-fronts legislative strategy, his hands-off approach to health care reform for much of the year, the actions of his economic team — especially Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — and his Afghanistan escalation.
But more than anything else, there’s a sense that the party’s greatest communicator isn’t conveying to voters that he understands their worries about the economy.
And that could swamp all Democratic boats, even those carrying incumbents who previously felt they were secure.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who supported Obama’s $787 billion stimulus a year ago, says the president needs to be much more forceful about how, where and why the money was spent if Democrats are going to get credit for attacking the recession in an era of double-digit unemployment.
“I think the administration needs to be much more aggressive, and hopefully the president will outline some of this in his State of the Union address,” she said. “We very much need leadership from the executive on this. You can’t just put money out there — even if we had it to put it out there — unless it’s going to produce an actual new job.”
Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy — whose father’s seat was captured Tuesday night by a Republican who opposes the health care reform bill — says Obama is still popular but needs to harness his “fierce urgency of now” when it comes to improving the economy.
“We’ve done a damn good job at righting this ship. And now it’s starting to move in the right direction. Now what happened?” he said. “We lost the sense of urgency that we’re still doing it every single day, because this isn’t over yet.”
The problem, from the perspective of the White House, is that fractious Democrats provide all the political direction of a nine-needled compass — and often send contradictory messages about how they want him to proceed.
In the House alone, there are nearly as many Democratic positions on health care as there are Democrats, with liberals goading Obama to double-down on reform and ram through a bill using the Senate’s controversial 51-vote “reconciliation” process.
Moderates, embodied by Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a fiscal hawk, and New York Rep. Eliot Engel, are urging Obama to dispense with the issue as soon as possible before he marches the party off a cliff.
“I think that an effective majority is one that advocates and listens,” Engel said. “I’ve done a lot of advocating; now I’m listening. If the people say, ‘Wait, slow down, you’re going a little bit too fast,’ then we need to slow down.”
At the moment, the whole cacophonous crew seems to be united by the fear that no one is safe if a tea party-backed Republican can win the Senate seat the late Ted Kennedy held for nearly 50 years.
On the day after Brown’s win, panicky House Democrats convened in the Capitol to discuss post-Massachusetts strategy, with some in attendance complaining about what they believed to be continued White House disengagement.
“We all pretty much knew for sure we were going to lose Massachusetts,” one person in attendance told POLITICO on Wednesday. “And yet, last night and this morning, we had absolutely no message guidance from the White House, [the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] or [the Democratic National Committee]. There was no leadership. ... So all of the members today are just opining about what they think it means and whether we should move forward on health care.”
Despite the criticism, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs seemed determined to stay the hands-off course. Gibbs told reporters Thursday that, after Massachusetts, the president wants to let “the dust settle” and look “for the best path forward.”
But House Democrats, already terrified by the wholesale defection of independents to the GOP in Massachusetts, were infuriated when a New York Times article, apparently citing an administration source, suggested Speaker Nancy Pelosi could pass an unamended version of the Senate’s health reform bill.
“The sense was that the Obama folks were trying to say it was inevitable when it wasn’t,” said New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, a supporter of the public option who has clashed with the White House repeatedly about the issue.
“It wasn’t that they were bullying us, but it reinforced the idea that they were a little tone-deaf to what the reality inside the House and Senate really were,” Weiner added.
Meredith Shiner, Kasie Hunt and John Bresnahan contributed to this report.
Obama: Twelve months on, the star falls back to earth
Last year he could do no wrong. Now he is on the stump in a desperate bid to avert a Republican fightback. David Usborne reports
Thursday, 29 October 2009
If there was a degree of déjà vu for fans of Barack Obama crammed inside a university athletic arena in Hackensack, New Jersey, the other evening, it was entirely deliberate. They only had to close their eyes and listen to the deafening chants of "Yes We Can" to imagine they had been transported back to the heady days of a year ago when their candidate was on the verge of seizing the White House and making history.
Even with open eyes they could have felt some of that old frisson. Event organisers wandered the hall wearing shirts proclaiming "Yes We Can 2.0", as if they were selling the latest Windows update, and a giant banner stage-right gave top billing to Obama. The name beneath his, Corzine, might almost have been an afterthought.
This was not a re-election rally for Mr Obama – not yet, please – but for Jon Corzine, the former boss of Goldman Sachs and now governor of New Jersey. He had invited the president to speak because, when Jersey voters go to the polls next Tuesday – New Jersey and Virginia are the only states where governorships are in play this year – it is not at all clear that they won't ditch him in favour of his Republican opponent, Chris Christie. The latest polls say it's too close to call.
That's better than in the summer when Christie had a double-digit lead. But, in the final stretch, Corzine needs to remind Democrats of the fervour of 12 months ago when they overwhelmingly chose Obama over John McCain. "One more time", the disco beat booms before the two men arrive on stage in front of a crowd of about 3,000 eager supporters. "One more time. We're going to celebrate. Oh yeah. Alright." Once at the microphone, Corzine promises to be brief. "I know who you came to see," he says.
Obama does what is required of him with his usual eloquence, speaking for 30 minutes. He looks happy to be campaigning again, relieved of Oval Office responsibilities for an afternoon, his stump oratory uncaged. But selflessness and politics do not go together. He is in New Jersey because what happens here next week will matter to him. This is an off-year for congressional races, so, rightly or wrongly, the outcome of these two gubernatorial races will be viewed by some as a first referendum on his presidency.
The President has already suffered a slow, but steady, decline in his approval ratings, so it cheers no one in the White House that the outcome in Jersey is so uncertain. In Virginia, where the President campaigned this week, the outlook is worse with most polls suggesting that the Democrat candidate, Creigh Deeds, will be walloped by his Republican rival, Bob McDonnell.
If Republicans seize the governors' mansions in both states, the embarrassment will be acute. That is just what happened in both New Jersey and Virginia back in 1993 before the Republicans seized control of the US Congress the following year, dealing a crippling blow to the newly minted Democratic president of the time, Bill Clinton.
But even losing one of them next week will scratch the sheen of President Obama, who seems, one year on from his election, to be hovering in the view of most Americans between competent and fumbling, notwithstanding the high esteem in which he is still held abroad and, of course, in the minds of the Nobel committee.
What is certain is that the almost-mad expectations placed on Obama that unusually warm night in Chicago's Grant Park when he delivered his victory speech last November, have given way now to a general unease about his performance in office. For sure, he has mostly avoided calamity. Not getting the Olympics for Chicago doesn't count. Nor is his administration in disarray or anything close to it. (Mr Clinton had barely arrived in office before he was instantly engulfed in mini-scandals.) But the Obama magic that should be working to protect Democrats like Corzine and Deeds seems mostly to have leaked away.
New Jersey is a state that naturally belongs in the Democratic column. Moreover, since 1947, only two Jersey governors have failed to win a second term. But Corzine is unpopular in the state, thwacked by raising property taxes and the effects of the economic recession. "The New Jersey governor's race is going down to the wire," predicted the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Virginia had been a red state – as far as the presidency was concerned – since 1964, but it turned blue for Obama and Democrats hailed it as a sign that their party was breaking the virtual lock that Republicans had long enjoyed on the South. Keep Virginia, they said, and the Democrats will keep the White House.
The plight of Deeds – 11 points down according to a recent poll in the Washington Post – is being interpreted as a measure of how far the pendulum is already tracking back to the Republicans in that state, and probably elsewhere. Just as Mr Obama's victory was powered in part by his success in winning over independents, it is now the independents who are feeling disappointed and fleeing back to the other side.
"This is a state that Obama won by seven points," said Nick Ayres, executive director of the Republican Governors Association. "They don't want this to be their Olympics, Part II."
McDonnell, the Republican candidate, will be the first to put the blame on the President if he wins the Virginia race. "There are blocs of independent voters that are being driven over because they are very concerned about these federal policies: its spending and the new intrusions into the free enterprise system," he said. "Those voters probably leaned toward President Obama in the last cycle. But when voters see specifics... I think some bloc of voters said: 'This is not the change we thought we were getting'."
Back in Hackensack, Carrie Wilkins, a 44-year-old hairstylist, is exasperated by the bad press the President has been getting. "He has a very tough job," she says, arriving for the Corzine event with her 14-year-old son, Troy, whom she has taken out of school specially. "I don't think he has had a chance to do anything yet. He is trying, but it was such a mess when he came in. I kind of feel bad for him, actually."
Indeed, the attacks on Obama have become fiercer. Wisely, or otherwise, the White House has called out Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, saying that it has abandoned all pretence of objectivity in the daily ear-boxing it gives Barack. Saturday Night Live, which last year so brilliantly skewered Sarah Palin, is getting sharper in its weekly skits on Obama. Meanwhile, the usual media stars of the conservative right, notably Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, continue to grow their Obama-bashing brands. The Nobel Prize was a gift to them from heaven.
They know what they think, and would probably think it whatever the president did. A broader picture, and a much prettier one, is provided by the polls. According to the Real Clear Politics poll of polls, the President's approval rating is still hovering above 50 per cent, but only just. Sometimes we forget, however, to measure Mr Obama against his opponents. Little fuss was made over a poll by CNN last week, which showed the Republican Party with just 36 per cent approval – the lowest it has been in a decade.
A more reliable observer of the scene may be Troy, the schoolboy. Asked if he thought Obama had done a good job so far, he paused for a second and then delivered a rolling shrug of the shoulders. "I guess so." Meaning he, like many Americans, is not quite sure yet.
A lot of things are in the pending tray in Washington. Pending is the economic recovery, for instance. While the signs of recovery seem to multiply almost daily, so do the warnings that this will be a largely jobless one, at least for the time being. The breaking of the 10,000 mark on the Dow Jones Industrial Average this month looks encouraging to economists, but it is galling to the almost one-in-ten Americans out of work.
Pending also is the grinding effort on Capitol Hill to pass healthcare reform. This has been much more of a struggle than the Obama team – many of whom came to Washington with scant experience of its labyrinthine ways – ever expected. The success or failure of the healthcare push could change the perception of Obama profoundly. While momentum towards a deal seems to be building at last, a wise person would not bet on its passing just yet.
The debate has also exposed what some now see as a naivety in Obama's candidature: his dream of creating a new spirit of bi-partisanship in Washington has hardly come to pass. So far, only one Republican has stepped forward to support just one of the versions of healthcare reform to have surfaced from five congressional committees.
Healthcare is one of several areas where Obama has displayed characteristics that his supporters call patience and a preference for conciliation, but which others brand as dithering and betraying an absence of the kind of toughness that was typically personified by Lyndon B Johnson, 45 years ago. "Healthcare could be his hammer," argues Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "If he gets it, he will have proven that his style works, that you don't have to be an in-your-face LBJ type to get significant healthcare reform. But, if it falls apart or he gets a tiny piece of it, then there will be criticism that he is ineffective and not tough enough."
The narrative of a President who is too pliable has been growing in volume since the summer, much to the chagrin of the White House. Nor is it coming only from the right. There are those on the left who feel let down by Obama and are infuriated by his "political pragmatism". They object, for instance, when he refuses to push aggressively for the so-called "public option" to compete with private insurers in a new healthcare system, or when he declines to meet with the Dalai Lama in Washington because his agenda with China is more important to him. They even don't like it when he brushes off a member of Congress openly calling him a liar as being unimportant.
That's the way Obama is, but some contend it is unhelpful. "Obama has created an atmosphere of no fear," Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and political biographer, told the National Journal. "Nobody is really worried about the revenge of Barack Obama, because he is not a vengeful man. That's what we love about him; he is so high-minded, and a conciliatory guy, and he tries to govern with a sense of consensus – all noble goals, but they don't get you very far in this Washington knifing environment."
As Obama takes his time deciding whether to send as many as 40,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, he has again come in for attack, not least from Dick Cheney, who brooded in the shadows while in power but prefers daylight in opposition. "What ... Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public," Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, shot back. "We've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously."
The truth is that when Obama has played it tough, it has usually been in ways almost designed to infuriate the conservatives who call him lily-livered. He fired the CEO of General Motors earlier his year before bailing the company out and, just last week, his administration took extraordinary steps to force banks and lending institutions to scale back previously outrageous pay deals for their executives. Both things were bold and in-your-face. But they also represent severe cases of interfering in the private market, which the right abhors.
Obama knows he is still on probation. In his speech in Hackensack, he asked the crowd "to cast aside the cynics and the sceptics and prove to all Americans that leaders who do what's right and who do what's hard will be rewarded and not rejected". It was meant as an appeal to Jersey voters to show mercy to Corzine and give him back his job. But, with the 3 November polls being seen by some as the first verdict on Obama's infant presidency, he might too have been asking for a little understanding for himself.
Dwindling fortunes: Obama's approval rating
12pts
The percentage drop in Obama's approval rating since he became president.
65,000
The number of US troops currently in Afghanistan. Obama is considering a request from his top general for another 40,000.
280
The number of US troops killed in Afghanistan since Obama's election victory.
$787bn
The size of the Obama adminstration's fiscal stimulus programme.
$2.5m
The amount Obama earned in royalties from the sale of his books last year.
3
The number of presidents, including Barack Obama, to win the Nobel Peace Prize while in office.
24
The number of rounds of golf played by President Obama this year.
Sotomayor Says White House Even Picked Out Her Clothes
Officials took over her fashion decisions, she says
Sotomayor described her grueling nomination process privately when she spoke to 1,800 alumni, students and faculty, the New .
State Sen. Ed Meyer attended the event and said Sotomayor became teary at times, but kept the crowd laughing.
The Yale Law School grad talked about shopping for clothes to wear to her acceptance ceremony, but government officials took over the fashion decisions. They told her to bring five suits and then recommended which one she should wear, Meyer said.
The whole vetting process was intrusive, she said, according to the Yale Daily News. The FBI even investigated a parking ticket she had received two years earlier.
New Haven is not only home to Sotomayor's alma mater, it is also home to one of the most controversial issues to come up during the justice's nomination process.
Sotomayor was on a three-judge appellate panel that took the city's side in a now-famous reverse discrimination suit that several New Haven firefighters filed. Sotomayor's panel took the city's side that too few minorities scored high and it would therefore be open to discrimination lawsuits.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, reversed the appellate court's ruling over the summer.
In addition to the Law School event, Sotomayor, the first Latina on the Supreme Court, also attended a luncheon, reception and the reunion dinner with about 50 guests.
She was escorted by the United States Supreme Court Police and requested that no members of the media attend the conversation with alumni, students and faculty, the Register reports.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC Connecticut
First Published: Oct 19, 2009 6:49 AM EDT
Obama urges people to serve their communities
Oct 16, 7:05 PM (ET)
By EILEEN SULLIVAN
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COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) - Calling public service "the essence of our liberty," President Barack Obama on Friday urged Americans to step up and volunteer in their communities.
Speaking at a community service forum in Texas, Obama said there's only so much government can do in tackling the nation's problems. He said government can build the best schools, but it can't run the PTA. It can buy the armed forces the best equipment, he said, but it can't give a home-cooked meal to a military family stretched thin.
"The need for action always exceeds the limits of government," Obama said. "While there's plenty that government can and must do ... there's a lot that government can't and shouldn't do and that's where active, engaged citizens come in."
The event was hosted by former President George H.W. Bush at Texas A&M University. Bush was the first president to create a permanent White House office dedicated to promoting volunteerism.
The forum was affiliated with the Points of Light Institute, which honors people and groups who participate in community service.
Bush first spoke of the "thousand points of light" in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican convention, using it as a metaphor for all the things Americans do, individually and in groups, to help fellow citizens. He created the Daily Point of Light Award in 1989 to honor volunteers. Friday's event honored the 20th anniversary of his volunteer movement.
In recognizing that initiative, Obama said Bush "didn't call for one blinding light to shine from Washington, but for a vast galaxy of people and institutions to solve problems in their own backyards."
The president said he's optimistic about the future, despite the recession and security threats, because young Americans today are more engaged in service activities than any generation in decades.
"In the end, service binds us to each other and to our community and to our country in a way that nothing else can," he said.
Obama, a Democrat, initiated a "United We Serve" call to service in June that culminated in a national day of service on the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"Our 44th president is absolutely right," Bush said as he was introducing Obama. "There isn't a more important time than now for us all to get involved."
Obama cited Bush's long record of public service, which began as a young fighter pilot in World War II. He said Bush's "life of service is an inspiration to all of us."
Several hundred protesters gathered outside the auditorium where Bush and Obama spoke. Bush had said the event was not political, but the protesters gave speeches criticizing Obama's efforts to revamp health care. Many of the protesters were from anti-tax Tea Party groups that bused in members from around the state.
Obama Absent From Virginia Governor’s Race as Democrat Trails
By Heidi Przybyla
Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- For Virginia, it’s not easy being purple.
The state had shown signs of becoming Democratic territory when Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate of his party to win Virginia since 1964. The governor and both U.S. senators are Democrats, too.
That trend may be in trouble. The Democratic candidate for governor, state Senator Creigh Deeds, trails Republican Bob McDonnell, a former attorney general, by 53 percent to 44 percent, according to a Washington Post poll of likely voters released Oct. 9.
National headwinds on health care and voter anxiety over new spending programs are playing a role in Virginia, said Senator Mark Warner, a former Democratic governor of the state.
The climate in Washington is “making it harder in places like Virginia,” Warner said. “The challenge is also that the presidential-year electorate often looks different than the gubernatorial-year electorate.”
Virginia and New Jersey hold the only gubernatorial races this year, and Virginia in particular is being examined as a barometer of Obama’s political strength or of a budding Republican resurgence that could carry over into the 2010 congressional elections.
Swing-State Purple
That ambiguity still might certify one thing: the state’s status as neither reliably Republican red nor Democratic blue, and instead, swing-state purple.
McDonnell, the Post poll showed, is running well among the voters who delivered the state for Obama, namely independent- leaning men and suburban women, voters who are both less ideological and partisan.
The Republican also has history on his side: Virginia hasn’t elected a governor from the party that holds the White House since 1973.
McDonnell’s major concern might be a thesis that he wrote as a graduate student 20 years ago in which he criticized the impact of working women on families that the Deeds campaign has used to paint his rival as hostile to women’s rights.
“Any victory for Deeds would be more of an anti- Republican vote rather than a pro-Deeds vote,” said Rhodes Cook, publisher of a non-partisan newsletter in Virginia that tracks voting trends. “It’s a question of whether McDonnell has shot himself in the foot.”
Wounded
So far, Deeds, 51, is the one who seems to be wounded. And Obama, 48, hasn’t been much help.
Obama, who campaigned in Virginia at least 30 times in the 2008 campaign, has returned just once to support Deeds. Vice President Joe Biden attended a fundraiser for the Democratic candidate Oct. 8. Blacks, who made up 20 percent of the vote in Virginia in 2008 and also helped secure the president’s victory, are tepid about Deeds.
“There’s not the same enthusiasm for Deeds and McDonnell” among any demographic group, said Bobby Scott, a black congressman from Virginia’s third district, which stretches from Richmond to Newport News. Scott said, and “it’s very difficult to target a specific message to one community.”
Republicans haven’t tried to tie Deeds to Obama. Instead, they have made the Democratic congressional leaders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the target of negative ads.
Debating Points
In their first prime-time debate on Oct. 12, Deeds attacked McDonnell, 55, on transportation and women’s issues while McDonnell repeatedly warned that Deeds would raise taxes to pay for infrastructure improvements. Deeds even accused McDonnell of intending to “lie” about issues and trying to reinvent himself as a moderate.
Deeds is also trying to raise money with a new fundraising e-mail highlighting Rush Limbaugh’s recent comment calling him a “mealy-mouthed idiot.”
George Allen, the former Republican Virginia senator and governor who has been campaigning for McDonnell, said the climate reminds him of 1993, when he beat Democratic Attorney General Mary Sue Terry the year after President Bill Clinton was first elected.
“We’d had eight years of Ronald Reagan, four years of George Bush, Clinton won and what we were able to do in my campaign was channel all of that,” he said. “Bob McDonnell is in a similar situation, although better. I was 31 percent behind and had no money.”
Concrete or Sand
Republican George W. Bush won Loudoun County in the northern part of the state by 13 percentage points in 2004. By 2005, a new pattern began to take hold, with Governor Tim Kaine and Senator James Webb, both Democrats, winning the county. In 2008, Obama took Loudoun by an 8 percentage-point margin, with 92 percent of the black vote and 60 percent of those age 29 and under.
“To Democrats’ advantage, the line where the Republican strength begins and the Democratic strength ends goes further and further West in each election,” Cook said. “Is that written in concrete, or is that written in sand? We don’t know.”
Voters such as Eva Seifert, a 45-year-old Republican from Leesburg who said she was troubled by McDonnell’s thesis, will help provide the answer. She is undecided.
“I’m going to both of their Web sites to dig a little deeper,” said Seifert, who works in banking. “Things can be turned and twisted.”
Published: October 12 2009 22:11 | Last updated: October 12 2009 22:11
Just five years ago, Barack Obama was still a local politician in Illinois, preparing for a run for the US Senate. His office wall in Chicago at the time was decorated with the famous picture of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston, after knocking him out in a heavyweight title fight. Ali famously boasted that he could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” But now that Mr Obama is president, he seems to float like a butterfly – and sting like one as well.
The notion that Mr Obama is a weak leader is now spreading in ways that are dangerous to his presidency. The fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday will not change this impression. Peace is all very well. But Mr Obama now needs to pick a fight in public – and win it with a clean knock-out.
Read the FT’s international affairs columnist’s authoritative and lively commentary throughout the week
In truth, the Norwegians did the US president no favours by giving him the peace prize after less than a year in office. The award will only embellish a portrait of the president that has been painted in ever more vivid colours by his political enemies. The right argues that Mr Obama is a man who has been wildly applauded and promoted for not doing terribly much. Now the Nobel committee seems to be making their point for them.
The rightwing assault on the president is based around a number of slogans that are hammered home with damaging frequency: Obama the false Messiah; Obama, the president who apologises for America; Obama, the man who is more loved abroad than at home; Obama, the man who never gets anything done; Obama the hesitant; Obama the weak.
Of course, this is the kind of stuff that was always going to be hurled at a liberal, Democratic president by the Republicans. The danger for Mr Obama is that you are beginning to hear echoes of these charges from people who should be the president’s natural supporters.
One leading European politician warns that Mr Obama is looking weak on the Middle East: “If he says to the Israelis ‘no more settlements’, there have got to be no more settlements.” And yet it is the White House, not the Israeli government, that has backed down.
Even before the Nobel announcement, liberal American columnists were sounding increasingly sceptical about the man they once supported with such enthusiasm. Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post that the president “inspires a lot of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama”. Now Saturday Night Live – the slayer of Sarah Palin – has turned its fire on President Obama, portraying him a do-nothing president.
How has this impression built up? The promise of bold changes of policy on the Middle East and Iran – without much to show for it – has not helped. The public agonising over policy towards Afghanistan has been damaging. The slow pace of progress on healthcare has hurt.
Even the president’s strengths can begin to look like weaknesses. His eloquence from a public platform has begun to contrast nastily with his failure to get things done behind the scenes. I winced when I heard him proclaim from the dais at the United Nations that “speeches alone will not solve our problems”. This, from a man who was due to give three high-profile speeches in 24 hours in New York. I winced again, when Muammer Gaddafi of Libya told the UN that he would be happy “if Obama can stay forever as the president”.
Obviously, the gloom can be overdone. Mr Obama has been dealt a very difficult hand. He arrived in office when the entire global financial system was still shaking. The American economy remains in deep trouble. The president inherited two wars that were going badly and a deep well of international resentment towards the US. The Nobel committee’s decision was silly, but it reflected something real – the global sense of relief that the US now has a thoughtful, articulate president, who has some empathy for the world outside America. Mr Obama’s conservative critics might deride him as “Hamlet” because of his indecision over Afghanistan. But President Hamlet is still preferable to President George W. Bush. At least Mr Obama makes decisions with his head, rather than his gut.
It is worth remembering that the presidency of Bill Clinton also got off to a very rocky start. Mr Clinton failed over healthcare, blundered around over gays in the military (an issue that President Obama is now revisiting) and suffered military debacles in Somalia and Haiti. And yet he went on to be a successful president. Mr Obama has not yet suffered setbacks comparable to the early Clinton years – and he still has plenty of time to turn things around.
But momentum matters. The president badly needs a quick victory or a lucky break. He also needs to show that, at least sometimes, he can inspire fear as well as affection. Mr Obama can charm the birds off the trees. He can inspire crowds in Berlin and committees in Oslo. But – sad to say – he also needs to show that he can pack a punch.
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