Politics Daily

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas on Incumbency and Secession

Matt Lewis — 2010-10-31T23:40:00+00:00

Filed under: Democrats, Republicans, Mobile Lead, Governors, 2010 Elections, Conservatives, Campaigns, Matt Lewis and the News, Interview Video

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Politics Daily.

Perry is running for re-election against Mayor Bill White of Houston (a recent poll shows Perry leading by 10 points).

"I think people are pretty wise," said Perry, when asked if his long tenure could hurt him or cast him as a "career politician." Texans understand, "if you've got a good person, who's doing a good job, leave him there."

Perry, if re-elected, would become the longest-serving governor in America.

Perry, who was first elected governor in 2000, also discussed his controversial suggestion that Texas may at some point secede from the union, as well as his campaign's decision not to meet with newspaper editorial boards.

Click play below to watch highlights from the interview, and click here to watch the full interview.

Note: Matt Lewis spoke at a conservative blogger summit sponsored by Perry's team earlier this year.

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Lieberman and Scott Brown Move to Strip U.S. Citizenship For Terrorists

Patricia Murphy — 2010-05-06T19:00:00+00:00

Filed under: The Capitolist, International, Mobile Lead, Times Square Bomb

In the wake of the bombing attempt in New York City's Times Square, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) introduced a bill in the Senate Thursday to revoke the U.S. citizenship of suspected terrorists if the State Department finds they are affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization.

The lead suspect in the Times Square case, Faisal Shahzad, is a U.S. citizen.

The State Department already has the authority to revoke citizenship of anyone who takes up arms against the United States as a part of a foreign army, but Lieberman said Thursday that terrorists are "stateless actors who don't wear a uniform," and are a greater danger to the country because they are American citizens.

"With increasing frequency, I regret to say it has become clearly a strategy of Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups over the past couple of years to recruit American citizens to train overseas and then use their American passports to re-enter our country for the purpose of planning and carrying out attacks against us," he said.

He also noted that once a person's citizenship is revoked, the Department of Justice would have a choice of trying the individual in a military commission or a federal court.

In order to strip a person's citizenship under the bill, Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.) said that the State Department would have to prove that the person has joined a foreign terrorist organization voluntarily and that he has an intent to renounce his rights to be an American. Altmire has introduced the same bill in the House with Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.).

Brown, a Judge Advocate General's Corps officer in the Massachusetts National Guard, said the issue to him is one of safety, not politics, and pointed to Adam Gadahn, the American operative with Al Qaeda who set fire to his passport in a recruiting video, as an example of someone who should no longer be a U.S. citizen. "If somebody wants to set fire to their passport, let's help them along," Brown said.

Nidal Hasan, the shooter who killed 12 people at Ft. Hood, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the suspected mastermind of the failed attempt to explode a bomb on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, are both American citizens.

Despite the bill's bi-partisan support, critics from across the political spectrum ripped it Thursday as unlawful.

Laura Murphy, the Director of the ACLU's Washington Office, called it unconstitutional and ineffective, and said, "This bill turns the whole notion of due process on its head."

House Minority Leader John Boehner questioned the legality of revoking a person's citizenship before trying him, while Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) worried that stripping a suspect's citizenship would take away the option of later trying the person for treason against the United States, which includes a possible death penalty sentence.

But Lieberman, Brown and their House co-sponsors defended the measure as a crucial update to a 70-year-old law law that that needs to reflect the new nature of America's enemies.

"Our enemies today -- those in foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban -- are just as intent on attacking and killing Americans as the Germans and Japanese were in World War II," said Lieberman. "Our enemies are even more willing today than the Nazis or fascists to kill innocent civilian Americans here in our homeland."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she is open to the idea of the bill, but she needs to see the details before she would support it. "I like the spirit of it," she said. "But what's the standard?"

Pelosi urged a cautious approach, pointing out that Americans put Japanese in internment camps during World War II. "They thought they had a connection (to the Japanese Empire) just because of their ethnic background."

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George Gallup, Health Care and the Peril of Legislating by Polls

Carl M. Cannon — 2010-03-21T23:30:00+00:00

Filed under: House, Democrats, Republicans, Barack Obama, Health Care, Polls, Voting, Obama Administration, Mobile Lead, Public Option, Health Care Endgame

To John Boehner, the top Republican in the House, the health care bill coming up for a vote on Sunday boils down to a single question: Which party is heeding the will of the American people? "Americans want Washington to scrap this job-killing government takeover of health care," says the Ohio Republican.

Picking up on this theme, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia asserts flatly that the American people have already "rejected" the Democrats' proposed health care legislation, citing a Wall Street Journal poll showing that 57 percent of respondents fear it would hurt the economy.

Reps. Eric Cantor of Virginia and Charles Boustany of Louisiana made the same point directly to President Barack Obama at the White House-sponsored health care summit on Feb. 25. "We don't care for this bill. I think you know that," Cantor told the president. "The American people don't care for the bill. I think that we've demonstrated in polling that they don't..."

The public opinion surveys cited by the Republican leadership do indeed report such findings. And Eric Cantor is a bright, attractive guy, and Charles Boustany was a practicing physician with first-hand knowledge of the problems in medicine. Nonetheless, this line of argumentation is all wrong. For months, Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators have brandished public opinion surveys like shillelaghs over the heads of health care reform's proponents, threatening mayhem to the Democrats and their party should they dare to ... legislate.

You will hear more of this all weekend -- and in the future after the health care debate in Washington comes to a climax. But it strikes me as bad social science, bad government, and bad history -- with a dose of hypocrisy thrown in. Using polls in this way is not only unscientific, it's not how a Republic can, or should, operate.

Personally, I do not look forward to the passage of the president's package. I would have few qualms about voting against it if I were in Congress. I'd prefer less government involvement in health care, not more, and less insurance, too. (I think Americans should pay out of pocket for routine medical care, that insurance should be for truly expensive procedures, and that the whole thing should be uncoupled from employment. My views were informed by an eye-opening Atlantic Monthly cover story last summer, "How American Health Care Killed My Father," an article that should have altered the national debate, but didn't.) My views aren't important, and I only mention them because this is not a back-door argument for the Democrats' bill. It's a front-door argument for better debate and better governance.

Let's start with the concept of governing by polls. Bill Clinton did this, to a fault many believed, the nadir coming when he tasked pollster Dick Morris to ascertain whether vacationing each summer at Martha's Vineyard sent the right re-election message for 1996. (I never saw any actual survey on this question, but after Morris reported back to Clinton, a president who neither rode horses nor fly fished ended up in Wyoming for his family's summer holiday.) Clinton's successor veered toward the other extreme: George W. Bush took obvious pride in ignoring public opinion. "I make decisions on what I think is right for the United States based upon principles," Bush told Chris Wallace of Fox News in a February 2008 interview. "I frankly don't give a damn about the polls."

Let's leave for another day a discussion of whether this was a bridge too far for a wartime president. This much is certain: Many influential Republicans and conservatives simply loved this aspect of the 43^rd U.S. president 's personality. "Some call it stubbornness; I call it principled leadership," Rudy Giuliani proclaimed as Republicans met in New York to re-nominate George W. Bush in 2004. "President Bush has the courage of his convictions."

And a week before George W. Bush left office, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, singled out this trait as perhaps Bush's most impressive attribute. "President Bush knows that it is tough to lead when you are following the polls," Hatch told his colleagues in a Jan. 14, 2009 tribute to the outgoing president on the Senate floor. "George W. Bush is not leaving the presidency with chapped fingers from holding them up to the wind."

Not to belabor the obvious, but how can it be political courage when a Republican president ignores public opinion polls and high-handed arrogance when a Democratic president does the same thing?

And what of these polls anyway? Do they deserve to be accorded the great weight Republicans are putting in them? I wouldn't think so. Polling the public on something like a 2,100-page health care bill is more akin to junk science than social science -- even though this kind of thing has been going on since the beginning of modern polling.

* * * * *

In 1936, a college journalism teacher named George H. Gallup came out of Iowa with a doctoral degree and an idealistic streak to famously embarrass Literary Digest magazine, which ran a poll predicting a huge victory by Alf Landon over Franklin Roosevelt. Literary Digest had conducted its quadrennial straw poll without mishap since 1920. And in 1936 the magazine's editors were confident that the 2.3 million post cards they'd received -- the names came from subscription lists, automobile registrations and telephone books -- were more than enough to give them an accurate picture. This proved spectacularly wrong: The Digest had Landon besting Roosevelt by 55 percent to 41 percent. It turned out that Literary Digest's cohort was probably a more affluent sample than the country as a whole in the height of the Great Depression. An even worse flaw in the Digest's methods was the response rate: The magazine had sent out 10 million cards -- and the Americans who didn't want to waste the money on a stamp were disproportionately voting Democratic that year.

George Gallup wasn't the only political scientist who'd figured out how to build a better polling mousetrap in the mid-1930s. Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, for example, had also learned that with a relatively small sample size of between 2,000 and 2,500 people, they could take the pulse of a nation with 128 million people. It was eye-opening, and the public followed closely as these three men engaged in a spirited competition with themselves, as well as Literary Digest. Whose methods would prove the best?

In political lore, Gallup was the victor, although in real life the competition was won by Elmo Roper. Crossley's model had FDR winning with 53.8 percent of the vote; Gallup had the Democratic ticket winning with 55.7 percent, and Roper said it would be a whopping 61.7 percent -- very close to Roosevelt's actual total of 62.5 percent. George Gallup's coup was that he also predicted that Literary Digest would be wrong, a prognostication that helped make him become a household name. It also attracted Franklin Roosevelt's attention: By 1940, the president quietly retained Roper and Gallup to poll for him on his plans for having the U.S. government help the British in their war against Germany, a plan of action that became known in headline-ese as "Lend-Lease."

It sounds so sensible in hindsight -- and God knows Roosevelt was in the right about Nazi Germany. But in George Gallup, in particular, FDR had hit on a socially conscious innovator who was less interested in horse-race polls than in plumbing the minds of the American people about the issues he cared about, education reform, criminal justice and quality of life. This turns out to be a mixed blessing. To this day the official company biography asserts that George Gallup's name is "synonymous with integrity and the democratic process," and this is true enough. But the democratic process is not as tidy as George Gallup or his public opinion polls, and the very notion of polling Americans about complex policy issues that they often know little about is problematic on its face.

In 1995, for instance, at the behest of CNN and USA Today, Gallup polled about the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The questions ranged from the straightforward (agree or disagree with the verdict) to the absurd (would Simpson have been convicted if he were white.) OK, that kind of thing helps get a pulse on racial attitudes, but how about these questions: Did Judge Lance Ito do a good job? Did the jury reach a verdict too quickly? These are technical legal questions that were posed to non-lawyers, who typically watched little of the actual trial, and who may never have set foot in a courtroom in their lives. In other words, everyday Americans who had no basis for registering an original opinion at all. You probably see where I'm going with this. Aren't similar problems present in the health care debate -- and also when pollsters try to determine public opinion on other intricate policy questions, in which the key participants themselves cannot agree on what the legislation would accomplish -- or even on what it should be called?

Take "cap and trade," for instance. The concept itself is not easy to comprehend, but what the shorthand phrase means in policy-speak is having the government set a limit (a cap) on various types of pollutants that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Companies with aging plants can buy credits (that's the "trade" part) from firms with cleaner emissions. The theory is that by essentially charging companies for polluting -- and rewarding companies that build cleaner plants -- government creates market incentives to lower greenhouse emissions. I have no opinion on whether this is the right approach to global warming, but I have a definite opinion on the efficacy of polls purporting to show where the public is on this issue.

A 2009 Zogby Poll claimed that only 30 percent of Americans support cap and trade, while a CNN Poll done last fall asserted that 6 in 10 support it. Who is right? Who cares? The most enlightening, not to mention entertaining, polling done on cap and trade reveals that Americans have no earthly idea what the thing means -- or even what issue realm it belongs to. This Pew Poll shows that in an open-ended question only 23 percent of Americans correctly knew (guessed?) that cap and trade concerns energy and environmental policy. And fully 55 percent acknowledged knowing "nothing at all" about cap and trade.

Polls about both cap and trade and the health care bill made the Top 10 Dubious Polling Award. This little-known, but important annual list (it started in 2009) is compiled by George F. Bishop and David W. Moore, two veteran pollsters, authors and political scientists who display appropriate skepticism of their brethren -- and of the media outlets that promote such goofy social science.

One obvious possible lesson of the health care polls may simply be that the Republicans did a better job of criticizing the legislation than the Democrats did at promoting it. Or maybe it's just too complicated an issue, and the public doesn't trust something it doesn't understand. Or perhaps Americans even like the features of the bill well enough, it's Democrats they can't stand -- or Congress itself. (There are actually numerous polls that tend to bolster that last postulate.)

Of course, things could be worse. Ross Perot could be president. I don't mean that as a personal dig at Ross Perot -- I'm using him as a symbol here. Nearly two decades ago, Perot anticipated the interactive nature of the Internet. The phrase 2.0 wasn't in vogue -- the technology did not yet exist -- but this is what the twangy Texas tycoon was talking about in his call for governing via "Electronic Town Halls." California and two dozen other states have for nearly a century practiced a controversial form of direct democracy with their referendum systems. Perot's fantasy of governing via insta-polling would have made California look namby-pamby. In Perot-ville, America would (theoretically) have been spared the messiness and corrupting influence of lobbyists, legislators, political consultants, special interest groups and the media.

"With interactive television every other week, we could take one major issue to the American people ... have them respond, and show by congressional district what the people want," Perot explained. Or think they want. One thing is certain, however: Although the Founders of our Republic couldn't have known about the Internet, a Webocracy would have given them pause. They had enough qualms about democracy.

The Framers had fought a revolution against monarchy, so they knew they didn't want that. But unchecked democracy struck them as too close to anarchy. And so checks and balances were built in to the system. The Supreme Court: lifetime tenure. Senators serve six years, presidents four, House members two. A deliberate body (the Senate), the people's House, a chief executive with veto power. It's all there, mechanisms to be responsive to the people's whims, while being responsible to posterity -- and minority views -- at the same time. In a "pure democracy," James Madison worried in the Federalist Papers, "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual."

In a letter to a friend named John Taylor written while Madison was in the White House, John Adams amplified on this sentiment. "Remember," he wrote, "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

John Adams was right about a lot of things, but our democracy hasn't committed suicide -- not yet -- and one reason it hasn't is that a critical mass of men and women remember that it's a democracy, yes, but wrapped inside a Republic. That shouldn't be a hard word for Republicans to remember.

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Report Says 75,000 Web Sites a Month Use Unlicensed Newspaper Articles

Bruce Drake — 2009-12-01T16:55:00+00:00

Filed under: Mobile Lead, News Media

As the debate over the Internet's impact on the traditional news industry goes on, and publishers try to decide whether to charge for content, a new study says that during a one-month period 75,195 Web sites re-used at least one article taken from a newspaper in full or nearly full form.

The study was conducted by the Fair Syndication Consortium, a group that includes more than 1,500 publishers, which trolled the Internet between October 15 and November 15. The consortium's goal is to ensure creators of original content get compensated when it is used elsewhere, such as by receiving a share of ad revenue.

The researchers found 111,933 nearly exact copies of newspaper articles on the Web sites it surveyed. In these cases at least 80 percent of the original article or more was used.

Another 163,173 stories were excerpted, meaning more than 125 words were re-used but less than 80 percent of the original articles.

Articles from large national newspapers are re-used as many as 15 times.

The study found that blog sites, which it said are most often cited as having the most re-used content, made up less than 10 percent of the "re-using" sites.

The study said that many of the sites re-using the content are, in effect, monetizing it because of the revenue they get from Google and Yahoo's ad networks.

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Of Lassitude and Lobster Rolls: Obama Heads for Vineyard Vacation

Walter Shapiro — 2009-08-21T08:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Mobile Lead

MARTHA'S VINEYARD, Mass. -- The weather-beaten, hand-painted sign nailed to a tree on State Road in Vineyard Haven is about the last tangible memento on this island harking back to Bill Clinton's time of troubles. For me, it remains a living symbol of the Monica-mad summer of 1998. The lettering on the lobster-trap-sized placard is faded, but the defiant take-that-Ken-Starr message remains unequivocal: "HOORAH FOR BILL."

When Clinton - now a globe-trotting hostage negotiator - met with Barack Obama for 40 minutes in the White House Situation Room Tuesday, the topic was the insular, hermetic government of North Korea. But since the former president was fresh from a 63^rd birthday dinner at the Martha's Vineyard home of Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, it is quite possible that another insular (but far from hermetic) place was also discussed.

If Clinton offered his Democratic successor any advice on how the sitting president should relax during his upcoming one-week Vineyard vacation that starts Sunday, Obama should file it next to Dick Cheney's helpful memos on how to find loopholes in the Constitution. The six Clinton summers on the Vineyard (aside from the Big Chill of 1998) were a manic whirlwind, from golf outings with Vernon Jordan at Farm Neck to impromptu strolls along Main Street in Vineyard Haven, to a social round of cocktail parties, dinners and fundraisers that would have exhausted Ernest Hemingway during his Paris days.

Just as Obama has rewritten the Clinton playbook on how to achieve health care reform, he has a chance to do the same when it comes to enjoying the true essence of island life in August. The secret of the Vineyard is the ability to do absolutely nothing amid beautiful surroundings. Obama has gone the houseguest route before (staying in Oak Bluffs with his close friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett in 2004 and 2007), but this is the first time that he is here, answerable to no one but time and tide and, oh yes, the Secret Service.

Most presidents are too tightly wound to ever let go - think of Lyndon Johnson racing around his ranch in a Cadillac convertible or George H.W. Bush roaring around the waters off Kennebunkport in his cigarette boat, the Fidelity. And I am not suggesting that Obama should completely shuck his responsibilities by trying to use the suitcase containing the nuclear codes as a floatation devise on Tisbury Great Pond. But there are psychological benefits that come with pretending - even for just a week - that the Obamas are just another typical laid-back American family spending upwards of $35,000 on their vacation at Blue Heron Farm.

Obama may have the right stuff (but maybe not the right staff) to pull it off, since he is island born (Hawaii) and island raised (Indonesia). Obama boasts the political self-confidence to come to this upscale Democratic enclave (as opposed to, say, the Outer Banks of the swing state of North Carolina) and the personal self-confidence to dare replicate the Clinton choice of an island idyll. Now comes the test of whether Obama, the most self-contained of modern presidents, has the capacity to power down. He is certainly advertising his planned languor as White House press secretary Robert Gibbs again stressed Friday that the Obamas have no public events planned on the Vineyard.

I have been Vineyard-bound for the last two weeks, carefully preparing with each beach visit, for the arduous journalistic responsibility of covering the vacationing Obamas. When Pulitzer Prizes are at stake, you simply cannot start too early on a sand and salt-water regimen. But I am willing to give up the prize and the testimonial dinner in my honor for the joy of living in a country where the president embraced lassitude.

In fact, as a patriot, I fantasize about a White House press briefing by deputy press secretary Bill Burton that goes something like this:

Q: Could you give us a read out on the president's day?

A: Aside from a 15-minute national security briefing this morning, the president, as far as I know, did absolutely nothing.

Q: What do you mean "absolutely nothing"?

A: He had lunch with the first lady and his daughters and joined them on the beach. I'm told he had a book with him, but that he mostly held it in his lap and looked out at the water. He also dozed a bit.

Q: What's the book? Is he dozing over a briefing book on health care? Is he abandoning the public option?

A: No, it's something he found on the bookshelves at the house he's renting. I think it was "Vanity Fair."

Q: Is it the issue of the magazine with the Sarah Palin story? Is he worried about re-election?

A: No, I believe it is the 19^th century novel by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Q: What is the president doing this evening?

A: He's having dinner with his wife and the girls. And I think they plan to play some board games. There are also unverified rumors about a jigsaw puzzle.

Q: C'mon. Stop holding out on us. Has he had another beer with Skip Gates? When is he going to Valerie Jarrett's for dinner? And when's tee time with Vernon Jordan?

A: They're all friends of the president and they understand his need to have some unstructured time with his family.

Q: This doesn't make sense. Do you expect us to believe that the president is on vacation doing nothing?

A: Absolutely; nothing is the phrase of the day.

Q: What are you hiding from us? Are we about to go to war with Iran?

Who are we kidding here? Presidents cannot just disappear into the early morning fog off the water, although it is true that the Secret Service has tested everyone's gullibility by (ssshhh!) taking down the sign on South Road in Chilmark for Blue Heron Farm. During World War II, the British tried similar deceptive tactics with directional signs to thwart a German invasion.

Every president is surrounded by aides eager to wring the maximum political advantage from every muscle movement by the Leader of the Free World with the possible exception of a POTUS sneeze. So, it is all but certain that memos have already been prepared arguing that Obama can solidify the Midwestern agricultural vote by making a Saturday morning pilgrimage to the West Tisbury Farmer's Market. There are also probably tentative plans for Obama to hold a stimulus package round table on the island with the president pointing to the virtues of the Vineyard's uniquely diversified economy built around fruit pies, cut flowers and lobster rolls.

There is an aura of subdued expectation on the island - as much a sense of puzzlement about Obama's vacation style as gushy enthusiasm. Sure, there are signs like "Welcome to Martha's Vineyard President Obama and Family" in store windows on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs. But the annual Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Fair, which began Thursday morning and will end just as the president is arriving on Sunday, is devoid of Obama T-shirt vendors, hand-stitched quilts featuring the first family or flower arrangements in the shape of the White House. While it is an exaggeration to say everyone on the island is a Democrat (Mississippi GOP Sen. Thad Cochran is defying clichés by vacationing here), the goodwill here toward the new president is pretty universal.

If Obama ventures out in the evening - as he surely will - he should be aware of the peculiar journalistic tradition that might be called "Vineyard Off-the-Record." Back during that fateful summer of 1998, my wife and I attended a large dinner party that featured the feuding Clintons in their first public appearance after the president made his belated televised confession. Our host, Steve Rattner, cautioned us (and the few other journalists on the guest list) that the dinner was completely off-the-record and writing about the Clintons' awkward night out would be a breach of every conceivable code of honor. So imagine my chagrin the next morning to turn on CNN to see Alan Dershowitz (whom nobody bothered to warn) burbling about his dinner with Bill Clinton. He got the scoop - and I learned that reporters are the only ones who can actually keep a secret on the island.

Even with Hurricane Bill (somebody at the Weather Service has a warped sense of humor) heading in this general direction, Barack Obama has one week to make Martha's Vineyard his own. As America's oldest biracial summer resort, many on the island feel a special kinship to America's first biracial president.

There will be the inevitable political attacks on Obama for his elitist vacation habits in the midst of a recession. But bad times should not rule out good vacations. After all, FDR readied himself to fight the Depression by cruising the Caribbean on Vincent Astor's yacht.

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Obama's Altar Call for Health Care Reform: Conscience Protections and No Federally Funded Abortion

David Gibson — 2009-08-19T22:18:00+00:00

Filed under: Mobile Lead

Can the Religious Left deliver exactly the kind of health care reform that the Religious Right has been trying to derail?

The matchup has so far been a lopsided victory for conservatives, who have a lot more practice at thwarting legislation with apocalyptic messaging and impressive grass-roots operations.

But as part of the White House's gambit to change that dynamic in the crucial coming weeks, President Obama on Wednesday afternoon joined a coalition of moderate-to-liberal religious leaders for a call-in rally aimed at recasting the debate in moral terms -- that is, a biblical morality of caring for the elderly and infirm and for would-be mothers. So far, of course, the moral debate has focused almost exclusively on fictitious "death panels" and federally funded abortions.

In his brief remarks, Obama answered his adversaries in overtly biblical language: He accused those who have been talking up "death panels" and rumors of taxpayer-funded abortions and government health care for illegal immigrants of "bearing false witness." He called such talk "ludicrous," and "an extraordinary lie" that was in fact undermining the nation's character.

"These are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation: that is that we look out for one another, that I am my brother's keeper, that I am my sister's keeper," Obama said. "And in the wealthiest nation on earth we are neglecting to live up to that call."

"One thing you all share is a moral conviction," Obama told his listeners. "You know that this debate on health care goes to the heart of who we are as a people."

The president was speaking on a late afternoon call sponsored by a coalition of more than two dozen religious groups of all faiths that are launching a "40 Days for Health Reform" campaign -- 40 being a number that recalls not only Bible stories of the Israelites wandering in the desert and Jesus' period of fasting, but also the likely political window that Obama has to seal the deal on a reform plan.

Obama was clearly ramping up his rhetoric in an effort to counter the strident attacks. He punctuated each claim from opponents -- about insuring illegal aliens, a government takeover of health care, taxpayer funding of abortion, and so-called "death panels" -- with a firm rejoinder: "Not true."

The liberal evangelical leader and longtime Obama backer, Jim Wallis, opened the call-in with a vow that over the next 40 days "the nation will hear a steady moral drumbeat from the faith community about God's desire for the health and healing of our nation" and for "truth-telling" in the debate. Wallis said believers "are in danger of losing the moral core" of the health care debate.

But Obama and Melody Barnes, his chief domestic adviser, who also addressed the gathering, were also careful to couch their prophetic language in pragmatic terms. They spoke about reining in health care costs as making good health care affordable without increasing the deficit. "I would say health care is at the crux of being a faithful steward of our resources," said Barnes, niftily combining God talk and widespread concerns about the program's eventual price tag.

Barnes assured one listener, a nurse at a Catholic parish in Pennsylvania, that no health care package would fund abortion and said it would include the "robust" conscience protections for believers that Obama has promised; these are two of the points that many religious groups have said would be deal-breakers.

In response to another question about making health care affordable for the nation and for individuals, Barnes again covered the White House retreat on the so-called "public option" portion of the reform, saying that in contrast to recent reports, the president does strongly support it as a way to contain costs.

Can Obama turn things around by turning health care reform into a moral crusade? During the campaign, he did not necessarily win over white evangelicals, but he talked the talk enough to blunt many of their concerns, and since his election Obama has continued to use the bully pulpit to cast his policies in a moral and ethical framework.

On his signature initiative, however, Obama was slow to make that moral case, and that has hurt him.

On Wednesday, Wallis argued that the call-in for the faithful shows just "how united the faith community is" behind Obama's goal, but the facts say otherwise. Religious Right organizations have campaigned vigorously against the plans, using a two-pronged attack, one moral and one practical.

A controversial television ad from the Family Research Council, for example, claims that health care reform would promote abortion and deny care to the needy, and would also represent a "government takeover." And an analysis by the public policy arm of the influential Southern Baptist Convention warned that whatever the details, "what we can say with absolute certainty is that this legislation will lead to diminished health care for most Americans, less choice, higher taxes, and unprecedented government intrusion into every level and aspect of society, from business to education to marriage to individual liberty."

In principle, almost all religious traditions back universal health care as a moral imperative or even a basic human right. Abigail Rian Evans, a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of "Redeeming Marketplace Medicine: A Theology of Health Care," said that there are three general points of agreement: inclusive coverage, no exclusions for preexisting conditions, and portability. But, she added, religious leaders have not been able to hold a left-right coalition together around those principles, in large part because political considerations have taken precedence over religious concerns.

The ultimate irony of the health care debate is that an issue that should be the biggest moral no-brainer since the civil rights movement has become as religiously polarizing as abortion.

Catholic leaders -- who represent a huge flock and have a longstanding commitment to universal health care -- could be driving the issue, but they are deeply divided among themselves over worries about abortion and euthanasia, and by political sympathies and antipathies for Obama.

And the conservative Protestants most in need of better health care tend to be most skeptical of government-backed reform. Statistics show that across the Bible Belt -- the final redoubt of Republican strength -- people have the poorest health care and score the lowest in terms of physical well-being. Moreover, the numbers of uninsured continue to stay especially high in the South among Hispanics and young adults -- those last two groups representing blocs that Republicans not only lost badly last November but need to win in the future to move from political vulnerability to viability.

From that view, backing health care reform could be just the cure for an ailing GOP -- if opposing health care reform weren't making them feel so good today.

Given that reality, the key to Obama's success will be turning health care reform into a biblical imperative by making Bible believers see themselves as the marginalized and down-trodden that the Scriptures are talking about, rather than calling for acts of charity on behalf of others.

Obama seemed to be trying to thread that needle on Wednesday, and Democratic operatives say he'll continue to push health care reform as a grand American cause that makes us feel good while also making us feel better.

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Obama May Know What He's Doing on Health: An Ode to Ambiguity

Jill Lawrence — 2009-08-19T05:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Health Care, Mobile Lead

Remember that old "Saturday Night Live" skit called "What if . . . Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Here's a proposition some people may find equally preposterous: What if President Obama actually has a strategy on health reform? What if there's a method to all of this seeming chaos?

I don't have inside information, but after observing Washington and politicians for more than 25 years, I do have a political brain. And if I were formulating strategy at the White House, I would be thinking it's way too early to play hardball about anything, especially the public insurance proposal that has inflamed both liberals (who insist on having it) and conservatives (who insist it must be dumped).

I'm not saying it's wonderful that the administration has lost control of the schedule and the narrative framework, or that it took so long for Obama to talk about how reform will help people who have insurance as well as those who don't. Still, amid the liberal clamor for Obama to go on offense, to show some spine, draw those lines in the sand, I say, take a breath and think about how Congress works. Think about the endgame, when House and Senate negotiators will reconcile the differences in their bills to come up with a final bill. Now think about what needs to happen to get to that point.

House Democratic leaders have left no doubt their reform bill will include a public, government-run plan to compete with private plans in a new insurance policy marketplace. So right now the most important thing is to get some version of health reform through the Senate. The second most important thing is to get it through the Senate without having to use a budget procedure called reconciliation.

Reconciliation is tempting because it would require only 51 votes, instead of the 60 needed to shut off a filibuster and proceed with business. But reconciliation is so restrictive that the guts of health reform - new regulations on insurance companies, the much debated public option, even the nonprofit co-op model some are discussing as a substitute - probably could not be included. I wrote about the limits of reconciliation here.

So, assume you're in search of 60 votes at a time when Democrats Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd are ailing and rarely, if ever, in the chamber. At least a handful of those votes need to be from Republicans to reach 60 and also to bring along conservative and moderate Democrats such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Michael Bennet and Mark Udall of Colorado. The same potential GOP converts come up all the time: Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

The best way NOT to get those 60 votes is to declare right now that you won't settle for anything less than a full-scale public plan. The second best way not to get them is to make clear you'll insist on a public option later, when the Senate is in negotiations with the House to mesh their bills. Thus the best strategy right now is to stay flexible - or at least appear that way. Whether by accident or design, Obama and his team have achieved this. Nobody knows for sure how hard he'll push, or when, or what for.

This is, needless to say, beyond frustrating to liberals. As Jon Stewart put it Monday night on his "Comedy Central" show: "Mr. President, I can't tell if you're a Jedi 10 steps ahead of everything or if this whole health care thing is kicking your ass just a little bit. Why is this so hard? Why can't you guys just stay on message? Remember the Bush team? Little bit of discipline, little bit of repetition? They sold us a war nobody wanted and nobody needed."

But health reform has many more complexities and congressional phases than the Senate's one-shot authorization of a war. My view - to be honest, my hope - is that Obama is deliberately keeping people guessing as the delicate process unfolds. Princeton scholar Fred Greenstein, author of "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush," told me that's a definite possibility. He called Obama "a constructive political chameleon" who is making "studious use of ambiguity."

It's not like Obama is the first president to employ strategic uncertainty. Abraham Lincoln used "persuasion and force and ambiguity" to keep border states in the Union in the weeks before the Civil War began, Greenstein said. When one of his generals ordered the emancipation of slaves in Kentucky, "Lincoln reversed it and stressed that while he thought slavery was an evil, he was not on an anti-slavery crusade." That was frustrating to Northern anti-slavery forces. But it was also short-lived. When it became clear that the Union "really had to take its gloves off," Greenstein said, the politically savvy Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Franklin Roosevelt had similar skills. In "No Ordinary Time," author Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes Eleanor Roosevelt as telling Winston Churchill, "You know, Winston, when Franklin says 'Yes, yes, yes,' it doesn't mean he agrees with you. It means he's listening." Greenstein said FDR compared himself to a quarterback -- the objective was to win the game and he didn't know what his next play would be until he saw the previous play. The metaphor served "to justify an enigmatic performance in terms of people not knowing how far he was going to go, what he was standing for," Greenstein said.

That sounds a lot like where we are right now with Obama on health reform. Let's envision a time when the first round is over. The Senate has passed a bill that does not have a public option. Maybe it has a co-op option, which my colleague Patricia Murphy explained here. The House has also passed a reform bill and it includes a strong public insurance plan. Negotiators from both chambers are now ready to shape the final bill. And now we are at the point when a huge presidential investment makes sense.

Obama could try carrots and sticks - threats to withhold campaign help or promises to do everything he can to get someone re-elected. He could make a moral appeal - How can we continue as the only industrialized nation without universal coverage? - and hint at or promise administration jobs to any electoral casualties. He could try to extract pledges from conservative Senate Democrats that they will vote to cut off a filibuster, even if they intend to vote against the bill itself. Because once the filibuster is broken, all Obama needs is 51 votes - and that 51 could include Vice President Joe Biden breaking a tie.

If there must be compromise, if for instance the Senate won't accept the House's public plan, negotiators would have substantial flexibility to go beyond what's in either bill. Say the two sides agree on a "trigger" mechanism - that is, a public plan would be added to the marketplace at a certain point if insurance companies had failed by then to meet a pre-arranged standard of broad, affordable coverage. Longtime Washington player Ron Pollack, executive director of the liberal health care advocacy group Families USA, told me the negotiators could do that even if neither bill contains a trigger. "There is lots of room for creativity," he said.

He knows that from personal experience. In the early 1970s, Pollack said, conferees on a food stamp bill decided out of the blue to eliminate "hippies" from the program. They added a ban on participation by people who lived in houses with unrelated people - their definition of a commune. He successfully challenged the provision in court. "It wasn't knocked out because it was inappropriate for something new to come up in conference committee," Pollack said. "It was knocked out on constitutional grounds."

In the end, if Obama must give up on the public option or any other element of health reform that he considers significant, he retains his own option to make another push at any point in his one or two terms. And modifications would hardly be unusual.

The Social Security Act originally excluded agricultural workers and professions dominated by women. Medicare only recently expanded to cover prescription drugs. Even more basic, slaves weren't freed and women couldn't vote for generations after the country was founded. As Obama himself once said, changes came, providing evidence that the Union "can always be perfected." He may have to sign an imperfect reform bill in the end, but it won't be because he declined at this precise moment to dig in his heels, define what's acceptable and threaten to veto anything that falls short.

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