http://blog.cagle.com Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:08:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 en http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/19/romneys-new-book-gives-him-head-start-in-2010-gop-race/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/19/romneys-new-book-gives-him-head-start-in-2010-gop-race/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 05:10:43 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=24133 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/19/romneys-new-book-gives-him-head-start-in-2010-gop-race/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/12/will-pushing-on-health-care-doom-the-dems/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/12/will-pushing-on-health-care-doom-the-dems/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:33:12 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=21341 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/12/will-pushing-on-health-care-doom-the-dems/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/05/congress-obama-can-score-a-big-bipartisan-success-school-reform/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/05/congress-obama-can-score-a-big-bipartisan-success-school-reform/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:51:27 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=12455 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/05/congress-obama-can-score-a-big-bipartisan-success-school-reform/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/02/two-smart-governors-suggest-incremental-health-care-reform/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/02/two-smart-governors-suggest-incremental-health-care-reform/#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:04:21 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=12339 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/03/02/two-smart-governors-suggest-incremental-health-care-reform/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/02/22/debt-menace-grows-but-gop-democrats-fight-each-other/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/02/22/debt-menace-grows-but-gop-democrats-fight-each-other/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:27:52 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=11953 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/02/22/debt-menace-grows-but-gop-democrats-fight-each-other/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/02/02/can-obama-gop-get-anything-done/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/02/02/can-obama-gop-get-anything-done/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:28:28 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=10171 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/02/02/can-obama-gop-get-anything-done/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/01/27/obamas-top-errors-too-big-government-failure-to-spur-lending/ http://blog.cagle.com/2010/01/27/obamas-top-errors-too-big-government-failure-to-spur-lending/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:27:57 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://blog.cagle.com/?p=9799 http://blog.cagle.com/2010/01/27/obamas-top-errors-too-big-government-failure-to-spur-lending/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2009/07/02/reconciliation-to-pass-health-bill-wont-work/ http://blog.cagle.com/2009/07/02/reconciliation-to-pass-health-bill-wont-work/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://www.caglepost.com/article/761d0b58-de84-4f50-aacb-54ecec051808.html
If an attempt is made to pass health reform under "reconciliation" rules -- requiring just a simple majority vote -- Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., told me, the bill would be so pared down, "you'd be left with Swiss cheese."

Conrad also serves on the Finance Committee, which will mark up its version of health care reform in July.

Reconciliation rules, he said, require that a bill be scored as deficit-reducing over six years and that any substantive policy change in it also have a fiscal purpose.

The result, said Conrad, is that "you'd be left with a dramatically reduced package" that would fall short of comprehensive health reform.

"You would have a very hard time expanding coverage to the 46 million who don't have it," he said, and the "Byrd Rule" -- requiring fiscal germaneness -- could strip the bill of many of its policy provisions.

So, Conrad said, "health reform needs to be passed on a 60-vote basis, and that means it needs to be bipartisan."

And that, he said, all but certainly rules out including a government-run "public plan" like Medicare designed to "compete with" -- or replace -- private insurance companies.

Conrad said he expected it will require up to six Republican votes to pass health reform in the Senate, but only one Republican -- Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) -- has indicated she'd support any sort of public plan, and then only as a fallback.

Conrad has proposed a compromise plan that would create nongovernmental co-ops as an alternative to the public plan.

With the expected arrival soon of Al Franken from Minnesota, Democrats will have 60 Senate votes, theoretically enough to break a Republican filibuster and pass whatever legislation they want.

But, Conrad pointed out, Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., have been absent from the Senate because of illness and at least two Democrats have publicly stated they won't support a public plan.

They are Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Mary Landrieu, D-La. And, Conrad said, "there are probably more."

So, doing the math, even if Kennedy, Byrd and Franken were all present, Democrats would need two Republicans to break a filibuster -- and would need more if moderates like Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Mark Pryor, D-Ark. and Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., opposed the public plan.

The difficulty of getting to 60 is what has inspired liberals -- and the Obama administration -- to contemplate using budget reconciliation rules to pass health reform with just 51 Democratic votes.

Last week, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reiterated, "We want to pass health reform under regular order ... but reconciliation is in reserve."

The rules were set up in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 to ease the way for deficit-reduction measures to pass if authorized in Congress's annual budget resolution.

This year's resolution did allow for health reform to be considered under reconciliation rules -- but Conrad said advocates of the strategy have not studied its difficulties.

"The problems are two-fold," he said. "Number one, everything has to be deficit-neutral -- and actually have to produce $1billion in deficit reduction over six years.

"Since one of the six years is this year, and this year will almost be over by the time we do it, it'll have to reduce the deficit over five years and every year thereafter," he said.

"In the alternative, using regular order, it only has to be deficit-neutral over 10 years. That's a big difference in what kind of reform you write."

The second problem with reconciliation rules, he noted, is the Byrd Rule, named for former Senate Appropriations Chairman Byrd, making any provision in the bill subject to being removed if it does not have a budget effect -- and requiring 60 votes to sustain it.

"When reconciliation was developed, it was solely for the purpose of deficit reduction. It was never intended for substantive legislation."

Conrad said that "all kinds of things would be vulnerable to striking, including insurance market reforms, all the changes designed to encourage wellness and prevention -- all those kinds of things."

A key player in determining whether an item was struck would be Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin, who'd be under enormous pressure from Democrats to find that provisions satisfied the Byrd Rule.

"There's no question in my mind that he'd call it like he saw it," Conrad said. "He will not be giving liberal interpretations. He's a stickler for precedent. ... He's impervious to pressure."

Republicans have served notice that they would regard an attempt to use reconciliation rules for health reform as a "declaration of nuclear war," leading to a procedural close-down of Senate business.]]> http://blog.cagle.com/2009/07/02/reconciliation-to-pass-health-bill-wont-work/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2009/06/25/obama-rides-high-at-five-months-but-clouds-gather/ http://blog.cagle.com/2009/06/25/obama-rides-high-at-five-months-but-clouds-gather/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://www.caglepost.com/article/e3e64042-5e48-4ff5-9728-f289f8b5fa20.html
For sure, he's popular. He's laid out a breathtakingly bold agenda that he has good prospects of fulfilling. And his opposition is in dire political straits.

But too much shouldn't be made of high approval ratings after five months. Obama's Gallup rating on June 20, at 59 percent, is exactly the average of the last eight newly elected presidents.

And that average is dragged down by Bill Clinton's dismal showing, 39 percent, in 1993 -- the result of a self-created kerfuffle over gays in the military and of disarray in the White House.

Obama clearly continues to enjoy his honeymoon with voters, but history suggests that voters generally take a long time to become disenchanted with new presidents, when they do.

Dwight Eisenhower had a 69 percent approval rating at this early stage in 1953 and fell below 60 only in his second term during the 1958 recession.

John F. Kennedy had a 61 percent approval rating after five months in 1961 and stayed in the 60s or 70s until just before his assassination.

Richard Nixon was at 63 percent at this point in 1969 and remained in the 50s and 60s until a dip in 1971. He didn't crater into the 30s until 1973.

Jimmy Carter was at 63 percent after five months, stayed in the 60s until September 1977 and didn't go into the 40s until February 1978. He left office with a 31 percent approval rating.

Ronald Reagan scored 59 percent in June 1981 and remained in the high 50s and low 60s until unemployment began to spike in November 1981 in the then-worst recession since the Great Depression. He went as low as 35 percent in January 1983, but was handily re-elected.

Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, had a 69 percent approval rating in June 1989 and stayed in the high 50s, 60s, 70s -- even 80s -- into 1990, even before the first Gulf War in 1991, when it shot up to 91 percent. Then he lost the presidency in 1992.

Clinton had the shortest honeymoon of any recent president, falling from the 50s into the 40s by May 1993. He climbed out of his early hole, remaining in the low 50s and high 40s until his health care plan fell apart in September 1994. But he got re-elected, too.

And, despite the divisive circumstances of his election, George W. Bush had a 55 percent approval in June 2001 and stayed mostly in the 50s and 60s until his popularity soared after Sept. 11, 2001.

Regardless of history, Obama enjoys even higher ratings in some other polls than in Gallup's -- his Washington Post-ABC rating is 65 percent -- and he's the beneficiary of 2-to-1 favorable stories in the mainstream media, according to the Pew Research Center.

Despite some media caviling, the public does not seem to think Obama has bitten off more than he should be trying to chew with a domestic agenda that includes healthcare reform, energy and environmental transformation, new financial regulation, plus the takeover of banks and auto companies.

And with a heavily Democratic Congress, Obama is likely to show results on most of his agenda -- if he's willing to compromise with conservative Democrats and some Republicans on issues like health reform, energy and financial regulation.

The biggest domestic threats to Obama's success are ballooning debt and the possibility that, despite his stimulus package, an economic recovery will be delayed.

Almost all the polls show that the public's main worry is about deficit spending. Only 46 percent in the Gallup Poll approve of his handling of the federal budget deficit, and only 45 percent think he is doing a good job controlling federal spending.

Indeed, Obama's own Office of Management and Budget reported that gross federal debt -- which more than doubled during George W. Bush's administration -- would nearly redouble by 2019 to more than 100 percent of gross domestic product, the highest level since World War II.

Politically, big deficit and debt numbers cause worry, but their potential economic effects are the main threats to Obama's success.

Some Republicans anticipate that by the time Obama faces re-election in 2012, the public will again be focused on the "misery index" -- the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate -- that contributed to Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980.

Shorter-term, there's reason to worry that just as some economic analysts are seeing the "green shoots" of a recovery, there could well be a second financial crisis brought on by defaults on commercial real estate, consumer credit and emerging-economy debt.

There's a total of $3.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt outstanding -- for office buildings, multifamily residences, retail centers -- of which $1.3 trillion is due for refinancing in the next five years.

And, worried analysts say the properties are highly "overleveraged," meaning loans are worth more than the property will sell for, creating the possibility of mass defaults and new pressure on bank balances.

Conceivably, this might not be the expected "u-shaped" recovery -- with a steep decline followed by a long period of slow growth and eventual improvement -- but a "w," in which the present uptick is followed by another decline.

If that occurs, after the public starts becoming optimistic about a recovery, as some polls show it now is, then Obama may not be able to blame the "w" economy on "W," his predecessor.

It's undoubtedly with some such calculation that Obama in his press conference on Tuesday poured cold water on budding public optimism, predicting unemployment would top 10 percent, rather than the 8 percent he previously forecast.

With the 2010 elections more than 16 months off, Democrats have a wide, 9-point edge over Republicans in generic Congressional polling.

But for his party to keep its big majorities, the jobless rate has to be heading down a year from now. In 1982, it's worth remembering, even Ronald Reagan could not keep his party from losing 26 House seats.]]> http://blog.cagle.com/2009/06/25/obama-rides-high-at-five-months-but-clouds-gather/feed/ http://blog.cagle.com/2009/06/18/elections-in-iran-make-nuclear-talks-harder/ http://blog.cagle.com/2009/06/18/elections-in-iran-make-nuclear-talks-harder/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000 Morton Kondracke http://www.caglepost.com/article/c48dedb2-bb32-472f-98dd-9329c416f3e9.html
Some good it did. The ruling powers in Iran -- rigidly hostile to the United States and determined to develop nuclear weapons -- rigged the vote to restore radical Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

And Obama's mild statements of "concern" at violence directed against opposition protesters is not likely to win him any points, either, if and when the Iranian regime decides to accept his offer of "unconditional negotiations."

Still, Obama's tactics are understandable. He's betting that the regime headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will prevail and that he will have to deal with it.

Conceivably, the mass demonstrations being conducted by supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi could cascade into a revolution such as that which ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979.

More likely, Khamenei would use his military, Revolutionary Guard and Islamic militias to re-enact the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in China if the regime appeared threatened.

Khamenei obviously is hoping to mollify the protesters by promising a review of the election results. The outcome is a foregone conclusion, but the regime clearly aims to have the demonstrations fizzle.

So, the likely result is what Obama anticipated in his outreach address to the Islamic world: that he'd be negotiating with a government run by Khamenei regardless of whether Mousavi or Ahmadinejad were elected president.

In that speech, 6,000 words long, Obama devoted just two paragraphs to Iran, in one of which he acknowledged that the United States "played a role" in the 1953 overthrow of the country's elected government.

He's obviously conscious of that history -- and the anti-American uses the regime constantly makes of it -- which is why he went out of his way to say "it's not productive for a United States president to be seen meddling" in Iran's internal affairs.

I'd hope that if he thought there was a chance of really toppling the regime, he would speak out to support the opposition and that he's being restrained out of calculation.

In Cairo, he merely observed that Iran "has played a role" in "acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians," going easy on the activities that led to Iran being designated by the State Department as the world's "most active state sponsor of terrorism."

He also passed up mentioning that, in April, Egyptian authorities arrested 49 Hezbollah terrorists bent on carrying out attacks, along with a handler allegedly trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

And, he went easy on the long record of international findings that Iran has been enriching uranium and evading inspections, surely for the purpose -- though the regime denies it -- of producing nuclear weapons.

On the very day Obama reached out to Muslims and spoke of "moving forward without preconditions" toward Iran, Khamenei declared that "the nations in the region hate the United States from the bottom of their hearts."

And, he said, "the new U.S. government seeks to transform this image. I say firmly that this will not be achieved by talking, speech and slogans."

For sure, it makes sense for the United States to at least try "engagement" -- or "tough" diplomacy, as Obama described it this week. President George W. Bush did so, too, after failing to get anywhere by shunning the regime.

But the difficulties, especially in getting Iran off the nuclear track, are even more abundantly clear after what amounts to a clerical-military putsch in Iran.

Both Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are closely tied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a fascist- or Communist-like organization that polices internal security, conducts foreign intelligence and terrorist activities, operates businesses -- and promotes the nuclear weapons program.

Last weekend's voting was barely over when Khamenei declared Ahmadinejad's re-election a "divine miracle."

Ahmadinejad may actually have won a majority, but a 63 percent victory is hard to credit, as is Mousavi's loss among his fellow ethnic Azeris and in his own home village. Those results were meant to humiliate the opposition.

Ahmadinejad, at a victory rally Sunday, vowed to crack down on his political rivals ("dismantle the network of corruption") and never negotiate about Iran's nuclear program with any foreign government.

"That file is shut, forever," he said.

In an interview, Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, told me that the United States is in a "wait and see posture" on Obama's proposal for dialogue.

Jones underscored Obama's May 19 statement in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Obama is giving Iran until the end of the year to see if it is interested in negotiating in good faith.

"The process can't be an open-ended thing that goes on forever. If, unfortunately, we see no change in (the agenda) we want to talk about, sanctions are always on the table," he said.

Actually, more than sanctions are in play. In his own speech on Sunday, Netanyahu called Iran's nuclear program "the greatest threat facing Israel, the Middle East, the entire world and the human race."

Israel's record in crippling Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and bombing Syria's North Korea-supplied reactor in 2007 practically guaranteed that Netanyahu will order a strike on Iran if diplomacy fails to stop the nuclear program and he thinks he can retard the weapons threat.

Americans close to Netanyahu say the chances of a strike are "100 percent." Another Mideast expert I regularly test on this question told me, "I used to say 50-50. The Iranian election pushes it to two-to-one."

That's the limiting factor on Obama. He has a year, maybe two, to try direct negotiations with Iran, then sanctions, then perhaps really tough sanctions if he can get other countries to cut off gasoline supplies to Iran to force an end to the nuclear program.

It's worth a try, and it's understandable that Obama would want to be "diplomatic" in approaching Iran. But the election shows that Iran's nuclear faction is dug in. Israel is not going to wait until it develops the instruments of another Holocaust.

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