For Obama, a Signature Issue That the Public Never Embraced Looms Large - Social Security was popular from the start, supported by 73 percent of Americans in early 1937 and 78 percent the next year in Gallup polls. Medicare had the approval of 62 percent in early 1965 and 82 percent by the end of that year in Harris polls.

From The New York Times:

On the day President Obama took the final step in turning the Affordable Care Act into law, his senior adviser, David Axelrod, predicted the public would eventually embrace his ambitious effort at health care reform.
      

“As the American people become familiar with what this program is and what it isn’t,” Mr. Axelrod said, “they’re going to be very, very happy with it.”

      

Two years later, the public is no happier with the law than it was then. Mr. Obama’s signature initiative may have prevailed in the Supreme Court, but a White House that vowed a public relations blitz selling the act’s virtues never fully followed through, much to the frustration of many Democrats and even some of the law’s authors.

      

Now Mr. Obama faces the consequences as he heads toward a hotly contested election that will decide whether he has a second term and, by extension, whether the law will survive efforts to repeal it.

      

And while the White House and its allies sent e-mails and held conference calls promoting the overhaul soon after the Supreme Court victory on Thursday, they privately made clear their interest in moving the national conversation back to the economy, the main electoral battleground.

      

“Unfortunately, we never had a really effective strategy around communicating to the public the benefits and the rationale behind health care reform,” said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a physician and University of Pennsylvania vice provost who was a top White House adviser involved in developing the program. “We never had a spokesperson, and the public never really understood what we were doing.”

      

That failure still baffles supporters like Dr. Emanuel, given the significance of health care to Mr. Obama’s legacy. Some see it as a result of the president’s own instinctive diffidence or the natural desire to move to the next challenge. Others note the complexity of the act itself, or criticize the president’s advisers for not being more assertive.

      

But there was also calculation on the part of White House officials who concluded that the public was fatigued with the subject and more concerned about jobs. As they pondered plans to sell the overhaul, they found few troops to rally. Democratic lawmakers ran away from it and party donors refused to finance advertising to promote it.

      

“No one in history has ever been able to communicate successfully about health care, because it is a deeply personal and polarizing issue and people are therefore afraid of the unknown,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “We need the law to be fully in effect before the known overtakes the unknown.”

      

Mr. Obama’s team holds out hope that with the validation of the court ruling, the health care law will generate more popular support as it is phased in through 2014. And they take heart from polls showing that elements of the law, like protections for those with pre-existing conditions, rate high with the public.

      

Some supporters have argued that other social programs in the past were controversial at first before becoming embedded in American society. But polling suggests that is not so.

      

Social Security was popular from the start, supported by 73 percent of Americans in early 1937 and 78 percent the next year in Gallup polls. Medicare had the approval of 62 percent in early 1965 and 82 percent by the end of that year in Harris polls.

      

By contrast, just 32 percent supported the Affordable Care Act when it was approved in March 2010, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. As of a month ago, 34 percent supported it, virtually unchanged. To be sure, about a fifth of those who oppose it say it did not go far enough, essentially frustrated liberals.

      

That Mr. Obama’s presidency may be defined by the law would have seemed unlikely in March 2007, when as a presidential candidate he showed up for a health care forum in Las Vegas unprepared, by his own admission. When he finally developed a plan, he rejected requiring American adults to obtain health insurance and pilloried his chief opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for supporting it.

      

As he took office, health care was on his agenda but not yet dominant. The economy was in a free-fall; health care competed with issues like climate change and immigration for Mr. Obama’s political capital. One adviser said if the White House had realized the economic troubles would be as sustained as they have been, health care might never have been on the table. Others disagree, arguing that health care did not detract from efforts to promote recovery.

      

Either way, health care rose to the fore in part through circumstance. The House passed a climate change bill, but it took deal-making and lobbying that alienated some around Mr. Obama. The White House concluded that the Senate could not pass the climate plan with only Democrats, since some from coal states opposed it. Likewise, Mr. Obama lost Republican cooperation on immigration, leaving health care the most plausible initiative.

      

“It wasn’t a choice so much as, of the three issues, the only one that had a chance was health care,” said a senior administration official who asked not to be named discussing priorities.

      

To pass health care, Mr. Obama abandoned his campaign position on the mandate. “The president we had to convince, because it was going back on what he promised,” Dr. Emanuel recalled. “But once we effectively laid out for him why this would be a better argument, he was convinced this was the right move.”

      

Still, some urged the president to narrow his ambitions, including Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff and Dr. Emanuel’s brother. And victory came after an ugly process: closed-door deals with the pharmaceutical industry, policy inducements to recalcitrant lawmakers, legislative legerdemain after a Massachusetts special election cost Democrats their filibuster-proof supermajority.

      

To win over an unenthusiastic public, officials promised an aggressive campaign. In April 2010, a month after the law was signed, the White House hired Stephanie Cutter, a prominent Democratic strategist, to handle public outreach for it. But she was given other projects as well, and by August had been reassigned as Mr. Axelrod’s deputy. The White House and its allies made efforts to educate the public, hosting events and posting information online, but it was sporadic.

      

Critics say public discontent stems not from how the president sells the overhaul, but what he is selling.

      

“Democrats can point to a couple of aspects that light up some numbers for them, but when weighed against the negatives they get blown away,” said Jonathan Collegio, communications director for American Crossroads, a group that supports Mitt Romney for president.

      

Groups like Crossroads swamped the president’s allies with television advertising. Since the law’s passage, $235 million has been spent on ads attacking it, compared with $69 million for those supporting it, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

      

“I’d be a heck of a lot happier if I had $100 million too,” said Eddie Vale, communications director for Protect Your Care, which supports the law. “But we’re playing with the hand we’ve been dealt.”

As for the president, he has promoted his program in fits and starts. In his State of the Union address this year, he devoted two sentences to it — 44 words out of more than 7,000. Aides said they decided to focus on jobs.

      

“That is the A-No. 1 issue on people’s minds,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “You can’t do both. You have to make choices.”       

Poll suggests Obama swing state attacks working

From The Washington Post:

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll out Wednesday suggests that in key swing states, President Obama’s ad campaigns against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney are working.

While nationally the two rivals are locked in a dead heat, in 12 expected battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — Obama leads by eight points in the survey.

White voter registration in Georgia down to 60 percent

Jim Galloway writes in the AJC's Political Insider:

Demography, like a glacier, is slow but relentless.

If you wonder why there’s been so much discussion of the Latino vote lately, take a look at these figures that Alan Abramowitz, the Emory University political scientist, drew from the Georgia Secretary of State’s monthly data:

In May of 2008, African-Americans made up 28 percent of active registered voters in Georgia while whites made up 65 percent and “other” race (a category that’s hard to interpret but presumably includes a lot of Hispanics and Asians since very few of them identify themselves as Hispanic or Asian) made up 7 percent.

In May of 2012, African-Americans made up 29.4 percent of active registered voters, whites made up 60.2 percent, and “other” race made up 10.4 percent.

So the downward trend in the white share of voters in Georgia has continued. There is certainly no evidence here that nonwhites have been disappearing from the rolls of registered voters. In all likelihood, the nonwhite share will increase further between now and November, as it did in 2008.”

Expanded Oil Drilling Helps U.S.Wean Itself From Mideast

From The Wall Street Journal:

America will halve its reliance on Middle East oil by the end of this decade and could end it completely by 2035 due to declining demand and the rapid growth of new petroleum sources in the Western Hemisphere, energy analysts now anticipate.

The shift, a result of technological advances that are unlocking new sources of oil in shale-rock formations, oil sands and deep beneath the ocean floor, carries profound consequences for the U.S. economy and energy security. A good portion of this surprising bounty comes from the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique perfected during the last decade in U.S. fields previously deemed not worth tampering with.

By 2020, nearly half of the crude oil America consumes will be produced at home, while 82% will come from this side of the Atlantic, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By 2035, oil shipments from the Middle East to North America "could almost be nonexistent," the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries recently predicted, partly because more efficient car engines and a growing supply of renewable fuel will help curb demand.

[T]he U.S. military will keep guarding the region's oil shipping lanes, as it has done for decades. "Nobody else can protect it and if it were no longer available, U.S. oil prices would go up," said Michael O'Hanlon, a national security expert with the Brookings Institution, who says the U.S. spends $50 billion a year protecting oil shipments. But China, a growing consumer of Middle Eastern crude, is seeking a larger presence in the region, with its navy joining antipiracy efforts near Somalia.

The shift away from Middle Eastern oil means closer ties with Canada, which is emerging as the top U.S. energy ally, but also with Latin neighbors that are strong trading partners. A dollar spent buying oil from these countries is more likely to end up back in the U.S. than a dollar spent buying Iraqi or Saudi crude. Economies buoyed by petrodollars also lessen the appeal of northward migration for Latin America's poor, says Jeremy Martin, director of the energy program at the Institute of the Americas in La Jolla, Calif.

The American energy revolution also is making a splash across the Atlantic. Countries in Eastern Europe, long dependent on Russia for their energy, are seeking to tap their own shale resources with the help of U.S. companies.

The prospect that new sources of supply in the Americas could lead to years of flat or even falling oil prices is a source of great concern in the Kremlin. Surging oil revenues over his 12 years in power have helped President Vladimir Putin pay for an eightfold increase in government spending, going to everything from pension and wage hikes to costly projects like the Sochi Olympics to a major military buildup. Now, his government is scrambling to find ways to tighten its belt as oil prices—and thus tax revenues—slide. Finding a new driver for Russia's economy is "a colossal challenge," said economy minister Andrei Belousov.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a six-term Utah Republican, fended off a primary challenge from a Tea Party-backed insurgent candidate on Tuesday, a result that showed the power of money, organization and incumbency to overcome grass-roots anger at the Washington establishment.

From The New York Times:

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a six-term Utah Republican, fended off a primary challenge from a Tea Party-backed insurgent candidate on Tuesday, a result that showed the power of money, organization and incumbency to overcome grass-roots anger at the Washington establishment.

Ultimately, voters chose experience over insurgency, sparing Mr. Hatch the same drubbing suffered by Republican incumbents like Richard G. Lugar of Indiana last month and Robert F. Bennett of Utah in 2010, who saw their political careers ended by upstart conservatives.

It is a race he will not run again. On Tuesday, Mr. Hatch reiterated that the coming term would be his last.

Noonan: Romney can win, but he needs more than applause lines. President's 54-minute speech last week was a speech about everything—renewable energy, tax credits, Abraham Lincoln, tax loopholes, deficit imbalances, infrastructure, research and development incentives. But a speech about everything is a speech about nothing.

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

You know what Republicans on the ground think when they look at Mitt Romney?

"Please don't blow it." They think President Obama can't win but Mr. Romney can still lose. So they're feeling burly but anxious, hopeful yet spooked.

They see Mr. Obama as surrounded by bad indicators—bad polls, bad economic numbers, scandals. They see a grubbiness in the administration now, a vacuity. When the White House sends out spokesmen to make the case for him on the Sunday morning shows, it's campaign operatives, like David Plouffe and David Axelrod. They more or less spin how he'll win. Where are the heavyweights, the cabinet secretaries, the great men and women of the Democratic Party? Hiding? Unable to make the case? Not trusted to make the case? Or are the political guys the only heavyweights in the administration?

Mr. Romney is looking good, as are his crowds. When the camera shows people in the stands behind him as he speaks, they no longer look as if they walked in off the street or put a bet on a horse and are straining to see if it breaks from the pack. Now they look like people watching their horse take the lead, with no one coming up the outside.

The Romney strategy the past eight weeks has been, in a small way, shrewd: have the candidate out there talking in a candidate-like manner, but don't let him say anything so interesting that it will take the cameras off Mr. Obama. The president is lurching from gaffe to mess, from bad news to worse. Don't get in his way as he harms himself.

It's working, but won't for long. People want meaning, a higher and declared purpose.

An odd fact: Republicans more than others, amazingly, have internalized and hold to the idea that this president has some secret magical powers he's just waiting to unleash. Those powers normally go by the name "eloquence." But the eloquence was always exaggerated, and to the extent it existed, there's no sign it's about to kick in.

Do you remember any phrase or sentence the president has said in a speech or statement the past 3½ years? One? Anything, in all that talking, that entered your head and stayed there? You do not. He is interesting, his words are not. Republicans obsess on his eloquence because it allows them to pretend they lost in 2008 because the American people were gulled by pretty words. The truth is he won because he seemed the furthest thing possible from the Republicans who'd presided over two unwon wars and the great recession.

The president's rhetorical powers are not a factor in the campaign. Mr. Romney is not more boring than Mr. Obama. That's not a compliment, precisely, but is true.

Actually, it's amazing that during an existential crisis—a crisis that is economic, cultural and political, and that bears on our role and purpose in the world—both candidates for our highest office have felt free to be so . . . well, insubstantial. Neither Mr. Romney nor Mr. Obama has caught hold of the overall meaning of his candidacy, Mr. Romney because so far he's chosen not to, and Mr. Obama because he's tried and failed.

With just more than 130 days to go, Mr. Romney has to start pulling from his brain and soul a coherent and graspable sense of the meaning of his run. "I will be president for this reason and this. I will move for this and this. The philosophy that impels me consists of these things."

Only when he does this will he show that he actually does have a larger purpose, and only then will people really turn toward him. He has to tell Americans why they can believe him, why a nation saturated with politics, chronically disappointed by its leaders, and tired of promises can, actually, put some faith in him.

They want to know how America can come back. Because they're pretty sure, down deep, that America has another comeback in her.

Mr. Romney has a tendency to litter his speeches with applause lines. They come one after another. It's old-fashioned, and it's based on the idea that that's all TV wants, five seconds of a line and two seconds of applause. But applause-line speeches aren't suited to the technological moment, when people can click on a link and listen to a whole speech if they have time. If all it is is applause lines, they'll turn away.

More important, applause-line speeches are not right for a time of crisis, because they do not allow for the development of a thought, a point of view, an insight. Those things take quiet building. Sometimes they take paragraphs, sometimes pages. They take time. But people like to listen if you're saying something interesting.

Campaign professionals like applause lines in part because they think that's all a campaign speech is, a vehicle for a picture of people clapping. They see the world in pictures on a screen; they are largely postliterate. They don't care about meaning, they care about impression. But in the end, the impression is bad: distracted candidate barking lines, robotic audience clapping.

As for the president, his big campaign speech last week in Cleveland not only was roundly panned but was deeply revealing. In it—all 54 minutes of it—he attempted to make the case for his economic stewardship and his re-election.

What he revealed is that he doesn't know the case for his own re-election.

Politicians give 54-minute speeches when they don't know what they're trying to say but are sure the next sentence will tell them. So they keep talking. They keep saying sentences in the hope that meaning will finally emerge from one of them.

A 54-minute speech is not a sign of Fidel-like confidence, or a love for speaking. A 54-minute speech is a sign of desperation.

It was a speech about everything—renewable energy, tax credits, Abraham Lincoln, tax loopholes, deficit imbalances, infrastructure, research and development incentives. But a speech about everything is a speech about nothing. I listened once and read it twice: It wasn't a case for re-election, it was a wordage dump.

The president has wrestled for the past six months with themes. He's jumped from one to another. They are:

It's not so bad—this indicator is up, and that one.

OK, it's bad, but it could have been worse—my actions kept us from tanking.

It's bad, but it's Bush's fault.

It's bad, but it's the congressional Republicans' fault.

I have made it less bad, and I need more time to make it even less badder.

Rich people have fancy cars and car elevators, I stand for jalopies and street parking.

None of it has worked.

What does it say of a crisis presidency at a dramatic moment that a president can't make the case for his own re-election, can't find his own meaning?

It says the other guy can win—if he has meaning. And isn't just a handsome stranger who says, "I'm not the last guy, I'm not the guy you don't like."

That won't do this year.

I hate this attitude so much: Orrin Hatch Battles Ted Kennedy's Ghost in Utah - The Republican senator's history of bipartisan deal-making has become a political liability in Tuesday's primary

From The Wall Street Journal:

What many conservatives view as Mr. Hatch's worst fiscal sin was co-sponsoring the 1997 children's health-care plan (S-Chip) with the late Ted Kennedy. I remember a few days after that bill passed, when an exuberant Mr. Hatch boasted to a conservative gathering that "I rolled Ted Kennedy" because "it's not an entitlement" and the bill didn't have the panoply of health benefits liberals wanted.

Road Trip Helps Romney Brush Up on Banter - At a breakfast, Mr. Romney introduced two of his sons, Matt and Craig, in a slightly unusual fashion. “I love them,” Mr. Romney said. “I love them like they’re my own. And they are! Craig!”

From The New York Times:

Mitt Romney’s English is direct and to the point, useful for attacking President Obama on the stump or dismantling his Republican opponents in primary debates. He is even fluent in French. But the one language Mr. Romney doesn’t seem to speak is small talk.

Over a five-day “Every Town Counts” bus tour through six swing states that is scheduled to wrap up on Tuesday, Mr. Romney’s attempts at banter were on sometimes painful display as he toured a factory floor here; scooped chocolate chip ice cream in Milford, N.H.; and served pancakes at a Father’s Day breakfast in Brunswick, Ohio.
      

At the breakfast, Mr. Romney introduced two of his sons, Matt and Craig, in a slightly unusual fashion. “I love them,” Mr. Romney said. “I love them like they’re my own. And they are! Craig!”

Mr. Romney joins a long list of presidential candidates who sometimes struggled with the basics of presidential campaigning. Former President George W. Bush was a fumbling and at times hilariously clumsy orator, so much so that entire books were devoted to his malapropisms. Al Gore was so stilted in 2000 that his campaign, trying to warm him up, paid the feminist writer Naomi Wolf for sartorial advice: earth tones for the man who wrote “Earth in the Balance.”

In a Shift, Biggest Wave of Migrants Is Now Asian

From The New York Times:

Asians have surpassed Hispanics as the largest wave of new immigrants to the United States, pushing the population of Asian descent to a record 18.2 million and helping to make Asians the fastest-growing racial group in the country, according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.
      

While Asian immigration has increased slightly in recent years, the shift in ranking is largely attributable to the sharp decline in Hispanic immigration, the study said.

Immigration scholars have attributed the decrease in Hispanic immigration to a mix of factors, including the economic downturn in the United States, increased deportation and border enforcement by the American authorities, and declining birthrates in Mexico.

      

Tougher enforcement measures have made a greater impact on the Hispanic immigrant population than on the Asian immigrant population because a much higher percentage of Hispanics are in the United States without immigration papers, experts said. About 45 percent of Hispanic immigrants in the United States are here illegally compared with about 13 percent to 15 percent of Asian immigrants, Pew demographers found.

“A century ago, most Asian-Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination,” the study said. “Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.”

At least 83 percent of the total Asian population in the United States traces its ancestry to China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, the Korean Peninsula or Japan — and demographic characteristics can vary widely from group to group.

      

Indians, for instance, lead all other Asian subgroups in income and education, the report said. Indians, Japanese and Filipinos have lower poverty rates than the general public, while Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese have higher poverty rates.

Crackdown on Migrants Tugs at Soul of Israelis; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contends that African immigrants are economic immigrants and that they threaten the Jewish character of Israel.

From The New York Times:

TEL AVIV — One by one, immigration inspectors escorted the migrants out of a dilapidated building into an alley teeming with African-run stores and hair salons. Then, they were led onto a waiting bus, in the first steps on the way to deportation to their native South Sudan.

Many residents here in the Neve Shaanan area of south Tel Aviv complain of rampant crime by migrants and say that it has become “Soweto,” a reference to the site of a 1976 uprising in South Africa. At a recent protest fanned by right-wing politicians, one lawmaker described the Africans, known here as “infiltrators,” as “a cancer in our body.” Later, Africans’ stores and apartments were attacked.
      

But the government clampdown is also ripping at Israel’s soul. For some, the connotations of roundups and the prospect of mass detentions cut too close to the bone.

      

“I feel I am in a movie in Germany, circa 1933 or 1936,” said Orly Feldheim, 46, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, as she doled out food last week to a long line of immigrants in the neighborhood’s Levinsky Park.

      

Since 2005, about 60,000 sub-Saharan Africans have surreptitiously crossed the porous border from Egypt into Israel after traversing the rugged desert of the Sinai Peninsula.

      

The rising tensions caused by their presence have prompted the government to announce a tough new policy to stem the influx of African immigrants and asylum seekers. The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has vowed to clear the country of all illegal immigrants within three years.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contends that most of them are economic immigrants and that they threaten the Jewish character of Israel. On Sunday, he said that all new arrivals would immediately be placed in detention.

After Chorus of Protest, New Tune on Deportations

From The New York Times:

President Obama decided last week on a major policy shift to stop deportations of young illegal immigrants after administration officials saw that he was losing the initiative to Republicans on an issue he had long championed and that he was alienating the Latino voters who may be pivotal to his re-election bid.

In recent weeks, the White House faced intense pressure from some of its closest allies — their voices often raised in frustration — to provide some relief for immigrant communities. The urging came from Harry Reid of Nevada and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top two Democrats in the Senate, and the Hispanic caucus in the House of Representatives, as well as Latino and immigrant leaders across the country.
      

Bleak figures reported early this month by the Department of Homeland Security showed that a yearlong program designed to shift enforcement away from illegal immigrants who pose no security risk was not producing results, with only about 500 young students nationwide spared from deportation.

And last week, students without immigration papers started a campaign of sit-ins and hunger strikes at Obama campaign offices in more than a dozen cities, saying that despite his promises, the president was continuing to deport immigrants like them.

      

After three years of record deportation numbers and cautious moves on other immigration policies, Mr. Obama finally used his executive authority in a sweeping way that surprised even his supporters, ending deportations for at least 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children.

An important change, administration officials said, came from the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, who approached the White House in mid-May with a plan to use existing laws to lift the threat of deportation for large numbers of illegal immigrant students.

      

After pressing tough enforcement since the beginning of the administration, Ms. Napolitano had been increasingly criticized by Latino and immigrant advocates who said she seemed to be thwarting the president’s policies. Since his first campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama had pledged his support for legislation known as the Dream Act, a proposal before Congress that would provide a path to legal status for illegal immigrant students.

      

Ms. Napolitano’s shift helped ease rising impatience at the White House with her department. A big stumbling block, White House officials said, was resistance from career staff members and enforcement agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement to a policy adopted a year ago. It required them to use prosecutorial discretion in picking and choosing among illegal immigrants facing deportation. It was the first time immigration officers had been asked to make such judgments as a regular practice.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican whose star is rapidly rising in his party, was close to introducing his own bill to help illegal immigrant students by giving them a temporary status, something quite similar to what White House officials had in mind. They feared Mr. Rubio’s proposal would pre-empt the president, making it appear he did not want to work with Republicans.

The White House was also awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court, expected any day, on the administration’s lawsuit against Arizona over a tough state immigration enforcement law. Campaign officials feared an adverse decision could leave Mr. Obama empty-handed when he tried to mobilize Latino voters for the November election.

A big concern for Mr. Obama, White House officials said, was whether he had legal authority to offer relief to so many immigrants.

The White House was less concerned about whether it would be circumventing Congress and enraging Republicans. “Look, every time we sneeze in the direction of an immigrant, someone says it’s amnesty,” the official said.
      

Under the policy, officials are to exercise discretion in deferring deportations of immigrants who qualify for two years. A grant of deferred action, as it is formally known, allows immigrants to apply for work permits. To be eligible, they must be 30 or younger and have come to the United States before they were 16. They must be in school or high school graduates or military veterans, with no criminal records.

'Avalanche of Leaks'; One of the adults in the administration, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to White House national security adviser Thomas Donilon; "I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend," he said. "What?" asked Mr. Donilon. "Shut the [blank] up."

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal:

What is happening with all these breaches of our national security? Why are intelligence professionals talking so much—divulging secret and sensitive information for all the world to see, and for our adversaries to contemplate?

In the past few months we have read that the U.S. penetrated al Qaeda in Yemen and foiled a terror plot; that the Stuxnet cyberworm, which caused chaos in the Iranian nuclear program, was a joint Israeli-American operation; and that President Obama personally approves every name on an expanding "kill list" of those targeted and removed from life by unmanned drones. According to the New York Times, Mr. Obama pores over "suspects' biographies" in "what one official calls 'the macabre 'baseball cards' of an unconventional war."

From David Sanger's new book, "Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power," we learn that Stuxnet was "the most sophisticated, complex cyberattack the United States had ever launched." Its secret name was "Olympic Games." America and Israel developed the "malicious software" together, the U.S. at Fort Meade, Md., where it keeps "computer warriors," Israel at a military intelligence agency it "barely acknowledges exists."

The Pentagon has built a replica of Iran's Natanz enrichment plant. The National Security Agency "routinely taps the ISI's cell phones"—that's the Pakistani intelligence agency. A "secret" U.S. program helps Pakistan protect its nuclear facilities; it involves fences and electronic padlocks. Still, insurgents bent on creating a dirty bomb, if they have a friend inside, can slip out "a few grams of nuclear material at a time" and outwit security systems targeted at major theft. In any case, there's a stockpile of highly enriched uranium sitting "near an aging research reactor in Pakistan." It could be used for several dirty bombs.

It's a good thing our enemies can't read. Wait, they can! They can download all this onto their iPads at a café in Islamabad.

It's all out there now. Mr. Sanger's sources are, apparently, high administration officials, whose diarrhetic volubility marks a real breakthrough in the history of indiscretion.

What are they thinking? That in the age of Wikileaks the White House itself should be one big Wikileak?

More from the Sanger book: During the search for Osama bin Laden, American intelligence experts had a brilliant idea. Bin Laden liked to make videotapes to rouse his troops and threaten the West. Why not flood part of Pakistan with new digital cameras, each with a "unique signature" that would allow its signals to be tracked? The signal could function as a beacon for a drone. Agents got the new cameras into the distribution chain of Peshawar shops. The plan didn't catch Osama, because he wasn't in that area. But "traceable digital cameras are still relied on by the CIA . . . and remain highly classified."

Well, they were.

There was a Pakistani doctor named Shakil Afridi who was sympathetic to America. He became involved in a scheme to try and get the DNA of Osama's family. He "and a team of nurses" were hired by the U.S. to administer hepatitis B vaccinations throughout Abbottabad. The vaccinations were real. Dr. Afridi got inside Osama's compound but never got to vaccinate any bin Ladens.

In the days after bin Laden was killed, the doctor was picked up by Pakistani agents and accused of cooperating with the Americans. He was likely tortured. He's in prison now, convicted of conspiring against the state.

No word yet on the nurses, but stand by.

Mr. Sanger writes that President Obama "will go down in history as the man who dramatically expanded" the use of drones. They are cheaper than boots on the ground, more efficient. But some of those who operate the unmanned bombers are getting upset. They track victims for days. They watch them play with their children. "It freaks you out," a former drone operator told Mr. Sanger. "You feel less like a pilot than a sniper."

During the Arab Spring, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was insistent that Mr. Obama needed to stick with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, even, Mr. Sanger reports, "if he started shooting protestors in the streets."

King Abdullah must be glad he called. Maybe he'll call less in the future.

***

All of this constitutes part of what California Sen. Dianne Feinstein calls an "avalanche of leaks." After she read the Stuxnet story in the Times, she was quoted as saying "my heart stopped" as she considered possible repercussions.

Why is this happening? In part because at our highest level in politics, government and journalism, Americans continue to act as if we are talking only to ourselves. There is something narcissistic in this: Only our dialogue counts, no one else is listening, and what can they do about it if they are? There is something childish in it: Knowing secrets is cool, and telling them is cooler. But we are talking to the world. Should it know how, when and with whose assistance we gather intelligence? Should it know our methods? Will this make us safer?

Liberally quoted in the Sanger book is the White House national security adviser, Thomas Donilon. When I was a child, there was a doll called Chatty Cathy. You pulled a string in her back, and she babbled inanely. Tom Donilon appears to be the Chatty Cathy of the American intelligence community.

It is good Congress has become involved. They wonder if the leaks have been directed, encouraged or authorized, and by whom. One way to get at that is the classic legal question: Who benefits?

That is not a mystery. In all these stories, it is the president and his campaign that benefit. The common theme in the leaks is how strong and steely Mr. Obama is. He's tough but fair, bold yet judicious, surprisingly willing to do what needs to be done. He hears everyone out, asks piercing questions, doesn't flinch.

He is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer.

And he is up for re-election and fighting the constant perception that he's weak, a one-man apology tour whose foreign policy is unclear, unsure, and lacking in strategic depth.

There's something in the leaks that is a hallmark of the Obama White House. They always misunderstand the country they seek to spin, and they always think less of it than it deserves. Why do the president's appointees think the picture of him with a kill list in his hand makes him look good? He sits and personally decides who to kill? Americans don't think of their presidents like that. And they don't want to.

National security doesn't exist to help presidents win elections. It's not a plaything or a tool to advance one's prospects.

After the killing of bin Laden, members of the administration, in a spirit of triumphalism, began giving briefings and interviews in which they said too much. One of the adults in the administration, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, reportedly went to Mr. Donilon's office. "I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend," he said. What? asked Mr. Donilon.

"Shut the [blank] up," Mr. Gates said.

Still excellent advice, and at this point more urgently needed.

Post-Watergate campaign finance limits undercut by changes

Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post:

The money poured into Richard M. Nixon’s reelection campaign from all corners: Six-figure checks flown by corporate jet from Texas; bundles of payments handed over at an Illinois game preserve; a battered brown attaché case stuffed with $200,000 in cash from a New Jersey investor hoping to fend off a fraud investigation.

During four pivotal weeks in spring 1972, the president brought in as much as $20 million — about $110 million in today’s dollars — much of it in the form of illegal corporate donations and all of it raised to avoid disclosure rules that went into effect that April.

“The decision was made that it was time to put the hay in,” John Dean, Nixon’s counsel at the time, recalled in an interview last week. “A lot of us believe Watergate might never have happened without all that money sloshing around.”

Four decades later, there’s little need for furtive fundraising or secret handoffs of cash. Many of the corporate executives convicted of campaign-finance crimes during Watergate could now simply write a check to their favorite super PAC or, if they want to keep it secret, to a compliant nonprofit group. Corporations can spend as much as they want to help their favored candidates, no longer prohibited by law from spending company cash on elections.

The political world has, in many respects, come full circle since a botched burglary funded by illicit campaign cash brought down an administration. The excesses of the Nixon era ushered in a series of wide-ranging restrictions on the use of money in campaigns, including limits on individual campaign contributions that remain in force today.

But the intervening decades have also brought changes that have undercut many of the political financing rules put in place in response to the Watergate scandal, including a Supreme Court case that freed corporations and unions to spend unlimited money on elections and a public-financing regime that has collapsed into irrelevance.

‘Money corrupts’

The result is a frenzied rush to raise money, with echoes of that spring 40 years ago: President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney spend much of their time crisscrossing the country to collect as much cash as possible, while political groups run by their former aides solicit donations of seven — and eight — figures from sympathetic billionaires.

Last week, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson contributed $10 million to Restore Our Future, a super PAC dedicated to helping Romney win in November. Adelson, one of the richest men in the world, and his relatives have spent more than $35 million to help Republicans in the 2012 elections.

“I think we’re in the middle of a scandal that hasn’t quite gelled yet,” said Roger M. Witten, who worked in the Watergate special prosecutor’s office and now handles campaign-finance cases at WilmerHale in New York. “A tremendous amount of ground has been lost. We’ll have to relearn the lessons of Watergate — that money corrupts the system.”

Many conservatives and civil-liberties advocates take a different lesson, however, saying stricter rules would have done little to stop Nixon political operatives intent on breaking the law. Bradley J. Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman who is one of the leading voices for deregulating the campaign finance system, said many of the limits enacted after Watergate were ineffective and intruded on First Amendment rights.

“It’s not bad or good in and of itself to spend more money in politics,” Smith said. “We’ve got to shake off the bugaboo, the ghost of Watergate, that somehow justifies never-ending regulation of people’s free-speech rights.”

At the dawn of 1972, Nixon campaign aides, fueled by their boss’s legendary paranoia and scheming, set out to ensure his reelection by taking advantage of a window of opportunity — a loophole that let them raise unlimited, secret funds for about a month between the expiration of one election law and the enactment of a new one. The frenzy began March 10 and lasted until April 7, when legislation went into effect requiring disclosure of political donors.

In the months and years that followed, prosecutors and journalists unraveled a mind-boggling array of bank accounts and revolving political committees used to launder the money. Overseen by Nixon’s finance director, Maurice Stans, the effort featured a half-dozen “pickup men” roaming the country gathering checks and cash.

The volume was so great that some donations that had been offered went uncollected, while others came in late. One New Jersey lawmaker showed up in Washington on April 10 with a briefcase filled with $200,000 in $100 bills, money eventually traced to indicted financier Robert L. Vesco; the contributions were treated as if they had been received prior to the deadline.

Overall, Nixon’s 1972 reelection effort raised an estimated $60 million — “the largest amount of money ever spent in a political campaign,” as Stans later bragged.

By 1975, prosecutors reported that 32 individuals and 19 corporations were convicted or had pleaded guilty to violations of campaign-contribution laws, including household names such as Goodyear, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Northrop, American Airlines, Gulf Oil and Phillips Petroleum, records show.

Former Watergate prosecutor Frank Tuerkheimer, who now teaches law at the University of Wisconsin, said he and his colleagues viewed the cases as the beginning of a crackdown on campaign-finance violations.

‘We were wrong’

“Unfortunately, that didn’t happen,” Tuerkheimer said. “We thought it would result in serious enforcement. We were wrong.”

Congress responded to Watergate by amending the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1974, which implemented contribution and spending limits, created the FEC and provided a system of public financing for presidential contests. The Supreme Court soon struck down the spending limits and other restrictions on free-speech grounds in Buckley v. Valeo.

But donation limits and public financing remained, and, for a time, money seemed to play a smaller role in national politics. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan ran for reelection without holding a single campaign fundraiser because he and Democratic challenger Walter Mondale each accepted $40 million in public funds.

The next crack in the wall constructed by reformers came in the 1990s, after a series of FEC rulings led to the rise of unlimited “soft money” donations to parties, an atmosphere that spurred several major financing scandals during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Reformers pushed back again in 2002 with a major campaign finance law sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), which banned unlimited donations to parties, imposed new restrictions on ads and attempted to limit the impact of self-funding millionaire candidates.

Many of the McCain-Feingold provisions, however, were struck down in a series of decisions culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which jettisoned a long-standing ban on corporate and union spending on elections. The court ruled 5 to 4 that corporations had the same rights as people when it comes to political speech, upending restrictions on election spending by businesses that stretched back a century.

‘Brought back to life’

The rulings have led to a proliferation of super PACs and other groups and have made it easier for wealthy individuals to spend unlimited money on politics.

“The pieces that created the Watergate scandal — secret money, unlimited donations — have been brought back to life by the Citizens United decision,” argues longtime activist Fred Wertheimer, who helped draft many of the reforms put in place in the 1970s. “The Supreme Court’s idea that you can let all this money into the system without leading to corruption is absurd.”

The long-running debate has been complicated by shifting politics and allegiances. Those in favor of more restrictions on campaign spending now tend to be Democrats, who have been pushing unsuccessfully to enact new disclosure laws for secretive nonprofits and other reforms. Leading Republicans, meanwhile, have adopted a no-regulation posture: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said last week that Obama’s push for broader disclosures amounted to a “Nixonian” attempt to intimidate conservatives.

But 40 years ago, the lines were scrambled, and many proponents of fewer restrictions came from the left. Joel M. Gora, now a professor at Brooklyn Law School, worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to help advocacy groups resist donor disclosure requirements and was on the legal team that rolled back many restrictions in Buckley.

Gora views Citizens United and other anti-regulation decisions as victories for free speech and says that many regulations are part of an “incumbent protection racket” aimed at quashing dissent. One of the plaintiffs in Buckley was Eugene McCarthy, whose insurgent Democratic presidential bid in 1968 was heavily funded by six-figure donations from antiwar donors.

“These laws are restricting outsiders, whether liberal or left-wing outsiders or conservative and right-wing outsiders,” Gora said. “The difference between the Adelsons of today and the people who wanted to support Gene McCarthy is really just a matter of the amount.”

Young illegal immigrants’ amnesty could tighten competition for jobs, college - New policy does not grant any public benefits, such as Medicare and Medicaid. Federal law already grants all undocumented immigrants the right to a public-school education and emergency hospital care.

From The Washington Post:

President Obama has just opened a floodgate of opportunity for young illegal immigrants in the United States, but could it squeeze the aspirations of legal Americans in the process?

Across the nation Friday, immigrant advocates and Hispanic youth groups hailed Obama’s decision to offer legal status to some undocumented immigrants under 30 as a watershed in U.S. immigration history and a long-sought victory for ambitious youths denied a chance to realize the American dream.

“I thank God for this day. It has changed my whole life,” Jorge Acuna, 19, a college student in Silver Spring who came to the United States with his family as a child, told a cheering crowd outside the White House on Friday afternoon, minutes after Obama announced the new policy. Last spring, the community college student was nearly deported to his native Colombia. Now, under the amnesty, he will be able to pursue his degree in engineering.

But opponents of illegal immigration warned that the policy could create significant new competition for jobs and university slots at a time of nationwide recession and numerous states’ efforts to curb public spending.

“I see a tidal wave coming,” said Brad Botwin, president of Help Save Maryland, a group that opposes legalization for undocumented immigrants. “Half of our college graduates today can’t find jobs, and the unemployment rate for high-school-aged Americans is extremely high. This is unfair to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who are out there struggling to get ahead.”

Residency not provided

Under the new policy, as many as 1.4 million undocumented immigrants under age 30 will be able to apply for the amnesty, allowing them to work and attend college legally. To be eligible, they must have been in the United States for five years, have no criminal record, and attend high school or college or be a military veteran.

The policy does not provide permanent legal residency, but it protects those who qualify from being deported and gives them a chance to renew their new status every two years. It also does not grant any public benefits, such as Medicare and Medicaid. Federal law already grants all undocumented immigrants the right to a public-school education and emergency hospital care.

It was not immediately clear how the policy would dovetail with state laws and policies on illegal immigration. In the absence of a broad federal mandate, states have passed a variety of laws ranging from the relatively lax to the extremely strict. In the first three months of 2012, more than 860 bills and resolutions concerning immigration were introduced in state legislatures.

The most significant and contentious aspect of the new policy is that it automatically grants hundreds of thousands of people in their teens and 20s — most of them from Mexico and Central America — the right to work in the United States. Many may have already been working, but as undocumented laborers they often had to accept low wages and poor conditions.

As Greeks Head to Polls Again, a Fear That No One Will Win - While New Democracy appears to be running neck-and-neck with Syriza, many say they believe that Europe’s best chance to negotiate a lasting deal with Athens — and to keep down social unrest at home — would be if Syriza is in the government and part of whatever emerges.

From The New York Times:

Greeks head to the polls on Sunday for the second time in two months with a pervasive sense of dread that any government that comes to power will fail to resolve the political and economic turmoil that threatens the country’s future — and the financial stability of Europe itself.   

If the establishment center-right party New Democracy ekes out a victory in a race that polls show as tight, Greece still faces weeks or months of negotiations with European lenders over the terms of its austerity program, which all parties agree are too onerous to enforce on its rapidly shrinking economy.

A victory by the leftist party Syriza promises a more serious confrontation, especially with Germany, over how — and perhaps whether — to keep Greece in the euro zone.

While New Democracy appears to be running neck-and-neck with Syriza, many say they believe that Europe’s best chance to negotiate a lasting deal with Athens — and to keep down social unrest at home — would be if Syriza is in the government and part of whatever emerges.

“We have a brand new political landscape and it will change a lot more in the years to come, because the austerity collapsed the center,” said Nikos Xydakis, a political analyst and an editor at the daily newspaper Kathimerini. He added that the next Greek government would not have much staying power.

“The problems are huge,” he said. “Actually, the country faces collapse,” and no Greek political party has the “moral power” to win over the electorate, or “huge support from Europe.”       

Mitt Romney’s Rose Garden strategy — and its limits

From The Washington Post:

Romney has adopted a classic “Rose Garden” strategy in recent months, largely refusing to engage in extended — or frequent — question and answer sessions with reporters on the trail or sit down with TV anchors for more extended interviews.

Romney is breaking from that course somewhat this weekend, agreeing to appear on CBS’ “Face the Nation” — his first non-Fox News Channel Sunday show interview since announcing he was running for president in 2011.

Viewed broadly, what Romney is trying to do is obvious. Republicans believe — and they are almost certainly right — that if the November election is a referendum on President Obama and his handling of the economy, they win.

Why then, many in the party argue, should Romney make himself widely available to the press and, in so doing, virtually ensure that the spotlight occasionally moves off of Obama and onto him — and not in a good way.

That’s why Romney has almost exclusively done televised interviews with Fox News Channel — whose editorial bent tilts conservative — and has kept the press at arm’s length (or even further) throughout the campaign.

The latest incident? Romney’s team escorted the press out of an event in which he was taking questions from members of the Business Roundtable on Wednesday night at the Newseum in Washington. The Romney team notes that reporters were escorted out at the request of the Business Roundtable. (Worth noting: President Obama did the same thing when he spoke to the group earlier this year.) And, Romney’s last direct interaction with the people who cover him on a daily basis was two weeks ago when he did a press availability outside of the now-shuttered Solyndra plant in California.

Ed Rogers, a veteran Republican strategist, fully endorsed the Rose Garden strategy — even questioning why Romney would agree to do a Sunday show this weekend.

“What is the upside to a sunday show appearance,” asked Rogers. “Don’t do it. Things are going great.”

The problem with a Rose Garden strategy — particularly if you aren’t the current occupant of the White House — is that it has limitations.

There’s no question that 95 percent of beating an incumbent in any election is convincing people why he/she deserves to be fired. But, there is at least 5 percent of the equation in which the challenger must prove that he/she is up to the job they are seeking.

The bar a challenger must clear to be considered a credible alternative is admittedly lower than the hurdle an incumbent faces to prove to the electorate that he deserves a second term. But, the bar exists.

That’s why simply running on an “I’m not that guy” strategy isn’t likely going to be enough to get Romney into the White House. Yes, Bill Clinton’s main case in 1992 was that President George H.W. Bush was mishandling the economy. But, Clinton closed the deal only when he was able to sell the public on the notion that he had good — and better — ideas to improve things domestically.

Republicans politicians up to and including Wisconsin Gov.Scott Walkerand Wisconsin Rep.Paul Ryanhave suggested in recent days that Romney needs to offer his own alternative, positive vision for the country — not simply run against the vision offered by President Obama.

“Even with the economic headwinds the President is facing, and they’re at gale force with no sign of subsiding, Romney is not in the lead,” said John Weaver, a longtime political adviser to Arizona Sen. John McCain. “This is really defying political gravity. Given that Obama is over performing in some key groups, Romney needs to be more aggressive in telling his own narrative and not sit back hoping a slow recovery will do the President in.”

To date, Romney and his team have clearly benefited from their embrace of a Rose Garden strategy. But their decision to appear on “Face the Nation” this weekend also suggests they understand the strategy’s limitations when it comes to convincing voters that Romney is the right person to serve as the 45th president of the United States.

Tom Friedman: When countries with such different cultures become this interconnected and interdependent — when they share the same currency but not the same work ethics, retirement ages or budget discipline — you end up with German savers seething at Greek workers.

Tom Friedman writes in The New York Times:

For many years, strategists have debated whether Turkey would be a “bridge” or a “gully” between predominantly Christian Europe and the Arab/Muslim Middle East. If Turkey were admitted to the European Union, it would be a bridge binding these two worlds. If it were kept out of the E.U., it could become a gully separating the two. It turns out that Turkey these days is neither a bridge nor a gully. It’s an island — an island of relative stability between two great geopolitical systems that are cracking apart: the euro zone that came into being after the cold war, and the Arab state system that came into being after World War I are both coming unglued.

The stresses are getting to everyone. The reactions range from the truly horrific murders perpetrated by the Assad mafia family clinging to power in Syria to the disturbing fight that broke out last Thursday on a morning TV talk show in Greece, where the spokesman of a far-right party tossed water in the face of a woman from the left-wing party on the show and then smacked another woman panelist in the face three times.

The island of Turkey has become one of the best places to observe both these worlds. To the west, you see the European Monetary Union buckling under the weight of its own hubris — leaders who reached too far in forging a common currency without the common governance to sustain it. And, to the south, you see the Arab League crumbling under the weight of its own decay — leaders who never reached at all for the decent governance and modern education required to thrive in the age of globalization.

Europeans failed to build Europe, and that is now a big problem because, as its common currency comes under pressure and the E.U. goes deeper into recession, the whole world feels the effects. The Syrians failed to build Syria, the Egyptians failed to build Egypt, the Libyans failed to build Libya, the Yemenis failed to build Yemen. Those are even bigger problems because, as their states have been stressed or fractured, no one knows how they’ll be put back together again.

To put it another way: In Europe, the supranational project did not work, and now, to a degree, Europe is falling back into individual states. In the Arab world, the national project did not work, so some of the Arab states are falling back onto sects, tribes, regions and clans.

In Europe, the supranational project did not work because the European states were never ready to cede control over their budgets to a central authority that would ensure a common fiscal policy to back up a common currency.

In the Arab world, the national project did not work — in many, but not all cases — because the tribes, sects, clans and regional groups that make up these Arab states, whose borders were drawn up by colonial powers, were unwilling or unable to meld genuine national communities.

So the E.U. today has many citizens, but no single supranational nation state to which everyone is ready to cede economic authority. And the Arab world has many national states, but few citizens. In Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Bahrain, you have one sect or tribe ruling others by force — not because they forged a voluntary social contract with one another. In Egypt and Tunisia, you have more homogeneous societies and a stronger sense of citizenship, which is why they have a better chance at transitioning to more consensual politics.

In fairness, in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Iraq, you have many people, particularly young rebels, who want to be citizens. They want to live in states where people have rights and obligations and multiethnic parties. But it’s not clear they have the leadership and educated middle classes needed to forge modern political identities out of atavistic ones.

One question historians will puzzle over is why both great geopolitical systems fractured at once? The answer, I believe, is the intensifying merger of globalization and the information technology revolution, which made the world dramatically flatter in the last five years, as we went from connected to hyperconnected. In the Arab world, this hyper-connectivity simultaneously left youths better able to see how far behind they were — with all the anxiety that induced — and enabled them to communicate and collaborate to do something about it, cracking open their ossified states.

In Europe, hyperconnectedness both exposed just how uncompetitive some of their economies were, but also how interdependent they had become. It was a deadly combination. When countries with such different cultures become this interconnected and interdependent — when they share the same currency but not the same work ethics, retirement ages or budget discipline — you end up with German savers seething at Greek workers, and vice versa.

And us? America’s flexible federal system makes it, theoretically, well-suited to thrive in a hyperconnected world, but only if we get our macroeconomic house in order and our education up to par (or better). We should be the world’s island of stability today. But we’re not. As Mohamed el-Erian, the chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, puts it, “We’re just the cleanest dirty shirt around.”

Walter Jones observes: A 'jungle primary' could change Georgia politics

In a 7-31-2011 post entitled "All work and no play . . . - A non-political post: It sure was good seeing Tom Crawford and finally meeting Walter Jones last week," I wrote:

But the real highlight for the day came in finally getting to meet another heavy among journalism's elite in Georgia, Walter Jones, Director of Morris News Service.

Although Walter's reporting on the events of the day were in The Georgia Times-Union (a Georgia edition of The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville), you will find Walter's articles in most of Georgia's major metropolitan newspapers just about every day.

In a 9-30-2011 post entitled "A week after, is it safe to wonder if this was a case of 'Look Mom, the Emperor has no clothes'? -- Analysis of Troy Davis' execution," I wrote:

This is the Cracker Squire's first and only post on the Troy Davis frenzy.

Walter Jones tackles a tough one where, regardless of what you say and how you say it, you risk offending just about everyone. Walter, thanks for this story. It shows why you are one of the best.

Walter Jones does an excellent job of reporting and analysis in his article entitled "Analysis of Troy Davis' execution: A cause gone out of control" in The Georgia Times-Union:

This week Mr. Jones pins a keeper -- and you might even learn something from reading it to boot -- about the open or jungle primary that we will soon be hearing more rather than less about.

Thanks Walter, we do so enjoy your reporting and perspective. Maybe if your story had just stuck to the basics and reported that (1) under California's new open-primary system, all candidates for each office compete on a single ballot, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation; and (2) that the system, designed to favor more moderate, middle-of-the-road candidates over ideologically extreme contenders in both major parties, also allows for outcomes in which two Democrats or two Republicans could face each other in November, then Todd Rheam over a gapundit.com wouldn't have gotten his panties in such a wad.

For me and my house, I love and even more than than so appreciate the analysis, even if, as was the case in your Troy Davis story, by being the best and telling it all brother you risk offending innocently both sides.  Keep it the good work.

Mr. Jones article reads:

If California’s latest political fashion comes east, it could shake up politics in the Peach State, experts say.

Last Tuesday, California put into gear its so-called jungle primary in which all candidates appear on the same ballot regardless of party. Voters can pick a candidate from one party in this race and another party in that one, and an independent in a third.

“I know all the trends start in California,” said Kerwin Swint, political science professor at Kennesaw State University.

Not just fashions and entertainment trends. Remember the tax revolt Harold Jarvis launched from California and the immigration crackdown?

Richard Nixon, Earl Warren, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger also started their political careers there.

The last one, the body-building Republican governor, sponsored a state referendum that led to use of the jungle primary. His aim was to break up the Democrats’ stranglehold on the legislature that prevented him from getting anything passed.

The idea is that allowing independents and members of both major parties to select the nominees would force candidates to take moderate stances. It would end the zigzag common to most elections where a candidate has to run to the right or the left to win the nomination and then race to the middle for the general election.

Georgia uses the same mechanism in special elections. That’s how the General Assembly wound up with an independent, something unheard of in traditional elections.
Swint notes that independents are the fastest-growing voter bloc.

“Voters like choices, so they say they don’t like parties that much anyway,” he said.

A survey by the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies shows that 16 percent of party members also planned to vote for someone from the opposite party.

Yet, other research shows voters still like to see candidates’ party labels because it helps them make their decision when voting on down-ticket races where they know little about who’s running.

The primary may lessen some of the power of incumbents, but that can’t be gauged this year because the state also used a citizen commission to redistrict the state which left many veteran officeholders running in new territory or against colleagues.

California is a complex state. Georgia, on the other hand, is dominated by one party and one political philosophy, conservative.

While Tuesday gave California a lot of runoffs between two candidates of the same party, last month’s candidate-qualifying period did the same thing here. Six Georgia congressmen face challengers within their own party.

Primary challengers here, though, usually are running to the outside and accusing the incumbent of losing touch with the party base.

Districts here are so lopsided that primaries effectively determine the whole election as they used to before California installed its jungle approach.

“It would change Georgia pretty dramatically,” said Randy Evans, a political advisor on the congressional and national level as well as a former member of Georgia’s State Election Board.

Party stalwarts like Evans, who has chaired recent state GOP conventions, warn that the top-two primary like California’s can be manipulated by a few people, especially when there are many candidates and no runoff for the nomination.

“Personally I think having choices that actually reflect the center right and the center left of the two parties is fine,” he said.

The founding fathers hoped they had created a system free of political parties, but as soon as the country began operating under the Constitution, these same founders quickly gravitated into factions that became parties.

Maybe the Californians have invented a better mousetrap. Or, maybe it’s like reality television, celebrity fascination and other goofy trends that also originated on the Left Coast.

Pity the poor Obama administration leakers. They impart their much-cherished secrets to make their man look good and then, at the first chirp of criticism, are ordered to confess their (possible) crimes by the very same president they were seeking to please.

Richard Cohen writes in The Washington Post:

Pity the poor Obama administration leakers. They impart their much-cherished secrets to make their man look good and then, at the first chirp of criticism, are ordered to confess their (possible) crimes by the very same president they were seeking to please. In this, they are a bit like the male praying mantis. He does as asked, and then the female bites his head off.

What is remarkable about the recent leaks is the coincidence — it can only be that — that they all made the president look good, heroic, decisive, strong and even a touch cruel; born, as the birthers long suspected, not in Hawaii — but possibly on the lost planet Krypton. The leak that displayed all these Obamian attributes was the one that said the president personally approves the assassinations of terrorists abroad. He gives his okay, and the bad guys are dispatched via missiles from drones.

The New York Times, which broke this particular story, said it had interviewed “three dozen of [Obama’s] current and former advisers,” which suggests the sort of mass law-breaking not seen since Richard Nixon took out after commies, liberals, conservationists, antiwar protesters, Jews and, of course, leakers. The two U.S. attorneys assigned to finding the leakers may have to use the facilities at Guantanamo, which, as luck would have it, are somehow still open. Of course, the chances of a successful prosecution are slim, leak cases being hard to prove. Journalists, unlike the mob, still adhere to the Mafia code of silence, omertà. We are, at heart, traditionalists.

All administrations leak what they want when they want. Occasionally, some killjoy screams something about national security, but the republic somehow survives and the secret is usually only a secret to the American people, not to the enemy. This is undoubtedly the case with the recent disclosure regarding the use of a computer worm to wreak havoc with the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranians were onto it.

The leak that troubles me concerns the killing of suspected or actual terrorists. The triumphalist tone of the leaks — the Tarzan-like chest-beating of various leakers — not only is in poor taste but also shreds a long-standing convention that, in these matters, the president has deniability. The president of the United States is not the Godfather.

Of course, we have always known that the president, as commander in chief and all of that, is where the proverbial buck stops. But for the longest time, a polite fiction distanced the president from what, after all, is murder, and it helped somewhat in protecting him. Deniability is always a fiction, but it provides some space between the president and his orders, and does not plaster the presidential face on an act of extreme — and possibly illegal — violence. Presidents need protection from retaliation — not just in office, but for the rest of their lives. After all, the poor man’s drone is the suicide bomber.

The present and former government officials who leaked to the Times as well as to Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman are forgiven if they thought they were doing the boss’ bidding. After all, the president was serenely mum when the stories first hit. The White House did not react until some pesky Republicans, the reliably outraged John McCain in particular, yelled bloody murder. The leakers had to have noted that a torrent of leaks followed the killing of Osama bin Laden, with Obama characterized as just this side of personally dispatching the man with a butter knife. The Times’ David Sanger reports that the bragging got to the point that then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates told national security adviser Tom Donilon to “shut the [expletive] up.” Pakistan, it turns out, did not want its nose rubbed in its failure to notice bin Laden living in Abbottabad — or, for that matter, the SEALs coming to get him.

Killing is a serious matter. The death of an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) is deeply troubling (the government asked the government if it was legal, and the government said it was). For this as well as other assassinations, there could be blowback.

Assassination by drone has its charms — it has severely degraded al-Qaeda — and war, after all, is war. But I wonder if those presidents who knew war — a Truman, an Eisenhower, a Kennedy — would themselves boast about killing or let others do it for them. The leakers set out to blow a mighty trumpet for Obama. It came out, however, like a shrill penny whistle.

Vouchers Unspoken, Romney Hails School Choice - “Voucher” is a fighting word in education, so it may be understandable that when Mitt Romney speaks about improving the nation’s schools, he never uses that term.

From The New York Times:

“Voucher” is a fighting word in education, so it may be understandable that when Mitt Romney speaks about improving the nation’s schools, he never uses that term.

 Nonetheless, as president, Mr. Romney would seek to overhaul the federal government’s largest programs for kindergarten through 12th grade into a voucherlike system. Students would be free to use $25 billion in federal money to attend any school they choose — public, charter, online or private — a system, he said, that would introduce marketplace dynamics into education to drive academic gains.

His plans, presented in a recent speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, represent a broad overhaul of current policy, one that reverses a quarter-century trend, under Republican and Democratic presidents, of concentrating responsibility for school quality at the federal level.

“I will expand parental choice in an unprecedented way,” Mr. Romney said, adding that families’ freedom to vote with their feet “will hold schools responsible for results.”

His proposals are the clearest sign yet that Republicans have executed an about-face from the education policies of President George W. Bush, whose signature domestic initiative, the No Child Left Behind law of 2002, required uniform state testing and imposed penalties on schools that failed to progress.

Now Mr. Romney is taking his party back to its ideological roots by emphasizing a lesser role for Washington, replacing top-down mandates with a belief in market mechanisms. It is a change driven in part by Tea Party disdain of the federal government. In the Republican presidential nominating fight, candidates competed in calling to shut the Education Department.

Mr. Romney, who never went that far, also seems hemmed in politically by the fact that President Obama promotes many solutions that were once Republican talking points, including charter schools and teacher evaluations tied to test scores.

“There’s not much left for Republicans to be distinctive about,” said Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group. “The one line the Obama folks have refused to cross is the voucher line” — that is, allowing students to use taxpayer money to attend any certified school, even a private school.

Specifically, Mr. Romney proposed to change federal payments made to schools with large numbers of poor and disabled students into an individual entitlement. Students would take a share of the $25 billion in two federal programs to the school of their choice.

He would also extract the federal government from intervening to turn around the lowest performing schools, which has been a chief focus of the Obama administration. Instead, to drive improvement, Mr. Romney would have schools compete for students in a more market-based approach to quality.

Advocates for vouchers say they will have a larger impact if they become more widespread.       

One of Mr. Romney’s ideas for increasing students’ choices seems to contradict an anti-Washington emphasis: giving poor students the freedom to choose a public school outside their district.  

     

District boundaries have long been sacrosanct. They prevent urban students, for example, from enrolling in suburban schools that typically have higher-income families and sometimes more lavish budgets.

Once thought to be moribund, the voucher movement was revived by gains Republicans made in the 2010 midterm elections. Fourteen states since then have introduced or expanded private school vouchers, according to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

The money for the vouchers would come from two federal programs that Mr. Romney would overhaul that target students deemed in need of extra support: Title 1, for economically disadvantaged students; and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Currently the money from both programs, the largest K-12 initiatives in the Education Department, is awarded to states and districts based on federal formulas.

Grover J. Whitehurst, a Romney adviser, said that remaking the programs into individual payments that follow the student — he used the metaphor of a student’s backpack — could attract other streams of education dollars.

“If you connected state funding with federal funding, then you’re talking about a backpack with enough money in it to really empower choice,” said Mr. Whitehurst, director of education policy at the Brookings Institution. “The idea would be the federal Title 1 funds would allow states that want to move in this direction to do so, and if they did so, all of a sudden it’s a game changer.”       

Finally - Ethanol's Long Boom Stalls -Fuel-Additive Plants Close as Gasoline Demand Falls, Federal Mandates Are Met - The ethanol industry's once powerful political support has weakened amid high corn prices and efforts to cut federal spending and regulation.

From The Wall Street Journal:

WALHALLA, N.D.—For years, the biggest employer in this city of 1,000 people near the Canadian border was the ethanol plant on County Road 9, which pumped out the corn-based fuel additive to satisfy demand driven by federal mandates requiring its use in gasoline.

In April, plant owner Archer Daniels Midland Co. ADM -0.50%closed it, citing lackluster returns. The plant's 61 employees lost their jobs, and Walhalla lost its biggest source of tax revenue.

"Jobs like that are hard to come by," said Chris Jackson, Walhalla's 32-year-old mayor and proprietor of its main watering hole, Jackson's Bar. Business has suffered at the bar and the city's two motels and gas stations because truck traffic to the plant has ended. The mayor says that some residents who worked at the plant are planning to leave.

A local animal-feed company is considering buying the plant, but mainly to get access to a byproduct of ethanol manufacturing that is used to feed cattle.

America's ethanol boom is stalling, and the effects are starting to spread across a Farm Belt that had grown accustomed to soaring growth. Annual U.S. production of ethanol more than tripled from 2005 to 2011, driving up crop prices and pumping money into rural communities from Nebraska to North Dakota.

Now, ethanol demand is topping out. The amount used in gasoline is near federal mandates, and gasoline consumption is declining. After 15 straight years of growth, ethanol production this year will fall slightly and will be roughly flat next year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's May forecast. Updated output numbers will be released Tuesday.

The ethanol industry expanded based partly on expectations that gas consumption would keep rising, and that ethanol's share of that would continue to grow. Instead, gas demand this year is projected to be 6.7% below its peak in 2007, and efforts to expand ethanol's share face challenges. U.S. plants now face excess capacity, producing less than 14 billion gallons of ethanol a year, compared to capacity of 14.7 billion gallons, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade association.

"A lot of people are rethinking their assumptions on the ethanol industry and the potential size," said Jason Henderson, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Meantime, the broader farm sector remains a relative bright spot in the U.S. economy. Prices of some key commodities have fallen from historic highs reached in recent years, but land prices have continued to rise and unemployment in big agricultural states is generally below the national average.

The ethanol slowdown has been jarring, especially on the edges of the corn belt. About two dozen workers at an ethanol plant in Sutherland, Neb., were furloughed after the plant was idled in February.

Residents who invested in an ethanol plant in Levelland, Texas, have seen their holdings wiped out: The plant, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, sold for $9.2 million in May, a fraction of the cost to build it four years ago. "It is a big chunk of the community's change that is gone," said Richard Levy, a lawyer representing the plant's ownership in the bankruptcy case.

ICM Inc., a Colwich, Kan., engineering firm that helped design and build about 100 corn-to-ethanol plants in the U.S., has cut its payroll to 325 workers from 750 workers in 2008, said Chief Executive Dave Vander Griend. Most of its business now is in South America and Europe.

The slump is weighing on prices American farmers get for corn, which rose to record highs in recent years based partly on ethanol demand. The ethanol industry now consumes about 40% of corn produced in the U.S., up from around 14% in 2005. The Agriculture Department projects corn prices for this year will decline at least 20% to an average of $4.20 to $5 a bushel, partly because of flat demand from ethanol producers.

The ethanol boom started in the latter half of the past decade. It was fueled by a need to replace the gasoline additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether—which was used to reduce air pollution but was found to contaminate ground water—and by a federal mandate requiring a growing volume of ethanol be blended into gasoline.

Annual production surged to 13.95 billion gallons last year from 3.8 billion gallons in 2005, according to the energy information agency. The Renewable Fuels Association says the ethanol industry directly employs more than 90,000 people.

Ethanol producers went through a rough patch around 2008, when surging corn prices and plunging prices for gasoline and ethanol squeezed profits. Some plants closed and factory construction slowed. But production kept growing.

Two key federal rules govern ethanol's use. One, created in 2007, requires total ethanol production of 15 billion gallons a year by 2015. That is only about 9% above current levels.

But that target, based on projections that fuel consumption would keep growing, now conflicts with an older rule that, until recently, capped ethanol's share of gasoline at 10%. That cap, in place for more than 30 years, determined how gasoline stations and most cars were built, and it has effectively been reached: Ethanol is expected to constitute 9.7% of the nation's gasoline supply this year, up from less than 5% in 2007.

In several steps in the past year and a half, the Environmental Protection Agency has effectively increased the cap to allow gasoline that is 15% ethanol, known as E15. The ethanol industry is pinning its hopes on rapid adoption of E15. "We are putting a lot of faith in E15," said Walter Wendland, CEO of two ethanol plants in northern Iowa. "We have a market problem out there for our production."

But large-scale adoption of E15 faces sizable challenges. Not a single fuel station sells it today. Gasoline stations need to spend money changing pumps and alerting customers. The auto and oil industries have voiced strong concerns about E15, saying the fuel could damage cars and leave customers with expensive repairs.

Meanwhile, the ethanol industry's once powerful political support has weakened amid high corn prices and efforts to cut federal spending and regulation. Congress last year eliminated about $6 billion in annual subsidies, and critics are pushing for cuts in the 15 billion-gallon-a-year mandate.

The change was evident in Iowa, where support for ethanol has usually been an important part of campaigning ahead of the state's caucuses. In this year's Republican race, the issue barely registered, said Tim Hagle, a political science professor at the University of Iowa. "It is taking a back seat to other issues," he said.

Changes in politics or other factors could brighten ethanol's outlook. For example, falling corn prices could improve the profitability for ethanol makers, who have struggled to balance strong corn prices with weak ethanol prices.

In Walhalla, there is still hope workers could return to the plant, but not because of optimism about ethanol. SweetPro Feeds is talking to ADM and state officials about buying the plant, said Bob Thornberg, SweetPro's president. ADM declined to comment.

If the deal goes through, the plant would start making ethanol again, but mainly because SweetPro sees value in an ethanol byproduct. Ethanol "has hit a limit right now," Mr. Thornberg said.