White House News

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Obama gives leaders ’24 to 36 hours’ to come to debt agreement

(Alex Wong - VIA BLOOMBERG) Updated 8:40 p.m.

President Obama told congressional leaders at their latest debt-limit meeting that they must come to an agreement on the way forward by early Saturday morning or else they will be called back to the White House this weekend, aides from both parties with knowledge of the meeting said Thursday evening.

At a meeting that lasted 80 minutes, congressional negotiators and the White House finished their review of the work done by a group led by Vice President Biden, said the aides, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the meeting.

At the end, Obama told the bipartisan leaders that, over the next 24 to 36 hours, he wanted them to indicate a path forward that would be able to pass both chambers.

No White House meeting is set for Friday. Instead, leaders are expected to go to their rank-and-file members to discuss the negotiations.

Thursday’s meeting ended at 5:43 p.m. Shortly afterwards, the White House announced that Obama would hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Friday.

Obama told lawmakers that he and his staff would be “on call” during the time leading up to the deadline, aides said..

Congressional leaders and Obama also heard Thursday from Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew and National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling on alternative solutions, as well as on several of the administration’s proposed deficit-reduction enforcement mechanisms.

According to a Democratic aide, Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reiterated their support for a “grand bargain.”

Republican aides described the meeting as “cordial,” “businesslike” and “polite.” Democrats said it was “constructive.”

Two Democratic aides noted that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) “didn’t say a single word” throughout the meeting. However, the bulk of the meeting was focused on the presentation by administration officials, and one Democrat described the gathering as “relatively quiet.”

House Republicans and Democrats have set conference meetings at the Capitol for early Friday morning; Republicans will meet at 8 a.m., while Democrats are set to meet at 9 a.m.

No meetings appeared to be scheduled on the Senate side; the chamber is not in session on Friday.

“We’re not having any more meetings this week at least in part because we’re already working here in the Senate on a proposal,” said one Republican aide, referring to efforts underway between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) aimed at producing a “backup plan” on raising the debt limit.

McConnell offered a preview of that plan during a radio interview Thursday evening in which he said that a deficit-reduction committee comprised of members of Congress would “probably be part of the bill as well.” The committee would report back on its work by the end of the year, and the legislation would move through both chambers through fast-track procedures.

McConnell also said in the interview with Hugh Hewitt that he hoped there could be agreement with Obama on a package of spending cuts and that they could be included in the agreement as well. He also renewed his opposition to the inclusion of any tax increases in a deal.

“We do not believe that this level of government is appropriate for America’s future,” he said.

A Republican aide also said that Geithner told participants that, in addition to raising the debt ceiling, Congress must also enact a long-term plan to deal with the country’s deficit and debt.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) “used that warning to reiterate his concern that nothing the administration is offering to this point will resolve our debt problem,” the aide said.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Funeral for Betty Ford attended by Michelle Obama, former first ladies as speakers laud activist career

First ladies, past and present, and others who called the White House home remembered Betty Ford on Tuesday, not just for her decades-long work against substance abuse but for contributing to a political era when friendship among lawmakers helped them govern.

First lady Michelle Obama, accompanied by former first ladies Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Rodham Clinton, strode quietly into St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in this desert resort town and took their seats next to former President George W. Bush in one of the first-row pews as services began.

Bush, accompanied by former first lady Nancy Reagan, arrived just a few minutes ahead of Mrs. Obama and the others. The former president, wearing a dark suit, blue tie and white shirt, chatted quietly with Reagan as they waited for the services to begin. He greeted Clinton as the secretary of state and former first lady took a seat next to him.

Others expected to attend included President Richard Nixon’s daughters, Tricia Nixon-Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower; President Lyndon Johnson’s daughters, Lucie Baines Johnson and Lynda Bird Johnson Robb; and Robb’s husband, former U.S. Sen. Charles Robb.

Former first lady Betty Ford died of natural causes in California on Friday, at the end of an extraordinary life during which she turned a short tenure as First lady into activism which affected the national political climate. As Donnie Radcliffe reported:

Betty Ford, a self-proclaimed “ordinary” woman who never cared for political life but made a liberating adventure out of her 30 months as first lady, died Friday at age 93.

“I decided that if the White House was our fate,” she once said of Gerald R. Ford’s brief presidency, “I might as well have a good time doing it.”

To the surprise of some and the consternation of others, Mrs. Ford evolved as an activist first lady whose non-threatening manner coupled with her newfound celebrity provided the women’s movement with an impressive ally. Undaunted by critics, she campaigned for ratification of the ill-starred Equal Rights Amendment, championed liberalized abortion laws and lobbied her husband to name more women to policymaking government jobs.

“Perhaps it was unusual for a first lady to be as outspoken about issues as I was, but that was my temperament, and I believed in it,” she said in an interview for this paper at her Rancho Mirage, Calif., home in 1994. “I don’t like to be dishonest, so when people asked me, I said what I thought.”

Her husband, who died in 2006, was a longtime Michigan congressman who became House minority leader. He served as Richard M. Nixon’s vice president before the Watergate scandal led him to succeed Nixon, who resigned Aug. 9, 1974, and become the nation’s 38th president. Mrs. Ford had not wanted her husband to be president, but once he took office, she was determined that Americans know him as one with integrity.

Betty Ford planned for the event of her death, and at her request her farewell focused on bipartisan politics and the comraderie they shared during her time in Washington. Speakers included Cokie Roberts and Rosalynn Carter, as Reliable Source reported:

They don’t talk about it much, but it’s common practice for former presidents and first ladies to design their own funeral programs. Ford, who died Friday at age 93, will have two: a memorial Tuesday in California attended by Michelle Obama, and a funeral Thursday in Michigan, where she’ll be buried next to her husband.

In 2006, Cokie Roberts got a call from Ford’s daughter Susan: her mom wanted Roberts to deliver a eulogy, whenever that time came, at her funeral.

“Wow — that’s an incredible honor,” the veteran D.C. journalist replied. Then, she recalls, Susan gave Roberts her assignment: “Mother wants you to talk about the way things used to be.”

Meaning?

“A time in Washington when Democrats and Republicans used to be friends, when their families were all friends,” Roberts told us Monday. “The main message she wanted me to say is when you’re friends, government works. It’s like she planned it for this week.”

Roberts was one of three speakers chosen for Tuesday’s memorial. Ford also asked her successor Rosalynn Carter, as well as Geoffrey Mason of the Betty Ford Center. Ford’s body will travel to Michigan for the interment Thursday at the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. Lynne Cheney (her husband served as President Ford’s White House chief of staff) and biographer Richard Norton Smith will give eulogies at the funeral.

All of Ford’s family — four children, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren — are expected to attend the services, but none has been announced as speakers.

More from The Washington Post

Westboro Baptist Church to protest Betty Ford’s funeral

Opinion: Betty Ford’s contribution

Notable quotes on the death of former First Lady Betty White

View the original article here

West Wing briefing: Should Obama back McConnell’s debt ceiling proposal?

The proposal to end the impasse over the federal debt ceiling offered by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Tuesday would effectively shift the entire responsibility of the issue to President Obama. The proposal would require Obama to identify trillions of dollars in budget cuts and prohibit him from raising taxes on upper-income Americans as Democrats would like.

Despite those less-than-ideal circumstances, should he take the deal anyway?

McConnell’s proposal would create a new legal structure authorizing the president to raise the debt limit by as much as $2.5 trillion in three installments, but would require him to submit to Congress a request for an increase, along with a list of proposed spending cuts equal to the increase. The debt limit would be increased unless Congress not only passed a resolution disapproving of the increase but also had a two-thirds majority in both houses to override a presidential veto of the resolution.

Agreeing to the proposal would likely end any chance of Obama crafting a comprehensive deficit reduction deal that would be a boon to the president’s 2012 prospects, but it would show him tackling a major problem in a bipartisan manner and make it hard for Republicans to cast him as a big spender. McConnell’s plan would require Obama to list proposed spending hikes, but disallows tax increases, which the president has said should be enacted to help balance the budget.

At the same time, Obama would avert cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits that were part of the proposed broader agreement, but strongly opposed by many Democrats. And Obama would only have to propose budget cuts; there is no guarantee they would actually be enacted by Congress.

Accepting the deal would allow Obama to stop talking about an issue in which the president simply hasn’t sold the public on his position. Despite the rhetoric from Obama and even many Republicans about the dangers of a government default, polls show a plurality of Americans, including many Democrats, don’t support raising the debt limit.

Read more at PostPolitics.com

Fact Checker: Will Obama be able to keep paying Social Security benefits if the debt ceiling is reached?

Fast Fix: Will we hit the debt ceiling?

The door is open for Rick Perry

By Perry Bacon Jr. | 08:52 AM ET, 07/13/2011

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Culture, hard lessons drive GOP’s anti-tax stand

Despite all that, most congressional Republicans have vowed not to raise taxes of any kind, complicating efforts to reach a bipartisan deal to reduce spending and prevent the United States from defaulting on its loans.

The adamant stand puzzles many analysts. They say it’s almost self-defeating, blocking Republicans from accepting deals in which Democrats have made the biggest concessions.

“Republicans don’t know when to take ‘yes’ for an answer,” said Bob Bixby of the bipartisan Concord Coalition, a leading advocate of balanced budgets. “They could have very, very favorable terms” in the current negotiations, he said, with Democrats yielding far more in spending cuts than Republicans would have to yield in tax hikes.

The potency of the Republican Party’s anti-tax stance seems to have caught even a top GOP lawmaker, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, by surprise. He had to back away from suggestions that he might accept significant revenue hikes as part of a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan.

“There was never any agreement to allow tax rates to go up in any discussions I’ve ever had with the White House,” Boehner said Monday.

Key Republicans and others cite at least four key events that transformed the GOP from a party with a balanced approach to taxes and spending — Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both raised taxes, though many Republicans now ignore those facts — to a party that puts a no-net-tax-increase pledge above almost everything else.

—Read My Lips.

George H.W. Bush’s most memorable campaign phrase in 1988 was “Read my lips: No new taxes!”

But in 1990, Bush faced a rising deficit and congressional Democrats who, like today, insisted on revenue increases to partly offset spending cuts. Bush’s advisers persuaded him to accept the deal. Hardcore conservatives howled, and Bush lost his 1992 re-election bid to Bill Clinton.

A dispirited GOP played a role, but Bush’s slow response to a rapidly deteriorating economy probably played a bigger part. Nonetheless, Republican lore holds that Bush lost because he reneged on a vow never to raise taxes, and thousands of Republican officials since then have sworn not to make the same mistake.

—2003.

By that year, Bush’s son had succeeded Clinton as president, and he solidified the GOP’s image as a party that doesn’t raise taxes, even when it launches costly new missions. In fact, President George W. Bush persuaded Congress to enact a second major tax cut, on top of the one from 2001. Also in 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and the GOP-led Congress expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, both of which were paid for with borrowed money.

“2003 was the most fiscally irresponsible year, possibly of all time,” said David Walker, a former comptroller general who travels the country calling for deficit reduction.

Despite such charges, few Republican officials today say the lesson of 2003 is to raise revenues when programs expand and deficits soar.

—A man named Grover.

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, has spent years cajoling, persuading and bullying GOP officials into signing a pledge never to support a net increase in taxes. While some Republicans grumble about Norquist’s clout, he still wields enormous influence, partly by warning those who defy his pledge that they will pay a political price.

“My God, what has this country come to when one person has to give you permission to do what’s best for the country?” Clinton said in a recent speech, referring to Norquist.

—A more conservative GOP.

In recent years, staunch conservatives have expanded their influence in the Republican electorate. “The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group,” which is conservatives, writes political analyst Nate Silver.

The trend increases the threat of a party primary challenger to any GOP lawmaker who makes accommodations, such as tax increases, to reach an accord with Democrats.

Today’s Republican Party is so taxaphobic that hardly anyone blinks when Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell says, day after day, that the nation has a spending problem, not a taxing problem.

Mathematically, of course, that’s not necessarily true. A government can close a budget gap with tax hikes, spending cuts or some combination of the two. Liberal bloggers make this point more robustly than do most Democrats in Congress.

“No, McConnell, we have a revenue problem, not a spending problem,” wrote a blogger named westcoastliberal at Rawstory.com. “If you and your GOP cohorts had not sought tax cuts as a remedy for every problem, we could be sitting pretty as a country right now.”

The Republican Party’s anti-tax stand is aided by a public with conflicting wishes. Voters generally oppose large deficits, higher taxes and cuts in programs that benefit them, a painless but impossible combination.

A March AP-GfK poll found that 62 percent of Americans say cutting government services is preferable to raising taxes in order to balance the budget. Less than one-third favored tax hikes.

But their tune changes when faced with specifics, such as cutting popular and expensive programs that threaten to drive the deficit much higher. A new Pew Research poll asked whether it is more important to reduce the budget deficit or to maintain current Medicare and Social Security benefits. “The public decisively supports maintaining the status quo,” Pew found.

Walker says the growing deficit mirrors a changed society that’s less willing to confront the consequences of spending more money than one makes. For 175 years, he said, the country refused to accept big deficits except in cases of deep recessions, declared wars or national emergencies. “It was part of our culture,” he said.

“About three decades ago, our culture changed,” Walker said. Americans amassed debts on their credit cards and home equity loans, and the government similarly lived on borrowed money. Given voters’ and lawmakers’ reluctance to make sacrifices, Walker said, Congress should enact a system of automatic spending cuts and temporary tax surcharges that would be triggered when the deficit hits designated levels.

Bixby, of the Concord Coalition, said deal-making in Congress “used to be a good thing.” Now, he said, “people seem to be going out of their way to avoid a solution.”

Tax hikes and program cuts are naturally unpopular, Bixby said, but how else can the deficit be tamed?

“Raise revenues and cut spending,” he said. “It’s not that difficult.”

View the original article here

Obama raises record-breaking $86 million

President Obama’s reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee together raised a whopping $86 million in the second quarter of 2011, campaign manager Jim Messina announced in an early morning online video sent to supporters.

Obama’s re-election campaign collected $47 million, while the president raised another $38 million for the DNC via a joint fundraising committee that allows donors to write a single check that is then divvied up between the two entitites.

The haul far surpasses the goal Messina set for the campaign’s national finance committee of collecting a combined $60 million between April 1 and June 30.

“It’s a monumental achievement,” Messina said.

Obama’s total is more than the $35 million raised this past quarter by all the Republican presidential candidates combined (although Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann has not yet reported her fundraising). The GOP is lagging in fundraising, a problem made more acute by Obama’s success. By this point in 2007, 10 GOP presidential hopefuls had collectively raised more than $118 million. Obama had raised $58.9 million over two quarters.

Details on Obama’s haul won’t be publicly available until Friday, but according to Messina, the average contribution was $69, 98 percent of donors gave less than $250 and more than 552,462 people have contributed to the joint committee.

“We did this from the bottom up,” Messina said. “We didn’t accept one single dollar from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs.”

Obama advisers have privately told donors that they hope to raise more than the $750 million raised by the campaign in 2008. The president could well become the first politician to raise over a billion dollars for a campaign.

Despite Obama’s massive fundraising advantage, Messina still argued that the president was the underdog in need of help. “We have reason to be proud of what we’ve built so far, but it’s going to get tougher from here,” he said in the video. “GOP outside spending for 2012 could be as much as $500 million.”

Read more on PostPolitics.com

Fact Checker: Can Obama keep paying Social Security benefits if the debt ceiling is reached?

GOP indecision on 2012 may give Rick Perry a ‘huge opening’

West Wing briefing: Should Obama back McConnell’s debt ceiling proposal?

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Obama to address debt-ceiling talks at news conference

President Obama on Monday will hold his second news conference in as many weeks in his push to get members of both parties to agree to a deal that would raise the national debt ceiling but also include measures that would reduce the federal budget deficit.

The 11 a.m. news conference in the press briefing room will come before Obama meets again with congressional leaders to try to rally them behind his vision for a proposal that would reduce the deficit by more than $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

Obama is trying to use his bully pulpit as president to get leaders in both parties to reach an agreement, but is so far having limited success, as Democrats say they oppose changes that would reduce benefits in Social Security and Republicans oppose any tax increases.

The president is unlikely to adopt the tone of his last press conference, when he unfavorably contrasted Congress with his two daughters. But Obama could challenge both parties to ignore activists in their bases and strike a far-reaching deal to reduce the deficit.

Obama helped push Congress toward a deal in December that extended tax cuts but also unemployment benefits. But he is facing a tougher task this time, trying to persuade members of both parties to take controversial stances on polarizing issues.

More coverage of the negotiations:

— With clock ticking, debt talks are deadlocked

— The U.S. has defaulted before. Sort of.

— No grand bargain for Obama, Boehner

— Obama will still seek $4B debt deal, aides say

— Get the latest news at PostPolitics

By Perry Bacon Jr. | 05:33 AM ET, 07/11/2011

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Friday, July 8, 2011

Can Twitter help Obama reach skeptical voters?

Can the medium help make up for the message?

President Obama’s participation Wednesday in a virtual town hall in which he will answer questions put to him by Twitter users is the latest move by Obama’s tech-savvy operation, which in 2008 was well-ahead of both his Democratic rivals and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the use of Internet to excite supporters, organize volunteers and raise money.

But in office, despite “"West Wing Week,” the "White Board,” a Facebook town hall and other innovations in the use of the Internet by a president, Obama has lost support among major swaths of the electorate, particularly independents. What happened between 2008 and 2011 of course was a historically bad recession and a hyper-partisan environment in Washington that soured some voters on Obama.

Obama and his team are constantly communicating and trying different ways to reach and convince the American electorate of their case, and the Twitter event is the latest example. These types of events have no real harm and some benefit for the president: no doubt some Americans who don’t read papers like The Washington Post or watch television news can get information from the Twitter session. The president can point out his eagerness to work with the GOP and his ideas to spur job growth to a new audience.

What’s not clear is if communication is, in fact, the problem for the Obama White House. Over the last two years, some Democratic party strategists and activists have urged Obama and his team to attack the GOP more, heap blame on Wall Street for the crash of 2008 that set off the recession , and detail plans that would use more government money to stimulate the economy to show a contrast with Republicans, even if those proposals have little chance to become law.

But polls suggest the real challenge is not about communication, but a sluggish economy that has millions of Americans worried about their economic futures. And it’s not clear if anything Obama will tweet on Wednesday can change that.

By Perry Bacon Jr. | 06:00 AM ET, 07/06/2011

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