Political Wisdom: Obama, Auto Makers Move Forward on Climate Change

President Barack Obama’s plans to tackle climate change are underway and The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder explains some of the details. “The administration’s comprehensive climate change announcement today is being cast in bold, efficacious terms: through 2016, new CAFE standards will take the equivalent of 177 million cars off the road — or shut down 194 coal plants. Mindful of the economy, administration officials point to a change in the way standards are measured. No longer will be corporation-wide; reductions will be expected in each type of automobile, which the White House believes will preserve an element of consumer choice. Vehicles will cost about $600 more, on average, to ratchet up the standards.” Car companies will voice their support for the plan today, Ambinder writes. “Why the auto makers gave in to this? It’s easy to understate the pressure; 17% of all C02 emissions in America come out of auto tailpipes. According to a fact sheet prepared by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the new standards — or, ‘harmonized NHTSA and EPA standards’ would be ‘attribute-based,’ which allows the automakers flexibility in designing fleets. Most importantly, it provides “certainty” for long-term planning and gives automakers sufficient lead time to take advantage of existing technology. And then there’s the ‘compliance flexibility measures,’ which include a variety of different credits for other technologies that use CO2.”

Political Wisdom: Obama Takes a Stab at Quiet Bipartisanship

President Barack Obama’s taking another shot at this bipartisanship thing but this time he’s doing it a little more quietly, write Politico’s Patrick O’Connor and Jonathan Martin. They write, “The goal: Try to get at least some Republicans to back big-ticket items such as Obama’s health care plan, but avoid the public spectacle of being rejected a second time around. Rather than have the president, his motorcade and his press pool trek to Capitol Hill, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel last week invited about a dozen or so moderate House Republicans to meet with him in a small outdoor courtyard just off the West Wing…although Obama doesn’t need GOP support in the House, where a huge Democratic majority can move legislation over Republican objections, the president and his top aides know that Republican votes in the House can provide cover for Democrats there and may help curry GOP votes in the Senate. There’s also the political benefit of looking bipartisan — an appearance that’s hard to keep up when House Republicans continue to vote en masse against your signature legislative efforts. The Republicans also have an interest in the outreach. House Republican leaders — particularly Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) — have worked hard over the last month to shed the ‘party of no’ label, constantly pushing the story line that Republicans have alternatives to the Democrats’ plans and talking the talk about wanting to work cooperatively with the president.”

Political Wisdom: Pelosi’s Big Fight: How to End It & Who to Trust

It hasn’t been a pretty end to the week for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She’s picked what looks to be a big fight with the CIA over her claim that the agency lied to her about its use of waterboarding on terror suspects, and Politico’s Glenn Thrush describes the battlefield the morning after: Pelosi’s remarks, he said, “prompted a sharp rebuke from Republicans, some pushback from intelligence officials and a lukewarm response from at least one high-ranking member of her own party.” The lukewarm response, Thursh notes, came from the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who “passed up a chance to back up Pelosi’s charge. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) asked Hoyer if he also believed that the CIA had intentionally misled the House. Hoyer’s response: ‘I have no idea of that — don’t have a belief of that nature because I have no basis on which to base such a belief. And I certainly hope that’s not the case. I don’t draw that conclusion.’” Later, Thursh notes, “Hoyer struck a more supportive tone when speaking to liberal talk show host Ed Schultz.”

An addendum: Hoyer, who was responding to comments from Cantor in his intial comment, later issued a more definitive statement: “I have known Speaker Pelosi for more than 45 years and I believe her. The Republicans’ focus on what she knew and when is a political distraction meant to divert attention from teh qeustion of whether the Bush administration allowed torture to be used.”

Political Wisdom: Why Were Republicans Able to Stall Hayes?

Senate Republicans blocked the nomination of David Hayes, President Barack Obama’s pick for deputy secretary of the Interior, this morning. Salon’s Alex Koppelman explains why – and why it was a weird time to have the vote at all. He writes, “Hayes himself wasn’t the reason Republicans decided to filibuster his nomination; in fact, he’d been confirmed to the same post during the Clinton administration. But they decided to use the opportunity to take a stand against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s decision to overturn some of the actions the Bush administration instituted as it left office, including the issuance of dozens of oil and gas drilling leases. Democrats could only muster 57 votes for cloture, three short of the 60 needed to end the filibuster. Really, though, they needed just two votes, as Majority Leader Harry Reid voted against for procedural reasons (his vote means Democrats can try again). So it’s a bit puzzling as to why he allowed the vote to be held without Sens. Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Barbara Mikulski, none of whom voted. Kennedy, obviously, remains ill and is missing all but the most important votes — but that’s not the case for Kerry and Mikulski, and with those two votes, the filibuster could have been overcome.”

Political Wisdom: Economic Recovery Talk is ‘Premature Exaltation’

All this talk about how, just maybe, we’re out of the economic woods is bothering Arianna Huffington. On her Huffingtonpost site, she calls all the happy talk “premature exaltation.” In talking to financial types in New York and Washington, she explains, “I was stunned by how many Wall Street and political insiders were ready to break out the champagne. Forgive me if I keep the bubbly on the shelf.” For an example of how easily people forget painful economic lessons, “look no further than Sunday’s New York Times, in which a variety of Wall Streeters, asked whether it is ‘safe to exhale yet,’ offered up delusional gems such as ‘I’m of the view that this is a bull market,’ a bottom ‘probably has been reached,’ and this could be a ‘lasting bull market’ that in a few years might hit October 2007 highs. One of the problems with this happy talk is that it contributes to running out the clock on the narrow — and narrowing — window for reform….here we are in May and while we’ve gotten some impressive talk from Obama’s economic team about the need to fix the financial system, there has been no real push for reform — only the ongoing express delivery of few-strings-attached taxpayer dollars to Wall Street.”

Political Wisdom: Why the Health Care Industry Wants to Cooperate

People are very excited about the news that health care industry folks said they want to do their part to cut costs. Time’s Karen Tumulty points out that it’s a pretty vague promise and gives her take on what it actually means. She writes, “But the industry offers almost no details of how it intends to do this, and it would be virtually impossible to track how well the individual players–insurance companies, drug firms, hospitals, unions–are doing at meeting that mark. The fact is, this idea–first floated, as best I can recall, by Karen Ignani, the top insurance industry lobbyist, at the White House health care summit in March–is designed to make sure that the health industry has a seat at the negotiating table. Which suggests they think health reform is actually going to happen, and that they are better off helping to shape the final product than fight it, as they did 15 years ago. (Others, including Tom Daschle, Obama’s first pick for HHS Secretary, are still giving it only a 50/50 chance.) It is also a reflection of the fact that the health industry wants reform–at least, it wants it on their terms…Heading off a public plan is what is implicit in this gesture the health industry is making this morning.”

Eagleburger: Obama Looks Weak to U.S. Enemies and Allies

Timothy J. Alberta reports on politics.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger compared President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office to those of President John F. Kennedy—and not in terms of their youth, good looks or oratory.

Eagleburger told the Council on Foreign Relations that just as JFK’s 1961 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev led the Russian leader to think the young American president was naive and weak on foreign policy, Obama’s diplomatic overtures have invited foreign leaders to view the new president as timid and untested.

After initially saying conclusions are difficult to draw after 100 days, he said, “But when I began to think about it, the first thing that occurred to me was to remember a meeting on June 4th, 1961 between JFK and Nikita Khrushchev. And Khrushchev very clearly came away from that meeting misjudging, I think, JFK, but thinking he was a very weak president. And that probably, as much as any single thing thereafter, led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. ”

Eagleburger said he sees “the same kind of problems for us in terms of how [Obama] is going to be judged, not so much by Americans who may or may not have it right, but rather by others.”

Eagleburger, a longtime diplomat who served under President George H. W. Bush, said America’s enemies aren’t the only ones unconvinced of Obama’s international authority. “The president got nowhere when it came to trying to ask the Europeans to help us in Afghanistan,” he said.

Obama’s most important foreign policy task is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Eagleburger said, adding that “unless the United States is prepared to use force, it’s almost too late now. But if the United States is not prepared to use force, this is an issue that’s gotten beyond us. And it will not be long before we see nuclear weapons on the hands of far too many states.”

Political Wisdom: Why Filling the Supreme Court Seat Isn’t Fun

So there’s this pesky Supreme Court seat to deal with and National Journal’s Stuart Taylor Jr. says he’s “cautiously betting that Obama will choose a moderate liberal who believes in judicial restraint. By this I mean deference to elected officials unless they violate clear constitutional commands or show gross irresponsibility. The lack of such restraint is what I mean by ‘judicial activism.’ A restrained liberal justice might, for example, hope for legislative recognition of same-sex marriage (as do I) but decline to rewrite the Constitution to override the democratic process on the issue by judicial decree. This is not to suggest that the president will pick a centrist, let alone a conservative. Filling moderately left-of-center Justice David Souter’s seat with anyone seen as more centrist would be a stunning abandonment of Obama’s campaign stance that would infuriate his liberal base.But nominating a crusading liberal activist could seriously jeopardize the president’s own best interests, in terms of policy as well as politics. And although some of Obama’s past statements are seen by critics as a formula for judicial activism, he has also shown awareness of its perils.”

Obama’s Remarks on Budget: ‘We Must Build a Government of the 21st Century’

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON REDUCING SPENDING IN THE BUDGET
Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building
Room 350
10:42 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. All across this country, Americans are responding to difficult economic times by tightening their belts and making tough decisions about where they need to spend and where they need to save. The question the American people are asking is whether Washington is prepared to act with the same sense of responsibility.

I believe we can and must do exactly that. Over the course of our first hundred days in office, my administration has taken aggressive action to confront a historic economic crisis. We’re doing everything that we can to create jobs and to get our economy moving while building a new foundation for lasting prosperity — a foundation that invests in quality education, lowers health care costs, and develops new sources of energy powered by new jobs and industries.

But one of the pillars of this foundation is fiscal responsibility. We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don’t matter and waste is not our problem. We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration — or the next generation.