Super Duper!

I might post on the TRILLION dollar budget the Little Prince hopes to pass on to his successor, complete with cuts to social services and Medicare that will leave the nation trembling, and military spending that rivals WWII. We might even talk about Exxon Mobil’s newest record setting profit at $40.6 billion. Or, we could further discuss the FISA vote ahead, and Harry Reid talking out both sides of his mouth. But … tomorrow’s the big day — SuperDuperTuesday — and it turns out I do vote tomorrow; again, this “crunch” nomination process does not serve us … but then the whole process is wack and needs a good revamping. Here was a headline yesterday:

Sunday in the Golden State: Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy and Michelle Obama stump for Barack Obama at the University of California, Los Angeles, while Bill Clinton appears at four churches in black communities in the area this morning. Also Worthy of Note: Almost half the anticipated ballots have been cast in advance of the election. Independents can vote in the Democratic Primary in California, but Not the GOP Primary.

Maria Shriver showed up for that Obama gathering, by the way, throwing her weight to him — Arnold had already crowned MadDog John McCain. But the thing to look at is the last sentence. What up with the Independents? There does appear to be a crossover of Inde’s, not to mention REPUBLICANs, for Obama [Ike's granddaughter, Susan, has endorsed him]; nobody is immune to the “hope for change” fever.

Obama’s skill comes from being a community organizer, a “roots-up” process and he frames his arguments with “we” — Hil has the “top-down” skills that comes from being a legal eagle looking after the client and speaks to “I.” That explains their styles … meanwhile, I still can’t find much to differentiate them in terms of votes, funding, caving to the corporations or coziness with the Israeli Lobby that keeps us in the confrontational mode internationally. I keep scouting around for something that will allow me to make an informed choice, because … bewildering as this is … Missouri is inconsequential on most fronts but apparently has the record for selecting the president in its primaries; 35 out of 36 times, or some such. Claire McCaskill, our junior Senator, threw her allegiance to Obama and it remains to be seen how the state votes as a whole, but we’re definitely “purple” at this juncture and considered the pivot vote for both party’s candidates.

This is one for the history books — besides the obvious: the black man, the woman, the Pubs at loose ends with no groomed leader in sight, the first time since the 50’s that the Veep didn’t jump into the race [THANK ya, Jaysus!] Some say, additionally, that Barack is the knife to the throat of the Boomers influence.

There is still blowback ahead of an unusually nasty sort, the old animosity toward the Clintons which the pundits suggest would gather a [remarkably] lethargic Pub voting base* to action; fairly or un, she is surely hated by many — and while we may not have studied their records carefully, you can bet the Right has and will be prepared to exploit them. So this post will show us some warts — best we know now, one of these folks will be our candidate.

Of the two, Obama’s wave is still waving and gathering speed — its become almost mystical at this point and who knows what beach it will break on. Looks good for him tomorrow, but don’t kid yourself that the game’s over any time soon. We won’t have a nominee — just another lap around the track. After tomorrow the beat may change and the rhetoric become blurred. The popularity contest of state-by-state selection will give way to the national-agenda-to-beat-the-Pub message; we may learn something there.

Here’s a collection that attempts to inform you [and me] if you’re still undecided — I thought the Frank Rich piece in the Times this weekend was a pretty fair analysis of the situation [and the phenomenon]; there’s a link to the glitzy new song Obamafolk have released, and analysis of the frontrunners records [I trust McClatchy, the Times a bit less.] Bob Herbert reminds us that we don’t have a lock on this presidency yet … and need to sober up a little. The last piece by Ted Rall talks about the nomination process itself and the influence of the Independents — a factor we have discounted.

So tomorrow, vote with an excited heart … or a heavy one — but VOTE. Democracy has very little going for it at the moment, except citizen action … ALWAYS take that opportunity!

Jude

* The 28th Republican legislator has announced his upcoming retirement, now — they’re bailing out as fast as they can. No fun being the underdog, huh? So much for the Pub demand for “bipartisanship” now that they can’t get their way 24/7 [Digby does a fine article on that, here.]

Ask Not What J.F.K. Can Do for Obama
FRANK RICH, NYT
February 3, 2008

BEFORE John F. Kennedy was a president, a legend, a myth and a poltergeist stalking America’s 2008 campaign, he was an upstart contender seen as a risky bet for the Democratic nomination in 1960.

Kennedy was judged “an ambitious but superficial playboy” by his liberal peers, according to his biographer Robert Dallek. “He never said a word of importance in the Senate, and he never did a thing,” in the authoritative estimation of the Senate’s master, Lyndon Johnson. Adlai Stevenson didn’t much like Kennedy, and neither did Harry Truman, who instead supported Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri.

J. F. K. had few policy prescriptions beyond Democratic boilerplate (a higher minimum wage, “comprehensive housing legislation”). As his speechwriter Richard Goodwin recalled in his riveting 1988 memoir “Remembering America,” Kennedy’s main task was to prove his political viability. He had to persuade his party that he was not a wealthy dilettante and not “too young, too inexperienced and, above all, too Catholic” to be president.

How did the fairy-tale prince from Camelot vanquish a field of heavyweights led by the longtime liberal warrior Hubert Humphrey? It wasn’t ideas. It certainly wasn’t experience. It wasn’t even the charisma that Kennedy would show off in that fall’s televised duels with Richard Nixon.

Looking back almost 30 years later, Mr. Goodwin summed it up this way: “He had to touch the secret fears and ambivalent longings of the American heart, divine and speak to the desires of a swiftly changing nation — his message grounded on his own intuition of some vague and spreading desire for national renewal.”

In other words, Kennedy needed two things. He needed poetry, and he needed a country with some desire, however vague, for change.

Mr. Goodwin and his fellow speechwriter Ted Sorensen helped with the poetry. Still, the placid America of 1960 was not obviously in the market for change. The outgoing president, Ike, was the most popular incumbent since F. D. R. The suburban boom was as glossy as it is now depicted in the television show “Mad Men.” The Red Panic of the McCarthy years was in temporary remission.

But Kennedy’s intuition was right. America’s boundless self-confidence was being rattled by (as yet) low-grade fevers: the surprise Soviet technological triumph of Sputnik; anti-American riots in even friendly non-Communist countries; the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. at an all-white restaurant in Atlanta; the inexorable national shift from manufacturing to white-collar jobs. Kennedy bet his campaign on, as he put it, “the single assumption that the American people are uneasy at the present drift in our national course” and “that they have the will and strength to start the United States moving again.”

For all the Barack Obama-J. F. K. comparisons, whether legitimate or over-the-top, what has often been forgotten is that Mr. Obama’s weaknesses resemble Kennedy’s at least as much as his strengths. But to compensate for those shortcomings, he gets an extra benefit that J. F. K. lacked in 1960. There’s nothing vague about the public’s desire for national renewal in 2008, with a reviled incumbent in the White House and only 19 percent of the population finding the country on the right track, according to the last Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll. America is screaming for change.

Either of the two Democratic contenders will swing the pendulum. Their marginal policy differences notwithstanding, they are both orthodox liberals. As the party’s voters in 22 states step forward on Tuesday, the overriding question they face, as defined by both contenders, is this: Which brand of change is more likely, in Kennedy’s phrase, to get America moving again?

Lost in the hoopla over the Teddy and Caroline Kennedy show last week was the parallel endorsement of Hillary Clinton by three of Robert Kennedy’s children. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed article, they answered this paramount question as many Clinton supporters do (and as many John Edwards supporters also did). The “loftiest poetry” won’t solve America’s crises, they wrote. Change can be achieved only by a president “willing to engage in a fistfight.”

That both Clintons are capable of fistfighting is beyond doubt, at least on their own behalf in a campaign. But Mrs. Clinton isn’t always a fistfighter when governing. There’s a reason why Robert Kennedy’s children buried the Iraq war in a single clause (and never used the word Iraq) deep in their endorsement. They know that their uncle Teddy, unlike Mrs. Clinton, raised his fists to lead the Senate fight against the Iraq misadventure at the start. They know too that less than six months after “Mission Accomplished,” Senator Kennedy called the war “a fraud” and voted against pouring more money into it. Senator Clinton raised a hand, not a fist, to vote aye.

In what she advertises as 35 years of fighting for Americans, Mrs. Clinton can point to some battles won. But many of them were political campaigns for Bill Clinton: seven even before his 1992 presidential run. The fistfighting required if she is president may also often be political. As Mrs. Clinton herself says, she has been in marathon combat against the Republican attack machine. Its antipathy will be increased exponentially by the co-president who would return to the White House with her on Day One.

It’s legitimate to wonder whether sweeping policy change can be accomplished on that polarized a battlefield. A Clinton presidency may end up a Democratic mirror image of Karl Rove’s truculent style of G.O.P. governance: a 50 percent plus 1 majority. Seven years on, that formula has accomplished little for the country beyond extending and compounding the mistake of invading Iraq. As was illustrated by the long catalog of unfinished business in President Bush’s final State of the Union address, this has not been a presidency that, as Mrs. Clinton said of L. B. J.’s, got things done.

The rap on Mr. Obama remains that he preaches the audacity of Kumbaya. He is all lofty poetry and no action, so obsessed with transcending partisanship that he can be easily rolled. Implicit in this criticism is a false choice — that voters have to choose between his pretty words on one hand and Mrs. Clinton’s combative, wonky incrementalism on the other.

There’s a third possibility, of course: A poetically gifted president might be able to bring about change without relying on fistfighting as his primary modus operandi. Mr. Obama argues that if he can bring some Republicans along, he can achieve changes larger than the microinitiatives that have been a hallmark of Clintonism. He also suggests, in his most explicit policy invocation of J. F. K., that he can enlist the young en masse in a push for change by ramping up national service programs like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

His critics argue back that he is a naïve wuss who will give away the store. They have mocked him for offering to hold health-care negotiations so transparent (and presumably feckless) that they can be broadcast on C-Span. Obama supporters point out that Mrs. Clinton’s behind-closed-doors 1993 health-care task force was a fiasco.

A better argument might be that transparency could help smoke out the special-interest players hiding in Washington’s crevices. You’d never know from Mrs. Clinton’s criticisms of subprime lenders that one of the most notorious, Countrywide, was a client as recently as October of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations giant where her chief strategist, Mark Penn, is the sitting chief executive. Other high-level operatives in her campaign belong to Dewey Square Group, an outfit that just last year provided lobbying services for Countrywide.

The question about Mr. Obama, of course, is whether he is tough enough to stand up to those in Washington who oppose real reform, whether Republicans or special-interest advocates like, say, Mr. Penn. The jury is certainly out, though Mr. Obama has now started to toughen his critique of the Clintons without sounding whiny. By framing that debate as a choice between the future and the past, he is revisiting the J. F. K. playbook against Ike.

What we also know is that, unlike Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama is not hesitant to take on John McCain. He has twice triggered the McCain temper, in spats over ethics reform in 2006 and Mr. McCain’s Baghdad market photo-op last year. In Thursday’s debate, Mr. Obama led an attack on Mr. McCain twice before Mrs. Clinton followed with a wan echo. When Bill Clinton promised that his wife and Mr. McCain’s friendship would ensure a “civilized” campaign, he may have been revealing more than he intended about the perils for Democrats in that matchup.

As Tuesday’s vote looms, all that’s certain is that today’s pollsters and pundits have so far gotten almost everything wrong. Mr. McCain’s campaign had been declared dead. Mrs. Clinton has gone from invincible to near-death to near-invincible again. Mr. Obama was at first not black enough to sweep black votes and then too black to get a sizable white vote in South Carolina.

Richard Goodwin knew in 1960 that all it took was “a single significant failure” by Kennedy or “an act of political daring” by his opponents for his man to lose — especially in the general election, where he faced the vastly more experienced Nixon, the designated heir of a popular president. That’s as good a snapshot as any of where we are right now, while we wait for the voters to decide if they will take what Mrs. Clinton correctly describes as a “leap of faith” and follow another upstart on to a new frontier. ++

Why I Recorded Yes We Can
WILL.I.AM, HuffPo
[link to star-studded Youtube]

Lowering the Volume
BOB HERBERT, NYT
February 2, 2008

There may be some grown-ups left in the Democratic Party after all.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did themselves and their party a world of good on Thursday night by conducting themselves with grace and dignity throughout their widely hyped debate in the celebrity-filled Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.

After the food fight in South Carolina and the speculation that these two history-making candidates genuinely dislike one another, the run-up to the debate had a touch of the atmosphere that preceded the Ali-Frazier fight in 1971.

To their credit, the candidates lowered the volume.

Mrs. Clinton got a big laugh when she said: “You know, it did take a Clinton to clean after the first Bush, and I think it might take another one to clean up after the second Bush.” She intended the line to be funny. But it also addressed a profound truth about politics and government in the United States.

In his biography of Tom Paine, John Keane referred to a pamphlet that Paine had written near the end of his life and said:

“Paine here touched on a quintessential feature of modern republican democracy: it is superior to all other types of government not because it guarantees consensus or even ‘good’ decisions, but because it enables citizens to reconsider their judgments about the quality and unintended consequences of those decisions.

“Republican democracies enable citizens to think twice and to say no, even to policies to which they once consented.”

It’s no secret that Americans want to turn the page on the George W. Bush era. Turnouts have been extraordinary, even record-breaking, in the Democratic contests thus far.

In Florida, where no candidates actively campaigned in the Democratic primary, more than 1.7 million voters went to the polls. They knew their state’s delegates might not be seated at the party’s national convention, but they were going to vote, no matter what.

At the same time, Democrats are far outpacing Republicans in fund-raising. Senator Obama raised an astonishing $32 million in the month of January alone.

There is a surge of excitement running through Democratic voters and public officials in this election cycle that has seldom been seen in recent decades.

This is the stuff of which overconfidence is made.

Anyone who thinks the Democrats are a lock to win in November has somehow forgotten about Karl Rove, the right-wing radio network, the hanging chads of 2000, the Swift boat debacle, the intimidation of black voters in Florida, the long lines of Democratic voters standing forlornly in the rain in Ohio, and on and on.

Those who may think that a woman named Clinton or a black man named Obama will have an easy time winning the White House this year should switch to something less disorienting than whatever it is they’re smoking.

It was important for Senators Clinton and Obama to behave as they did on Thursday night because they desperately need each other. Consider two scenarios. In one, there’s a blood feud between the Clinton and Obama forces, heightening tensions among women, blacks, whites and Hispanics, while sending independents and a whole lot of Democrats scurrying to John McCain.

In the other, Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama wins the Democratic nomination and their forces unite enthusiastically for the general campaign. In that scenario, Senators Clinton and Obama, former President Clinton, former Senator John Edwards, Senator Edward Kennedy and others would be a formidable team barnstorming the country to drum up turnout and put the candidate over the top.

For the past several days, the grown-ups who understand the folly of the first scenario have been in charge in both camps. As Mr. Obama put it in his opening statement at the debate: “I was friends with Hillary Clinton before we started this campaign. I will be friends with Hillary Clinton after this campaign is over.”

However it turns out, there is something thrilling about the current election season. Because of the Internet and other technological wonders, the public space has been radically expanded. Audiences at the debates and the various campaign rallies of both parties are paying extremely close attention. Young people are coming into the process in droves.

For all its flaws, the system forged in the 18th century is working remarkably well in the 21st. James Madison may never have heard of CNN or Google, but the people who walked through a cold rain to vote in South Carolina, and those who trudged through the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the millions who will vote on Super Tuesday can still hear him:

“If there be a principle that ought not to be questioned within the United States, it is that every man has a right to abolish an old government and establish a new one.” ++

Clinton and Obama on Economic Policy
Scarecrow, FireDogLake
Monday February 4, 2008

Two recent New York Times articles, two weeks apart, provide important insights into how Senators Clinton and Obama describe the nation’s economic priorities and the role of government in the economy.

In this January 21 Times article, Senator Clinton makes clear she is focused on the need to reverse the excesses of the Bush economic and tax policies:

. . . Mrs. Clinton put her emphasis on issues like inequality and the role of institutions like government, rather than market forces, in addressing them.
She said that economic excesses — including executive-pay packages she characterized as often “offensive” and “wrong” and a tax code that had become “so far out of whack” in favoring the wealthy — were holding down middle-class living standards. . . .

“If you go back and look at our history, we were most successful when we had that balance between an effective, vigorous government and a dynamic, appropriately regulated market,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we have systematically diminished the role and the responsibility of our government, and we have watched our market become imbalanced.” . . .

She added: “I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.”

. . . She would roll back the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes over $250,000 while creating more tax breaks below that threshold; impose closer scrutiny on financial markets, including the investments being made by foreign governments in the United States; and raise spending on job-creating projects like the development of alternative energy. . . .

Her first priority, she said, would be changing the tax code. She has proposed tax credits for college tuition, retirement savings, health care and alternative energy use, most of which would go to lower- and middle-income families. She would also raise the top marginal rate to 39.6 percent, its level for much of her husband’s administration. Increasing high-end tax rates would bring in $52 billion a year, her campaign says, and help pay for some of her other proposals.

“It’s shocking that there is such a continuing political pressure to lower tax rates on the wealthy, when so much of what we look back on now with nostalgia and pride,” she said, referring to the decades immediately after World War II, “was at a time when those who were well off were paying a significantly higher percentage of their income.”

The equivalent article on Senator Obama appeared on February 2. Note the similarities:

If elected, Mr. Obama said he would to try to forge a popular mandate for policy changes that could reverse a generation of slow wage growth and outlast any one administration. At the top of his list would be shifting the tax burden more toward the wealthy and making investments — in health care, alternative-energy research and education — that would cost a significant amount of money but could ultimately lift economic growth. . . .

“We have to disaggregate tax policy between the wealthy and the working class or middle class,” he said. “We have to be able to say that we are going to at once raise taxes on some people and lower taxes on others.”

He added: “This has been one of the greatest rhetorical sleights of hand of the Republican Party, and it has been a great weakness of the Democratic Party.”
[snip]

He has called for shoring up Social Security by raising payroll taxes on very high earners, while she has not. He also favors a permanent tax credit of up to $1,000 for families in the bottom 90 percent or so of the income distribution, which makes his package of middle-class tax credits significantly larger than hers. . . .

Either way, the Obama program clearly emphasizes help for the middle class — through tax cuts and new programs — more than deficit reduction. His approach puts him somewhat to the left of the [Bill] Clinton administration but broadly in line with the Democratic Party now.

Indeed, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton hold similar or identical positions on a host of economic issues, and Democratic economists not aligned with either campaign often speak positively about both.

The second article argues there are differences in how each would govern, and thus approach economic solutions, but it’s also possible these are more about how each can get elected, given who they are, not how they’d actually govern. And after yesterday’s expose, it’s hard to argue that either would be more or less susceptible to opposition or influence from powerful economic interests. ++

Clinton’s ‘35 years of change’ omits most of her career
Matt Stearns, McClatchy Newspapers
Sunday, February 3, 2008

WASHINGTON — To hear Hillary Clinton talk, she’s spent her entire career putting her Yale Law School degree to work for the common good.

She routinely tells voters that she’s “been working to bring positive change to people’s lives for 35 years.” She told a voter in New Hampshire: “I’ve spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector.” Speaking in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said his wife “could have taken a job with a firm … Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund.”

The overall portrait is of a lifelong, selfless do-gooder. The whole story is more complicated — and less flattering.

Clinton worked at the Children’s Defense Fund for less than a year, and that’s the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she’s ever had. She also worked briefly as a law professor.

Clinton spent the bulk of her career — 15 of those 35 years — at one of Arkansas’ most prestigious corporate law firms, where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards.

Neither she nor her surrogates, however, ever mention that on the campaign trail. Her campaign Web site biography devotes six paragraphs to her pro bono legal work for the poor but sums up the bulk of her experience in one sentence: “She also continued her legal career as a partner in a law firm.”

The full truth doesn’t fit into the carefully crafted narrative the campaign has developed about Clinton, said Sally Bedell Smith, the author of “For Love of Politics,” a study of the Clintons’ partnership.

“She wants to be seen as someone who has devoted her life to public service,” Smith said. “I suppose if you say it enough, maybe you can get people to believe it.”

Spokesman Phil Singer said the campaign highlights Clinton’s side work because it discovered early on that voters didn’t know about it.

Clinton did a great deal of public service work during her time at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. She served on the board of the Legal Services Corp. during the Carter administration and for a time was its chair. She helped found a child advocacy system in Arkansas and took on several tasks as the state’s first lady, such as revisions of the state’s education system and rural health care delivery.

She also served on the board of directors of the Children’s Defense Fund, and on the board of a children’s hospital.

“It’s important for voters to know that she worked to improve rural health care, to improve education,” Singer said. “Yes, she worked at a law firm. Are voters interested in hearing about some accounting case she worked on, or things people care about in the real world? … That’s the point, that’s the rationale. It’s nothing more complicated than that.”

Clinton did receive a smaller salary than most other Rose partners, topping out at about $200,000, in part because of her outside activities, according to several biographies.

But “these were all activities on the margins of her professional life, working as a corporate lawyer, representing corporations,” biographer Smith said.

In her autobiography, “Living History,” Clinton mentions two cases. In one, she represented a canning company against a man who found part of a dead rat in his pork and beans. In another, she represented a logging company accused of wrongdoing after an accident injured several workers. While Clinton used both anecdotes for comic effect, in both cases she was working for corporate interests.

She also served on corporate boards, including that of retail giant Wal-Mart from 1986-1992, frozen yogurt purveyor TCBY from 1985-1992 and cement manufacturer LaFarge from 1990-1992. She earned tens of thousands of dollars in fees from each.

Clinton’s firm represented Wal-Mart and TCBY while she sat on their boards, a cozy practice that corporate governance experts frown upon because of the potential for conflicts of interest.

Politicians naturally want to stick to their chosen narratives, but other aspects of Clinton’s relationship with the Rose Law Firm could remind voters of the more controversial side of the Clinton legacy.

There was her work on behalf of Madison Guaranty, a failed savings and loan at the heart of the Whitewater investigation — the billing records of which were mysteriously found in a White House storage room years after investigators first asked for them. And there’s Webster Hubbell, a Rose partner, Clinton pal and high-ranking Justice Department official who was convicted of fraud charges related to his work at the firm.

Clinton isn’t the only candidate downplaying less high-minded work. Rival Barack Obama cultivates a squeaky-clean image and referred to his work as a “civil rights attorney” at Thursday’s Los Angeles debate. He didn’t mention other work he did during his decade at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, a small Chicago law firm, helping craft housing deals involving millions of dollars in public subsidies.

Among those involved in some of the deals: Obama patron Tony Rezko. He donated thousands to Obama’s campaigns, raised thousands more and was even involved in the purchase of the Obama family home in Chicago.

These days, Rezko is awaiting trial in federal court on fraud charges. ++

Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate
MIKE McINTIRE, NYT
February 3, 2008

When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.

Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”

“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.

A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.

Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.

“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”

The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.

Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.

Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.

In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the leak controversy or other nuclear issues.

The Obama campaign said in written responses to questions that Mr. Obama “never discussed this issue or this bill” with Mr. Axelrod. The campaign acknowledged that Exelon executives had met with Mr. Obama’s staff about the bill, as had concerned residents, environmentalists and regulators. It said the revisions resulted not from any influence by Exelon, but as a necessary response to a legislative roadblock put up by Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time.

“If Senator Obama had listened to industry demands, he wouldn’t have repeatedly criticized Exelon in the press, introduced the bill and then fought for months to get action on it,” the campaign said. “Since he has over a decade of legislative experience, Senator Obama knows that it’s very difficult to pass a perfect bill.”

Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.

Nuclear safety advocates are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s efforts yielded any lasting benefits. David A. Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed that “it took the introduction of the bill in the first place to get a reaction from the industry.”

“But of course because it is all voluntary,” Mr. Lochbaum said, “who’s to say where things will be a few years from now?”

Others say that turning the whole matter over to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as Mr. Obama’s revised bill would have done, played into the hands of the nuclear power industry, which they say has little to fear from the regulators.

Mr. Obama seemed to share those concerns when he told a New Hampshire newspaper last year that the commission “is a moribund agency that needs to be revamped and has become a captive of the industry it regulates.”

Paul Gunter, an activist based in Maryland who assisted neighbors of the Exelon plants, said he was “disappointed in Senator Obama’s lack of follow-through,” which he said weakened the original bill. “The new legislation falls short” by failing to provide for mandatory reporting, said Mr. Gunter, whose group, Beyond Nuclear, opposes nuclear energy.

The episode that prompted Mr. Obama’s legislation began on Dec. 1, 2005, when Exelon issued a news release saying it had discovered tritium, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear power, in monitoring wells at its Braidwood plant, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. A few days later, tritium was detected in a drinking water well at a home near the plant, although the levels did not exceed federal safety standards.

At least as disturbing for local residents was the revelation that Exelon believed the tritium came from millions of gallons of water that had leaked from the plant years earlier but went unreported at the time. Under nuclear commission rules, plants are required to tell state and local authorities only about radioactive discharges that rise to the level of an emergency.

On March 1, Mr. Obama introduced a bill known as the Nuclear Release Notice Act of 2006. It stated flatly that nuclear plants “shall immediately” notify federal, state and local officials of any accidental release of radioactive material that exceeded “allowable limits for normal operation.”

To flag systematic problems, it would also have required reporting of repeated accidental leaks that fell below those limits. Illinois’ senior senator, Richard J. Durbin, a fellow Democrat, was a co-sponsor, and three other senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, later signed on. But Mr. Obama remained its primary champion.

In public statements, Mr. Obama dismissed the nuclear lobby’s arguments that the tritium leaks posed no health threat.

“This legislation is not about whether tritium is safe, or at what concentration or level it poses a threat,” he said. “This legislation is about ensuring that nearby residents know whether they may have been exposed to any level of radiation generated at a nuclear power plant as a result of an unplanned, accidental or unintentional incident.”

Almost immediately, the nuclear power industry and federal regulators raised objections to the bill.

The Nuclear Energy Institute jumped out in front by announcing its voluntary initiative for plant operators to report even small leaks. An Exelon representative told an industry newsletter, Inside N.R.C., that Exelon was “working with Senator Obama’s office to address some technical issues that will allow us to support the legislation.”

Last week, an Exelon spokesman, Craig Nesbit, said the company sought, among other things, new language to specify what types of leaks should be reported, and assurance that enforcement authority remained with the nuclear commission and not state or local governments.

“We were looking for technical clarity,” Mr. Nesbit said.

Meanwhile, the nuclear commission told Mr. Obama’s staff that the bill would have forced the unnecessary disclosure of leaks that were not serious. “Unplanned releases below the level of an emergency present a substantially smaller risk to the public,” the agency said in a memorandum to senators, which ticked off about a half-dozen specific concerns about the bill.

Senate correspondence shows that the environment committee chairman at the time, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma who is a strong supporter of industry in battles over energy and environmental legislation, agreed with many of those points and held up the bill. Mr. Obama pushed back, at one point temporarily blocking approval of President Bush’s nominee to the nuclear commission, Dale E. Klein, who met with Mr. Obama to discuss the leaks.

But eventually, Mr. Obama agreed to rewrite the bill, and when the environment committee approved it in September 2006, he and his co-sponsors hailed it as a victory.

In interviews over the past two weeks, Obama aides insisted that the revisions did not substantively alter the bill. In fact, it was left drastically different.

In place of the straightforward reporting requirements was new language giving the nuclear commission two years to come up with its own regulations. The bill said that the commission “shall consider” — not require — immediate public notification, and also take into account the findings of a task force it set up to study the tritium leaks.

By then, the task force had already concluded that “existing reporting requirements for abnormal spills and leaks are at a level that is risk-informed and appropriate.”

The rewritten bill also contained the new wording sought by Exelon making it clear that state and local authorities would have no regulatory oversight of nuclear power plants.

In interviews last week, representatives of Exelon and the nuclear commission said they were satisfied with the revised bill. The Nuclear Energy Institute said it no longer opposed it but wanted additional changes.

The revised bill was never taken up in the full Senate, where partisan parliamentary maneuvering resulted in a number of bills being shelved before the 2006 session ended.

Still, the legislation has come in handy on the campaign trail. Last May, in response to questions about his ties to Exelon, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to a Nevada newspaper citing the bill as evidence that he stands up to powerful interests.

“When I learned that radioactive tritium had leaked out of an Exelon nuclear plant in Illinois,” he wrote, “I led an effort in the Senate to require utilities to notify the public of any unplanned release of radioactive substances.”

Last October, Mr. Obama reintroduced the bill, in its rewritten form. ++

COLUMN: INDEPENDENTS GO HOME
Open Primaries Are Killing Democracy
Ted Rall
Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Check out this political mystery: Liberals, a.k.a. the Democratic base, are angry. They’re so angry that they tried to unseat senior senator and former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman in 2006, who had become synonymous with bipartisanship. Bipartisanship, hell. They’re in the mood for payback.

So why is Barack Obama, a bipartisan accommodationist who promises to appoint Republicans to his cabinet and praises Ronald Reagan, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination? Why is Hillary Clinton, militant centrist of the DLC, running a close second?

Mystery #2: Liberal primary voters are obsessed with choosing a nominee who can win the general election in November. And yet, according to a hypothetical head-to-head match-up, neither Obama nor Clinton qualifies. The most electable Democrat, found the most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. match-up poll, is John Edwards.

“Edwards is the only Democrat who beats all four Republicans, and McCain is the only Republican who beats any of the three Democrats [in November 2008],” says Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director. But Edwards hasn’t won a single primary.

What’s going on? Why are angry, electability-oriented Democrats voting for the two candidates least likely to win–candidates who want to sing Kumbaya with the Republicans?

As we discussed last week, the media has frozen out Edwards because their corporate owners are scared of him. But there’s a second reason that the Democratic primaries have “gotten terribly off track,” in the words of The New York Times’ Paul Krugman.

A lot of non-Democrats are voting in Democratic primaries.

Twenty-three states now have so-called “open primaries.” Registered independents are allowed to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary. “What’s everybody talking about now? Independents,” Morris Fiorina, a professor of political science at Stanford says. Huge numbers of Democratic primary voters aren’t Democrats at all: 20 percent in the Iowa caucuses, 44 percent in New Hampshire, 23 percent in South Carolina.

As you might expect, candidates whose appeal crosses party lines have benefited from these open primaries. “Obama is winning independents, McCain is winning independents,” says Professor Fiorina.

Political scientists differ over the moderating effect of open primaries, but history paints a clear picture. There hasn’t been a left-wing Democratic nominee since George McGovern in 1972, or an overtly right-wing Republican one since Barry Goldwater in 1964. (Though they governed differently, Reagan and Bush II campaigned as uniters, not dividinators.) Both parties see open primaries as part of a “big tent” strategy–people who vote for party X in the primaries are said to be likelier to vote for Party X’s nominee in the fall. Open primaries are also supposed to winnow out “extreme” candidates (see McGovern and Goldwater, above) while selecting for those with broad appeal to the overall electorate. But the advantages of open primaries–which have yet to be statistically proven–come at a steep price.

As Larry Gerston writes in the San Jose Mercury-News, “people who identify as Democrats or Republicans operate with different opinions than independents. Partisans tend to have stronger opinions on leading issues, are more aware of current events, have well-developed political value sets and tend to be more involved politically on an ongoing basis. For most independents, politics is much more a spectator sport. These folks are more amused than committed, tend to know less about the leading issues and candidates, and commonly operate with a less defined set of political values.”

Independents complain that “closed primaries”–Democratic primaries are only open to Democrats, Republican primaries to Republicans–deny them a voice. In truth, registered independents choose not to vote in primaries. There is no practical reason to register as an independent. If you want to switch from one party’s primaries to the other’s, all you have to do is fill out a form. And, in the general election, you can vote for any party regardless of party affiliation.

The potential for mischief, on the other hand, is enormous in open primaries: conservatives voting for the worst Democrat, liberals for the worst Republican. Even “honest” independents queer the process by reducing the chances of a hardcore liberal or conservative winning their party’s nomination. This year, they’re boosting Obama and McCain, neither of whom have generated much enthusiasm from their party’s bases. (If these two men face off in November 2008, McCain will enjoy an edge since the GOP tends to better coalesce behind its nominees. Republican party loyalists will also find McCain’s right-wing voting record to their liking. Obama, on the other hand, repeatedly voted to fund the Iraq War.)

Polarization is good for democracy. Voters may claim not to like mudslinging campaign battles, but they turn out in greater numbers when the parties nominate candidates whose views are significantly different. In 2000, Gore and Bush were seen as so ideologically indistinct that many liberals cast protest votes for Ralph Nader. (Little did we know!) Turnout was 51.3 percent. It went up to 55.3 percent in 2004, high water mark of the red-blue divide.

Moderate nominees, er, moderate the enthusiasm of the liberals and conservatives who make up the two major parties’ bases. When your party’s standardbearer doesn’t promise much, there isn’t a lot to win. Nor is there much to lose if the enemy party’s nominee seems relatively reasonable. The Democratic and Republican parties, already so similar on issues like trade, immigration and abortion, become more broadly indistinguishable. Elections offer fewer, less relevant options. Citizens tune out. Over time, some will start to yearn for another, less free but more effective form of government.

Open primaries, wrote Gerston, are “akin to casual sports fans having a voice in the selection of college playoff schedules or newly arrived residents of a town affecting the decision of a long-disputed, festering public policy issue.” If we want to get rid of the two-party system, great. Until then, let Democrats pick the Democratic nominee and Republicans choose the Republican nominee. If independents want to play too, let them fill out a form. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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