President Bush has tried, with varying degrees of success, to avoid playing the role of "pundit in chief" on daily campaign developments. But yesterday he weighed in on some of the foreign policy issues that have cropped up recently on the trail, criticizing the Democratic presidential contenders for their positions on Iraq and trade and, in the case of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), for his willingness to meet with U.S. adversaries.
In a wide-ranging news conference at the White House, his first in two months, Bush appeared especially animated in shooting down the proposition that a president should meet with the leaders of Cuba and Iran without preconditions, an idea that has been an element of Obama's foreign policy agenda and that has led to sparring with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
"Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Ra¿l Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him," Bush said, referring to the new Cuban president. "He gains a lot from it by saying, 'Look at me, I'm now recognized by the president of the United States.' "
Bush said a decision to meet with some foreign leaders could be counterproductive. "It can send chilling signals and messages to our allies. It can send confusion about our foreign policy. It discourages reformers inside their own country. And, in my judgment, it would be a mistake" with Iran and Cuba, he said.
Bush generally steered clear of attacking Obama and Clinton by name -- though he did say that "Senator Obama better stay focused on his campaign." But his critique resembled that by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has been trying to sow doubts in recent days about Obama's fitness to be commander in chief.
The president echoed McCain when asked about Obama's recent statement that, while he intends to withdraw troops from Iraq, he would consider sending them back if al-Qaeda forms a base inside the country.
"It's an interesting comment," Bush replied. "If al-Qaeda is securing a al-Qaeda base? Yeah, well, that's exactly what they've been trying to do for the past four years."
The president also criticized statements by Obama and Clinton that they would try to reopen elements of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
"The idea of just unilaterally withdrawing from a trade treaty because of . . . trying to score political points is not good policy," Bush said. "It's not good policy on the merits, and it's not good policy to -- as a message to send to . . . people who have in good faith signed a treaty and worked with us on a treaty."
Clinton responded to Bush's comments yesterday at a news conference by repeating her pledge to "fix" NAFTA by toughening labor and environmental standards. She said she found Bush's comments "highly ironic, since President Bush has turned a blind eye to all of the actions by China and others who dump steel into Ohio, hurting Ohio workers and the Ohio economy."
Aides to Obama, who took the brunt of Bush's broadsides, reacted sharply to the president's comments, saying he had been notably ineffective during his term in his goals of bringing democracy to Cuba and halting Iran's nuclear program -- goals that they said Obama shares.
"It's not as though [Obama] is going to sit down for a rum and Coke with Ra¿l Castro and say 'Cheers,' " said Susan Rice, one of Obama's senior foreign policy advisers. "Why the United States fears to negotiate or views direct discussions as a reward rather than as an instrument to change behavior is a mystery to anyone who studies diplomacy. It is a patently failed approach, as the U.S. has demonstrated over the last eight years."
During his news conference, Bush appeared to draw a contrast between talking to the leaders of Cuba and Iran and having discussions with Russia and China, two countries whose repressive policies at home have drawn criticism from human rights activists and U.S. lawmakers.
Asked about the likely new president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, Bush said he hopes his successor has a relationship "with whoever's running foreign policy in Russia."
"It's in the country's interest," Bush added. "That doesn't mean we have to agree all the time."
Similarly, Bush said he is looking forward to going to the Olympics in Beijing this summer despite concerns about human rights in China. "I'm looking forward to seeing the athletic competition," he said. "But that will not preclude me from meeting with the Chinese president, expressing my deep concerns about a variety of issues, just like I do every time I meet with the president."
He was very sharp, however, in his denunciation of the new Cuban president, who took the place of Fidel Castro on Sunday. Bush made it very clear that he believes meeting with him would be a waste of time. "I'm not suggesting there's never a time to talk, but I'm suggesting now is not the time . . . to talk with Ra¿l Castro," he said. "He's nothing more than an extension of what his brother did, which is to ruin an island and imprison people because of their beliefs."
Bush's comments were another indication that he does not intend to relax U.S. trade and travel restrictions on Cuba anytime soon. That position has pleased many of his Cuban American supporters in Florida and elsewhere, but disappointed lawmakers and others who think the U.S. drive over 50 years to isolate Cuba has run its course.
Julia E. Sweig, director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, described Bush's statement on Cuba yesterday as "classic dug-in Bush embracing a failed policy no matter what."
Fonte: The Washignton Post
29 de fevereiro 2008
Autor: Michael Abramowitz
sexta-feira, 29 de fevereiro de 2008
Senate Continues Debate on Iraq Pullout
2 Bills Unlikely to Pass, but Both Parties Square Off With Eye Toward Elections
The Senate yesterday continued a heated but largely theatrical debate on a bill to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 120 days and began considering another that would require the Bush administration to develop a new strategy against terrorism.
Republicans relished the opportunity to joust over war policy, confident in their political standing because of security gains in Iraq since President Bush's troop buildup took hold there last year. But Democrats said the debate offers them a new chance to highlight Republican support for a still unpopular war, setting the stage for them to run a general-election campaign this fall largely against Bush's policies in Iraq.
Under the complicated rules set up for the congressional debate, however, it is all but certain that neither bill introduced by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) would be approved. It is possible that neither would even approach a final vote, despite knotting up the chamber in as many as three days of floor debate.
Rather than distancing themselves from Bush's Iraq policy, Republicans embraced the improvements on the ground since the president sent an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year, and they criticized Democrats for wanting to change course.
"The surge has worked. This is coming from someone who was a cynic," Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said during the floor debate. Brownback had criticized Bush's policies in Iraq last year.
"The Democrats are sort of in denial. It's almost as if they're sorry things have gotten better," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a brief interview.
Democrats used the debate to test their emerging line of political attack on Bush's war policy, contending that the mounting cost of the conflict in Iraq is stealing resources from domestic priorities that could help prop up the sagging economy.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the Iraq war the "$800 billion gorilla in the room" that is diverting funds that could be used to address the subprime mortgage crisis in the housing market.
"The spending issue is becoming a new dynamic here," Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an interview. "They are misreading public opinion dramatically. The closer we get to November, the more apparent that will be," he added, referring to Republicans.
Schumer, who also chairs Congress's Joint Economic Committee, is holding a hearing today that he said will demonstrate how funding for Iraq displaces federal spending on economic recovery programs.
"The world should understand America has done its share," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said, closing the debate before a second procedural vote on the Feingold measures. "When is enough going to be enough?"
The debate in the past two days centered on Feingold's bill to begin troop withdrawals within 120 days of its passage and, at that point, to prohibit expenditures not meant for running counterterrorism operations, protecting the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or training Iraqi forces. The second bill would require the administration to draw up a new strategy on the battle against al-Qaeda and to present it to Congress within 60 days.
Arranging a pair of votes on preliminary motions that they expected Republicans to block, Democrats did not expect to have a lengthy debate on either measure. Reid had already scheduled a Tuesday-afternoon debate on a package of bills dealing with the housing crisis.
But, in a surprise move on Tuesday, most Republicans supported opening the debate on the first Iraq measure, even though not a single one had backed five previous bids to take up Feingold's withdrawal bills. Yesterday, 42 Republicans voted with 45 Democrats and two independents to begin a debate on Feingold's second measure.
The complicated parliamentary procedure used to bring the Feingold bills to the floor makes it likely that the bills would simply be withdrawn sometime today. Rather than hold a final vote on either measure, the Senate could just shift its attention to the housing legislation.
Em destaque: Senado americano discute a continuidade da Guerra no Iraque tendo em vista as próximas eleições.
Fonte: The Washington Post
Publicação: 28 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022703382.html?wpisrc=newsletter
The Senate yesterday continued a heated but largely theatrical debate on a bill to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq within 120 days and began considering another that would require the Bush administration to develop a new strategy against terrorism.
Republicans relished the opportunity to joust over war policy, confident in their political standing because of security gains in Iraq since President Bush's troop buildup took hold there last year. But Democrats said the debate offers them a new chance to highlight Republican support for a still unpopular war, setting the stage for them to run a general-election campaign this fall largely against Bush's policies in Iraq.
Under the complicated rules set up for the congressional debate, however, it is all but certain that neither bill introduced by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) would be approved. It is possible that neither would even approach a final vote, despite knotting up the chamber in as many as three days of floor debate.
Rather than distancing themselves from Bush's Iraq policy, Republicans embraced the improvements on the ground since the president sent an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Iraq last year, and they criticized Democrats for wanting to change course.
"The surge has worked. This is coming from someone who was a cynic," Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) said during the floor debate. Brownback had criticized Bush's policies in Iraq last year.
"The Democrats are sort of in denial. It's almost as if they're sorry things have gotten better," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a brief interview.
Democrats used the debate to test their emerging line of political attack on Bush's war policy, contending that the mounting cost of the conflict in Iraq is stealing resources from domestic priorities that could help prop up the sagging economy.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the Iraq war the "$800 billion gorilla in the room" that is diverting funds that could be used to address the subprime mortgage crisis in the housing market.
"The spending issue is becoming a new dynamic here," Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an interview. "They are misreading public opinion dramatically. The closer we get to November, the more apparent that will be," he added, referring to Republicans.
Schumer, who also chairs Congress's Joint Economic Committee, is holding a hearing today that he said will demonstrate how funding for Iraq displaces federal spending on economic recovery programs.
"The world should understand America has done its share," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said, closing the debate before a second procedural vote on the Feingold measures. "When is enough going to be enough?"
The debate in the past two days centered on Feingold's bill to begin troop withdrawals within 120 days of its passage and, at that point, to prohibit expenditures not meant for running counterterrorism operations, protecting the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or training Iraqi forces. The second bill would require the administration to draw up a new strategy on the battle against al-Qaeda and to present it to Congress within 60 days.
Arranging a pair of votes on preliminary motions that they expected Republicans to block, Democrats did not expect to have a lengthy debate on either measure. Reid had already scheduled a Tuesday-afternoon debate on a package of bills dealing with the housing crisis.
But, in a surprise move on Tuesday, most Republicans supported opening the debate on the first Iraq measure, even though not a single one had backed five previous bids to take up Feingold's withdrawal bills. Yesterday, 42 Republicans voted with 45 Democrats and two independents to begin a debate on Feingold's second measure.
The complicated parliamentary procedure used to bring the Feingold bills to the floor makes it likely that the bills would simply be withdrawn sometime today. Rather than hold a final vote on either measure, the Senate could just shift its attention to the housing legislation.
Em destaque: Senado americano discute a continuidade da Guerra no Iraque tendo em vista as próximas eleições.
Fonte: The Washington Post
Publicação: 28 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022703382.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Clash on Iraq Could Be McCain-Obama Preview
TYLER, Tex., Feb. 27 -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of making ill-informed comments about Iraq and al-Qaeda in Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate, signaling that a general-election brawl between the colleagues would center in part on who has the foreign policy experience to lead a country at war.
Despite McCain's war-hero status and years of foreign policy experience, Obama made it clear that he will not back down from such a fight, issuing a quick rebuke of McCain that linked him to President Bush and the war in Iraq.
The spat began when McCain seized on a comment by Obama that he would reserve the right to return to Iraq after withdrawing troops "if al-Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq."
"I have some news," McCain told voters at a rally here Wednesday morning. "Al-Qaeda is in Iraq. Al-Qaeda is called 'al-Qaeda in Iraq.' My friends, if we left, they wouldn't be establishing a base. . . . they would be taking a country. I will not allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender."
McCain has pledged to keep U.S. forces in Iraq as long as it takes to create stability, form a unified government and defeat terrorist groups. He favors adding more troops, if necessary, to achieve those goals.
Obama, who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, has said that there is no military solution to the conflict and that he would start bringing troops home after becoming president to force Iraqi factions to resolve their differences. Obama said he would withdraw about one to two combat brigades a month, with the goal of having all of them out within 16 months.
For McCain, the decision to pick a fight with Obama helps keep the presumptive GOP nominee from being overshadowed by the battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) for the Democratic presidential nomination. It also gives him a chance to undermine confidence in Obama's foreign policy experience before the Democrat can turn full attention to the general election.
But even as he focuses on a potentially decisive showdown with Clinton in four contests next Tuesday, Obama has made it clear he won't ignore the attacks from McCain. Generating headlines about an Obama-McCain showdown could also benefit Obama by creating the sense among Democratic primary voters that he is on the verge of becoming their party's nominee and also that he can hold his own against the Republicans.
Speaking to 7,000 voters at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Obama answered McCain's mocking tone with his own.
"McCain thought that he could make a clever point by saying, 'Well let me give you some news, Barack, al-Qaeda is in Iraq.' Like I wasn't reading the papers, like I didn't know what was going on. I said, 'Well, first of all, I do know that al-Qaeda is in Iraq; that's why I've said we should continue to strike al-Qaeda targets.
"I have some news for John McCain, and that is that there was no such thing as al-Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq." The crowd roared its approval. "I've got some news for John McCain. He took us into a war along with George Bush that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11, and that would be al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that is stronger now than at any time since 2001.
"So John McCain may like to say he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but so far all he's done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that's cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars."
"As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests," Obama said in the debate. "And if al-Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."
McCain seized on those words, saying they showed a lack of understanding of the terrorist group's activities in the country.
The Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq was formed in response to the U.S. presence in Iraq. The U.S. military thinks that the group's activities -- such as large-scale car bombings of Shiite gathering places -- peaked in 2006 and that American forces destroyed much of the organization in a series of raids last year.
The group is "frustrated" but "not defeated," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey W. Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said in an interview last month. U.S. officials say that coalition forces have pushed the group largely out of Baghdad and Anbar province, but that it remains active in the upper Tigris River valley.
McCain's attack on Obama's answer is the latest attempt by the Republican to cast Obama as inexperienced on foreign policy. Several months ago, McCain criticized Obama for suggesting that he would bomb al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan without that country's approval.
"The best idea is to not broadcast what you are going to do. That's naive," McCain said earlier this month. "You make plans and you work with the other country that is your ally and friend, which Pakistan is. You don't broadcast and say you are going to bomb the country without their permission or without consulting them. This is the fundamentals of the conduct of national security policy."
Em destaque: Artigo ressalta as diferenças entre Obama e McCain sobre a condução da política externa americana e o Iraque.
Fonte: Washington Post
Autor: Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray
Publicação: 28 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022703826_2.html?wpisrc=newsletter&sid=ST2008022703886
Despite McCain's war-hero status and years of foreign policy experience, Obama made it clear that he will not back down from such a fight, issuing a quick rebuke of McCain that linked him to President Bush and the war in Iraq.
The spat began when McCain seized on a comment by Obama that he would reserve the right to return to Iraq after withdrawing troops "if al-Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq."
"I have some news," McCain told voters at a rally here Wednesday morning. "Al-Qaeda is in Iraq. Al-Qaeda is called 'al-Qaeda in Iraq.' My friends, if we left, they wouldn't be establishing a base. . . . they would be taking a country. I will not allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender."
McCain has pledged to keep U.S. forces in Iraq as long as it takes to create stability, form a unified government and defeat terrorist groups. He favors adding more troops, if necessary, to achieve those goals.
Obama, who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, has said that there is no military solution to the conflict and that he would start bringing troops home after becoming president to force Iraqi factions to resolve their differences. Obama said he would withdraw about one to two combat brigades a month, with the goal of having all of them out within 16 months.
For McCain, the decision to pick a fight with Obama helps keep the presumptive GOP nominee from being overshadowed by the battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) for the Democratic presidential nomination. It also gives him a chance to undermine confidence in Obama's foreign policy experience before the Democrat can turn full attention to the general election.
But even as he focuses on a potentially decisive showdown with Clinton in four contests next Tuesday, Obama has made it clear he won't ignore the attacks from McCain. Generating headlines about an Obama-McCain showdown could also benefit Obama by creating the sense among Democratic primary voters that he is on the verge of becoming their party's nominee and also that he can hold his own against the Republicans.
Speaking to 7,000 voters at Ohio State University on Wednesday, Obama answered McCain's mocking tone with his own.
"McCain thought that he could make a clever point by saying, 'Well let me give you some news, Barack, al-Qaeda is in Iraq.' Like I wasn't reading the papers, like I didn't know what was going on. I said, 'Well, first of all, I do know that al-Qaeda is in Iraq; that's why I've said we should continue to strike al-Qaeda targets.
"I have some news for John McCain, and that is that there was no such thing as al-Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq." The crowd roared its approval. "I've got some news for John McCain. He took us into a war along with George Bush that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11, and that would be al-Qaeda in Afghanistan that is stronger now than at any time since 2001.
"So John McCain may like to say he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but so far all he's done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that's cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars."
"As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests," Obama said in the debate. "And if al-Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."
McCain seized on those words, saying they showed a lack of understanding of the terrorist group's activities in the country.
The Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq was formed in response to the U.S. presence in Iraq. The U.S. military thinks that the group's activities -- such as large-scale car bombings of Shiite gathering places -- peaked in 2006 and that American forces destroyed much of the organization in a series of raids last year.
The group is "frustrated" but "not defeated," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey W. Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said in an interview last month. U.S. officials say that coalition forces have pushed the group largely out of Baghdad and Anbar province, but that it remains active in the upper Tigris River valley.
McCain's attack on Obama's answer is the latest attempt by the Republican to cast Obama as inexperienced on foreign policy. Several months ago, McCain criticized Obama for suggesting that he would bomb al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan without that country's approval.
"The best idea is to not broadcast what you are going to do. That's naive," McCain said earlier this month. "You make plans and you work with the other country that is your ally and friend, which Pakistan is. You don't broadcast and say you are going to bomb the country without their permission or without consulting them. This is the fundamentals of the conduct of national security policy."
Em destaque: Artigo ressalta as diferenças entre Obama e McCain sobre a condução da política externa americana e o Iraque.
Fonte: Washington Post
Autor: Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray
Publicação: 28 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022703826_2.html?wpisrc=newsletter&sid=ST2008022703886
Bush hits Obama on foreign policy
President says meeting with adversarial leaders can 'send the wrong signal.'
WASHINGTON -- Setting aside his stated reluctance to enter the presidential campaign, He also challenged Democrats' skepticism about the North American Free Trade Agreement, and reminded Obama that Al Qaeda has been seeking to establish a base in Iraq "for the past four years."
At the same time, he said at a
In the lively 46-minute session, during which Bush bantered with reporters, he delivered a forceful plea for congressional support of his plan to renew anti-terrorist eavesdropping legislation.
He attacked congressional critics of his Iraq policy and expressed curiosity -- as well as uncertainty -- about Dmitri A. Medvedev, the all-but-certain successor to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
But it was in his challenge to Obama's readiness to meet with the pariahs of American foreign policy that Bush plunged most directly into the presidential campaign.
The president said that "sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro" would lend the status of the American presidency to the new Cuban leader.
"He gains a lot from it by saying, 'Look at me, I'm now recognized by the president of the United States,' " Bush said.
Bush's reluctance to speak publicly about the campaign serves a political purpose, given his low approval ratings and questions about whether his words can help or hurt Republican candidates.
However, with Obama and Clinton seeking to differentiate themselves from each other and from Bush on foreign policy, he may have helped make their point.
Bush has long objected to talking with adversaries -- notably from Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Asked why such talks, without preconditions, would be wrong, he said they would "give great status to those who have suppressed human rights and human dignity."
Obama, who has said that if elected he would be willing to meet U.S. enemies, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told reporters after Bush spoke that the United States should not fear engaging its foes.
Campaigning in
In exchange for changes in its behavior, Obama said, Iran could expect eventual consideration of its bid to join the World Trade Organization and the loosening of U.N. sanctions.
The controversy takes on new timeliness with the ascendance of Raul Castro to the Cuban presidency, replacing his brother, Fidel.
"I'm not suggesting there's never a time to talk, but I'm suggesting now is not the time . . . to talk with Raul Castro," Bush said.
"He's nothing more than an extension of what his brother did, which was to ruin an island, and imprison people because of their beliefs.
"The decisions of the U.S. president to have discussions with certain international figures can be extremely counterproductive," he said. "It can send chilling signals and messages to our allies; it can send confusion about our foreign policy; it discourages reformers inside their own country. And in my judgment, it would be a mistake."
Even as Bush put up a wall between himself and certain foreign leaders -- he singled out Kim Jong Il of North Korea -- he said it was "important to establish personal relations with leaders even though you may not agree with them."
Bush is expected to hold a farewell meeting with Putin, with whom he acknowledged having had "diplomatic head-butts," while in eastern Europe for a NATO summit in April, roughly four weeks before Putin leaves the presidency.
Asked whether he thought Medvedev, as the Russian president's hand-picked successor, would turn into a Putin puppet, Bush said: "I wouldn't say that."
Trade policy has increasingly become a focal point in the Democratic presidential race, particularly in
Clinton has called for renegotiating elements of NAFTA, which her husband's administration pushed through Congress after it was largely negotiated by the
Broadening her criticism of the current administration's trade policy, she said in Ohio on Thursday that Bush had "turned a blind eye to all of the actions by China and others to dump steel into Ohio, hurting Ohio workers and the Ohio economy."
Defending the pact that in 1993 tore down barriers to trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Bush said "the idea of just unilaterally withdrawing from a trade treaty because of trying to score political points is not good policy."
On other topics, Bush:
* Criticized Obama's statement in a Democratic debate Tuesday that "if Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq," then the United States would have to act to protect itself. "Well, that's exactly what they've been trying to do for the past four years," he said.
* Said if eavesdropping legislation did not protect telephone companies from lawsuits -- a central issue in whether to renew a measure aimed at listening in on potential terrorists' conversations -- litigation "would give Al Qaeda and others a road map as to how to avoid the surveillance." He said that the telephone companies' help was needed, but that without government protection they would be exposed to lawsuits by "class-action plaintiffs attorneys" sensing "a financial gravy train."
* Was asked whether he was trying to collect up to $200 million for his presidential library, whether Americans should know who is contributing, whether he would disclose the contributions as they arrive, and whether he would restrict who could donate and how much they could give.
"No, yes, no, yes," he replied.
james.gerstenzang@ latimes.com
Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak in Texas and Michael Finnegan in Ohio contributed to this report.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: Presidente Bush, que até então evitava comentários sobre a corrida dos candidatos às eleições americanas deste ano para não prejudicar os republicanos, faz críticas às intenções de Barack Obama de encontrar líderes de países não aliados aos Estados Unidos se eleito.
Fonte: Los Angeles Times
Publicação: 29 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/campaign08/newsletter/la-na-bush29feb29,0,1632976.story?page=1
quinta-feira, 28 de fevereiro de 2008
War and peace, the Army way
Another 100 years of U.S. troops in Iraq?
"Fine with me,"GOP presidential contender John McCain said in January. McCain, who's famously irascible, was presumably exaggerating. His point, he clarified, wasn't that he actually foresaw another 100 years of war, but that U.S. troops may retain an important role in Iraq that goes on for many years after direct combat operations end.
"Fine with me,"
Don't like that idea? Get used to it. Because in many ways, McCain's comments are squarely in line with the latest Army doctrine.
This week, the Army released a new version of FM 3-0, the Army Field Manual on Operations. The first revision since
Remember the 1990s, when disgruntled Army officers waged a muttering campaign against the Clinton administration's decision to send them to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, on the grounds that real soldiers ought to spend their time fighting, not acting as peacekeepers/cops/prison guards/civil administrators? Things are different now.
The 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq changed a lot of minds about the value of what the military once marginalized as "OOTW" -- "Operations Other Than War." The rise of Al Qaeda helped demonstrate that the many varieties of human misery -- poverty, chaos, repression, civil conflict -- also happen to be perfect breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism. And our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq made it painfully clear that winning the peace matters as much as winning the war.
The U.S. military has always been exceptionally good at war fighting. In Iraq, for instance, defeating the military forces of
By adding stability operations as a new core mission, the revised Army Field Manual tries to ensure that the failures of Iraq will never be repeated. FM 3-0 foresees future Army forces fighting when fighting is called for -- but troops also will work as needed to ensure civilian security and provide "emergency infrastructure reconstruction, humanitarian relief [and] political, legal, social and economic institutions that support the transition to legitimate local governance."
Stability operations will be integrated into Army planning and training at every level and will take place across the "full spectrum of conflict": that is, such activities may be preventive (intended to keep an unstable society from collapsing), or coexist with traditional war fighting, or occur in the aftermath of a conflict.
Imagine! If the
So FM 3-0 is welcome, and overdue.
But here's the rub. Successful stability operations take a lot of time.
Maybe not McCain's 100 years, but if the U.S. is serious about seeing stability operations as part of the Army's core mission, we'll need a larger Army, and we'll be looking at extended deployments in trouble spots around the globe. You can defeat an enemy army in a month, but truly "stabilizing" a society is something that will happen -- if it happens -- over 10 or 20 years, not 10 or 20 weeks.
FM 3-0 also raises as many new questions as it answers.
The Army can't possibly "stabilize" every troubled society, so how will the U.S. select priorities? Will military involvement in traditionally humanitarian activities create new dangers for private relief and humanitarian organizations? Will others around the world see U.S. stability operations as just a new form of imperialism?
And: Should FM 3-0 be seen as a continuation of a disturbing post-9/11 trend toward the militarization of U.S. foreign policy? Or should it be seen as a sort of "civilianization" of the military, insofar as it acknowledges that real security for the United States can't be achieved through force alone?
And: What role will civilians play? The State Department supposedly "coordinates" U.S. stability operations, including those undertaken by the military -- but that's like saying a mouse will coordinate a pack of 800-pound gorillas. Will Congress commit the funds to build up civilian capacity to match our undoubted military capacity?
In the end, of course, the Army can't answer these questions. Congress and the next president need to. And let's hope they take the task seriously, because 100 years without answers would be an awfully long time.
rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com
***
Em destaque: A colunista do Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks, comenta a inserção de mais uma base de atuação do exército americano no seu manual de operações de campo em sua primeira revisão desde 11 de setembro de 2001 (FM 3-0): 'operações de estabilidade', ou seja, atuação do exército na reconstrução de uma nação.
Antes as bases eram apenas duas: a de defesa e ataque.
Fonte: Los Angeles Times
Autora: Rosa Brooks
Publicação: 28 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oe-brooks28feb28,0,1983673.column
Obama, McCain trade jabs on Iraq, terror
They offer a preview of a possible matchup in the general election, while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton focuses on trade and foreclosures.
DUNCANVILLE, TEXAS -- Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama sparred long distance Wednesday over Iraq and terrorism, previewing a likely foreign policy debate should the two men face each other in the fall.
The exchange was sparked by a response Obama gave in Tuesday night's debate with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both Democrats favor a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which McCain opposes.
The exchange was sparked by a response Obama gave in Tuesday night's debate with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both Democrats favor a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which McCain opposes.
Asked if he would reserve the right as president to send U.S. troops back into Iraq to quell an insurrection or civil war, Obama replied: "As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad."
Reacting Wednesday morning in Tyler, Texas, McCain taunted: "I have some news: Al Qaeda is in Iraq. . . . It's called 'Al Qaeda in Iraq.' " Some in the town-hall audience laughed.
"If we left . . . they wouldn't be establishing a base," the Arizona Republican said. "They'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen, my friends."
Obama responded at a rally in the sports arena at Ohio State University in Columbus. "I have some news for John McCain," the Illinois Democrat said, leaning into the crowd for emphasis. "There was no such thing as 'Al Qaeda in Iraq' until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."
Noting that McCain tells audiences that he would follow Osama bin Laden to the "gates of hell" to catch him, Obama brought the crowd of more than 7,000 to its feet by gibing, "All he has done is to follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq."
Later, at a rally Wednesday night in Texas, Obama added, "That's the news, John McCain. And I'm happy to have that debate with you in November. In October. In September."
The back-and-forth framed the case that the two men, still fighting to clinch their party nominations, would be likely to make against each other in a general election campaign.
McCain suggests that Obama, 46, is too callow to serve as commander in chief. "If we do what Sen. Obama wants to do -- and that's an immediate withdrawal -- that would mean surrender in Iraq," McCain said at a noontime town hall in San Antonio. "I guess that means that he would surrender and then go back."
Obama asserts that McCain, 71, is too wed to the policies of President Bush and old-line Washington. "He's tied to the politics of the past," Obama told the crowd in Columbus. "We are about policies of the future."
The Democrat later left Ohio to campaign in Duncanville and San Marcos, Texas; the two states hold primaries Tuesday that pose a potential make-or-break challenge for Clinton. In the race superdelegates, Obama gained and Clinton lost one Wednesday when Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a leader of the civil rights movement, changed sides and endorsed the senator from Illinois.
"I understand he's been under tremendous pressure," Clinton told KTRK-TV in Houston in a satellite interview. "He's been my friend. He will always be my friend."
The New York Democrat campaigned Wednesday in Ohio, where she focused on the state's ailing economy and accused Obama and McCain of failing to address the surge in home foreclosures.
"Sen. Obama does not have a plan," Clinton told reporters on a flight from Cleveland to Columbus. "Sen. McCain doesn't have a plan."
She said she was pleased by Tuesday night's Democratic debate in Cleveland, saying she had succeeded in drawing contrasts with Obama and in demonstrating her credentials to be president.
Clinton ignored suggestions that she had failed to change the essential dynamic of the Democratic race, which has tipped Obama's way since early February, when he began his string of 11 straight victories. "What's important is that we have a lot of people yet to vote," Clinton said.
In Zanesville, Clinton again pledged to fix the problems she sees with the North American Free Trade Agreement. The pact with Mexico and Canada was signed into law by her husband, former President Clinton.
"We're going to have trade that lifts up our families -- pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-American trade," Clinton told several hundred supporters. She also touted her plan to put a moratorium on home foreclosures. "Too many Ohioans are losing their homes," she said. "The numbers are staggering."
mark.barabak@latimes.com
maeve.reston@latimes.com
Barabak reported from Ohio and Texas, and Reston reported from Texas. Times staff writers Michael Finnegan in Ohio and Johanna Neumann in Washington also contributed to this report.
****
Em destaque: Os candidatos Barack Obama e John McCain, os favoritos para serem os finalistas das eleições americanas de 2008 trocam 'farpas' sobre suas posições em relação ao Iraque.
Publicação: 28 de fevereiro 2008
Fonte: Los Angeles Times
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/mideastemail/la-na-campaign28feb28,0,5906566.story
quarta-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2008
Duas opiniões
Segue abaixo dois artigos do Los Angeles Times.
O primeiro, de Andrew Napolitano, problematiza e critica a discriminação feita pelos Estados Unidos aos estrangeiros, que são alvos não protegidos pela constituição federal americana (4th Amendment) para as práticas de vigilância pelo governo.
(link original: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-napolitano18feb18,0,1665050.story)
O segundo artigo é uma resposta a Napolitano feita pelo congressista republicano Darrell Issa, que defende a prática de vigilância de 'terroristas estrangeiros' para o bem estar do povo americano.
(link original: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-issa25feb25,0,1843063.story)
****
He made that infamous statement in a TV interview years after he left office, but the attitude espoused was obviously one he embraced while in the White House. He, like his present-day successor, rejected the truism that the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from conducting electronic surveillance of anyone without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of a crime, restrains the president.
In response to the abuses during the Nixon administration, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 1978. The law provides that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.
The 4th Amendment was written in response to the Colonial experience whereby British soldiers wrote their own search warrants, thus literally authorizing themselves to enter the private property of colonists.
The amendment has been uniformly interpreted by the courts to require a warrant by a judge; and judges can only issue search warrants after government agents, under oath, have convinced the judges that it is more likely than not that the things to be seized are evidence of crimes. This standard of proof is called probable cause of crime. It is one of only two instances in which the founders wrote a rule of criminal procedure into the Constitution itself, surely so that no Congress, president or court could tamper with it.
FISA also created the bizarre, constitutionally questionable procedure in which federal agents could appear in front of a secret court and, instead of presenting probable cause of a crime in order to obtain a search warrant, would only need to present probable cause that the target of the warrant was an agent of a foreign government. The foreign government could be friendly or it could wish us ill, but no illegal or even anti-American behavior need be shown. Subsequent amendments to this statute removed the "agency" requirement and demanded only that the target be a person physically present in the U.S. who was not born here and is not an American citizen, whether working for a foreign government or not.
The FISA statute itself significantly -- and, in my opinion, unconstitutionally -- lowered the 4th Amendment bar from probable cause of "crime"to probable cause of "status." However, in order to protect the 4th Amendment rights of the targets of spying, the statute erected a so-called wall between gathering evidence and using evidence. The government cannot constitutionally prosecute someone unless it has evidence against him that was obtained pursuant to probable cause of a crime, a standard not met by a FISA warrant.
Congress changed all that. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 and its later version not only destroyed the wall between investigation and prosecution,they mandated that investigators who obtained evidence of criminal activity pursuant to FISA warrants share that evidence with prosecutors. They also instructed federal judges that the evidence thus shared is admissible under the Constitution against a defendant in a criminal case. Congress forgot that it cannot tell federal judges what evidence is admissible because judges, not politicians, decide what a jury hears.
Then the Bush administration and Congress went even further. The administration wanted, and Congress has begrudgingly given it, the authority to conduct electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans without even a FISA warrant -- without any warrant whatsoever. The so-called Protect America Act of 2007, which expired at the end of last week, gave the government carte blanche to spy on foreign persons outside the U.S., even if Americans in the United States with whom they may be communicating are spied on -- illegally -- in the process. Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee last year that hundreds of unsuspecting Americans' conversations and e-mails are spied on annually as a consequence of the warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States.
So where does all this leave us? Even though, since 1978, the government has gotten more than 99% of its FISA applications approved, the administration wants to do away with FISA altogether if at least one of the people whose conversations or e-mails it wishes to monitor is not in the U.S. and is not an American.
Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior. So the government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the U.S. or not.
If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is "A Nation of Sheep."
**********
Artigo Resposta
**********
Andrew Napolitano's Op-Ed article arguing that foreign terrorists are entitled to protections under the 4th Amendment is riddled with false arguments and absurd comparisons. It is lucky for all of us that federal courts have rejected his wrong-headed, judicial-activist theories.
We live in a dangerous time and our intelligence agencies are our front line of defense. To a great extent, it is through their efforts that we have prevented numerous attacks on the United States since the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001. Our vigilance and aggressive approach to combating terrorism must continue if we are to avert future attacks.
I sit on both of the committees in the House of Representatives with jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Intelligence and Judiciary. One of the biggest differences between the two committees is that many proceedings before the Intelligence Committee are held in secret, closed sessions. The simple reason for this is that much of the information disclosed at these hearings could endanger American lives if released to the public.
For the very same reason, requests for FISA wiretaps are made in nonpublic FISA court proceedings. The information presented during these proceedings is sensitive in nature, and we cannot allow our enemies to know what we know, or worse, give them information they do not already have. Napolitano's assertion that FISA court proceedings are "bizarre" and unconstitutional ignores our national security interests as well as interpretations of the Constitution by our nation's court system.
Napolitano, arguing that FISA and our government's monitoring of terrorists are unconstitutional, posed a question that I find truly perplexing. He asked, "If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?"
Let me be clear, foreigners abroad do not enjoy — and have never been granted — the protections of the U.S. Constitution, including 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
FISA requires a different showing of probable cause from traditional criminal wiretaps. However, this isn't a "constitutionally questionable procedure" as Napolitano suggests. It's common sense. Clearly, acquiring evidence to prosecute a crime that has already been committed is markedly different from acquiring foreign intelligence information to prevent a terrorist attack. Congress recognized this when it enacted FISA in 1978 — an effort that did not extend the powers of the presidency but attempted to limit them. The constitutionality of FISA is well-settled by the courts. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review even noted that, in certain respects, FISA actually surpasses constitutional requirements for traditional criminal warrants.
Since its enactment in 1978, FISA has not required court orders to monitor a person who is not in the U.S. and is not an American. Napolitano seemingly misunderstands the real and important purpose of FISA — to provide constitutional protections to U.S. persons, not foreigners.
Napolitano's article echoes many of the arguments made by the Democrat majority in the House, that effectively monitoring foreign terrorists and protecting the rights of Americans are incompatible. Earlier this month, the Senate adopted a bipartisan bill that would stay on the books for six years — House Democrats, however, refused to bring this bill to the floor for a vote, deciding instead to allow authority critical to our ability to monitor terrorists to simply expire. Leaving town without acting on an issue so important is shameful — the House Democrat leadership has placed both our homeland and our troops fighting abroad in increased danger.
The debate over FISA is an important one and Republicans are committed to ensuring that individuals within the United States continue to enjoy their full constitutional rights. Everyone agrees that we need strong protections against monitoring of Americans' communications. That's why our intelligence laws have always required court orders to target people in the U.S. However, we cannot hamstring our intelligence agencies by forcing them to seek a court order every time they need to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists abroad. The tools used by the intelligence community must be as real and rapidly deployed as any looming threat.
Darrell Issa is a Republican congressman from Vista.
O primeiro, de Andrew Napolitano, problematiza e critica a discriminação feita pelos Estados Unidos aos estrangeiros, que são alvos não protegidos pela constituição federal americana (4th Amendment) para as práticas de vigilância pelo governo.
(link original: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-napolitano18feb18,0,1665050.story)
O segundo artigo é uma resposta a Napolitano feita pelo congressista republicano Darrell Issa, que defende a prática de vigilância de 'terroristas estrangeiros' para o bem estar do povo americano.
(link original: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-issa25feb25,0,1843063.story)
****
The invasion of America
Creeping intrusions against our privacy rights are an assault on the Constitution. When President Nixon was in his pre-Watergate heyday, he ordered the FBI and the CIA to electronically monitor the private behavior of his domestic political adversaries. Shortly after Nixon resigned, investigators discovered hundreds of reports of break-ins and secret electronic surveillance. None of it was authorized by warrants, and thus all of it was illegal. But it had been conducted pursuant to the president's orders. Nixon's defense was, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."He made that infamous statement in a TV interview years after he left office, but the attitude espoused was obviously one he embraced while in the White House. He, like his present-day successor, rejected the truism that the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from conducting electronic surveillance of anyone without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of a crime, restrains the president.
In response to the abuses during the Nixon administration, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 1978. The law provides that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.
The 4th Amendment was written in response to the Colonial experience whereby British soldiers wrote their own search warrants, thus literally authorizing themselves to enter the private property of colonists.
The amendment has been uniformly interpreted by the courts to require a warrant by a judge; and judges can only issue search warrants after government agents, under oath, have convinced the judges that it is more likely than not that the things to be seized are evidence of crimes. This standard of proof is called probable cause of crime. It is one of only two instances in which the founders wrote a rule of criminal procedure into the Constitution itself, surely so that no Congress, president or court could tamper with it.
FISA also created the bizarre, constitutionally questionable procedure in which federal agents could appear in front of a secret court and, instead of presenting probable cause of a crime in order to obtain a search warrant, would only need to present probable cause that the target of the warrant was an agent of a foreign government. The foreign government could be friendly or it could wish us ill, but no illegal or even anti-American behavior need be shown. Subsequent amendments to this statute removed the "agency" requirement and demanded only that the target be a person physically present in the U.S. who was not born here and is not an American citizen, whether working for a foreign government or not.
The FISA statute itself significantly -- and, in my opinion, unconstitutionally -- lowered the 4th Amendment bar from probable cause of "crime"to probable cause of "status." However, in order to protect the 4th Amendment rights of the targets of spying, the statute erected a so-called wall between gathering evidence and using evidence. The government cannot constitutionally prosecute someone unless it has evidence against him that was obtained pursuant to probable cause of a crime, a standard not met by a FISA warrant.
Congress changed all that. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 and its later version not only destroyed the wall between investigation and prosecution,they mandated that investigators who obtained evidence of criminal activity pursuant to FISA warrants share that evidence with prosecutors. They also instructed federal judges that the evidence thus shared is admissible under the Constitution against a defendant in a criminal case. Congress forgot that it cannot tell federal judges what evidence is admissible because judges, not politicians, decide what a jury hears.
Then the Bush administration and Congress went even further. The administration wanted, and Congress has begrudgingly given it, the authority to conduct electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans without even a FISA warrant -- without any warrant whatsoever. The so-called Protect America Act of 2007, which expired at the end of last week, gave the government carte blanche to spy on foreign persons outside the U.S., even if Americans in the United States with whom they may be communicating are spied on -- illegally -- in the process. Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee last year that hundreds of unsuspecting Americans' conversations and e-mails are spied on annually as a consequence of the warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States.
So where does all this leave us? Even though, since 1978, the government has gotten more than 99% of its FISA applications approved, the administration wants to do away with FISA altogether if at least one of the people whose conversations or e-mails it wishes to monitor is not in the U.S. and is not an American.
Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior. So the government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the U.S. or not.
If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is "A Nation of Sheep."
**********
Artigo Resposta
**********
No 4th Amendment for terrorists abroad
Foreign intelligence gathering requires different tools from criminal investigations.
Andrew Napolitano's Op-Ed article arguing that foreign terrorists are entitled to protections under the 4th Amendment is riddled with false arguments and absurd comparisons. It is lucky for all of us that federal courts have rejected his wrong-headed, judicial-activist theories.
We live in a dangerous time and our intelligence agencies are our front line of defense. To a great extent, it is through their efforts that we have prevented numerous attacks on the United States since the tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001. Our vigilance and aggressive approach to combating terrorism must continue if we are to avert future attacks.
I sit on both of the committees in the House of Representatives with jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Intelligence and Judiciary. One of the biggest differences between the two committees is that many proceedings before the Intelligence Committee are held in secret, closed sessions. The simple reason for this is that much of the information disclosed at these hearings could endanger American lives if released to the public.
For the very same reason, requests for FISA wiretaps are made in nonpublic FISA court proceedings. The information presented during these proceedings is sensitive in nature, and we cannot allow our enemies to know what we know, or worse, give them information they do not already have. Napolitano's assertion that FISA court proceedings are "bizarre" and unconstitutional ignores our national security interests as well as interpretations of the Constitution by our nation's court system.
Napolitano, arguing that FISA and our government's monitoring of terrorists are unconstitutional, posed a question that I find truly perplexing. He asked, "If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?"
Let me be clear, foreigners abroad do not enjoy — and have never been granted — the protections of the U.S. Constitution, including 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
FISA requires a different showing of probable cause from traditional criminal wiretaps. However, this isn't a "constitutionally questionable procedure" as Napolitano suggests. It's common sense. Clearly, acquiring evidence to prosecute a crime that has already been committed is markedly different from acquiring foreign intelligence information to prevent a terrorist attack. Congress recognized this when it enacted FISA in 1978 — an effort that did not extend the powers of the presidency but attempted to limit them. The constitutionality of FISA is well-settled by the courts. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review even noted that, in certain respects, FISA actually surpasses constitutional requirements for traditional criminal warrants.
Since its enactment in 1978, FISA has not required court orders to monitor a person who is not in the U.S. and is not an American. Napolitano seemingly misunderstands the real and important purpose of FISA — to provide constitutional protections to U.S. persons, not foreigners.
Napolitano's article echoes many of the arguments made by the Democrat majority in the House, that effectively monitoring foreign terrorists and protecting the rights of Americans are incompatible. Earlier this month, the Senate adopted a bipartisan bill that would stay on the books for six years — House Democrats, however, refused to bring this bill to the floor for a vote, deciding instead to allow authority critical to our ability to monitor terrorists to simply expire. Leaving town without acting on an issue so important is shameful — the House Democrat leadership has placed both our homeland and our troops fighting abroad in increased danger.
The debate over FISA is an important one and Republicans are committed to ensuring that individuals within the United States continue to enjoy their full constitutional rights. Everyone agrees that we need strong protections against monitoring of Americans' communications. That's why our intelligence laws have always required court orders to target people in the U.S. However, we cannot hamstring our intelligence agencies by forcing them to seek a court order every time they need to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists abroad. The tools used by the intelligence community must be as real and rapidly deployed as any looming threat.
Darrell Issa is a Republican congressman from Vista.
terça-feira, 26 de fevereiro de 2008
'WE CANNOT LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN'
Clinton Compares Obama to Bush Foreign Policy Experience at Issue
"We've seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security," Clinton told students at George Washington University. "We cannot let that happen again. America has already taken that chance one time too many."
Clinton's critique of Obama's foreign policy credentials came as she is escalating her attacks in the run-up to primaries on March 4 in Ohio and Texas -- contests that even her husband has called must-wins.
Obama's campaign dismissed the attempt to link him to Bush.
"It's ironic that Hillary Clinton compared Barack Obama to George Bush when she voted to authorize the war in Iraq," said retired Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, an Obama adviser.
Clinton's speech yesterday, which came on the eve of a Democratic debate in Cleveland that will be the candidates' final face-off before March 4, was part of an effort that the former first lady's advisers say is aimed at "raising the stakes" in the contest. Over the next week, Clinton will seek, in sometimes dark terms, to frame the challenges facing the next president in the hopes that it will reinforce the experience argument that failed to stop Obama from winning 11 straight contests so far.
But the Obama campaign said Clinton's team was also using more nefarious tactics. A picture appeared yesterday morning on the Drudge Report Web site showing Obama in Somali dress during a trip he took to Kenya in 2006 as part of his Senate duties. The site said the image came from the Clinton campaign. Obama aides argued that it was an attempt to draw attention to Obama's race and to a rumor that he is a Muslim. Obama is a Christian.
After Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton team of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering," Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams issued a statement saying that "if Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely."
Williams's statement did not deny that Clinton's team had sent the Web site the picture, although communications director Howard Wolfson said later in the day that he had "no knowledge" of the involvement of campaign aides playing a role in distributing it.
He sought to turn the controversy into an argument that media coverage has been too favorable toward Obama, an argument that Clinton is also making.
During a fundraiser in Boston late Sunday, Clinton referred to a skit on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" that depicted a CNN debate in which questioners fawned over Obama.
"I just have this sense that finally my opponent is getting maybe a little bit of scrutiny," Clinton told about 300 supporters to loud cheers. "How many of you saw 'Saturday Night Live'? . . . That wouldn't have happened just a couple of weeks ago. . . . We have two candidates and we've been focused on one more than the other in terms of asking the hard questions."
At that same fundraiser, Clinton previewed her plan for victory, promising to attack Obama on "issues" including health care and saying: "We're going to emphasize more and more the experience gap." She also indicated that she plans to question the way Obama is conducting his campaign in light of his "new politics" rhetoric. Her aides spent much of the day accusing him of hypocrisy, noting that in Iowa, he criticized John Edwards for allowing independent groups to spend money on advertisements on his behalf, but that his campaign has not criticized labor groups that are now doing the same for him.
Clinton advisers privately acknowledge the challenge of attacking Obama without it reflecting negatively on their candidate, although she has sharpened her tone noticeably since a debate on Thursday, an event that was so mild that Clinton was forced to make clear that she was not conceding the race.
At George Washington University yesterday, she criticized her rival's statements that he would meet leaders of nations such as North Korea without preconditions and that he would consider attacking Pakistan if its leaders would not cooperate in fighting terrorism.
"He wavers from seeming to believe that mediation and meetings with preconditions solves the world's most intractable problems to advocating rash, unilateral military action," Clinton said.
Obama, who still trails Clinton in most polls in Ohio, spent the day there, laying out his plans to help seniors at a roundtable discussion before rallies in Dayton and Cincinnati. While his aides batted back Clinton's attacks, he looked forward to his possible general election opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), but kept an eye on Clinton.
"Some people are telling you not to believe, because they say 'Those Republicans are going to be tough on Obama,' he told a crowd of more than 11,000 at the University of Cincinnati. "I don't mind having debates with John McCain. I admire, I revere John McCain's service to this country. . . . But he has embraced George Bush's economic policies and tax cuts for the rich, and he said we will stay in Iraq even if it takes 100 years. . . . I want to have that debate."
Em destaque: Hilary Clinton compara a inexperiência de Obama em lidar com política externa com a inexperiência de Bush neste assunto.
Fonte: Washington Post
Publicação: 26/02/2008
Autor: Perry Bacon Jr.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/25/AR2008022502663.html?wpisrc=newsletter
"We've seen the tragic result of having a president who had neither the experience nor the wisdom to manage our foreign policy and safeguard our national security," Clinton told students at George Washington University. "We cannot let that happen again. America has already taken that chance one time too many."
Clinton's critique of Obama's foreign policy credentials came as she is escalating her attacks in the run-up to primaries on March 4 in Ohio and Texas -- contests that even her husband has called must-wins.
Obama's campaign dismissed the attempt to link him to Bush.
"It's ironic that Hillary Clinton compared Barack Obama to George Bush when she voted to authorize the war in Iraq," said retired Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, an Obama adviser.
Clinton's speech yesterday, which came on the eve of a Democratic debate in Cleveland that will be the candidates' final face-off before March 4, was part of an effort that the former first lady's advisers say is aimed at "raising the stakes" in the contest. Over the next week, Clinton will seek, in sometimes dark terms, to frame the challenges facing the next president in the hopes that it will reinforce the experience argument that failed to stop Obama from winning 11 straight contests so far.
But the Obama campaign said Clinton's team was also using more nefarious tactics. A picture appeared yesterday morning on the Drudge Report Web site showing Obama in Somali dress during a trip he took to Kenya in 2006 as part of his Senate duties. The site said the image came from the Clinton campaign. Obama aides argued that it was an attempt to draw attention to Obama's race and to a rumor that he is a Muslim. Obama is a Christian.
After Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton team of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering," Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams issued a statement saying that "if Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed. Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely."
Williams's statement did not deny that Clinton's team had sent the Web site the picture, although communications director Howard Wolfson said later in the day that he had "no knowledge" of the involvement of campaign aides playing a role in distributing it.
He sought to turn the controversy into an argument that media coverage has been too favorable toward Obama, an argument that Clinton is also making.
During a fundraiser in Boston late Sunday, Clinton referred to a skit on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" that depicted a CNN debate in which questioners fawned over Obama.
"I just have this sense that finally my opponent is getting maybe a little bit of scrutiny," Clinton told about 300 supporters to loud cheers. "How many of you saw 'Saturday Night Live'? . . . That wouldn't have happened just a couple of weeks ago. . . . We have two candidates and we've been focused on one more than the other in terms of asking the hard questions."
At that same fundraiser, Clinton previewed her plan for victory, promising to attack Obama on "issues" including health care and saying: "We're going to emphasize more and more the experience gap." She also indicated that she plans to question the way Obama is conducting his campaign in light of his "new politics" rhetoric. Her aides spent much of the day accusing him of hypocrisy, noting that in Iowa, he criticized John Edwards for allowing independent groups to spend money on advertisements on his behalf, but that his campaign has not criticized labor groups that are now doing the same for him.
Clinton advisers privately acknowledge the challenge of attacking Obama without it reflecting negatively on their candidate, although she has sharpened her tone noticeably since a debate on Thursday, an event that was so mild that Clinton was forced to make clear that she was not conceding the race.
At George Washington University yesterday, she criticized her rival's statements that he would meet leaders of nations such as North Korea without preconditions and that he would consider attacking Pakistan if its leaders would not cooperate in fighting terrorism.
"He wavers from seeming to believe that mediation and meetings with preconditions solves the world's most intractable problems to advocating rash, unilateral military action," Clinton said.
Obama, who still trails Clinton in most polls in Ohio, spent the day there, laying out his plans to help seniors at a roundtable discussion before rallies in Dayton and Cincinnati. While his aides batted back Clinton's attacks, he looked forward to his possible general election opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), but kept an eye on Clinton.
"Some people are telling you not to believe, because they say 'Those Republicans are going to be tough on Obama,' he told a crowd of more than 11,000 at the University of Cincinnati. "I don't mind having debates with John McCain. I admire, I revere John McCain's service to this country. . . . But he has embraced George Bush's economic policies and tax cuts for the rich, and he said we will stay in Iraq even if it takes 100 years. . . . I want to have that debate."
Em destaque: Hilary Clinton compara a inexperiência de Obama em lidar com política externa com a inexperiência de Bush neste assunto.
Fonte: Washington Post
Publicação: 26/02/2008
Autor: Perry Bacon Jr.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/25/AR2008022502663.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Top Obama and Hilary Flip-Flops
Top Obama Flip-Flops
1. Special interests In January, the Obama campaign described union contributions to the campaigns of Clinton and John Edwards as "special interest" money. Obama changed his tune as he began gathering his own union endorsements. He now refers respectfully to unions as the representatives of "working people" and says he is "thrilled" by their support.
2. Public financing Obama replied "yes" in September 2007 when asked if he would agree to public financing of the presidential election if his GOP opponent did the same. Obama has now attached several conditions to such an agreement, including regulating spending by outside groups. His spokesman says the candidate never committed himself on the matter.
3. The Cuba embargo In January 2004, Obama said it was time "to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro." Speaking to a Cuban American audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not "take off the embargo" as president because it is "an important inducement for change."
4. Illegal immigration In a March 2004 questionnaire, Obama was asked if the government should "crack down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants." He replied "Oppose." In a Jan. 31, 2008, televised debate, he said that "we do have to crack down on those employers that are taking advantage of the situation."
5. Decriminalization of marijuana While running for the U.S. Senate in January 2004, Obama told Illinois college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In the Oct. 30, 2007, presidential debate, he joined other Democratic candidates in opposing the decriminalization of marijuana.
Top Clinton Flip-Flops
1. NAFTA In a January 2004 news conference, Clinton said she thought that "on balance [NAFTA] has been good for New York and good for America." She now says she has "long been a critic of the shortcomings of NAFTA" and advocates a "time out" from similar trade agreements.
2. No Child Left Behind Clinton voted in favor of the 2002 education bill that focused on raising student achievement levels, hailing the measure as "a major step forward." She now attacks the law at campaign rallies and meetings with teachers, describing it as a "test, test, test" approach.
3. Ending the war in Iraq In June 2006, Clinton restated her long-standing opposition to establishing timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces in Iraq. In a Jan. 15, 2008, Democratic debate in Las Vegas, she proposed to "start withdrawing" troops within 60 days of her inauguration, to bring out "one or two brigades a month" and to have "nearly all of the troops out" by the end of 2009.
4 . Driver's licenses for illegal immigrants In a campaign statement on Oct. 31, 2007, Clinton expressed support for a plan by New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer (D) to offer limited driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, after going back and forth on the matter in a televised debate. In a Nov. 15, 2007, televised debate from Nevada, she replied with a simple "no" when asked if she approved the driver's license idea in the absence of comprehensive immigration changes.
5. Florida and Michigan delegates In September 2007, the Clinton campaign formally pledged not to participate in primary or caucus elections staged before Feb. 5, 2008, in defiance of Democratic National Committee rules. She now says delegates from Florida and Michigan should be seated at the Democratic National Convention, despite their flouting of rules that all the major Democratic candidates endorsed.
Em destaque: Pontos interessantes que demonstram a mudança de opinião dos candidatos democratas a respeito de assuntos internos e de política internacional.
Fonte: Washington Post
Publicação: 25/02/2008
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/24/AR2008022402094.html?wpisrc=newsletter
1. Special interests In January, the Obama campaign described union contributions to the campaigns of Clinton and John Edwards as "special interest" money. Obama changed his tune as he began gathering his own union endorsements. He now refers respectfully to unions as the representatives of "working people" and says he is "thrilled" by their support.
2. Public financing Obama replied "yes" in September 2007 when asked if he would agree to public financing of the presidential election if his GOP opponent did the same. Obama has now attached several conditions to such an agreement, including regulating spending by outside groups. His spokesman says the candidate never committed himself on the matter.
3. The Cuba embargo In January 2004, Obama said it was time "to end the embargo with Cuba" because it had "utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro." Speaking to a Cuban American audience in Miami in August 2007, he said he would not "take off the embargo" as president because it is "an important inducement for change."
4. Illegal immigration In a March 2004 questionnaire, Obama was asked if the government should "crack down on businesses that hire illegal immigrants." He replied "Oppose." In a Jan. 31, 2008, televised debate, he said that "we do have to crack down on those employers that are taking advantage of the situation."
5. Decriminalization of marijuana While running for the U.S. Senate in January 2004, Obama told Illinois college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In the Oct. 30, 2007, presidential debate, he joined other Democratic candidates in opposing the decriminalization of marijuana.
Top Clinton Flip-Flops
1. NAFTA In a January 2004 news conference, Clinton said she thought that "on balance [NAFTA] has been good for New York and good for America." She now says she has "long been a critic of the shortcomings of NAFTA" and advocates a "time out" from similar trade agreements.
2. No Child Left Behind Clinton voted in favor of the 2002 education bill that focused on raising student achievement levels, hailing the measure as "a major step forward." She now attacks the law at campaign rallies and meetings with teachers, describing it as a "test, test, test" approach.
3. Ending the war in Iraq In June 2006, Clinton restated her long-standing opposition to establishing timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces in Iraq. In a Jan. 15, 2008, Democratic debate in Las Vegas, she proposed to "start withdrawing" troops within 60 days of her inauguration, to bring out "one or two brigades a month" and to have "nearly all of the troops out" by the end of 2009.
4 . Driver's licenses for illegal immigrants In a campaign statement on Oct. 31, 2007, Clinton expressed support for a plan by New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer (D) to offer limited driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, after going back and forth on the matter in a televised debate. In a Nov. 15, 2007, televised debate from Nevada, she replied with a simple "no" when asked if she approved the driver's license idea in the absence of comprehensive immigration changes.
5. Florida and Michigan delegates In September 2007, the Clinton campaign formally pledged not to participate in primary or caucus elections staged before Feb. 5, 2008, in defiance of Democratic National Committee rules. She now says delegates from Florida and Michigan should be seated at the Democratic National Convention, despite their flouting of rules that all the major Democratic candidates endorsed.
Em destaque: Pontos interessantes que demonstram a mudança de opinião dos candidatos democratas a respeito de assuntos internos e de política internacional.
Fonte: Washington Post
Publicação: 25/02/2008
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/24/AR2008022402094.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Democrats Equally Adept at Shifting Positions
Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton engage the crowd at the Democratic presidential debate in Austin on Thursday. Both candidates have reversed or altered some positions under the increasing pressure to win over voters. (By Rick Bowmer -- Associated Press)
Last week's Democratic debate in Austin had been underway for less than half an hour when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign zipped an e-mail to reporters headlined "Obama flip-flop on Cuba." The message noted that Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) had backtracked on earlier calls for normalizing relations with Havana, now making such a step contingent on progress toward democracy.
The Obama camp struck back minutes later with a message pointing out that Clinton (N.Y.) had changed her position on immigration. She was now calling for legislation giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship to be introduced within 100 days of her inauguration -- after earlier refusing to make such a commitment.
Charges of flip-flopping have become routine as the Democratic nominating contest heads to a crucial series of primaries and caucuses on March 4 in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island. While Obama and Clinton have largely succeeded in escaping the flip-flopper label that was pinned on Republican candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, they have provided each other with plenty of ammunition for accusations of inconsistency and pandering to the voters.
A review of the two candidates' records shows that both senators have shifted positions on numerous issues as the competition for votes has become more intense. In some cases, the shifts have been subtle, a change of emphasis rather than an obvious reversal. But on other issues, both candidates are saying things that are quite different from their previous positions.
After earlier opposing a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, both the leading Democratic candidates have been forced to become ever more specific on the campaign trail, in response to voters who want the United States to pull back from Iraq as soon as possible. Clinton's reversal on the question of the timetable has been particularly dramatic. She now says that she would get "nearly all" U.S. troops out of the country by the end of 2009; Obama says he would get all "combat troops" out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office.
In June 2006, Clinton was booed and hissed by a conference of liberal Democratic activists for refusing to agree to a date to get out of Iraq on the grounds that it would send the wrong signal to the United States' enemies.
Such shifts are pretty standard in presidential election politics, according to Marion Just, a professor of political science at Wellesley College who has been following the campaign closely.
Candidates start off by being as ambiguous as possible about their policies in order to keep their options open, Just said. As they come face to face with voters, they are "forced to become more specific," even if it means contradicting previous statements. "In the current electronic era, it is difficult to make even a slight change because the Internet is forever," Just said. "Your previous statements pop up on YouTube."
As senators, both Obama and Clinton also have long records of thousands of votes that provide plenty of fodder for opposition research. As Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) discovered to his chagrin in the 2004 presidential campaign, and as Obama is discovering with his voting record in the Illinois Senate, it is often difficult for legislators to explain the nuances of tactical voting and finely tuned trade-offs.
Because Clinton has been in the U.S. Senate longer than Obama -- seven years, as opposed to his three-- she has many more votes to explain away. During their campaign appearances, both senators have been sharply critical of the landmark education bill known as No Child Left Behind. Clinton voted for the bill in 2001, along with a majority of other Democrats; Obama was not in the U.S. Senate at the time.
"Clinton ratcheted up her opposition to No Child Left Behind as the race became tighter and she needed votes," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy and a former Democratic staffer. "She is reacting to what she has been hearing on the campaign trail, particularly from teachers."
For Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, flip-flopping on the campaign trail is a very human trait.
"Politicians are like the rest of us," he said. "In everyday life, we say things to make ourselves look better, get people to like us, get a job. We all lie, to a greater or lesser extent. It's the same with politicians."
Em destaque: A matéria trata da constante mudança de posição dos candidatos democratas a respeito de temas diversos em sua campanha tais como o prazo para a retirada das tropas americanas do Iraque.
Fonte: Washington Post
Publicação: 25/02/2008
Autor: Michael Dobbs
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/24/AR2008022402081.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Last week's Democratic debate in Austin had been underway for less than half an hour when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign zipped an e-mail to reporters headlined "Obama flip-flop on Cuba." The message noted that Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) had backtracked on earlier calls for normalizing relations with Havana, now making such a step contingent on progress toward democracy.
The Obama camp struck back minutes later with a message pointing out that Clinton (N.Y.) had changed her position on immigration. She was now calling for legislation giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship to be introduced within 100 days of her inauguration -- after earlier refusing to make such a commitment.
Charges of flip-flopping have become routine as the Democratic nominating contest heads to a crucial series of primaries and caucuses on March 4 in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island. While Obama and Clinton have largely succeeded in escaping the flip-flopper label that was pinned on Republican candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, they have provided each other with plenty of ammunition for accusations of inconsistency and pandering to the voters.
A review of the two candidates' records shows that both senators have shifted positions on numerous issues as the competition for votes has become more intense. In some cases, the shifts have been subtle, a change of emphasis rather than an obvious reversal. But on other issues, both candidates are saying things that are quite different from their previous positions.
After earlier opposing a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, both the leading Democratic candidates have been forced to become ever more specific on the campaign trail, in response to voters who want the United States to pull back from Iraq as soon as possible. Clinton's reversal on the question of the timetable has been particularly dramatic. She now says that she would get "nearly all" U.S. troops out of the country by the end of 2009; Obama says he would get all "combat troops" out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office.
In June 2006, Clinton was booed and hissed by a conference of liberal Democratic activists for refusing to agree to a date to get out of Iraq on the grounds that it would send the wrong signal to the United States' enemies.
Such shifts are pretty standard in presidential election politics, according to Marion Just, a professor of political science at Wellesley College who has been following the campaign closely.
Candidates start off by being as ambiguous as possible about their policies in order to keep their options open, Just said. As they come face to face with voters, they are "forced to become more specific," even if it means contradicting previous statements. "In the current electronic era, it is difficult to make even a slight change because the Internet is forever," Just said. "Your previous statements pop up on YouTube."
As senators, both Obama and Clinton also have long records of thousands of votes that provide plenty of fodder for opposition research. As Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) discovered to his chagrin in the 2004 presidential campaign, and as Obama is discovering with his voting record in the Illinois Senate, it is often difficult for legislators to explain the nuances of tactical voting and finely tuned trade-offs.
Because Clinton has been in the U.S. Senate longer than Obama -- seven years, as opposed to his three-- she has many more votes to explain away. During their campaign appearances, both senators have been sharply critical of the landmark education bill known as No Child Left Behind. Clinton voted for the bill in 2001, along with a majority of other Democrats; Obama was not in the U.S. Senate at the time.
"Clinton ratcheted up her opposition to No Child Left Behind as the race became tighter and she needed votes," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy and a former Democratic staffer. "She is reacting to what she has been hearing on the campaign trail, particularly from teachers."
For Robert Feldman, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, flip-flopping on the campaign trail is a very human trait.
"Politicians are like the rest of us," he said. "In everyday life, we say things to make ourselves look better, get people to like us, get a job. We all lie, to a greater or lesser extent. It's the same with politicians."
Em destaque: A matéria trata da constante mudança de posição dos candidatos democratas a respeito de temas diversos em sua campanha tais como o prazo para a retirada das tropas americanas do Iraque.
Fonte: Washington Post
Publicação: 25/02/2008
Autor: Michael Dobbs
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/24/AR2008022402081.html?wpisrc=newsletter
sábado, 23 de fevereiro de 2008
Guantanamo prosecutor turns defense witness
Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who resigned as the prison's chief military prosecutor in October, will testify at a hearing for the driver of Osama bin Laden.
From the Associated Press
February 22, 2008
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO -- The former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay said Thursday that he would be a defense witness for the driver of Osama bin Laden.
Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October over alleged political interference in the U.S. military tribunals, told the Associated Press that he would appear at a hearing for Salim Ahmed Hamdan."I expect to be called as a witness. . . . I'm more than happy to testify," Davis said in a telephone interview from Washington. He called it "an opportunity to tell the truth."
At the April pretrial hearing inside the U.S. military base in southeast Cuba, Hamdan's defense team plans to argue that the alleged political interference cited by Davis violates the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Brian Mizer, told the Associated Press.
Davis alleges, among other things, that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II said in August 2005 that any acquittals of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo would make the United States look bad, calling into question the fairness of the proceedings.
"He said, 'We can't have acquittals; we've got to have convictions,' " Davis recalled.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, denied that Haynes made such a comment. Gordon also denied the former prosecutor's allegations of political interference, which he has repeated in newspaper opinion columns and in interviews in recent months.
If the judge rejects the motion to dismiss, Mizer said, the defense will seek to remove two top officials in the military commission system -- legal advisor Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann and Convening Authority Susan Crawford -- from Hamdan's case. This would probably result in further delays to a trial that has been stalled by legal challenges.
It is not clear whether the Pentagon -- which defends the commission system as fair -- will allow Davis to testify. In December, two months after he resigned as the chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo war-crimes tribunals, the Defense Department barred Davis from appearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
The U.S. holds about 275 men at Guantanamo and plans to prosecute about 80 before military commissions. The Pentagon this month charged six detainees with murder and war crimes for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said they could be executed if convicted.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: Um ex-procurador de Guantánamo, Morris Davis, se dispõe a ser testemunha de defesa no processo de julgamento de um motorista de Osama Bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Davis largou seu cargo em Outubro de 2007 alegando intervenções políticas nos tribunais militares americanos. Segundo ele, o general William J. Haynes , que faz parte do Conselho de Segurança do Pentágono, disse em Agosto de 2005 que qualquer absolvição de suspeitos de terrorismo presos em Guantánamo faria os Estados Unidos serem mal vistos, o que colocou em questão a justeza dos tribunais militares.
Observação: Esta matéria não está diretamente relacionada às Eleições Americanas, mas possui informações pertinentes para o blog e para a pesquisa do grupo.
Fonte: The LA Times
Publicação: 22 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/mideastemail/la-na-gitmo22feb22,0,2370010.story
From the Associated Press
February 22, 2008
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO -- The former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay said Thursday that he would be a defense witness for the driver of Osama bin Laden.
Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October over alleged political interference in the U.S. military tribunals, told the Associated Press that he would appear at a hearing for Salim Ahmed Hamdan."I expect to be called as a witness. . . . I'm more than happy to testify," Davis said in a telephone interview from Washington. He called it "an opportunity to tell the truth."
At the April pretrial hearing inside the U.S. military base in southeast Cuba, Hamdan's defense team plans to argue that the alleged political interference cited by Davis violates the Military Commissions Act, Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lt. Brian Mizer, told the Associated Press.
Davis alleges, among other things, that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II said in August 2005 that any acquittals of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo would make the United States look bad, calling into question the fairness of the proceedings.
"He said, 'We can't have acquittals; we've got to have convictions,' " Davis recalled.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, denied that Haynes made such a comment. Gordon also denied the former prosecutor's allegations of political interference, which he has repeated in newspaper opinion columns and in interviews in recent months.
If the judge rejects the motion to dismiss, Mizer said, the defense will seek to remove two top officials in the military commission system -- legal advisor Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann and Convening Authority Susan Crawford -- from Hamdan's case. This would probably result in further delays to a trial that has been stalled by legal challenges.
It is not clear whether the Pentagon -- which defends the commission system as fair -- will allow Davis to testify. In December, two months after he resigned as the chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo war-crimes tribunals, the Defense Department barred Davis from appearing before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
The U.S. holds about 275 men at Guantanamo and plans to prosecute about 80 before military commissions. The Pentagon this month charged six detainees with murder and war crimes for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said they could be executed if convicted.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: Um ex-procurador de Guantánamo, Morris Davis, se dispõe a ser testemunha de defesa no processo de julgamento de um motorista de Osama Bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Davis largou seu cargo em Outubro de 2007 alegando intervenções políticas nos tribunais militares americanos. Segundo ele, o general William J. Haynes , que faz parte do Conselho de Segurança do Pentágono, disse em Agosto de 2005 que qualquer absolvição de suspeitos de terrorismo presos em Guantánamo faria os Estados Unidos serem mal vistos, o que colocou em questão a justeza dos tribunais militares.
Observação: Esta matéria não está diretamente relacionada às Eleições Americanas, mas possui informações pertinentes para o blog e para a pesquisa do grupo.
Fonte: The LA Times
Publicação: 22 de fevereiro 2008
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/mideastemail/la-na-gitmo22feb22,0,2370010.story
terça-feira, 19 de fevereiro de 2008
Shame, Sen. McCain
His vote against a ban on 'enhanced' interrogation methods belies his opposition to torture.
February 19, 2008
One of John McCain's most admirable traits has been his eloquent opposition to the use of torture against suspected terrorists. During a Republican presidential debate last year in which other candidates tried to out-tough each other by endorsing "enhanced" interrogation methods, McCain recalled: "When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that sustained us as we went -- underwent torture ourselves -- is the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them. It's not about the terrorists; it's about us."
Yes it is, which is why Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) should have voted last week for legislation sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would remove any doubt that CIA interrogators are forbidden to engage in waterboarding and other tactics banned by the Army Field Manual. Instead, McCain squandered some of his moral authority by supporting the Bush administration's position that the CIA should have more leeway than military interrogators. The legislation passed the Senate anyway, as well as the House, but support from McCain, the putative Republican nominee, would have made it harder for President Bush to veto.
McCain was adamant that he wasn't reneging on his belief that waterboarding is illegal under a law he sponsored in 2005 prohibiting "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners in U.S. custody. With waterboarding off the table, in McCain's view, there's nothing wrong with allowing CIA interrogators to use other methods not available to the military. Although McCain wasn't specific about what those might be, the Army Field Manual bans subjecting prisoners to sleep deprivation, painful "stress positions" or extreme temperatures, or using dogs to intimidate them.
To be fair, McCain's original anti-torture amendment also gave the CIA greater leeway -- and that was the problem. As long as there is a double standard for interrogations, there will be suspicions that the CIA is engaging in practices that most reasonable people would consider torture -- including waterboarding, which was inflicted on three suspected terrorists in 2002 and 2003. Such suspicion is deepened by signs that Bush doesn't agree with McCain that waterboarding is now illegal. Earlier this month, Bush spokesman Tony Fratto said that it was legal and could be employed again "under certain circumstances."
Bush long ago proved that, in dealing with the reality and the threat of terrorism, his administration will take a mile for every inch that Congress gives. In voting to give Bush that inch, McCain has been untrue to his principles.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: Editorial do jornal LA Times critica a decisão do candidato republicano John McCain de dar apoio a posição da administração Bush quanto ao uso de métodos 'mais persuasivos' pela CIA - como o waterboarding - para interrogar suspeitos. Seu voto no Senado, contrário a medida que proibiria a CIA dessas ações, segundo o editorial, estaria desmentindo sua posição contrária ao uso da tortura.
Publicação: 19 de fevereiro 2008
Fonte: La Times
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-mcain19feb19,0,4421936.story
February 19, 2008
One of John McCain's most admirable traits has been his eloquent opposition to the use of torture against suspected terrorists. During a Republican presidential debate last year in which other candidates tried to out-tough each other by endorsing "enhanced" interrogation methods, McCain recalled: "When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that sustained us as we went -- underwent torture ourselves -- is the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them. It's not about the terrorists; it's about us."
Yes it is, which is why Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) should have voted last week for legislation sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would remove any doubt that CIA interrogators are forbidden to engage in waterboarding and other tactics banned by the Army Field Manual. Instead, McCain squandered some of his moral authority by supporting the Bush administration's position that the CIA should have more leeway than military interrogators. The legislation passed the Senate anyway, as well as the House, but support from McCain, the putative Republican nominee, would have made it harder for President Bush to veto.
McCain was adamant that he wasn't reneging on his belief that waterboarding is illegal under a law he sponsored in 2005 prohibiting "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners in U.S. custody. With waterboarding off the table, in McCain's view, there's nothing wrong with allowing CIA interrogators to use other methods not available to the military. Although McCain wasn't specific about what those might be, the Army Field Manual bans subjecting prisoners to sleep deprivation, painful "stress positions" or extreme temperatures, or using dogs to intimidate them.
To be fair, McCain's original anti-torture amendment also gave the CIA greater leeway -- and that was the problem. As long as there is a double standard for interrogations, there will be suspicions that the CIA is engaging in practices that most reasonable people would consider torture -- including waterboarding, which was inflicted on three suspected terrorists in 2002 and 2003. Such suspicion is deepened by signs that Bush doesn't agree with McCain that waterboarding is now illegal. Earlier this month, Bush spokesman Tony Fratto said that it was legal and could be employed again "under certain circumstances."
Bush long ago proved that, in dealing with the reality and the threat of terrorism, his administration will take a mile for every inch that Congress gives. In voting to give Bush that inch, McCain has been untrue to his principles.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: Editorial do jornal LA Times critica a decisão do candidato republicano John McCain de dar apoio a posição da administração Bush quanto ao uso de métodos 'mais persuasivos' pela CIA - como o waterboarding - para interrogar suspeitos. Seu voto no Senado, contrário a medida que proibiria a CIA dessas ações, segundo o editorial, estaria desmentindo sua posição contrária ao uso da tortura.
Publicação: 19 de fevereiro 2008
Fonte: La Times
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-mcain19feb19,0,4421936.story
segunda-feira, 18 de fevereiro de 2008
Sobre Tortura
Primeiro, uma coluna de Rosa Brooks, do LA Times sobre recentes esforços do atual presidente americano, George Bush, para a legalização do waterboarding - considerado pelos atuais candidatos a presidência uma forma de tortura assim como pelas Nações Unidas. A coluna foi publicada dia 14 de fevereiro deste ano, e aqui vai o link direto:
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-brooks14feb14,1,1585725.column?ctrack=5&cset=true
Bush's last push for torture
In its lame-duck year, the administration has been conducting a PR campaign for waterboarding.
February 14, 2008
They're baack! The Bushies, that is. I was so preoccupied with the presidential primaries that I almost forgot about that guy who keeps hanging around in the White House, despite the nation's fervent desire that he disappear. And I'm sure I wasn't alone in my memory lapse. With the news so full of Obama, Clinton, McCain and Huckabee, Bush and Cheney had started to seem like dead men walking.
But I was making the classic horror movie mistake. You know ... you let down your guard for an instant, and that's when you realize that the dead men walking are actually vampires -- and they're stalking you.
That's what happened this week. While we were all fixated on who will be the next president, loyalists to the outgoing president took advantage of our collective distraction to try to leave a last gruesome legacy for the American people: torture.
Remember waterboarding? In most versions of waterboarding, detainees are blindfolded and then strapped to a board. After that, they have water poured into their mouth and nose, sometimes through a cloth or cellophane (to enhance the sensation of simultaneous smothering and drowning). It was a favorite interrogation method of the Spanish Inquisition. U.S. courts have recognized it as torture, and in past wars, the U.S. government prosecuted it as a war crime.
Not anymore! While the rest of us were obsessing over the 600 possible methods of counting delegates, the Bush administration was busily conducting a PR campaign on behalf of waterboarding. It began last week. First, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey told Congress that no one could be investigated or prosecuted for "whatever was done" as part of a covert CIA interrogation program because the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had given its blessing to a bunch of secret "whatevers." Then CIA Director Michael V. Hayden openly acknowledged, for the first time, that "whatever" had, in fact, included waterboarding, which was used on at least three Al Qaeda suspects.
Did Hayden blush to confess that U.S. intelligence agencies were incapable of getting critical intelligence through means other than torture? Nope. Along with National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell, Hayden suggested that waterboarding might well be handy again in the future.
The White House was equally blase about waterboarding. White House spokesman Tony Fratto defended its legality and asserted that whether we waterboard more detainees in the future "will depend on circumstances." What's more, Fratto emphasized, it's the president who will make the call, not Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney called the interrogation of the three suspects who were waterboarded "a good thing," and cheering from the sidelines, Antonin Scalia, the administration's favorite Supreme Court justice, mused in a radio interview that it would be "absurd" to assume any clear constitutional restrictions on "so-called torture" when potential terrorist threats are at issue.
The administration's PR push on waterboarding doesn't enjoy much support, either internationally or here at home. Our closest allies, the British, reaffirmed Tuesday that they consider waterboarding a form of torture prohibited by international law. That's an opinion shared by the U.N. human rights commissioner.
Here in the U.S., Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidates, have condemned waterboarding as torture. They've been joined by the leading GOP presidential candidates, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Speaking in October 2007, McCain said that waterboarding "is not a complicated procedure. It is torture." In December 2007, Huckabee added his voice to McCain's: "Waterboarding is torture, and torture violates the moral code of Americans and jeopardizes the country's security."
Just for good measure, on Wednesday the Senate joined the House in passing legislation that prohibits the CIA from using waterboarding or any similar "harsh" interrogation techniques.
But President Bush says he'll veto the bill. And here's what I don't get. Bush has less than a year left in office. His approval ratings are already abysmally low. Why is he determined to compound his problems by going down in history as the first president to openly order and justify torture? Is this really the legacy he wants to leave behind?
The task for the next president, Democrat or Republican, is clear. Very soon after taking office, our next president needs to lay this monster to rest by unambiguously repudiating waterboarding and all forms of torture.
That's the easy part of the next president's task, though. The hard part? Prying the thumbscrews out of the Bush administration's cold, dead hands.
rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com
*** *** ***
E Segundo, dois vídeo do programa 'The Daily Show', com o apresentador Jon Stewart, focando a prática de tortura pelos EUA, como o waterboarding. Os programas foram veiculados dia 11 de fevereiro de 2008, o link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=156409&title=torture-talk
e os vídeos:
continuação:
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-brooks14feb14,1,1585725.column?ctrack=5&cset=true
Bush's last push for torture
In its lame-duck year, the administration has been conducting a PR campaign for waterboarding.
February 14, 2008
They're baack! The Bushies, that is. I was so preoccupied with the presidential primaries that I almost forgot about that guy who keeps hanging around in the White House, despite the nation's fervent desire that he disappear. And I'm sure I wasn't alone in my memory lapse. With the news so full of Obama, Clinton, McCain and Huckabee, Bush and Cheney had started to seem like dead men walking.
But I was making the classic horror movie mistake. You know ... you let down your guard for an instant, and that's when you realize that the dead men walking are actually vampires -- and they're stalking you.
That's what happened this week. While we were all fixated on who will be the next president, loyalists to the outgoing president took advantage of our collective distraction to try to leave a last gruesome legacy for the American people: torture.
Remember waterboarding? In most versions of waterboarding, detainees are blindfolded and then strapped to a board. After that, they have water poured into their mouth and nose, sometimes through a cloth or cellophane (to enhance the sensation of simultaneous smothering and drowning). It was a favorite interrogation method of the Spanish Inquisition. U.S. courts have recognized it as torture, and in past wars, the U.S. government prosecuted it as a war crime.
Not anymore! While the rest of us were obsessing over the 600 possible methods of counting delegates, the Bush administration was busily conducting a PR campaign on behalf of waterboarding. It began last week. First, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey told Congress that no one could be investigated or prosecuted for "whatever was done" as part of a covert CIA interrogation program because the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had given its blessing to a bunch of secret "whatevers." Then CIA Director Michael V. Hayden openly acknowledged, for the first time, that "whatever" had, in fact, included waterboarding, which was used on at least three Al Qaeda suspects.
Did Hayden blush to confess that U.S. intelligence agencies were incapable of getting critical intelligence through means other than torture? Nope. Along with National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell, Hayden suggested that waterboarding might well be handy again in the future.
The White House was equally blase about waterboarding. White House spokesman Tony Fratto defended its legality and asserted that whether we waterboard more detainees in the future "will depend on circumstances." What's more, Fratto emphasized, it's the president who will make the call, not Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney called the interrogation of the three suspects who were waterboarded "a good thing," and cheering from the sidelines, Antonin Scalia, the administration's favorite Supreme Court justice, mused in a radio interview that it would be "absurd" to assume any clear constitutional restrictions on "so-called torture" when potential terrorist threats are at issue.
The administration's PR push on waterboarding doesn't enjoy much support, either internationally or here at home. Our closest allies, the British, reaffirmed Tuesday that they consider waterboarding a form of torture prohibited by international law. That's an opinion shared by the U.N. human rights commissioner.
Here in the U.S., Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidates, have condemned waterboarding as torture. They've been joined by the leading GOP presidential candidates, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Speaking in October 2007, McCain said that waterboarding "is not a complicated procedure. It is torture." In December 2007, Huckabee added his voice to McCain's: "Waterboarding is torture, and torture violates the moral code of Americans and jeopardizes the country's security."
Just for good measure, on Wednesday the Senate joined the House in passing legislation that prohibits the CIA from using waterboarding or any similar "harsh" interrogation techniques.
But President Bush says he'll veto the bill. And here's what I don't get. Bush has less than a year left in office. His approval ratings are already abysmally low. Why is he determined to compound his problems by going down in history as the first president to openly order and justify torture? Is this really the legacy he wants to leave behind?
The task for the next president, Democrat or Republican, is clear. Very soon after taking office, our next president needs to lay this monster to rest by unambiguously repudiating waterboarding and all forms of torture.
That's the easy part of the next president's task, though. The hard part? Prying the thumbscrews out of the Bush administration's cold, dead hands.
rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com
*** *** ***
E Segundo, dois vídeo do programa 'The Daily Show', com o apresentador Jon Stewart, focando a prática de tortura pelos EUA, como o waterboarding. Os programas foram veiculados dia 11 de fevereiro de 2008, o link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=156409&title=torture-talk
e os vídeos:
continuação:
segunda-feira, 11 de fevereiro de 2008
The Spat
by Hendrik Hertzberg
February 11, 2008
During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th—“Tsunami Tuesday,” when voters in states with half the nation’s population participate in a not quite national primary—the emotional texture of the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign changed profoundly. For most of Year One of this insanely elongated process, the Democratic Party had been a peaceable kingdom. Its voters were proud of and pleased with the array of choices before them: proud of its diversity, pleased with its unity. A confident woman in middle age; a graceful young African-American of mixed parentage; a handsome Southerner from a white working-class family; and a Mexico City-raised, three-quarters Hispanic governor-diplomat with (for a touch of mayonnaise) a blandly “American” name—these were the Democrats’ leading contenders, supplemented by a more conventional pair of distinguished senators from the East Coast. After years of talk about “looking like America,” here was the real thing. On questions of policy, the views of the candidates were as reassuringly similar as their backgrounds were exhilaratingly different. Such disagreements as they had, none of them fundamental or bitter, were subsumed in their revulsion at the moral and strategic failures of the Bush Administration. As for Democratic voters, it was hard to find one who wouldn’t tell you something like this: “I’m supporting so-and-so in the primary, but I’ll be fine with any of them—just so we get a Democrat in the White House.”
But as Iowa gave way to New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and the contest careered toward its ultimate form of a zero-sum game between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the mood darkened. Anger and depression, the pop-psych books tell us, are two sides of the same coin: depression is anger suppressed, anger is depression liberated. Is it possible to strobe between the two? It must be, because, as the Clinton-Obama race turned nasty, a rapid alternation was noticeable among the sort of obsessive Democrats who follow every twist and turn. This was true of people all across the deep-blue universe: passionate Obama supporters; tentative Obama supporters; Obama-Clinton fence-sitters (including the fans of John Edwards, now bereft); and tentative Clinton supporters. (Passionate Clinton supporters, notwithstanding their candidate’s shrinking but still sizable lead in national polls, seem to be a little rarer.)
The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as “negative attacks.” The most egregious, because so coldly premeditated, was a radio spot that took as its hook a snippet of audio from an Obama interview in which he said, “The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years.” A smooth-voiced announcer then adds:
Really? Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street? Running up a nine-trillion-dollar debt? Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?
Uh, no. Those are not the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about. But the spot’s disingenuous questions were plainly intended to deceive the unwary into assuming that Wall Street tax breaks and the like are the very ideas Obama has been advocating. With equal honesty, the spot could have said, “Denying global warming? Torturing prisoners? Appointing right-wing ideologues to the federal courts? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?” But that might have taxed the credulity of even the unwary.
Actually, Obama was not talking about any particular ideas. He was talking about the conservative movement’s success in marketing its policy ideas and presenting itself as an intellectual powerhouse. He can be faulted for getting the timeline wrong in a way that dismissed the Clinton years—the Republicans’ “party of ideas” claim is at least thirty years old—but his basic point has long been a commonplace among Democrats. It is why liberals have spent the past decade and more trying to build a counterweight to the conservative infrastructure of think tanks and policy journals.
Obama has turned out to have a kind of political magic unseen since the Kennedy brothers of the nineteen-sixties. He has something of Jack’s futuristic, ironic cool, something of Bobby’s earnest, inspiring heat. His endorsement, last week, by President Kennedy’s surviving brother and surviving child closed the circuit. Senator Clinton’s answer to this is “I have more experience.” And it’s true. Her mastery of policy is deep and subtle; her sense of how the White House wields power is probably unequalled. But experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning.
Anyway, an argument is no match for an aura. So the Clinton campaign evidently concluded that it had no choice but to “go negative,” and Bill Clinton was assigned, or assigned himself, the task. Some of his attempts to sully his wife’s opponent—calling Obama’s consistent opposition to the Iraq war “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen” and dismissing his South Carolina victory as a racial one, like Jesse Jackson’s twenty years ago—have been untruthful or unworthy or both. Whether or not these and similar attacks “worked” (the evidence is mixed), they certainly succeeded in diminishing both the former President and his wife. “The Clintons” used to be a Republican trope, calculated to make one or the other half of the couple look like a puppet or a victim or a co-conspirator; now it is simply descriptive. Bill Clinton’s talents are immense, and so are those of Hillary Clinton. But the events of the past few weeks have suggested that the peculiar dynamics of the Clinton marriage, which distorted the workings of the first Clinton White House in areas ranging from its failed health-care initiative to its inability to quash the Whitewater hoax, would be carried over into a second.
For some Democrats, a final straw has been the Clinton campaign’s sudden interest in changing the rules. In Nevada, where the state’s Democratic Party had provided special caucus sites for casino workers, Clinton allies tried to get them shut down after a union representing many of those workers endorsed Obama. The Democratic National Committee warned the Party’s affiliates in Michigan and Florida that if they moved their primaries ahead of Tsunami Tuesday they would lose their Convention delegates. They did so anyway, and now Clinton—whose name was the only one on the Michigan ballot and who carried Florida, where no one campaigned—is demanding that the two states’ delegates be accredited. Those delegates, added to the bulk of the unelected “superdelegates,” could conceivably put Clinton over the top if Obama arrives at the Convention with a slight edge in delegates chosen by voters—a scenario that would bear an ugly resemblance to Florida, the popular vote, and the Supreme Court, circa 2000.
Last Thursday night’s televised debate between the two remaining Democrats—a civilized and substantive conversation—has eased the tension. But politics ain’t beanbag. One of the arguments made on behalf of the Clintons is that they know how to win. They do what is necessary. They fight hard. They’ve shown they can survive the worst the Republican attack machine can throw at them, next to which the relatively mild roughing-up they’re giving Obama is downright Gandhian. But there are hard-nosed arguments for Obama, too. Nothing would energize the dispirited, disoriented Republicans like running against Hillary Clinton. And a late-entry challenge from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his billions would be far less likely if Obama became the Democratic nominee.
Obama’s Democratic critics worry that his soaring rhetoric of reconciliation is naïve. But, as Mark Schmitt has argued in The American Prospect, Obama’s national-unity pitch should be viewed as a tactic as well as an ideal. It might lengthen his coattails, helping Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate in marginally red districts and states. It would not protect him from attack, of course, but it would enable him to fire back from the high ground. And, as a new President elected with a not quite filibuster-proof Senate, he would be in a better position to peel off the handful of Republican senators he would need to make meaningful legislative progress than someone who started from a defensive crouch. Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: A disputa dentro do partido democrata para a definição de seu candidato à presidência
Fonte: The New Yorker
Publicação: 11 de fevereiro 2008
Autor: Hendrik Hertzberg
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/02/11/080211taco_talk_hertzberg
February 11, 2008
During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th—“Tsunami Tuesday,” when voters in states with half the nation’s population participate in a not quite national primary—the emotional texture of the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign changed profoundly. For most of Year One of this insanely elongated process, the Democratic Party had been a peaceable kingdom. Its voters were proud of and pleased with the array of choices before them: proud of its diversity, pleased with its unity. A confident woman in middle age; a graceful young African-American of mixed parentage; a handsome Southerner from a white working-class family; and a Mexico City-raised, three-quarters Hispanic governor-diplomat with (for a touch of mayonnaise) a blandly “American” name—these were the Democrats’ leading contenders, supplemented by a more conventional pair of distinguished senators from the East Coast. After years of talk about “looking like America,” here was the real thing. On questions of policy, the views of the candidates were as reassuringly similar as their backgrounds were exhilaratingly different. Such disagreements as they had, none of them fundamental or bitter, were subsumed in their revulsion at the moral and strategic failures of the Bush Administration. As for Democratic voters, it was hard to find one who wouldn’t tell you something like this: “I’m supporting so-and-so in the primary, but I’ll be fine with any of them—just so we get a Democrat in the White House.”
But as Iowa gave way to New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and the contest careered toward its ultimate form of a zero-sum game between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the mood darkened. Anger and depression, the pop-psych books tell us, are two sides of the same coin: depression is anger suppressed, anger is depression liberated. Is it possible to strobe between the two? It must be, because, as the Clinton-Obama race turned nasty, a rapid alternation was noticeable among the sort of obsessive Democrats who follow every twist and turn. This was true of people all across the deep-blue universe: passionate Obama supporters; tentative Obama supporters; Obama-Clinton fence-sitters (including the fans of John Edwards, now bereft); and tentative Clinton supporters. (Passionate Clinton supporters, notwithstanding their candidate’s shrinking but still sizable lead in national polls, seem to be a little rarer.)
The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as “negative attacks.” The most egregious, because so coldly premeditated, was a radio spot that took as its hook a snippet of audio from an Obama interview in which he said, “The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years.” A smooth-voiced announcer then adds:
Really? Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street? Running up a nine-trillion-dollar debt? Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?
Uh, no. Those are not the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about. But the spot’s disingenuous questions were plainly intended to deceive the unwary into assuming that Wall Street tax breaks and the like are the very ideas Obama has been advocating. With equal honesty, the spot could have said, “Denying global warming? Torturing prisoners? Appointing right-wing ideologues to the federal courts? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?” But that might have taxed the credulity of even the unwary.
Actually, Obama was not talking about any particular ideas. He was talking about the conservative movement’s success in marketing its policy ideas and presenting itself as an intellectual powerhouse. He can be faulted for getting the timeline wrong in a way that dismissed the Clinton years—the Republicans’ “party of ideas” claim is at least thirty years old—but his basic point has long been a commonplace among Democrats. It is why liberals have spent the past decade and more trying to build a counterweight to the conservative infrastructure of think tanks and policy journals.
Obama has turned out to have a kind of political magic unseen since the Kennedy brothers of the nineteen-sixties. He has something of Jack’s futuristic, ironic cool, something of Bobby’s earnest, inspiring heat. His endorsement, last week, by President Kennedy’s surviving brother and surviving child closed the circuit. Senator Clinton’s answer to this is “I have more experience.” And it’s true. Her mastery of policy is deep and subtle; her sense of how the White House wields power is probably unequalled. But experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning.
Anyway, an argument is no match for an aura. So the Clinton campaign evidently concluded that it had no choice but to “go negative,” and Bill Clinton was assigned, or assigned himself, the task. Some of his attempts to sully his wife’s opponent—calling Obama’s consistent opposition to the Iraq war “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen” and dismissing his South Carolina victory as a racial one, like Jesse Jackson’s twenty years ago—have been untruthful or unworthy or both. Whether or not these and similar attacks “worked” (the evidence is mixed), they certainly succeeded in diminishing both the former President and his wife. “The Clintons” used to be a Republican trope, calculated to make one or the other half of the couple look like a puppet or a victim or a co-conspirator; now it is simply descriptive. Bill Clinton’s talents are immense, and so are those of Hillary Clinton. But the events of the past few weeks have suggested that the peculiar dynamics of the Clinton marriage, which distorted the workings of the first Clinton White House in areas ranging from its failed health-care initiative to its inability to quash the Whitewater hoax, would be carried over into a second.
For some Democrats, a final straw has been the Clinton campaign’s sudden interest in changing the rules. In Nevada, where the state’s Democratic Party had provided special caucus sites for casino workers, Clinton allies tried to get them shut down after a union representing many of those workers endorsed Obama. The Democratic National Committee warned the Party’s affiliates in Michigan and Florida that if they moved their primaries ahead of Tsunami Tuesday they would lose their Convention delegates. They did so anyway, and now Clinton—whose name was the only one on the Michigan ballot and who carried Florida, where no one campaigned—is demanding that the two states’ delegates be accredited. Those delegates, added to the bulk of the unelected “superdelegates,” could conceivably put Clinton over the top if Obama arrives at the Convention with a slight edge in delegates chosen by voters—a scenario that would bear an ugly resemblance to Florida, the popular vote, and the Supreme Court, circa 2000.
Last Thursday night’s televised debate between the two remaining Democrats—a civilized and substantive conversation—has eased the tension. But politics ain’t beanbag. One of the arguments made on behalf of the Clintons is that they know how to win. They do what is necessary. They fight hard. They’ve shown they can survive the worst the Republican attack machine can throw at them, next to which the relatively mild roughing-up they’re giving Obama is downright Gandhian. But there are hard-nosed arguments for Obama, too. Nothing would energize the dispirited, disoriented Republicans like running against Hillary Clinton. And a late-entry challenge from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his billions would be far less likely if Obama became the Democratic nominee.
Obama’s Democratic critics worry that his soaring rhetoric of reconciliation is naïve. But, as Mark Schmitt has argued in The American Prospect, Obama’s national-unity pitch should be viewed as a tactic as well as an ideal. It might lengthen his coattails, helping Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate in marginally red districts and states. It would not protect him from attack, of course, but it would enable him to fire back from the high ground. And, as a new President elected with a not quite filibuster-proof Senate, he would be in a better position to peel off the handful of Republican senators he would need to make meaningful legislative progress than someone who started from a defensive crouch. Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.
*** *** ***
Em destaque: A disputa dentro do partido democrata para a definição de seu candidato à presidência
Fonte: The New Yorker
Publicação: 11 de fevereiro 2008
Autor: Hendrik Hertzberg
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/02/11/080211taco_talk_hertzberg
The Mission
Mitt Romney’s strategies for success.
by Ryan Lizza
On a recent Thursday in Derry, New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate, was engaged in a conversation about milkshakes. It was early afternoon at a nineteen-fifties-themed diner called MaryAnn’s, and Romney, surrounded by cameramen and reporters, went from table to table introducing himself to voters. Before running for office in Massachusetts—unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1994 and, successfully, for governor in 2002—Romney made a fortune as a management consultant and leveraged-buyout specialist, and, in twenty-five years in the business world, he learned to love information-gathering. “There are answers in numbers—gold in numbers,” he wrote in “Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games,” his 2004 memoir. “Pile the budgets on my desk and let me wallow.” His campaign manager, Beth Myers, told me recently that Romney regularly checks Mittromney.com, and sends off e-mails to aides, asking them to add more detailed information to the site.
At MaryAnn’s, Romney, his suit jacket removed and his sleeves rolled up, made his way swiftly through the restaurant, methodically quizzing the patrons. He sat down with two gray-haired women in a booth and pointed to a creamy drink on the table. “Is this a malt or is this a milkshake?” he asked.
“It’s a frappe,” one of the women replied.
“We call that a milkshake in the Midwest,” Romney, who has lived in Massachusetts for the past thirty-six years, said. “It’s a frappe here, right? This is ice cream and, and—”
“And milk,” the woman replied.
“And milk, yeah. How are you doing? I’m Mitt Romney.”
Romney is smart. He was chosen as the speaker for his graduating class at Brigham Young University. He pursued joint graduate degrees at Harvard, in law and business, graduating cum laude in law and in the top five per cent of his class at the business school. “I like smart people,” he wrote in “Turnaround.” “A lot.” But, like many smart overachievers, especially in politics, he sometimes tries a little too hard. The conversation turned from frappes to health care, and he asked, “Is it O.K. here in New Hampshire?”
“I live in Vermont,” one of the women responded.
“I live in Massachusetts,” the other said.
Undaunted, Romney cheerily pressed for their views on how to improve the health-care system. One of the women made a pitch for more government spending on care for the elderly. The poor, she argued, benefit from government programs, and the rich can afford their own care. “I think the middle people need some help.” Romney perked up and patiently explained the details of a 2004 law that provided more state assistance for home care. His new friends were smitten. “That’s a nice idea,” one of them said. Romney did not mention that the new rules applied only to the poor.
Romney walked into a room decorated with posters of fifties icons. He stood before Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and chatted with a table of patrons finishing plates of home fries and eggs. Suddenly, a heavyset man wearing a bright-orange cap entered the room. “Mr. Romney,” he called out. “Eric Orff—I’m a hunter.” It was a potentially awkward moment. Earlier this year, Romney claimed that he’d “been a hunter pretty much all my life.” A few days later, he said in a statement, “I’ve hunted small game numerous times.” Four days after that, Romney told W. Gardner Selby, of the Austin American-Statesman, “Any description of my being a hunter is an overstatement of capability.”
Still, he couldn’t resist. “You’re a hunter?” he said to Orff. “Well, same here. Good to see ya.” Orff had a question about the environment: “It’s eighty degrees today. What are we going to do about global warming?” Romney’s response was quick and concise. “We’re going to get ourselves off of foreign oil,” he said. “And to do that it’s going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we’re going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gases.” It was a good answer, but also a strange one. Not long ago, Romney released a glossy pamphlet detailing his positions on major issues. He sounded like Al Gore when talking to the environmentalist in New Hampshire, though his policy book’s treatment of global warming reads more like something from ExxonMobil. In it, Romney refers to the “debate” over “how much human activity impacts the environment”—code words for the global-warming-denial crowd. He offers no plan to “dramatically” curtail emissions of CO2, just an aside that “we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse-gas emissions.” As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney, in December, 2005, pulled out of a Northeast-state agreement on carbon reduction—a plan that he had supported the month before.
This is a habit of Romney’s. Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He brings a salesman’s bravado and certainty to issues. At a debate in May, when asked how he would respond to a hypothetical situation involving the interrogation of a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, he said, “Some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is that we ought to double Guantánamo.” Elected as a pro-choice governor in 2002—YouTube is flooded with his passionate advocacy of abortion rights—he now presents himself as the most resolute anti-abortion candidate in the Republican field. A Mormon, he sometimes adopts the religious language of Evangelicals when he is addressing conservative Christian groups. To economic conservatives, he pitches himself as the candidate most strongly committed to slashing spending and taxes. (He’s the only major G.O.P. candidate to have signed a formal anti-tax pledge, the sort of move that his spokesman dismissed as “government by gimmickry” in Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.) To national-security conservatives, he is the most hawkish. (He says often that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran, should be indicted under the Genocide Convention, and his campaign has named the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, the vice-chairman of Blackwater, as an adviser.) But, while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics.
Romney’s transition from the boardroom to the campaign trail has been clumsy in other respects, too. According to “Turnaround,” at Bain Capital, the investment firm that Romney headed, the partners suspected that their boss fostered a cutthroat competitive environment in order to motivate them. When he greets voters, this competitiveness often surfaces as posturing; chitchat turns into one-upmanship. After a voter at the New Hampshire diner told Romney, “My daughter goes to Michigan State,” he replied, “Oh, does she, really? My brother’s on the board of Michigan State.” When another patron said that she was from Illinois, Romney told her, “I won the straw poll at the Illinois Republican convention!” Romney’s most seemingly innocuous comments can be head-scratchers. Later that afternoon, standing next to a local supporter who had escorted him to several Derry businesses, Romney told reporters, “Now I understand why I’m going to be gaining a couple of pounds with him, because we’ve eaten everywhere we’ve gone, almost.” Romney, a fitness buff who is shown jogging in a recent campaign ad, had about half a frappe at the diner (he threw the rest away) and a cookie at a bakery—nothing at an Italian restaurant, a feed store, a scrapbook shop, or a hardware store. Whatever gene causes hyper-competitive perfectionists always to go one step beyond their adversaries, or anyone else, Romney has it. Republican candidates inevitably criticize, with some accuracy, Democratic proposals on health care or taxes as being closer to the way things are done in Europe. Earlier in the day, before a crowd of New Hampshire college students, Romney said that the policies of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards were similar to those of a Communist dictatorship. Their ideas, he said pointedly, “didn’t work for the Soviet Union.”
Most explorers searching for the philosophical roots of Mitt Romney begin the journey with his religion. Mormonism is a major factor in the campaign, even if it is rarely mentioned by Romney’s opponents. “I think the Mormon issue is a real problem in the South, and it’s a real problem in other parts of the country, but people are not going to say it,” Dan Bartlett, President Bush’s former counsellor, said in a recent speech. “People are not going to step out and say, ‘I have a problem with Romney because he’s Mormon.’ What they’re going to say is he is a flip-flopper.” Given the importance to the Republican Party of Evangelical Christians—especially Southern Baptists, who have traditionally been hostile to Mormonism—the Romney campaign is understandably concerned about the attention that reporters pay to his religion. Romney’s senior aides were unsettled by a recent Newsweek cover story that dwelled on Romney’s relationship to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as the Mormon Church is officially known. “I thought it was unfortunate that every aspect of the Governor’s life was presented through the prism of religion,” Kevin Madden, Romney’s press secretary, told me. Romney himself, irked by Newsweek’s argument that he was distancing himself from Mormonism, wrote to the magazine, saying, “I am an American running for president, not a Mormon running for president, but I am also very proud of my faith.” He added, “It is puzzling that when Newsweek looks at me what you mostly see is a Mormon.” Romney sometimes faces hostile questions about his religion. At a recent “Ask Mitt Anything” event in Orange, California, a young man asked, “If you were elected President, how many First Ladies could we expect?” The audience gasped, but Romney remained unflustered and advised the questioner to consult the L.D.S. Web site.
In private, a Romney aide frankly conceded that, aside from accusations of “flip-flopping,” his greatest political liability is his religion, which is unfamiliar to most Americans. Jan Shipps, a leading non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, said that it was useful to consider the difference between Romney and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who holds the highest government post of any Mormon in American history. “Reid is a Church member,” Shipps said. “But he is a convert. I’m sure he’s devoted, I’m sure he’s a tithe-paying member and all of that”—devout Mormons contribute ten per cent of their earnings to the Church—“but he was not born into the Church. He didn’t get Mormonism with his mother’s milk, as it were. But Romney is a sixth-generation Mormon”—what scholars call a DNA Mormon. “His ancestors were some of the very first converts.”
Romney’s ancestors had important roles at every turning point in the Mormons’ dramatic nineteenth-century history. Mormonism was founded in western New York, in 1830, by Joseph Smith, after he claimed to have been visited by an angel who directed him to gold plates with inscriptions, which he “translated” into the Book of Mormon. In the eighteen-forties, Romney’s forefathers were present in Nauvoo, Illinois, a settlement established by Smith. After Smith’s murder, in 1844, which forced many persecuted Mormons to move westward, it was Mitt Romney’s great-great-grandfather who first explored the mountain pass leading down to the Salt Lake Valley, according to “Turnaround.” When, in the eighteen-nineties, the federal government cracked down on polygamy, again scattering Mormon families, Romney’s great-grandfather, who had five wives, was among those who fled to Mexico, where Romney’s father, George, was born, in 1907.
By the time Romney was a teen-ager—he was born in 1947—the Church had shifted toward growth by conversion, a change that reinforced the uniqueness of the ancestral Mormons. In addition, George Romney, who grew up in Mormon strongholds in Idaho and Utah, brought up his family in Michigan, where he was the chairman and president of the American Motors Corporation, a small, aggressive competitor of the Big Three, and, later, a three-term governor of the state. Mitt Romney grew up in Bloomfield Hills, a Detroit suburb, where he was the only Mormon in his school. Dane McBride, now a Virginia physician, met Romney in 1966, while both were serving in France as missionaries. Afterward, Romney and McBride attended Brigham Young University together. Like Romney, McBride attended schools where he was one of very few Mormons. “Mitt and I, because of that, were much more experienced in explaining and defending our religion,” McBride told me. “We also grew up feeling that there was a little bit of a difference between us and our friends.”
Many commentators have suggested that Romney will need to make a speech akin to the one that John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he promised to resign if there was ever a collision between his beliefs as a Catholic and the national interest. Jan Shipps is skeptical of the idea that Romney could do something similar. “Mormonism was a cult, just as Christianity was a cult in the beginning,” she told me. “But a cult, when it grows up, becomes a culture, and the people who are a part of it take on an ethnic identity, a peoplehood. Romney is not Mormon the way, say, Ted Kennedy is Catholic. Romney is Mormon the way Ted Kennedy is Irish. That’s the difference. And, when it’s that much a part of who you are, it’s very hard to explain it to other people, because you can’t figure out why they can’t see it. He can’t do a J.F.K., because when J.F.K. did his thing on the Catholics there were people who knew that they were afraid of Catholicism, but at least they knew what it was.”
Romney’s cultural Mormonism is in some ways more important to understanding him than his theological Mormonism. As governor, after all, Romney had a history of supporting positions that were at odds with the practices of the Church. He has opposed cigarette taxes and loosened restrictions on alcohol sales, even though the L.D.S. strongly discourages its members from smoking and drinking. He has also opposed some forms of stem-cell research, even though the Church has no quarrel with such experiments. (Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, also a Mormon, is a prominent proponent of the research.) Romney grew up in an era when the Mormon Church was growing rapidly, and this forced it to start thinking like a corporation. It became what has been called a “franchise religion,” and its leadership in Salt Lake City instituted a process of “correlation,” which standardized Church teachings and missions around the world. In 1974, the Church even had a team of management consultants help restructure some of its operations. Romney was chosen for a leadership position during his mission in France, and was a leader of local Mormons in Massachusetts. “Gifted men who are Latter-Day Saints start getting assignments as administrators when they go on their mission,” Shipps said. “And those assignments continue—from being in charge of people on this mission to eventually being in charge of a ward, which is like a parish. They have to administer that, and then they have to administer what is essentially a diocese. They learn administration in particular ways.” In that sense, Romney may have learned as much about management from Mormonism as he did about religion.
According to McBride, one of the most important reading assignments Romney had as a missionary was the 1937 best-seller “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill. Hill, the Stephen Covey of his era, essentially invented the personal-success genre, and his advice about the importance of persistence and organized planning would have been particularly useful to an American Mormon trying to convert French Catholics. During a visit to Romney’s mission, Howard W. Hunter, a member of the Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles and later the president of the Church, advised Romney and his colleagues to study Hill’s book. “I want you to understand, the Lord does not care whether you become rich or not, but he does want you to learn how to succeed, and to be successful,” he told them. The can-do spirit of an achievement expert, like Hill, is highly compatible with Mormon religious teaching. There is no original sin and no predestination in Mormonism. It is a religion that preaches optimistic assumptions about human nature, including the premise that humans can become like God in the afterlife, which may help explain its increasing worldwide appeal. In a recent essay in the Christian Century, the religious historian Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp noted that, unlike earlier branches of Christianity, in Mormonism “healthy living and moral values are extolled not simply as exercises in discipline, but as keys to individual progress.” She added, “The language that the L.D.S. Church uses to discuss child-rearing focuses less on preventing sin and avoiding temptation and more on personal cultivation.” According to McBride, he and Romney became diligent students of “Think and Grow Rich.” “We read it, we studied it, we discussed it together—we were into it,” he told me. “It wasn’t Romney’s Bible through life or something like that, but those were concepts and ideas that we got early on, and they did have an impact on us and we did study it, and it became a part of our mentality.”
In late September, Mitt Romney spoke before an audience in a banquet room in Santa Clara, California, within walking distance of high-tech firms like Yahoo, Nortel, and A.M.D. Wearing a blue suit and tie, a gold watch on his wrist, and product in his hair, he never moved from center stage, where an American flag helped frame him for his camera shots. He held a microphone with four fingertips and a thumb and rotated his torso a hundred and eighty degrees every five seconds or so, like a human garden sprinkler. This was his kind of crowd. The event was organized by the local chamber of commerce, and the questions were about entitlements, technology, education, and immigration. The man seated next to me was the president of the Silicon Valley chapter of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. At this forum, no one asked Romney about abortion or religion.
One person wanted to know if there was any difference between Romney’s background and that of his opponents. “Is there anything in my background that’s not different than my opponents?” Romney answered. He went on to relate an anecdote from his days as a management consultant: “I spent my life in the private sector. I spent twenty-five years in business, some high-tech, some low-tech. I remember one of my first consulting assignments—someone came and said they’d taken a piece of glass, about eighteen inches long, and they’d stretched it to a kilometre long. And they’d shone a light through it. That was an optical wave gatherer, they called it. And now we call it fibre optic. And we were hired to find a strategy for Corning to take advantage of this technology.” Romney is as keen to talk about his business background as he is reluctant to talk about his religious background. He has said that his experience as a young management consultant is what helped prepare him for government service.
Romney would be both the first Mormon President and the first President to come from the world of consulting. The profession, whose roots are in the scientific-management fad of the nineteen-twenties, has only recently begun to produce its first generation of political leaders. Benjamin Netanyahu is an alumnus of the Boston Consulting Group, where Romney started out, and William Hague, the former Tory leader, got his first job at McKinsey & Company. In the United States, the growing reputation of consulting as the “it” profession for the American élite got a recent endorsement when Chelsea Clinton decided to join McKinsey rather than pursue a law degree, as her parents did.
Romney joined the Boston Consulting Group in 1975, after graduating from Harvard Business School. The firm had been founded by a former Bible salesman named Bruce Henderson, one of the industry’s conceptual pioneers. In the insular world of consulting, B.C.G. had a reputation as the intellectual shop, seen not just as a hands-on consultancy but also as a think tank, and it popularized the concept of business strategy, or organizing a company around its goals—an idea that swept boardrooms in the seventies. “B.C.G.’s idea was: We don’t need to understand your industry; we need to understand a few important principles that we can apply to all of our clients,” Christopher McKenna, the author of “The World’s Newest Profession,” a history of the consulting industry, told me. B.C.G., using a toolbox of concepts that its people had come up with—“the experience curve,” “the strategic business unit,” and “the growth-share matrix”—helped reinvent the way its clients did business. Its big idea was the experience curve—over time, unit cost decreases as experience increases. Romney spent almost four years at B.C.G. applying these principles.
The year before Romney joined B.C.G., William Bain, one of the company’s stars, had left to start his own firm, Bain & Company, which he promised would be a radical new consulting business. If B.C.G. was like an ivory tower, Bain was a trade school. The tradition best exemplified by McKinsey, one of the oldest firms, had consultants acting like pollinating bees, moving valuable information from one company to another, even within the same industry. Much of what you paid for as a C.E.O. was the expertise that McKinsey had lifted from your rivals. “It was a conduit for the transfer of knowledge,” McKenna told me. “You paid McKinsey an entry fee to do this for you.” Bain’s idea was to create a more exclusive and mutually beneficial arrangement with his clients. He promised not to work for the competition, and, instead of simply devising a new strategy, he would stick around and help implement it. It was the difference between belonging to a gym and having a personal trainer.
Bain also demanded that his consultants work with top-level management, so that decisions could be executed quickly. The approach “was revolutionary,” said Bob White, a Bain alumnus and a longtime Romney friend, who is now the chairman of the Romney campaign. In 1977, Romney joined the Bain team as part of a second wave of consultants who left the Boston Consulting Group. By 1978, Fortune had declared consulting “the current glamour industry for the newest M.B.A.s,” and noted that Harvard graduates were moving into management consulting at a record pace.
Bain’s brand of “relationship consulting” bred a unique culture at the company’s headquarters, in Copley Square. Since Bain didn’t work for business rivals, companies were more willing to share sensitive data. It was there that Romney developed his passion for collecting huge amounts of information. The company soon earned a reputation for extreme secrecy—it was dubbed the K.G.B. of management consulting. It’s been reported that, initially, employees didn’t use business cards, and they spoke in code when discussing clients in public. According to a study conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Business, Bain had a “strict policy forbidding interaction with the press.” It adopted what was called a “one-firm” culture. Employees read “Dress for Success” and were sent on Outward Bound-style leadership retreats. Business reporters wondered why Bain consultants all seemed to wear the same red ties. Romney and his colleagues were called Bainies, and, not surprisingly, there were accounts of insufferable young Bainies swarming into a company and confidently reorganizing it as middle managers were brushed aside. As the consulting business grew, competition for the brightest M.B.A.s intensified, and Bain became an aggressive recruiter. Harvard once kicked the company off campus, temporarily, because the firm offered graduates “exploding bonuses,” payments that declined each day the student dithered about a decision to join Bain.
William Bain believed that he could extract more value from the firms he advised by investing in them. In 1984, he chose Romney, by then one of his top consultants, to launch Bain Capital, a private equity firm that bought up companies, mostly through leveraged buyouts. Applying Bain’s patented techniques, they sometimes expanded the companies they bought and at other times they downsized them, but they almost always made a profit. By the time Romney ran for the Senate, in 1994, it is estimated that he was worth several hundred million dollars.
Romney has said that his training as a management consultant taught him a methodology for problem-solving. He told the conservative author and talk-show host Hugh Hewitt that the conceptual tools he had picked up in the business world gave him the confidence to walk into a C.E.O.’s office and offer advice on an industry with which he was unfamiliar. “You’re going to get data that they have but have never analyzed in the proper way, and then you’re going to tear it apart and debate it amongst yourselves and with them and find new and bold answers,” he told Hewitt. Ever since Romney moved into the political profession—starting with his failed Senate run—a great question has been whether this is a transferrable skill.
Romney’s business background wasn’t enough to beat Kennedy, who turned it into a liability by highlighting stories about companies that were downsized after Bain takeovers. Soon after that loss, Romney began looking for a public platform to showcase his talents. In 1999, he took over the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic Winter Games of 2002, which was then mired in a bribery scandal. The tainted officials had been ousted, but a significant financial problem had emerged: there was a projected budget deficit of three hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. Romney cut costs, raised money, and successfully lobbied the federal government to allocate more funds for the Winter Olympics. By all accounts, he was an extremely competent manager of the enterprise, and his public cheerleading for the games refurbished their reputation. Harvard Business School has taught Romney’s turnaround of the Olympics as a case study. The study, written by the Business School professor H. Kent Bowen, is filled with detailed charts, complicated matrixes, and screen shots from software that Romney and his chief operating officer, Fraser Bullock, used to track their progress as they reorganized the committee. One exhibit from early 2001 offers a glimpse into the limits of the management-consultant world view: a list of twenty-eight “potential risk factors,” which are divided into three tiers based on their probability and impact. No. 28, at the bottom of Tier 3, is “threat or act of terrorism.”
In his first year as governor, 2003, Romney learned a lesson about the differences between management theory and governance. After he was elected, he asked Bain & Company to evaluate the state’s education system, and the Bain-assisted review formed the basis of a radical overhaul that would have increased fees and dismantled the system in place at the University of Massachusetts. In the corporate world, the Bainies, whose power emanated from the C.E.O.’s office, could implement their plans by diktat. On Beacon Hill, Romney had to deal with a Democratic legislature. The Bain education plan never passed. Still, in his last year in office, Romney used a very Bain-like approach—rigorously studying the problem, coming up with a solution based on empiricism, not ideology, and working hard at implementation—to propose a universal-health-care plan for the state and see it passed. Ever since he became a Presidential candidate, Romney has been ambivalent about this success. Sometimes he boasts about it, but at other moments he is uncharacteristically understated. “I like the plan we passed in Massachusetts,” he said in Santa Clara. “It’s not perfect. I liked the one I proposed. The legislature changed it in some ways I wouldn’t have thought about. But I think it is a step forward.”
Romney’s Presidential campaign is perhaps the best indicator of the potential and the limits of Bainism. In G.O.P. political circles, it is frequently cited as being more competently run than any of his opponents’ operations. Although Romney is relying more and more on his personal wealth—he has donated seventeen million dollars of his own money to his campaign—he has also raised forty-five million dollars, almost as much as the leading Republican fund-raiser, Rudy Giuliani, who has raised forty-seven million dollars. And Romney, who started the race as a relatively unknown governor, has made the most progress in polls in the early primary states, though he lags far behind nationally. One Monday this fall, I spent the day at his headquarters in Boston. The campaign takes up two floors of an old law firm in the North End, Boston’s Little Italy. It was the day after the fund-raising quarter closed, and aides were nervously monitoring the news, checking developments about Romney’s opponents. When I walked into the office of Matt Rhoades, Romney’s communications director, he was puzzling over some remarks made by Senator John McCain, in which McCain tried to clarify a statement that America was founded as a Christian nation. Attempting to explain himself, McCain told reporters, “It’s almost Talmudic. We are a nation based on Judeo-Christian values.” Rhoades typed the word “Talmudic” into dictionary.com.
Romney’s strategy was perhaps best summarized by the atmosphere in the office of his campaign manager, Beth Myers. On the wall were maps of the first states to vote in caucuses and primaries—Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan. On a bookshelf opposite were thick binders of research on Romney’s top opponents. The spine of one binder said “John McCain, an Unreliable Republican.” Another said “Rudy Giuliani, Left . . . Not Right.” The maps are a reminder that Romney probably has only one path to winning the Republican nomination: he must win the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, states where he has been leading in the polls, and create enough momentum and media attention to carry him through to February 5th, when some twenty states will vote—including New York and California, where Romney is barely known. The labels on the research binders reinforced the idea that Romney’s strategy rests on presenting himself as the true conservative Republican in the race, and on making the sale.
Napoleon Hill himself would be impressed with the planning and persistence that Romney has displayed in trying to convert conservatives to his cause. In every Republican debate, he glows with the bright effervescence of a born salesman. But a political campaign may not be as susceptible to the strategies of management consulting as a business, where advising a corporation to reinvent itself is standard practice. Romney’s strategic audit of the 2008 campaign suggested that his party was hungry for a reliable Republican. For Romney, the danger is that of going too far in attempting to please every constituency. In doing so, he may have underestimated the importance of authenticity, an asset that in politics is sometimes more valuable than ideological purity
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Em destaque: Perfil do ex-candidato republicano a presidencia, Mitt Romney
Fonte: The New Yorker
Publicação: 29 de outubro 2007
Autor: Ryan Lizza
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/29/071029fa_fact_lizza
by Ryan Lizza
On a recent Thursday in Derry, New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate, was engaged in a conversation about milkshakes. It was early afternoon at a nineteen-fifties-themed diner called MaryAnn’s, and Romney, surrounded by cameramen and reporters, went from table to table introducing himself to voters. Before running for office in Massachusetts—unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1994 and, successfully, for governor in 2002—Romney made a fortune as a management consultant and leveraged-buyout specialist, and, in twenty-five years in the business world, he learned to love information-gathering. “There are answers in numbers—gold in numbers,” he wrote in “Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games,” his 2004 memoir. “Pile the budgets on my desk and let me wallow.” His campaign manager, Beth Myers, told me recently that Romney regularly checks Mittromney.com, and sends off e-mails to aides, asking them to add more detailed information to the site.
At MaryAnn’s, Romney, his suit jacket removed and his sleeves rolled up, made his way swiftly through the restaurant, methodically quizzing the patrons. He sat down with two gray-haired women in a booth and pointed to a creamy drink on the table. “Is this a malt or is this a milkshake?” he asked.
“It’s a frappe,” one of the women replied.
“We call that a milkshake in the Midwest,” Romney, who has lived in Massachusetts for the past thirty-six years, said. “It’s a frappe here, right? This is ice cream and, and—”
“And milk,” the woman replied.
“And milk, yeah. How are you doing? I’m Mitt Romney.”
Romney is smart. He was chosen as the speaker for his graduating class at Brigham Young University. He pursued joint graduate degrees at Harvard, in law and business, graduating cum laude in law and in the top five per cent of his class at the business school. “I like smart people,” he wrote in “Turnaround.” “A lot.” But, like many smart overachievers, especially in politics, he sometimes tries a little too hard. The conversation turned from frappes to health care, and he asked, “Is it O.K. here in New Hampshire?”
“I live in Vermont,” one of the women responded.
“I live in Massachusetts,” the other said.
Undaunted, Romney cheerily pressed for their views on how to improve the health-care system. One of the women made a pitch for more government spending on care for the elderly. The poor, she argued, benefit from government programs, and the rich can afford their own care. “I think the middle people need some help.” Romney perked up and patiently explained the details of a 2004 law that provided more state assistance for home care. His new friends were smitten. “That’s a nice idea,” one of them said. Romney did not mention that the new rules applied only to the poor.
Romney walked into a room decorated with posters of fifties icons. He stood before Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and chatted with a table of patrons finishing plates of home fries and eggs. Suddenly, a heavyset man wearing a bright-orange cap entered the room. “Mr. Romney,” he called out. “Eric Orff—I’m a hunter.” It was a potentially awkward moment. Earlier this year, Romney claimed that he’d “been a hunter pretty much all my life.” A few days later, he said in a statement, “I’ve hunted small game numerous times.” Four days after that, Romney told W. Gardner Selby, of the Austin American-Statesman, “Any description of my being a hunter is an overstatement of capability.”
Still, he couldn’t resist. “You’re a hunter?” he said to Orff. “Well, same here. Good to see ya.” Orff had a question about the environment: “It’s eighty degrees today. What are we going to do about global warming?” Romney’s response was quick and concise. “We’re going to get ourselves off of foreign oil,” he said. “And to do that it’s going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we’re going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gases.” It was a good answer, but also a strange one. Not long ago, Romney released a glossy pamphlet detailing his positions on major issues. He sounded like Al Gore when talking to the environmentalist in New Hampshire, though his policy book’s treatment of global warming reads more like something from ExxonMobil. In it, Romney refers to the “debate” over “how much human activity impacts the environment”—code words for the global-warming-denial crowd. He offers no plan to “dramatically” curtail emissions of CO2, just an aside that “we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse-gas emissions.” As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney, in December, 2005, pulled out of a Northeast-state agreement on carbon reduction—a plan that he had supported the month before.
This is a habit of Romney’s. Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He brings a salesman’s bravado and certainty to issues. At a debate in May, when asked how he would respond to a hypothetical situation involving the interrogation of a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, he said, “Some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is that we ought to double Guantánamo.” Elected as a pro-choice governor in 2002—YouTube is flooded with his passionate advocacy of abortion rights—he now presents himself as the most resolute anti-abortion candidate in the Republican field. A Mormon, he sometimes adopts the religious language of Evangelicals when he is addressing conservative Christian groups. To economic conservatives, he pitches himself as the candidate most strongly committed to slashing spending and taxes. (He’s the only major G.O.P. candidate to have signed a formal anti-tax pledge, the sort of move that his spokesman dismissed as “government by gimmickry” in Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.) To national-security conservatives, he is the most hawkish. (He says often that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran, should be indicted under the Genocide Convention, and his campaign has named the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, the vice-chairman of Blackwater, as an adviser.) But, while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics.
Romney’s transition from the boardroom to the campaign trail has been clumsy in other respects, too. According to “Turnaround,” at Bain Capital, the investment firm that Romney headed, the partners suspected that their boss fostered a cutthroat competitive environment in order to motivate them. When he greets voters, this competitiveness often surfaces as posturing; chitchat turns into one-upmanship. After a voter at the New Hampshire diner told Romney, “My daughter goes to Michigan State,” he replied, “Oh, does she, really? My brother’s on the board of Michigan State.” When another patron said that she was from Illinois, Romney told her, “I won the straw poll at the Illinois Republican convention!” Romney’s most seemingly innocuous comments can be head-scratchers. Later that afternoon, standing next to a local supporter who had escorted him to several Derry businesses, Romney told reporters, “Now I understand why I’m going to be gaining a couple of pounds with him, because we’ve eaten everywhere we’ve gone, almost.” Romney, a fitness buff who is shown jogging in a recent campaign ad, had about half a frappe at the diner (he threw the rest away) and a cookie at a bakery—nothing at an Italian restaurant, a feed store, a scrapbook shop, or a hardware store. Whatever gene causes hyper-competitive perfectionists always to go one step beyond their adversaries, or anyone else, Romney has it. Republican candidates inevitably criticize, with some accuracy, Democratic proposals on health care or taxes as being closer to the way things are done in Europe. Earlier in the day, before a crowd of New Hampshire college students, Romney said that the policies of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards were similar to those of a Communist dictatorship. Their ideas, he said pointedly, “didn’t work for the Soviet Union.”
Most explorers searching for the philosophical roots of Mitt Romney begin the journey with his religion. Mormonism is a major factor in the campaign, even if it is rarely mentioned by Romney’s opponents. “I think the Mormon issue is a real problem in the South, and it’s a real problem in other parts of the country, but people are not going to say it,” Dan Bartlett, President Bush’s former counsellor, said in a recent speech. “People are not going to step out and say, ‘I have a problem with Romney because he’s Mormon.’ What they’re going to say is he is a flip-flopper.” Given the importance to the Republican Party of Evangelical Christians—especially Southern Baptists, who have traditionally been hostile to Mormonism—the Romney campaign is understandably concerned about the attention that reporters pay to his religion. Romney’s senior aides were unsettled by a recent Newsweek cover story that dwelled on Romney’s relationship to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as the Mormon Church is officially known. “I thought it was unfortunate that every aspect of the Governor’s life was presented through the prism of religion,” Kevin Madden, Romney’s press secretary, told me. Romney himself, irked by Newsweek’s argument that he was distancing himself from Mormonism, wrote to the magazine, saying, “I am an American running for president, not a Mormon running for president, but I am also very proud of my faith.” He added, “It is puzzling that when Newsweek looks at me what you mostly see is a Mormon.” Romney sometimes faces hostile questions about his religion. At a recent “Ask Mitt Anything” event in Orange, California, a young man asked, “If you were elected President, how many First Ladies could we expect?” The audience gasped, but Romney remained unflustered and advised the questioner to consult the L.D.S. Web site.
In private, a Romney aide frankly conceded that, aside from accusations of “flip-flopping,” his greatest political liability is his religion, which is unfamiliar to most Americans. Jan Shipps, a leading non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism, said that it was useful to consider the difference between Romney and Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who holds the highest government post of any Mormon in American history. “Reid is a Church member,” Shipps said. “But he is a convert. I’m sure he’s devoted, I’m sure he’s a tithe-paying member and all of that”—devout Mormons contribute ten per cent of their earnings to the Church—“but he was not born into the Church. He didn’t get Mormonism with his mother’s milk, as it were. But Romney is a sixth-generation Mormon”—what scholars call a DNA Mormon. “His ancestors were some of the very first converts.”
Romney’s ancestors had important roles at every turning point in the Mormons’ dramatic nineteenth-century history. Mormonism was founded in western New York, in 1830, by Joseph Smith, after he claimed to have been visited by an angel who directed him to gold plates with inscriptions, which he “translated” into the Book of Mormon. In the eighteen-forties, Romney’s forefathers were present in Nauvoo, Illinois, a settlement established by Smith. After Smith’s murder, in 1844, which forced many persecuted Mormons to move westward, it was Mitt Romney’s great-great-grandfather who first explored the mountain pass leading down to the Salt Lake Valley, according to “Turnaround.” When, in the eighteen-nineties, the federal government cracked down on polygamy, again scattering Mormon families, Romney’s great-grandfather, who had five wives, was among those who fled to Mexico, where Romney’s father, George, was born, in 1907.
By the time Romney was a teen-ager—he was born in 1947—the Church had shifted toward growth by conversion, a change that reinforced the uniqueness of the ancestral Mormons. In addition, George Romney, who grew up in Mormon strongholds in Idaho and Utah, brought up his family in Michigan, where he was the chairman and president of the American Motors Corporation, a small, aggressive competitor of the Big Three, and, later, a three-term governor of the state. Mitt Romney grew up in Bloomfield Hills, a Detroit suburb, where he was the only Mormon in his school. Dane McBride, now a Virginia physician, met Romney in 1966, while both were serving in France as missionaries. Afterward, Romney and McBride attended Brigham Young University together. Like Romney, McBride attended schools where he was one of very few Mormons. “Mitt and I, because of that, were much more experienced in explaining and defending our religion,” McBride told me. “We also grew up feeling that there was a little bit of a difference between us and our friends.”
Many commentators have suggested that Romney will need to make a speech akin to the one that John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he promised to resign if there was ever a collision between his beliefs as a Catholic and the national interest. Jan Shipps is skeptical of the idea that Romney could do something similar. “Mormonism was a cult, just as Christianity was a cult in the beginning,” she told me. “But a cult, when it grows up, becomes a culture, and the people who are a part of it take on an ethnic identity, a peoplehood. Romney is not Mormon the way, say, Ted Kennedy is Catholic. Romney is Mormon the way Ted Kennedy is Irish. That’s the difference. And, when it’s that much a part of who you are, it’s very hard to explain it to other people, because you can’t figure out why they can’t see it. He can’t do a J.F.K., because when J.F.K. did his thing on the Catholics there were people who knew that they were afraid of Catholicism, but at least they knew what it was.”
Romney’s cultural Mormonism is in some ways more important to understanding him than his theological Mormonism. As governor, after all, Romney had a history of supporting positions that were at odds with the practices of the Church. He has opposed cigarette taxes and loosened restrictions on alcohol sales, even though the L.D.S. strongly discourages its members from smoking and drinking. He has also opposed some forms of stem-cell research, even though the Church has no quarrel with such experiments. (Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, also a Mormon, is a prominent proponent of the research.) Romney grew up in an era when the Mormon Church was growing rapidly, and this forced it to start thinking like a corporation. It became what has been called a “franchise religion,” and its leadership in Salt Lake City instituted a process of “correlation,” which standardized Church teachings and missions around the world. In 1974, the Church even had a team of management consultants help restructure some of its operations. Romney was chosen for a leadership position during his mission in France, and was a leader of local Mormons in Massachusetts. “Gifted men who are Latter-Day Saints start getting assignments as administrators when they go on their mission,” Shipps said. “And those assignments continue—from being in charge of people on this mission to eventually being in charge of a ward, which is like a parish. They have to administer that, and then they have to administer what is essentially a diocese. They learn administration in particular ways.” In that sense, Romney may have learned as much about management from Mormonism as he did about religion.
According to McBride, one of the most important reading assignments Romney had as a missionary was the 1937 best-seller “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill. Hill, the Stephen Covey of his era, essentially invented the personal-success genre, and his advice about the importance of persistence and organized planning would have been particularly useful to an American Mormon trying to convert French Catholics. During a visit to Romney’s mission, Howard W. Hunter, a member of the Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles and later the president of the Church, advised Romney and his colleagues to study Hill’s book. “I want you to understand, the Lord does not care whether you become rich or not, but he does want you to learn how to succeed, and to be successful,” he told them. The can-do spirit of an achievement expert, like Hill, is highly compatible with Mormon religious teaching. There is no original sin and no predestination in Mormonism. It is a religion that preaches optimistic assumptions about human nature, including the premise that humans can become like God in the afterlife, which may help explain its increasing worldwide appeal. In a recent essay in the Christian Century, the religious historian Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp noted that, unlike earlier branches of Christianity, in Mormonism “healthy living and moral values are extolled not simply as exercises in discipline, but as keys to individual progress.” She added, “The language that the L.D.S. Church uses to discuss child-rearing focuses less on preventing sin and avoiding temptation and more on personal cultivation.” According to McBride, he and Romney became diligent students of “Think and Grow Rich.” “We read it, we studied it, we discussed it together—we were into it,” he told me. “It wasn’t Romney’s Bible through life or something like that, but those were concepts and ideas that we got early on, and they did have an impact on us and we did study it, and it became a part of our mentality.”
In late September, Mitt Romney spoke before an audience in a banquet room in Santa Clara, California, within walking distance of high-tech firms like Yahoo, Nortel, and A.M.D. Wearing a blue suit and tie, a gold watch on his wrist, and product in his hair, he never moved from center stage, where an American flag helped frame him for his camera shots. He held a microphone with four fingertips and a thumb and rotated his torso a hundred and eighty degrees every five seconds or so, like a human garden sprinkler. This was his kind of crowd. The event was organized by the local chamber of commerce, and the questions were about entitlements, technology, education, and immigration. The man seated next to me was the president of the Silicon Valley chapter of Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. At this forum, no one asked Romney about abortion or religion.
One person wanted to know if there was any difference between Romney’s background and that of his opponents. “Is there anything in my background that’s not different than my opponents?” Romney answered. He went on to relate an anecdote from his days as a management consultant: “I spent my life in the private sector. I spent twenty-five years in business, some high-tech, some low-tech. I remember one of my first consulting assignments—someone came and said they’d taken a piece of glass, about eighteen inches long, and they’d stretched it to a kilometre long. And they’d shone a light through it. That was an optical wave gatherer, they called it. And now we call it fibre optic. And we were hired to find a strategy for Corning to take advantage of this technology.” Romney is as keen to talk about his business background as he is reluctant to talk about his religious background. He has said that his experience as a young management consultant is what helped prepare him for government service.
Romney would be both the first Mormon President and the first President to come from the world of consulting. The profession, whose roots are in the scientific-management fad of the nineteen-twenties, has only recently begun to produce its first generation of political leaders. Benjamin Netanyahu is an alumnus of the Boston Consulting Group, where Romney started out, and William Hague, the former Tory leader, got his first job at McKinsey & Company. In the United States, the growing reputation of consulting as the “it” profession for the American élite got a recent endorsement when Chelsea Clinton decided to join McKinsey rather than pursue a law degree, as her parents did.
Romney joined the Boston Consulting Group in 1975, after graduating from Harvard Business School. The firm had been founded by a former Bible salesman named Bruce Henderson, one of the industry’s conceptual pioneers. In the insular world of consulting, B.C.G. had a reputation as the intellectual shop, seen not just as a hands-on consultancy but also as a think tank, and it popularized the concept of business strategy, or organizing a company around its goals—an idea that swept boardrooms in the seventies. “B.C.G.’s idea was: We don’t need to understand your industry; we need to understand a few important principles that we can apply to all of our clients,” Christopher McKenna, the author of “The World’s Newest Profession,” a history of the consulting industry, told me. B.C.G., using a toolbox of concepts that its people had come up with—“the experience curve,” “the strategic business unit,” and “the growth-share matrix”—helped reinvent the way its clients did business. Its big idea was the experience curve—over time, unit cost decreases as experience increases. Romney spent almost four years at B.C.G. applying these principles.
The year before Romney joined B.C.G., William Bain, one of the company’s stars, had left to start his own firm, Bain & Company, which he promised would be a radical new consulting business. If B.C.G. was like an ivory tower, Bain was a trade school. The tradition best exemplified by McKinsey, one of the oldest firms, had consultants acting like pollinating bees, moving valuable information from one company to another, even within the same industry. Much of what you paid for as a C.E.O. was the expertise that McKinsey had lifted from your rivals. “It was a conduit for the transfer of knowledge,” McKenna told me. “You paid McKinsey an entry fee to do this for you.” Bain’s idea was to create a more exclusive and mutually beneficial arrangement with his clients. He promised not to work for the competition, and, instead of simply devising a new strategy, he would stick around and help implement it. It was the difference between belonging to a gym and having a personal trainer.
Bain also demanded that his consultants work with top-level management, so that decisions could be executed quickly. The approach “was revolutionary,” said Bob White, a Bain alumnus and a longtime Romney friend, who is now the chairman of the Romney campaign. In 1977, Romney joined the Bain team as part of a second wave of consultants who left the Boston Consulting Group. By 1978, Fortune had declared consulting “the current glamour industry for the newest M.B.A.s,” and noted that Harvard graduates were moving into management consulting at a record pace.
Bain’s brand of “relationship consulting” bred a unique culture at the company’s headquarters, in Copley Square. Since Bain didn’t work for business rivals, companies were more willing to share sensitive data. It was there that Romney developed his passion for collecting huge amounts of information. The company soon earned a reputation for extreme secrecy—it was dubbed the K.G.B. of management consulting. It’s been reported that, initially, employees didn’t use business cards, and they spoke in code when discussing clients in public. According to a study conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Business, Bain had a “strict policy forbidding interaction with the press.” It adopted what was called a “one-firm” culture. Employees read “Dress for Success” and were sent on Outward Bound-style leadership retreats. Business reporters wondered why Bain consultants all seemed to wear the same red ties. Romney and his colleagues were called Bainies, and, not surprisingly, there were accounts of insufferable young Bainies swarming into a company and confidently reorganizing it as middle managers were brushed aside. As the consulting business grew, competition for the brightest M.B.A.s intensified, and Bain became an aggressive recruiter. Harvard once kicked the company off campus, temporarily, because the firm offered graduates “exploding bonuses,” payments that declined each day the student dithered about a decision to join Bain.
William Bain believed that he could extract more value from the firms he advised by investing in them. In 1984, he chose Romney, by then one of his top consultants, to launch Bain Capital, a private equity firm that bought up companies, mostly through leveraged buyouts. Applying Bain’s patented techniques, they sometimes expanded the companies they bought and at other times they downsized them, but they almost always made a profit. By the time Romney ran for the Senate, in 1994, it is estimated that he was worth several hundred million dollars.
Romney has said that his training as a management consultant taught him a methodology for problem-solving. He told the conservative author and talk-show host Hugh Hewitt that the conceptual tools he had picked up in the business world gave him the confidence to walk into a C.E.O.’s office and offer advice on an industry with which he was unfamiliar. “You’re going to get data that they have but have never analyzed in the proper way, and then you’re going to tear it apart and debate it amongst yourselves and with them and find new and bold answers,” he told Hewitt. Ever since Romney moved into the political profession—starting with his failed Senate run—a great question has been whether this is a transferrable skill.
Romney’s business background wasn’t enough to beat Kennedy, who turned it into a liability by highlighting stories about companies that were downsized after Bain takeovers. Soon after that loss, Romney began looking for a public platform to showcase his talents. In 1999, he took over the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the Olympic Winter Games of 2002, which was then mired in a bribery scandal. The tainted officials had been ousted, but a significant financial problem had emerged: there was a projected budget deficit of three hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. Romney cut costs, raised money, and successfully lobbied the federal government to allocate more funds for the Winter Olympics. By all accounts, he was an extremely competent manager of the enterprise, and his public cheerleading for the games refurbished their reputation. Harvard Business School has taught Romney’s turnaround of the Olympics as a case study. The study, written by the Business School professor H. Kent Bowen, is filled with detailed charts, complicated matrixes, and screen shots from software that Romney and his chief operating officer, Fraser Bullock, used to track their progress as they reorganized the committee. One exhibit from early 2001 offers a glimpse into the limits of the management-consultant world view: a list of twenty-eight “potential risk factors,” which are divided into three tiers based on their probability and impact. No. 28, at the bottom of Tier 3, is “threat or act of terrorism.”
In his first year as governor, 2003, Romney learned a lesson about the differences between management theory and governance. After he was elected, he asked Bain & Company to evaluate the state’s education system, and the Bain-assisted review formed the basis of a radical overhaul that would have increased fees and dismantled the system in place at the University of Massachusetts. In the corporate world, the Bainies, whose power emanated from the C.E.O.’s office, could implement their plans by diktat. On Beacon Hill, Romney had to deal with a Democratic legislature. The Bain education plan never passed. Still, in his last year in office, Romney used a very Bain-like approach—rigorously studying the problem, coming up with a solution based on empiricism, not ideology, and working hard at implementation—to propose a universal-health-care plan for the state and see it passed. Ever since he became a Presidential candidate, Romney has been ambivalent about this success. Sometimes he boasts about it, but at other moments he is uncharacteristically understated. “I like the plan we passed in Massachusetts,” he said in Santa Clara. “It’s not perfect. I liked the one I proposed. The legislature changed it in some ways I wouldn’t have thought about. But I think it is a step forward.”
Romney’s Presidential campaign is perhaps the best indicator of the potential and the limits of Bainism. In G.O.P. political circles, it is frequently cited as being more competently run than any of his opponents’ operations. Although Romney is relying more and more on his personal wealth—he has donated seventeen million dollars of his own money to his campaign—he has also raised forty-five million dollars, almost as much as the leading Republican fund-raiser, Rudy Giuliani, who has raised forty-seven million dollars. And Romney, who started the race as a relatively unknown governor, has made the most progress in polls in the early primary states, though he lags far behind nationally. One Monday this fall, I spent the day at his headquarters in Boston. The campaign takes up two floors of an old law firm in the North End, Boston’s Little Italy. It was the day after the fund-raising quarter closed, and aides were nervously monitoring the news, checking developments about Romney’s opponents. When I walked into the office of Matt Rhoades, Romney’s communications director, he was puzzling over some remarks made by Senator John McCain, in which McCain tried to clarify a statement that America was founded as a Christian nation. Attempting to explain himself, McCain told reporters, “It’s almost Talmudic. We are a nation based on Judeo-Christian values.” Rhoades typed the word “Talmudic” into dictionary.com.
Romney’s strategy was perhaps best summarized by the atmosphere in the office of his campaign manager, Beth Myers. On the wall were maps of the first states to vote in caucuses and primaries—Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan. On a bookshelf opposite were thick binders of research on Romney’s top opponents. The spine of one binder said “John McCain, an Unreliable Republican.” Another said “Rudy Giuliani, Left . . . Not Right.” The maps are a reminder that Romney probably has only one path to winning the Republican nomination: he must win the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, states where he has been leading in the polls, and create enough momentum and media attention to carry him through to February 5th, when some twenty states will vote—including New York and California, where Romney is barely known. The labels on the research binders reinforced the idea that Romney’s strategy rests on presenting himself as the true conservative Republican in the race, and on making the sale.
Napoleon Hill himself would be impressed with the planning and persistence that Romney has displayed in trying to convert conservatives to his cause. In every Republican debate, he glows with the bright effervescence of a born salesman. But a political campaign may not be as susceptible to the strategies of management consulting as a business, where advising a corporation to reinvent itself is standard practice. Romney’s strategic audit of the 2008 campaign suggested that his party was hungry for a reliable Republican. For Romney, the danger is that of going too far in attempting to please every constituency. In doing so, he may have underestimated the importance of authenticity, an asset that in politics is sometimes more valuable than ideological purity
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Em destaque: Perfil do ex-candidato republicano a presidencia, Mitt Romney
Fonte: The New Yorker
Publicação: 29 de outubro 2007
Autor: Ryan Lizza
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/29/071029fa_fact_lizza
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