State of Change

Obama Will Note "Signs of Progress" on Economy

By John Nichols

Barack Obama will claim a measure of victory in his administration's struggle to right the U.S. economy tonight, as he participates in the second primetime press conference of his presidency.

"(We've) put in place a comprehensive strategy designed to attack this crisis on all fronts," Obama will say in an opening statement to reporters. "It's a strategy to create jobs, to help responsible homeowners, to re-start lending, and to grow our economy over the long-term. And we are beginning to see signs of progress."

That line would have really resonated had it been delivered Monday night, after the Dow surged almost 500 points in what appeared to be a positive response to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's scheme to buy the toxic assets of bad banks.

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March 24, 2009

Geithner Goes From Zero to Hero? Not So Fast

By John Nichols

Yes, it is true: If you offer a trillion dollars to Wall Street, it will perk up.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has supposedly gone from zero to hero because his scheme to have taxpayers back up another bailout of bad bankers -- by buying all those toxic assets -- caused the stock markets to spike on Monday.

"Markets Like Geithner's Plan," chirped the Atlantic Online, in a pretty typical headline at the close of the day.

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March 24, 2009

Big Questions for President Obama's Big Press Conference

By Ari Melber

It is rough out there, but President Obama appears to take it in stride. He is juggling crises, promoting a huge new budget and, to his credit, regularly making his case to the people.

On Tuesday, Obama is holding the second prime time press conference of his first 100 days, keeping him on par with President Bush's early pace for press conferences. (Bush held pressers in February and March of 2001, though he did not tackle prime time, when far more people watch live, until May.) These events are a rare, valuable opportunity for the public to hear the President questioned directly. The press, for its part, is given the responsibility to set the agenda for important policy questions and the public interest priorities that the President should address. In that spirit, here are just a few questions for the big event:

1. Will The Washington Post ask about sports again? Really. The Post used its question at Obama's first presser to ask how he felt about Alex Rodriguez' steroid use. "The Washington Post asked the only question that did not involve domestic or foreign policy," recounted one website devoted to steroids, "and was widely criticized as being inappropriate given the importance of other issues discussed during the prime-time presidential press conference."

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March 23, 2009

With Geithner Plan: "The Zombie Ideas Have Won."

By John Nichols

Michigan Congressman John Conyers drew loud applause from a large, Obama-friendly crowd when he suggested the other night -- on a stage we shared in Massachusetts -- that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner might have reached his sell-by date.

The next evening, speaking at an event in Wisconsin, I made the same suggestion and got the same response. (The only noisier and more consistent applause was for the suggestion that the United States should be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, rather than sending them in.

When you leave Washington, it very quickly becomes clear that Geithner -- and, more importantly, the treasury secretary's approach to the economic meltdown -- has lost the confidence of progressives. He is Wall Street's man doing Wall Street's bidding, arguably as bad a player as anyone that John McCain would have put in the position.

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March 23, 2009

NBC's Chuck Todd Gathers Citizen Questions for Obama Presser

By Ari Melber

In another example of traditional journalists experimenting with participatory media, Chuck Todd, NBC's White House Correspondent, is gathering questions from citizens in preparation for Tuesday's prime time press conference with President Barack Obama.

Todd is soliciting question ideas from blog commenters, both through Newsvine.com and a plug on MSNBC's First Read, and he will also look over some of the top questions voted by citizens at Ask The President, (which I just launched in a partnership with The Nation, PDF and The Washington Times). Addressing Newsvine readers, Todd explained:

I'd like question ideas from you for the president next Tuesday night... But I don't necessarily want the question ideas DIRECTLY from you, I want to hear what your neighbors and less politics-obsessed friends and family want asked... I know every reporter claims they are listening to you and I'm not going to promise that I'm going to use a direct question but I do view these prime time press conferences as vehicles for the public...

In response to Ask The President, which enables a more accountable process for transparent voting and question submission by video and text, Todd emailed me asking us to "send ideas" his way. "I'm soliciting question ideas from a wide variety of sources and do want to ask a 'kitchen table' question on Tuesday," he added.

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March 23, 2009

Organizing for Obama at Ikea

By Ari Berman

Obama for America took its newly reconstituted campaign organization, Organizing for America (OFA), out for a test drive this weekend, asking its 13 million person email list to gather support for Obama's budget.

More than 1,100 canvasses were scheduled in 50 states on Saturday, and I attended one in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. There are few places in the country where Obama's support is stronger than in Ft. Greene--a vibrant, multi-ethnic, racially and socio-economically mixed neighborhood with tree-lined streets, old brownstones and a spacious park in the middle. On a sunny afternoon, about two dozen OFA volunteers gathered on the edge of the park, across from a farmer's market selling Apple Cider and fresh pies.

"We're here to send a message to Washington that the country is still activated," said Geoff Berman, a theater director and volunteer coordinator for OFA who spent nine weeks in southeast Missouri last fall for Obama. The ostensible purpose of the day was to get people to sign forms pledging their support for Obama's budget, which would then be passed on to members of Congress. More importantly, it was an opportunity for OFA to get the rust off, keep its volunteers active (and hopefully recruit more) and see how voters in communities across the country were responding to Obama's agenda. "The organization itself is taking shape and we don't want it to take shape in a vacuum," Berman (no relation) said. "The Obama campaign and Administration want to learn from everything we do." OFA, a subset of the Democratic National Committee, is gearing up to hire field organizers across the country who will constitute the next phase of the DNC's modified 50-state strategy.

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March 23, 2009

Taxing Bonuses Is Not Enough

By John Nichols

Congressman Lloyd Doggett, the former Texas jurist who has brought a prosecutor's sensibility to the struggle to hold Wall Street speculators to account, joined most other members of the House in voting for legislation to tax the bonuses paid by the American Insurance Group to its managers.

But the Austin Democrat, who as a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee and Budget Committee has been among the harshest critics of bank and insurance-industry bailouts, argues that Congress has not gone far enough when it comes to cracking down on those he refers to as "the AIG insurance bootleggers."

"While today's bill is very important to restoring Eisenhower-level taxes to those who took these bailouts, we need to ensure that it gets to the bonuses paid to foreign AIG employees, we need to question why this bailout helped AIG provide twenty European banks almost $60 billion dollars without asking them to sacrifice one red cent," says Doggett.

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March 20, 2009

Obama on Leno: Nero, Zero, or Hero?

By Leslie Savan

Oh, it's wonderful when conservatives and their media begin to tsk-tsk over what's "appropriate" behavior for President Obama. "He flies off to Los Angeles tonight to appear on the Jay Leno show," Senator John Kyl sniffed, as if Obama were running off to drown his troubles at the local bar. "He even has time to fill out his NCAA basketball bracket," Senator Lamar Alexander complained, making me wonder, Would they disapprove if they found out that on occasion Obama takes a 20-minute bath instead of a five-minute shower?

But no one does pretend puritanical as well as the New York Post, whose post-Tonight Show front page is headlined: "No Joke! O yuks it up on Leno as economy burns."

To assert that the president of United States shouldn't talk directly to the people in times of crisis is positively dippy. Not only do the tsk-tskers want him to look derelict in his duty, they want him surrounded and at bay, like Manuel Noriega: Ideally they'd keep Obama caged in the Beltway bubble, where they can torture him by blasting at high decibels the sound of their own voices, and no others, 'round the clock.

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March 20, 2009

Dodd's Mistake Was to Trust This Treasury Department

By John Nichols

The founders established a system of checks and balances so that bad ideas developed in the executive branch of the federal government did not become the law of the land.

When the chairman of a key Senate committee waters down legislation to ban bonuses for employees of firms collecting federal bailout money at the behest of the Secretary of the Treasury, the system is broken.

And the man who broke it is Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is taking huge hits for doing the Obama administration's bidding.

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March 19, 2009

Populism Is Not Fungible

By Leslie Savan

At first the political import of the AIG bonus scandal looked scary indeed, especially if you were watching the cable hysteria: President Obama was allowing the same moneymen who had driven the world economy off a cliff skip away with million-dollar bonuses after he'd already committed billions in taxpayer funds to prop up their rotten Ponzi scheme of a company. At last, a prairie fire of populist rage that would soon scorch the White House! Republicans redux!

But really: The idea that populist rage aimed at corporate greed is in any way a threat to Barack Obama is one of the funniest memes the mainstream media has promoted since the notion that he was a "socialist" or "palling around with terrorists," or that old knee-slapper that he "isn't black enough," all of which talk-show bloviators once rated as "serious problems."

Let's get a grip, and focus on the real politics of the AIG scandal and not the "optics," as the pundits love to call them. Today you have politicians of all stripes--from Barney Frank and Andrew Cuomo to Mike Pence and Chuck (Seppuku-san) Grassley--trying to commandeer grassroots anger over the exhorbitant bonuses white men at the top of American business have been paying themselves. That is, we have left, right, and center trying to outdo one another in opposing the fundamental inequities of the capitalist system.

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March 19, 2009