Watching Washington

Palin: Really Retreating Or Just Reloading?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has won millions of admirers with her gift for direct, personal communication. Her appeal combines an earnest and urgent seriousness with a bright and winning air of spontaneity. And the governor was working each of these elements extra hard at her hastily arranged news conference Friday.

She needed to, because she had a difficult message to deliver and an even more difficult rationale to sell.

Few were surprised to hear that the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president (and likely contender for president in 2012) had decided not to seek re-election as governor in 2010. But the blockbuster came a few seconds later, with the second part of her announcement.

With what appeared to be a smile of delight, she began explaining why she would not "go with the flow" and complete her term in office. It would be the easy way out to serve as a "lame duck," she said, and she was not that sort of person. She wasn't a quitter. And so, she said, she had decided to ... quit.

This leaves two paths ahead for Palin, who will leave office in three weeks.

Choice One: She can go home to Wasilla and try to remake the life she had there before politics (or at least statewide and national politics) blew it up. This might have the much-to-be-desired effect of removing her from the late-night comedians' hit list, the incessant tabloid chatter and the endless round of recriminations with John McCain's 2008 campaign team. Just this week, Palin had won the dubious distinction of being named "Sitting Duck" of the year by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Choice Two: She can stop worrying about the intricacies of the Alaska budget and the internal squabblings of the Legislature in Juneau and concentrate on putting together a campaign for 2012. After all, she is one of the three Republicans mentioned most often as her party's preferred candidates for Next Time (along with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, who both ran in 2008). Among Republican primary voters, she had the highest personal approval rating of any 2012 Republican prospect in a recent Pew Research Center poll, and it was over 70 percent.

So Sarah Palin is a player for 2012. And when that is true, a politician nearly always views all other elements of Creation through that presidential lens. When viewed through that lens, being governor of Alaska has done Palin as much good as it's likely to do. The governorship has already proven far more difficult in her third year than it was in her first two, when she gathered in the low-hanging fruit. This year, her star power turned against her and engendered resentment.

In recent months she has battled legislators, including those in her own party, preferring to vilify them rather than negotiate with them on the budget and other challenges. Her once stratospheric approval rating in statewide polls has slipped, and re-election in 2010, while still likely, would not have been a waltz. Needless to say, even a hard-won re-election victory in 2010 would have weakened her momentum in terms of the Republican presidential sweepstakes in 2012.

So it was widely expected she would find a time to bow out as a candidate in 2010. There's no sin in leaving a governorship after one term; in fact, the Commonwealth of Virginia only allows one term.

But Palin has raised a world of new questions by deciding to limit herself to far less than one term. She will have 17 months to go on her contract when she resigns. Some may be satisfied with the explanation she offered on Friday, that finishing her term would be "politics as usual" and a self-indulgence. She said it was time to "pass the ball so the team can win." Maybe that's all there is to it.

Others will suspect the governor is so focused now on 2012 that she believes she must devote herself to it whole-heartedly, even at the cost of her mission in Alaska and her implicit pledge to serve Alaskans.

What is so pressing? She needs time to build a staff that is loyal to her alone, as we can see from the endless replays of the internal wars of the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008 in Vanity Fair and Politico this past week. She must show she can raise tens of millions of dollars before the primaries, and hundreds of millions after that. And most desperately, she has to develop a more resilient media sensibility that can turn both fawning and savaging attention to her purpose.

Assuming the soon-to-be-former governor wants all this, and has prepared herself for the sacrifices ahead, she is making a hard-headed decision to reach for the brass ring and to do it now.

7:20 PM ET | 07- 3-2009 | permalink

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Sixty In the Senate: Be Careful What You Wish For

We've been hearing it for as long as we can remember. To make Big Things happen in Washington, the conventional wisdom says you need the Big Three: the presidency, control of the House of Representatives and 60 votes in the Senate.

It is not unusual for one party or the other to have a grip on the first two of these levers, but it has been nearly 30 years since either party had the third. Those three decades have given rise to the Myth of 60.

Senate rules require a three-fifths majority to cut off debate and vote on an issue of significance. That means a filibuster by a handful -- or even a single senator -- can freeze the institution in place. Without the 60 votes it needs for cloture, the majority can set the agenda, but it cannot necessarily bring any element of it to fruition.

And that, in turn, allows whichever party is nominally in charge to blame its frustrations largely on its lack of 60 votes in the Senate.

That myth is about to busted.

The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that Al Franken won the disputed Senate election in that state last November. It has taken eight months, several recounts and two court cases to reach this point, but Franken will be sworn in next week.

Combining Franken's win with the seven other seats Democrats wrested from the GOP in November 2008, and tossing in party-switcher Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Majority Leader Harry Reid now finds himself with 58 card-carrying members of his caucus. And when you tack on the two independents, Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, as the Democrats usually do when there's a party-line roll call vote, you have 60 on one side.

That means Nirvana for Reid, right? No. It might just make his life miserable.

Just because 60 people put their feet under Harry's table at the weekly Democratic policy luncheon does not guarantee him that many votes on the floor. Even if Sanders and Lieberman prove relatively reliable, you cannot say the same for all the official Democrats.

In two cases, there are issues of health. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is suffering from cancer and has not been seen on the Senate floor in weeks. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia has been in and out of the hospital and at 91 is a question mark on any given day.

Let's assume for the moment that on a major issue, both Byrd and Kennedy (the two longest-serving Democrats in Senate history) will find a way to weigh in. The real problem may come from those Democrats who are physically hale but whose political position is delicate.

Reid's most immediate problem may be the last vestiges of the Southern Democrats, a rump caucus that once dominated the chamber. Jimmy Carter had to worry about 18 Southern Democrats in the Senate in 1979, a power bloc that still considered itself the fulcrum for the institution. President Obama, by contrast, needs to tend to just seven, all of whom are very much products of the New South.

That means Reid and his Senate majority will find their consensus point somewhere well to the left of where it was in Carter's day.

But that fact alone raises the prospect of breakaway Democrats spoiling the perfection of 60. Even if all seven Southern Democrats do go along, Reid must keep an eye on Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Begich of Alaska -- just to name a few.

But if having 60 votes on paper is not a guarantee of success, it is only a guarantee that expectations will escalate. And in that sense it is more a burden than a boon.

That is the real downside to the new Democratic domination. What will the party do when shorn of the time-tested excuse of the filibuster?

Think about the House side of the equation. The chairmen of House committees have long been told they had to bend to the Senate version of legislation because of the filibuster and the challenges of life in the Senate. They are weary of watering down their bills so as to serve the peculiar prerogatives of "the other body."

Given the new math, everyone from David Obey at Appropriations to Charlie Rangel at Ways and Means and John Conyers at Judiciary is going to wonder why he still has to knuckle under.

Isn't it time, they will ask, for Reid to get his Democrats in line and vote these big Barack Obama initiatives and systemic overhauls into law?

And if Reid responds by doing precisely that, won't he make the Senate circus all the more partisan?

It may appear that attaining 60 votes is achieving the Holy Grail. But in fact, it is a distraction and even a temptation.

The true path to greater achievement in the Senate does not depend on a three-fifths majority oppressing a two-fifths minority. It relies on skillful leaders to craft compromises that allow supermajorities to form on big issues, supermajorities that include members from both parties.

That is how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, and in those days it took a far more daunting two-thirds majority (67) to shut off debate. Bipartisan deals also passed the tax cuts of the early 1980s and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.

There were similar moments in nearly every presidency since. And there may be more in the months to come.

The key is to bust the Myth of 60 as a magic wand for passing one-party bills. It may be useful as a threat or a fallback strategy, but reliance on a party-line vote to 60 will not bring Senate passage of health care, energy or financial regulation bills that truly matter.

For that, the president and his party will have to make law the old-fashioned Senate way, by bringing votes across the aisle one at a time.

8:57 AM ET | 07- 1-2009 | permalink

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Why Obama Has to Bail Out California, But Won't

Each year about this time, the nation turns its weary eyes to Sacramento, where the perennial late-June budget crisis has the Golden State on the verge of bankruptcy.

This year, the numbers are gaudier than ever. The state must close a $24 billion gap between revenues and expenditures by July 1 or run short on operating cash. The gap to be closed is bigger than most states' budgets in their entirety. And while last-minute maneuvering has averted disaster in the past, this year's negotiations are proving fruitless.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed selling the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and San Quentin prison, releasing thousands of prison inmates, closing more than 200 state parks, wiping out welfare for a half-million families and terminating health care coverage for nearly a million children in low-income households. But even all that is not enough when tens of billions of dollars must be found.

There's only one place where people fling such numbers about routinely without irony or awe. And that one place is Washington, D.C. That's why lots of Californians, cool as ever, shrug their well-tanned shoulders and say the feds will bail them out. Just like GM and AIG. Just like the banks.

Well, yes and no.

Yes, California is important to the health of the broader economy and body politic. Yes, California contributes 14 percent of the total national economy. If it were a separate country, its economy would be among the eight largest in the world.

And yes, the bankruptcy of its state government may well throw thousands of state and local government employees out of work, prompting more layoffs in the private sector. Staggered by such dislocation, California could slow or even abort the nation's nascent recovery from recession.

If that's not enough pressure on the president, consider the politics. All by itself, California supplies one-fifth of the Electoral College votes a candidate needs to become president, and in 2008 it cast its vote overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. Any strategy for his re-election begins here.

Moreover, the speaker of the House and the chairmen of a half-dozen major congressional committees all hail from California, which also happens to be by far the richest trove of campaign funds for all candidates for federal office.

And yet, and yet ... no.

No, the federal government is not about to bail out the state government of California. The cavalry is not riding to the rescue.

President Obama has expressed alarm, of course, but if you listen closely to what he says, you'll hear the federal Treasury door slamming shut. The White House has made it clear: Budget bailouts for individual state governments are not happening.

That's a source of frustration and anger for Californians, inclined as they are to believe that Washington is as much to blame for their predicament as Sacramento. They see little to admire in the budget shenanigans of other states and still less to emulate in the budgetary practices of Capitol Hill.

From the coastal perspective, putting California in the penalty box seems a pious show of parsimony and the height of Washington hypocrisy. Who can argue that California has been more profligate than, say, New York or Illinois? Or that its decisions have been more reckless than those of GM?

The difference, of course, is fairly simple. When the Obama administration decided to bail out GM, it did not have 49 other car companies standing in line behind it. A bailout for California would establish a profound precedent. If Washington decided to underwrite Sacramento this year, it would be on the hook to do it every year. And how could the White House or Congress say no to any other state that couldn't bring itself to balance its own books?

Wait now, the Californians say, it's not that simple. It's not that they don't want to be provident. The economy is down and unemployment is up, higher in California than anywhere but Michigan. State income tax revenue, the lifeblood of the budget, has fallen off by more than 30 percent. How can you blame California for its own suffering?

It's a decent argument. But four other states have experienced income tax declines equally steep or steeper. And none of them is a basket case as bad as California. That's because they all have a political mechanism for dealing with a budget crisis, even one so severe as this.

California, sadly, does not. That's why its current crisis is not really economic; it's governmental. California's political model has failed at the basic tasks of negotiation and compromise by which public sector budgets are built.

A century ago, progressive Californians such as Gov. Hiram Johnson installed populist inventions such as the initiative and referendum process. They did it to wrest control of the Legislature from the Southern Pacific Railroad and other monopolies.
In recent decades, these populist mechanisms have become increasingly popular as means to subvert the normal (and often gridlocked) legislative process. They have been used to commit the state to big spending programs for popular items like early education, but their main effect has been to limit revenue options severely.

Beginning with the watershed Proposition 13 in 1978, the state has hamstrung itself by walling off property values of longtime owners from tax inflation. Politically, it's hugely popular. In terms of fairness, economics and government policy, it's disastrous.

If that were not enough, the state Constitution also requires the budget to pass by two-thirds vote, the same vote required to raise taxes. Needless to say, doing either one has become impossible for all practical purposes.

Some elements of the state power structure have tried this year to regain control over the budget with new ballot measures designed to break the stalemate. But the April voting drew only a trickle of turnout, and the result was a lopsided refusal to pay any more or do with any less.

At this point, all sides seem resolved to remain at impasse and let someone else blink first.

After all, you can't just let California go.

Or can you?

2:36 PM ET | 06-23-2009 | permalink

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Sotomayor May Benefit From Another Bad Break

Even misfortune can be well timed. And if you have to have your lower leg in a cast and make your way on crutches for a while, why not do it when it can do you some good?

So it is for Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose nomination to the Supreme Court is pending in the Senate. She may be hobbled for a few weeks, but her confirmation is now definitely on wheels.

Boarding a shuttle flight in New York for her appointments in Washington this week, the appellate judge suffered a small fracture of her right ankle. But she immediately announced she would keep up her schedule of schmoozing the U.S. senators who will vote on her nomination.

That means for the next few weeks we will see the New Yorker efforting through Senate hallways with a plucky grin or a look of determination.

It's perfect.

Like it or not, getting Senate confirmation to a high-profile post has a lot to do with public acceptance, which depends largely on the human factor. Of course the approval ratings of the nominating president matter, as do the qualifications and views of the nominee. But you can't overlook that personal impression.

That is why current Chief Justice John Roberts was easily confirmed and Robert Bork was rejected -- even though their views may be hard to tell apart. Roberts appealed to the popular imagination as Mr. Perfect and Mr. Perfectly Humble. Bork came across as an arrogant, overbearing professor who wanted to be on the court to sample the "intellectual feast."

Consider too the last addition to the court, Justice Samuel Alito, who was chosen late in 2005 by President George W. Bush. Alito was the president's second choice after Harriet Miers, who had withdrawn after stirring controversy among conservatives. He was a man replacing a woman on the court (Sandra Day O'Connor) and a doctrinaire conservative replacing a moderate swing voter. But he had another problem. Call it judicial temperament if you like, but he came across as a bit of a cold fish.

No surprise, then, that initial reaction to the Alito nomination was tepid. An Ipsos survey in USA Today found only 38 percent of Americans backing him shortly after he was named. Among Republicans and evangelical Christians, his support was higher, but not nearly as high as Roberts had enjoyed earlier in the same year.

The Fox News poll had his backing at just 45 percent when the hearings began, and Alito's confirmation was by no means a done deal. Democrats, sensing a fresh wind at their back, were talking about a filibuster.

The hearings featured a monotonic Alito giving noncommittal answers to an array of Democratic inquisitors. The atmosphere grew increasingly tense until, on the second day, a Republican senator supporting Alito recited a long litany of the attacks against him. Suddenly, Alito's wife, Martha-Ann, broke down sobbing in her front row seat. She left the hearing room in tears.

The moment was captured and replayed endlessly on video that day and night and featured on the nation's front pages the next day. From then on, the anxiety that had hung in the room seemed to dissipate. At week's end, polls showed the public preferred Alito's performance to that of the committee. The die was cast: The ultimate Senate vote to confirm was 58 to 42.

Sotomayor's poll numbers have been better than Alito's from the start. A Quinnipiac University poll of more than 3,400 people nationwide in the first week of June found 55 percent supporting her confirmation. Her numbers held up among all races and religious groups except white evangelical Christians, who opposed her nomination 41 percent to 35 percent.

The very same Quinnipiac poll also found clear majorities in all categories disagreeing with Sotomayor on her most famous ruling. That would be the case in which she upheld the city of New Haven's decision to throw out a firefighters promotion exam on which minority applicants did poorly. Quinnipiac found more than 70 percent disagreed with that ruling, and 55 percent thought affirmative action should be abolished.

But at the same time, people didn't seem to hold the New Haven ruling against Sotomayor personally. That may be because her human characteristics, lifelong struggle and exemplary success still resonate with people of all kinds and views. Her personal story (diagnosed with diabetes at 8, losing her father at 9) has been a hit since the day President Obama stood with her at the White House and she saluted her mother, weeping in the front row.

In recent days, some of the early resistance to her nomination has weakened. Some of her most outspoken detractors have retracted their most quoted comments (Newt Gingrich said he shouldn't have called her a racist). Former first lady Laura Bush went on ABC saying Sotomayor's nomination made her feel proud as a woman.

In other words, being on Sotomayor's side seems the better place to be. In the end, the broken ankle may be just one more apparent disadvantage that ultimately makes this woman stronger, and harder to resist.

2:51 PM ET | 06- 9-2009 | permalink

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Can A New President Make A New World?

In his effort to reach out to the Muslim world from a lectern in Cairo, President Obama relied on the stark differences separating him from former president George W. Bush. This was at once the underlying strength of the speech, and its ultimate weakness.

Those who heard the speech, or who will hear of it, cannot fail to note the change of regime. For the Muslim world, and others disenchanted with the previous American president, nothing could be more welcome.

But from this point forward, the great virtue of being someone other than George W. Bush will pay diminishing returns. And while the speech foresaw a far better world for Muslims everywhere, it did not include a clear path or plan for getting there.

Unquestionably a visionary, the new American president is still working on being an architect and an engineer.

Perhaps it is too soon, even premature, for the new president to offer much in the way of concrete steps. He did grasp the nettle of Israel, at least briefly, acknowledging its right to exist alongside that of Palestine. He did scold the Israelis over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the expanding settlements in occupied territory, saying: "It is time for these settlements to stop."

But he did not go beyond what has been said on that subject before, notably in the early months of the administration of George W. Bush. On Nov. 16, 2001, Bush's secretary of state, Colin Powell, said this about the settlements in occupied territory:

"Israeli settlement activity has severely undermined Palestinian trust and hope. It pre-empts and prejudges the outcome of negotiations and, in doing so, cripples chances for real peace and security. The United States has long opposed settlement activity. ... Settlement activity must stop. For the sake of Palestinians and Israelis alike, the occupation must end."

In restraining himself on this as well as other subjects of extreme sensitivity, Obama was again using the combination of caution and candor we came to know over two years of presidential campaigning.

Once again, as in that campaign, the most resonant themes sounded by the new president were largely personal. Such as his name, his race and his personal story. The presence of Islam in his cultural DNA. All these elements are unique in the history of American presidents and can scarcely fail to impress.

Beyond that, this man, this new symbol of a different America, stands in contrast to his immediate predecessor in his fundamental worldview. Where the former president said terrorists simply "hate freedom," the new president finds the roots of resentment against the U.S. in centuries of Western colonialism.

And while he repeated the standard presidential vow to defend Americans against global threats, he described quite a different understanding of the threats. There was no reference, for example, to the word "evil." And when he spoke of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he called it "a war of choice," as opposed to a war of necessity.

These shifts on issues combine with his unique identity to inform the Obama appeal to Muslims, as well as to the international community in general. The combination has been enormously effective, and it may in time change the course of world events.

But the new president can rely on the newness and the contrast for only so long. Starting on a high note of expectation sets him up for dramatic downturns. As he acts to defend and represent American interests, as he inevitably must, he will seem less different. He will seem more American.

Touring the Great Pyramid at Giza after making his speech, the president was shown a hieroglyphic he found familiar. "It looks like me," he said, pointing to the prominent ears. His guide said the figure represented a man who had been a judge, a scholar and a priest. The president smiled.

A priest, a judge and a scholar. In his speech, Obama seemed to be reaching for a bit of all three. But as his presidency continues, he realizes he must expand his resume of careers. He will need to be a builder. Imagining the world as it could be is not enough.

1:29 PM ET | 06- 4-2009 | permalink

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The Weight Of The World Weighs On Obama

The default mode of Barack Obama is motion; the activism of his young presidency is everywhere in evidence.

From the day he took office, he has been a blur of executive orders and challenges to Congress, almost manic in reacting to economic upheaval at home and threats abroad — all the while pushing for new national systems for health care, energy use and education.

So it seemed a dramatic contrast this week to see him cooped up in a small space deep within the White House, sitting for a joint interview by NPR hosts Michele Norris and Steve Inskeep.

Was that really the national symbol, the focus of so much global excitement, folded into a modest chair in the ground-level library? Amid this rather casual collection of books, the man's legendary aura and energy seemed almost caged — temporarily under house arrest.

Those in the room saw Inskeep and Norris bore in on Middle East policy, the president engaging with his typical seriousness but less than his usual buoyancy. The problems discussed are vexing, and the vexation shows.

Check the presidential costume: black suit, white shirt, stylish silk tie (solid cerulean blue), preternatural calm. Check, double-check. He is fully himself, and yet not so. A note of weariness creeps into an answer. A sense of late afternoon hangs in the room.

The impression may have come from the day the president had already logged. In the morning, he had announced the bankruptcy filing of General Motors. Once the greatest private manufacturing concern in the world, the jewel of American capitalism, GM was becoming a ward of the state.

After that sobering event, the president paid a visit to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where he met with more than 50 patients wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. He awarded Purple Hearts. Both wars continue under his regime, and the fighting in Afghanistan is escalating.

It was also a day of news dominated by an airliner lost at sea and an abortion doctor shot dead at his church on Sunday morning. But beyond the downbeat tone of the day's affairs, the presidential attitude seemed to anticipate the week ahead — and the weeks to come.

This week takes Obama abroad, pursuing U.S. aims in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Europe. The centerpiece of the trip is a speech at Cairo University billed as an address to the Muslim world.

It is not often that one national leader is able to address hundreds of millions of people in foreign lands, let alone to do so with the intent of changing their minds about his country. But the unique circumstances of this one man's birth and upbringing, his name and phenomenal rise, have made such a moment possible.

The president is clearly mindful of the Cairo moment — its enormous potential to alter the pattern of decades and generations of hostility and misunderstanding. Even for a president, this is a weighty assignment. And this president is a man who writes his most important speeches largely by himself, sacrificing sleep for the splendid concentration of the wee hours.

Whatever may happen with the speech and world reaction, the president will return from his trip facing critical tests on Capitol Hill between now and the August recess. The main one is House consideration of a bill overhauling the health care delivery system. The president said this week that these two months will be "the make-or-break period ... the time where we've got to get this done."

All other issues, even the energy bill and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, will be distractions. This president in his first year will be judged on how he handles health care no less than on his stewardship of the economy. And health care is not a hurdle he can clear with a speech, no matter how eloquent or visionary.

Contemplating all this might make anyone's demeanor somber.

5:25 PM ET | 06- 2-2009 | permalink

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Does Sotomayor Have An Empathy Problem?

President Obama's first nominee for the Supreme Court arrives on the playing field with momentum that will be difficult to stop. At 54, Sonia Sotomayor is the ideal age and has all the right academic and judicial credentials. She would upgrade the court's diversity of gender and ethnicity. She has an inspiring personal story of aspiration, work and sacrifice. Her mother sat in the East Room of the White House weeping with joy at her appointment ceremony.

So how might this bullet train to the high court be derailed? That is the question for conservatives who oppose her (or may eventually do so), as well as for supporters who want to see her nomination confirmed as swiftly as possible.

Sotomayor will attract opposition for her views on abortion, gay marriage and other cultural issues. An unpopular ruling on affirmative action that she joined may soon be overturned by the current Supreme Court, with attendant publicity. And she has made several ill-advised remarks regarding policymaking from the bench and the advantages of judgment some Latinas may have over certain white males.

But these are the predictable squabbles over ideology and judicial philosophy and personal expression that one might expect from any judge likely to be appointed by a Democratic president in our time. The damaging quotations from speeches may well be handled in a few deft lines when Sotomayor settles in for a session with the Senate Judiciary Committee in July.

A potentially greater source of vulnerability may be implied by a term that President Obama and others have been using lately. The term is empathy. In the parlance of their party, Democrats use this word to mean sensitivity to the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. Why shouldn't a judge, exercising the great power the Constitution has reserved for the judiciary, show compassion for the consequences?

Republicans, for their part, regard empathy as a code word for emotion. They imply that emotion, in the context of jurisprudence, is tantamount to irrationality. Lately, Republicans have made frequent reference to "feelings," as in "the court should apply the law as written, irrespective of the feelings of the individual justices." Getting in touch with one's feelings might be good therapy, the conservatives say, but it's a lousy way to decide big cases.

An emphasis on feelings also plays to prejudices about Sotomayor's sex (the word hysteria is rooted in a Greek word for women) and ethnicity (the Latin character is almost synonymous with emotionality). But these subtexts function as undercurrents. The direct attack is on the notion that a judge who empathizes with people is a bad judge.

This is one way to read the frequent references being made to the symbolic statue of Justice, holding aloft the scales while wearing a blindfold. To be truly impartial, the implication would have it, one needs to be oblivious.

One can wonder whether any such concept of justice stands up to scrutiny. Is it really a superior intellectual system that seeks to apply only a dispassionate reading of laws written generations or even centuries earlier? Or is that a mental construct that glorifies the status quo, justifying economic and political arrangements as they are?

Empathy also implies a sharing -- whether of values or circumstances or experience. It may be obvious to some that any such identification constitutes a conflict of interest for a judge, especially a Supreme Court justice. But if the presence of such connections implies partiality, what does the absence of such connections imply?

Ultimately, Sotomayor has more going for her than any one nominee has any right to expect. In addition to her qualifications and attributes, she has the potent advantage of representing a group that is now the largest political minority in the U.S. and the fastest-growing. Hispanics are increasingly able to vote, and increasingly likely to vote Democratic. The last thing minority Republicans need right now is to deny a Hispanic a seat on a court that has never had one.

It is also dangerous for Republicans to go too far in seeking a dehumanized rationality on the high court. The public wants sensible and evenhanded judges. But there is little evidence that the public wants automotons.

When the last new justice, Samuel Alito, was appointed in 2005, he began his confirmation process as an unknown and a bit of a cold fish. The public did not fall in line behind his nomination until after his wife had fled the hearing room one afternoon in tears, distraught at the way her husband was being caricatured.

After that emotional moment, featured endlessly in the media, the polarity switch was thrown and the energy flowed in the nominee's favor. In the end, concerted Democratic opposition was unable to threaten his confirmation.

Sotomayor begins her confirmation battle with the emotional polarity already in her favor. So long as she maintains that advantage, and so long as the facts of her case remain as they are today, resisting her will cost opponents more than it gains them.

8:25 AM ET | 05-27-2009 | permalink

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What Do Cheney And Pelosi Have In Common?

No one will ever mistake House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Dick Cheney for soul mates, but the two have a lot in common.

Lately, they have in common the issue of torture, and the burden of things they knew about it, did about it or said about it in the difficult months of late 2002 and early 2003.

Few periods in our history raise as many searching questions as that anxious year and a half between the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And the Republican Cheney and Democrat Pelosi bear the weight of those months as it falls on their respective parties.

Cheney defends the use of "extreme techniques" while refusing to call waterboarding torture. Pelosi insists she did not know about waterboarding despite claims to the contrary, and she accuses the CIA of lying to her and to Congress.

Both have been cast as scapegoats by forces both within and beyond their control. They have chosen to speak out, but they were also compelled to do so by their histories.

Both these partisan leaders are products of the political struggles they have seen and sought over the past generation. They come to the events of our time as embodiments of the electoral and ideological combat of decades past.

It sometimes surprises people to realize that this man and woman represent the same political vintage. Cheney has long cultivated an image of seniority and experience, personifying the grumpy grandpa. For her part, Pelosi is just as well-known for a glamor and a spitfire style that belie her age.

Yet Pelosi, at 69, is actually 10 months older than Cheney, who is still 68.

So why does Cheney come across as her uncle? Possibly because he has been in Washington politics for four decades. Pelosi was still serving on the San Francisco Library Commission when Cheney moved up to chief of staff in the White House of President Gerald Ford. That was in 1975.

In the later 1970s, Cheney was elected to Congress from his native Wyoming and Pelosi became the Democratic Party chair for Northern California. In the 1980s, Cheney moved up into the inner circle of GOP leadership in the House. Pelosi became the party chair for California and a member of the Democratic National Committee, jobs that would accommodate the five children she still had at home.

When her youngest entered high school, Pelosi ran in a special election for a vacant seat and joined Cheney in Congress. That was in 1987.

The two were members of Congress together for less than two years. Early in 1989, Cheney left to become secretary of defense for President George H.W. Bush. Pelosi stayed in the House, got on the Appropriations and Select Intelligence committees. Cheney flirted with a presidential run in the mid-'90s before settling into a corporate role at Halliburton.

Throughout the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the two could be found on opposite sides of the issues that divided Americans most profoundly: Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, nuclear weapons, taxes and defense spending, abortion, gun rights and gay rights, Supreme Court justices and the balance between energy and the environment.

Their careers were steeped in the conflicts of their time. And, in a sense, they are bound together today by their lifelong investment in those conflicts. For 30 years, they have each raised millions of dollars and logged countless air miles for congressional candidates, from safe incumbents to long-shot challengers.

Such labor in the field makes a difference, but it also takes a toll. It can wear even the happiest warrior down until little but warrior remains.

President Obama has said he wants to open a new epoch in American politics. Throughout his campaign, and in the weeks that followed his election, Obama said he saw nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past. It was remarkable that he said this, in part because his own candidacy was based on opposition to the war in Iraq and other salient elements of the administration of George W. Bush. But he sensed that looking backward would be a distraction from his ambitious plans for the future.

Since his inauguration, of course, President Obama has found it increasingly difficult to maintain this focus. The past rises up on all sides, not just distracting but overwhelming. The torture conundrum, the photos of prisoner abuse, the fate of internees at Guantanamo, the next moves to be made in Iraq and Afghanistan -- all these persist, but the most perplexing is torture.

To some degree, Obama brought the torture issue to a boil himself by releasing in April the legal memos the Bush administration relied on to legitimize its interrogation methods. But his decision to do so reflected a realization that some issues from the past cannot be forgotten.

That is especially true when actors from the past remain so visibly onstage. In Pelosi's case, her role as senior House Democrat on Intelligence in 2002 clings to her. But more important, any culpability she has for what she may have known about torture at the time is magnified by her current elevation. The speaker, as everyone should know by now, stands next in the White House succession after the vice president.

Cheney's prominence is more voluntary. He might have left the capital and kept his own counsel. That's what his former bosses, both Presidents Bush, chose to do. But Cheney, the veteran of all these wars over all these years, cannot bring himself to leave the field.

Judging by recent polls, neither Cheney nor Pelosi has gained much popularity with their efforts to justify their performance in 2002 and 2003. Partisans on either side will defend their own, but watching these two war horses makes the rest of us wonder: What will it take to shake our preoccupation with the past?

10:12 AM ET | 05-21-2009 | permalink

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What Is Dick Cheney Trying To Accomplish?

Even before this week, it was apparent Dick Cheney would not go gently into the not-so-good night of a former vice president.

The man whom many consider the most powerful veep in history had already been far more vocal and visible than most of his predecessors in retirement. This week in particular, the former No. 2 has been out there almost daily, doing talk shows and giving a formal address to the American Enterprise Institute on the importance of interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture.

Along the way, he is also unburdening himself of opinions on everything else, from tax policy to the fate of the GOP to the choice of a commanding general in Afghanistan. Once known for his reticence and low profile, the man from Wyoming is suddenly his party's most prominent national figure and audible voice. He is having his catharsis, and having it abundantly.

The change is less in Cheney than in the surrounding circumstances. He stands out now in large part because no one else so senior and salient in the Bush administration has come forward to defend the extreme interrogations. And Cheney has come out swinging. He denies waterboarding is torture, denies breaking any laws in using it and insists plenty of high-placed Democrats knew about it. And when he says the Obama regime is making America less safe, he says it in the short, sharp, simple way that makes for a good crawl line on cable TV news.

Once he has your attention, Cheney insists the rough stuff was used to reveal new plots like the Sept. 11 attacks, not to get suspects to provide links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. He sidesteps the complex debate about whether torture yields unique results, reinforces what other techniques reveal or produces false leads. He also elides the equally challenging problem of torture's blowback effect: How much terrorism do we engender in our future by using these tactics today?

Grasping these nettles would not be useful to the vice president's point, which is that torture (by any name) works. In pushing this idea, he relies less on evidence than on the common, intuitive notion that torturing people until they talk makes people tell you things. Otherwise, why has torture been so common through the ages?

All the expert testimony in the world has a hard time counterbalancing that inexpert and rhetorical question. For many, no evidence ever will.

But that does not speak to Cheney's own motivation in his current media blitz. To understand his current drive to change the national conversation, we have to consider multiple motives.

First, Cheney is not a hired apologist or a campaign strategist but a true believer. He sees the Obama administration's rejection of waterboarding and other harsh tactics as weakening the overall U.S. defense against another massive attack. By questioning that policy, Cheney hopes to reverse it. He is defending his own anti-terrorism policy because he still believes in it.

Second, Cheney is a political scientist and amateur historian who can see the consensus emerging all around him with regard to the Bush administration. For the moment, at least, the consensus judges harshly the decision to invade Iraq and the eagerness to subject individual terrorism suspects to waterboarding -- in some cases scores of times. Cheney feels it necessary to get out there and defend what is left of the Bush-Cheney legacy, before the drumbeat of condemnation grows deafening.

Third, Cheney is exercising some of his personal First Amendment rights. He is a man of strong views, and it has been some time since he could express them freely. He endured eight years of a tight leash in a White House that listened to him (maybe too much) but thought others should not. When Cheney spoke in public in the later Bush years, it was nearly always to Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or to smaller audiences in the most loyal Republican states.

Cheney had tremendous, perhaps unprecedented influence in and around the Oval Office itself. But his public image, quite positive during his time as secretary of defense in the early 1990s, deteriorated badly. He became associated with an unpopular war, an unpopular oil industry and, of course, an unpopular Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney was largely responsible for Rumsfeld's role as secretary of defense in George W. Bush's administration, as Rumsfeld had been responsible for Cheney's rise in the Gerald Ford administration 25 years earlier.

And all that came before the hunting accident in Texas cast the shotgun-toting vice president as buffoon.

So the political side of the White House saw Cheney as a problem factor in the swing states and among the swing voters who decide national elections. The flip side is on display these days, as the Obama White House gleefully pounces on whatever Cheney says and gloats over his low personal approval ratings in polls.

Cheney knows all this. But in 2009, he no longer needs to care. If he finds himself exasperated by what he sees around him, he can jolly well answer his telephone, book himself a broadcast opportunity or two and fire back. How many other people who have lost their jobs in recent months can do the same?

10:59 AM ET | 05-13-2009 | permalink

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Kemp Evoked Era And Spirit Of Reagan's Rise

I first met Jack Kemp 30 years ago in an oak-paneled room of the Wisconsin Club, a private venue for businessmen in downtown Milwaukee. He was there to address a luncheon meeting of the Pachyderm Club, obviously a Republican gathering, and I was there as a cub reporter for The Milwaukee Journal.

Kemp held forth for the better part of an hour on something he called "supply-side economics." The audience of traditional, Midwestern conservatives looked skeptical.

They were fine with Kemp's drive to cut taxes, especially the taxes investors pay on capital gains and dividends. They had no problem with the notion that these tax cuts would unleash freshets of capital and refresh economic growth.

But when Kemp talked about cutting the income tax rate by 10 percent each year for three years, some in the room asked how federal spending could be cut commensurately. Kemp said that didn't matter; deficits would not be a problem and growth would restore the budget to balance in time.

This last proposition did not sit so well with the Pachyderms, who began to drift away after getting their coffee. When the congressman paused for breath, I asked whether his deep tax cut and deficit owed something to the stimulative strategies John Maynard Keynes pushed during the Great Depression. Kemp's eyes got wide. "No, no it's not Keynes," he said, his face contorted in horror. "Stick around; I want to talk to you."

And so I stuck around to confront the persona of Jack Kemp. Having grown up in an American Football League town, I knew him as the charismatic quarterback who led the Buffalo Bills to two AFL titles in the 1960s. I knew he had moved on to politics, working for Gov. Ronald Reagan in California and then winning a seat in Congress in a Buffalo district. By the late 1970s, while still in his early 40s, Kemp was being promoted as a national figure, a good-looking ex-jock who liked to talk about ideas.

And did he ever. Once all the club members and other guests had disappeared, the congressman opened up his briefcase and poured out his program with all the passion he once brought to football. He waxed rhapsodic about the "Laffer curve," then regarded as a crackpot notion from a rather obscure academic. It purported to predict how lower tax rates would improve federal tax revenues and wipe out the budget deficit.

Of course, Arthur Laffer and his curve were to become much better known in 1981, when Reagan moved from California to Washington as president and pushed a modified version of the Kemp tax cut through Congress in his first months in office.

The early 1980s were a good time to be Jack Kemp. A new generation of like-minded youthful conservatives had begun to arrive and rise in the chamber — including Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, David Stockman and Dick Cheney.

But more important to Kemp was the rise of his ideas. The Reagan program looked radical at first, and the country took a while to climb out of the worst recession it had seen since the Great Depression. But when the economy turned up, Reagan's stock rose dramatically — and Kemp's did likewise.

He was a prophet of the positive. The GOP had to talk about expanding wealth and giving people a chance to do better. It had to stop being "the party of root canal," stop carping about the federal debt and deficits because those issues mattered only to those who would be voting Republican in any case. Kemp was all about reaching out to people who had never voted Republican, or at least not in decades.

Kemp moved the ball a long way for his party, and he got a fair share of attention for it. But he never got to wield much of the power his party won. He served nine terms in the House with his party mired deep in the minority, giving up his seat to run for president in 1988. That presidential campaign never quite got off the ground, and Kemp quit the race before the end of March.

The man elected president that year, George H.W. Bush, gave his former rival a Cabinet job as secretary of housing and urban development. It was a chance for Kemp to try out some of his ideas, such as "urban enterprise zones." Kemp stuck it out as a team player, but it was far from the role he had been preparing for all his life.

When the first Bush administration ended in 1993, Kemp headed for the private sector. The following year, he watched from the sidelines as one of his junior colleagues from his House days, Newt Gingrich, led a successful assault on Capitol Hill and became the first Republican speaker in 40 years.

In the summer and fall of 1996, Kemp had one last hurrah as the Republican candidate for vice president. He and top-of-the-ticket partner Bob Dole had never been close, and the strain showed at times during their losing campaign. Kemp had often said the one position he cared to play on a football team was quarterback, and it showed.

Kemp declined to mount another presidential bid of his own in 2000 and did not join the new Republican administration organized that year by the second President Bush. He had not been in the public eye often in recent years. His story always seemed unfinished, his potential unfulfilled.

So it was sad this weekend to learn of his death, to reflect on what he brought to the party and the Congress, and to mourn what has been lost since he left the national political stage. He embodied much of the spirit that lifted Reagan at his zenith, including Reagan's ability to make conservative economics appealing to the working class.

Kemp never figured out how to finesse the conflict between his party's economic and social agendas. He preferred to focus on the essentially egalitarian notion that any and all individuals should be allowed to go as far as their talent and work would take them. He was the original big-tent Republican, all about outreach and welcome, as eager to expand the party as he was to expand the economy.

He always had the sunny, eternally upbeat manner so many saw in Reagan in the White House. With Kemp's passing, those days suddenly seem distant indeed.

7:49 PM ET | 05- 4-2009 | permalink

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