Tax compromise, DADT, and a big step today on the START treaty... so much for a lameduck session and political gridlock....
By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post Writers Group
If Barack Obama wins re-election in 2012, as is now more likely than not, historians will mark his comeback as beginning on Dec. 6, the day of the Great Tax Cut Deal.
Obama had a bad November. Self-confessedly shellacked in the midterm election, he fled the scene to Asia and various unsuccessful meetings, only to return to a sad-sack lame-duck Congress with ghostly dozens of defeated Democrats wandering the halls.
Now, with his stunning tax deal, Obama is back. Holding no high cards, he nonetheless managed to resurface suddenly not just as a player but as orchestrator and central actor in a high $1 trillion drama.
Compare this with Bill Clinton, greatest of all comeback kids, who, at a news conference a full five months after his shellacking in 1994, was reduced to plaintively protesting that "the president is relevant here." He had been so humiliatingly sidelined that he did not really recover until late 1995 when he outmaneuvered Newt Gingrich in the government-shutdown showdown.
And that was Clinton responding nimbly to political opportunity. Obama fashioned out of thin air his return to relevance.
Remember the question after Election Day: Can Obama move to the center to win back independents? And if so, how long would it take? Answer: Five weeks. An indoor record, although an asterisk should denote that he had help — Republicans clearing his path and sprinkling it with rose petals.
Obama's repositioning to the center was first symbolized by his joint appearance with Clinton, the quintessential centrist Democrat, and followed days later by the overwhelming 81-19 Senate majority that supported the deal. That bipartisan margin will go a long way toward erasing the partisan stigma of Obama's first two years.
Despite this, some on the right are gloating that Obama had been maneuvered into forfeiting his liberal base. Nonsense. He will never lose his base. Where do they go? Liberals will never have a president as ideologically kindred — and they know it. For the left, Obama is as good as it gets in a country that is barely 20 percent liberal.
The conservative gloaters were simply fooled again by the flapping and squawking that liberals ritually engage in before folding at Obama's feet. And Obama pulled this off at his lowest political ebb. After the shambles of the election and with no bargaining power — Republicans could have gotten everything they wanted on the Bush tax cuts retroactively in January without fear of an Obama veto — he walks away with what even Paul Ryan admits was $313 billion in superfluous spending.
Including a $6 billion subsidy for ethanol. Why, just a few weeks ago Al Gore, the Earth King, finally confessed that ethanol subsidies were a mistake. There is not a single economic or environmental rationale left for this boondoggle, and the Republicans have just revived it.
Even as they were near unanimously voting for this monstrosity, Republicans began protesting $8.3 billion of earmarks in Harry Reid's omnibus spending bill. They seem not to understand how ridiculous this looks after having agreed to a Stimulus II that even by their own generous reckoning has 38 times as much spending as all these earmarks combined.
The greatest mistake Ronald Reagan's opponents ever made — and they made it over and over again — was to underestimate him. Same with Obama. The difference is that Reagan was so deeply self-assured that he invited underestimation — low expectations are a priceless political asset — whereas Obama's vanity makes him always needing to appear the smartest guy in the room. Hence that display of prickliness in his disastrous post-deal news conference last week.
But don't be fooled by defensive style or thin-skinned temperament. The president is a very smart man. How smart? His comeback is already a year ahead of Clinton's.
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President Barack Obama may be staging a comeback in the eyes of the American people, a new poll suggests.
In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Monday, 48 percent of Americans say they approve of how Obama is handling his job, while 48 percent disapprove.
The disapproval number is the lowest it’s been since May, when it was 46 percent in the same poll. His disapproval rating reached as high as 54 percent in September — when the five-month Gulf Coast oil spill saga ended — and clocked in at 50 percent in November.
The president also received more support for his policies than at any other time since mid-2009. Fifty-five percent of Americans said the country would head in the right direction under policies proposed by Obama; in May 2009, 63 percent of those surveyed said Obama’s policies would lead the country in the right direction. In January, the last time pollsters asked about Obama’s policies, just 49 percent said they would improve the country.
The Republican leadership in the House and Senate didn’t fare as well. In the poll, 44 percent of Americans said the GOP’s proposed policies would lead the country in the right direction, while 51 percent said they would take the country in the wrong direction. Policy proposals from congressional Democrats were supported by 48 percent of those polled.
Opinion Research Corp. surveyed 1,008 adults by phone Dec. 17-19. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.
The poll comes on the heels of more positive polling news: A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey last week showed 42 percent of Americans said they would probably vote to reelect the president, while 39 percent said they would vote for a generic Republican candidate.
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The upcoming Senate vote on a U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty may turn out to be a defining moment for the Obama administration's foreign policy.
If he wins the support of at least two-thirds of the Senate for the New START agreement in a vote that may come as early as Tuesday, President Obama could build on the victory as he turns to a long list of foreign policy challenges — including Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and his broader plans to limit nuclear weapons.
Failure would be regarded in some world capitals as confirmation that the administration is too weak and preoccupied with domestic problems to put its stamp on world affairs.
With the Republican Senate leadership lined up against approving the treaty in the last days of a lame-duck session, the issue will be decided by a handful of GOP senators. Supporters are expected to vote to cut off debate on Tuesday, a step that would open the way for a final vote later in the day or on Wednesday.
The administration has made controlling nuclear weapons a major foreign policy goal and held out its "reset" of relations with Russia over the last two years as its most tangible international accomplishment. It views the New START treaty, which would reduce the ceiling on long-distance nuclear warheads by up to 30%, as the centerpiece of that relationship.
Russia has enormous influence in many key areas. It has close economic ties to Iran, including in civil nuclear power, and as a member of the U.N. Security Council, its cooperation is essential to pressure the Islamic Republic to accept limits on its nuclear program. Twenty years after Moscow ended its own war in Afghanistan, it has recently expressed a willingness to cooperate with the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries there. And Russia is one of five countries engaged in sporadic talks with North Korea about its nuclear program.
Other countries will also be watching. The vote will probably help them decide whether it's in their interest to cooperate with Obama.
"At this point, he needs a foreign-policy win," said Paul Saunders, a former State Department official at the Nixon Center in Washington.
The vote comes at a time when world powers have been reassessing the administration's power in light of its midterm election setbacks, the unraveling this month of its strategy for Arab-Israeli peacemaking, and other reversals.
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