Reprinted from the Feeherytheory.com

I ran into Congressman Jimmy Duncan in the hall of the Capitol and we had a little chat.

Duncan is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet, a savvy politician who is completely honest and to the untrained eye, just an awe-shucks, country lawyer type of person.

Duncan has taken some tough votes in his career.  He votes against pretty much all spending bills and he voted against the Iraq War, votes that in hindsight look pretty smart.  He is an old-time conservative, but he isn’t one to beat his own chest or pontificate too much.

Anyway, I asked Mr. Duncan what he thought about the upcoming election, and he was upbeat.  He told me that he hasn’t seen this kind of excitement from the Republican base since 1994.  He said that each year he hosts a big event for his campaign in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.  He typically gets around 500 hundred to show up, but in 1994, Newt Gingrich drew 1200.

This year, he told me he invited John Thune.  And guess what?  Thune is expected to match Newt’s total from sixteen years ago.

John Thune is probably the only potential Republican Presidential candidate who can take President Obama in a basketball game of one-on-one.   I have played the round ball with the Senator from South Dakota, and believe me, he has skills.  He has a nice jump shot, he’s very athletic, he can jump and he can run like a gazelle.  I haven’t seen POTUS play up close, but just watching him on television, my guess is that Thune could take him pretty easily on the basketball court.

The question that many Republicans are asking today is:  Can Thune take Obama one-on-one in the political arena?

And the more GOPers look at the potential primary field, the better Thune looks.

Thune has some obvious attributes that help.  He is conservative in all the right places, but he isn’t so strident that he alienates the middle of the political spectrum.  He comes from small town America, his father was a World War II combat veteran, he is not in any way slick, and he has a down-to-earth quality that is genuine and sincere.

While he is a nice guy, he is also a fierce competitor who made a national name for himself by knocking off former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle six years ago.  He will always be a hero to many on the right for beating Mr. Daschle.

Some will question if Thune has the experience to run for President, but his experience at the House and Senate far exceeds that of both Mr. Obama, our current President, and Sarah Palin, who now looks to be the Republican front-runner.  He certainly is more trusted by the right than Mitt Romney, is less toxic to the middle than Mike Huckabee, has more charisma than Mitch Daniels, and has more star power than Haley Barbour.

I have written positively about Daniels and Barbour as potential candidates in the past, and I have not changed my opinion of either one of them.  I think both Mitch and Haley would make great Presidents, but I don’t get the clear sense that either one of them are willing to throw their hats in the ring quite yet.

I don’t know if Thune is ready to jump in yet either.  He still has to get re-elected this fall (which shouldn’t be much a problem for him), and then he has to convince his family that the time is right for him to upend their lives and make a run for the White House.

John Bresnahan wrote an interesting piece about Thune where he quoted Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the Democratic National Committee Executive Director, as saying, “This is personal, but John Thune is somebody that I have nightmares about.  I have worked for Tim Johnson and Tom Daschle, and he is just a guy you can’t ever count out.  He has his head down and is doing some policy stuff.  (You’ve) just got to start looking at him.”

Well, obviously the folks in Knoxville, Tennessee have gotten the memo and they are lining up to start looking at him this August.

Editor’s note:  John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. He is president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy.

Reprinted from weeklystandard.com

            Last November, as members of the House of Representatives considered the health care reform bill, President Obama made a dramatic trip to Capitol Hill. After closing down sixteen blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue, a half-mile long White House motorcade whisked the presidential entourage past cheering tourists to meet with the House Democratic Caucus.

            Despite the drama, these trips rarely occur if the outcome is unknown.  No sense aggravating a bunch of taxi drivers if you’re not going to win.

            When he arrived before the roaring group of lawmakers, the president oozed transformational hyperbole.  Even lowly House members could “make history” by passing the measure, the president apparently told his audience, according to news accounts.

           But not everyone bought the narrative.

            “He can make history,” one conservative Democrat reportedly said after the meeting. “But I’ll be history if I vote for that thing.”

            Notwithstanding those concerns, we all know how the story ended.

            Democratic partisans hoped enacting health care would boost the president’s and Congress’s sagging popularity, particularly with fickle independent voters that supported Democrats in 2006 and 2008, but have moved decidedly in the GOP’s direction this year.

            The same calculus motivated the Democratic leadership’s sales pitch for stimulus legislation, cap-and-trade, and the Wall Street reform bill.

            Legislative success produces political popularity, Democrats argue. Bill Clinton and his party, after all, lost the majority in Congress in 1994 because they failed to pass health care, right?

            Yet despite all the legislative notches carved in their belts, Democratic prospects for 2010 still look bleak.  It turns out congressional productivity isn’t political alchemy after all.

            Some believe it’s content, not volume, hurting the Democrats.  But that argument explains only part of the problem. Other clouds contribute to Obama and his party’s dreary political state. Indeed, nagging fears about the economy also deepen voter angst.

            The party in power catches the brunt of the political fallout from a bad economy, and this year, independents appear ready to take out their frustrations surrounding stubbornly high unemployment out on the Democrats.

            But beyond policy disagreements and a languid economy, I believe a third explanation deserves consideration, particularly when it comes to that often pivotal 10 to 15 percent of the electorate: Independents do not identify or lean toward one party or the other.

            These voters, by and large, value balance. By more than a 2-1 margin, an April 2010 Resurgent Republic poll found independents favored a Republican Congress to serve as a check-and-balance on President Obama compared to a Democratic Congress to help the White House pass its agenda.

            So what have these voters witnessed from Washington in the past eighteen months? First, a president who promised to rise above partisanship. Second, a Democratic majority in Congress with the means to accomplish its goals without any Republican support on major issues like stimulus, cap-and-trade, health care, and Wall Street reform.

            Together, these two factors sowed seeds of doubt among independents.

            A Republican political consultant I talked to elaborated. “What I’ve seen in polling and focus groups is that a red flag goes up with these independents when they watch what has happened over the past year or so. They wonder how it can be that nearly everyone from one party is for something and everyone from the other party is against it.  Something fishy must be going on!”

            A Democratic lobbyist I talked to agreed.  “George Bush and Barack Obama have one thing in common. Neither one wanted to pick big fights with their own party. Both had a figurative chat with their congressional leaders who told them, ‘Mr. President you can do this the hard way or the easy way.’ Both Bush and Obama chose  ‘the easy way’ which meant a no confrontation approach with your party and walking in lockstep against the other side. That turns off independents.”

            Strong partisan behavior always aggravates voters with weak or nonexistent partisan ties. Collective decisions by the president and his party leaders in Congress to bypass Republicans over the past eighteen months have contributed to a sharp decline in Democrats’ standing with independent voters.   And as a result, there won’t be nearly as many cheerleaders in the majority party when Obama comes to call on the Hill this winter.    

Editor’s Note: Gary Andres is Vice Chairman of Research for Dutko Worldwide and writes a weekly column for the Weekly Standard and the Hearst Newspapers.

The news media hailed President Obama’s victory on the Wall Street reform bill signed into law earlier this week as another example of his legislative prowess.

When it comes to congressional arm-twisting, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, like others, extolled him as a modern day LBJ.

 “If passage of the financial regulatory overhaul on Thursday proves anything about President Obama it is this,” Stolberg wrote.  “He knows how to push big bills through a balky Congress.”

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor last week, Linda Feldman shared the sentiment: “Passage of financial regulatory reform signals another landmark legislative victory for President Obama, following the Recovery Act and health-care reform.”

But is Obama the new master of the Capitol?  Or, instead, is his large Democratic herd on the Hill more responsible for these victories?

Despite the media adulation, the size of the Democratic pack in Congress explains a lot more about the White House’s legislative success than anything else. And ironically, the partisan nature of these first term “wins” will shrink the size of his party’s congressional margins next year, hampering his future effectiveness, even if he deploys the same tactics. It’s all about the numbers.

Emphasis on the president’s personal legislative skills is not unique to the current White House occupant. In his book, Legislating Together, UCLA political scientist Mark A. Peterson describes this orientation as a “presidency centered perspective.”  It’s a metaphor, according to Peterson, firmly rooted in the popular imagination. “Whether the president succeeds or fails…depends upon the skill with which the president fashions influence, which itself is derived from the national expectation that the unifying force of political leadership resides in the Oval Office.”

Peterson observed this tendency twenty years ago. But it’s still true today, given the cult of personality surrounding Obama.  Whenever Congress tries something big, it’s all about the success or failure of the White House agenda. And whether he wins or loses, it’s all about him – his skill, his efforts, and his legacy.

But as Texas A&M professor George C. Edwards III contends in his book, At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress,  “Presidential efforts at leading Congress do not occur in a vacuum. To understand presidential leadership one must also understand the context in which it takes place.”

Edwards argues “despite the conventional wisdom that attributes substantial importance to a president’s legislative skills in determining support for the president on congressional votes, there is good reason to be cautious in accepting this conclusion at face value. Other factors are likely to exercise more influence on congressional voting.”

Other scholars agree.  Political scientists Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher in their book The President in the Legislative Arena conclude: “[T]here is little the president can do to move members of Congress very far from their basic political predisposition.”  Congressional leaders, Bond and Fleisher argue, hold more sway than presidents over lawmakers. “Congressional leaders are likely to have more influence on how Congress responds to presidential preferences than anything the president can do personally.”

After all, Obama’s legislative victories were not based on bills crafted by the White House.  Democratic leaders in Congress formulated the stimulus legislation, health care, and, most recently, the Wall Street reform bill.

No doubt the White House share “wins,” but they occurred because congressional leaders knew their respective caucuses and plotted intra-party deals.

And Democratic Caucus politics in Congress marches to its own drummer. Legislative leaders evaluate the political landscape, develop agendas, and grapple with internal demands from rank-in-file lawmakers. The issues under consideration are not inconsistent with the White House, but Congress is not unlike most unwieldy institutions: It takes care of its own.

Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid believed enacting these big “reforms” would eventually produce political propellant for their caucuses.

They didn’t do it because Barack Obama twisted their arms.  Instead, they thought it was the right thing to do, and they believed it would ultimately help Democrats maintain their majority in Congress.

Big legislative majorities always help president’s look quasi-omnipotent when it comes to relations with Congress.  But Mr. Obama “won” his battles because he was part of a stampeding Democratic majority that badly outnumbered the other side.  His victories would have been more impressive if he occasionally challenged his own team or negotiated something other than token GOP support.

Yet Obama’s victories have been pyrrhic; their partisan nature will undoubtedly thin the Democratic herd this November.   A year from now, no one is going to be making analogies to LBJ.  
Editor’s Note: Gary Andres is Vice Chairman of Research for Dutko Worldwide and writes a weekly column for the Weekly Standard and the Hearst Newspapers.

Reprinted in part from washingtonexaminer.com

            “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

            In the 20 years I’ve known him, Jeff has never uttered words like that about the wholesale-distributor business he built from scratch over the past 25 years in Maryland, D.C. and Delaware. He’s had ups and downs like every small business, but he’s always seemed to know instinctively what to do, either to sustain existing business, or, in good times, expand into new areas and new brands.

            We were talking about the frustrations of small business, his and others like it all across the country, that can’t hire, invest and expand because there is so much uncertainty about what the future holds.

            Jeff ticked off just a few of his concerns: health care mandates; new and higher taxes and fees; the cost to the consumer of new financial services regulations; new workplace rules, and new rules and regulations that may come from environment and energy reform. The list goes on.

            There is always uncertainty in times of recession, but this time it’s different.  The uncertainty is rooted in politics as well as economics.

      The Obama Administration entered office in 2009, and soon after passing a stimulus bill, it embarked on a historic transformation of American government and society, right in the middle of the recession. The pivot to the liberal agenda just drained the energy out of the focus on economic recover.

            It was as though President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office after the inauguration and was transfixed on the glare of the window of opportunity.  It was an opportunity to rekindle the activism and empowerment of government borne and nurtured in the Roosevelt and Johnson presidencies. But by making wrenching changes in government policy in a short period of time, he would risk injuring the very entities needed to spur economic recovery—financial institutions and small businesses.

            The Obama Administration didn’t cause the recession. The Obama Administration isn’t singularly or even mostly responsible for stagnation now.  Those seeds were planted a decade ago.  But the President can be charged with negligence.  He wasted a year on a political agenda while the economic agenda was treated with only rhetoric.

            What is the result of this mixture of politics and economics? 

            Republican Leader John Boehner and Congressmen Peter Roskam and Aaron Schock recently held a small business summit with the U.S. Chamber, the International Franchise Association, National Federation of Independent Business, the Home Builders and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others. 

            The Congressmen were told:

•    New climate legislation could produce 1,500 new costly and confusing  regulations.
•    The new financial services reform law calls for 533 new rules, 60 studies and 93 reports. They may all impose more costs on consumers and businesses.
•    The health care program requires 100 new rulemakings.  The cost estimates keep climbing.
•    The government has enacted $700 billion in new tax increases in just 18 months. New taxes already enacted or pending include higher capital gains, higher individual income taxes, higher estate taxes, and new taxes on enterprise value.
•    Small Business Administration guarantees of loans are down by half.
•    74 percent of banks are reporting a tightening of credit.
•    Small businesses are facing new regulations governing everything from their hours of operation to workplace conditions.  They are facing more paperwork.  Every small business will now have to file more 1099 forms (independent contractor purchases) with the IRS. Paperwork costs could be high.
•    There is approximately $2 trillion (estimates very widely) sitting in banks that could be loaned for business expansion, but isn’t, in part, because of uncertainty about new rules and regulations.
•    It is now 18 percent more expensive to do business here than in our 12 other industrial partners and that percent does not include higher labor costs here.
•    In a Chamber survey 46% of small business people said the Administration’s policies are making the economy worse.  Only 30 & said better.

            Small businesses are the bedrock on which our economy rests. They create anywhere from 60-80 percent of new jobs.  They employ about half the workforce, according to the Tax Foundation. They drive innovation and serve as the incubator for creative, often risk-intensive and sometimes crazy entrepreneurship.  

            Economic recovery cannot occur without them.  

            Jeff zeroed in just on health care.  “If one employee goes into the exchange, the employer can be hit with penalties.  If you have more than 50 employees as opposed to 49, under Obamacare it puts you into a whole new group with more regulation and higher costs.”

            Another small business executive I talked with, Maureen Schantz, president of Alternative Health Associates in Alexandria, VA., said her biggest concerns are insurance and taxes.  “Every time I turn around, there are more taxes,” she said.  The taxes and expenses are going up, “but you can’t raise your prices in a recession.”  
    
            There are two sides to every story, and when it comes to small businesses, there are many.  Not everyone agrees that the government is a problem.       

            “Government policies are a Trojan Horse used by business people as an excuse for their own inability to grow,” says Luke Chung, president of FMS, a computer software and services company in Tyson’s Corner.  “The cost of health care is a fraction of the total cost of services, so are accounting expenses. As a small business with under 50 employees, I’m very pleased with the new health care reform policies.”

            Say what you will about the President’s liberal mission, this was no time to pursue it.  While trying to propel the country farther into the 21^st Century, he may be trapping us in an extended period of economic stagnation and a rocky future for the people who can get us out of it.

Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.

Republicans—for good reasons—are pretty giddy about the prospects for Election Day.  Unless unemployment suddenly drops, there is just no precedent in American history for the election to result in anything other than a massive victory for Republicans.  The mainstream media can rant all they want about the Tea Party and the party of ‘no’, but it will not change a thing in my opinion.

But , in addition to the issues of the economy, massive spending, and ObamaCare, another issue is emerging as salient and defining.  I am talking about immigration.  Depsite, our election-year euphoria, my fear is that we Republicans are failing to fully grasp and understand the power of a defining moment in American politics, a failure that could have long-term implications that are not good for our Party.

In 1964, after the death of John Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson pushed hard for the passage of historic civil rights legislation.  Some of the most vile, racist statements ever uttered came from a group of southern Democrats.  In fact, the filibuster to defeat the legislation was in the hands of this group—Byrd and Robertson from Virginia, Morgan and Ervin from North Carolina, Russell and Talmadge from Georgia, Ellender and Long from Louisiana, Teague and Thurmond (still a Democrat) from South Carolina, Hill and Sparkman from Alabama, even Fulbright from Arkansas, and Eastland and Stennis from Mississippi. 

There were a handful of Republicans who weren’t so sure the legislation was a good idea and did not believe in federal intervention as the bill proposed.  But, when the cloture vote came, they wheeled in Senator Kuchel, a Republican from California, who proudly pointed to his eye as an indication he was in favor of ending debate.  Non-southern Democrats and large numbers of Republicans were the reason the legislation became law.   That is fact, and it would be great if Americans actually understood real history, but they don’t.

Since then, however, Black Americans have voted overwhelmingly Democratic.  Why?  The GOP candidate for president, Barry Goldwater—the very definition of an old-fashioned conservative—opposed the legislation in the name of protecting states rights.  Yes, the southern Democrats used the same notion to justify their racist point of view.  However, nobody at the time even intimated that Barry Goldwater had a racist bone in his body.  It mattered not.  Blacks came to believe that, at a defining moment, Democrats (because of Lyndon Johnson) liked them and Republicans (because of the views of Barry Goldwater) did not.  From that point forward, we know what voter behavior has been.  Blacks almost instantly began voting for the very southern Democrats—including George Wallace—who had opposed every civil rights law proposed.  Faced with the choice of a white Democrat and a Black Republican, Blacks have consistently voted for the Democrat.

What does all this mean to us today?  By large margins, we see voters wanting tough laws on immigration.  They want our borders secured.  They do not want those who have broken the law and/or ignore the law to be rewarded.  Can we remember way back to 1994 when Pete Wilson was tough on immigration in his re-election campaign for Governor in California?  He won a big victory.  But, what else happened?  Hispanics in California identified with Democrats. Republicans have been swamped in election after election at the statewide level, save for what transpired after the Gray Davis debacle.  In other words, Hispanics in California decided (as Blacks had done in 1964) that Democrats liked them and Republicans did not.

Now, we have President Obama proposing legislation that is widely opposed.  His Justice Department is suing to overturn the law in Arizona that Americans, as a whole, greatly like.  Inside his own party, individual Members of Congress, Senators, and Governors are angry at the President.  He seems to have isolated the Democrats as being liberal to the point of wanting to cram their ideology on a resistant public.   Yet, my view is he is being smart as a fox.

It is likely true that in 2010 voters will rally to the Republican slant on the issue and reject what they see as the Democratic side of the issue.  The question is what happens next?  Maybe even in 2012 the issue will be so alive and so relevant that having the overall public side with Republicans can mean more victories.  After that, I am worried disaster awaits my Party.

What history shows me is that the minority voters, once locked into place, stay locked into place.  So, Democrats begin now with no worse than 10 percent advantage at the national level when an election starts—13 percent of the electorate in 2008 was Black.  In 2008, nine percent was Hispanic, and they voted 2-1 for Obama.  The Hispanic portion of the electorate will get larger.  John McCain won the non-Hispanic white vote 56-43%.  However, starting the game down 19-3, it was not enough (the remaining votes coming from Asians, etc.).  Assume, for the minute, the combination of Blacks and Hispanics become 25 percent of the vote in the not too distant future (not unrealistic).  If a Democrat candidate for President starts with a 22-3 advantage, do we really think that the Republican is likely to get 49 percent versus 27 percent for the Democrat of the other votes to be cast in many elections?

What happens is the minority vote gets locked into place while the non-Hispanic white vote does not.  If Hispanics in America conclude Democrats are their friends and we Republicans are their enemy on a permanent basis, will someone please tell me how we make the math work?  I am NOT arguing for weak immigration laws.  I am arguing that what is said and done is something that is carefully thought out and involves Hispanics carrying the message.  Otherwise, I simply do not see how the smiles on our faces in 2010 do not become permanent frowns later.

Editor’s Note: Bill Greener is a founding partner of Greener and Hook, a communications firm specializing in work for Republican candidates and private organizations facing public policy challenges.  Formerly, he headed the political and communications divisions of the Republican National Committee, as well as serving as Convention Manager for the 1996 National Convention.  Greener also has been an executive at International Paper and Wheelabrator Technologies.

Reprinted from weeklystandard.com

Bill Thomas loved schemes. The former California congressman, who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee from 2001 to 2006, practiced the arcane art of parliamentary procedure like a wizard, concocting potions that turned his political opponents into hapless frogs.

Thomas sometimes even kept the details of his grandiose plans a secret from allies. He once pulled Majority Leader Dick Armey aside on the House floor and whispered that he had a new idea about how to pass a controversial piece of legislation. 

“Great,” Armey said. “What is it?” 

“I can’t tell you,” Thomas said with a twinkle in his eye. “But you’ll love it.” 

Thomas understood Congress’s dark side. His lengthy House tenure—28 years​—convinced him that there is a gene in congressional DNA that leads lawmakers to kick the can down the road rather than make tough choices.

The behavior of the current Democratic majority is a testament to Thomas’s understanding. Fail to pass a federal budget? No problem: We’ll muddle through. Let unemployment benefits lapse? Blame the Republicans. Funding the war in Afghanistan? Hey, there’s always money somewhere. A growing list of federal agencies and programs crying out for reform and reauthorization? Aw, just extend current law for another few months. This list could go on. 

Thomas’s crowning achievements were the 2001 and 2003 tax cut bills, and both included a procedural tripwire that set in motion a ticking political time bomb.

Republican leaders wanted the tax cuts to be permanent, but in order to get the votes for enactment of both bills, they used the budget process known as reconciliation. While this meant the legislation could pass the Senate with only 51 votes, it also limited the policy changes in the bill to a finite period. Hence the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010—a long way off, many thought back then.

But Thomas also knew a future Congress would face an unavoidable deadline and a tough political choice. Doing nothing assures an automatic tax increase—and not a small one. Failure to act will actually produce the largest tax hike in history. And in about six months, the long fuse Thomas lit nearly ten years ago will ignite an explosion.

On January 1, 2011, the top individual tax rate jumps from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. The child tax credit gets slashed in half—from $1,000 to $500. Taxes on dividends snap back to 39.6 percent from their current 15 percent rate. Capital gains rates jump from 15 percent to 20 percent. The current lowest tax bracket increases by 50 percent—from 10 percent to 15 percent. The estate tax, which phased down to zero this year, surges to a whopping 55 percent. Taxes on married couples increase, and the dependent care and adoption tax credits get reduced. This is just a sampling.

Normally modifying tax law requires major congressional action. But because of the way the 2001 and 2003 legislation was structured, if Congress does nothing, all these taxes increase automatically. Boom.

Several participants in the negotiations surrounding the passage of the two tax bills say Thomas’s flair for creative legislation helped seal the deals. One former senior administration official recalls a meeting on the Truman Balcony at the White House with Republican congressional leaders when the 2003 bill had hit a snag in the Senate. “Even though Republicans controlled the majority in the Senate, several senators wanted to cut the [amount of money] dedicated to tax cuts in half,” he told me. 

This created a problem. To help spur economic growth after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush wanted to accelerate the individual rate reductions first passed in 2001. He also sought to cut the tax rate on dividends. House Republicans had a strong interest in reducing the capital gains tax as well. Doing all this, along with addressing other issues such as the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), the marriage penalty, and child tax credits would cost hundreds of billions, more than the Senate was willing to swallow.

Thomas was uncharacteristically quiet during the contentious meeting, but the wheels were turning. After hearing the Senate problem, Thomas broke his silence. “I think I have a way of doing this,” he said. He then proceeded to describe a plan that shifted some implementation dates and phased in other provisions, making the numbers fit into the Senate budget window.

While everyone’s preference was to make all these tax cuts permanent, Thomas and others were trying to do the best they could under the political constraints. He proposed to use as much money as possible to enact the most simulative yet politically vulnerable tax reductions—accelerating the individual marginal rates and cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains. He felt he could phase out other more politically popular provisions, knowing a future Congress would have a tough time not extending these tax cuts.

After listening to the Thomas scenario, Bush was convinced. “I’m with Bill,” he told the other congressional leaders.

“[Thomas’s] main goal was to protect what many thought was the most needed but vulnerable pieces of the package—the individual marginal rate reductions,” David Hobbs, former assistant to the president for legislative affairs told me. “Protecting the middle class from the AMT, the child credit, and marriage penalty relief had broad bipartisan support,” he notes. “By structuring the bill the way he did, Thomas got the biggest bang for the buck and did the most with what he had to work with.” 

He also created a huge political headache for today’s Democrats, already nervous about November’s elections.

President Obama says he wants to shield families making less than $250,000 from higher rates. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced the administration wants the capital gains increase to go no higher than 20 percent. 

Editor’s Note: Gary Andres is Vice Chairman of Research for Dutko Worldwide and writes a weekly column for the Weekly Standard and the Hearst Newspapers.

Reprinted from: feeherytheory.com

Sometimes, I just want to strangle Ronald McDonald.

From approximately 2 in the afternoon yesterday until about 8 o’clock yesterday night, my four-year old son had one message and one message only.  He wanted to go to Old McDonald.

Old McDonald – as he likes to call the place where you get the Big Mac – serves Happy Meals, and apparently, the Happy Meal is the only thing that makes my son happy these days.

So, for every fifteen minutes, at various pitches and voice levels, my son requested that we go to Old McDonald’s and get a Happy Meal.

On one level, the discourse between my son and me was extraordinarily frustrating.  I knew that he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, and he knew he wasn’t going to get a Happy Meal yesterday, but that didn’t stop him from requesting it on a fairly regular basis.

But on the other level, the message discipline that came from little Jack was very impressive.  He stuck to his message, no matter how ineffective it turned out to be.

Little Jack reminds me a bit of Joe Biden.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves.  When it comes to message discipline, Joe Biden is no Jack Feehery.  Biden is usually on some crazy tangent somewhere, whether he is talking about Anna Chapman (probably my favorite Biden line ever), the President’s over-reliance on the teleprompter (a close second place), or whatever else comes through his transom.

But on one issue, Biden is Johnny One-Note.  He believes that the economic stimulus — passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress and signed by the President — is good for the economy.   In fact, he is so confident, he is calling June/July/August, “Recovery Summer.”

He believes that the reason the stimulus package is so unpopular is because the American people are too stupid to understand what is in it.

Here is how he described it yesterday with Jake Tapper on This Week:

MR. TAPPER:  So the reason you’re not getting enough credit is because the public doesn’t understand everything that’s happened yet?

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, nor could they or should they.

I mean, in the last six months of the Bush administration, they lost 3 million jobs.  Before we got our economic package in place, another 3.7 million jobs were lost in the first six months we took office.  The last six months of this year — the first six months of this year, we created almost 600,000 private jobs, you know, in the private market.

That’s not nearly enough to make up for the 8 million jobs lost in the recession, but people are going to start to focus on exactly what we’re doing.  Look, I’m convinced, at least from sitting around my dad’s kitchen table, and the people I grew up with, is when things are really tough economically and the country’s in trouble, all they want to know is — they don’t expect an answer, but they expect to be reassured that we’re moving in the right direction.  That is –

MR. TAPPER:  But they don’t know that we are.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN:  No, they don’t think (so) now, because I don’t think they know the detail of what’s going on.

For example, here you had the insurance industry spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make the health-care bill out to be this god-awful tragedy.

Now what’s starting to happen, the health-care numbers are going up. Why?  Because they’re figuring out that small businesses are going to get a 30 percent tax cut.  They didn’t know that because of all the advertising done.

So there’s a lot — and I would use health care as an example. Health care has gone from a barrage of advertising against it — why it was so bad.  Just like Wall Street reform:  The financial institutions spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against this — “this is an awful thing;” “it’s government regulation.”  All it is is rational control, and a turning around of what the Republicans did, which is let Wall Street run wild.

When you say to people, you know, we just went out and had a regulatory reform bill.  Where I come from, it’s like, okay, what does that mean?  They don’t know what it means yet, understandably.  And so I think it takes time, Jake

It doesn’t actually take that much time to figure this out, Mr. Vice President.

We know your message on the so-called stimulus.  “It is working.   It is working. You idiots just don’t understand all the mysterious ways that it is working.”

Actually (as my son might say), it is not working.

The economy looks like it might be heading for a double-dip recession.

Consumer confidence is down.

More Americans than ever think our country is on the wrong track.

The cash infusions that the Obama Administration made to local and state governments, which allowed them to stay artificially bloated, have run out and now the bill is coming due.

They have refused to deal with the expiring tax provisions, which  means that the business community has no faith in the future.  They have passed a huge new financial regulatory bill where most of the big decisions have been punted to unelected bureaucrats, which means even more uncertainty for those folks who make the most of the small business loans out there.

And worse, the business community is terrified it is just going to get worse.

The Vice President can stay on his message all he wants, but it is not working.

My son didn’t get his Happy Meal and believe me, he wasn’t happy about it.

The American people are not believing the Vice President’s Happy Talk, and believe me, they aren’t happy either.

I may want to strangle Ronald McDonald, but the voters are going to do something else to the Democrats this fall.  They are going to throw them out of office.

Editor’s note:  John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. He is president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy.

 What follows will be considered nothing less than heresy by other children of the ’60s (who are now IN our 60s), but the irony is too perfect to ignore.

• The poet laureate of our generation was a guy named Robert Allen Zimmerman, better known to some as Bob Dylan.
• Of all the poems he set to music, one of my favorites was “The Times They are a’Changin’” which was a plea to “mothers and fathers,” “writers and critics,” and “Congressman, Senators” to (in the latter group) “please heed the call.”
• Ok. You remember the song and, if you are of a certain age, you will now walk around for the rest of the day with the tune bouncing off synapses unused for the nearly five decades since you might have listened to someone playing it on their Martin nylon string guitar sitting on the floor of the TKE house at Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio 45750.
• Or, some variant on that theme.

• Here’s the headline on the Washington Post’s web page about their new poll:

Majority Favors GOP Control of Congress

• The explanatory graf reads:

“A new Washington Post/ABC poll found those most likely to vote in the midterms prefer the GOP over continued Democratic rule by a sizable margin of 56 percent to 41 percent.”

• Calling a 15 percentage point chasm a “sizeable margin” is like calling the Deepwater Horizon spill an “oil leak.”
• There’s more bad news for Democrats. According Dan Balz’ and Jon Cohen’s analysis of that poll:

“Public confidence in President Obama has hit a new low … nearly six in 10 voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country.”

• But, before RNC Chairman Michael Steele begins singing the Ren & Stimpy “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy” song and declaring himself “Speaker-in-Waiting,” the poll indicates voters don’t trust almost anyone currently in public office to solve almost any of our problems.

• On what is called the “re-elect” question (“Are you more inclined to re-elect your Representative or more inclined to look around for someone else”) among registered voters the result is:

26 percent re-elect
62 percent look around

• If these numbers are correct, then the Tea Party Movement, which manifested itself like a category 5 hurricane last August, has had far more effect on the public’s thinking than many columnists and commentators would like to believe.
• Almost nothing is going right:
• Unemployment is stuck in the mid-nine-percent range;
• Oil has gushed out of the sea floor for nearly three months;
• Obama himself has pushed Immigration to the front burner (and then turned that burner to “high”) as a problem without a solution;
• People are frightened about economic news they can’t even understand (Oh, no! Credit Default Swaps for Greek Sovereign Debt are on the rise!);
• Afghanistan is seen as a necessary, but never-ending, war;
• and on and on.
• The danger to the nation is not whether Republicans or Democrats control the House or Senate (or both); nor is it whether Obama wins a second term. The danger to the Republic is we have lost confidence in our political institutions to solve anything.

• In spite of the amount of time and effort which has been expended by the White House and Congress on a financial overhaul bill, it has so little impact on real life that even the Washington Post consigned the story that there are now probably enough votes in the Senate for passage to page 9.
• Page one included a story about a New Jersey man who is one of the 1.4 million Americans who have been out of work for at least 99 weeks.
• That is what is at the base of American uncertainty: We all live with the fearful knowledge that we are but one phone call to “drop by the boss’ office next Friday afternoon” away from joining the ranks of the unemployed.
• The stanza about Senators and Congressmen ends with these lines:

There’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’;

It will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls;

For the times, they are a’changin.

• They would all do well to heed the call.
• On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the fully lyrics to the song and to a discussion of the 1964 album by the same name; a link to the Washington Post/ABC News poll data and to the summary; also a link to Ren & Stimpy with the full lyrics of that song.
• Finally, the Catchy Caption of the Day needs no caption. It is the iconic 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange of the “Migrant Woman.”

Reprinted from Townhall.com

Abraham Lincoln: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln address in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 22, 1861:

“That sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty … to the people of this country … Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? … if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Lincoln’s inaugural address of March 4, 1861: “The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’ ”

Elena Kagan: “To be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution, and my job as a justice will be to enforce and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”

Elena Kagan, June 30, 2010, in Senate testimony: “… I’m not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existent (to) the Constitution and the laws. But my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws. You should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief (in an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) if I had one (said on being asked if she disagreed with the Declaration of Independence’s enunciation of inalienable rights).”

Justice John Marshall, Fletcher v. Peck, Supreme Court (1810): “(It is not simply) the particular provisions of the Constitution of the United States (that nullified the Georgia statute but also) those general principles which are common to our free institutions.”

Apparently unbeknownst to Ms. Kagan, from the very beginning, it was the inalienable rights of the people that made the people sovereign and thus permitted the people to form the Constitution and continue to guide its application.

The very reason for the American experiment was — and is — to establish the principle and the reality that no man or government may alienate a person’s life, liberty or pursuit of happiness.

Anyone who has experienced the expectation of the imminent loss of any of those conditions knows profoundly their value — and thus the value of our form of government, which exists to protect those rights.

It does not take a legal scholar to know that. But it could be said that no one can rightly be called an American legal scholar who does not understand that the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the animating purposes of all our laws — of the law. They are the soul of our Constitution. Without those rights, the body of law is a corpse — a soulless, purposeless, manipulable, disposable, dead, material thing. If Ms. Kagan does not know that, then she knows nothing of our law.

Even more to the point, the right to remove those conditions from a man must always lie exclusively in the power of Him who gave them. The judge or politician who does not understand the source of those rights is ever likely to presume — at some useful moment — that a mere man or woman or government may act to deny such rights. Indeed, they are not rights if they are not so created — but mere temporary grants of privilege from an all-powerful state.

We have seen in the current congressional session how indifferent our government is to even the formalities of positive law and procedure. Less than two weeks ago, the House decided to “deem” a federal budget passed — though it has not been passed. A few months ago, it was prepared to “deem” a transforming socializing health services scheme passed without voting on it.

Our Founders, in the opening decades of our national life, built into our governing fundamentals many redundancies — fail-safes — to protect us from tyranny, either of the creeping or of the sudden kind. First, was a Congress of the people, two branches to check each other, an executive branch itself in check with the others, and the states in sovereign balance with the federal powers. And all those powers subordinate to the undergirding sovereignty of the people.

The very power of the Supreme Court to exercise judicial review derives precisely from the court’s being empowered by the pre-constitutional sovereignty of the people in their inalienable right to protect themselves from any undue state restraints on such sovereign rights (see “Empire of Liberty,” Gordon S. Wood, pages 443, 448-451).

And now, proposed to be intruded into that temple of justice — that last fail-safe of freedom — comes the form of Elena Kagan: Cold to the passion of our Declaration of Independence; ignorant of its animating powers; insentient of its still-governing force; and — thankfully — oblivious even to her need to attempt to hide her true scorn and indifference to our founding unalienable rights.

It is a dead certainty that, if she is admitted to the high court, the day will come when she will cast aside — carelessly, indifferently and without pause, but with a leering smile and chuckle on her lips — our sacred birthrights as so much nuisance and interference with the government’s right to direct our lives as it — or she — sees fit.

She must be barred from the court.

Forty-one filibustering senators can save the Republic this week. Or all 99 will surely be condemned by history for their failure to act when they had the legal power to do so.

The senators have had their warning: Side with Abraham Lincoln and the Republic or with Elena Kagan. Which will it be?

Editor’s Note:  Tony Blankley is a TV pundit, nationally syndicated columnist, Executive Vice President  of Edelman Public Relations worldwide,a New York  Times best-selling author,  former press secretary to Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Reagan Speechwriter, former California Deputy Attorney General.

 The flash from the explosion–and implosion–of General Stanley McChrystal has faded and his story is already old news.  Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson and Rod Blagojevich are back in the headlines. 

 That’s too bad.   If there is any good to come of the McChrystal tragedy, if we as a society are to learn from the experience, then we need to sift through the rubble again and see if we can’t find out more about the right and the wrong,  who did what to whom, why it happened and how, and what has changed or will change as a result.  It’s important. 

 General McChrystal, as you will recall, was the U.S. commander in Afghanistan brought down by a story in Rolling Stone Magazine. McChrystal and his aides were quoted as speaking derogatorily and crudely of the civilian chain of command from Washington to Kabul.

 The story caused serious direct and collateral damage.  The coverage for a brief time was thorough, but there is a lot more for serious journalists to cover. 

• General McChrystal, at the height of what apparently was an exemplary 34-year military career will apparently resign from the Army this fall, his career in shambles, by his own hand, to be sure.  He may not be alone.  It may be safe to assume that a good many of the career soldiers around him have suffered permanent career damage.  What chain of events, what train of logic in Washington and Afghanistan brought him to his end?  What’s his story? 

 The military command in Afghanistan and the military’s relationship with civilian leadership in the war zone have been forced into a major realignment, further compromising progress there, and raising questions about the fundamentals of the relationship between diplomats and warriors.  What happens now in the relationship between McChrystal’s replacement, General Petraeus and Ambassador Eikenberry and White House czar Negroponte?   How are the Departments of State and Defense and the White House sorting out the perpetual conflict between civilian and military rule?

 The Pentagon is putting new restrictions on media access to military personnel and should be, if it is not already, undergoing a major reassessment of the ground rules and guidelines for coverage of military operations, particularly in war zones.  If not, why not? The incident raises all kinds of questions about military beat reporting, and the extent to which the military is obligated to cooperate with the traditional media, new media and those like Rolling Stone that are trying to morph their way into new segments of the business.  

• Media institutions should be, if they are not already, confronting a long list of concerns: journalistic ethics; competitive business practices that seem to supersede news judgments; the evolving definition of what is news and what isn’t; the withholding of legitimate news from the public to hype a story or a book; the rampant use of anonymous sources; the trust between journalists and their subjects; and even who owns news content, an issue raised by the pirating of the Rolling Stone article before publication. The biggest conundrum rests at the feet of serious journalists who must  wrestle with and judge, the deception, deceit, exploitation, opportunism, hype and hustle that seemed to infect the work of the author of the article, Michael Hastings (CBS’ Lara Logan so far is among the very few to have expressed consternation about Hastings’ conduct and agenda).

• And finally, there is even the broader issue of the continual and persistent erosion in the willingness of people to enter public service. New York Times Columnist David Brooks addressed that issue recently with excellent historical context.  He wrote:  “By putting the kvetching (of McChrystal and his aides) in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority.”  He continued:  “The reticent ethos had its flaws.  But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

In the end, there’s a long list of losers:  McChrystal and his aides, the military, the media, the American people, and even Afghanistan. 

 But there are never losers without winners.  

 Rolling Stone Magazine, after suffering sagging advertising and a decline in circulation, has by some accounts experienced a surge of both.  It may now join so many other mostly infotainment tabloids that are doing well exploiting the public’s insatiable appetite for gossip, gotcha journalism and a colorful and imaginary blend of fact and fiction.

 But Rolling Stone’s triumph is nothing compared to… 

Michael Hastings, the freelance writer who took down McChrystal.  He won immediate fame and the potential for future fortune. It was announced last week that he has already signed a lucrative book deal. 

 Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.