publié dans : Politique

Sometimes, it turns out, politicians can be taken at their word. More than a year ago, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama told the Reno Gazette-Journal that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Reagan, he said, “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” The implication was that Obama, if elected, would be no less ambitious.

But well before then, and without reference to the Gipper, Obama was aiming higher than most of us could have imagined. In an interview two years ago, I remember being struck by his certainty that this was a moment that required audacity — one of his favorite words — and that he, uniquely, could supply it. Obama is determined to shift our whole political spectrum to the left, redraw the boundaries of our politics and expand the realm of the possible. He senses that the nation is already moving in his direction, well ahead of its political leadership.

So far, Republicans seem oblivious to what’s happening. After Obama gave his prime-time speech to Congress last week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal began his response with a patronizing, cringe-worthy riff in which he congratulated the president on being the first African American to hold the office — as if we hadn’t noticed. Jindal went on to lay out a program that would have sounded innovative if the year were 1978: lower taxes, smaller government, wave the flag, etc. Two days later, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, “I’m still convinced America wants to like us” — as if he were having a private Sally Field moment.

Obama’s speech to Congress was merely to set the stage. The week’s main event — and the most important act thus far of his already eventful presidency — was the $3.6 trillion budget he proposed Thursday. The sums of money involved are so huge that commentators used up a year’s worth of adjectives: unprecedented, staggering, breathtaking. Ultimately, though, the numbers will mean less to history than the way Obama’s budget reorders the nation’s priorities and changes the relationship between Americans and their government.

In halting some of the largess that the Reagan, Bush and Bush administrations gave to the wealthiest Americans, Obama reintroduces the principle of progressive taxation — the idea that the rich, who can afford it, should pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes so that the government can do more to improve the lives of those who are not rich. This is what John McCain was warning against, I think, when he attacked Obama during the campaign as a “redistributionist.” It is also why the Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican Party immediately began sputtering about rampant socialism.

Does anyone else recall that one early supporter of this radical redistributionist idea was Teddy Roosevelt, McCain’s supposed hero? I wonder whether the Rough Rider’s assessment of today’s Republicans — staunch defenders of those who make more than $250,000 a year and who tell everyone else to buzz off — would be printable in a family newspaper.

Obama proposes the kind of budgetary support that Kathleen Sebelius, nominated yesterday as health and human services secretary, must surely love: a $634 billion “down payment” over the next 10 years on health-care reform, with the aim of moving toward universal coverage. The important thing here isn’t the big number but the fact that he is expanding the government’s responsibility for citizens’ health beyond the old, the young and the poor. Conservative commentators, of course, are outraged that Obama would go so far as to offer a government-supported plan that Americans are likely to prefer to the hodgepodge of private insurance coverage they now have to navigate. Has the president no shame?

By including education among his top three priorities, Obama expands on a commitment to make improving the schools a federal matter, not just a local issue. This bit of intrusive social engineering was actually initiated by George W. Bush, of all people. On energy policy, by contrast, Obama reverses Bush administration policy, which was all about oil. But the bigger headline on the energy front is his acceptance of our nation’s responsibility to play its part in slowing or reversing global climate change.

There’s a reason Obama’s approval ratings remain so high. He senses that Americans yearn for greater fairness and accountability, especially after the excesses that threaten to wreck our economy and destroy so many dreams. He knows that American individualism is tempered by the need to feel community in the nation and the world.

He also knows that windows of opportunity for fundamental change remain open just briefly before slamming shut. His declaration Saturday that “I didn’t come here to do the same thing we’ve been doing or to take small steps forward” may be the understatement of the year.

The writer will answer questions at 1 p.m. today at http://www.washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Mr Medvedev said linking Iran and the missile shield would not be productive

US President Barack Obama has written to his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, suggesting co-operation in blocking Iranian missile plans.

Mr Obama offered to suspend plans for a US missile defence shield, if Moscow backed efforts to stop Iran developing long-range missiles, officials said.

The letter, delivered last month, was a response to an earlier Russian letter.

President Medvedev said on Tuesday that he was ready to co-operate on Iran, but had received no offer of a trade-off.

“If we are to speak about some sort of exchange, the question has not been presented in such a way, because it would not be productive,” he told reporters in Madrid after meeting Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

We are already working in close contact with our US counterparts on the Iranian nuclear issue Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

“Our American partners are ready to discuss this problem, and that’s already positive,” he added.

“Several months ago, we were hearing different signals.”

Mr Medvedev said he hoped that the situation would be different under the Obama administration, but stressed that “no-one is linking these issues to some kind of trade-offs, particularly on the Iranian issue”.

“We are already working in close contact with our US counterparts on the Iranian nuclear issue,” he said.

‘Iranian threat’

A senior US official told the BBC that a letter had been sent “a few weeks ago” to the Kremlin outlining a possible initiative involving the missile shield and repeating US concerns about Russia’s lack of support for Western efforts to put pressure on Iran over its long-range missile programme.

The official said the letter was hand-delivered, although it was not clear by whom.

Will Russia accept US deal?

Earlier on Tuesday, the New York Times newspaper quoted a senior Obama administration as saying: “It’s almost saying to them, put up or shut up.

“It’s not that the Russians get to say, ‘We’ll try and therefore you have to suspend.’ It says the threat has to go away.”

The paper added that “the letter was intended to give Moscow an incentive to join the United States in a common front against Iran”.

The US says its planned missile defence system in Europe is intended to destroy incoming ballistic missiles fired by “rogue states”, such as North Korea and Iran. However, Moscow says they could directly threaten its own defences.

The Iranian military says its missiles have a range of 2,000km (1,240 miles), which would mean they could potentially hit targets in Greece, Bulgaria or Romania, all Nato members.

Establishing a link

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says the US is seeking to establish a link between its own missile defence plans and Iran’s development of ever longer-range missiles potentially capable of delivering a nuclear warhead.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates made this linkage explicit in comments at a Nato summit in Poland last month, noting that he had “told the Russians a year ago that if there were no Iranian missile programme there would be no need for the US missile sites”.

But, our correspondent says, it is not clear how Russia could limit Iran’s missile programme, which rests largely upon a close relationship with North Korea.

There has been some Russian help in the past – from individuals or companies – but little to suggest any official assistance from Moscow, he adds.

Our correspondent says Washington may want Moscow to back a tougher sanctions regime against Tehran.

At present, Iran is a market for Russian weaponry, airliners and civil nuclear technology. A Russian-built reactor is expected to begin operation in Iran later this year.

Indeed, Moscow may feel it has stronger cards in its hand than Washington, our correspondent adds.

It controls vital land and air access routes to Afghanistan, which analysts believe could become crucial as existing supply lines for US and Nato forces through Pakistan come increasingly under attack.

Until recently, the idea that the world’s most powerful nations might come together to tackle global warming seemed an environmentalist’s pipe dream.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, was widely viewed as badly flawed. Many countries that signed the accord lagged far behind their targets in curbing carbon dioxide emissions. The United States refused even to ratify it. And the treaty gave a pass to major emitters in the developing world like China and India.

But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”

That treaty, officials and climate experts involved in the negotiations say, will significantly differ from the agreement of a decade ago, reaching beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions and including financial mechanisms and making good on longstanding promises to provide money and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate change.

The perception that the United States is now serious has set off a flurry of diplomacy around the globe. “The lesson of Kyoto is that if the U.S. isn’t taking it seriously there is no reason for anyone else to,” said Bill McKibben, who runs the environmental organization www.350.org.

This week the United Nation’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, will make the rounds in Washington to discuss climate issues. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is organizing a high-level meeting on climate and energy. Teams from Britain and Denmark have visited the White House to discuss climate issues. In China, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made climate a central focus of her visit and proposed a partnership between the United States and China. And a special envoy from China is coming soon.

But a global treaty still faces serious challenges in Washington and abroad, and the negotiations will be a test of how far the United States and other nations are prepared to go to address climate change at a moment when economies around the world are unspooling. The global recession itself is expected to result in a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as manufacturing and other polluting industries shrink, lessening the pressure on countries to take action.

“The No. 1 thing will be for everyone to see that the U.S. is on an urgent and transformational path to a low carbon economy — that would have a galvanizing effect,” said John Ashton, the British foreign secretary’s special representative for climate change.

The Obama administration has said that it will push through federal legislation this year to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States — a promise that Mr. Obama reiterated Tuesday in his speech to Congress.

The Kyoto Protocol has been a touchstone of the environmental movement. Thirty-seven developed countries, including Japan, Australia and nations in the European Union, ratified the accord, agreeing to reduce or limit the growth of carbon dioxide emissions by specified amounts. President George W. Bush, pressed by the Senate, rejected the accord, because countries like China were not also subject to mandatory emission levels. China and India also refused to ratify the protocol.

At the tail end of his administration, Mr. Bush made tentative overtures toward China and other countries on climate matters. In 2007, he convened a meeting of countries that were major emitters of greenhouse gases. Later, in bilateral economic talks, China and the United States agreed that they would cooperate on clean technology development and some other climate issues.

But Kyoto was shaped largely by climate scientists and environment ministers, not the higher-level officials now laying the groundwork. And even many who participated in the earlier accord now say they see it as weak and naïve about political and economic realities. Of the countries that signed, more than half are not on track to meet their targets according to 2008 United Nations data, including Germany, Ireland and Canada.

“In Kyoto we made a lot of promises to each other, but we hadn’t done the domestic politics,” Mr. Ashton said, “and that is why Kyoto — though a valuable step forward — has ultimately been so fragile.”

The talks on the new treaty, said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “provides an opportunity to fill this gap that we’ve seen, and this time perform up to expectations.”

The 1997 protocol was a narrow accord about the emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses linked to global warming. The new agreement will need to address how those reductions can be achieved in a way that takes account of their effects on energy supplies and economies — especially at a time of global recession.

Negotiating the treaty when countries are under extreme economic stress presents challenges, Mr. de Boer acknowledged. Politicians in Italy and Canada have complained that it will be difficult to clean up industries to meet their Kyoto goals because of the economic downturn. But others say a global industrial recession, in which emissions tend to drop anyway and countries are poised to spend billions to stimulate economies, is the time to craft a global effort to combat global warming.

With developing countries like China and India emerging as major carbon dioxide emitters in the past few years, experts said that if the new treaty was to be effective, every nation would have to accept emissions limits. “If one part of the world acts and the other does not, that doesn’t really generate a climate benefit,” said Mr. de Boer, who is responsible for organizing the December meetings.

Developed countries would most likely get binding numerical targets, as some did in Kyoto. Developing countries, which were exempt under Kyoto, would probably be given less stringent goals, though it is not clear if these will be longer-term numerical targets or some other mechanism that ties allowable emissions to economic growth.

Mr. Obama has said the United States will lead the effort, but over the next months, he will have to show what exactly that means. A good first step, environmentalists say, would be to commit to trying to limit warming to two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures, an ambitious goal that the European Union has adopted but that the Bush administration steadfastly avoided. It could also pledge to reduce emissions by 50 or 80 percent by 2050.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that humans could largely adapt to two degrees of warming, but that a greater temperature increase could cause far more serious consequences, from a dangerous rise in sea levels to mass extinctions.

Climate experts added that the United States did not need to have in place national legislation to limit greenhouse gasses, a process that could take months, to negotiate in Copenhagen. “It’s not just about analyzing a piece of legislation,” Mr. Ashton said. “It’s about the feeling you get if you’re a leader sitting in Beijing. It’s like love; you know it when you feel it.”

A more complex issue is whether negotiators will retain the system of trading carbon credits that is central to the Kyoto Protocol, a kind of global commodities market for carbon.

That system allows developed countries that produce more than their allotted share of emissions to balance their emissions budget by investing in projects that curtail emissions elsewhere. Such projects might include the cleaning up of a coal power plant in China, planting trees in Africa or converting pig manure to electricity in the Netherlands. The same cap and trade concept is now used in Europe’s emissions.

But as the European Union and the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol have tried such projects over the past few years, problems have emerged. Most notably, it is hard to determine the emissions-reducing value of carbon credit projects, making it easy to game the system. The new treaty, experts say, will also have to broaden Kyoto’s focus beyond industrial emissions to activities like airline travel, one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. In the end, it will also have to include financial mechanisms and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate change.

“This is not just about emissions but about creating a massive investment in a new global energy economy” that includes forests, oceans and the transfer of technology, said Angela Anderson, director of the Pew Environment Group’s Global Warming Campaign.

American negotiators were limited in Kyoto by a Senate resolution saying that the United States would not accept numerical caps unless China did as well. But Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, “There has been a sea change in the Senate,” and he added that he believed that there were enough votes — Democratic and Republican — to ratify a strong treaty.

What is unclear is whether politicians will be willing to commit to large enough changes to have a significant effect on global warming. “The Bush administration set the bar very low,” Mr. McKibben said.

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting.

One day after the Chicago Bulls visited the White House, The 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama receives a standing ovation as he enters the arena to watch one of his favorite hometown teams, the Chicago Bulls take on the Washington Wizards courtside at the Verizon Center in Washington D.C.(Friday, February 27, 2009).

WASHINGTON — When Newt Gingrich’s Congress was moving full-speed in its efforts to shrink the government more than a dozen years ago, Ralph G. Neas, an indefatigable champion of liberal causes, threw up his hands and declared that his side had been outmaneuvered.

Liberals who had grown up pressing their case with marches and old-fashioned door-knocking campaigns, Mr. Neas said, were no match for conservatives with big business allies and a commanding understanding of the new talk-radio, cable-news battlefield, where former President Bill Clinton’s signature health care plan lay bleeding.

Recent days have found Mr. Neas in a new perch, preparing to join the coming fight over President Obama’s sweeping health care proposals, with plans to coordinate a campaign of television advertisements, “blogger outreach” and community meetings. This time, he is supported by his own phalanx of big business backers, including the Exelon power company and Giant food stores.

“We get another chance to do it again, and win this time,” he said in an interview in his new office at the National Coalition on Health Care, which recently named him its chief executive.

The battle to grow the government, just getting under way, promises to be no less intense than the battle to shrink it was.

The rush of activity, particularly as it relates to health care, is illuminating a realignment of interests and a shift in the public debate, with liberal interest groups rising up to run vigorous — and expensive — campaigns in support of Mr. Obama’s agenda in a way they did not for the Clinton White House. And they have brought to their side some unexpected corporate support.

The health care fight is one of many looming clashes likely to be set off by Mr. Obama’s aggressive spending and proposed regulatory and tax policy changes.

Less than 48 hours after Mr. Obama released his budget outline last week, oil and gas executives closely aligned with Republicans telegraphed a major fight against several tax provisions proposed for their industry. And real estate executives made it clear they would resist new limits on deductions for interest paid on mortgages for higher-income households, an area of common cause with Republicans.

In his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, the president predicted that his agenda would draw attack from “special interests and lobbyists” on several fronts. “I know they’re gearing up for a fight as we speak,” he said. “My message to them is this: So am I.”

Mr. Obama can, however, expect help from several outside groups as he labors to shift the government in a different direction. The efforts are in many ways the result of planning that took place in the years Democrats spent in the wilderness — which grew thicker around them as President George W. Bush and his political guru Karl Rove built an army of influence with conservative activists, backed by big business.

Spurred in part by former Clinton White House aides seeking a return to power, and inspired by the success of the activist group MoveOn, liberals formed organizations like Media Matters for America, which calls attention to what it considers conservative-slanted news coverage, and the Center for American Progress, a group founded by John D. Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff and Mr. Obama’s transition director, to promote liberal solutions to major problems. With support from the billionaire George Soros and the Hollywood producer Steve Bing, among other undisclosed donors, the group became a liberal government in exile, developing a full range of policy prescriptions.

So Mr. Neas, a longtime combatant in judicial appointment battles who famously led the successful fight against President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court, is emerging in the health care fight to find a newly robust liberal apparatus. His organization is among a handful of moneyed groups that will be pressing for Mr. Obama’s proposal to make health care more accessible and more affordable.

The National Coalition on Health Care was formed in 1990 to push for universal health care and is supported by a mix of business, labor, religious and health care organizations. It has spent several years focused on policy, but its founder, Dr. Henry E. Simmons, said he brought in Mr. Neas as its chief executive because, “It’s time to move into the campaign mode.”

Mr. Neas said that members had already been walking the halls of Congress to lobby lawmakers and that his group was identifying local bloggers and editorial writers for support.

Mr. Podesta’s group is cooperating with two separate coalitions planning to fight for Mr. Obama’s health care plan with television advertisements, interview appearances on cable news talk shows and e-mail campaigns.

“This is no longer going to be Barack Obama standing by himself getting pilloried by the special interests with no one pushing back — if I can describe what it felt like in the White House in 1993,” Mr. Podesta said Friday.

The defeat of the Clinton health care plan was a hard learning experience for Democrats. They were caught flat-footed by an insurance industry-backed campaign to kill the proposal. It is best remembered for advertisements featuring a yuppie couple, Harry and Louise, worrying about limits on quality health care.

“The battle had been lost by the time the progressive community and its allies began rallying around the Clinton bill,” Mr. Neas said. “Now, people are prepared.”

This time, too, the ground has shifted in the debate, with new support for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system from some quarters of the business community, where the crushing effect of benefits costs and the impetus to contain them through new governmental policies are a regular topic of discussion.

Wal-Mart and AT&T, for example, are members of Better Health Care Together, a group Mr. Podesta’s organization helped found with the leader of the Service Employees International Union, Andy Stern.

Even the insurance industry group that ran the “Harry and Louise” spots — now called America’s Health Insurance Plans — says it wants to play a different role this time around.

For the moment, Mr. Obama has set out principles for creating a near-universal health care system, setting aside $630 billion in his new budget toward that purpose. The mechanics are still under discussion, and the administration has been careful to try to bring Congress and the many competing interests into the process. When the Clinton administration tried to create universal health care, it presented Congress with an elaborate scheme that was set upon by critics.

“There’s a different atmosphere — there’s widespread recognition that this needs to get done,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the group. Though the group criticized Mr. Obama last week over a new Medicare-related proposal, Mr. Zirkelbach added, “we’re confident at the end of the day we will be on the side of health care reform.”

Yet an opposition infrastructure is beginning to come into view, with Democrats closely monitoring a new organization, Conservatives for Patients Rights, that told The Wall Street Journal last week it was devising plans for a multimillion-dollar campaign calling for free market solutions.

Sara Taylor, a political director in the Bush administration, said critics of Mr. Obama could find a receptive public. “The fundamentals haven’t changed: huge majorities of Americans don’t want the government meddling with their health care,” Ms. Taylor said.

Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York who was a leading critic of the Clinton health proposal, jumped back into the fray recently with an attack on the Obama plan.

But even Republicans say the Democrats seem better prepared for the fight this time.

“For a while there was a lack of cohesion on the Democratic side that was preventing them from putting together the same level of grass-roots organizations as the Republicans,” said Brian Jones, a former Republican National Committee communications director. “Now they have the intensity, they have the mechanics.”

Mr. Neas also sees a difference. Pondering his movement’s progress since its darker days, he said, “To say the least, we’re doing much better.”

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama challenged the nation’s vested interests to a legislative duel Saturday, saying he will fight to change health care, energy and education in dramatic ways that will upset the status quo.

“The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long,” Obama said in his weekly radio and video address. “But I don’t. I work for the American people.”

He said his ambitious budget plan, unveiled Thursday, will help millions of Americans, but only if Congress overcomes resistance from deep-pocket lobbies.

“I know these steps won’t sit well with the special interests and lobbyists who are invested in the old way of doing business, and I know they’re gearing up for a fight,” Obama said, using tough-guy language reminiscent of his predecessor, George W. Bush. “My message to them is this: So am I.”

Some analysts say Obama’s proposals are almost radical. But he said all of them were included in his campaign promises. “It is the change the American people voted for in November,” he said.

Nonetheless, he said, well-financed interest groups will fight back furiously.

Insurance companies will dislike having “to bid competitively to continue offering Medicare coverage, but that’s how we’ll help preserve and protect Medicare and lower health care costs,” the president said. “I know that banks and big student lenders won’t like the idea that we’re ending their huge taxpayer subsidies, but that’s how we’ll save taxpayers nearly $50 billion and make college more affordable. I know that oil and gas companies won’t like us ending nearly $30 billion in tax breaks, but that’s how we’ll help fund a renewable energy economy.”

Passing the budget, even with a Democratic-controlled Congress, “won’t be easy,” Obama said. “Because it represents real and dramatic change, it also represents a threat to the status quo in Washington.”

Congressional Republicans continued to bash Obama’s spending proposals and his projection of a $1.75 trillion deficit this year.

Almost every day brings another “multibillion-dollar government spending plan being proposed or even worse, passed,” said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., who gave the GOP‘s weekly address.

He said Obama is pushing “the single largest increase in federal spending in the history of the United States, while driving the deficit to levels that were once thought impossible.”

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On the Net:

Obama address: http://www.whitehouse.gov