A Major Issue for the New Congress
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr A MajorIssue for the New Congress In a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll last July, 53 per cent of the respondents said they want government to do more to...
...troops in Iraq...
...ANI), and the work was to be handed over to Qorvis Communications...
...That was once a favorite response of President Bush when he was asked about the economy...
...That will take some of the pressure off as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tries to negotiate an agreement in the face of widespread Iraqi opposition...
...This was made explicit in correspondence unearthed by the Post...
...This is likely to remain a major issue for the next Congress...
...The documents were what is known as “SCI,” Sensitive Compartmented Information...
...Among other things, he established the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...
...and Barack Obama (D.-Ill...
...After sweeping Democratic losses in the Congressional election of 1994, President Bill Clinton felt obliged to say that the President is relevant...
...The contract was therefore given to a group called Alaska Newspapers Inc...
...But the financial crisis has called on the talents of insiders...
...McCain accused his opponent of waging class warfare...
...There are other ways of shifting wealth that few would term class warfare: unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing vouchers, earned income tax credits...
...The IG report said former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales took home with him classified information relating to the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and the Administration’s prisoner interrogation program...
...The Washington Post revealed that the FDA found an ingenious way around that...
...Her first major interview was reviewed like a performance...
...The forged document indicated that Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists, had been trained in Iraq...
...chairmen of the Senate and House Banking Committees, respectively...
...So much for the big issues...
...The rhythm of the campaign was disturbed by the Wall Street meltdown...
...He signed a form testifying to his awareness that mishandling such information could cause “irreparable injury to the United States...
...This sham of a contract calls into question the integrity of Federal contracts awarded to small businesses and Alaska Native corporations...
...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr A MajorIssue for the New Congress In a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll last July, 53 per cent of the respondents said they want government to do more to solve problems...
...Iraq’s political leaders said however, that no deal was expected before the American Presidential election on November 4. Having written off the Bush Administration, they were presumably counting on a victory by Barack Obama, who had shown a willingness to accept a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops...
...And finally, on September 29, his early-morning appeal for passage of the $700 billion bailout...
...In the 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt, facing the Great Depression, gave us the New Deal...
...What else was the campaign about...
...AVery Lame Duck There was something almost touching about what happened to President Bush on September 29...
...Another word that has gone into disrepute is deregulation, as in candidate McCain’s “I am always for less regulation...
...Turns Away from Decades of Deregulation...
...says Americans “have had it...
...At 7:34 A.M., he stepped into the White House driveway and told the assembled press that the leaders of both parties supported the economic bailout bill and now their members had to “send a strong signal to markets at home and abroad...
...were debating such subjects as lipstick on a pig...
...But there has recently been bad blood between the Bush Administration and the Kremlin over issues like the Russian invasion of Georgia...
...President Bush is a very lame duck...
...And the campaign was distracted by the woman in the contest...
...Similarly, insider has become a less negative designation...
...The White House denies the story...
...He called for a commission to study the crisis...
...Change, mavericks, outsiders vs...
...Shifting wealth, though, has always been a part of the American credo, and is not inconsistent with creating wealth...
...Altering Our Political Dictionary One of the casualties of the financial crisis is the word fundamental, as in “the fundamentals remain strong...
...There have been recurrent proposals to substitute a flat tax or a consumption tax that would treat the wealthy and the poor evenhandedly...
...This was followed by the Savings and Loan scandals that gave us the Savings Association Insurance Fund and the Resolution Trust Corporation in 1989...
...Election At his first news conference in January 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the release of two American airmen whose reconnaissance plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union the previous July...
...The last was seized upon by the McCain camp when Obama told the now famous Joe the Plumber, during the third Presidential debate, that nobody likes high taxes, but when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody...
...While America Burned I WAS REMINDED of Rome in its decline, glorying in its circuses and gladiators even with the Visigoths at the gates...
...The Bush Administration is in terrible trouble trying to negotiate an agreement with the Baghdad government covering the continued stationing of U.S...
...That was it...
...Seldom have we witnessed such dramatic evidence of the withering of Presidential authority...
...In the 1900s President Theodore Roosevelt carried out his philosophy of the Square Deal...
...So it looked as though Russia would use its veto in the Security Council to block an extension, leaving the U.S...
...Governor Palin was hailed as a consummate outsider from way up north...
...While in government service, Gonzales received at least two personnel briefings on the handling of sensitive information and documents...
...Saving Face Instead of the Public The Bush Administration tends to treat performance problems as public relations problems...
...He said the bully pulpit was no substitute for knowing how to get things done in Washington...
...Not simply any woman, but a woman who has done it all, from governing a town and a state to presiding over a family with a pregnant teenage daughter...
...One e-mail last October said ANI would “gladly serve” as prime contractor for the “FDA deal,” with Qorvis acting as subcontractor...
...Differential tax rates have been at the core of the American tax structure since 1913...
...Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World, asserts that a document used by the White House to justify invading Iraq was forged by the CIA (at the White House’s behest...
...More recently, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drew criticism for lagging performance on salmonella poisoning and other inspection failures, it responded by offering a $330,000 contract to a public relations firm to improve its image...
...Not just any public relations firm, but one with friends in the agency, Qorvis Communications...
...A briefing paper of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) warned against a “rush to regulate,” saying an ambitious agenda of reform in the midst of a financial crisis is “an invitation to bad regulation...
...He blamed the ideology of deregulation...
...But in the United States, where the top 10 per cent reached a level of income share not seen since the Depression, the differential income tax has remained secure...
...The 1980s witnessed a period of rolling back regulation under President Ronald Reagan...
...Some six hours later the House rejected the bill, with two-thirds of the Republican members opposed...
...Some people at Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s rallies wore pink buttons reading, “Hot Chicks Vote Republican...
...Once polls showed that voters were anxious for change, the tendency was for candidates to try to capture the word by promising real change or fundamental change, except that fundamental had become a no-no word...
...He reacted to a series of business scandals by using the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and other measures to regulate the economy...
...and Michael G. Oxley (R.-Oh...
...At one point the campaign came to resemble theater...
...McCain, who stuck to his mantra— “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”—blamed greed and mismanagement for the trouble...
...Bush had served as cheerleader-in-chief for government bailouts...
...Perhaps as great a surprise as any was the disclosure, in a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, that an Administration obsessed with secrecy broke the rules on protecting secrets...
...It was a stunning surprise, although probably it should not have been...
...I can’t wait for the next revelation of a Bush Administration image-polishing venture...
...To everybody’s surprise, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Moscow will support an Iraqi request for the UN mandate to be extended...
...A tentative accord months in the making, is hung up in the Iraqi Cabinet, and it is unlikely that there will be any resolution by the time the current United Nations mandate authorizing multinational military operations in Iraq expires on December 31...
...The crisis has a way of altering our political dictionary...
...Then there is change, a subject of contention between the warring candidates...
...The law, though, requires competitive bidding...
...If history is any guide, that may lead to demands for new laws and perhaps new agencies to police the behavior of financial giants...
...This was taken as a positive gesture to the new President by Communist Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev, who was not on good terms with President Dwight D. Eisenhower after the shooting down of a U2 spy plane on May 1, 1960, and the consequent collapse of a Paris Summit set to start 12 days later...
...Armed Forces in Iraq with no legal underpinning—stuck between Iraq and a hard place, you might say...
...Obama said that idea amounted to “passing the buck...
...Called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, it was advanced by Paul S. Sarbanes (D.-Md...
...On September 24, he warned that without immediate Congressional action, America could “slip into a financial panic...
...And the funny thing about Joe the unlicensed plumber is that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual income of real plumbers in Ohio is under $48,000...
...As an exception, the law permits awarding noncompetitive contracts to Alaskan Native enterprises...
...Behind the scenes he did lobby his own Texas Republican delegation by phone, and they voted 15 to 4 against him...
...Norman J. Ornstein of the AEI defended himself in the Washington Post as a “card-carrying insider...
...President Bush, in his closing weeks in office, appears to have become all but irrelevant where Congress is concerned...
...The gap between rich and poor is greater in America than in any other advanced democracy...
...Shortly after the turn of the century the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals surfaced...
...The current impulse for new controls was signaled by the Wall Street Journal on July 25 with an article headlined, “Amid Turmoil, U.S...
...That is, “always” until the Administration’s bailout of the huge AIG insurance company, with its strong element of regulation...
...A week earlier, former Speaker Newt Gingrich had publicly urged members to vote against the bailout, calling it “a dead loser” that might cost Republicans the Presidential election...
...Senator McCain may argue that creating new wealth is better than redistributing existing wealth...
...New York Times columnist William Kristol criticized Charles Gibson of ABC for acting “as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D...
...Washington insiders and, in the homestretch, wealth distribution...
...Perhaps it is redistribution to the poor that the Republican nominee was worried about...
...John D. Dingell (D.-Mich...
...House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.Calif...
...Slipping into the Twilight Bob Woodward’s latest book, The War Within, says the Bush Administration conducted an extensive electronic spying operation on Iraq’s prime minister...
...Yet even with Wall Street in shambles, those ideologically opposed to regulation were not ready to give up...
...On September 18, he announced he was canceling outof-town travel that day to closely monitor the situation of failing banks...
...The nitty-gritty of hammering out a compromise measure with Congress was left to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr...
...Why McCain should be concerned is hard to imagine...
...That was when the 16th Amendment to the Constitution created the income tax on individuals and corporations...
...And so the Bush Presidency slips into the twilight...
...exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student...
...For example, when the Department of Education came under fire for its implementation of No Child Left Behind it paid a conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams, $24,000 to say nice things about the program...
...Now we have the investment bank meltdown...
...In the South our cities were being lashed by hurricanes, in the North our great temples of capitalism were crumbling, and our aspirants for the Presidency, Senators John McCain (R.-Ariz...
...He said Russia was convinced that a complete pullout of international forces would not be advisable...
...chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over the FDA, says: “The agency chose to use its limited resources to save face instead of saving the public health...
...They resulted in legislation that changed corporate governance and accounting practices...
...Thus America entered one of its periodic swings between deregulation and regulation...
...I recalled that because something comparable, a new start with a new President, may be possible in Iraq...
...The George W. Bush Administration is engaged in a gigantic redistribution of wealth to the banks...
...Washington insiders were usually lumped with lobbyists and special interests...
...Iraq’s Bet on the U.S...
...You get it...
...There was talk of extending the UN mandate for another year...
...Gonzales had to resign as attorney general for another reason—the politicization of Justice Department hirings...
...Foreign leaders placed their bets on an American election race all over again...
...He did not attempt any dramatic display of leadership, like going up to Capitol Hill to exert pressure on lagging legislators...
...But soon the candidates were back to attacking each other...
...He suggested that Obama might be talking socialism...
Vol. 91 • September 2008 • No. 5
