Government Executive - Authors - George E. Condon Jr.

Analysis: Trump Staff Still Short on Relevant Experience

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 09:36:24 -0400

There isn’t much that President Trump hasn’t tried in staffing top jobs at the White House. He has tried political operatives. He has tried populists. He has tried nationalists. He has tried generals. He has tried political provocateurs. He has tried family. He has tried New Yorkers. He has tried Goldman Sachs. He has even—briefly—tried The Mooch.

At the seven-month mark of his presidency, the results have not been pretty. Polls uniformly show his job approval at an historic low. As fact-checkers have documented, his record of pushing significant legislation through Congress similarly suffers in comparison to his predecessors, despite White House claims to the contrary. His signature campaign promises—funding a border wall, repealing Obamacare, rebuilding infrastructure, and cutting taxes—have either run into roadblocks in Congress or have not yet been introduced.

Trump’s difficulties on Capitol Hill and the ouster of senior strategist Steve Bannon on Friday focus attention on what is perhaps the only thing he has not tried on his staff: hiring people with experience passing legislation and intimate knowledge of how government works.

Bannon’s experience was in the Navy as an officer, on Wall Street as an investment banker, in Hollywood as a producer, and in the world of conservative media at Breitbart. Never did he have to work with Congress. It is a hole in his résumé shared by most of his former colleagues on Trump’s senior staff. For all the times he was portrayed as an old Washington hand, ousted Chief of Staff Reince Priebus was a relative newcomer to Washington, having come to D.C. in 2011 to head the Republican National Committee. Before that, he spent four years as chairman of the Wisconsin GOP. Before joining the White House staff, he had never had to pass a bill either on the state or national level.

His replacement, retired Gen. John Kelly, spent some time at the Pentagon working with Congress, though the bulk of his time in the military was in combat commands. That gives Kelly more experience working with Congress than Priebus had, but considerably less than almost all his modern predecessors as chief of staff.

Of the 22 chiefs of staff before Priebus, serving seven presidents, only three had less experience with Congress: Hamilton Jordan with President Carter, John Sununu with President George H.W. Bush, and Mack McLarty with President Clinton. Sununu’s inexperience mattered little since Bush was deeply experienced in Washington as a former member of the House, ambassador, CIA director, and vice president. He had spent years building deep personal relationships with members of Congress. But both Carter and Clinton, newcomers to Washington, suffered from wounds inflicted by missteps of their chiefs.

Trump’s aversion to congressional experience is a great contrast to his predecessor. President Obama chose then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel as his first chief, mainly because of his ties to Congress. And three of his four subsequent chiefs came out of Capitol Hill. The other, William Daley, also had extensive Washington experience.

That type of résumé is absent among the heavyweights in the Trump White House. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor, was respected as a pollster for her expertise on how women vote. Senior advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump wield clout in the inner councils because of their family ties to the president, but are neophytes at trying to maneuver through Congress. They are among many New Yorkers who brought no congressional experience to the White House. That group includes Keith Schiller, head of Oval Office operations; Hope Hicks, the new communications director; and, briefly, Anthony Scaramucci—“The Mooch”—the man Hicks replaced. Omarosa Manigault, director of public liaison, briefly worked for Vice President Al Gore before being fired but is best known as a contestant on Trump’s The Apprentice. Also coming from New York was Gary Cohn, who, before being named the president’s chief economic adviser, headed Goldman Sachs.

Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, had experience on Capitol Hill and at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. But his most recent years were spent at the RNC, focused more on electing people to Congress than getting their votes. Spicer’s replacement, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, did some work with Congress when she worked in the Education Department under President George W. Bush. But her main experience is in campaigns, including those of her father, Mike Huckabee.

That puts great pressure on the few members of Trump’s staff who are respected for their knowledge of the inner workings of Congress, including Rick Dearborn, the deputy chief of staff for legislative affairs, and Marc Short, the director of legislative affairs. Dearborn worked for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, as did Trump’s senior adviser for policy, Stephen Miller. And of course there is Vice President Mike Pence, who spent a dozen years in Congress before becoming governor of Indiana.

The Carter experience suggests that the need for congressional savvy is more compelling when a president is elected as an outsider. Carter later acknowledged that he made a mistake pushing so many major issues at the same time. “There were always 12 or 15 bills that we were trying to get through the Congress at any one time,” he said in an oral-history interview with the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Congress, he learned, can’t handle that much at the same time. In contrast, he said, President Reagan had more success focusing on a smaller number of priorities.

Carter said he was additionally hindered by running against the political establishment in 1976—as Trump would do in 2016. “I didn’t have any obligation to the people in Washington for my election. Very few of the members of Congress, or members of the major lobbying groups, or the distinguished former Democratic leaders, had played much of a role in my election,” he said, adding, “I just didn’t have that sort of potential tie to them, and I think they felt that they were kind of on the outside.” He said he learned “very quickly” that “there was no inherent loyalty to me” among members of Congress. Four decades later, Trump is learning the same lessons about congressional know-how on his staff and about loyalty on Capitol Hill.

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Trump Has His 20th 'Worst Week' Out of 30 in Office

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 10:43:33 -0400

By the end of the week, count on headlines declaring this the worst week of Donald Trump’s presidency. That’s not really surprising. Any president who in one seven-day period threatened nuclear war in Korea, talked of a possible war in Venezuela, and found “some very fine people” marching with Nazis and white supremacists could expect those headlines.

But there is another reason why they won’t be surprising: Journalists and analysts have fallen in the habit of declaring almost every week in this presidency the worst yet. Perhaps befitting a president unlike any of his predecessors, this is a journalistic trend never seen before.

This is the 30th week since Trump was sworn into office. A neutral ranking of those weeks would show that 20 have been bad for the president, while only four weeks have been positive for him. The other six weeks were neither good nor bad.

Some weeks have been challenging to assess. The week of Feb. 27 to March 5, for example, began on a high note with the president’s well-received address to a joint session of Congress. But before the week ended, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, and the president tweeted his incendiary accusation that President Obama had wiretapped him. Six months later, those two negatives more than outweigh the standing ovations during his speech.

Another week that the White House wanted to chalk up as a big win for the president similarly looks much worse in hindsight. That was the week of May 1 to 7, the highlight of which was the festive rally in the Rose Garden celebrating the House passage of a Republican replacement for Obamacare. After the crushing defeat in the Senate, that celebration looks more silly than positive.

The only “good” weeks that hold up for the White House were the April week when he ordered a missile strike on Syria and watched the Senate confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the subsequent week when Gorsuch was sworn in to the delight of conservatives, and, finally, the week in June when the Supreme Court reinstated much of Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

It is more time-consuming to chronicle the “bad” weeks—and a little embarrassing to look at how many times journalists were quick to declare them the worst ever. The earliest came when the Slatest blog on Slatelooked at Trump’s fifth day in office and proclaimed it “the worst day yet.” Two days later, The New Republic headlined a story “Trump’s Worst Week Ever,” seeing only “utter chaos.” That same day, The Huffington Post said “Trump Already Looks Like the Worst of Richard Nixon,” adding, “and it’s just the first week.” Nor did The Guardian like Trump’s first week, seeing “carnage, both real and imagined.”

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Trump’s travel ban in early February, the online woman’s magazine Bustle wrote of his many bad weeks, “this week may have been the worst. It was the week he lost, big league.”

Looking at the week that began with the speech to Congress, The Villager saw “Trump’s very bad week.” Satirist Samantha Bee called it “Trump’s very bad no good week.” Seth Meyers waited another few days and saw “a really bad week.” Then, when the Russia investigation intensified two weeks later, Washington Monthly noted, “It’s already a bad week for Trump”—the same assessment leveled that day by the New York Daily News. On March 24, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “This has been a bad week for Trump.” And Washington Monthly ratcheted up the stakes, asking if it was “the worst week ever for a first-term president?” The New Republic, on the same day, agreed it had been a bad week, adding confidently, “But next week will be worse.” And it was, according to Newsweek (“worst week in office”), NBC News (“a bad week for Trump”), and, again, Newsweek (“Donald Trump’s No Good, Very Bad Week With Europe”).

April passed with no one issuing a “worst week” proclamation. But they returned with a vengeance in May. U.S. News & World Report looked at the firing of James Comey and the Oval Office meeting with Russian officials and declared it “a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week.” CNN saw a “disastrously bad week in Washington.” After Robert Mueller was appointed special prosecutor, the Los Angeles Timesobserved that “an already bad week got even worse for President Trump.”

In June, during a week when the president was feuding with the mayor of London, accusing Comey of lying, and mocking an American ally (Qatar), Curve, the lesbian magazine, declared June 8 as “one of the worst days” in the presidency because of Comey’s testimony. The very next week didn’t go much better. CNN proclaimed that Trump “had the absolute worst week in Washington.”

None of this could prepare you for the number of times Trump’s weeks in July and August were to be condemned—weeks featuring the rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci, the sacking of Reince Priebus, the elevation of a new chief of staff, a bizarre speech to the Boy Scouts, an encouragement of police brutality, the threats of “fire and fury” on the Korean peninsula, and the meek reaction to Russian expulsion of American diplomats.

Mother Jones on July 26 said, “It’s Been a Week From Hell for Trump’s Cabinet, and It’s Only Wednesday.” The next day, The San Diego Union-Tribune, in a now-familiar refrain, wrote of “President Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.” The next day, MSNBC saw “President Trump’s worst week yet.” The Political Insider blog tweaked that a little, calling it “Donald Trump’s worst week—so far.” Business Insider wrote that Trump “may have just had his worst week yet.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionsimply declared it “Trump’s worst week.” The Boston Globe put it in a question: “Was this Trump’s worst week ever?” The Atlantic was more certain: “Trump’s Worst Week Yet.”

The Financial Times was more colorful, writing that “Trump’s week staggers from bad to worse.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel saw a week “quickly shrouded in defeat and discord.” CNN ratcheted up the gloom on July 29, taking note of “Donald Trump’s manic, fantastical and utterly disastrous week.” The Daily Beast, on Aug. 4, showed self-awareness regarding how many times it had judged Trump’s weeks. This time, it proclaimed “Trump’s worst week since last week.”

And all that was before he threw the prestige of his office behind a march that was organized by Nazis and white supremacists and resulted in the death of a woman. Based on the last seven months, there is a pretty good chance that some news organization in the next few days will look at the past seven days and declare them to be President Trump’s worst week yet.

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Kushner’s Curious Plan for a Back Channel

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 10:17:47 -0400

Diplomatic back channels, far from being invented by Donald Trump or his son-in-law Jared Kushner, have been an accepted fixture in almost every presidency since George Washington, most famously at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when President Kennedy’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was more engaged than his secretary of State.

President Washington encouraged Alexander Hamilton to hide his talks with a British general from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Washington knew Jefferson was hostile to normalized relations with the former enemy and kept him in the dark until formal relations were opened in 1791, according to Washington biographer Ron Chernow. That proved more demonstrably successful than Kennedy’s 171 years later.

Even before the Soviet missiles were spotted in Cuba, Attorney General Kennedy had developed a close relationship with Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet GRU agent he had invited to his home, met with almost three dozen times, and taken messages from for his brother, the president. But, as Evan Thomas notes in his 2000 biography Robert Kennedy. His Life, Bolshakov had misled him about the missiles, insisting they were only defensive. Kennedy soon learned that the Kremlin had intentionally kept Bolshakov in the dark so he could mislead Kennedy.

“Bolshakov’s unwitting deception illustrates the drawbacks of operating through go-betweens … and back channels,” wrote Thomas. It also explained why, in the midst of the missile crisis, Kennedy made more use of another back channel—Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. A key moment was when President Kennedy had his brother meet secretly at the Justice Department with the ambassador to send a message that the United States was willing to remove its missiles from Turkey to defuse the crisis.

The long history of back channels winds from Washington through Franklin Roosevelt’s use of Harry Hopkins to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, to President Kennedy’s use of his brother, Richard M. Nixon’s use of Henry Kissinger to forge an arms-limitation treaty with the Soviets and the opening to China, and Barack Obama’s work with the pope to normalize relations with Cuba in 2014.

“Back channels are as old as diplomacy itself,” said Richard A. Moss, an associate research professor at the Naval War College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies. “Back channels are an essential tool in the diplomatic tool box. They are a very effective tool when wielded properly.”

The problem for Kushner—and the likely reason his back channel is subject to more second-guessing than previous secret communications—is that he proved himself no Alexander Hamilton in his dealings with Russian officials during the transition. While veteran diplomats were unconcerned by his meetings and viewed the president-elect as being well within his rights to open a dialogue, many were mystified by the steps that Kushner allegedly took to shield his conversations from U.S. counterintelligence officials.

The meeting, first reported by The Washington Post last week, brought Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to Trump Tower in New York on either Dec. 1 or 2, according to intercepts of Russian communications cited by the Post. At the meeting, which also included Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, the men discussed Kushner using Russian diplomatic facilities, presumably to keep their talks from being monitored by U.S. counterintelligence.

Moss is the coauthor of a new book, Nixon’s Back Channel to Moscow: Confidential Diplomacy and Détente. He noted that there is ample precedent for such back channels in presidential transitions, citing Nixon’s use of Kissinger to signal the Kremlin in 1968 that he was ready to work for better relations. But he finds no precedent for Kushner’s offer to use highly secure Russian facilities, recalling that Kissinger made a point of keeping the FBI aware of what he was doing. It was the State Department that Nixon wanted shut out, particularly on China.

“The possible use of Russian secured communications, that just looks terrible,” Moss told National Journal. “It looks like it was designed to circumvent legitimate U.S. counterintelligence monitoring.”

Cuba may have been the cause of more back channel-subterfuge than almost any other foreign hot spot. In Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, author Peter Kornbluh examines 50 years of behind-the-scenes and unofficial talks to free prisoners and inch the United States and Cuba toward reconciliation.

Separate from those discussions, the meetings on the Cuban Missile Crisis were some of the most intense. On the day before Robert Kennedy met with the ambassador, the Soviets set up a meeting between ABC newsman John Scali and the embassy counselor, Aleksandr Fomin, who was the chief Soviet intelligence operative in the United States. Fomin and Scali discussed the crisis at the Occidental Restaurant, a coffee shop at what is now the Capital Hilton, and at the Yenching Palace restaurant on Connecticut Avenue. Scali, who later would become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, served as a courier between the two sides until the crisis was resolved.

Kornbluh sees differences in what is happening today. What sets the Kushner-Flynn contact apart from previous back channels, he said, is not only the suggested use of Russian facilities, but also that it came at a time when the Trump campaign’s links to Russian interests were a source of controversy.

“It’s not the issue of back channels,” he told National Journal. “It’s the issue of when they’re done and what they’re being done for.”

Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, added, “If they use the Russian facilities, that would mean that the Russians really would have great leverage knowing what was said when nobody else knew what was said. This is beyond peculiar.”

The same concern was expressed by Michael J. Morell, the former acting director and deputy director of the CIA. In a Q&A this week with the security site The Cipher Brief, Morell urged people not to overreact to news of the meeting, stating his lack of confidence in The Washington Post’s sourcing and stressing that too few facts are known at this point. Morell, though, shares the concerns of other analysts like Moss and Kornbluh.

“Why the request for the use of the Russian embassy’s secure communications?” he asked. “There are potential answers to those questions that would leave me saying, ‘OK, I understand. It was not smart to ask, but I get it and it is OK.” He added, “And there are potential answers to those questions that would leave me saying, ‘Put that at the top of the FBI’s list’.”

Moss endorses Morell’s caution and his expectation that the talk of using Russian communications will become the focus of the investigation. “There may be perfectly legitimate reasons for doing that. There may be nefarious reasons for doing that,” he said. “The only way we’re going to find out is if it is investigated.”

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How to Make Donald Trump’s Phone Safe

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 11:00:00 -0500

Eight years after he was the man trying to grant Barack Obama’s plea to keep his BlackBerry, Richard “Dickie” George is watching with more than casual interest while another president-elect fights to keep his smartphone as a lifeline out of the bubble that is the modern presidency.

Obama won that battle—sort of—thanks to the work of a team at the National Security Agency headed by George, and thanks to the president’s willingness to accept severe restrictions.

Today, the challenges presented by President-elect Donald Trump’s heavy use of social media on an unsecured Android phone are considerably more daunting. And the outcome is less than clear only five weeks before the Inauguration.

Trump transition officials will not talk about the issue, not even responding to questions on whether they have had any discussions with the NSA. The president-elect, in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes shortly after the election, promised to be “very restrained” with Twitter “if I use it at all.” With 17.3 million followers, he sees Twitter as “a method of fighting back” against criticism.

Indeed, in his postelection tweets, he has attacked The New York Times, Vanity Fair, CNN, NBC News, and Saturday Night Live. On Dec. 5, he seemed to answer the question about his future tweets when he tweeted: “If the press would cover me accurately & honorably, I would have far less reason to ‘tweet.’ Sadly, I don’t know if that will ever happen!”

That means the NSA, which is in charge of protecting U.S. government communications and information systems, will have to deal with a tweet-happy president, one who has told his aides he does not want to surrender his Samsung Galaxy S4. It’s exactly the type of challenge George thrived on during his 41 years with the NSA. Before he retired in 2011 and became senior adviser for cybersecurity at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, George had spent the previous eight years at the NSA as technical director for the Information Assurance Directorate.

He was in that job on Election Day in 2008 when he was told to find a way to let Obama keep his BlackBerry. In an interview this week with National Journal, George compared the assignment to the NSA’s development of “Vinson,” a secure voice-encryption unit that was a forerunner of the cell phone. “We designed that in 1957. We built the first model in 1970, and we fixed everything we found wrong through the first few engineering models, and we fielded it in 1976. It took 19 years to get that thing out,” he said, contrasting that with the three-month time frame to reengineer Obama’s phone.

To do it, he assembled a core team of about a dozen, with up to another 50 working on the project. In the end, after tweaking the phone’s algorithms and engineering, he presented the new president with a severely limited device. Obama could call and receive calls from only a handful of close friends—who first had to be briefed by the White House counsel’s office and have their devices examined. He could not click on any attachments and could not tweet. “And he wasn’t playing Angry Birds, I can promise you that,” joked George.

In Obama’s last year in office, the NSA replaced his BlackBerry with a new phone. The limitations remained in force, as the president joked in an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on June 9. Obama recalled what he was told when given the new device: “This is a great phone—state of the art. But it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text, the phone doesn’t work, and you can’t play your music on it,” he joked.

George was watching Fallon that night and laughed along with the president. “I thought his characterization was right on. In fact, I laughed with my wife and told her, ‘Boy, did he get that right.’”

The limitations are critical because the threat is so dire, he said. “We are all targets,” he said. “But he has got a much bigger bull’s-eye on his back than I do or anybody else.” He added that it is almost certain that a president would be sent false links, often disguised as coming from legitimate sources. “If someone can get into the secretary of Defense system and send a message to the president with a ‘You need to read this’ link, the chances are much better that he is going to click on that than if it comes from some person he’s never heard of.”

If a president is not careful, he could surrender control of his phone, his camera, and the device’s microphone and GPS. “People are going to try a lot harder, spend a lot more resources to get him. You’ve got to protect yourself,” said George.

Trump’s postelection tweets also have raised the possibility of hackers sending out fake tweets that look as if they came from Trump and have the potential of affecting the stock market or triggering foreign crises. Two companies already saw their values drop following barbed early-morning tweets from Trump. On Dec. 6, he criticized the amount he said—inaccurately—Boeing was spending on a new Air Force One, demanding, “Cancel order!” Boeing’s shares lost almost 1 percent at the opening of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Six days later, Lockheed Martin suffered a more than 5 percent hit after Trump tweeted that the cost of the F-35 fighter jet program was “out of control.”

“And,” said George, “those were really mild things he said. You could really tank a company if you wanted to” with a fake tweet. “The impact he can have is phenomenal.”

For Trump, George suspects the answer will be giving him multiple devices. “It’s not like he is only going to have one device to do things from. And it’s not like he has to worry about carrying extra devices. There are people who will be carrying stuff for him.” George said the functionality of one device can be limited to sending tweets. “This is the device that you only Twitter on. You don’t take phone calls, you don’t send emails. You Twitter on this and nobody is calling you on this.” Another phone would be used for calls to his family.

NSA officials know, though, that no president has to listen to them. They can only hope that Trump is as cooperative as Obama was. “He is the president; he gets to make the risk-management decision,” said George. “The good news was that Obama was about as easy to work with as you could imagine. He didn’t fight us at any step. He took it really seriously, and what more could you ask for?”

With Trump, he said, “We can suggest. But no one is going to tell him.” He added, “This is the president. He can do what he wants. But presidents are inherently really smart people. They understand the risks that they take and they try to play the game right. You don’t get to be president if you don’t understand that kind of stuff.”

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The Rocky Obama-Sanders Relationship

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 09:41:40 -0400

Don’t expect a lot of warmth when President Obama sits down Thursday at the White House with Sen. Bernie Sanders. This is not a reunion of political allies or personal friends or fellow senators who bonded when they served together. Instead, the agenda will be all business as the president does his duties as leader of the Democratic Party, and Sanders takes the opportunity to lick his wounds, air his grievances, and begin to come to grips with his defeat at the hands of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Both at the White House and in the Sanders camp, there is too much history for either side to pretend otherwise. Aides to Obama well remember the senator’s loud opposition to the president’s positions on single-payer health reform, Social Security reform, Wall Street regulation, the proper pace to end two wars—even Sanders’s effort to block the president’s appointee to be a commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration because of ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

They remember his lengthy speech on the Senate floor in December 2010 condemning the tax-cut deal between the White House and Republicans. And they especially remember his open talk in 2011 of the need to have a true progressive run against Obama in the Democratic primaries in 2012. “If a progressive Democrat wants to run, I think it would enliven the debate, raise some issues, and people have a right to do that,” he said in March 2011. Four months later, on a radio program, Sanders spoke of the “millions of Americans who are deeply disappointed in the president, who believe that, with regard to Social Security and a number of other issues, he said one thing as a candidate and is doing something very much else as a president, who cannot believe how weak he has been … in negotiating with Republicans.”

They also took note at the White House when the Sanders campaign gave great prominence to one of the most acerbic critics, Ivy League professor Cornel West, who labeled Obama “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface” in a November 2012 interview with Democracy Now and who told Truthdig in May 2011 that Obama was “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

When National Journal included a critical comment from Sanders in a story in 2012, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney fired off an angry email to the offending reporter: “You’re quoting Bernie Sanders??? BERNIE SANDERS??” Carney’s message was clear—we don’t take Sanders seriously at the White House and you shouldn’t either in your reporting. It was a message that Carney not so subtly delivered again after he left the White House and was quoted widely as stating that the president favored Clinton in her match against Sanders.

In the Sanders camp, that comment by Carney—and the winking assent of the White House—rankled. But not as much as the comment by the president himself in January. In an interview with Glenn Thrush of Politico, Obama sought to come off as even-handed in assessing the two Democratic candidates. But there was no masking his preference for Clinton when he forcefully challenged the notion that his campaign in 2008 was a model for Sanders in 2016. “No, no,” said Obama, adding, “I don’t think that’s true.”

Obama was at his most dismissive of Sanders in that interview when he voiced sympathy for Clinton’s challenges as a front-runner and said of Sanders, “You’re always looking at the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before—that’s a disadvantage to her.”

Nor did relations warm during the campaign. Those around Obama understand that Democrats cannot just promise to provide a third Obama term. But they chafed at some of Sanders’s attempts to break sharply with the president’s record. In a February interview on MSNBC, Sanders suggested that Obama had not displayed sufficient presidential leadership to close the gap between Washington and the American people. Clinton’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, quickly tweeted, “The idea of Bernie Sanders, who has little to show for his 25 years in Congress, giving leadership lectures to President Obama is absurd.”

Earlier in the campaign, Sanders drew the attention of the White House when he said his presidency could represent a “course correction” from the current administration.

Despite the tension just beneath the surface, both sides have publicly celebrated what they call a friendship as the president has officially remained neutral and Sanders has tried to promise more progressive policies without alienating the incumbent. “Barack Obama is a friend of mine,” Sanders said on ABC’s This Week in November. “I think he’s been a very strong president and has taken this country in an extraordinarily difficult moment in history in a very positive way.”

Thursday, at a difficult moment in Sanders’s political career, the two men have a chance to refresh that relationship and test how receptive the senator is to tough advice from his “friend.”

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How Obama Will Give His Final State of the Union

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 12:00:00 -0500

As President Obama prepares to deliver his final State of the Union address Tuesday, he can only hope for better treatment than the last two-term president received. The White House back in 2008 was less than thrilled when President George W. Bush’s appearance before a joint session of Congress was overshadowed by another event scheduled by a rival politician more skilled at commanding the media spotlight. That troublemaker’s name was Barack Obama.

He was candidate Barack Obama then. And Jan. 28, 2008, was one of the most important days of his campaign. Less than six miles away from Capitol Hill, then-Sen. Obama was donning the mantle of the Kennedy family at what news reports described as a “Beatlesesque” event at American University. There, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, in what the AU News Service called “part rock concert, part rally, part coronation,” officially endorsed Obama over rival Sen. Hillary Clinton on live TV. Six hours later, President Bush took to the House rostrum. He had a bigger audience. But, The Washington Post concluded, he was “upstaged by the larger and louder speech of the day” given by Kennedy.

Eight years later, now-President Obama will see if he’s still able to keep that spotlight or whether it will be drawn away by the larger and louder candidates of the day who are fighting to win his job. For Obama’s upstaging of Bush was not the first time an incumbent president has been frustrated trying to make the country—and Congress—pay attention to his last State of the Union address. To the dismay of those incumbents, the reaction has often been a national shrug at a message tuned out as one they’ve heard before.

Only five presidents have been in the position that Obama will be in Tuesday—George Washington in 1796, Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, Ronald Reagan in 1988, Bill Clinton in 2000, and George W. Bush in 2008. All other two-termers—who didn’t run for a third term as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1940—submitted written reports to Congress rather than personally addressing the lawmakers. Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush all envisioned the speech as Obama hopes to this time, as a means to battle the view that they were lame ducks with diminishing influence and waning control of the Washington agenda.

“Nobody wants a seven-year presidency,” said Clark Judge, one of the writers of Reagan’s 1988 address. Explaining his approach to that speech to National Journal, Judge said Obama has to acknowledge what Reagan, Bush, and Clinton learned. “The president is struggling in the eighth year. No matter who you are, you’re struggling.”

He added, “You are always struggling with the question of how you keep momentum.” The State of the Union address can be important to that fight. “You need to keep that focus. And even if you can’t pass anything, you want to have established agenda items. If you have political skills and don’t think ‘it’s my way or the highway’, you can have a very productive last year in office. Reagan certainly did.”

Stephen Hess, who helped write Eisenhower’s 1960 speech, noted that all the post-FDR two-term presidents faced hostile Congresses in their last year in office and understood that their chances for legislative victories were slim. “We saw that speech as really a flight plan for the bureaucracy,” he said.

This is a key point, said Lee H. Hamilton, the 17-term Democratic congressman from Indiana who is now director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. “There isn’t any doubt that the president’s use of the bully pulpit diminishes as he approaches the end of his tenure. He doesn’t command the attention of the American public that he did earlier in his presidency. But he cannot be ignored and he still has all the power. He still has total control of the executive branch.”

Reagan, Clinton, and Bush all used their final addresses to forcefully remind everyone that they had a year to go. “My message to you tonight is put on your work shoes: We’re still on the job,” said Reagan. Clinton warned against complacency. “We have unfinished business before us and the American people expect us to get it done,” declared Bush.

For all the two-termers, though, there were ample reminders that others now were seen as the future. In 2008, Bush looked out at an audience that included Sens. Hillary Clinton and Obama—as well as the scene-stealing Kennedy. (The eventual GOP nominee that year, Sen. John McCain, did not attend.) Eisenhower had six Democratic presidential candidates before him and Vice President Richard Nixon behind him. Clinton had four Republican candidates and Vice President Al Gore present. Even George Washington had multiple candidates present among his cabinet, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

The challenge to shift public attention away from the campaign and back onto the White House is daunting. It is made no easier by the insistence of every president to take one last stab at agenda items previously denied in Congress. George Washington was the most beloved and popular president in history. But he used his address to complain of Congress’s reluctance to build a navy, open a military academy at West Point, and establish a national university.

Eisenhower made a staunch push for increased foreign aid; Reagan again demanded a line-item veto and his Strategic Defense Initiative; Clinton used almost 10,000 words to lay out a long and familiar agenda; Bush once more appealed for immigration and Social Security reform. Reagan, Clinton, and Bush all complained the Senate was not confirming their judicial appointments, something certain to be in Obama’s text Tuesday. And all three openly threatened vetoes if Congress sent them legislation they viewed as obnoxious. Again, expect Obama to make a similar threat.

Another reality for lame-duck presidents is that fewer people watch their final State of the Union. Nielsen did not measure audiences for Eisenhower or Reagan, but documented the decline for Clinton and Bush. Clinton went from 45.8 million in 1994 to 31.5 million in 2000. Bush had 51.8 million viewers for his first in 2002 and only 37.5 million for his last in 2008. Clinton’s 31.5 million still stands as the smallest audience, a record almost certain to be broken Tuesday. Obama’s audiences have gone from 48 million in 2010 to just 32 million last year.

Obama will likely take another page from the two-termer playbook and make a pitch to historians and analysts starting to assess his legacy. Reagan opened his address stating that he would not offer “a proud recitation of the accomplishments of my administration. I say let’s leave that to history.” But he wasn’t taking any chances and within minutes was offering just that recitation.

That was not accidental, said speechwriter Judge. “That was something we did all eight years,” he said. He called it an intentional effort to keep the economic numbers in front of the press. “There was an effort to downplay our achievements and by going back to that over and over again, it made it harder to downplay them,” he said.

It also was part of the desire to force the candidates to talk about Reagan’s issues. “We were laying out an agenda for the eighth year,” said Judge. “But also laying out themes that we felt should drive the debate that year. I am sure that President Obama will be trying to shape the upcoming election in his speech as well.”

The lesson of the previous two-termers for Obama is clear, said Hamilton. “Full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes,” he said. “Go ahead and make your pitch to the American public in what you believe in, what you have learned, what you think the country needs. Act as if you have all the power you ever had and push it as hard as you can. Don’t slack. Use the power you have.”

Obama, he added, “cannot be cowed by the fact that power is slipping away. He wants to go out with guns blazing.”

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The White House Thinks Obama Had a Very Good Year. The Public Isn’t so Sure.

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 15:44:06 -0500

By almost all traditional metrics, the White House should be celebrating his 2015 instead of offering the subdued and measured defense seen from President Obama at his end-of-the-year press conference. After all, the usual numbers are good—unemployment rate down, job creation up, inflation low, GDP up, gas prices declining. Only the stock market, which will end the year slightly down, is in negative territory.

To add to a bullish appraisal for the president’s agenda, the year saw him prevail on some of his top priorities—protecting Obamacare, achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, reaching an international climate agreement, and pushing through his rapprochement with Cuba. The president can also point to the lowest “Misery Index”—adding unemployment with inflation—since Harry Truman was president. The current 5.3 Misery Index would normally guarantee high approval.

But these are not normal times and traditional metrics don’t tell the whole story. Instead, these are times of widespread national fear of terrorism and anxiety over the availability of good jobs. So the president concludes 2015 mired in the polling doldrums, his approval rating stuck just about where it was when he started the year. And, with the nation even more polarized than before as it weathers a nasty fight to elect the next president, there is no path visible to push Obama’s ratings above 50 percent.

“It was not a bad year for him until November when suddenly everything was pushed off the table by terrorist attacks,” said Bill Schneider, the veteran political analyst who is a professor at George Mason University. “He accomplished certain things, none of them wildly popular. But the economy was definitely improving, the stock market was stabilizing, unemployment was down as much as anyone had hoped for, and the economy was looking good.”

Then came the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and a reaction by the president that even he reportedly conceded to a group of columnists failed to capture the national craving for reassurance and strength. “That is terrorism,” said Schneider, “and he didn’t seem to be strong. That has pushed everything else off the table. Climate change—who cares? Inequality—who cares?”

Schneider, who has been a champion for centrists and moderates in the Democratic Party, said Americans yearned for a reaction similar to President George W. Bush’s after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. “What many Americans were waiting for was for the president to say a very simple ‘Go get ‘em.’ But he’s not a ‘Go get ‘em’ president. … He doesn’t really come across as tough and strong and determined the way Bush did. That is because of the kind of president he is. He has this style and temperament of a professor. Rational. Calm. And thoughtful.”

At the White House, they hoped that 5 percent unemployment, 2 million new jobs and $2-a-gallon gas—down almost 50 cents from a year ago—could trump that anxiety. They also insist that their list of accomplishments is worthy of acclaim. White House press secretary Josh Earnest cited the thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations, the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the rising numbers of those with health insurance, and the Pacific trade pact. “If I’d have read that list off the top at the beginning of this year. … I don’t think anybody would have thought that was realistic that we were going to get all of that done, particularly facing new Republican majorities in the House and Senate.”

Pressed to explain why none of that boosted the president’s approval ratings, Earnest suggested the attack in San Bernardino “probably leaves people a little concerned, as it should, and that may have a broader impact on their assessment of the current condition of the country.”

William Galston, President Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser, said he agreed with the checklist of accomplishments. “But,” he said, “obviously, that is not the way the American people are keeping score right now. And that’s the president’s problem.”

Galston went beyond terrorism to explain Obama’s plight. “People are looking for a significant increase in wages and income and they are looking for a sense of security against foreign threats. And they don’t really think they’ve gotten either one of those. So the rest of it doesn’t seem to matter that much.”

Galston noted that most of the president’s proudest achievements—Iran, the Affordable Care Act, and the climate deal—were forced through with neither Republican support nor public approval. “If you’re acting on your own hook in polarized times, then you’re not going to persuade a lot of people on the fence or on the other side that you’re doing the right thing. So your job approval is not likely to rise.”

Making it worse for Obama is his often-puzzling inability to grasp the emotional need to reassure a frightened citizenry. “When people are feeling scared, it takes a special art to reassure them. He was basically saying you should keep cool the way I’m keeping cool,” Galston said. “But if people are feeling hot and bothered, telling them to stay cool can sometimes make them even more hot and bothered.”

Galston added, “I think he knows himself very well. Whether he understands the people that he’s been leading for almost seven years is a different question altogether. I think he understands people who are like him. I don’t think he understands people who are unlike him particularly well.”

Carroll Doherty, director of political research at the Pew Research Center, marveled at how little the president’s approval rating moved during the year. “It has moved two points, from a low of 46 to a high of 48,” he noted, with it ending the year at 46, down one from the start of the year. The RealClearPolitics average for Obama is 43.5.

Doherty said Obama has to fight through general dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, fears of terrorism and continuing anxiety over incomes. “People still feel they are falling behind. People feel their incomes haven’t kept up with the cost of living. … So even though things are significantly better from the depths of the recession, they still are not all that positive.”

He said the climate deal is little help to Obama because it’s “among the most polarizing of all issues”—wildly popular with Democrats, deeply unpopular with Republicans.

All that leaves Obama right where he was at the beginning of 2015. In historical terms, he is “between Bush and Clinton,” said Doherty. “Clinton was well above 50 percent and approaching 60 percent. Bush was declining at this point to the 30 percent range. The trajectories were very different. Obama’s is different in the sense that his has been so stable.”

The White House response is to take the long view and argue that it matters more whether what they achieved in 2015 helps Americans a decade from now instead of whether it boosts poll numbers today. “We are much more focused on the work of the American people than we are on reading polls,” said Earnest. For his part, the president insisted that “our steady, persistent work over the years is paying off for the American people in big, tangible ways.”

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The President Again Tries to Right the Ship

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 10:00:00 -0500

With the country shaken by the bloodshed in Paris, nervous about attacks at home, and concerned about an influx of refugees from the Middle East, many presidents would take to the airwaves for a prime-time address to reassure an anxious nation. But that is not President Obama’s preferred way to use the bully pulpit.

Instead, after a week out of the country and out of sight for most Americans, Obama on Tuesday used his third press conference in eight days to persuade Americans it is safe to follow their daily routines and to reassert his command of the war against terrorism.

Basking in praise from visiting French President Francois Hollande, who stood at an adjoining lectern in the East Room, the American president found himself playing catch-up in the wake of the multiple assaults in Paris and the rising intensity of the political criticism coming from Republicans on the campaign trail. So it was not surprising that Obama prefaced his opening statement by explaining that it “will be a little longer than usual. I have been traveling, and this is an important moment for our nations and for the world.”

He easily could have added: It is also an important moment for his presidency and his legacy.

It is unusual for any president to use so many press conferences in such a short time to try to right the ship. And the exercise did not start out auspiciously for him. His meeting with reporters in Antalya, Turkey, on Nov. 16 was widely panned, as most critics saw a defensive and testy president. By the time he next took questions six days later, the president had more than found his equilibrium.

Meeting reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, he was sure-footed and almost eloquent, talking of the “beautiful, wonderful lives” lost in Paris, flexing the muscle of a 65-nation coalition, and appealing to the nation to rise above “prejudice and discrimination.” His theme was powerful: “We do not succumb to fear.” That, he said, is “the primary power that these terrorists have over us. They cannot strike a mortal blow against the United States, or against France. … But they can make people fearful. And that’s understandable. …”

The big problem for the White House is that almost nobody in the United States saw this more confident president—the press conference took place 9,500 miles and 13 time zones away in Malaysia. It was 1 a.m. on a weekend in Washington when the president spoke.

So Tuesday’s press conference was the president’s third attempt to get it right, to explain why his approach to defeating the Islamic State terrorists is the way to go. That he opted against a prime-time address is not surprising. According to numbers kept by presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar of Towson University, it has been a year since his last prime-time address to the nation. That came on Nov. 20, 2014 from the Cross Hall of the White House, and dealt with immigration.

“He can use other forums, such as 60 Minutes, where he has a large audience, particularly if he does it in the football season,” said Kumar. Also, she noted, using a morning press conference allows him to reach an international audience outside of the United States, where there are doubts about the allied strategy against ISIS as well. “He will be seen in Europe in the early evening, and they wanted to reach that audience as well,” added Kumar. “Since he is the leader of the coalition of allies, he needs to speak to that audience as well as the American one that is keen to hear from him now that he is in the United States.”

George Edwards III, presidential scholar at Texas A&M University, told National Journal he is not surprised that Obama shunned the flashy prime-time show in this instance. “The president knows what works. He is not going to convince a lot of people going on prime time. There would be high expectations and low impact.” Prime time is more conducive for presidents trying to sell specific actions.

“Here, the president doesn’t have a dramatic plan to offer,” said Edwards. “He is not going to announce he is sending the 82nd Airborne in to clear out ISIS. He is not going to announce that, so it would be pretty incremental stuff, and that is more difficult to explain.”

But Edwards said the president still needs to find a better way to rally support for his antiterrorism policy and to address a nation rattled by the Paris attacks. “Reassurance is useful, and that’s what people are looking for right now regarding terrorism,” he said. “They are nervous. They are skittish. And they are looking for reassurance. I don’t think it would hurt him to offer the reassurance of how the government is protecting its people.”

And neither press conferences in Turkey and Kuala Lumpur in the dark of the night nor one in Washington before noon reached big enough audiences to truly answer the questions about the administration’s response to Paris. So the White House is left with the daunting challenge of finding more ways to talk louder than the anti-Obama cacophony coming from the Republican campaigns, and to answer the quieter questions of so many Americans.

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Yes, President Obama Is Going to Watch the Debate

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 21:03:16 -0400

The White House wants you to know that President Obama is not watching every step taken by those who want his job.

“He feels like he’s got better things to do,” explained press secretary Josh Earnest when asked why the president didn’t watch the early GOP candidate debates. While Earnest on Tuesday grudgingly acknowledged that Obama might watch “parts” of the first Democratic debate, he said the competition from “some pretty good playoff baseball” is just too much to keep the president riveted on the debate stage.

Don’t believe it. Incumbent disinterest in politics is one of those fibs every White House tells, right up there with the assertions that the president doesn’t follow his own poll numbers and doesn’t really think about his legacy.

The truth is that this president—like all presidents—is a politician and a competitor. He is intensely proud of his record in office, doesn’t deny that he’d be tempted to stick around longer if not barred by the Constitution, and is peeved by the criticism being tossed around by the Republican wannabes. That much was clear from his weekend fundraising trip to the West Coast and his interview aired Sunday on 60 Minutes.

He knows that he can’t count on the Democratic candidates to defend his record. He understands they can’t be seen as running for his third term. So he has started using his speeches and interviews to mount his own defense and attack the Republicans who cast him as a failure. On Friday and Saturday, in four speeches in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, he let Republicans have it as grumpy, depressing, pessimistic, short-sighted candidates who want to take the county backwards.

“What we see most prominently in the presidential campaigns … is that politics of fear being fanned and expanding,” he said in Los Angeles. “And it can express itself in anti-immigration rhetoric. It can express itself in hunkering back on the need to take care of folks who are vulnerable, or to provide more opportunity for people who’ve been locked out of the American Dream. It can express itself in sort of cheap jingoism and militarism and nationalism that’s not grounded in our national security interests. But it’s a dangerous path.”

In Seattle, he drew laughter when he mocked the Republican candidates. “Why are all these Republican politicians so down on America? I mean, I know it’s political season, but listening to them is really depressing.”

He added, “It kind of doesn’t match up with the truth. In the reality they create, everything was terrific in 2008—in the middle of the worst recession in our lifetimes. Unemployment, uninsured rates going up; we were in two wars, hopelessly addicted to foreign oil, bin Laden still at large. To hear them tell it, those were the good old days.” He accused the candidates of “spending all their time trying to scare people and trying to tap into fear, particularly fear of other people.”

In San Francisco, he urged people to “listen to them a little bit just to hear what they’re saying.” He credited them with great “chutzpah” for their attacks on him, adding, “The fact-checkers can’t even keep up.”

His criticism is more specific when it comes to national security policies espoused by the Republican contenders. In little-noticed remarks during a White House meeting closed to the press on Sept. 10, the president said if he took the advice of Republicans “we’d be in, like, seven wars right now.” The remarks to a small group of veterans and Gold Star mothers of American troops killed overseas were uncovered by Olivier Knox of Yahoo News, who found a video of the president’s presentation. In the video, Obama said, “I’m not exaggerating. I’ve been counting. We’d be in military actions in seven places around the world.” The president did not specify the seven places. The various Republican candidates have at different points called for a stronger U.S. military response in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and the South China Sea.

In his 60 Minutes interview, the president rebuffed efforts to handicap Donald Trump’s campaign beyond calling him “a great publicity seeker” who he doesn’t think will ever be president. Beyond that, Obama demurred, stating, “I’ll leave it up to the pundits.”

He also danced a little bit around reporter Steve Kroft’s question on his feelings about being barred from running for another term. “I think it’s bittersweet,” he said. “On the one hand, I am very proud of what we’ve accomplished and it makes me think, I’d love to do some more. But by the time I’m finished, I think it will be time for me to go.”

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Obama Vows Another Try on Gun Regulation

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 10:14:31 -0400

Americans saw an angry and frustrated president Thursday evening, a president who has reached his breaking point as yet more innocent victims of gun violence are counted and yet more funerals are planned. For the 15th time in his tenure, President Obama had to face the cameras to somehow lead the nation in grieving the carnage left in the wake of a lone gunman.

As he did the previous 14 times, he offered condolences to the grieving, prayers for the fallen, and investigations for the facts. But gone this time was the subdued resignation that politics in Washington and a hostile Congress keep him from going further. This time, he vowed to go against those odds in a desperate bid to make sure that never again will he have to come to the White House briefing room to make what he bitterly described as a now-routine speech.

A president famed for his cool was visibly shaken; a politician noted for his calculation was ready for a fight he is likely to lose; a speaker notorious for his fondness of the teleprompter was quick to ignore his prepared remarks and speak mostly from the heart. The frustration was palpable and obvious through the long pauses, the grim demeanor, and the appeals to fellow citizens he prays share his determination.

He has tried before to change gun laws and didn’t deny that he may fail in this latest bid to pass laws making mass shootings less likely. But he made clear that this is a fight he is eager to wage in his remaining 15 months in office. It is a battle he enters with his eyes open, already anticipating the press releases, the calls for more citizens to be armed, the criticism that he is somehow politicizing something that should be kept out of politics.

His response was essentially what his predecessor once famously declared: “Bring it on.” He all but dared the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress to oppose him, outright appealing to gun owners across the country to join his crusade. Mocking the well-practiced arguments against restrictive gun laws, an exasperated Obama asked, “Does anybody really believe that?”

Nothing seemed to frustrate the president more than that he was following an oh-so-familiar script. This time, it was Umpqua Community College in Oregon. But he had the script after Sandy Hook and Fort Hood, Binghamton and Aurora, the Navy Yard and Charleston. That he was once again speaking for a community benumbed by a bloody rampage by a man with a private arsenal of weapons, angered him. “This has become routine,” he complained. “The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation and the aftermath of it, we’ve become numb to this.”

He knows that this routine includes the pushback to what he is proposing, a powerful gun lobby that will argue guns cannot be blamed for the insanity of individuals, that gun ownership is a constitutional right. Anticipating that, he argued, “We are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”

Before returning to his prepared remarks, he set a goal for his remaining time in office. “I hope and pray that I don’t have to come out again during my tenure as president to offer my condolences to families in these circumstances.” But he has been through this too many times and he seems to know better. It was the one moment where sad resignation briefly supplanted the anger. “Based on my experience as president, I can’t guarantee that. And that’s terrible to say.” Then the anger and resolution returned to his voice when he declared, “It can change.”

The months to come will determine if presidential fury will work any better than his past, more-conventional lobbying and speechmaking.

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Papal White House Visits Are Special, But They Sometimes Get Awkward

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 15:42:28 -0400

Pope Francis’s arrival at the White House on Wednesday will be marked with all the pomp normally accorded a head of state, not unlike the ceremonies that welcomed so many previous world leaders over the years. But as aides to President Obama and several earlier presidents have learned, there is nothing routine when a president of the United States sits down with the leader of the world’s one billion Catholics.

For White House staffers, that is both good and bad. It’s good in that many staffers remember papal meetings as one of the highlights of their tenure. But it’s bad because no one really knows in advance what a pope is going to say behind closed doors. Most summits are tightly scripted. That doesn’t happen in a papal-presidential meeting, leading to awkward moments in some of the past sessions between 12 presidents and six pontiffs. Behind closed doors and away from the cameras, the talks have at times gone from blessings and generalities to strong disagreements and specifics.

Still, participants keep coming back to the uniqueness of these summits between the world’s top temporal and top religious leaders. “It was one of the most memorable things personally that I worked on,” recalled Anita McBride, who played the lead role for the George W. Bush administration in planning Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the White House in 2008. “During my time in three different administrations, this totally rose to the top,” she told National Journal. “It is just on such a very different level from everything else.”

McBride is Catholic. But non-Catholic staffers give similar reports. Ari Fleischer, Bush’s first press secretary, was present for two meetings with Pope John Paul II. He laughingly acknowledged he had not given much thought to popes when he was a boy growing up Jewish in New York. “But this is special stuff—even if you’re not Catholic,” he said. “There is an other-worldliness to it. Unlike a summit meeting or other routine visit, even with the most important head of state, the papacy is unique. The trappings of office are different from anywhere else.”

Because John Paul was ailing and nearing death, his last meeting with Bush was “mostly ceremonial,” recalled Fleischer, with the president doing most of the talking. “But it had such an important air and feel to it. … Just to meet him was special. Popes have an air and a grace about them that sets them apart and makes them special even for those who aren’t Catholic.”

Fleischer still treasures a coin given him by the pope, just as McBride retains a rosary given her by Benedict. She recalled that Bush arranged for the pope to meet with the Catholics on his senior staff as well as some Bush family members who are Catholic.

That meeting made an impact on her. But even more, she said, she remembers how non-Catholics were affected. “There was not one person who was not moved by meeting the Holy Father. It doesn’t matter what faith you are, there is something extraordinarily moving and special about someone who is leading so many people. It is just on such a different level from other world leaders.”

There have, though, been some tensions in the past summits. President Woodrow Wilson, intending to keep the pope out of the postwar peace talks in Paris, initially refused to visit Benedict XV. He relented only when Joseph Tumulty, a Catholic and Wilson’s closest aide, insisted. The meeting, on January 9, 1919, did not go well.

According to a report in the National Catholic Review, Wilson was very much a “prickly Presbyterian” in the meeting, balking when the pope offered a traditional papal blessing. Wilson demanded an explanation. When the pope said the blessing was for everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic, the president turned to his staff and asked, “Are there any Catholics here?” The Catholics knelt and Wilson bowed his head for the blessing. He then rejected Benedict’s 10-point peace plan and refused to intervene to give control of Vatican City to the church instead of the anti-clerical Italian government.

More recent meetings have gone better but still have had moments of friction or embarrassment. John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was watched carefully to see if he would kiss Paul VI’s ring. He didn’t, instead shaking his hand. Jimmy Carter had what was officially billed as a productive and friendly meeting with John Paul II in 1979. Twenty-five years later—just months after the pope’s death—a fuller picture emerged when Carter wrote Our Endangered Values. In the book, he described the pope as a “fundamentalist” and gave more details of their meeting, the first-ever visit by a pope to the White House.

Carter wrote that the pope “seemed to welcome a free exchange of views.” So he “disagreed with him on his perpetuation of the subservience of women and their exclusion from the priesthood.” This, wrote Carter, was “harmonious.” But, he added, “there was more harshness when we turned to the subject of liberation theology” in Latin America. The pope had cracked down on the priests espousing that. But Carter called them “heroes.”

The next president to meet with John Paul was Ronald Reagan, who was a favorite of the Vatican after he opened diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1984. This act carried Reagan past the embarrassment of him noticeably dozing off during a meeting with John Paul II in 1983.

John Paul was still the pontiff a decade later when he sat down with President Bill Clinton in 1994. The White House thought the talks went well. But the pope—according to his surgeon—thought otherwise. He quoted the pope as saying: “The only leader I did not manage to have a proper conversation with was President Clinton. I was speaking and he was looking at one of the walls, admiring the frescoes and the paintings.”

George W. Bush had several meetings with popes, with the talks at times clouded by opposition to the Iraq War by both John Paul and Benedict XVI. Benedict privately questioned whether it was a “just war.” But he went out of his way not to embarrass the president in his arrival remarks at the White House.

When President Obama welcomes Francis to the White House Wednesday, it will cap months of planning by aides. But Charlie Kupchan, senior director for European Affairs on the National Security Council, acknowledged there could be surprises. “Not only is the Vatican not a ‘normal’ country, but this pope is a very independent figure,” he told reporters. “And we know from his previous travels that we don’t know what he’s going to say until he says it.”

The pope and the president broadly agree on climate change, income inequality, and fighting poverty. They sharply disagree on abortion and the contraception mandate of the president’s health care reform. But, as staffers repeatedly warn, the agenda is fluid. Greg Schneiders, a key aide in the Carter White House who was sometimes called the president’s “Catholic adviser,” said it is difficult to know what Francis will want to talk about. Jokingly, he added, “He and Obama may disagree a bit on which of them is more infallible.”

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Obama Embarks on Alaska Trip to Talk Climate, Glaciers

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 12:00:00 -0400

As President Obama embarks on the most ambitious presidential exploration of Alaska in U.S. history, he hopes to call attention to the threats facing that state's precious and majestic glaciers, attending a State Department-sponsored conference on glaciers and meeting with locals concerned about their melting.

That probably means he won't do what the last president to spend a lot of time in Alaska did: have the Navy bombard a glacier for his amusement. That was part of the entertainment for President Harding during his historic tour of Alaska in July 1923. With the president aboard the USS Henderson going from Juneau to Skagway, the ship's gunners fired several rounds of 5-inch shells into the wall of the Taku Glacier "so that Harding could watch the flashing ice avalanche," according to Harding's biographer, Francis Russell.

What Harding saw is called "calving," when huge chunks of ice "calv," or break off, a glacier. "It is very dramatic. I'm sure President Harding liked that," joked Michael Hawfield, an expert on Alaska history and an associate professor at the Kachemak Bay campus of Kenai Peninsula College in the University of Alaska system.

The glacier survived Harding's trip, though the president himself didn't. He died just 10 days after leaving Alaska exhausted and worn out by the exertions of the trip. Harding was the first president to visit Alaska, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, and nine of the 11 presidents after Alaska became a state in 1959. But most of those were refueling stops as they jetted off to Asian summits. One met a pope in the state and another met a Japanese emperor. But none had Alaska as the prime destination between Harding in 1923 and Obama, who will be in the state Monday through Wednesday.

With Air Force One and Marine One at his disposal, Obama will not face the strains and stresses that contributed to Harding's death. The president's journey will take him 8,400 miles in only three days, leaving Washington on Monday morning and returning to the White House on Thursday morning. In contrast, Harding's trip in 1923—which he called his "Voyage of Understanding"—was planned for 15,000 miles. It is unthinkable by modern standards for a president, with half his cabinet in tow, to hit the road for a three-month trip with multiple events scheduled for almost every single day. That is what Harding attempted. Alternately by train, boat, and horse, he was to go as far north as Alaska and Canada and as far south as the Panama Canal and Puerto Rico.

But he never would reach the end of the itinerary. Even before he reached Alaska, he was near-death. He had driven a wheat binder under a broiling-hot sun while wearing his suit, had given 80 speeches, had stood for hours in rainstorms, had endured severe sunburn and blistered lips, and had taken an excruciating 75-mile car ride in Utah on unpaved roads. According to his doctor, the next leg in Utah was even worse—a horseback ride on the rocky bed of the Virgin River. "The president cut a figure in leather chaps, blue flowing neckerchief, and Panama hat," wrote Dr. Joel T. Boone. But, he added, the president "suffered from hemorrhoids and with the saddle acting like a file, he could find relief from pain only by standing in the stirrups."

By the time he reached Tacoma, Harding was in trouble, finally complaining about his schedule. "Unless it is radically modified ... it will kill me," he said, adding, "I just cannot keep up such a pace without dire consequences to me." His doctors hoped Alaska would be more relaxing. But instead of taking the ordered rest, Harding insisted on staying up late every night on the ship, playing poker and bridge and shuffleboard, and watching movies on deck. Once in Alaska, things got worse. His aides had told him to wear long underwear and winter clothes. But the temperature when he got to Alaska was in the mid-90s. With stops at 10 ports, nonstop speeches—including one during heavy rain in Juneau—and seemingly endless ceremonies with native groups and politicians, Harding was exhausted.

Again, he ignored orders to rest, driving a spike to complete the Alaskan railroad, touring a coal mine, and visiting fish markets, baseball fields, and midnight banquets. Toss in some tainted crabs, a destroyer ramming his ship and tossing him out of his bed, and more speeches, and Harding was done. The White House physician had secretly brought a coffin on the trip out of fear that the ailing first lady would not survive. But it was the president who succumbed to the rigors the trip, dying in San Francisco.

Some 92 years later, Obama will not face similar rigors. He will be away from his White House bed only three nights, spending two in Anchorage and one aboard Air Force One. There will be no speeches in the rain, no midnight banquets and no tainted crab on his menu. With the temperatures in the mid-70s, he'll leave his long underwear home. He will, though, face some of the same issues that were on Harding's Alaskan agenda. Primarily, that will be the tension between development and preservation.

"We still see the same thing today," Hawfield told National Journal. "That is a longstanding tug in Alaskan society." At the time of Harding's visit, there were fears that overfishing would soon wipe out the stocks of halibut, salmon, and cod, forcing some government regulation of the industry. Again, there is concern about the fish, something that makes Obama's trip to a fishing village at Dillingham very topical.

"That is ground central for the fishing issues," Hawfield said. More so than in Harding's time, the concern is over the general health of the water, with acidification of ocean waters in the north as well as the general warming of the waters in both south and north.

Additionally, Obama's decision to be the first president to venture to the Arctic will bring him face-to-face with other environmental challenges when he goes to Kotzebue. "That is a perfect place to get a sense of the delicate nature of the Arctic as well as the struggles of the small bush communities, as they are called here," said Hawfield, who sees some of the challenges out his window. "We see right now a major die-off of sea birds where I live. We don't know why. We think maybe they are starving to death, that something is happening in the water that is causing stress."

He also can see three glaciers from his office window and he's glad that the president is coming to take stock, undeterred by the fact that Alaskan is a solidly Republican state that gave him only 38 percent of the vote in 2008 and 41 percent in 2012. "As an Alaskan, I'm just happy that he's going to take more time here than is usually the case," he said, noting that past presidents have rarely strayed far from Anchorage and the military bases where their planes were refueled. "The fact that Obama is actually going to the real Alaska is especially important."

And, it goes without saying, he is grateful that the president will not be ordering the Navy to shell any glaciers while he's there.

(Image via HurleySB/Shutterstock.com)

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Obama's Upcoming Kenyan Visit Will Be Different

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 16:23:02 -0400

The first time Barack Obama arrived in Kenya, the airport in Nairobi was, he recalled, "almost empty." The few officials there ignored him except for trying to bum a cigarette off him. They paid little attention to the fact that his luggage had been lost. Bagless, he left the airport in an old and broken down Volkswagen Beetle, its engine knocking and its muffler missing. "I felt tired and abandoned," he wrote later.

Friday night, 29 years later, he returns under decidedly different circumstances. This time, Kenyatta International Airport will not be empty. And his baggage—now including dozens of aides, hundreds of reporters, and thousands of security personnel as well as multiple armored limousines, a fleet of helicopters, and Air Force One—will not be misplaced.

The young man of that 1987 trip is back as the gray-haired president of the United States of America and the world's most famous son of Kenya. And while the young Obama was looking for signs of his own identity and a family he had never known, an older President Obama comes to Kenya—and his next stop in Ethiopia—bearing the message that the world's only superpower genuinely cares about Africa and is ready to help the continent battle terrorists, conquer disease, and fuel an economic resurgence.

This is not Obama's first return to Kenya since that 1987 visit. He has been back both as a private citizen and as a newly elected U.S. senator. But it is his first trip there as president. With that in mind, both the president and the White House have gone to great lengths to emphasize the official nature of his agenda and to de-emphasize the personal aspects of the trip. Pointedly, he is leaving his wife and two daughters back home, and he plans no side trip to his father's village of Kogelo, a seven-hour drive from the capital.

Obama does not deny that any return to Kenya can be emotional for him. It is just that he prefers to have those emotions play out away from the prying cameras and shouted questions of an international news media intent on writing about his homecoming. The trip, he said at his press conference last week, is "obviously something I am looking forward to."

But, he added, "I will be honest with you. Visiting Kenya as a private citizen is probably more meaningful to me than visiting as president, because I can actually get outside of the hotel room or a conference center." What he called "the logistics of visiting a place"—the ever-present security, the aides, the reporters—"are always tough as president."

That is particularly true in the Horn of Africa, a region that has been wracked by terrorist attacks, and the adjoining country of Kenya, still recovering from two brutal attacks launched by the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabaab—the killing of 67 at Nairobi's Westgate Mall in September 2013 and the killing of 147 at Garissa University on April 2.

The White House would also like to blunt the criticism that the president waited until his seventh year in office to travel to Kenya and tamp down the talk that he has failed to meet the high expectations of a country where so many schools bear his name and so many children born after his election are called "Barack," "Michelle," "Sasha," or "Malia."

"President Obama is loved across the continent," said Dr. Monde Muyangwa, director of the Wilson Center's Africa Program. "Expectations were high, and there is a sense that he has a deep connection to the continent. His presidency is celebrated across the continent and in the broader black diaspora across the world." But, she told National Journal as she was preparing to fly to Kenya to be there when the president arrives, "These were not realistic expectations." And, she said, the president "got off to a slow start" on Africa in his first term because of the need to focus on the domestic economic crisis.

E.J. Hogendoorn, deputy director of the Crisis Group's Africa Program, said the connection Kenyans feel is intense. "I don't think that Kenyans think of Obama as African-American. They think of him as Kenyan-American," he said. And, given the deep tribal split in Kenya between Luo and Kikuyu, he added, "Arguably, they even think of him as Luo-American."

The White House is casting this trip as all business, though. They stress the influential audiences at the two main stops on the trip—the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi on Saturday and the meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa on Tuesday. The most personal touches are likely to be found in the president's address to the Kenyan people on Sunday.

Despite Obama's personal ties to Africa, it is striking that his policies toward the continent have continued in a steady line first outlined by Democrat Bill Clinton and fleshed out by Republican George W. Bush. Before Clinton, U.S. policy toward the continent was seen through a Cold War prism. After Clinton, the policy has been guided by security and economic interests. A struggle to find Cold War allies became a search for U.S. markets.

Before Clinton, the only presidential visits to sub-Saharan Africa were by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who made a brief stop in Liberia in 1943 on his way back from the Casablanca Conference, and Jimmy Carter, who went to Nigeria and Liberia in 1978.

Between 1978 and 1998, presidents were no-shows except for a George H.W. Bush visit to American troops in Somalia on New Year's Eve in 1992.

But that changed in 1998 when Clinton, accompanied by members of Congress and a small army of eager business leaders, descended on the continent for an 11-day, six-country visit. In 2000, he was back for two more countries over four days.

Bush built on Clinton's foundation, making two separate trips to 10 countries over 11 days and gaining widespread respect in Africa for his attention to the fight against HIV/AIDS.

"Clinton really put the spotlight on Africa and forced people to say we need to start looking at Africa differently. He drew attention to a continent that had been largely ignored in the United States," said Muyangwa. "President Bush actually brought the attention and the resources. He built on the spotlight provided by the Clinton administration. Now, we see the Obama administration trying to build on both the Clinton and the Bush administrations."

National Security Adviser Susan Rice boasts that this is Obama's fourth trip to sub-Saharan Africa. But two of those trips were quick in-and-outs—a speech in Ghana in 2009 and the Nelson Mandela funeral in 2013. His only sustained trip was in 2013 when he spent seven days in three countries. So, to Kenyans and many Africans who have waited to see him, this 2015 trip marks the first real chance for Obama to put his own mark on African policy. They note this is the first-ever presidential trip to Kenya, the first-ever to Ethiopia and the first-ever appearance before the influential African Union.

"That is huge," said Muyangwa. "The symbolism of it plus the fact that it gives him the opportunity to speak to ordinary Africans from the seat of the African Union is powerfully important." It is a chance to remind Africans in general and Kenyans in particular just why they fell in love with him in 2008. And it is why he won't be able to just slip away as the younger Obama did 29 years ago.

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Should Joe Biden Run for President?

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:19:13 -0400

Vice President Joe Biden, urged on by his family and encouraged by many longtime supporters, has given himself until the end of the summer to decide if he will make another run for president in 2016. It may not be a deeply analytical chore for a politician who likes to follow his instincts. In the end, all that may matter to him is that this is the last chance to reach for his dream.

But more detached Democrats are taking a less-emotional look at the situation. Their list of pros and cons shows that Biden faces a very tough road to the party's nomination. They are well aware that in almost every cycle, there is a well-known candidate who is at his highest in the polls before he announces his candidacy and only sinks when his flaws are uncovered in the harsh spotlight of a national campaign. They well remember Fred Thompson, Wesley Clark, John Glenn, Frank Church, Bob Kerrey, Phil Gramm, and Rudy Giuliani. None lived up to their billing. As one veteran Democratic strategist told National Journal, "The negatives outweigh the positives—big time."

Here are the top five positives and negatives for a Biden candidacy:

Positives

1. He is, inarguably, authentic at a time when the public craves someone genuine and free of artifice. He could tap into that craving without the bullying overtones of Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor boasts that, "I mean what I say, and I say what I mean. And that's what America needs right now." Biden could say the same thing without it sounding like a threat. Biden may be one of the few longtime officeholders who has few enemies. People like him even when they disagree with him. He has easily survived the big stumble of his 1988 campaign when he appropriated part of the life story of a British politician. It's a misstep that looks pretty modest by today's standards.

2. He is not Hillary. With each botched interview and each Clinton Foundation/foreign-government revelation and each brittle performance by Hillary Clinton, Democrats grow more anxious. Many of them might welcome a real alternative rather than an aging socialist who wants to raise taxes or a little-known former governor best known for having actually raised lots of taxes.

3. He has a stellar resume. The vice president could argue that he would make government work. Clinton's resume is great. But no one in either party can match the length and heft of Biden's resume—44 unbroken years in public office: two years in local government, 35 years in the Senate, seven years as vice president. After seeing what happens with two consecutive presidents inexperienced in Washington, this kind of experience could be attractive to voters. Plus, in an age of polarization, he has shown he can work across the aisle.

4. He may be the only candidate in either party who can't be accused of enriching himself during his career in public service. He is free of scandal. There won't be the news stories that seem to dog just about every other candidate. There is a reason why he long was considered the least wealthy member of the Senate.

5. He connects easily with the working class and middle class. Cynics groan when he talks about growing up in Scranton or taking the train in Delaware. But he knew tough times as a kid and he won't make gaffes about urging Americans to work longer hours or declaring his family "dead broke" when millions were coming in from paid speeches. A common touch never hurt any candidate.

Negatives

1. He's old. Biden must know, as John Glenn once told him, that there is "no cure for the common birthday" and that he already may be too old to be a serious contender. He's a survivor of two near-fatal brain aneurysms who would be 74 on Inauguration Day, making him by five years the oldest first-term president in history. (Reagan was 69, James Buchanan was 65, and George H.W. Bush was 64 at the start of the presidencies.) If Clinton says "yesterday," then Biden screams the last century.

2. By the nature of the job, vice presidents look weak. It is a servile job, filled with indignities, funerals, and ceremonial tasks. Even the vice presidents treated with respect by their presidents and given real duties suffered. Ask Walter Mondale and Al Gore. Even Bush I, whose bravery was demonstrated in war, had to defend himself against unfair charges that he was a "wimp." It doesn't help that Obama saddled Biden with what Politico's Glenn Thrush once called the administration's "lost causes," putting him in charge of selling the unpopular stimulus in 2009, the doomed jobs bill, and the modest stab at gun control.

3. Too many people can't take him seriously. It is a fate suffered by many vice presidents. Democrats once ran an ad against Spiro Agnew that just included 20 seconds of nonstop laughter with the tagline: "This would be funny if it weren't so serious." Dan Quayle never was able to be taken seriously. It is very tough for any vice president to overcome what Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post once called "the too jokey/too gaffe-prone-to-be-taken-seriously narrative." Sen. Ted Cruz had to apologize for his meanness for going after Biden while he was mourning the death of his son. But there was an element of unfortunate truth in what Cruz said about Biden: "You don't need a punch line … The next party you're at, just walk up to someone and say, 'Vice President Joe Biden' and just close your mouth. They will crack up laughing."

4. Along with the long resume come hundreds of votes that can be used against him.Expect to see lot of repetition of the biting criticism from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates wrote in his book Duty that Biden has been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." His list included aid to Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and a variety of weapons systems. Foreign policy is supposed to be Biden's area of strength. But he can't even share credit with President Obama on the killing of Osama bin Laden because he tried to talk Obama out of the mission.

5. He has run twice before and shown himself to be a very bad candidate who can't raise money or put together a winning organization. He was likable and endearing but unable to organize any aspect of either an event or the larger campaign. This may be an instance where the long Washington resume works against him. His strength is being a Washington insider but that gets in his way in places such as Iowa and New Hampshire. In a moment of frustration during his losing 2008 bid, he insisted to Iowans that he was a better senator than Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards. He complained that Edwards "only passed four bills (and) they're all about post offices—I mean literally." Obama, he added, "hasn't passed any bills." And of Clinton, he said, "There's not a major bill I know with Hillary's name on it." Iowans yawned. Unimpressed with his bill-passing prowess inside the Beltway, they left him for dead in fifth place. It was enough to end his campaign.

But in a possible sign of things to come when he makes his decision about 2016, he announced that he had "not one single, solitary ounce of regret" about running and declared, "I ain't going away."

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Vietnam's Communist Party Leader to Meet With Obama in Washington

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 10:20:52 -0400

When President Obama welcomes Vietnam's Communist Party leader, Nguyen Phu Trong, to the Oval Office on Tuesday, it will be the latest step in the president's nearly life-long attempt to come to grips with a war that he was too young to fully understand but which still casts a powerful shadow over his foreign policy.

You have to go back 12 presidents and 70 years to find the last president before Obama not to have been personally touched by Vietnam. Harry Truman fended off personal appeals from both the French and Ho Chi Minh. Dwight Eisenhower opted against rescuing the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but sent in the first U.S. military advisers. John F. Kennedy increased the number of U.S. forces. Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the war with more than 500,000 troops. Richard Nixon expanded the bombing and began the reduction in troops. Gerald Ford oversaw defeat and withdrawal. Jimmy Carter pardoned the draft dodgers. Ronald Reagan dealt with college protests. George H.W. Bush negotiated with China while raising draft-eligible sons. Bill Clinton participated in war protests and avoided military service. George W. Bush used the National Guard to avoid service in the war.

Obama's visitor lived through much of that history. Trong, 71, was born when the country was still called French Indochina and joined the Communist Party when Obama was only 6. Since 2011, he has been general secretary of the party in Vietnam. This visit calls attention to his power in Vietnam. He holds no official government position but is being treated by the White House as if he were a head of state. That recognizes the reality that Trong is considered the most powerful leader in the country.

With Vietnam clashing again with China over possessions in the South China Sea, and with Vietnam a party to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord, the White House sees Trong as a potential regional partner 40 years after the war ended there.

Unlike his predecessors and unlike Trong, Obama missed that war. He was not yet born when Eisenhower sent in the first military adviser. He was barely 3 when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed, only 6 when Johnson was forced out of his reelection campaign, 7 during Nixon's secret bombing, 8 when four students were killed at Kent State, 11 when the draft ended, and 13 when the last American helicopter lifted off of the Embassy grounds in Saigon.

"Obama is the first president to come of age in the post-Vietnam era," David Axelrod, the president's longtime political adviser, told National Journal. "His political consciousness was not shaped by that war. He is not consumed by the arguments that swirled around it."

The president has acknowledged that he was personally untouched by the furor attending the war, spending the years of the most strident protests away from the U.S. mainland, living in Indonesia in 1967 at age 6 and then in Hawaii at age 9. "I was too young at the time to fully grasp the nature" of what he called the "social upheavals" wracking the United States, he wrote in The Audacity of Hope. But he said he "always felt a curious relationship to the '60s." Because he didn't have the personal memories, he has been on a long personal quest to understand what happened. "Mainly," he wrote, "my understanding of the '60s came as a result of my own investigations."

That quest followed him to his 2008 campaign for president, and then into the White House. "Obama is the first (recent) president not personally touched by the war, but professionally he has been touched by the war very directly," said Marvin Kalb, the longtime CBS and NBC reporter who examined the impact of Vietnam on Obama's policies in his book Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.

He recalled a 2008 trip that Obama took to the Middle East with Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. "On the whole ride from Andrews Air Force Base to Kuwait City, a 13-and-a-half hour ride, Obama conducted it as if it were a seminar on Vietnam," Kalb told National Journal. Ostensibly, the trip was supposed to be about Afghanistan. "But what was on his mind intellectually and professionally? Vietnam. There was no other subject that came up on that long ride according to both senators."

Obama wanted to know the lessons of that war. But once in the Oval Office, there was a limit to how often he wanted to hear about it. According to an official in some of the key meetings and according to Kalb's reporting, the president grew quite annoyed that some of his older advisers—most particularly his special aide Richard Holbrooke—kept bringing up Vietnam in discussions about Iraq and Afghanistan.

"He was constantly pissed off at Holbrooke for this," Kalb said. "I heard it from Dick himself. Dick acknowledged that he raised it too much. And every now and then he felt that by raising Vietnam he was losing his point because the president phased out. He didn't want to hear about Vietnam constantly."

He also has been determined to stamp out any suggestion that his escalation of troops in Afghanistan is in any way comparable to Johnson's escalation in Vietnam. In his book, Obama criticizes liberals who compare the two wars. "Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh," he wrote flatly, adding that "the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating." He made the point again in a 2009 interview with The New York Times and CNBC. "Afghanistan is not Vietnam," he asserted then.

In 2012, he chose to give his Memorial Day address at the Vietnam War Memorial. There, he spoke of the "complexity" of the war, calling it "one of the most painful chapters in our history." It was a speech that suggested he was himself still trying to figure out the lessons of the war.

"He was very much absorbed—and always has been—with questions that emerged out of the Vietnam experience," Kalb said. "When people say that Obama has had no personal connection with the war, in a way they are missing the point. Yes, he was not there. Yes, he did not serve. Yes, he was not drafted. But he is a smart man. He knows what the U.S. has gone through. And this particular war is not one he wants to repeat."

It explains much of Obama's policies today. "He is neuralgically negative about the commitment of American forces anywhere in the world because he wants to see evidence that it is going to be different from the way it was in Vietnam," Kalb said. "He wants it to work."

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White House Now Allows Photos -- Including Selfies -- on Tours

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 15:55:41 -0400

There was clearly a demand for White House photos.

After four decades of deprivation, White House tourists were allowed Wednesday to do that most cherished of touristy things—take pictures. Many even found themselves fulfilling a dream they may not have known they had and could take pictures of the pool taking pictures of them.

Those arriving at 9:55 a.m., when this White House pool reporter descended on the scene, were greeted by a video of the first lady informing them of the new policy. "Let me get a shot of that," exclaimed May-May Horcasitas, originally of Hong Kong and now living in South Beach, Florida. She was taking pictures on her phone. After capturing an image of the video, she turned to the Obamas' two family dogs, both sitting obediently as if to pose for the historic photographs. At about that point, the first lady was seen on the video dramatically ripping up a "No Photos" sign. "One more, one more," said Kathy Teachenor of Ojai, California.

Other visitors were taking pictures of the sign that said, "Photography is Encouraged. But please remember to turn off your flash and no video-recording or streaming."

A highlight just may have been the selfies visitors were taking with the bust of George Washington outside the State Dining Room. Caitlyn Richardson, 11, and Chloe Richardson, 13, were snapping away and immediately posting them on Instagram, laughing at a question about whether they thought George Washington—who never lived in the White House—could have grasped the notion of selfies or Instagram. All they knew, they said, was, "This is fun." Caitlyn is entering the 7th grade while her sister is entering high school. They also posed in front of what was a particularly popular photo, standing in front of the portrait of John F. Kennedy.

(Lest anyone go too far with selfies, the famed "selfie-sticks" remain banned.)

Lisa Ananager of Hampton, Virginia, a high school Latin teacher, was taking pictures on her HTC Touch phone. She was particularly enthused about a shot of the garden with the Washington Monument in the background.

In the East Room, Michael Labrecque of Palm Harbor, Florida, was posing his sons Madison, 11, and Mason, 9, for a photo while wife Melinda watched on. "This is amazing," he said. "I am very happy they changed the rule. I'm taking as many as I can."

In the Green Room, Tina Pucci of San Francisco was snapping away as sons Tony, 9, and Emilio, 10, posed, and husband Michael, a butcher, watched. "We just realized they changed the rules," she said. "It's great."

In the State Dining Room, Kim Kesler of Los Angeles watched as her daughter, Chloe, took pictures of the Abraham Lincoln portrait. "She is taking a lot of pictures," said her mother. "She won't let go of the camera. This is awesome." Also in the State Dining Room, Korey Richardson, 47, of San Jose, was excited about his pictures. "This is my first time here," he said. "I'm taking tons of pictures, at least 30 so far. I've already uploaded some to Facebook friends."

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Obama Delivers Strong Comeback to Netanyahu on Iran

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 22 May 2015 14:51:04 -0400

It took the White House almost three months of wandering in the diplomatic wilderness before it could find the most effective way to respond to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's extraordinary frontal assault on administration policies. But Friday, 80 days after the prime minister's confrontational speech to Congress, President Obama finally found his footing with a confident and assertive address at a Washington synagogue.

For most of those 80 days, the president was fitful in his response to Netanyahu. The one constant was that he found himself playing defense while the Israeli leader and his allies in the Republican Party were always on offense. It was, to most observers, an unusually emotional stance for a president who prides himself on his steady calm and ability to stay above emotional squabbles.

It is why the president reacted so negatively during his lengthy interview this week with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic when the writer said that his response "seemed very fraught and very emotional" with more criticism of Israel than any other American ally faced. "I have to say, Jeff, I completely disagree with that assessment," responded the president, insisting he simply had "a policy difference" with Netanyahu. But Goldberg was not alone in his conclusion and it was something Obama needed to deal with more fully than a simple denial in an interview.

Friday, wearing a yarmulke and standing in the sanctuary of the Adas Israel synagogue, Obama did just that. It was perhaps the first time since Netanyahu's March 3 appearance on Capitol Hill where he did not appear defensive. If anything, his 29-minute speech—and the warm reception it earned from the almost 1,200 in the audience—was an effort to put Netanyahu on the defensive. Obama convincingly cast himself as the one who is staying true to the ideals of the Jewish state, the one who is faithful to the founders of Israel when he pushes for fair treatment of Palestinians and serious negotiations with Iran. The values of the founders, he said movingly, "came to be my own values."

It is because of that, he said, that "when I hear some people say that disagreements over policy belie a lack of support of Israel, I must object and object forcefully." When the applause died down, he added, "For us to paper over difficult questions, particularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or about settlement policy, that's not a true measure of friendship."

Obama said it is his love of Israel that impels him to challenge Netanyahu's election-eve declaration that there will be no two-state solution to that conflict. "It is precisely because I care so deeply about the state of Israel—it's precisely because, yes, I have high expectations for Israel the same way I have high expectations for the United States of America—that I feel a responsibility to speak out honestly about what I think will lead to long-term security and to the preservation of a true democracy in the Jewish homeland," he said to more applause. "And I believe that's two states for two peoples, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security."

He said that remains true no matter how troublesome the Palestinian negotiators remain, acknowledging it is "not easy" to work with them. "The Palestinians are not the easiest of partners," he said, drawing knowing laughter. "The neighborhood is dangerous. And we cannot expect Israel to take existential risks with their security so that any deal that takes place has to take into account the genuine dangers of terrorism and hostility."

On the Iran deal, he sold it in part as something very personal to him and his legacy. As he had in his Goldberg interview, he said this partially explains why he will not accept a bad deal. "This deal will have my name on it, so nobody has a bigger personal stake in making sure that it delivers on its promise. I want a good deal."

Calling himself "an honorary member of the tribe" and reminding all that he has hosted seven White House seders, he was comfortable in the setting and forceful in his condemnation of anti-Semitism. His commitment, he explained, went back to the presence of rabbis and Jewish activists in the march in Selma, Alabama, 50 years ago.

It was an effective reminder of the kinship between African-Americans and Jews in the American civil rights movement. Whether that reminder or this visit to a synagogue are effective in keeping the president off of the defensive won't be clear until there is more follow-up by the White House. But after 80 days of stumbles, it is an important start.

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Barack Obama’s Top Secret Plan to Make You Laugh

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 11:00:00 -0400

Nobody—outside a small group inside the White House—knows for sure what President Obama will say when he speaks at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday. In the half-century in which presidents have tried out their comedy chops at this dinner, there have been fewer leaks than just about any presidential address. In fact, there is only one known instance of a joke leaking in advance. That was in 1998, when CNN's John King got ahold of one of President Bill Clinton's jokes, triggering an emergency meeting at the White House and an internal debate on whether to drop it from the text.

Speechwriter Michael Waldman called it "the unthinkable" and "the latest skirmish in the war with the press." In his book POTUS Speaks, Waldman wrote, "Most leaks were shrugged off. But leaking a joke—well, this had never happened. It demanded a witch hunt." He recalled that "angry staff members gathered" prior to the dinner. Mark Katz, an outside writer often brought in by Clinton to make these dinner speeches funnier, also witnessed the fury at the White House over the leak. He recalled Waldman's reaction. "The gravity of his tone and demeanor might have scared me into thinking there was some kind of national emergency underway," wrote Katz in his book Clinton and Me.

After a heated discussion in the Map Room, it was decided to keep the leaked joke in the speech—but change the punch line to punish the leaker and send a message to King. Either that message was received, or no news organization has considered jokes to be newsworthy enough. Whatever the reason, no presidential joke has leaked before any of the 17 Correspondents' Dinners since.

(The joke itself, which one of the writers conceded was "unfunny," had Clinton speculating about which member of Congress would follow John Glenn into space. It allowed the president to jab at his biggest tormenter in the House, concluding, "Godspeed, Dan Burton." The punch line changed to "Godspeed, Dick Armey," and life went on.)

Yet since this is Obama's seventh time at this dinner, we have a pretty good idea what to expect. You don't really need a leak to tell you his go-to moves, favorite joke targets, and most reliable punching bags. You only have to go through the numbers.

They tell you that he's likely to speak for just around 19 minutes—his shortest was 16 minutes in 2009; his longest, 22 minutes in 2013. His preferred path to a laugh takes him, every year, to Kenya, with 12 jokes about the controversy over his place of birth. The second-biggest butt of his jokes is Fox News at eight jokes, followed by Vice President Joe Biden at seven and Hillary Clinton at five.

Other go-to topics for easy humor are NBC/MSNBC (four times), as well as his TelePrompTer, his daughters, his bad polls, CNN, and Mitt Romney (each three times). Sometimes, he likes to combine topics as he did in 2013, when he merged talk of his past with concern about his graying hair to lamen: "I'm not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be."

Of course, as Obama's disclosure Thursday of the terrorism strike gone bad reminds everyone, a great unknown of any such social gathering is when world events make humor inappropriate. Ronald Reagan said he "just didn't feel" like being funny in 1983 on what he called the saddest day of his presidency when he came to the dinner after viewing the flag-draped coffins of Americans returning from Beirut. And George W. Bush at the 2007 dinner, only five days after 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech, declared, "I decided not to be funny."

Sometimes, it's been a close call. Clinton considered dumping his jokes in 1994 when Richard Nixon died the day before the dinner. He settled instead on a moment of silence.

Naturally, some of Obama's most memorable jabs were aimed at Republicans. In 2009, he described then-House Minority Leader John Boehner as "a person of color," quickly adding that it was "not a color that appears in the natural world." In 2014, he doubled down, noting that House Republicans were giving Boehner, by then the speaker, "a harder time than they give me—which means orange really is the new black." And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was not spared. In 2013, the president sarcastically noted that many were urging him to have a drink with McConnell. "Really?" he said to growing laughter. "Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?"

The president also has some topics that obviously tickle his fancy because he looks for openings to make jokes on them. There were those two jokes about eating dogs when he was a boy. And he couldn't hide his delight in making jokes using rap terms or African American slang about former Republican National Chairman Michael Steele.

Of course, it's not hard for the president to get a laugh—from himself. He is his own best audience. He just can't help himself. He has laughed at his own jokes 53 times in those six speeches, according to a National Journal review. Sometimes he just cracks himself up—including the Michael Steele jokes. After calling Steele "Notorious GOP" in 2010, he laughed and confessed, "I did a similar routine last year. But it always works."

What also always works for him are the props, the fake photos, the faux videos, and the sight gags. There were those rising TelePrompTer screens in 2009, the two ferns in 2014, and, memorably, the off-stage sound of him flushing a toilet in 2012 as a supposedly concerned press secretary Jay Carney begged "someone back there please turn off the president's mic."

There have been 30 doctored photos showing everything from his White House throne, the devil with Sen. Ted Cruz, and Biden throwing a shoe at Hillary Clinton, to an Oval Office meeting with a pirate, fake Politico headlines, the graying of his hair and an experiment with Michelle-inspired bangs. And there have been seven videos—ranging from a polished and clever Steven Spielberg-narrated look at Obama playing actor Daniel Day Lewis playing Obama, to a Lion Kingvideo of Obama's African birth, to a demonstration of how Mitt Romney and Obama treat dogs.

Most of the president's jabs are playful, at most making the target squirm amid the laughter. But occasionally they have drawn blood—and none more so than in 2011.

That dinner is best remembered for the president sitting on the secret that he had just ordered the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. But it was also when he launched the most protracted and withering assault seen at any dinner in memory. The target that year was Donald Trump, a man who craves the spotlight and at the time of the dinner was basking in it with his hints that he would run for president, and his increasingly wild accusations about the president's place of birth. But Trump didn't seem to relish the spotlight this night, as the cameras found him at Table 96 right in the middle of the ballroom, guest of The Washington Post.

The president's 200-word barrage eviscerated Trump, concluding in a faked-up photo of how Trump would turn the White House into the "Trump White House Resort and Casino." The snippet before that photo may turn out to be the most-remembered attack of the Obama era dinners:

Donald Trump is here tonight! Now, I know that he's taken some flak lately. But no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter—like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience, um. For example—no seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so, ultimately, you didn't blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir! Well handled.

On Saturday, Trump is scheduled to return to the dinner once again, this time as a guest of Fox News. With no leaks of any jokes, there's no way to know if, once again, he'll be a presidential target. Can Obama resist when Trump just this week insisted that he is "totally serious" about running for president?

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Iran Talks Could Win Kerry a Nobel Peace Prize

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 10:00:26 -0400

John Kerry did not start the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. But nobody has thrown himself more into the talks and nobody's reputation has more riding on their outcome than the American secretary of State currently trying to hammer out a deal in Switzerland.

The former Democratic senator from Massachusetts hoped when he took the helm at the State Department in 2013 that he would make his mark in history by finding the long-elusive formula for bringing Israelis and Palestinians together. That was a mess. Instead, Kerry found himself diverted to the search for a diplomatic way to block Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Already on his way to possibly eclipse Hillary Clinton as the most traveled secretary in history, Kerry has spent a third of this year—33 of the first 92 days of 2015—in those Swiss talks.

Even if he is able to claim success, Kerry—again—may not get the payoff he'd like. Given the complexity of the negotiations, the opposition of Israel's government, and the critics in Congress, the verdict almost certainly will be mixed.

"If these talks succeed, that is going to be his legacy," says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former Iran-Iraq analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and a senior staffer on President Clinton's National Security Council overseeing policy toward Iraq and Iran. "It would be an historic accord." As controversial as it would be in the United States and Israel and some Sunni Arab states, "everywhere else in the world, this is considered an unmitigated good."

If a deal is reached and Iran's nuclear program is blocked, Pollack added, "I think Kerry will get an enormous amount of credit for pulling it off. He will be in line for a Nobel Peace Prize. … He could go down in history books as being a monumentally important character, like Jimmy Carter with Camp David."

But, Pollack stressed, there is a flip side: "He could go down as Neville Chamberlain at Munich. Both are possible here."

Aaron David Miller, who spent two decades at the State Department working on the Middle East for presidents of both parties, thinks the accolades for Kerry will be restrained despite his strenuous efforts.

"Will it be his ticket into the secretary of State hall of fame? Absolutely not. He'd like to get in, to be like [Henry] Kissinger and [James] Baker. But to do that, I think he'd have to leave another legacy," likely from the broader Middle East peace process, said Miller, who is now vice president of the Wilson Center.

The difficulty for Kerry, he said, is the nature of the Iran talks. "Remember, it is not a peace treaty. This is not a transformation. This is a transaction. This is a business deal," he said. "They want something from us; we want something from them. And it is premised on the notion that if you buy time to avoid a crisis with Iran ... that over time Iran will evolve" and its behavior in the region will change.

That would take time to gauge—too much time to allow facile early assessments of any deal.

Early judgments will also be colored by Iran's trouble-making across the Middle East, from Syria to Iraq to Yemen. "This is not a popular regime. This is not a popular deal. And as a consequence, those who broker the deal are not going to get the kind of halo and kudos that Kissinger got or that Cy Vance and Jimmy Carter got for Camp David," said Miller.

"We tend to personalize these things," said P.J. Crowley, a veteran of President Clinton's NSC and Hillary Clinton's State Department. "It would be a significant accomplishment. But we're going to have to wait to see if we win the game. You are talking about a guy pitching in the seventh inning, and he's doing pretty well. But what matters most is, does the home team win the game?"

The pressure on Kerry has been intense, in part because Tehran is so virulently anti-American and anti-Iraeli and because its influence has been so destructive across the region. It also makes the personal relationship Kerry has struck with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif more critical. During the Cold War, both China and the Soviet Union were guilty of much worse actions. But the United States had diplomatic relations with Moscow and Beijing, permitting the American president to personally influence the direction of any negotiations. That option is not open today to Kerry.

"This is not a situation where you can up the ante," Crowley told National Journal. "In the Middle East peace process, the secretary of State does a lot of the heavy lifting. But everyone recognizes that if we get to the cusp of an agreement, then the president is the closer. ... But Kerry can't pass this up the chain. For obvious reasons, the president is not going to sit down with the president of Iran and work out the final details."

That ratchets up the pressure on Kerry and helps explain his frantic travel schedule. It took Hillary Clinton four years to break Secretary Madeleine Albright's record for foreign travel. But Kerry is taking aim at Clinton's mark. He has already traveled 746,168 miles to Clinton's 956,733 miles and has spent 326 days overseas compared with Clinton's 401. Because he has focused much of his travel on the Middle East, though, he is unlikely to break Clinton's record for number of countries visited. Clinton went to 112 while Kerry has been to 59.

"If you were to clock success in flight time hours and international meetings, he is clearly succeeding," said Kathleen Hicks, who was deputy Defense undersecretary on global and regional defense policy and strategy in Obama's first term and now is director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She urged caution on the early judgments of any Iran deal.

"There are so many factors swirling around these talks—the politics in Washington, the politics in Tehran, the allies, Russia—that it will be hard, even if it wildly succeeds, to say the success is Kerry's. Or, if it fails, to pin it on him."

She singled out the relationship Kerry has forged with Zarif as one of the biggest pluses of the talks. "This isn't about trust. It's about establishing a working relationship," she said, stressing the value of opening a channel to an adversary "to be able to discuss issues and prevent any kind of miscalculation."

Pollack also noted a benefit of Kerry's hard work that will pay off even if the talks collapse, stating that it will be important how the two sides are positioned if there is a failure.

"If they break down and the U.S. is seen as the guilty party, the expectation is that the sanctions will break down very quickly, because everyone will blame the Americans and will say the Iranians were trying to be reasonable and you wouldn't take yes for an answer so why should we continue to punish the Iranians," said Pollack. "But you have to give John Kerry credit that no one has done more to make sure that the United States is not seen as the guilty party if the talks fall apart. He has gone the extra mile. He has done everything. ... If the talks fall apart, it is going to be extremely difficult for the Iranians to blame the United States."

That isn't the legacy Kerry is seeking. But it may be the best to be had if the talks don't succeed.

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White House Struggles with the Language of Terrorism

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 10:02:17 -0500

President Obama and the White House came out aggressively Wednesday against those who have attacked his often-careful use of words to describe the battle against terrorists. The defense came after a week of being battered—mostly by conservatives—for a reluctance to talk about "Islamic terrorism" and a hesitation to label victims as Jewish or Christian.

In his keynote address to the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, the president acknowledged the furor, which has played out largely on the cable news shows, where critics objected to the title of the summit because it did not single out Muslims for blame.

"Leading up to this summit," he said, "there's been a fair amount of debate in the press and among pundits about the words we use to describe and frame this challenge. So I want to be very clear about how I see it."

What he sees, he explained, are terrorists such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State who are "desperate for legitimacy" and "try to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam."

But he said he is determined not to give them that legitimacy because that would help them gain recruits. "We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie," he said, adding: "They are not religious leaders. They're terrorists."

To applause, he added firmly: "And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam."

In saying that, the president is repeating almost word for word statements made by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, when he first declared the war on terror in the wake of the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001. In his address to the nation on September 20, 2001, Bush said the terrorists were on "the fringe" of Islam. "The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself," he said. In later remarks, Bush repeatedly said, "Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith." He added, "We do not fight Islam; we fight against evil."

But those sentiments never brought Bush the withering criticism faced by Obama for saying the same thing 14 years later. In part, that is because Bush at the same time was sprinkling his remarks with doses of bluster, such as wanting terrorists "dead or alive." And in part, it is because Obama has bewildered even his supporters by the reticence of his White House to state what seems obvious. In the last week, that means the obvious facts that Jews were targeted in the Paris attack on a kosher deli and that Christians were targeted in the horrific mass beheadings by the Islamic State militants in Libya last weekend.

At Wednesday's White House briefing, press secretary Josh Earnest denied he had "tip-toed" around the reality. But when pressed, he replied, "We'll put an end to the tip-toeing to the extent that there's been any." He added, "If people assume that I've been tip-toeing, let me just try and be as clear as I can and we'll see how this works."

In fact, Earnest and the White House had been more guilty of tripping over their own words than tip-toeing around the facts. Every White House tries to be cautious when talking about international affairs. They understand that diplomats—and enemies—will be parsing each syllable, eager to pounce on poorly chosen words. Bush was a victim of that in 2001 when he twice described the war on terror as a crusade, using a word that even centuries later is heavily laden with symbolism and bad memories for the Muslim world.

In Obama's case last week, it was seeming to suggest that the deli victims in Paris were chosen "randomly" and not because of their faith. Instead of immediately correcting the misimpression, Earnest and State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki struggled to answer questions. Only later in the day did Earnest send out a tweet to correct the record.

In the case of the Coptic Christians slaughtered by the Islamic State, an initial statement by Earnest said all the right things—except that it described the victims as Egyptian "citizens" instead of Christians. The critics ignored the fact that the president, in his op-ed written for the Los Angeles Times, wrote openly about "Egyptian Christians." Or that Earnest quickly offered assurances that he was not trying to ignore why they were killed.

The critics were too busy trying to find deeper meaning in the original statement. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, appearing on Fox News, called it "troubling" that the White House statement did not refer to the victims as Christians. Charles Krauthammer, also on Fox, complained that "we have an administration that is truly pathological in its inability to actually state what's going on." Columnist George Will, on the same show, lamented, "Why can't they say what specifically happened?"

Earnest tried again to clarify at his briefing.

"As I tried to make clear ... last week and I've made clear in a tweet following, there is no doubt about the motivation of the individual who carried out this attack against a kosher market in Paris," he said. "He was motivated by anti-Semitism. And he went to that market, hoping that he could kill Jewish people. And he was targeting them because they were Jewish."

Turning to the beheadings in Libya, he cited the statements of the killers "that they were killing Egyptians because of their Christian faith. And we have been crystal clear in the statement that we put out from the president on Friday, and the president's prayer breakfast remarks earlier this month, that it is wrong and completely unacceptable and unjustifiable to target people, particularly with acts of violence, because of who they are, because of who they worship, because of what their last name is or because of what they look like."

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Yes, President Obama's Budget Is a Big Deal

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 10:08:41 -0500

Even before he submits his budget, President Obama is hearing loud and clear from Republicans that it is already "dead on arrival." It is the same cry presidents hear every year when Congress is held by the opposing party, once leading a frustrated Ronald Reagan to plaintively ask: "Why do I even bother sending them?"

Reagan's staff had a simple answer at the time, reminding him that federal law requires the White House to send up a budget every year. But they also knew what Obama's advisers understand today, that a president's budget can accomplish much, no matter how much it is initially eviscerated by critics and no matter how little is recognizable in the final document adopted by Congress. It is why this White House sees the new budget as a way to eliminate the sequester, push programs for the middle class, put Republicans on the defensive, and lay the groundwork for the 2016 campaign.

Few things set the Washington agenda more clearly than a president's budget done well and treated seriously by a White House. Unfortunately, that has been one of the problems for Democrats in the Obama years. Too often, this White House has treated the budget exercise as an inconvenience, openly flouting the law by submitting it weeks or months late, inadequately marketing its provisions, and shrugging off Congress's failure to actually pass a budget.

This time, the administration promises, will be different. This time, officials have devoted more effort to selling the budget even before sending it up to the Hill, when, for the first time in years, they will meet the statutory deadline for doing so. And this time, they insist, they are realistic about the fate that awaits their proposals when the budget reaches a House and a Senate now firmly under the control of Republicans.

"No president has ever put forward a budget with the expectation that Congress is going to pass it in its current form," said White House press secretary Josh Earnest on Thursday. "That was even true when ... there was a president whose party controlled both houses of Congress." The administration's most optimistic outlook is that when the budget is released on Monday it will be "the beginning of a negotiation" with Republicans.

The value of a president's budget—as Reagan learned when Democrats controlled the Congress and dismissed his submissions at DOA—is that it both sets the national agenda and makes clear a president's vision and its cost. "Budgets are important," said Earnest, "because they're a way that we can codify our values and our priorities." After Monday, he added, Republicans "have their say."

William Galston went through this exercise when he was President Clinton's chief domestic policy adviser and Republicans ran the House. "It is important to know that the fact that the package as a whole is declared DOA doesn't mean that all the individual pieces are," he toldNational Journal, stressing that a president can use a budget to do many things at once: please his party's base in one program, lay the groundwork for his party's next presidential campaign in another, and "send some signals to the opposition party that there are areas where they can do business."

That is why, Galston said, you need to look beyond the expected denunciations from Republican spokesmen. "Look at how people in charge of different parts of the agenda—the committee chairs—react to pieces. Those chairs have choices. They can focus on what divides them from the White House, or they can focus on what conceivably might be common ground."

Isabel Sawhill, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under Clinton and now a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, said the mere exercise of producing a budget benefits an administration. "It's not just the president. It is a vehicle for getting everyone in the administration and all the Cabinet secretaries on the same page. The process of putting the budget together is a process of negotiation among all the different parts of the administration, with the president himself finally resolving any disagreements."

In the end, she said, the document "sets what people are going to be talking about." In this case, Obama hopes it is middle-class economics. But that will happen only if the president is committed to selling the budget over and over again, something he did only fitfully on his health care reform.

Rudolph Penner, who served in Gerald Ford's OMB and headed the Congressional Budget Office when Reagan was president, noted that Dwight Eisenhower never stopped talking about his budget, vetoing anything at odds with it. Gerald Ford personally oversaw his budget, adding line items he knew would win over members of Congress. And Bill Clinton "had a photographic memory" for the budget, according to Sawhill. "He was both a most detailed person and a person who saw the broader picture," she said. And he never stopped stressing his top budget priorities.

That has not been the case for Obama during his presidency.

"If you're a cynic, then you can say they are only doing what is minimally necessary to comply with the law," said Sawhill. And even that was has not always been the case. The law makes clear that the budget must be submitted by the first Monday in February. With very few exceptions—almost always in the first year of a new administration—previous presidents abided by that law. But in Obama's early years, reporters who asked about the deadline were greeted with disdain bordering on contempt. Before this year, that deadline was met only in 2010. And in most years, the deadline was missed by two to three months, sending a clear message that a budget was not a very high priority.

The budget, said Penner, was in danger of losing its clout as it became clear to Congress that "presidents took it less seriously and were more careless in its formulation."

But Earnest insists that Monday's on-time budget should be taken very seriously and will set the stage for the coming showdown with Congress and brushed aside the many declarations of "dead on arrival."

"We certainly are never pleased to see Republicans unilaterally rule out making any progress on policies that are beneficial to middle-class families," Earnest said. "But it certainly wouldn't be the first time that they've done that. They've done that for many times, maybe even daily, over the last several years."

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Obama Won't Hear Cheers in India on Afghanistan Policy

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 10:33:36 -0500

One of the few times President Obama received bipartisan applause in his State of the Union address was when he boasted that "our combat mission in Afghanistan is over." But when he arrives in New Delhi this weekend, he won't hear any cheers for the pullout.

Instead, Obama will encounter considerable anxiety and much concern over the future among India's leaders. It is why, when he isn't marching in a parade or visiting the Taj Mahal or doing the other symbolic events that dominate his trip schedule, he will need to reassure Prime Minister Narendra Modi that America isn't about to abandon South Asia or the Indian subcontinent.

There are other issues on the agenda, including climate change, defense cooperation, terrorism, immigration, and nuclear liability. But it is Afghanistan that will demand the most hand-holding.

The backdrop—as always in India—is how the U.S. pullout affects the country's longtime enemy, Pakistan. The Indians see Pakistan harboring terrorists who up to now have been focused on crossing into Afghanistan to fight American troops and support the Taliban. But they fear terrorists will now feel free to refocus on fighting India.

"They're extremely concerned about that," said Richard Rossow, an India expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "That certainly is at or close to the top of the list." The Indian public, Rossow said, is "concerned that America's drawdown in Afghanistan will release militant groups in Afghanistan, and India's concern is that that will result in more cross-border terrorism on themselves."

Indians are also frustrated by what they see as the episodic nature of American interest in their region, experts say. They remember when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and, New Delhi believes, Washington seemed to stop caring about South Asia.

"India would like the U.S. to stay and stay in large numbers," said Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution. She said there was "quite a bit of heartache" when Obama first announced a timeline for withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. "There was a sense that it changed the dynamics in the region."

Madan said Indians believe that "as long as the U.S. has some amount of troops that it will remain interested. They think that without a U.S. presence there, there will be instability in the region, that Pakistan will have more influence.... They think things will be worse without the U.S. there."

Additionally, New Delhi worries that it has wasted $2 billion in development aid for Afghanistan. India is proud to be the largest donor of such aid but now sees those projects "under threat or likely to be under direct threat if the Taliban come back in good force," Madan said.

Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told reporters that the president will use his time with Modi to assure the Indians they will not be abandoned just because the troops are coming home.

"In Afghanistan, where Americans have sacrificed so much, India is a major contributor to development assistance in support of the Afghan government," Rhodes said. "We need to maintain that cooperation going forward now that the U.S. has drawn down our military presence. It's all the more important that there is broad support from the international community, including India."

He said counterterrorism cooperation "will be a focal point" of the Obama-Modi talks. Both countries have strong intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan but have looked for ways to improve intelligence-sharing. Also, it is important for Obama to send a message about the right kind of terrorist threat. While there is concern in India about ISIL's recruiting of Indians to be fighters, India wants to hear the president talk more about terrorists in South Asia and in Pakistan.

Rhodes indicated the president is aware of that, insisting that the U.S. battle against ISIL "doesn't lessen our vigilance in South Asia."

The president is scheduled to arrive in New Delhi early Sunday morning. That day, he will hold talks with Modi, take questions from reporters, and attend a State Dinner. Monday is the ceremonial high point, as Obama will march in the Republic Day parade, commemorating the adoption in 1950 of the constitution making India an independent nation. As Modi's guest of honor, he will then review the rest of the parade, a Soviet-style marshaling of military weaponry and tanks. Later, he and Modi will focus on U.S.-Indian commercial ties at a CEO roundtable and CEO summit. On Tuesday, the president will deliver the major speech of the trip in New Delhi before going to Agra for the obligatory stop at the Taj Mahal before returning to Washington.

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How Will Obama Speak to a Hostile Congress?

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 10:08:15 -0500

President Obama has to make a choice in his State of the Union address. When he strides to the Speaker's Rostrum on Tuesday night and, for the first time in his presidency, faces a Congress under the complete control of his opponents, he must choose either defiance and denial or compromise and conciliation. And the country watching will know within minutes what tone he wants to set.

In the 10 weeks since the election, that tone has been much more "in your face" than conciliatory, starting with Obama's press conference the day after the election gave Senate control to Republicans and swept Democrats out of office in state legislatures, state constitutional offices, and governorships across the country. He did concede, rather grudgingly, that Republicans "had a good night." But he contended that it was his duty not just to listen to the millions of Americans who had voted. Obama said he also planned to heed the message of nonvoters: "To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too."

The president's actions since suggest that what he heard from them was that it was time to double down on his previous policies regardless of the unified opposition by the Republican Congress. That meant, in part, stoutly defending his aggressive use of executive orders against a relentless GOP assault. But the State of the Union address gives him a unique platform to send a high-profile message to the country and to Republicans about how he is adjusting to the new political environment in Washington.

His dilemma is one that confronted every president of the past 100 years. All of them lost seats in midterm elections. Fourteen of the 16 presidents between Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush had to come to Congress in the wake of stinging setbacks for their parties that left their opponents with more leverage. Like Obama today, two others—Wilson in 1918 and Ronald Reagan in 1986—lost at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm election of their second terms. Also like Obama, three—Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, Bill Clinton in 1994, and George W. Bush in 2006—lost at least one chamber in their first terms.

Each had to make the choice now facing Obama: how to treat the newly victorious foes. Wilson was lucky. He was able to completely ignore the Democratic defeats and cloak his speech in patriotic bunting. He celebrated the end of World War I, announced his decision to go to Paris for peace talks, and pledged to the newly Republican House to stay "in close touch with you" from France. "You will know all that I do," he declared.

Twelve years later, Herbert Hoover ducked having to deal with big gains by Democrats in both chambers by refusing to go to Congress to deliver a State of the Union address after the 1930 election. Instead, he used a written report to answer the Constitution's call for him to "from time to time give to Congress Information of the State of the Union." It was probably just as well that in that year of deep Depression he didn't have a live audience to hear him boast that "actual suffering has been kept to a minimum during the past 12 months."

Most of the presidents rose to the occasion, though, and struck exceedingly gracious notes about the newly empowered leaders placed in charge of the legislative branch. George W. Bush was particularly gracious in 2007 when he began his speech with warm praise for Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi. "Tonight," he said, "I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words: 'Madam Speaker.' " He moved Pelosi when he recalled her father, a former House member, being present for past presidents. "But nothing could compare with the sight of his only daughter, Nancy, presiding tonight as the speaker of the House of Representatives."

In 1987, Reagan also singled out the new Senate majority leader, Robert Byrd, and new speaker, Jim Wright, by name. Obama, after suffering the loss of the House in 2010, similarly praised new Speaker John Boehner in his 2011 address, calling him the embodiment of the American Dream. "That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father's Cincinnati bar can preside as speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth," Obama said.

In 1995, Clinton did not use Newt Gingrich's name. But he referred to the new House speaker, offering his congratulations and acknowledging that the voters were angry. "We didn't hear America singing," he said. "We heard America shouting."

In 1955, Eisenhower made no direct mention of the staggering GOP losses in both chambers in the 1954 elections. He dealt with the electoral debacle in his first 36 words: "First, I extend cordial greetings to the 84th Congress. We shall have much to do together; I am sure that we shall get it done—and that we shall do it in harmony and goodwill."

That is a theme oft-repeated by presidents who have lost their way in Congress and one almost certain to run through Obama's address on Tuesday. Reagan simply repeated Eisenhower's remarks, stating, "I cannot find better words." He added, "And now, ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, why don't we get to work?"

Those words were echoed by Clinton in 1995 when, more than once, he implored Congress, "Let's work together on this." Bush, in 2007, hit the same theme. "We are not the first to come here with government divided and uncertainty in the air. Like many before us, we can work through our differences, and we can achieve big things for the American people," he said. "Our citizens don't much care which side of the aisle we sit on, as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done"

bama, in 2011, was a little more restrained when talking about crossing the aisle—even though that was the evening when many Democrats and Republicans made a big point of sitting alongside members of the other party. He indicated he was skeptical that he would see "a new era of cooperation" in the divided Congress. "What comes of this moment is up to us," he said. "What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow."

Sadly, the answer was negative. There wasn't much working together in the coming days. But that reality did not diminish presidents' love for the word "together." In the wake of partisan setbacks and facing freshly hostile Congresses, modern presidents have embraced the word. Four times in Eisenhower's address; four times in Reagan's; 17 times in Clinton's; 10 times in Bush's; and six in Obama's.

Listen—together—for it from Obama again on Tuesday.

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Obama Almost Never Vetoes Bills. That's About to Change.

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 11:00:00 -0500

The failure of the Keystone XL pipeline bill to get the needed 60th vote Tuesday night kept the nation from getting a glimpse of what governing is going to look like in Washington for the next two years. But it's only a delay.

President Obama didn't need to use his veto pen this time. Yet there is no doubt that the president who promised an American transformation is ready to make the shift from hope and change to government by veto. A White House that started out decidedly uncomfortable about even threatening a veto will soon find that the pen is one of the most important weapons left in a Democratic arsenal badly depleted by the midterm elections earlier this month.

Obama is a latecomer to the veto wars. In his first two years, with Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress, the White House was wary of even talking about vetoes. Then-press secretary Robert Gibbs repeatedly danced away from questions about them. When the president did use the veto, it was sparingly, reluctantly, and out of public view. In his six years in office he has vetoed only two bills. If you except James Garfield, who served just six months in office before his assassination in 1881, that is fewer vetoes than any president in the 161 years since Millard Fillmore occupied the White House and issued none.

Obama's two vetoes attracted almost no attention. The first one was not even recognized as a legitimate veto by Congress. That came in December 2009. Congress passed a bill to fund the Defense Department and pay for the ongoing wars. But to give the president time to study the full spending bill, it also passed a continuing resolution to keep the Pentagon operating for one week. Obama didn't take the extra time, immediately signing the spending bill and rendering the CR moot. Nevertheless, the president sent the CR back to Congress unsigned, contending he had "pocket vetoed" it. Congress did not recognize the legitimacy of that act.

Obama's second and most recent veto was Oct. 7, 2010. His target was a bill long sought by the banking industry, the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act. On its face, the bill simply said that states and federal courts would have to recognize notarizations by notaries public from any state. But timing was everything. The bill was rammed through at the very time banks were battling a major scandal in which mortgage companies and banks were "robo-signing" foreclosure documents without reviewing them. The banks hoped this bill would give them some protection from almost-certain lawsuits. But the White House, declaring that "consumer financial protections are incredibly important" and warning of the bill's "unintended impact," refused to go along. The House failed to override the veto on Nov. 17, 2010.

Neither veto suggests the flood of vetoes likely when Republicans take over the Senate in January. A glimpse comes from the threats issued by the White House in the four years since the GOP gained control of the House. After the 2010 election, the White House's initial reluctance to talk about vetoes gave way to frequent threats. Obama warned of vetoes of sanctions against Iran, partial government funding bills that would restore funding only to certain government functions during the shutdown in 2013, the defense spending bill of 2013, repeal of the tax on medical-device makers included in Obamacare, Republican cuts in taxes on small businesses, payroll-cut extensions, weakening of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and policy on the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

But there were no further vetoes, in large part because a dysfunctional Congress, divided between a Republican House and a Democratic Senate, all but stopped approving meaningful legislation and sending anything to his desk. That will change in January, and the White House is braced for legislation they expect to be so objectionable that vetoes will be inevitable. That was what happened with President Clinton. Clinton issued no vetoes in his first two years, when his party controlled Congress. But in his next six years, he vetoed 37 bills, 36 by regular veto and one by pocket veto.

Perhaps the best model for Obama was Clinton's veto of welfare reform in 1995. Republicans and some Democrats warned him it would be political suicide for him to veto such a popular measure. Republicans thought they had him just where they wanted him. But he defied the pundits, and made his veto very public along with his demands for changes. Congress could not override his veto and was forced to give him the changes he wanted, allowing Clinton to claim the final product as a success in his reelection campaign.

Clinton's 37 vetoes left him about normal for two-term presidents—but far behind the record-holder, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, who often worked through the night studying legislation, issued 414 vetoes in his first term and 170 in his second, according to records kept by the Senate. That is topped only by Franklin D. Roosevelt's 635, but FDR had more than 12 years in office.

More recent presidents have been less willing to veto bills. George W. Bush had only 12 in eight years; George H.W. Bush issued 44 in his one term; Ronald Reagan had 78 in two terms; Jimmy Carter issued 31 in four years; Gerald Ford had 66 in only two-and-a-half years; and Richard Nixon issued 43 in his six years. Other 20th-century presidents who faced hostile Congresses include Dwight Eisenhower, who issued 181 vetoes, and Harry S. Truman, who vetoed 250 bills, placing him behind only Cleveland and FDR.

Obama is unlikely to match Truman if only because gridlock will not end just because the Senate flips parties. The lack of a needed 60th vote in the Senate will keep many bills off of Obama's desk. But with the expected rush of legislation off the GOP wish list, he can be expected to quickly reach double figures in vetoes. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, has predicted that much of the legislation will target the way the federal government manages national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. All are likely to draw vetoes from a president who would like to build his legacy on climate and environmental issues.

CAP also recalled that Clinton was effective not just in his use of vetoes but in his threatened use of vetoes, citing a study by University of Florida professor Richard Conley, who found that Clinton issued veto threats on 140 bills and "was generally successful in halting the Republicans' agenda or wresting policy concessions from the majority leadership."

This article appears in the November 20, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.

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Stung at Home, Obama Embarks on His Longest Foreign Trip

George E. Condon Jr., National Journal — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 12:00:00 -0500

No one could blame President Obama if he wants to get as far away as he can from the bodies of defeated Democratic candidates strewn across the American landscape, far away from the gloating of Republicans and far away from the doubts he can be an effective leader over the next two years. So it is perhaps serendipitous that the president left Saturday for the longest foreign trip of his presidency, a 24,000-mile trek through three countries and two continents that will have him attend four international summits.

The trip, though, is unlikely to give him much respite from the new political realities ushered him by Tuesday's midterm elections. Word of his party's losses and his weakened grip on power has made it to all the corners of the globe he will hit, from Beijing to Rangoon, Myanmar, to Brisbane, Australia. TheGlobal Times, run by the Communist Party in China, gleefully stated that "a weak Obama must cooperate with China even more." China's state-run media quickly labeled Obama "a lame duck." The Washington Post quoted an Asia analyst in Tokyo calling Obama "the incredible shrinking president." In Russia, the state-owned Tass news agency carried a statement by the head of the foreign affairs committee in parliament calling the election outcome a "Democratic failure" and "a personal defeat for Obama."

"This is going to be a tough trip for the president," said Ernest Bower, codirector of the Pacific Partners Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on Southeast Asia. He said Obama will face the same questions at the week's varied summits, starting with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Beijing. That will be followed by meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the East Asia Summit in Myanmar, and, finally, by the G-20 summit in Australia. In all, the president will meet with more than 50 world leaders. And they all will have some variation of the same question.

"They're wondering, who is Barack Obama now after the midterm elections?" said Bower. "They'll be trying to discern whether he has the commitment and political capability, political capital to follow through on earlier commitments.… Is he a rock star? Is he a lame duck? I think the jury's out." Bower said the optimists among the Asian leaders hope the president may have been liberated by his defeat on Tuesday. They want to believe, he said, "that President Obama has the Asian engagement DNA in his blood. It's what he wants to do. But he has been sort of hijacked by domestic politics and the elections in the United States, and that now he may be able to turn to Asia for legacy issues."

Other analysts are less optimistic. "The larger question hanging over this trip is whether a diminished Obama can revive U.S. strategic leadership in the Asia Pacific," said David Dollar, who spent two decades at the World Bank and was country director for China and is an expert on Asian economies. Kenneth Lieberthal, senior director for Asia on the National Security Council in the last two years of the Clinton administration and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said a major challenge for Obama this week is to allay the fears of allies.

"It's important for the president to make clear by his posture, by his agenda, and by what he indicates he can commit to on this trip, to show that when it comes to most aspects of foreign policy, the executive branch leads in the U.S. and that he is determined to use his last two years in office, among other things, to be a very active player in foreign policy," said Lieberthal. He acknowledged that "the election does not help him." But he said the president can rebound. "He has to go out there and make the case," he said. "That's one of the reasons why these trips and personal meetings with other leaders are very important."

If recovering from the election is Obama's first challenge, it is certainly not his only one for a trip on which every leg carries diplomatic peril. At every stop, he must confront doubts across the region that he is ready to do what it takes to fully implement the "pivot to Asia" that has been at the heart of his foreign policy. In Beijing, he must try to repair damage to his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping on issues ranging from the Hong Kong democracy protests to trade negotiations, Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. companies and the Pentagon, human rights, China's dispute with Japan over a chain of islands in the East China Sea, and China's fights with several other countries over maritime boundaries in the South China Sea.

This will be Obama's fourth meeting with Xi, after 12 meetings with his predecessor Hu Jintao. But the friction between Xi and Obama has grown. "The relationship has gone fairly badly over the second half of last year and especially the first half of this year," said Lieberthal. Obama can be expected, though, to publicly thank Xi for China's provision of help for the treatment of Ebola in Africa.

In Myanmar, formerly called Burma, the president also faces delicate diplomatic challenges. Two years ago, when he made his historic trip to Myanmar, Obama was able to celebrate the military leadership's initial steps toward reform and the freeing of political prisoners. But with the country's 2015 elections approaching, the regime has backslid and he can be expected to press President Thein Sein to get the reforms back on track. He will meet with Myanmar leaders and the opposition both in the new capital of Naypyidaw and in Rangoon, also known as Yangon.

Ironically, in the wake of a domestic election campaign in which Democrats suffered because of the perception of a weak economy, the strongest card the president can play in all the summits—and particularly at the G-20 meetings in Brisbane—is the robust nature of the American economic recovery.

"The U.S. economy is performing pretty well and seems to be accelerating, whereas Europe is slowing down and there's the risk of deflation and recession," said Dollar, who is also a senior fellow at Brookings and was the Treasury Department's economic and financial emissary to China in Obama's first term. "Japan is slowing down, emerging markets are slowing. So it's an interesting moment where, despite the election results, the U.S. president goes in with a fairly strong hand."

There is also, from the perspective of Asian and Pacific leaders, a silver lining to Obama's political setbacks. The region has a major stake in the stalled negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the effort by 14 Asia and Pacific countries to forge a free trade zone that could give a significant boost to the world economy. One of the reasons progress has stalled is that trade promotion authority—formerly known as fast track—has not been granted by Congress. With Democrats in control of the Senate, current Majority Leader Harry Reid has refused to bring TPA up for a vote. But on the day after the election, both future Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the president spoke of the TPP and trade agreements as one area of potential agreement.

This article appears in the November 10, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.

(Image via 1000 Words / Shutterstock.com)

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