Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 20

Apparently, the White House has largely abandoned the practice of posting interview transcripts. Not one of yesterday's "Full Ginsburg" interviews is on the site. Here are links:

• CBS "Face the Nation"
• ABC "This Week"
• NBC "Meet the Press"
• CNN "State of the Union"
• Univision

Hope, Change, and Profit

From CQ Politics:

The hours are long, the work is sporadic, and chances of failure lurk eveywhere, but politics is still a place where hot-shot operatives can pull down a six-figure salary, a CQ MoneyLine analysis has found.

The analysis of expenditure reports showed that at least 216 campaign and political action committee staffers made more than $100,000 each in the 2008 election cycle.

The largest reported paycheck, nearly $300,000, went to Eli Pariser, former executive director of MoveOn.org Jay Banning, the former chief financial officer for the Republican National Committee, was second, taking in $291,780. Karrie Harris Cohen was a close third. She was paid $288,094 for running the Every Republican Is Crucial political action committee tied to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.

ACORN

In Epic Journey, we tell how the site my.barackobama.com was a big asset to the Obama campaign. It has also proved to be a liability, since it provides material to opposition researchers. A case in point is his now-embarrassing talk to ACORN in November 2007, dutifully recorded by Sam Graham-Felsen:

When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, "I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Clinton, Newsom, and Brown

Bill Clinton is reportedly endorsing San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom over Attorney General Jerry Brown in the California's Democratic gubernatorial primary. Why? One reason is that Newsom supported Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid. (Newsom still remembered an old snub by Barack Obama.) But there is another, bigger, reason.

When Brown ran against Clinton for the 1992 presidential nomination, things got ... heated. See:




As William Faulkner once explained: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

2010

AP notes that 54 Democrats entered the House in the sweeps of 2006 and 2008. Many come from swing districts or GOP-leaning constituencies. Now they have to defend tough votes on health and other issues.

Add to that the absence of Obama from the top of the ticket, which could reduce turnout among blacks, liberals and young people, and the likelihood of a highly motivated GOP base confused by the president's proposed health care plan and angry at what they consider reckless spending and high debt.

Taken together, it could be the most toxic environment for Democrats since 1994, when the party lost 34 House incumbents and 54 seats altogether. Democrats currently have a 256-178 edge in the House, with one vacancy. Republicans would have to pick up 40 seats to regain control.

Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

In his address to Congress, President Obama asserted that "most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse."

For decades, however, presidents have been waging war on waste and declaring progress.

• Dwight Eisenhower: "The strong expansion of the economy, coupled with a constant care for efficiency in Government operations and an alert guard against controllable waste and duplication, has brought us to a prospective balance between income and expenditure.
• John F. Kennedy: "The notable progress made by the Department of Defense in reducing costs and eliminating waste is typical of the government-wide effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our operations."
• Lyndon Johnson: "We are cutting waste where we find it. We are cutting inefficiency where we can prove it. We are cutting out the nonessentials so we can better support what is essential."
• Richard Nixon: "Our search for waste has led us into every nook and cranny of the bureaucracy. "
• Gerald Ford: "I am shaking up and shaking out inefficiency and waste wherever I find it."
• Jimmy Carter: "One of my major commitments has been to restore public faith in our Federal government by cutting out waste and inefficiency. In the past four years, we have made dramatic advances toward this goal, many of them previously considered impossible to achieve."
• Ronald Reagan: "[W]e launched an all-out campaign against fraud, waste and abuse at the Federal level."
• George H.W. Bush: "And I sent Congress my first line-item rescissions, cutting $3.6 billion in unneeded wasteful spending These rescissions will serve notice to Congress that the days of wasteful spending are over."
• Bill Clinton: "Medicare fraud and waste are more than an abuse of the system; they’re an abuse of the taxpayer. By overbilling, charging for phony procedures, and selling substandard supplies, Medicare cheats cost taxpayers hundreds of millions a year. That’s why we’ve assigned more Federal prosecutors and FBI agents than ever to fight this kind of fraud, and why we’ve invested in new tools to investigate and prosecute these crimes. All told, our efforts have prevented the wasteful spending of an estimated $50 billion, and aggressive enforcement has recovered nearly $1.6 billion for the Medicare Trust Fund."
• George W. Bush: "Fought health care fraud and waste by cutting wasteful spending out of the Medicare and Medicaid programs. The Medicare bill that the President signed will cut wasteful spending and save seniors and taxpayers an estimated $20 billion over the next decade."

The Speech

In his speech to Congress on health care, the president said: "Now, add it all up, and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years -- less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration. (Applause.)"

At First Things, an analysis from Epic Journey's Jim Ceaser:

He is President of the United States and he strongly supports the War in Afghanistan, asking soldiers daily to sacrifice their lives for that cause. Less than a month ago he rousingly defended the policy before the Veteran’s of Foreign Wars not as “a war of choice” but as “a war of necessity.” True enough, during the campaign as well, Obama always gave his support to the Afghan war, in contrast to the Iraq War, which was the “war of choice.” The question now, however, is why he would include Afghanistan inside of a rhetorical appeal that rests on the implicit notion, at least to his own partisans, of the scandal of wasting funds. And why he would do this at the very point when he is calling on Americans to make greater sacrifices for that venture? A President who is a serious war-time President, a position he has embraced for himself, might wish to think twice before evoking sentiments that raise doubts about his own policies.