FatherGarage.com

President Obama combined two of his passions – basketball and politics –by playing host to a dozen members of Congress at the White House on Wednesday night to watch the televised contest between the Chicago Bulls and the Charlotte Bobcats.

The attendees, according to a list from the White House, were all from Illinois and North Carolina. They included just two Republicans; the White House did not say how many Republicans were invited but declined.

But if the group’s partisan split skewed Democratic, especially counting the First Fan, the dozen lawmakers seemed evenly split between Bulls and Bobcats fans. Also attending were the mayor of Charlotte, Anthony Foxx, and a council member, James Mitchell.

Attendees were to include both senators from Illinois – Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Democratic leader, and Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican who last year won the seat that Mr. Obama used to hold. But of North Carolina’s two senators, Kay Hagan, a Democrat, was listed but the Republican, Richard M. Burr, was not.

The nine House members included four Democrats from Chicago – Representatives Danny Davis, Jesse Jackson Jr., Luis Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky; four Democrats from North Carolina — G.K. Butterfield, Larry Kissell, David Price and Mel Watt – and one Republican from North Carolina, Sue Myrick.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

It is never stated openly. And certainly no one in the White House has gone on the record. But recent coverage of President Obama has implicitly asked the question in a sideways manner.

Was Rahm Emanuel to blame for the administration’s struggles?

The unspoken question has been posed in a spate of articles in the past several weeks about the successor to Mr. Emanuel, who served as Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff for nearly two years until leaving to run for mayor of Chicago.

William Daley, the new chief of staff, has begun to put his stamp on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And his changes are inevitably reversing some of the decisions that Mr. Emanuel made.

A story by Anne E. Kornblut of The Washington Post this week described an effort by Mr. Daley’s White House to rebuild strained relationships with some members of Mr. Obama’s cabinet.

“You hear the same thing: ‘I don’t think we’re used well. I don’t think we’re consulted enough,’ ” Mr. Daley told Ms. Kornblut in an interview. “Whether it’s true or not, perception becomes reality, and I think there’s a desire to feel more part of a team.”

Mr. Daley steered well clear of pointing the finger at Mr. Emanuel. But the article makes clear that the new chief of staff is not wedded to running Mr. Obama’s White House the way Mr. Emanuel did. In fact, the story says Mr. Daley has been promising cabinet members that things will change.

A report by the Times’s Jackie Calmes offered a similar description of a White House that is ready to abandon some of Mr. Emanuel’s traditions.

The story noted that in the Emanuel era, last-minute changes to Mr. Obama’s Saturday radio addresses would keep speechwriters guessing until the last minute. That has changed under Mr. Daley, the article said.

So has the frenetic pace that Mr. Emanuel set — always by example. The story by Ms. Calmes described Mr. Emanuel as an “idea-a-minute dynamo who would dart from floor to floor trying to control matters mundane and major.”

“Rahm very much needed to do it all,” Mr. Daley told a group of reporters last month, according to the piece in The Times. “And I don’t have that need.”

It is the oldest trick in the political book: the incoming blames the outgoing. But it’s usually employed by one party against the other, as in Mr. Obama’s repeated efforts to blame his predecessor, George Bush, for the budget and foreign policy difficulties he faced in 2009.

In the case of Mr. Emanuel, there are few major policies being unwound. It is, after all, still Mr. Obama’s White House and Mr. Emanuel was charged with putting into effeect the president’s agenda — as Mr. Daley is now.

And let’s face it, a more disciplined approach to the Saturday radio address is not exactly a major change in an administration that is confronting questions about war, democracy abroad, record-setting debt and a still-fragile economy.

Rather, the new narrative about the White House has more to do with an atmosphere at the White House that appears to have changed. Pete Rouse, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, took over briefly as chief of staff after Mr. Emanuel and before Mr. Daley’s arrival.

According to The Post story, Mr. Rouse told cabinet members, “We recognize that one thing we didn’t do well enough in the first two years was to use you.”

Interestingly, Mr. Emanuel is in a position to return the favor — just to a different Mr. Daley.

As the incoming mayor of Chicago, Mr. Emanuel will replace Richard M. Daley, the brother to the current White House chief of staff. Both men are Democrats, but part of Mr. Emanuel’s effort to establish himself as the leader of the Windy City will be to emphasize how things are going to change.

In a speech after winning the mayoral election, Mr. Emanuel walked the difficult line — praising the old, but calling for change.

“Rich Daley is the only mayor a whole generation of Chicagoans has known and an impossible act to follow,” Mr. Emanuel said, before pivoting. “Yet we have to move forward. And we know that we face serious new challenges — and overcoming them will not be easy.”

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

He may not be the high-profile, high-volume, hard-charging White House chief of staff that Rahm Emanuel was, but suddenly, William M. Daley is everywhere.

He was at the negotiation table Thursday evening, as administration officials and top party lawmakers convened in a face-to-face meeting in their efforts to agree on a budget and avoid a government shutdown.

Two days before, he spoke via videoconference to business executives at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Florida. And it was Mr. Daley last weekend who wrote an opinion article in the Financial Times to counter the claim — made earlier by the chief executive of 3M — that President Obama is anti-business.

Looking forward, political junkies all over the country will have a chance to see him on Sunday morning, when he appears on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

In only a few weeks on the job as President Obama’s top aide, Mr. Daley, a former banking executive and commerce secretary, has emerged as a valued behind-the-scenes legislative negotiator and ambassador to big business while helping to impose a new sense of discipline at the White House.

With legislative relationships — especially in the House — dating back two decades, Mr. Daley has become a key part of the administration’s legislative liaison strategy, reaching out personally to Republican lawmakers by phone and in person, according to people on Capitol Hill who have been on the receiving end of the effort.

His presence in that strategy was clear on Thursday as photographs showed him side-by-side with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Jack Lew, the budget director, as the trio headed to the opening round of budget negotiations.

House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, are demanding deep cuts in federal spending as the two sides work to end a months-long impasse over the current year’s spending. Democrats have offered cuts as well, but object to the depth of the Republican effort, saying it would hurt needed programs and slashes spending too deeply while the economy is still recovering.

Mr. Biden offered the shortest of assessments of the meeting after it ended: “We had a good meeting, and the conversation will continue.”

CNN’s Dana Bash reported that at some point Mr. Biden asked staff members, including Mr. Daley, to leave the room to the elected officials. But those familiar with Mr. Daley and Mr. Boehner have said they expect conversations between these two to be at the heart of negotiations.

“From my interchanges with them, infrequent but over the span of two decades, I’ve found that they both have good political judgment on both people and issues, including a keen sense of when their own side is about to get clobbered,” Michael Barone, a fellow at the American Enterprise institute and the co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, wrote earlier this year. “It’s not hard for me to see these two guys negotiating agreements on major issues.”

Earlier this week, Mr. Daley’s video appearance at the chamber event was welcomed by business executives, many of whom have known Mr. Daley for years. The new chief of staff answered questions about economic and trade issues, according to an official who attended.

“We were pleased to hear from Bill Daley at our board meeting today and enjoyed discussing ways to address our mutual goals of creating jobs and bolstering the economy and US competitiveness,” said Tom Collamore, the senior vice president for communications at the group.

Mr. Daley has also helped to bring less drama to the White House, according to the Times’s Jackie Calmes. He has a bearing that fits the moment for Mr. Obama as he begins his re-election campaign: a no-nonsense, calm, I’m-the-adult-in-the-room manner.

In the Financial Times’s opinion article, Mr. Daley took George Buckley, the 3M executive, to task in a way that is reminiscent of a mildly scolding teacher.

“There is plenty of work to do. But the stakes are too high to give credence to the kind of comments Mr Buckley made this week, or to believe those who would question Mr Obama’s commitment to our economic recovery,” Mr. Daley wrote.

But look for Mr. Daley’s most public role to be as a new and frequent pitchman on the Sunday morning news programs. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, has left the White House after filling that role on many Sundays. So has Robert Gibbs, the former press secretary. David Plouffe, who replaced Mr. Axelrod, is famously camera-shy.

In his first Sunday morning interview as chief of staff at the end of last month, Mr. Daley offered the administration’s view on the then-unfolding protests in Egypt and on the president’s relationship with Wall Street. Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on January 30, he also foreshadowed Thursday’s budget meeting on Capitol Hill.

“We want to sit down with the leadership of Congress as we work through the deficit, as we work through the other issues and talk about the possibilities,” he said.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will convene a meeting of Congressional leaders of both parties in the Capitol in Thursday afternoon in an effort to find a way out of a spending dispute that has the entire government operating under a stop-gap budget.

The White House announced that what could be the first of several sessions would be held at 4 p.m. Also taking part from the Obama administration will be the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, and Jacob Lew, the budget director. President Obama called for the negotiations on Wednesday.

When they first heard of the planned talks, Republicans were unenthusiastic since Democrats had not yet made public their own plan for spending cuts and the House had approved $61 billion in reductions. But Republicans said they would take part. They continued to press on Thursday for a Democratic proposal.

“Republicans are happy to go,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said. “But putting a meeting on the schedule doesn’t change the fact that neither the White House nor a single Democrat in Congress has proposed a plan that would allow the government to remain open and that would respond to the voters by reining in spending. All we get is talk.”

The current interim spending bill passed by the Senate and signed by the president Wednesday expires March 18, giving Congress and the administration two weeks to strike a deal to fund the government through Sept. 30, pass another short-term measure or see parts of the government shut down.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

From Today’s Times:

-         While gay rights advocates vocally celebrated President Obama’s denouncing of the Defense of Marriage Act, Republican politicians and other conservative leaders have remained unusually silent. The Times’s Michael D. Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg examine the shifting political climate that places economic concerns above social issues.

-         For freshman members of the House, the current recess has been their first foray into striking the delicate balance between pleasing both the party in Washington and the voters back home. Although the budget battles in the halls of Congress are tough, many freshman legislators are finding it tougher to face supporters back home who will be directly affected by the hard decisions on spending. The challenges will come as voters, even in reliably conservative districts, push back against the cuts, The Times’s Jennifer Steinhauer reports.

- Columbus, Ohio, is where the forerunner to the modern labor movement, the American Federation of Labor, began in 1886 and the United Mine Workers four years later. Today, The Times’s Sabrina Tavernise finds, many working-class residents have mixed feelings about efforts to weaken collective bargaining for public-employee unions.

Around the Web:

-        The government watchdog group Common Cause is calling on the White House to disclose all of its meetings with lobbyists, whether they take place inside the White House or out. Although the Obama administration is the first to release the White House visitor’s log to the public, Politico reports that the president’s aides go to extra lengths to keep visits from lobbyists under wraps by holding meetings off campus.

-         Although energy cannot be created or destroyed, a government shutdown could halt it. A pause in financing would temporarily drain the Energy Department of everything but its national security operations, Politico reports. A government closing similar to the last one in 1995 would cripple many of the Obama administration’s new energy initiatives for a brief yet crucial period.

- A spokesman for Mitt Romney, a likely Republican presidential candidate in 2012, defended the health care overhaul enacted in Massachusetts while Mr. Romney was governor there, the National Journal reports. “Mitt Romney is proud of what he accomplished for Massachusetts in getting everyone covered,’’ said the spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom. “What’s important now is to return to the states the power to determine their own health care solutions by repealing Obamacare. A one-size-fits-all plan for the entire nation just doesn’t work.” Mr. Romney has faced questions about the Massachusetts plan from conservatives, who have united in opposition to Mr. Obama’s health care law.

-         Almost two months after the deadly shooting in Tucson that killed six and wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Legislature is considering a bill to establish the Colt revolver as the official state firearm. Gun control advocates are denouncing the measure as a waste of time when the state is struggling economically, reports The Huffington Post. Republican Senator Ron Gould is sponsoring the bill and says that it is an effective way to honor the state’s western heritage.

Washington Happenings:

- President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will meet with Democratic governors today in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to discuss the ways Washington and the states can work together to improve the economy and create jobs. Governors from both parties are converging on Washington this weekend for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association.

-         Walter Reed Army Medical Center will have a Purple Heart ceremony for soldiers injured while supporting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

After both a historic (see Desiree Rogers, the first African-American social secretary) and shaky start (see Ms. Rogers, whose first state dinner would best be remembered as “Salahi-gate”), the White House made history yet again when it announced Friday that Jeremy Bernard will be the new social secretary. Mr. Bernard will be the first openly gay person to hold that position.

“Jeremy shares our vision for the White House as the people’s house, one that celebrates our history and culture in dynamic and inclusive ways,” President Obama said in an e-mail statement. “We look forward to Jeremy continuing to showcase America’s arts and culture to our nation and the world through the many events at the White House.”

Currently, Mr. Bernard serves as senior adviser to the United States ambassador to France. He previously served as the White House liaison to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Mr. Bernard and Rufus Gifford, his then-partner, were early supporters of Mr. Obama’s candidacy in California. The pair lived in Los Angeles and raised millions of dollars for Mr. Obama when he was an Illinois senator.

When they moved to Washington, they scored a two-bedroom in a green building in the city’s hip Logan Circle neighborhood, and quickly earned a reputation as a power couple.

“I am deeply humbled to join the White House staff as Social Secretary and support President Obama and the First Lady in this role,” Mr. Bernard said in an e-mail statement. “I have long admired the arts and education programs that have become hallmarks of the Obama White House, and I am eager to continue these efforts in the years ahead.”

Mr. Bernard will be the third social secretary in the Obama administration. After Ms. Rogers left, she was replaced by Julianna Smoot, a fund-raising powerhouse and political operative who stepped down in February after just 10 months, to join the president’s re-election operation in Chicago.

Jonathan Capehart, an openly gay man and editorial writer for The Washington Post, first broke news of Mr. Bernard’s hiring in a blog post this afternoon. After disclosing that he and Mr. Bernard are friends, he praised the appointment as “an excellent choice.”

“He will bring a certain warmth and irreverence to the job that will make him a joy for his colleagues to work with,” Mr. Capehart wrote. “His knowledge of the Obamas and his intense attention to detail will ensure that their vision for the people’s house continues seamlessly. And he has a reverence for the presidency and the meaning of the White House that will make him an imaginative steward of their image.”

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.