Obama reverses course after pressure from allies

Feb 10 (Reuters) - As soon as the news hit, the deluge began.

Catholics from across the country began calling the White House within hours of the Obama administration's announcement on Jan. 20 that religious institutions would be required to offer free birth control to employees as a health-care benefit.

But these calls weren't protests from conservative bishops or the rank-and-file in the pews. They were calls from a kitchen cabinet of informal political advisers that President Barack Obama had relied on for years -- allies who had worked with him on various social issues and in some cases, campaigned for him.

They had access, and they intended to use it to drive change in a policy they said they saw as a clumsy, provocative and an unnecessary infringement on religious liberty.

Among the many who called: Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana; Stephen Schneck, a political scientist at the Catholic University of America; and Sister Simone Campbell, who runs a Catholic social-justice lobby in Washington.

They reached out to friends in the Obama campaign, in the office of Vice President Joe Biden, in the White House domestic policy shop and its office of faith-based initiatives, in the Department of Health and Human Services.

One even wrote a proposed speech for the president, in which Obama would admit he'd been wrong and offer a compromise.

"A daily dunning," is how Campbell described it.

UNCERTAIN FOOTING

From the start, Obama officials were receptive to calls for change, Campbell and others said. But they seemed uncertain about how to proceed, and the talks had little urgency.

People close to the White House said formulating the policy on contraceptive coverage had been a bruising fight, lasting for months last fall and into the winter, with deep divisions among senior staff - including its Catholics - about the wisdom of requiring Catholic colleges and hospitals to subsidize free birth control for their employees in the name of improving women's health care access.

The administration seemed prepared for a furious protest from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a formidable adversary in the earlier debate over healthcare reform, people with knowledge of the internal debate said.

But officials appeared taken aback by the intensity of the pleas coming from close Obama allies, several of whom argued to anyone who would listen that the policy was not only morally wrong, but out of step with the president's values.

"This decision just seems not in keeping with the person he is," said Douglas Kmiec, a conservative legal scholar at Pepperdine University and an Obama supporter.

In their quest for a compromise, Kmiec and other allies of the president focused at first on what was dubbed the "Hawaii solution." Hawaii requires all health insurance plans to cover contraception. But it lets religious employers delete that benefit from their plans - so long as they agree to refer any worker seeking contraceptive coverage to a third party that can provide it at nominal cost.

The HAWAII SOLUTION

The Hawaii model excited several Catholic allies, who thought it would neatly solve the problem by ensuring that religious employers didn't have to pay for the birth control benefits themselves.

But as talk about a Hawaii solution intensified, Catholic bishops moved to quash it, arguing that referring women to low-cost contraception would be as immoral as distributing the drugs and devices first-hand.

"The church must have the freedom to refuse to cooperate in any way in making these 'services' available," Bishop William Lori, who heads a committee on religious liberty, wrote on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops blog. "If we provide the means for another to act against the moral law, we ourselves become morally culpable as well."

That pronouncement came at the crest of a potent protest wave orchestrated by the bishops. Women's groups, meanwhile, had begun pushing back hard against suggestions of compromise.

Judy Waxman, a vice president of the National Women's Law Center, even said she would consider suing if the administration changed the policy in a way that required women to jump through any hoops to get their free contraception. "I see potential litigation in my future," she said before the compromise was reached.

Working frantically behind the scenes, Obama's loose-knit Catholic ally network continued to press its case. As noise on the issue grew, the allies said they began to gain traction with the White House. "As the momentum built, they realized, 'Uh oh, we've got trouble,' " said Campbell, the social-justice advocate.

Yet for days, a solution still seemed elusive. Several possible options would have required legislative approval, and given the divisions in Congress and heated election-year politics, Obama did not want to take that route, those familiar with the process said.

At the same time, said a senior Obama advisor, the president made clear he would not back down from his central point - that women employed by Catholic institutions should have the same right to free birth control, with no deductible and no co-pay, as woman employed by any other entity.

"It was hard figuring out the details of how this could work structurally," said John Gehring, who coordinates Catholic outreach for the group Faith in Public Life, a policy advocacy group generally aligned with Democratic policies.

As they struggled to find a solution, the would-be reformers found considerable support within the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership, where several staff members suggested they were not happy with the president's original policy. A key point person there: Joshua DuBois, the office head, who knew many of Obama's outside allies from the 2008 campaign and who reports to close Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett.

The faith office "was pressing very hard for a reasonable tweaking of the policy," Gehring said.

Those pushing for compromise also found a friend in Vice President Joe Biden, a fellow Catholic, who had argued from the beginning that religious employers should be exempt from the contraception mandate.

"He understands the Catholic community's views on these issues and is willing to speak up for them when appropriate," said James Salt, executive director of Catholics United, a group with a history of supporting liberal causes.

But though they were getting high-placed signals that a compromise could be worked out, no details emerged. As the days wore on and the political rhetoric grew louder, some Obama allies got discouraged. "The lines in the sand are being drawn sharper and deeper, so I'm not optimistic," Schneck, the political scientist, said earlier this week.

On Friday, Schneck said he realized why he had received so little concrete information about the working compromise. The administration had been so divided in its deliberations about the rule, he said, that "they needed to work this out inside their own walls first," before floating it to key interest groups.

"This was an internecine struggle," he said.

A senior U.S. official said that many of the reports about the internal White House deliberations have been "overdramatized." Officials declined to comment further on internal discussions.

Late Thursday evening, administration officials reached out to Schneck and other involved parties to let them know an announcement was imminent. "There was a tremendous sense of relief," Gehring said.

Before unveiling his compromise Friday morning, Obama called Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America; and Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association of the United States.

Richards and Keehan welcomed the announcement. The Conference of Catholic Bishops has been more cautious, releasing a statement calling the new approach promising, but declining to endorse it fully.

The compromise allows religious employers to opt out of providing birth control coverage to employees. But in making that concession, Obama promised those employees that they could get free contraception all the same, courtesy of their health insurance providers.

Obama's Catholic allies said that approach hit all the right notes. "Very practical, very respectful, very common sense," Roemer said.

Sister Campbell wasn't so restrained: "This," she said, "is a glorious day."

The birther movement will not be silenced - even in the face of facts

The birther movement: immune to facts?

By Alan Silverleib, CNN

April 28, 2011 -- Updated 1534 GMT (2334 HKT)

(CNN) -- Can the "birthers" ever be convinced that Barack Obama was born in America and is eligible to serve as president?

Probably not, according to one prominent psychology professor and other political observers.
Since Obama launched his bid for the White House, a sizable minority of Americans has expressed strong doubts about whether he was actually born in the United States. Over the past few years, the allegation that he was born overseas -- in Kenya or perhaps Indonesia -- has taken on a life of its own, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed that roughly 25% of Americans -- including over four in 10 Republicans -- believe Obama was definitely or probably not born in the United States.
Earlier this week, CNN released the results of its own investigation into the controversy. Documents and statements from numerous public officials and childhood friends made clear that the president was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.

On Wednesday, Obama himself addressed the issue, pleading for an end to the distractions of "sideshows" and "carnival barkers."

 

The president yielded to demands from his critics that he release his original long-form birth certificate, filing a special legal request with Hawaiian authorities to release a document that is no longer used for official purposes and ordinarily remains buried in the basement archives of the state health department.

Obama's 2008 release of the more common "live birth certification" -- a short computer-generated form typically used for documentation purposes -- did little to silence the chorus of skeptics.
It remains to be seen whether Wednesday's release will be received any differently. But the early reaction wasn't exactly positive.

One of the main websites pushing the birther claims -- birthers.org -- declared that "forgery or not, now we can debate the true meaning of a natural born citizen."

The U.S. Constitution says only "natural born" citizens can become president -- a vague clause that some members of the birther movement contend disqualifies Obama if he was born outside the United States.
Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of the conservative website WorldNetDaily.com, said that "we know (Obama's) father was a Kenyan citizen, and that he would therefore confer Kenyan or U.K. citizenship on his son, which would at best make him a dual citizen."

Dual citizenship, Farah asserted, "is not what the Founders had in mind when they coined the phrase 'natural born citizen.'"

Sharon Guthrie, the legislative director for a Texas state representative backing a bill requiring proof of citizenship for presidential ballot access, told the website Slate.com that she was still suspicious.

"What they produced today ... still says certificate of live birth across the top," she said. "We want to see a 'birth certificate.' ... The one that we have that says 'birth certificate' is from Mombassa, Kenya, with his footprint on it. He has still not produced an American birth certificate."

Why the unrelenting skepticism?

Emory University's Drew Westen, author of the "The Political Brain" and an informal advisor to Obama's 2008 campaign, chalked up much of it to Obama's reluctance to immediately rebut the charge more quickly in the presidential race.

"The right wing was attempting to make him 'one of them' as opposed to 'one of us,'" he claimed.
Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry, cited what psychologists call the "sleeper effect."
"If you present negative information about someone and it initially goes unchallenged, you might alter some people's conscious beliefs by challenging it later," he asserted. "But they are left with a negative gut-level feeling that doesn't go away."

"Political feelings, once they are strongly held, tend to be resistant to facts. It's just the result of the way our brains work," he said.

Westen mentioned the so-called "Swift Boat" attacks against Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry in 2004, which called into question the senator's service in Vietnam.
Kerry "allowed his honor to be challenged and didn't respond for weeks," Westen said. "When finally he did respond and had definitive evidence that the attacks were untrue, it was too late. People's feelings towards him had already changed. They wouldn't change back by that point."

Along similar lines, Westen told CNN that if staunch Democrats or Republicans are presented with clear evidence of wrongdoing on the part of their party's nominee shortly before an election, they'll come up with "every kind of rationalization to explain it away."

"We fight off information that makes us feel bad and gravitate toward information that makes us comfortable," he said.

Westen also brought up the explosive issue of race, one of the biggest political lightning rods in U.S. history. He insisted the birther movement never would have taken hold with a white president.

It's not fair to call a large segment of today's electorate "1950s-style racists," he said. But some people are "unconsciously prejudiced in a way that predisposes them to not believing that a black man with a funny name could have really been legitimately elected president of the United States."

But Bill Mayer, a Northeastern University political scientist, took issue with the notion of race as the critical component of the birther movement.

"The fact that Obama is black may affect the form of the conspiracy, but probably not the fact that there is a following for this rumor," he told CNN. "Conspiracy beliefs have a long history in American politics."
Mayer cited a range of political conspiracy theories, including claims regarding the Kennedy assassination, involvement on the part of the Clintons in alleged murders, and George W. Bush's supposed knowledge of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley noted that, back in the 19th century, questions were raised over the American roots of Andrew Jackson and Chester Arthur.

But it was "nothing like this," he told CNN. "We are now in the age of electronic journalism. ... This has become a ghastly scenario (over) the last month."

Mayer suggested that Obama's release of the long-form birth certificate will "further marginalize those who insist (the matter of his birth) is an open question." Still, he added, "I don't understand why the White House took so long" to put out the document.

Just how long will the controversy drag on? Westen claimed the birther issue will continue to be political fodder until a critical mass of Republican leaders decide it's making the GOP look "foolish" and hurting the party among independent voters.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, released a statement Wednesday claiming that the controversy "has long been a settled issue."

History suggests otherwise.

-----

Excessive rhetoric on Social Security and Obama’s budget plan

By Glenn Kessler

(Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“My argument with him [President Obama] is when he says ‘88 percent of the budget we’re not going to touch, reform or fix and we’re still going to solve our problems’ is an absolute falsehood. The fact is you can’t have Medicare out of the equation, you can’t have Medicaid out of the equation. And we can’t borrow the money, the $2.6 trillion that we’ve stolen from Social Security, in the international financial market without making Social Security sustainable.”
— Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), April 24, 2011
These are tough words on NBC’s “Meet The Press” from the junior senator from Oklahoma — who is personally close to the president despite disagreeing with him on virtually every public policy issue.
First, Coburn claims that Obama, in his budget speech on April 12, took 88 percent of the budget off of the table from any kind of reform. Second, he asserts that “we’ve stolen” $2.6 trillion of Social Security funds and that the money can’t be borrowed from the financial markets without major changes.
Coburn is a member of the so-called “Gang of Six” — three Senate Democrats and three Republicans looking for a budget compromise — but this is strong language. What’s he talking about?

The Facts

Let’s deal with Social Security first. The figure that Coburn mentioned — $2.6 trillion — refers to the money that has been placed in the Social Security trust fund. This is a difficult and complex subject that politicians frequently exploit, so please be patient.

Using the loaded word “stolen,” Coburn suggests that the trust fund is a fiction, or as some politicians assert, “worthless IOUs.”
John Hart, a spokesman for Coburn, said: “The language isn’t strong at all. If a person shoplifts with the intention of returning merchandise that is still shoplifting. That’s precisely what Congress has done with the trust funds. Politicians, of course, promise they will pay back the money they’ve stolen but we can only make good on that promise if we can borrow to do so.”
IOU, however, is just another way of saying bond. These bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. No president or Congress would risk defaulting on these bonds because it would ruin the nation’s financial standing.
The bonds are a real asset to Social Security and Medicare, but — here’s where it gets complicated — they also represent an obligation by the rest of the government. Like any entity that issues debt, such as a corporation, the government will have to make good on its obligations, generally by taking the money out of revenue, reducing expenses or issuing new debt. The action taken really depends on the resources available at the time. There is nothing particularly unusual about this, except that the U.S. government is better placed to make good on these obligations than virtually any other debt-issuer.
Coburn presumably understands this. He recently wrote an article in which he approvingly quoted a statement from a White House budget office report written during the Clinton administration. Note the word “redeemed”: “They [the bonds] are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.”
(Democrats who suggest redeeming those bonds will be painless or that Social Security is not adding to the deficit are making the exact opposite mistake. There is no free lunch when it comes to Social Security.)
Incidentally, it would have been very difficult for the government to have simply parked this money in the bank without affecting the financial markets. So the excess money generated by Social Security has been spent on other government activities and helped mask the overall size of the deficit. Coburn voted for some of those spending bills. To his credit, he did say “we’ve stolen” — including himself among the offenders.
There was a brief period — at the end of the Clinton administration — when the government generated so much money that the surplus was used to pay down the debt, in effect “a lockbox” of the funds. But that surplus disappeared with the advent of recession, war and sweeping tax cuts during the Bush administration. If the extra Social Security money had not existed, then the government would have had to borrow the $2.6 trillion in the public markets, in which case the overall debt would be the same.
Coburn’s assertion that Obama is walling off “88 percent” of the budget from “touch, reform or fix” is also a stretch. Obama never actually said anything close to that, but Hart said that Coburn based this statement on the fact that Obama’s proposed “debt failsafe” trigger in 2014 would require across-the-board spending cuts if certain debt targets were not reached — except for Social Security, low-income programs or Medicare benefits.
However, those programs are estimated to be less than 50 percent of the budget in 2014. Hart says Coburn was talking about the size of the programs far in the future, beyond 2025, and that “the long term projections matter because our unwillingness to deal with our long term debt problem is spooking the international financial community.” But it is a bit of rhetorical bait-and-switch to cite such a speculative figure as if it was established fact.
Moreover, Obama’s health-care law already is implementing cuts in Medicare (which many Republicans campaigned against) and Obama in his speech he would “build” on those cuts with other cost-saving measures in Medicare. Obama also said he would seek “more efficiency and accountability’ from Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor. That certainly sounds like Obama would touch the programs, if not “reform or fix.”

The Pinocchio Test

Coburn’s rhetoric on Social Security is not warranted by the facts. There were certainly consequences to using the Social Security surplus on tax cuts and government programs, and it is appropriate to discuss the choices Americans now face as a result of those decisions (which Coburn supported). But it does not help the public discourse on the debt to claim that the Social Security money was “stolen.”
Coburn’s claim that Obama is leaving 88 percent of the budget untouched is also not supported by the facts. His figure is speculative and, in any case, Obama did propose changes in Medicare and Medicaid.