If you want to know where the public’s anger should really be directed, columnist David Broder wrote, “look at the Tuesday Senate roll call and focus on the 22 Democrats, 23 Republicans and one independent who combined to scuttle what one sponsor has called ‘the last, best hope’ to avert a catastrophe.” These lawmakers, which included Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts and Sam Brownback, blocked a bill to create an independent debt-reduction commission. “These are the men and women who placed politics above the long-term needs of the country and rewarded their own narrow constituencies, rather than serving the national interest,” Broder wrote, adding that he hopes “this vote is remembered in November.” Roberts and Brownback also voted last week against restoring “pay-as-you-go” rules requring lawmakers to pay for spending increases or tax cuts.
The Republican National Committee voted last week not to impose a litmus test on GOP candidates. Some GOP activists had wanted to bar the RNC from supporting any candidate who agrees with fewer than eight of 10 conservative principles. But as a Wall Street Journal editorial argued: “If the elections in Massachusetts and 2006 and 2008 showed anything, it’s that Republicans can’t win with their base alone. They need independent voters. Those independents don’t want to be told that every GOP candidate must first bow to big-shot party vetters.” Or as the editorial concluded: “Litmus tests are for losers.”
“Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards,” columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote. When research subjects are encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of their brains light up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex. Kristof concluded: “So at a time of vast needs, from Haiti to our own cities, here’s a nice opportunity for symbiosis: so many afflicted people, and so much benefit to us if we try to help them.”
Many people, including members of the Obama administration, are acting as if 2010 could be a rerun of 1994, when the Republicans added 52 House seats and eight Senate seats and took back Congress for the first time in decades. But historian Nancy Cohen argues in a Los Angeles Times commentary that the GOP sparked a revolution in 1994 by recruiting new Christian right voters and white Southerners, and that there’s no similar constituency up for grabs this time. “In November, the GOP needs to pick up 40 seats in the House and 11 in the Senate to win control of Congress. It needs to broaden its constituency significantly but nothing suggests there are sufficient numbers of additional voters who can be recruited to its cause.æ.æ.æ. Tea-party activists do share the ideological intensity of some GOP voters of 1994. But they are neither new voters, like 1994’s evangelicals, nor are they party switchers, like 1994’s white Southerners. There is no good evidence — in surveys or reporting — that they are anything other than disaffected conservatives who have previously voted Republican. At this moment, the odds are better that they’ll split the GOP than that they’ll sweep the Democrats out of power.”
But such analysis doesn’t consider the impact of independent voters, as we saw in Massachusetts. Doyle McManus reported: “The number of voters who call themselves independent has risen to 37 percent in the Gallup Poll, against 33 percent who identify themselves as Democrats and 27 percent as Republicans. In recent months, independents’ sentiment has started to swing away from the Democrats. Over the course of 2009, the share of independents who said they ‘leaned Republican’ grew from 31 to 40 percent; those who leaned Democratic dropped from 47 to 38 percent.”
The substance of President Obama’s State of the Union address seemed to work quite well. Obama has taken the liberal advice to hold firm on financial reform. He insisted that large banks pay back their bailout and, unbelievably, Re-publicans sat on their hands.
Obama effectively projected his personality, often to the detriment of the opposition. He gently laughed at the GOP’s refusal to applaud his tax cuts.
Obama’s closing flourish served a double purpose. Pu-tatively, he was urging Amer-ica to remember its greatness and press on in the face of ad-versity. The message seemed also to be aimed at his fellow Democrats, who have suc-cumbed to utter panic.
For most of the last year, liberals have been berating the administration for things that weren’t its fault. Rhetoric and “leadership” can go only so far in the face of structural realities — Obama can’t turn Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., into a liberal. But we’ve finally reached a moment where these intangible qualities do matter. Stemming the Demo-cratic panic was the primary task of this speech, and I bet it succeeded
— Jonathan Chait, The New Republic
So much for all of that Washington talk about a mid-course change of political di-rection. If President Obama took any lesson from his party’s recent drubbing in Massachusetts, and its decline in the polls, it seems to be that he should keep doing what he’s been doing, only with a little more humility, and a touch more bipartisanship.
That’s our reading of his lengthy State of the Union ad-dress, which mostly repack-aged the president’s first-year agenda in more modest politi-cal wrapping. “Our admini-stration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved,” he said, in his most notable grace note.
He also showed more will-ingness to engage with Re-publicans than he or his party have shown during the last year of bending to the left on Capitol Hill. But whether this outreach is anything more than rhetoric will depend on a change of policy. And on that score, we heard mostly what Democrats used to say about George W. Bush and Iraq: Stay the course.
—Wall Street Journal editorial
The question going into the Scott Roeder trial was not whether he killed Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller; Roeder had already confessed. Rather, it was whether Sedgwick County District Judge Warren Wilbert would allow jurors to consider the charge of voluntary manslaughter, based on Roeder’s warped belief that he killed Tiller in order to save the lives of unborn babies. Wilbert made the correct ruling Thursday not to allow the lesser charge, and the jury needed only 30 minutes today to find Roeder guilty of first-degree murder, along with two additional counts of aggravated assault. Roeder wanted to get credit for his crime. After he receives his sentence on March 9 — preferably the Hard 50, as District Attorney Nola Foulston is requesting — he’ll also get the consequence. And then may we never hear from him again.
Members of the Kansas delegation weren’t impressed with President Obama’s proposal to freeze domestic spending for three years. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said: “I am pleased the president is concerned with our ever expanding federal deficit. However, his proposed efforts are a drop in the bucket and inconsistent with the ongoing actions of his party in Congress.” Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, said that “we need bold leadership to cut spending throughout the budget not just around the edges,” and he called on Obama to “repeal the so-called stimulus bill and end the TARP bailout program.” Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Hays, complained that the freeze won’t start until 2011, will last only three years and will not affect the more than $862 billion in stimulus funds still to be spent. “Our country is facing a $1.3 trillion deficit this year alone, and the president’s recommendations are simply not enough,” Moran said.
Hard to believe that President Obama felt it necessary to use a teleprompter to address elementary schoolkids in Virginia last week, for a speech consisting of 964 words. That’s especially striking because a week earlier in Topeka, Gov. Mark Parkinson had used neither notes nor a teleprompter to deliver his 3,296-word State of the State address. Parkinson told The Eagle editorial board that he has tried using teleprompters but doesn’t like them. Meanwhile, the latest SurveyUSA poll, co-sponsored by KWCH, Channel 12, found that 40 percent of Kansans approved of the job Obama was doing in January compared with 42 percent approval for Parkinson — a 4-point gain for Obama and a 3-point drop for Parkinson since December.
There are similarities between Sen. Tom Holland, D-Baldwin City, who is considering running for governor, and Rep. Tom Sawyer, D-Wichita, who ran for the office in 1998. In both cases, the Kansas Democratic Party struggled to find a candidate to take on a heavily favored GOP opponent. Sawyer ran against incumbent Gov. Bill Graves, and Holland, if he runs, will likely face Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. “What Sawyer got for his party loyalty was a beating you normally wouldn’t see outside of a Beetle Bailey cartoon,” Topeka Capital-Journal columnist Ric Anderson wrote. But Anderson thinks Holland could do better. “Where Graves was a moderate who had support from middle-of-the-road voters, Brownback’s conservatism could play against him at the polls,” Anderson wrote.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appeared to mouth the words “not true” during President Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday. Alito was reacting to Obama’s criticism of last week’s court ruling overturning campaign-finance laws (Alito was part of the 5-4 majority). Obama said that the court’s reversal of a century of law will “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.” David N. Bossie. president of Citizens United, the group that sued to overturn the law, disagrees with any effort to limit U.S. corporate spending on elections but shares Obama’s concern about foreign corporations.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., was among seven GOP senators who had sponsored legislation to create an independent debt-reduction commission, then voted against it this week. Brownback and others supported the idea before it was associated with President Obama. Republicans also fear the commission would end up recommending tax increases to reduce the deficit — a radioactive idea for Republicans trying to cater to conservative voters. Co-sponsor of the failed bill, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., called the outcome “yet another indication that Congress is more concerned with the next election than the next generation.” Meanwhile, Brownback has introduced legislation to create the Commission on Accountability and Review of Federal Agencies.
Pro-choice groups are making too much of an anti-abortion commercial that CBS plans to broadcast during the Super Bowl featuring University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother. It’s just a commercial, after all. Still, it’s worth noting that CBS’ decision reflects a policy change. In the past, CBS has prohibited advocacy ads. For example, CBS refused to broadcast a commercial during the 2004 Super Bowl by the United Church of Christ about how “Jesus didn’t turn people away,” including gays. CBS said this week that, under its new policy, the UCC ad would air.
James O’Keefe — who was hailed as a hero by Republicans when he posed as a pimp and helped bring down the community organizing group ACORN— is “now a persona non grata within the Republican Party,” USA Today’s On Politics blog noted. That’s because O’Keefe and three other men were arrested this week for allegedly trying to interfere with the telephone system in an office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. If convicted, each faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
As was the case last year, the public’s top three priorities for Congress and President Obama are the economy (83 percent), jobs (81 percent) and terrorism (80 percent), according a new poll by the Pew Research Center. Next on the list are securing Social Security (66 percent), improving educational systems (65 percent), securing Medicare (63 percent) and reducing the budget deficit (60 percent). Meanwhile, the issues that consumed much of the focus in Congress over the past year are lower priorities for the public: Reducing health care costs (57 percent), providing health insurance to the uninsured (49 percent) and global warming (28 percent). As is to be expected, priorities varied among Republicans and Democrats, sometimes dramatically. For example, 75 percent of Democrats said that providing insurance to the uninsured should be a top priority, compared with 26 percent of Republicans.
Fresh off its starring role in former centerfold model Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts, Cosmopolitan magazine is imagining seven other pols nude or at least shirtless, starting with Kansas Agriculture Secretary Josh Svaty: “It may be a cliche but the sexy secretary of agriculture proves that they sure grow ’em cute in Kansas. We wouldn’t mind seeing him in nothing but a row of corn.”
Sedgwick County District Judge Warren Wilbert told the jury in the Scott Roeder trial not to read an article in the current issue of GQ magazine. The piece by Devin Friedman details Roeder’s thoughts and actions on the morning he allegedly shot Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller. It also reports on previous plans Roeder allegedly had to kill or maim Tiller, on Roeder’s personal life, and on the operation of Tiller’s abortion clinic. Friedman said he had dozens of telephone conversations with Roeder from the Sedgwick County Jail, and he interviewed former clinic staff and members of Reformation Lutheran Church. “Did you look him in the eye when you shot him? Was that important to you?” Friedman asked Roeder in one interview. Roeder’s response: “No. That wasn’t important to me.”
Wednesday’s State of the Union Address will be President Obama’s third speech to a joint session of Congress but the first since his September health care address, when Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., infamously responded to Obama’s assertion that illegal immigrants wouldn’t receive health coverage by yelling “You lie!” Wilson was reprimanded by the House. But as Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, recently joked to The Eagle editorial board, you have to wonder whether Obama will face more heckling Wednesday, given that Wilson raised more than $1.5 million in campaign contributions in the week after his outburst.
There’s no shortage of advice for President Obama as he reacts to the Senate election in Massachusetts and prepares for his State of the Union address Wednesday. Here is some from columnist and best-selling author Thomas Friedman: “What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of ‘Start-Up America.’” Friedman said that Obama “should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: ‘What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over’ — and make that his No. 1 priority.”
