The man building Barack Obama’s future

CHICAGO — President Barack Obama’s post-presidential center will return full circle to his community organizing days, making an outreach program to help the historically underprivileged South Side a focus. Obama is expected to pick a community engagement director to lead the effort before leaving the White House.

The search is already underway.

Story Continued Below.

Details of the Obama Foundation’s mission and organization were shared with POLITICO in an exclusive interview with Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s best friend and the chairman of the foundation. Nesbitt said the planning includes a concerted effort to learn from the experiences of past presidents, including avoiding the financial tangles stemming from Bill Clinton’s decision to separate his presidential library in Little Rock and his family foundation in New York.

As much as the Obama team admires the work of the Clinton Foundation, Nesbitt said, “his [Clinton’s] physical presence is separate from his library. We will be all in one place. Everything that the president does will be from one central entity.”

When Obama leaves office in January 2017 at age 55, he will begin what could become the longest post-presidency in U.S. history. He is unlikely to be drawn back into politics, as Clinton was through his wife, already a senator and prospective presidential candidate by the time he left office.

Nesbitt sketched out a vision of an actively changing agenda that’ll keep Obama moving around the country and the world.

“I don’t see this being one thing forever,” Nesbitt said.

Nesbitt said that in contrast to other former presidents, Obama’s Chicago-based library will be an all-in-one institution — a presidential library, museum, archive, foundation and center — and it will serve as the primary platform for both Barack and Michelle Obama, who has ruled out any future in politics.

Fundraising isn’t expected to begin in earnest until after Obama’s left office, limiting the leverage and access he can use to woo donors, potentially putting him far behind on fundraising for a project that’s yet to land on a final price tag.

The center will also incorporate an academic component, potentially through partnered professors either at the University of Chicago a few blocks away, or with Obama’s alma mater Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and another satellite location still very much under discussion in Hawaii.

“We want to be able to have that academic perspective, to add to the social perspective,” Nesbitt said.

Obama’s mentoring program for black youth, My Brother’s Keeper, and the scaled-down version of his grass-roots campaign network, Organizing for Action, are both expected to become part of the institution as well.

“I know, just from our conversations, that in whatever idle time he has, he’s been thinking through what comes next,” said Obama’s former adviser, David Axelrod, saying those conversations date back years.

Via: Politico

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Democratic Blues Barack Obama will leave his party in its worst shape since the Great Depression—even if Hillary wins.

As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.

Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.

Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simpler—just measure the clout of the president’s party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obama’s six years have been terrible.

Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”

The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.

The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.

When Obama came into the White House, it seemed like the Democrats had turned a corner generationally; at just 47, he was one of the youngest men to be elected as president. But the party has struggled to build a new generation of leaders around him. 

Eight years later, when he leaves office in 2017 at 55, he’ll actually be one of the party’s only leaders not eligible for Social Security. Even as the party has recently captured more young voters at the ballot box in presidential elections, its leaders are increasingly of an entirely different generation; most of the party’s leaders will fade from the national scene in the years ahead. Its two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are 67 and 73. The sitting vice president, Joe Biden, is 72. The Democratic House leader, Nancy Pelosi, is 75; House Whip Steny Hoyer is 76 and caucus Chair James Clyburn is 75, as is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who will retire next year. It’s a party that will be turning to a new generation of leaders in the coming years—and yet, there are precious few looking around the nation’s state houses, U.S. House or Senate seats.

***

Barack Obama took office in 2009 with 60 Democrats in the Senate—counting two independents who caucused with the party—and 257 House members. Today, there are 46 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, the worst showing since the first year after the Reagan landslide. Across the Capitol, there are 188 Democrats in the House, giving Republicans their best showing since Herbert Hoover took the White House in 1929.

This is, however, the tip of the iceberg. When you look at the states, the collapse of the party’s fortunes are worse. Republicans now hold 31 governorships, nine more than they held when Obama was inaugurated. During the last six years the GOP has won governorships in purple and even deep blue states: Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio. In the last midterms, only one endangered Republican governor—Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania—was replaced by a Democrat. (Sean Parnell in Alaska lost to an independent.) Every other endangered Republican returned to office.

Via: Politico

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WATCH LIVE: Scott Walker Reveals Obamacare Alternative

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) is scheduled to make a speech from Minneapolis on Tuesday morning in which he lays out his plan to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. “If you’ve had it with Obamacare and you want someone who is going to do something about it, I am your candidate,” the Republican presidential candidate said in prepared remarks released ahead of the speech.

According to Politico, Walker aims to replace Obamacare with a plan “that would return authority to the states and provide sliding-scale tax credits directly to consumers who don’t get coverage at work to help them buy insurance.” In addition he would “give states greater say over Medicaid, which he would break into separate plans for different groups, such as poor families, people with disabilities and low-income seniors.”

Watch live stream video below, via NBC News:

VIDEO LINK

Via: Mediaite

Calling in the God squad [AL SHARPTON] to save the Iran deal

The White House campaign to save the Iran nuclear deal is getting a boost from the God squad.

Faith-based groups, many of them increasingly nervous about the well-funded push by opponents of the deal, are intensifying their lobbying of lawmakers ahead of an important congressional vote on the agreement

Over the weekend, the Rev. Al Sharpton called on black churches to mobilize in support of the nuclear deal. On Monday, a group of 340 rabbis from multiple strands of Judaism released a letter, urging lawmakers to vote for the agreement. And plans are in the works for a coordinated rollout of endorsements by a number of religious groups next week, an organizer said.

The campaign is led largely by Catholic and Quaker groups, such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and it reflects many of the organizations’ traditional anti-war stances. It also comes as themes of anti-Semitism and Islamism have risen in the debate.

Some of the undecided lawmakers being targeted, among them prominent Democrats, have Jewish constituents and donors who fear the agreement will empower Iran, whose Islamist leaders are avowedly anti-Israel and have even questioned the Holocaust. (Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson recently suggested in much-criticized remarks that President Barack Obama was anti-Semitic for pursuing negotiations with Iran.)

The campaign against the deal is being led by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Republican Jewish Coalition, and as much as $40 million or more is believed will be spent by the opposition on ads and other efforts, including sponsoring town halls to confront wobbly lawmakers.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, is feeling pressure from every side but particularly from his Jewish constituents. He has attended two town halls in the past week, the first hosted by AIPAC and other groups which local news reports described as tense. During the second gathering, hosted by Jeffries himself, a woman in the crowd compared a former State Department official who spoke in favor of the deal to supporters of Adolf Hitler.

Via: Politico

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House conservative seeks John Boehner's ouster

North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows had heard from leading conservatives that trying to oust Speaker John Boehner right now was a bad idea.

Reps. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), fierce and frequent critics of leadership, thought the move was ill-advised. Some of Meadows’ friends didn’t even see it coming. But just before 6 p.m. Tuesday — a day before the House was set to leave town for its five-week summer recess — Meadows offered a motion to vacate the chair, an extraordinarily rare procedural move that represents the most serious expression of opposition to Boehner’s speakership. If the motion were to pass — most Republicans say it will be hard to cobble together the votes — Boehner would be stripped of the speaker’s gavel, potentially plunging the House of Representatives into chaos.

GOP leaders were taken completely by surprise. Meadows, a second-term Republican, hadn’t even asked for a meeting with Boehner or other top Republicans to air his gripes.

Until now, the North Carolina Republican had taken small steps to undermine Boehner — he voted against procedural motions and against Boehner for speaker. Now he’s declared all-out war, and he could quickly find out how many people are willing to back him up.

Meadows, however, didn’t go as far as he could have. A motion to vacate the chair — last attempted roughly a century ago — is typically considered a privileged resolution. In that format, the House would hold a vote within two legislative days. Meadows, however, chose not to offer it in that form, which he said was a sign that he wanted a discussion.

GOP leadership allies said the move suggests Meadows is trying to steal the spotlight as Congress leaves for its break. He denied that but said a vote was unlikely before the August recess.

Via: Politico

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[VIDEO] Trump Responds to Lindsey Graham Insult by Giving Out His Cell Number

Donald Trump today fired back against Lindsey Graham calling him a “jackass” yesterday by just giving out his cell phone number.

Graham was so offended by Trump’s attacks on John McCain yesterday, he said that Trump needs to quit being a jackass and getting out of the race.

Trump responded by… well, doing what he does:

Politico actually got through to Graham by calling the number. This is what he said:

“I wonder what caused that,” Graham told a POLITICO reporter who dialed the number that Trump read.

“When it comes to the Donald, nothing surprises me anymore,” he said. “It’s just too bad, really,” he said, that Trump is taking away from a discussion on the Iran deal and more substantive policy issues.

Via: Mediaite

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CLINTON FOUNDATION DONOR-OWNED POLITICO PUBLISHES HIT PIECE ON DR. BEN CARSON

On Tuesday, Politico ran an article with this blaring headline: “Ben Carson’s Godly Riches: He reaped $2 million in fees from Christian groups in 2014 alone. Now he wants their votes.”

The headline, which implies some sort of hypocrisy on Dr. Carson’s part, is belied by the actual content of the article.

“Clearly if you were to read in great detail Politico’s article, they are clearly only admonishing Dr. Carson in their headline and not the true substance of their story,” Armstrong Williams, Dr. Carson’s business manager, tells Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.

“The reason being they truly had nothing to report,” Williams notes.

Politico, which is owned by Clinton Foundation donor Robert Allbritton, failed to point out in the article that during that same time period Hillary Clinton charged speaking fees ranging from $200,000 to $325,000, and Bill Clinton charged $250,000 for his average speaking fee. In 2010, Bill Clinton was paid a $500,000 speaking fee by a Russian company. Even former first daughter Chelsea Clinton charged speaking fees of $65,000, well in excess of Dr. Carson’s fees.

In 2014, Dr. Carson’s speaking fees ranged from $12,320 to $48,500.

During roughly the same period of time that Dr. Ben Carson earned $2 million in speaking fees, Bill and Hillary Clinton together earned $25 million in speaking fees.

The actual facts of Dr. Carson’s 2014 speaking engagements reported by Politico do not match the article’s somewhat sensationalist headline.

One fundraiser at which Carson spoke “brought in a net profit of $150,000,” after Carson’s fee was paid, the article reports.

At another fundraiser, the host organization was very pleased with the outcome of Carson’s speaking engagement. “He did a really good job for us in bringing in people who may not have known about HopeWorks,” the group’s executive director Ron Wade toldPolitico.

“They couldn’t find anything negative or controversial about Dr. Carson’s speaking engagements,” Carson’s business manager Williams says.

When asked about Politico’s failure to report the vastly higher speaking fees charged by Hillary, Bill, and even Chelsea Clinton, Williams is quick to point out Politico’s bias.

“Without a doubt the good Dr. Carson is held to a different standard,” Williams says. “It’s nitpicking by Politico. There’s really nothing negative they can report.”

The Politico bias, Williams argues, is as apparent from the people the authors chose not to interview as it is of those they chose to interview.

“Politico could not find anyone who was not satisfied with Dr. Carson’s speaking engagement. Imagine the many individuals interviewed for the article that were not included, because they had high praise for the good doctor.”

Williams’ comments support the perception that Politico is often a “mouthpiece” for establishment Republicans as well as the Democrat elites. “A lot of these sources Politico used are coming from within the establishment,” he says.

Carson’s strong showing in the polls has had an impact on his rivals for the Republican Presidential nomination, Williams argues. “Republican establishment candidates are very threatened by Dr. Carson,” he tells Breitbart News. “The establishment media consistently are searching for phony reasons to negate his immense popularity,” he adds.

From a strategic perspective, Carson offers something establishment Republicans can’t provide—appeal to disaffected conservative voters.

“Dr. Carson is popular among many conservative Christians and Millennials who did not vote in the last presidential election,” Armstrong says.

Currently, “outsiders” like Dr. Carson, Donald Trump , 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

96%

, and Carly Fiorina appear to be gaining traction, while more establishment- oriented candidates appear to be languishing.

“That article is trying to negate the progress and phenomenal gains Dr. Carson is making as an outsider,” Williams says.

The popularity of “outsider” candidates in the Republican Presidential primary field is likely to continue its upward movement in spite of Politico’s transparent and unsuccessful attempts to discredit them.

Via: Breitbart

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Rand Paul Will ‘Force The Expiration’ of the PATRIOT Act

Despite his not being included in a recent 2016 candidates poll on Fox & Friends, Rand Paul (R-KY) still has a strong following among Tea Party and Libertarian-leaning conservative voters. He’s even got a Super PAC pulling for him.

A lot of this has to do with Paul’s stance against the renewal of the PATRIOT Act and the approval of the USA Freedom Act, and he recently performed an unofficial filibuster against NSA surveillance.

In a statement to POLITICO, Paul lays out a simple plan for Sunday’s special session:

So tomorrow, I will force the expiration of the NSA illegal spy program.

What special session, you ask? As POLITICO points out, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wants to facilitate a rather quick debate on the surveillance bill that’s got Paul and others so worked up.

Paul explains his stance further, saying:

I am ready and willing to start the debate on how we fight terrorism without giving up our liberty.

Sometimes when the problem is big enough, you just have to start over. The tax code and our regulatory burdens are two good examples.

Fighting against unconditional, illegal powers that take away our rights, taken by previous Congresses and administrations is just as important.

I do not do this to obstruct. I do it to build something better, more effective, more lasting, and more cognizant of who we are as Americans.

Via: Mediaite

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Obama Froze Biden Out After Gay-Marriage Gaffe

AND THE DOWNSIDE TO THIS IS ??????

Vice President Joe Biden's role in the administration was virtually frozen after he angered President Barack Obama in 2012 by announcing his support of gay marriage while the president was still on record opposing it.

In a profile of the 71-year-old in Politico Magazine, the presumed 2016 presidential hopeful talked about how he had been given "every s*** job in the world" from the start of the Obama presidency, but detailed how relations with the president came to a virtual standstill after the gaffe-prone politician pre-empted Obama's announcement that he had "evolved" on the issue.

Urgent: Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance? Vote Now in Urgent Poll 

"When the president asked me what portfolio did I want, I said, 'Base it on what you want of me to help you govern,'" Biden said he told Obama.

"'But I want to be the last guy in the room on every major decision … You're the president, I'm not, but if it's my experience you're lookin' for, I want to be the last guy to make the case."

But everything changed in 2012, after Biden announced his approval of gay marriage before the president took a public stand, the Politico report says.

Biden's announcement forced Obama to make his own public statement about gay marriage earlier than he would have liked.

Despite attempts to apologize to Obama that he did not intend to upstage the president on the issue, the president's inner circle suspected otherwise and became increasingly hostile toward him.

Biden started to be excluded from strategic planning meetings, while his schedule of public events was curtailed and in some cases canceled. Aides went so far as to interfere with Biden's staffing decisions, blocking two of his selections for chief of staff, according to the magazine.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Biden's top possible rival for the presidential race, appeared to step into the breach. Clinton, for example, appeared alongside Obama during the president's first television interview of his second term. The Biden team was also disgruntled that the White House didn't strongly refute the rumors that Clinton would be selected to replace Biden. 

Via: Newsmax
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Question for ObamaCare: Where's the money?

More numbers from Obama Care but we still don't know what the health of the program is.

According to POLITICO:

"The administration's monthly enrollment update showed 2.2 million people had picked health plans in the federal or state health exchanges from Oct. 1 through Dec. 28. It's not yet clear how many have paid their first monthly premium, a requirement before coverage can begin. An additional 3.9 million people have been deemed eligible for Medicaid. 

 

More than half of those who have signed up are between 45 and 64, an age range that tends to be sicker and costlier to cover, according to the enrollment figures released Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services."

So let me get this straight:

1. No young people, or the ones who will fund the ACA;

2. Too many older and sick people, or the ones who will very likely use the service; and,

3. We do not have official reports on the premiums collected.  Is the Obama administration afraid of releasing premium info because so few have paid?

It looks to me that The Affordable Health Care Act is in very bad health. The death spiral is literally here.

Via: American Thinker
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Oregon Health Exchange Yet to Complete One Enrollment

Oregon will consider a switch to the federal health care exchange next year amid ongoing problems with its online enrollment program, Politico Pro reports.

The state’s exchange, Cover Oregon, still cannot process an entire enrollment online — a problem that is not expected to be repaired until after the 2014 enrollment period ends in March.

That has state officials weighing several options including scrapping its own enrollment system and moving to HealthCare.gov, the federal enrollment portal which is working better now after its own disastrous start. Switching to the federal site could be considered a significant political defeat for the state and Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, who strongly embraced the president’s health care law and is seeking reelection this year.

“As much as we don’t want to walk away from a big IT project, we have to consider it,” Kitzhaber health policy adviser Sean Kolmer told Politico. “It’s all about enrollment.”

Oregon is now analyzing what went wrong with the website, with many blaming the main contractor of the site.

Via: WFB

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Politico's Kelsey Snell Sloppily Decries Indiana's Economic Progress, Supposedly at the Expense of Illinois

Kelsey Snell "is a tax reporter at POLITICO Pro." Her output in a column entitled "Indiana lures 'Illinoyed' biz with tax breaks" makes one wonder how she arrived at her current position.

Snell's piece is riddled with striking omissions and lame progressive talking points. But the most jaw-dropping element in her report is her clear inability to detect erroneous numbers which she and her employer should know make no sense.

One of Snell's paragraphs has two obvious whoppers (bolds are mine throughout this post):

When (Indiana Commerce Secretary Victor) Smith, a former manufacturing executive, was appointed in January he was given one goal from Pence—adding 2,609,000 private sector jobs. He said the state has added 22,000 jobs since January, though he acknowledged he has a long way to go.

C'mon, Kelsey. The Hoosier State's total seasonally adjusted private-sector employment was only 2.545 million as of November. Smith's goal is obviously not to double employment; it's probably to raise it by 260,000. No one at Politico has detected this obvious blunder since the article's publication early Saturday evening.

Additionally, Snell's "22,000 jobs" figure is vastly understated. (If Smith said it, which I tend to doubt, Snell still should have verified it). The state has added 50,800 seasonally adjusted jobs since January. That's basically on track to achieve Pence's presumed 260,000-job, four-year goal.

As to omissions, let's start with the unmentioned fact that Indiana became a right to work state in February 2012 during the administration of Republican Mitch Daniels. Since then, the state has added 89,300 payroll jobs, with 80,000 of them in the private sector. During that same period, Illinois, whose workforce is over twice as large, has added proportionally fewer jobs.

Snell never brought up unemployment rates. Indiana's seasonally adjusted rate since Republican Mike Pence took office in January has fallen from 8.6 percent to 7.3 percent. The rate in Illinois is still 8.7 percent, barely down from January's 9.0 percent.

Via: Newsbusters
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GOP Launches Major Push to Capture Blue State Senate Seats

Republicans are targeting blue states with competitive races in an effort to win back a majority in the Senate, Politico reports. 

The GOP currently holds 45 seats in the Senate to the Democrats' 55, so it needs to win only six of those elections. Seven states currently represented by Democrats were carried by Mitt Romney in 2012, but Republicans want to increase their chances, so they are also targeting other close elections in purple states, and even some blue ones.

Republicans hope to capitalize on anti-Obamacare sentiment as the program has suffered glitches in its website and in trust in a White House that promised people they could keep their insurance and that premiums would not rise.

Even if a GOP hoped-for backlash against Obamacare doesn't pan out, Politico notes that Democrats could be forced to pull money from bigger races to spend money on less-consequential contests.

Republicans already hold a majority in the House of Representatives.

New York Times statistician Nate Silver has been predicting a possible GOP turnover of the Senate since early this year. Silver's predictions were made months before the disastrous rollout of Obamacare. 

Among the states Politico sees as most likely GOP prospects are Michigan, Iowa, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon and Hawaii.

With Sen. Carl Levin retiring in Michigan, Republicans there have rallied behind state Sen. Terri Lynn Land. In Iowa, Sen. Tom Harkin also announced his retirement. No clear leader has emerged there.

In New Hampshire, Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen won in 2008 with only 52 percent. Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown has now moved his primary residence to the Granite State and has been toying with challenging Shaheen.

Via: Newsmax
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