Obama reframes debate for budget fight — and 2012

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Reuters – U.S. President Barack Obama makes a point during his State of the Union address to a joint session of …

By Jane Sasseen – Wed Jan 26, 2:55 am ET

By JANE SASSEEN
Yahoo! New

"We do big things."

It was the closing theme of President Obama's State of the Union speech — an idea meant to serve as both a reminder of the enterprising spirit that has long propelled America through tough times as well as an optimistic assurance that the country is up to the enormous challenges it now faces.

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It's also a pretty good summary of what the president himself was up to as he spoke to the nation on Tuesday night.

The speech came at a critical juncture in his presidency. He has begun to recover from the depths of voter dissatisfaction he hit last fall, but he faces a newly empowered GOP determined to stop many of his initiatives as the 2012 campaign gets underway.

With both sides jockeying for leverage ahead of what promises to be brutal battle over the budget and government spending, the president had one over-arching goal as he took the podium: to convince a still-skeptical public that he has a strong plan to spur job growth and the economy, all while seeking to reframe the debate away from one narrowly focused on reducing the deficit and towards the need to invest in the future and maintain America's competitive strength.

"It's a hard speech," says James Thurber, a presidential historian at the American University.

Of course, the president touched on other areas in the nearly hour-long speech before a crowd that included Daniel Hernandez, the intern who helped save the life of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and the family of Christina Taylor Green, the 9-year-old who was killed in the Tucson shootings. Obama pledged to begin removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan by July, and to finish the job of bringing them home from Iraq. He promised a plan to consolidate and reorganize the federal government to make it more efficient.

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He also delivered another brief tribute to the victims and heroes of the rampage. As he did in Tucson, he turned that tragic experience into a jumping off point for a broader meditation on the need for a return to dialogue and a sense of common purpose in American politics. And he pointedly noted that Republicans, having been handed a greater role in governing by the American people in last November's election, now share the responsibility for resolving the country's problems.

"New laws will only pass with support from Democrats and Republicans," he said. "We will move forward together, or not at all — for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics."

But whatever else earned brief mention, jobs and the economy were at the core of the evening. Perhaps more than any other speech in his presidency, it also marked the return of the impassioned, visionary Obama of the campaign trail — the one who has rarely been seen since. In it, he set the terms of debate not just for the battle to come in the next several months over the 2011 budget, but for the debate that will lie at the heart of 2012 presidential campaign.

The important question is not just how much the government spends, the president told the nation, but what do we want the government to do. Yes, we must cut government spending. But contrary to the arguments laid out by Rep. Paul Ryan and Rep Michelle Bachmann in the GOP rebuttals that followed, he argued that spending cuts alone will never lead to prosperity. Instead, he made an insistent plea that America must continue to invest in the future, through education, infrastructure and research, if it is to sustain the American dream.

"At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else," the president said. And if there were any doubts about the centrality of those goals to the vision he laid out to retain American prosperity, he added later: "This is our generation's Sputnik moment."

Did it work? Certainly many of his allies were happy with the president's approach and the vigor with which he pushed back against congressional pressure to simply whack spending.

"He helped give people a sense that the world is very different," says Andy Stern, the former head of the Service Employees International Union, who has been a close advisor to the president. But he also worries that there is still little effort to more immediately address unemployment. "He laid out a cogent vision for the future, but the country is still lacking a national plan to get people back to work quickly."

Others saw a different problem with the agenda the president laid out. Whatever the merits of the investment ideas, they are an expense the country cannot afford at this point argues Brian Darling, the head of government relations for the conservative Heritage Foundation. "His proposals are very expensive; he's rolling out a laundry list of new spending items at a time when people want cuts," Darling says. "That will be a big pressure point."

No doubt, but the president also sought to reclaim the high ground on the deficit. He and his party have been pummeled over the past year by the perception that they have been spendthrifts who let Uncle Sam run amok with red ink. Jim Kessler, the vice president for policy at the Third Way, a centrist think tank, points out that that view was particularly strong among independent voters Obama had won over in 2008 but who abandoned the Democrats in 2010. To win them back, the president needs to begin making the case that he is serious about restoring fiscal discipline now that the worst of the recession is over.

To do so, he pledged to freeze domestic spending over the next five years, and made clear that the defense budget cannot be exempt from the painful pruning ahead. He also acknowledged the need to rein in the costs of entitlements programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, though without any specifics. "He put a strong marker in ground that reducing deficit is critical to growth," says Kessler.

But will that be enough? Others aren't convinced that he's gone far enough. "Republicans aren't looking for a freeze, they want out-and-out cuts," says Greg Valliere, an analyst for the Potomac Research Group. "That's not going to fly." And he points out that simply acknowledging the need to address Social Security, without suggesting how, will cause many deficit hawks to question whether the president is really serious.

Perhaps the biggest question of the night, however, is whether the speech will add to the president's newfound political momentum. Following his ability to find compromise with Republicans on taxes and other issues in December, and his eloquent eulogy in Tucson, the president's approval ratings are above 50 percent for the first time since late spring. Even opponents agree that this speech is likely to give him a further boost.

"This will help the president today; he's come out with a strong message," says Darling. "But it's like a sugar high. The problem will be come several months down the road when people realize he can't accomplish all that he's promised."

Ultimately, however, it is just a speech. However good it may have been, and whatever bump it gives him, it will only do so much. It's the underlying performance of the economy that will matter come 2012.

"An awful lot now will depend on the economy. If it continues to improve, we could see growth of 3.5 percent or maybe even 4 percent return," says Valliere. "If that comes true, Obama's standing will rise further — but only if unemployment really starts to come down as well."

Jane Sasseen is the editor-in-chief of politics and opinion at Yahoo! News.

Can Warren Buffett Stop the Spread of Nuclear Weapons?

By MICHAEL CROWLEY Tuesday, Jan. 04, 2011

ENLARGE PHOTO+

Billionaire Warren Buffett, pictured at a philanthropy press conference in Beijing on Sept. 30, 2010, has called the threat of nuclear weapons "the great problem of mankind"

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To a billionaire investor like Warren Buffett, $50 million is pocket change. But when Buffett invested that amount in an unusual project four years ago, he watched it as closely as some of Berkshire Hathaway's biggest holdings.

The project is an international effort to thwart the spread of nuclear weapons. And Buffett believes the return on his modest investment could be vastly more valuable than any of the lucrative stakes he holds in corporate America. That's because Buffett's biggest worry these days isn't that the global economy might collapse, but that terrorists might destroy an American city with a nuclear weapon. "This is the great problem of mankind," Buffett, 80, said in a December interview from his office in Omaha. He had just returned from a meeting with President Obama at the White House, where the official subject had been charitable education grants (Bill and Melinda Gates were also present). But, reflecting the President's shared strong interest in Buffett's pet obsession, he says, "we also talked about the nuclear issue."(See a timeline of nuclear disarmament.)

Four years after making that initial donation, Buffett recently saw the first dividends come in. On Dec. 5, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) unanimously approved the creation of a nuclear fuel bank overseen by the U.N. that would offer countries that agree to pursue nonmilitary nuclear programs a guaranteed source of fuel for their atomic reactors. The vote took months of diplomatic wrangling even after funds were raised to match Buffett's original 2006 donation of $50 million, which he offered on the condition that the additional $100 million required to buy the first stockpile of nuclear fuel come from other sources. With the help of an Obama Administration that has put nuclear nonproliferation at the top of its foreign-policy agenda, several countries chipped in — including $32 million from the European Union, $5 million from Norway and $10 million from the United Arab Emirates (which feels threatened by Iran and wants U.S. support for its own nascent nuclear-energy program).

Buffett first got the fuel-bank idea from his friend Sam Nunn, a former Democratic Senator from Georgia who left politics in 1996 and now heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private foundation that works to lock down vulnerable nuclear material around the world. But the concept is not new. Almost since the dawn of the nuclear age, policymakers and scientists have worried about the steady growth of countries (not all of them stable or benevolent) with the ability to enrich raw uranium into a form potent enough to power a nuclear reactor — or, alternatively, to the higher level of enrichment needed to make a nuclear bomb. In fact, it's been on Buffett's mind almost as many years. "I got interested in this in the 1950s," Buffett says. "I was never any star at physics, but when the first atomic bomb was detonated, I was delivering the Washington Post newspapers describing it. And when Einstein came out a few days later and said, 'This changes everything,' I knew it was important."(See Warren Buffett as part of the 2010 TIME 100.)

That's an understatement. The problem is that even countries that claim to want nuclear energy for peaceful purposes also insist they need enrichment equipment and expertise within their own borders. Case in point: Iran. Tehran's leaders have long claimed that their nuclear program poses no international threat because it is for peaceful purposes only. But they also say they need sophisticated enrichment plants with ultra-high-speed centrifuges because they can't rely on the international community for nuclear-fuel supplies. (Tehran often cites the way Germany abandoned a nuclear-reactor project near Bushehr after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.)

The U.S. and its allies, as well as many Arab nations, don't believe this claim; a broad consensus exists that Iran is determined to achieve at least the capability to develop nuclear weapons. The Obama White House sees an international fuel bank as a way to call Tehran's bluff. In speeches outlining his nonproliferation agenda, Obama has argued for supporting nuclear programs in countries that forswear bombmaking and domestic enrichment. "That must be the right of every nation that renounces nuclear weapons, especially developing countries embarking on peaceful programs," Obama said in an April 2009 speech in Prague. In an address in Cairo two months later, Obama specifically cited Tehran: "Any nation — including Iran — should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power," he said.(See TIME's best pictures of 2010.)

Although it will be many months before the fuel bank is open for business (a location has yet to be chosen, for instance), its advocates claim a major victory. "Preventing the proliferation of enrichment is a big step," says Nunn. "I'm delighted, obviously," says Buffett. Some observers are more skeptical, however. "The existence of the fuel bank won't deter Iran from continuing with its enrichment program," says Mark Hibbs, a nuclear-energy expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Iran spent billions of dollars on this investment and took considerable political risks to make it happen. Because of that enrichment program, Iran sits at the table with the world's powers. By the same logic, the fuel bank on its own merits won't deter other countries — such as Argentina, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey — from giving up the option of enriching uranium sometime in the future. Developing countries are suspicious that the fuel bank is a tool designed by a handful of advanced nuclear countries to discourage the rest from developing nuclear technology themselves."

Still, others remain hopeful that dynamic can be changed. Some, like Buffett and Nunn, see it as an urgent matter of national security. A world in which more and more nations can enrich uranium at home, they contend, is a far more dangerous world. Not only does a domestic uranium-enrichment program allow a country to divert its nuclear fuel to military purposes, it also multiplies the sources from which terrorists or rogue states might steal nuclear material or purchase it from corrupt insiders.(See the top 10 green ideas of 2010.)

That's why Nunn argues that a fuel bank is just one step toward a long-term goal of putting all the world's nuclear material under IAEA safeguard. "Over time, my belief is that we'll end up with regional enrichment centers where countries pool their resources to make [enrichment] economically viable, and make the process under IAEA safeguard," Nunn says.(Comment on this story.)

That won't be easy. But simply giving up is too dangerous, Buffett argues. The nuclear threats "never go away," Buffet concedes. "So we have to do what we can to minimize it. We can't put the genie back in the bottle — but we can keep that genie contained.