Iraq War’s 10th Anniversary Is Barely Noted in Washington

But on one topic, there was a conspiracy of silence: Republicans and Democrats agreed that they did not really want to talk about the Iraq war.

The 10-year anniversary of the American invasion came and went on Tuesday with barely passing notice in a town once consumed by it. Neither party had much interest in revisiting what succeeded and what failed, who was right and who was wrong. The bipartisan consensus underscored the broader national mood: after 10 years, America seems happy to wash its hands of Iraq.

Never mind that Iraq remains in perilous shape, free of Saddam Hussein and growing economically, but still afflicted by spasms of violence and struggling to move beyond autocratic government. With American troops now gone, the war has receded from the capital conversation and the national consciousness, replaced by worries about spending, taxes, debt and jobs. Whether the United States won or lost, or achieved something messy in between, seems at this point a stale debate.

President Obama, who rose to political heights on the strength of his opposition to the war, made no mention of it in appearances on Tuesday. Instead, he issued a written statement saluting “the courage and resolve” of the 1.5 million Americans who served during eight years in Iraq and honoring the memory of the nearly 4,500 Americans “who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who as a Republican senator broke with his party over the war, a move that complicated his recent confirmation hearings, likewise stuck to a written statement praising the troops and urging Americans to “remember these quiet heroes this week.”

Those on the other side of the debates likewise paid little notice. Former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and many other authors of the war made no public comments. Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a message via Twitter: “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

Although some foreign policy and news organizations held forums or produced retrospectives in recent days, the floors of Congress did not ring out with speeches expounding on the lessons of Iraq. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, gave a speech about the Middle East without mentioning the anniversary. Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, was prepared to say something about the anniversary if questioned at a morning news briefing, an aide said — but no one asked.

“This is a little like the crazy uncle in the attic that nobody wants to talk about,” said John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Iraq and is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “But we need to because we put him there.”

Critics like Mr. Nagl argue that the anniversary should serve as a reminder about what he sees as the mistake of starting the war. “It would be a shame if we did not pause and think hard about this as a nation,” he said. “We paid an enormous price as a nation. The Iraqis have paid a huge price. The region is destabilized.”

Some war supporters disagreed. “President Bush made the right decision on removing the Iraqi regime from power,” said Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense. Where America went wrong, he said, was “when we transformed ourselves from liberators to occupiers.” Like other war supporters, he expressed concern that Mr. Obama might lose the peace. “The full withdrawal of U.S. forces is risky,” he said.

Meghan O’Sullivan, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Bush, said that some lessons could be drawn, but that it was too soon for final judgments. “Many issues that will be key to answering the question of was it worth it still hang in the balance,” she said.

Public attitudes toward the war have hardened 10 years later. Fifty-four percent of Americans interviewed by CBS News in a poll released Tuesday said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, while 38 percent said it did the right thing. Fifty percent said the United States did not succeed in achieving its objectives, while 41 percent said it did.

The White House found itself in the awkward position of standing by Mr. Obama’s opposition to the war but offering an optimistic prognosis for Iraq — and even giving a grudging nod to Mr. Bush for removing a dictator from power.

“Ridding the world of Saddam Hussein was a welcome development for the world and for Iraq,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said at his daily briefing. “The president believes that Iraq has the potential for a better future today because of the remarkable sacrifice and service of American men and women in uniform as well as civilian American men and women who served in Iraq.”

Asked if that better future owed in part to the decision to invade, Mr. Carney said Mr. Hussein was removed by the military sent by Mr. Bush.

“And to the extent that credit is due, credit is due to him for that,” Mr. Carney said. “That does not change, I think, assessments made by this president as a candidate or by many others on this day, 10 years after, about the judgments made to go to war in Iraq.”

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Washington Is Stuck, but He’s Getting Out

Washington

In the outer office, constituents were dropping by unannounced, more or less demanding to see the congressman, “right here on his doorstep,” as one visitor insisted. In his inner sanctum office, Representative Gary Ackerman was happily contemplating his departure from all that after 30 years in Congress.

“I like to work, but in order to work you need a work product,” said the New York Democrat, who described arriving in the Capitol as a “bright and bushy-tailed liberal,” up from a childhood in a public housing project, eager to pass a law on his first day. He is exiting not so much in despair as relief to be gone from the legislative intransigence that he sees extended across the aisle by the House Republican majority.

Sounding like an anthropologist, Mr. Ackerman talked of spending enough time in Congress to remember dealing creatively with an extinct species known as moderate Republicans. “Oh yes, compromise,” he said nostalgically of such long-ago behavior. “They’ve all been quieted, muzzled, taking pledges before they ever get here,” he said, his tone unabashedly partisan. “It’s not that they’re running a Do Nothing Congress — they’re running an Undo Everything Congress.” He quoted a Capitol truism: “Any jackass can kick down the barn.”

The low point, he said, was when a Republican friend told him that private caucus meetings featured prayer gatherings where lawmakers hold hands and invoke God for or against specific measures on the House agenda. “In the past, a fight was over how to make a good bill better. Now it’s become Good versus Evil.”

As one of scores of lawmakers expected to depart this year, Mr. Ackerman may be typical, with no big, historic law named after him, but a number of successful efforts like spearheading a campaign to feed the starving in Ethiopia and sponsoring the “Baby AIDS” legislation, which required that mothers be notified if newborns tested positive for H.I.V. He survived a political scuffle or two, resigning from the ethics committee in 1992 after being entangled in the scandal over abuses of House checking accounts. In campaigning, he recalls taking out a loan of $160,000 for his first run, and three decades later he admits to cringing at the need to beg people for $1 million-plus every two years to keep his job. He described slinking off to his party’s campaign committee office near the Capitol where, in separate phone cubbies, lawmakers must turn themselves into jolly mendicants to check-writing supporters. “A sad tale of woe to see famous politicians calling and schmoozing, and everyone knows why.”

Constituents from the old Sixth District, which straddled the Queens-Nassau border, couldn’t accuse Mr. Ackerman of losing track of home. He chose not to sink deep roots in Washington, and lived on a houseboat on the Potomac called the Unsinkable, which sank and was replaced by Unsinkable II. Over the years, he watched sizable yachts owned by lobbyists tie up at his marina, but he loathes the idea of cashing in as a lobbyist after retirement as so many colleagues do. Only more “hat in hand” behavior, he said, describing a pathetic subgroup of ex-congressmen. “Guys who lose or give up their seats and never go home and hang around town because home is no longer real — and this place became real.”

Sometimes he sounds passionate enough to go another two years. But at 69, Mr. Ackerman suddenly decided he had had enough of politics where healthy compromise is off the table, with no sign that the majority pendulum would swing back in time for him. So he quit, and then quickly endorsed Assemblywoman Grace Meng, to help her win the primary in the heavily Democratic district. She fit in with the philosophy he celebrated at a recent farewell dinner, that politics, at its heart, should be driven by a desire to help people, not attack government.

Looking back, he says he’s still haunted by some votes he took. One was for the repeal of the 1988 Medicare catastrophic coverage plan. “We were so proud” when the plan passed, he said, “but the seniors became outraged it would cost them $6.35 or something, and started a big rebellion. The public isn’t always right, you know.” Democrats quickly repealed the good measure, following their panicked leadership “like a bunch of sheep,” Mr. Ackerman bitterly recalled. “I didn’t come here to go along, but I went along.” And he regrets voting for the Iraq invasion, he says, on the basis of “contrived, phony evidence.”

Still, he departs as he arrived — an optimist about the public’s eventually making good choices. He sports a carnation every day just as he did as a city public school teacher, his first job. His sense of humor is intact.

“What do I do with all these plaques?” he asked, puzzling over 11 cartons of them, collected over the years from groups like the East Bayside Homeowners Association and American Veterans for Equal Rights for being a solid public servant. More constituents were coming and going in the anteroom, looking for the congressman who was happily making his own plans to be gone.

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Gay Donors, Key Group for Obama, to Plot Strategy in Washington

Hundreds of leading gay donors will travel to Washington in late April to plan strategies and marshal financial commitments for state and federal elections around the country, according to people with knowledge of the meeting.

The conference, one of the largest ever gatherings of gay donors, is being organized by the Gill Action Fund, one of the country’s leading gay political organizations, which has played a quiet but pivotal role at the state level in recent years on gay marriage and other issues, including working to defeat lawmakers who oppose gay marriage. The fund is keeping quiet the details of the gathering, hoping to shield potential donors from unwanted scrutiny or attacks from opponents, and a spokesman for the fund declined to comment on the plan on Tuesday.

But the conferences comes as gay donors are rapidly becoming one of the most pivotal sources of campaign cash in next fall’s elections, with some groups and donors shifting their sights on the presidential and Congressional races after years of fighting against ballot initiatives outlawing gay marriage and advancing the issue in states like New York and Maryland.

A growing number of the top “bundlers” — volunteers who gather checks from friends and business associates — to President Obama are gay men or women, a constituency Mr. Obama has avidly courted in recent months as he seeks to find new sources of large donations to finance his re-election campaign. A “super PAC” supporting Mr. Obama, Priorities USA Action, is also avidly courting gay donors, as traditional sources of large checks, including Wall Street, prove more resistant to appeals.

Mr. Obama pushed successfully last year to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule barring openly gay men and women from serving in the military, while his administration has ceased to defend constitutional challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal recognition of benefits for same-sex couples.

But he also faces a day of reckoning over gay marriage, which he opposes but which is the top priority of many gay rights organizations. Many of his top supporters in the gay community are pressuring Mr. Obama to change his position, which aides to the president have signaled are “evolving.” Gay rights advocates, backed by a growing number of Democratic lawmakers, are also pushing to have support for gay marriage added to the party’s official platform later this year.

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Study shows health care bill may have cost Democrats the House - Washington Post

???initialComments:true! pubdate:03/09/2012 11:15 EST! commentPeriod:14! commentEndDate:3/23/12 12:15 EDT! currentDate:3/8/12 7:0 EST! allowComments:true! displayComments:true!Posted by Aaron Blake at 11:15 AM ET, 03/09/2012

A top Democrat acknowledged Thursday that President Obama’s health care bill hurt his party in 2010. And a new study suggests it cost the Democrats something pretty specific: their House majority.

“It was clearly a liability in the last election in terms of the public’s fear,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Thursday during a briefing with reporters.

The study, by five professors from institutions across the country, looks at the health care bill alongside other contentious votes in the 111th Congress and determines that, more so than the stimulus or the cap-and-trade energy bill, it cost Democrats seats. In fact, they lost almost exactly the number of seats that decided the majority.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) after the House vote on the payroll tax cut extension in December. (REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)

The study ran 10,000 simulations of a scenario in which all vulnerable Democrats voted against the health care bill and found that the rejections would have saved Democrats an average of 25 seats, which would have made the House parties close to a tie. (Republicans won 63 seats overall, but the study suggests around 25 of them would have been salvaged.)

In 62 percent of the simulations, Democrats were able to keep the House.

The study uses district-level data to show that the vote created “ideological distance” between the Democratic members of Congress and the median voters in their districts, compared with similar districts where the Democratic incumbent voted against the bill.

“Democratic incumbents who supported health care reform were seen as more liberal on average by their constituents than those who did not,” the study says.

The study comes at an important time for the health care bill — just as it’s threatening to become a major issue again in the 2012 election.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to take up a challenge to the individual mandate portion of the bill later this month when it holds oral arguments. Republicans are licking their chops, hoping to rekindle the kind of enthusiasm they reaped from attacking the bill two years ago, just as enthusiasm seems to be on the decline in the GOP.

Democrats, meanwhile, are planning to celebrate the two-year anniversary of the bill’s passage later this month as part of an ongoing effort to make sure the bill isn’t a political liability going forward.

Hoyer said that whatever harm the bill might have caused his party electorally two years ago, the effects are more mitigated now.

“I think some of the fears they had have not been realized,” Hoyer said. ”Therefore, I think you’ve dissipated the opposition. Republicans are going to use it, but I don’t think it’s as fertile soil as they had two years ago.”

The health care bill, in many ways, is a kind of sleeping giant. But it’s about to be awakened, and how the parties navigate the issue in the coming weeks and months will go a long way toward determining how the 2012 election pans out.

Associated Press 

Felicia Sonmez 

Rosalind S. Helderman 

Glenn Kessler 

Nia-malika Henderson 

T.w. Farnam 

Chris Cillizza; Aaron Blake 

Rachel Weiner 

::unspecified:: 

Lisa Rein 

Al Kamen 

Jason Horowitz 

Rachel Weiner 

Karen Tumulty 

Glenn Kessler 

Aaron Blake 

Aaron Blake 

Sari Horwitz 

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Wisconsin Democrats running first recall ad: ‘Walkergate’ - Washington Post

???initialComments:true! pubdate:02/27/2012 11:24 EST! commentPeriod:14! commentEndDate:3/12/12 12:24 EDT! currentDate:2/26/12 7:0 EST! allowComments:true! displayComments:true!Posted by Rachel Weiner at 11:24 AM ET, 02/27/2012

The Wisconsin Democratic party is releasing its first ad in the recall campaign against Gov. Scott Walker (R) Monday.

“Walkergate” compares a John Doe investigation into current and former Walker aides to the Watergate scandal, juxtaposing news clips about the probe with coverage of the 1970s Nixon scandal.

Petition signatures to recall Walker were filed earlier this year, in response to legislation that eliminated collective bargaining rights for many public employees. Those signatures have yet to be certified, but a recall election against the governor is likely to take place later this year.

As that fight goes forward, prosecutors are investigating four aides and appointees of Walker’s from when he was Milwaukee County executive. Two Walker appointees have been charged with embezzling funds intended for veterans; two aides were charged with illegal fund-raising.

“There are many similarities by Watergate and Walkergate,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate on a conference call with reporters, saying Walker “has given a blizzard of contradictory statements about what he knew and when he knew it.”

Walker says he is not a target of the probe, but he has hired two defense attorneys and is meeting with prosecutors.

Former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout have already entered the Democratic primary to take on Walker.

Democrats would not disclose the amount of money being spent on the “Walkergate” ad, saying only that it’s a rolling buy in multiple markets.

Walker Press Secretary Tom Evenson said the ad was full of “lies and distortions” and that the governor “immediately addressed any issues of misconduct when brought to his attention. ... The character assassination being conducted by Madison Democrats and big-government union bosses in this ad shows they are grasping at straws.”

Walker has been airing ads since the recall petition drive kicked off last fall; he has already raised and spent millions. The political action committee Americans for Prosperity, funded by the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers, has already put hundreds of thousands of dollars into ads supporting the governor.

A recent poll showed Walker leading all likely challengers.

Nia-malika Henderson 

Felicia Sonmez 

Dan Balz 

Sandhya Somashekhar 

Robert Barnes 

Philip Rucker 

David A. Fahrenthold 

Ed O'keefe 

Melinda Henneberger 

Felicia Sonmez 

Carol D. Leonnig 

Glenn Kessler 

Philip Rucker; Dan Balz 

Rachel Weiner 

Eric Yoder 

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Democrats launch campaigns by blowing up GOP Medicare plan - Washington Post

Democratic House candidates across the country are signaling a desire to make the GOP’s plan for Medicare reform a real issue — early and often — in the 2012 election.

From California to New Hampshire, Democrats are launching their campaigns with a united message on Medicare and hoping it will pay off next year.

That message? “Your Republican member of Congress voted to end Medicare as we know it, and it’s time for someone new.”

In Colorado, state Sen. Brandon Shaffer (D) launched his campaign against freshman Rep. Cory Gardner (R) this week by laying into Gardner for his vote in favor of the House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget that would turn Medicare into a voucher program.

Shaffer made the attack the keynote of his announcement, saying Gardner “just gutted Medicare with his vote on the Ryan budget.”

Other Democratic candidates who have made the Medicare plan a key part of their rollouts include activist Ann McLane Kuster, a repeat challenger to Rep. Charlie Bass (R-N.H.); Colorado state Rep. Sal Pace, who faces Rep. Scott Tipton (R); Dr. Ami Bera, who is running against Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) for the second straight cycle; Illinois state Sen. Dave Koehler, who is challenging Rep. Bobby Schilling (R); and Wisconsin state Sen. Pat Kreitlow, who is running against Rep. Sean Duffy (R).

Kuster railed against Bass’s vote in an op-ed, Bera held a town hall devoted to the GOP’s Medicare plan, and the rest all mentioned Medicare as a motivating factor for their campaigns.

The man who got the ball rolling, of course, was businessman Rob Zerban, who took the fight directly to the man responsible for the Medicare proposal, Ryan. Zerban’s challenge to Ryan instantly became a cause celebre for national Democrats earlier this year when it began to look like the GOP’s Medicare proposal would be a real liability.

Ryan, despite coming from a swing district, is a second- or third-tier target for Democrats. The others, though, are all among the most targeted Republicans on the map.

Medicare continues to poll well as an issue for Democrats – a recent Bloomberg poll showed that 57 percent think they would be worse off under Ryan’s plan, while just 34 percent think they would be better off – so it’s no surprise that they keep going back to the well.

Democrats have won a special election in upstate New York where the Medicare proposal was cited as the main reason for the upset, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) stated publicly that the GOP’s Medicare proposal gave him new hope for winning back the House in 2012.

The question for Democrats is whether the issue is as relevant in November 2012 as it is in July 2011.

People tend to be pretty passionate about entitlement programs, and Democrats are banking on them continuing to be strongly against the GOP plan next year.

At the same time, when Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-N.Y.) scandal broke, much of the Democrats’ messaging momentum on Medicare was thwarted. And, with President Obama floating the possibility of cuts to Medicare in a grand bargain on the debt ceiling there is some concern in Democratic strategist circles that the party will lose its political high ground on the issue.

Republicans, for their part, have struggled to justify the vote, and are hoping the issue doesn’t ruin their 2012 election prospects in the same way the Democratic health care bill swamped that party’s 2010 efforts.

There is anecdotal evidence that people don’t quite know what to think about Medicare. Results of a focus group of independents released today by Resurgent Republic, a conglomerate of GOP consultants and pollsters, shows that they are strikingly unfamiliar with the the Republican budget plan.

Of course, what they do know about the plan makes them not like it, and explaining the finer points is difficult to do. Democrats have a much simpler message to sell, and they are — quite literally — running with it. Look for them to keep running with it until they have a good reason not to or it stops paying dividends.

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Obama raising money at 2 Washington fundraisers (AP)

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is attending two fundraisers for his Obama Victory Fund, part of a push to attract contributions to the Democratic National Committee and to his re-election campaign.

Obama is the featured attraction Monday at a dinner of Americans in Support of a Strong US-Israel Relationship. The DNC said the event is sold out, with about 80 people paying for tickets between $25,000 and $35,800.

The president also was attending a DNC Mid-Atlantic Finance Committee dinner. About 100 people were expected to attend, paying between $10,000 and $35,800.

The president has been featured at a string of recent fundraisers. He attended three in Miami and one in Puerto Rico last week. He heads for New York later this week where he will attend two more events with donors.

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