NDN Blog

From the Times:

BAGHDAD, July 9 — The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, warned today that an early American withdrawal from Iraq could bring on an all-out civil war and regional conflict, pointedly telling the United States that it had responsibilities to continue lending support to the Baghdad government.

Mr. Zebari also asserted that Iraq’s neighbor Turkey had massed 140,000 troops near his country’s northern border and urged it to resolve differences with dialogue, not through force.

Mr. Zebari was speaking after a violent weekend in which more than 220 people were killed in Iraq, including 150 by a truck bomb in one of the deadliest single attacks since the American invasion in March 2003.

Asked if the Iraqi government’s was aware of the growing pressure on President Bush from Congress to impose a timetable for withdrawing American forces from Iraq, Mr. Zebari said his government was holding a “dialogue” with some congressmen.

“We explain to them the dangers of a speedy withdrawal and leaving a security vacuum, and the dangers vary from civil war to dividing the country or maybe to regional wars,” he said.

“Some people might disagree with this assessment, but in our estimation the danger is huge. Until the Iraqi forces and institutions complete their readiness, there is a responsibility on the U.S. and other countries to stand by the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people to help build up their capabilities.”

Mr. Zebari’s comments came after some Sunni and Shiite leaders called on Iraqi civilians to take up arms to defend themselves, amid frustration that Iraqi security forces had failed to halt the deadly suicide attacks....

David Sanger of the Times has a huge front page story about internal deliberations in the White House.  It starts:

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations....

Conservative author and commentator Byron York weighs in today with a true must read.  It starts:

Let's say you're a Republican president, a bit more than midway through your second term. You're scrambling to salvage what you can of a deeply unpopular war, you're facing a line of subpoenas from Democrats in Congress and your poll ratings are in the basement. What do you do?

You estrange the very Republicans whose backing you need the most.

That's precisely what President Bush has managed to accomplish during the two big political developments of recent weeks: the commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's prison sentence and the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform. But the president's problems with the GOP base go beyond those awkward headlines. Republicans aren't mad at Bush for the same reasons that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the devotees of MoveOn.org are; there's no new anti-Bush consensus among left and right. No, conservatives are unhappy because the president allied himself with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over an immigration deal that leaned too far toward amnesty for illegal immigrants. They're unhappy because Bush has shown little interest in fiscal responsibility and limited government. And they're unhappy, above all, because he hasn't won the war in Iraq.

All of this has left Republicans saying, at least among themselves, something blunt and devastating: It's over.

"Bush fatigue has set in," declares one plugged-in GOP activist.

"We're ready for a new president," says a former state Republican Party official in the South.

"There was affection," opines a conservative strategist based well beyond the Beltway, "but now they're in divorce court."

Read the rest here in today's Post. 

The Bush era has done great damage to Washington's ability to meet important challenges.  We know the story - big mistakes, challenges not met, extraordinary betrayal of the public trust.  In 2006 voters asked for a new chapter in the American story.  What we now know well into 2007 that this new chapter will not come quickly.  It will take years and a great deal of work to move past this disapointing and damaging era of politics. 

There are many examples of how Bushism will be with us for years to come.  The right-leaning Roberts court.  The continued erosion of American support for globalization and trade liberalization.  A Middle East more difficult than before.  But to me the most graphic example of our hard it is going to be bring the parties and the American people together to solve our common problems is what happened with the immigration bill last week. 

We have written about this often so I wont repeat other than to say that if anything was to pass in this Congress it was the immigration bill.  It had broad and deep bi-partisan support.  It passed the Republican controlled Senate last year.  It had a remarkable coalition behind it, including leaders of labor, the Catholic Church, business and immigrant rights groups.  It was supported by the most powerful leaders in Washington including the President, John McCain, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  And yet it still didnt pass. 

For progressives, we have several tasks ahead.  First to stay focused on solving problems not playing politics.  We need to get things done that improve the lives of average Americans.  Second, and perhaps most importantly, is that we cannot let these disapointing years cause us to doubt the power and goodness of the American experiment itself.  We have overcome much greater challenges before.  And though the array of challenges in front of us are great, and urgent, at our very core we must believe that they can met and tackled with the same sense of can-do optimism as this remarkable nation has met similar times of trial and trouble in our past.  This is no time for retreat, for withdrawal, for accepting the limited and cramped vision of the Bush era.   Our task now must be to re-imagine the goodness, and greatness, of America, and apply our creed and values to the newly emergent challenges of this new century. 

It is not the day that it is dark.  It has been our response to it.  And that we have the power to change.  But it is not going to be quick, easy, inexpensive and clean.  We have years of hard work ahead of us to move America beyond the broken politics of the Bush era.

The NYTimes reflects on the new Roberts Court this morning with a strong and well-argued editorial this morning.  An excerpt:

It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations, the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have had such a successful Supreme Court term. Society’s have-nots were not the only losers. The basic ideals of American justice lost as well.

It is very much worth reading in its entirety.

In the last several weeks NDN's arguments about American politics have been breaking through in powerful ways:

Immigration and its implications for the GOP - We are all deeply disappointed with the results of the immigration battle this year. However, the political aftermath of the debate has created a unique opportunity, one that may enhance our chances of reviving the bill, or even passing better immigration legislation, in the near future. NDN led an effort, capped by a joint press conference with NCLR last week, which demonstrated how the harsh tone of the immigration debate was pushing Hispanics away from the GOP, threatening their capacity to become a majority party in the 21st century. Our advice to the GOP throughout was "to sue for peace:" work with the Democrats to pass comprehensive immigration reform and minimize the damage to their brand in the Hispanic community, the fastest growing part of the American electorate. While we didn't win that battle, our efforts in the media had a significant impact on the interpretation of what happened as the bill collapsed last week.

The best example of our message success was a highly influential Wall Street Journal editorial last Wednesday, a day before the vote. But you can also find our presence and influence in articles in Newsweek, USNews, Congressional Quarterly and The New York Times, the LA Times (here and here), The St. Petersburg Times, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Salon (here and here), DailyKos, and The Hill. A national AP piece ran in dozens of papers across the country, and several of the stories above got picked up in major outlets like CBS News. This narrative also appeared in a front page story in USA Today last Thursday, and the New York Times on Sunday.

Reviewing these stories, it is clear the NDN team created and shaped the national narrative in these last few weeks around this very consequential immigration battle.

The emergence of a New Politics - Our large argument about how the big changes in three areas - governing agenda, media/tech/advertising and demography - are reinventing politics continued to drive media coverage of politics. Most prominently, a major NPR story by Mara Liasson highlighted NDN's extraordinary efforts to create a culture of investment to help create a 21st century infrastructure for progressive politics. Ron Brownstein's recent LA Times column featured our thinking about the emergence of a people powered politics. A recent New York Times article featured our commentary on the changing face of political advertising. A front page Washington Post story this week featured the thinking of NPI Fellow Tim Chambers, and referred to his excellent NPI paper on mobile media. And NPI Director Peter Leyden is featured in the current issue of Mother Jones where he discusses the potential of open-source politics.

NPI recently released an important new report, The Progressive Politics of the Millenial Generation, which Future Majority urges progressives to "make your bible for talking about young people in politics." A survey of young Americans by the New York Times/CBS News/MTV, released several days later, shows very similar statistics and comes to many of the same conclusions as our NPI report. If you haven't already read this important report, it certainly is worth a look.

All of this press has come in just the last few weeks. This year, NDN and its team has appeared in literally hundreds of stories in news outlets across the nation, in all types of media, in both Spanish and English. We have been quoted in front page stories of most major publications, including the New York Times Magazine, on topics ranging from globalization to the rise of Millennials to the emergence of viral video on the internet. Our Hispanic Strategy Director, Joe Garcia, was also part of the panel on Telemundo the night of the State of the Union.

The reason all this matters is that our work together is breaking through. NDN is not just imagining a better future for progressives, our point of view is being heard, driving the debate, having an impact. I am very proud of this powerful community we've built, together, and promise that we are working hard each and every day to usher in a better future for our politics and our nation.

Advertising takes another leap forward.  From the Times today:

Yahoo will announce new tools for online advertising today that could pull the company ahead in the race for what is called “behavioral targeting,” that is, the ability to better tailor online advertisements to the people most likely to buy.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

The Internet has long promised this kind of one-to-one marketing, but it has often been difficult for advertisers to customize display advertisements with a broad reach.

“Ad agencies have been really struggling with how to scale the value proposition of the Internet,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo. “We now can get scaleable one-to-one marketing.”

The announcement of SmartAds also comes while Yahoo is recovering from an extensive reshuffling in the executive offices, including the departure of its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, and Wenda Harris Millard, the company’s longtime chief sales officer. Yahoo has struggled to catch up with Google in search advertising and has disappointed investors with its ad sales the past few quarters.

SmartAds is one attempt to catch up. Although the technology is complex, the goal of SmartAds is simple: show the right advertisement to the right person at just the moment that he is about to pull out his wallet to make a purchase.

SmartAds is being tested on Yahoo’s network of sites — which includes local newspapers as well as its own portal — by two major airlines, although Mr. Teresi would not name them. He said the system will be offered to other industries in the coming months, including automobile companies and retailers in the fall.

The technology will also be applied for free across advertisements bought on Right Media, the online ad exchange that Yahoo purchased this spring (although the deal is still pending). The new feature may give Right Media a competitive advantage over other exchanges — like a new one created by DoubleClick, the online company that Google agreed to purchase for $3.1 billion in April. (The Google-DoubleClick merger is pending an antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission.)

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement....

Read the rest of the piece here.

"We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a  matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative. 

We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as "excessive."   The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country.  In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws.  It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals.  That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.

Although the President's decision eliminates Mr. Libby's sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process."

The Post pens an in-depth profile of Michelle Rhee, DC Mayor Fenty's choice to be the next Superindendent of Public Schools.  Her appointment is being taken up by the DC City Council this week. 

The appointment of Rhee may end up having national significance.  She is one of the first of a wave of education reformers to come from the remarkable Teach for America program to move into a top administrative spot.  It is also an early - perhaps too early - test of the young, idealistic and determined reformers coming out of the maturing national service movement.  It is a classic case of the old meets the new, but of course the battle will mean a great deal for those of us who live in DC and have kids in public schools here (I will have kids in 2nd grade and Kindergarten next year). 

I am hopeful that Fenty made a wise choice with Rhee.  Improving of our public schools, particularly for our fast growing minority populations in our resurgent urban cores, is one of the most important challenges facing the nation.  This job became a more urgent one with the Supreme Court's decision last week on limiting the ability of school districts to integrate their schools.  As the parent of kids in public schools I admire Mayor Fenty's bold vision and courage to appoint someone with Rhee's background to this critical post.  While the idea of Rhee is a powerful one, what matters most is now is that she and the Mayor carry out this reform ideas and improve DC's troubled schools.  The hard part of this great gamble has just begun.

Lots of stories these last few days on the further weakening of the Bush Presidency.  This morning Peter Baker of the Post publishes the most interesting analysis so far. 

For more on this topic from NDN visit the Meeting the Conservative Challenge section of our web site, www.ndn.org.