Washed It!

President Obama announced Friday that Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff and a fearsome White House operative, is resigning his post and would be replaced with another senior advisor.

Emanuel, who is planning to run for mayor of Chicago, departs 20 months into Obama’s presidency and leaves as one part of a staff shuffle that will bring a significant turnover at the top levels of the White House policy and economic team.

Senior presidential advisor David Axelrod is planning to leave the White House next year to begin preparations for Obama’s 2012 reelection drive, and economic advisor Lawrence Summers is quitting the White House to return to Harvard University.

Obama named senior advisor Pete Rouse to serve as Emanuel’s replacement, at least for now.

Emanuel’s departure had been expected since Mayor Richard Daley announced in September that he would not run for reelection. Obama lavished praise on Emanuel for his work at the White House.

“He just brings an unmatched level of energy and commitment to every single thing he does,” Obama said after embracing Emanuel before a cheering White House assembly.

Possible candidates for the permanent job include Thomas E. Donilon, a deputy national security advisor; Robert Bauer, White House counsel; Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader; and John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton.

cparsons@latimes.com
Obama makes it official, sends off top aide Emanuel

Rob Canty heard the news on TV Sunday morning at his home in St. Tammany Parish, La.: The wild oil well that changed his life — and the lives of thousands of others along the Gulf Coast — was sealed up, safely and permanently, thanks to an injection of cement 18,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

After nearly five months of heartache, misery and worry, the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico was dead.

The news was “real good,” said Canty, a 31-year-old shrimper, but it wasn’t likely to change his life back immediately. His shrimp boat is still contracted out indefinitely to BP, he said, and for the time being, he expects to remain among the 25,200 people hired to finish cleaning up the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

“We’re ready to try to go back fishing, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” Canty said. “We still got oil out there.”

Sunday’s announcement of the successful “bottom kill” of the BP well was met with relief, but only muted fanfare, as nearly all the players in the drama — including President Obama, outgoing BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, and a number of Gulf Coast residents — emphasized that the story was far from over, and that much more work remained to be done.

“Today, we achieved an important milestone in our response to the BP oil spill,” Obama said in a statement, adding that members of his administration “remain committed to doing everything possible to make sure the Gulf Coast recovers fully from this disaster.”

“This road will not be easy,” he said, “but we will continue to work closely with the people of the gulf to rebuild their livelihoods and restore the environment that supports them.”

Hayward — whose gaffes during the spill resulted in his ouster, effective Oct. 1 — declared that the well “no longer presents a threat to the Gulf of Mexico,” adding that BP’s commitment to repair the damage “remains unchanged.”

The final plugging of the well was a somewhat underwhelming denouement to one of the great engineering challenges in modern times. After a number of missteps, BP was able to seal the well in mid-July with a temporary custom cap. Once the oil had stopped flowing, experts embarked on a slow, careful, multistep process to ensure that it would be shut in for good: In early August, the seal was improved with a shot of drilling mud and cement from the top. Later, crews swapped out the old blowout preventer — the safety device that failed during the April 20 blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11 workers — with a newer, stronger cap.

Throughout the process, Thad Allen, the federal spill response chief, asserted that the well could be considered dead only when the outer ring of the well, called the annulus, was also plugged with cement from deep underground.

After testing to ensure that they would do no harm, crews on Thursday drilled into the annulus nearly 18,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, then began filling it with cement to ensure that oil would never again flow from the reservoir below.

Pressure tests were conducted late Saturday night that showed the cement job had been a success. On Sunday morning, Allen declared the well “effectively dead.”

“From the beginning, this response has been driven by the best science and engineering available,” Allen said in a statement Sunday. “We insisted that BP develop robust redundancy measures to ensure that each step was part of a deliberate plan, driven by science, minimizing risk to ensure we did not inflict additional harm in our efforts to kill the well.”

That was about as happy as anyone allowed themselves to be, at least in public. Even on the drilling rig some 50 miles off the Louisiana shore, the Associated Press reported that crews wouldn’t celebrate much. They’d treat themselves to prime rib on news of a job well done, but Rich Robson, the offshore installation manager, said the mood was bittersweet.

“To a lot of people, the water out here is a cemetery,” he said.

With the cement job completed, oversight of the well will shift from the National Incident Command, which was set up to deal with spill-related issues, to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which regulates offshore oil drilling.

BP plans to complete the abandonment of the well, removing portions of casing and further securing the well. The company will also begin dismantling and recovering the various equipment used in the effort to plug the well that has gathered around the wellsite over the months.

The more complicated work, however, is the ongoing effort to find and clean up the remaining oil, and measure and mitigate its effects on the environment.

Before it was capped, the well spewed 205.8 million gallons of oil. Much of it remains at sea.

According to the federal government, about 110 miles of shoreline are experiencing “moderate to heavy oil impacts,” most of it in coastal Louisiana.

Of great concern to scientists is the huge amount of oil — about a quarter of the total — in droplet form that is floating in vast clouds in the deep water. The long-term effect of these clouds, and the ability of bacteria to break them down naturally, is not clear.

Aaron Viles, campaign director of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental nonprofit in New Orleans, said the sealing of the well gave him a sense of “trepidation.”

“Because I know that as that news comes out — that it’s the ‘final seal of the well’ — it’s kind of the final real attention this issue’s going to get, in the world’s eyes at least.

“I do think that, while we’re likely at the end of the big telegenic story, the more challenging piece remains,” he added. “Which is quantifying the impact and responding in the most effective way to ensure these resources can recover.”

richard.fausset@latimes.com

Blown-out BP well is declared dead

President Obama drew a sharp contrast with Republicans Wednesday over what was shaping up as a key issue in the midterm congressional elections: the extension of tax cuts for top earners, which he said were unsustainable.

Obama’s remarks, delivered in the traditional electoral battleground state of Ohio, sounded every bit like the speeches he gave there two years ago during his first election bid. Originally billed as a policy speech, Obama only briefly outlined his new plan for $180 billion in spending — including $50 billion in infrastructure investments and a permanent extension of research-and-development tax credits.

Instead, he used the debate over Bush-era tax breaks to make a populist pitch, shaping the coming congressional midterm election as a choice between Democrats who support policies to advance the middle class and Republicans who would return to policies that created only “the illusion of prosperity.”

As he did so, Obama mentioned House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) by name eight times, as the White House sought to elevate the man who would become speaker of the House if Republicans gained a majority this fall.

“Make no mistake: He and his party believe we should … give a permanent tax cut to the wealthiest 2% of Americans,” Obama said. “With all the other budgetary pressures we have, with all the Republicans’ talk about wanting to shrink the deficit, they would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about $100,000 each to folks who are already millionaires.”

“So let me be clear to Mr. Boehner and everybody else,” he continued. “We should not hold middle-class tax cuts hostage any longer.”

Obama’s plan calls for extending tax cuts for households earning less than $250,000 a year, while allowing the marginal rates for higher earners to increase as scheduled Dec. 31.

“For those who claim that this is bad for growth and bad for small businesses, let me remind you that with those tax rates in place, this country created 22 million jobs, raised incomes, and had the largest surplus in history,” he said.

Obama also, as he had done often since Congress broke for its summer recess, urged Republicans to pass a package of small-business tax credits that had been stalled in the Senate, a holdup he said was delaying hiring.

Obama said Republican obstruction was emblematic of a strategy aimed at allowing the GOP to “sit on the sidelines and let Democrats solve the mess.”

“They’re making the same calculation they made just before the inauguration: If I fail, they win,” he said. “Well, they might think this will get them where they need to go in November, but it won’t get our country where it needs to go in the long run.”

Earlier Wednesday, Boehner announced two Republican alternative economic proposals for the September session. Foremost among them was a two-year extension – which he termed a freeze – of all current tax rates.

Republicans also would seek to cut non-security spending to 2008 levels, which they estimated would save $100 billion in its first year.

In January, Obama had proposed a three-year budget freeze that the White House said would save $250 billion over the next decade.

“We can’t deal with the deficit until we’re willing to get our arms around spending and have a strong economy,” Boehner said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday. “And you can’t have a strong economy if you’re raising taxes on the very people that you expect to invest in our economy to begin hiring people again.”

The Ohio Republican also seemed to welcome the direct confrontation with the Democratic president.

“Here’s the White House worrying about what I’ve got to say instead of working together to get our economy going again and to get jobs back in America,” he said.

Under election-year pressure, even Democrats have expressed reservations about Obama’s new proposals. Sen. Michael Bennet, seeking election to a full term this November in Colorado, said in a statement Wednesday morning that he opposed “additional spending in a second stimulus package.”

mmemoli@tribune.com
Obama blasts continued tax cuts for the rich

Democrats went back to work on Tuesday, fresh from what was supposed to be the summer of economic recovery, only to find themselves facing the fall of their political pummeling.

With the general election eight weeks away, Democrats finished the Labor Day holidays, the traditional end of summer, to wage autumn campaigns amid what polls and prognosticators predicted would be an ever-worsening political climate. The malaise is so deep that it threatens Democratic control of Congress and is likely cast a pall even on the presidential election two years away.

In the House, where Republicans need to gain a net 39 seats to win control, the Cook Political Report’s current outlook is for a Republican net gain of at least 40 seats. At this point, only 209 House seats are “solid,” “likely or “lean Democratic,” while 181 seats are “solid,” “likely” or “lean Republican,” and 45 seats are in the “toss-up” column, the report said Tuesday.

Earlier, the Rothenberg Political Report moved 20 House races toward the GOP, citing “national and local polls [that] continue to show further deterioration in Democratic prospects.”

“Given that, we are increasing our target of likely Republican gains from 28-33 seats to 37-42 seats, with the caveat that substantially larger GOP gains in the 45-55 seat range are quite possible,” Rothenberg said.

On the Senate side, Republicans face a tougher job, having to win a net 10 seats from the 19 Democratic seats at stake. The GOP is defending 18 seats of its own. No one expects Democrats to lose control of the Senate, but their grasp is expected to sharply loosen.

But the elections are just the surface manifestation of the deeper wave of discontent washing through the country, which is trying to deal with a stuttering economic recovery. Stubbornly high unemployment and an unhappiness with Democrats’ performance in Congress and the White House are among factors threatening to squeeze incumbents.

And those factors spell special trouble for the Democrats as they seek to mount a counterattack this year. President Obama already has called for Congress to help small businesses with new tax cuts and has offered another round of spending on infrastructure — both designed to foster job creation. This week, the president will travel to Ohio to outline his proposals, first made on Monday in Milwaukee.

Even as Obama pushes economic proposals, polls show there is a general lack of enthusiasm for Democrats who rode President Obama’s tide of euphoria and change into the White House in 2008.
According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Monday, Republicans hold a two-point lead over Democrats in the generic ballot, but that becomes a 13-point lead among those most likely to vote in November.

That finding is similar to the Wall Street Journal- NBC News poll also released on Monday. That poll found an even split at 43% on the question of whether Republicans or Democrats should run Congress. But likely voters put the GOP ahead 49% to 40%.

Even more worrisome for Democrats, the Washington Post/ABC poll found voters said they trusted Republicans about the same as they trusted Democrats to handle the nation’s problems. About 40% said they had more confidence in Democrats and 38% said the GOP. Three months ago, Democrats had a 12-point advantage.

On the economy, 43% of voters said they agreed with Republicans when it came to dealing with financial problems, while 39% favored Democrats, the poll found.

The WSJ/NBC News poll found only 26% of voters said they believed the economy would get better in the next year, down from 47% a year ago. About three of every five voters surveyed said they believed the country was on the wrong track, up from 48% a year ago. Only two of every five voters said they approved of how President Obama was handling the economy.

michael.muskal@latimes.com
A gathering end-of-summer storm of negative political sentiment

Pressure on President Obama to do something about the weakening economy intensified Friday with new government data showing that hiring remains lackluster, nudging the nation’s unemployment rate up to 9.6%.

With congressional elections less than eight weeks away, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden to say that he would soon propose a new package of tax cuts and other incentives to spur employment.

“We are confident that we are moving in the right direction, but we want to keep this recovery moving stronger and accelerate the job growth that’s needed so desperately,” the president said.

Obama spoke after the Labor Department reported that the nation lost 54,000 net jobs in August, fewer than economists had expected but still dismal. The private sector’s weak gain of 67,000 jobs was wiped out largely by the number of federal census jobs that ended.

The unemployment rate edged up to 9.6% from 9.5% in July, the first increase in that figure since April.

The president is expected to use a speech in Cleveland on Wednesday to outline a series of measures to kick-start the economy, which could include extending research and development tax credits for business, increasing spending on highways and other public works projects, and retaining the middle-class portion of the Bush administration tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Many analysts believe that those measures will have only a modest effect, especially in the short time remaining before the midterm elections. But with Republicans lined up solidly against the Democratic administration on economic policy, more far-reaching proposals are considered out of the question.

“The key will be whether it’s smart — getting bang for the buck — and if it’s big enough,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research group in Washington. “And I’m concerned on both of those fronts.”

One idea that has received some support from Republicans is a three-month payroll tax holiday for all workers and businesses.

That would amount to a 6.2% tax cut for each, freeing up money that employers could use for new hiring and workers could use to boost consumer spending.

But White House aides indicated that Obama will not embrace the idea. It would cost the government about $120 billion in revenue if adopted for two months — and a staggering $700 billion if continued for a full year.

Also, an unrestricted tax holiday would not be narrowly focused on Obama’s goal of adding jobs.

“I think the notion of giving payroll tax holidays is not very well targeted,” said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “That’s going to go to all kinds of firms, even those that are reducing their employees.”

Instead, Alan Krueger, the Treasury Department’s chief economist, said Obama asked his economic team to “review options that are targeted and responsible” — that is, more narrowly focused and less likely to aggravate the government’s budget and deficit problems.

Recognizing that many Americans have an unfavorable view of last year’s massive stimulus program, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has been taking pains to caution that “some big new stimulus plan is not in the offing.”

Among the narrower options under consideration is extending a tax break signed into law in March that exempts employers from their share of payroll taxes for the remainder of 2010 and provides other incentives if the employer hires someone who has been unemployed for at least 60 days.

The law, known as the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act, or HIRE, passed with bipartisan support, and one of its main backers, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), recently urged a six-month extension.

A White House aide, Jen Psaki, would not lay out specifics, but said that “the options under consideration build on measures the president has previously proposed.”

The moves being discussed are unlikely to change the jobs picture any time soon, Burtless said. He noted that the R&D tax credit, which expired Dec. 31, has repeatedly been renewed and is expected to be extended again this year.

Obama to propose new incentives to spur employment

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, President Obama recommitted the nation to ongoing repair of the Gulf Coast as the region’s fragile recovery hung in the balance and his own popularity needed shoring up amid disappointment with the administration’s handling of the gulf oil spill.

Obama underscored the optimism and ongoing frustration felt in New Orleans, a city that had shown signs of renewal despite lingering devastation.

Residents worry the nation will leave them behind, fatigued over the one-two punch of the hurricane and BP spill. Obama seemed intent on convincing them otherwise.

“I wanted to come here and tell the people of this city directly: My administration is going to stand with you – and fight alongside you – until the job is done,” Obama said at Xavier University, a historically black college where he delivered the commencement address less than a year after Katrina.

After being criticized for his administration’s slow response to this year’s BP oil spill, Obama impressed on gulf residents the improvements he had made in streamlining Katrina aid — including $1.8 billion for Orleans Parish Schools announced Friday.

Obama pledged to finish the largest civil-works project in the nation’s history — shoring up the failed levees — by next year. He noted the June groundbreaking on a new Veterans’ Administration hospital.

The White House sent top administration officials as the region held days of panel discussions, art exhibits — even a funeral for Katrina where attendees hoped to bury their grief and move on from the largest residential disaster in the nation’s history.

Yet for a president who works to separate his legacy in the gulf from that of his predecessor, President Bush, the administration’s handling of the BP spill links the two by the perceived inability of government to adequately respond to disaster.

“We are going to stand with you until the oil is cleaned up, the environment is restored, polluters are held accountable, communities are made whole and this region is back on its feet,” Obama said.

Obama made an unscheduled lunch stop before the afternoon speech, ordering a shrimp po’boy at the Parkway Bakery and Tavern, a 100-year-old restaurant in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans, eating with the first lady and their daughters. The president greeted patrons with hugs and handshakes.

“We’re just going to keep on building, we’re going to keep on working, alright?” the president said, according to the pool report.
Obama, in New Orleans, promises to ‘fight alongside’ Gulf Coast

If Marine Lance Cpl. Kevin Oratowski was intimidated about briefing three visiting generals as he headed out on another overnight patrol chasing the Taliban, he didn’t show it.

“We’re ready to go,” the 23-year-old from Camp Pendleton said brightly, his enthusiasm seemingly undimmed by the fact that he had spent most of the last 60 days in the heat, danger and uncertainty of Helmand province.

A few hours later, he was dead from a Taliban roadside bomb.

As the three generals watched the next day, Oratowski’s casket was loaded aboard a C-130 to begin its journey home. The cargo plane lumbered down a runway that didn’t exist just a few months ago and lifted heavily into the southern Afghanistan sky.

Next to the runway, earthmovers pushed mountains of gravel for other construction projects at the base here, projects to expand the “footprint” of the Marines as they settle in for a long battle for Helmand.

A year since the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan began with battalions of Marines descending on the Helmand River Valley, optimism about a quick defeat of the insurgents after early small-scale routs has given way to more sober assessments.

As the death toll steadily climbs, the top Marine warns that it could take as long as five years to defeat the Taliban and help the Afghan government establish a credible presence.

The massive assault in February on the Taliban-run town of Marja has not lived up to the U.S. prediction that it would prove a “tipping point” for the province. Two battalions of Marines are still assigned to protect Marja, but Taliban fighters spread messages of terror at night and plant bombs, killing Marines and villagers.

The provincial and national governments provide only a trickle of services. The vaunted “government-in-a-box,” a promise to establish a government in Marja as soon as the fighting stopped, was largely a flop.

“I think Stan McChrystal over-promised in regards to government-in-a-box,” Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway said, referring to the Army general who was then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Even as President Obama talks of beginning a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan next July, in Helmand, the talk is of “trend lines” and “metrics” rather than a quick knockdown.

In a series of meetings with Marines of all ranks, Conway said he expected Marines — whose numbers have doubled, to 20,000, in Helmand in the last 14 months — to be here until 2014 or 2015. Be prepared for a second or third tour, he said.

“We’re still going to have to convince these people who are fighting us that we are the strongest tribe,” Conway told several hundred Marines just minutes after the C-130 with Oratowski’s casket departed.

Conway and other senior officers say they remain confident of ultimate victory. It is a confidence born of the Marines’ experience in Iraq’s Anbar province, which in 2006 was branded as a lost cause by a Marine intelligence report but within two years was considered an example of the U.S. ability to defeat a ruthless insurgency.

“I’m an inveterate optimist,” Conway said in an interview at the end of his Helmand trip. “I found things better than I would have expected based on [media reports] and on intelligence I’ve been reading.”

The Western military has lately been touting the success of pinpoint special-operations raids targeting midlevel Taliban field commanders, particularly in the south.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said this week that coalition and Afghan troops had conducted thousands of raids that it said had fostered “a growing sense of distrust” among the Taliban, heightening the fear of spies in their midst.

The Taliban, of course, paints a much different picture. In a statement this week, spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi boasted of expanding influence in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the insurgency’s spiritual home.

“Helmand is … a great example of the defeat of the enemy,” Ahmadi said in a statement posted on the movement’s website. “An example of this is the Marja operation, in which thousands of [Western] and Afghan soldiers took part. They made it sound as if World War III had started, but now they are ashamed to even mention the name of Marja, due to their disgraceful defeat.”

Marines in Afghanistan prepared for a long haul

Shirley Sherrod, forced from her government post after becoming a target for unfounded complaints that she was a racist, rejected an offer Tuesday to return full-time to the Department of Agriculture.

At a joint news conference after meeting with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Sherrod, however, said she would work as a consultant with the agency on civil rights issues.

“I enjoyed my work at USDA,” said Sherrod in turning down the offer. “I just don’t think at this point I can stay full time with USDA.”

Sherrod was the Agriculture Department’s director of rural development in Georgia until she was forced to quit after a conservative blogger published edited portions of a speech in which she appeared to make remarks that could have been interpreted as racist.

Vilsack and others in the Obama administration condemned the comments which were later found to have been taken out of context. The NAACP also condemned Sherrod, a black woman.

When her remarks were published in context, both the Obama administration and the civil rights group apologized for their reaction and for Sherrod’s departure. On Tuesday, Sherrod told reporters she expected to file a lawsuit against the blogger.

Vilsack repeated his apology Tuesday and took full blame during the televised news conference.

“This was my responsibility and I will continue to take responsibility tor it as long as I live,” Vilsack said. “I know that I disappointed the president. I disappointed this administration. I disappointed the country. I disappointed Shirley. I have to live with that. I accept that responsibility.”

Vilsack said he hoped that the incident would be a spotlight on efforts to deal with civil rights issues. He also said the department has changed its internal procedures to avoid the type of rush to judgment that was involved in the Sherrod case.

“The secretary did push really, really hard for me to stay and work from the inside,” Sherrod said. But “look at what happened. I know he apologizes and I have accepted that. I know a new process is in place but I don’t want to be the one to test it.”
Agriculture official, ousted in racial controversy, rejects new job offer at USDA

President Obama on Friday took a strong stand in favor of building a mosque near the site where Muslim terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, breaking his silence on a political tempest that has left the country divided.

Speaking at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan, Obama framed the issue as one of religious freedom.

Muslims “have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,” Obama said, according to a White House transcript. “That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”