Washed It!

Prince William is engaged to longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton, Britain’s royal family announced Tuesday.

The 28-year-old heir to the throne and his fiancee will marry next year, royal aides said.
Announcement of the engagement had been rumored for weeks, as palace watchers looked ahead on the royal calendar and speculated that a marriage would have to take place sometime in 2011, sandwiched between other official royal activities.

Announcing the engagement now gives Buckingham Palace time to prepare for the most highly anticipated royal event since the lavish wedding of William’s parents, Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, in 1981.

The marriage will end bachelorhood for William and the hopes of young women around the world who have followed his every move and been charmed by his good looks and affable manner.

The prince and Middleton, who is also 28, met as students at the University of St. Andrews near Edinburgh, Scotland. Their relationship has been minutely dissected in the British tabloids, which have gleefully picked on Middleton’s middle-class background.

With no royal or aristocratic pedigree, Middleton will be the first commoner to marry an heir to the throne in centuries. Her parents are entrepreneurs who became millionaires from a mail-order party-supplies business, which has prompted some ridicule in a society where snobbishness can still be a prized trait.

Middleton’s mother, Carole, has been especially sneered at as a social climber who once worked as a flight attendant and who was caught on camera chewing gum during William’s graduation ceremony from military academy.

The couple have reportedly split up at various times over the years, but their closeness in recent times has led to speculation that marriage was imminent. Middleton’s parents were recently invited for a shooting party at the royal residence in Scotland, which was taken as a sign that a blending of the two families was in the offing.

William is second in line to the British throne, after Prince Charles. His low-key style and resemblance to his mother have made him a popular figure for a family battered by tragedy and scandal.

The prince’s aides said the pair became engaged while on vacation in Kenya last month. The wedding is expected to take place sometime in the spring or summer of next year. Royal watchers said that Westminster Abbey, where William’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, was married, is a likely venue.

After their wedding, the couple will live in northern Wales, where William will continue to serve in Britain’s air force.

Congratulations quickly began pouring in. British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was passed a note with news of the engagement during a Cabinet meeting and that, when he informed his colleagues, a cheer went up around the table.

Cameron later spoke with the prince by telephone — though whether he thanked William for providing some good news at a time when the British government is imposing a sweeping austerity plan is not known.

henry.chu@latimes.com
Prince William engaged to longtime girlfriend

For years in her native Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has been known simply as “The Lady,” a pro-democracy stalwart and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has languished for years in an arbitrary solitary confinement imposed by the nation’s ruling military junta.

Although she was snatched from the public limelight, residents of the former Burma have always known this about the charismatic Buddhist activist, now 65: She would not be broken by the military generals she has long defied.

On Saturday, Suu Kyi proved them all right. She was finally released from the mildewing, two-story villa where she has spent much of her house arrest, spanning 15 of the last 21 years.

Whether in prison or not, supporters say, she has remained a quiet but defiant symbol of struggle against political repression for residents of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

Always cutting a slight figure, the daughter of a national hero who had generations earlier campaigned for Burma’s independence from Britain endured personal hardship to uphold her political principals, often going years without seeing her husband or sons.

But as popes, presidents and activists called unsuccessfully for her release, she never wavered. Once asked if she thought her story had the makings of a Greek tragedy, she responded: “Don’t be silly. I don’t go in for melodrama.”

She later added: “I look upon myself as a politician. That’s not a dirty word, you know. Some people think that there is something wrong with politicians. Of course, there is something wrong with some politicians.”

Time and again, Suu Kyi showed her mettle since taking up the democracy struggle in 1988.

Spending much of her early life abroad, Suu Kyi had returned home that year just as street protests erupted against a quarter-century of military rule. The daughter of martyred independence leader Gen. Aung San, she quickly assumed a leadership role.

Then 44, she campaigned for the government to stage proper elections and became the first secretary general of the fledging National League for Democracy.

Explaining why she risked prison or worse by taking on the nation’s military, she responded: “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.”

Her unsuccessful efforts to stop a brutal military suppression that killed thousands of protestors, repeatedly facing own armed soldiers, gained her worldwide notoriety, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, being proclaimed by the Nobel committee as “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

But Suu Kyi’s sons, Alexander and Kim, accepted the award in Oslo on behalf of their mother who, seen as a threat by the country’s new military rulers, was detained in 1989 on national security charges.

She spent the next six years under house arrest at the family home at 54 University Avenue, enduring various periods in detention since then. Over the years, she has waged repeated hunger strikes to call attention to the military’s brutal repression of protesting students.

But Suu Kyi endured. When her husband, British scholar Michael Aris, died in London in March 1999, they had only seen each other a handful of times since her first house arrest a decade earlier.

Press reports have painted her life in captivity as austere. Rising each day at 4 a.m., she meditated, read and listened to one of five radios that were her only link to the outside world. She had no telephone, no television, no Internet. Her mail, if delivered at all, was heavily censored.

Once an accomplished pianist, Myanmar’s muggy equatorial heat long ago warped her instrument. Her only companionship: two long-serving, mother-and-daughter assistants.

Recent months have brought particular frustration. Suu Kyi was just a few weeks away from being released last year when she had an unexpected visit by an American, John Yettaw. She was found guilty of harboring anti-government elements and her sentence was extended.

At the time, one of her assistants told reporters: “It has been a hard life, she has sacrificed a lot. But she is used [to it] now. And she keeps working, waiting for the day she will be released.”

john.glionna@latimes.com
Suu Kyi outlasted her oppressors

One night a few years back, a California communications executive named Deborah Bowker was worried about her husband, who was sick and hospitalized. An old friend told her she shouldn’t be alone, that she should come over and stay the night.

The guest bedroom at the friend’s house was used most often by grandchildren, and contained two tiny beds. That night, Bowker was crying herself to sleep in one of them when the door cracked open. Without a word, Carly Fiorina padded across the room and crawled into the other bed.

Bowker and Fiorina have been close friends since they went to MIT together, and little changed for 20 years — until Fiorina decided to run for the U.S. Senate, with Bowker as her chief of staff.

That fretful night doesn’t seem like a big deal now. Bowker’s husband recovered, and Fiorina might not even remember it, Bowker said with a laugh. Bowker said she hadn’t told the story before and wasn’t sure why she was telling it now — except that she hardly recognizes Fiorina in the image that’s been created through the veneer of politics.

Those closest to Fiorina, 56, describe her as loyal and fun-loving, witty and bright. But they are well aware of the other image — of a pompous diva, aligned with the most strident factions of her Republican Party, pampered by a golden parachute after being fired from her high-profile job.

Fiorina the candidate hasn’t always helped matters. Her tone on the stump can be caustic. At one point in her dogged campaign against the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Barbara Boxer, an open microphone caught her belittling Boxer’s hair as “so yesterday.”

In a sneering attempt to connect with a “tea party” crowd near Fresno recently, she referred to San Francisco — the center of the metropolitan area where she spent nearly half of her life, the city just up the road from her 5,400-square-foot Los Altos Hills estate — as “that faraway world.”

And her critics tend to roll their eyes when Fiorina — who was raised on opera and French lessons, was the daughter of a powerful judge and has a sterling academic pedigree — pitches herself as a kind of Horatio Alger. Her journey, she said at one recent campaign event, was “only possible in the United States of America.”

Getting to know the person friends call “the real Carly,” meanwhile, can be a confounding task. Stung by several episodes in her life, including the unraveling of her first marriage and the brouhaha surrounding her firing from Hewlett-Packard, where she was chief executive, president and chairman, she is private and guarded.

Fiorina’s work ethic is legendary, and her discipline is one reason Boxer — a lioness of the left seeking her fourth Senate term — is in arguably the toughest race of her career. But Fiorina can be so on-message that she comes across as a machine.

During a recent heat wave, Fiorina met with business leaders in a sweltering City of Industry warehouse. A visitor joked that the record heat might cause her to rethink her position on global warming. Fiorina was not amused, launching instantly into her talking points about climate change — contending that she reserved the right to “challenge the science.”

On the campaign trail, it can be difficult to envision the Fiorina who could often be found dancing with the interns and the secretaries at the end of corporate parties, long after the other executives were gone. Or the woman who, on a recent boat trip, suddenly disappeared; she had jumped off the stern and hauled herself onto a tiny raft with her step-granddaughters.

Friends say she’s a fair cook and has a nice touch on the piano. She was raised Episcopalian but is not a regular churchgoer. She does Jane Fonda-style aerobics, whether she’s home or on the road.

She reads policy briefs on her iPad but reads books the old-fashioned way. She’s a voracious shopper, said one friend of 20 years, and gave one Hong Kong jeweler enough business that he put her picture in the window. She has at her disposal a household net worth estimated as high as $121 million and yachts on both coasts, and will be one of the wealthiest members of Congress if she wins.

She and her husband, Frank Fiorina, a former AT&T executive with blue-collar roots in Pittsburgh, have been married for 25 years. It is a second marriage for both; she calls him a “hunk” with some frequency.

Last fall, she threw him a sock-hop-themed 60th birthday party, tracking down friends he hadn’t seen in 30 years. Fiorina was stylish as ever, said an old friend, Kathy Fitzgerald, in a black dress and textured stockings — and, since she was being treated for breast cancer, bald.

Cara Carleton Sneed was born in Austin, Texas. Her mother, a talented oil painter, was a refugee from a troubled childhood in Ohio. Her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, was a University of Texas law professor whose ambition in academia meant that she was perpetually “the new kid,” she wrote in her autobiography, as the family moved repeatedly.

In 1969, while teenagers across America experimented with a new counterculture, Fiorina was in Ghana, where her father was teaching students about the country’s new constitution.

Fiorina’s father soon joined the Stanford law faculty, and she graduated from Stanford with a degree in philosophy and medieval history — which, she jokes, rendered her unemployable. She bounced from job to job, working as a typist, a temp, a receptionist. In 1980, she signed on as a management trainee with AT&T.

Fiorina presents a sharp contrast in images

The Supreme Court intervened again Monday in a lawsuit against a former George W. Bush administration official, agreeing to decide whether former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is entirely shielded from claims that he misused the law to arrest terrorism suspects under false pretenses.

Obama administration lawyers appealed on Ashcroft’s behalf and asserted that it would “severely damage law enforcement” if the nation’s top law enforcement official could be held liable for abusing his authority.

In the last five years, civil libertarians have tried, without much success, to sue former Bush administration officials for overstepping the law. These suits have run into a series of procedural barriers. For example, those who accused the government of wiretapping their phones without a search warrant had their cases thrown out of court on grounds they could not prove they had been wiretapped. Others who said they were wrongly arrested and tortured had their claims dismissed when the government invoked the “state secrets” privilege.

Last year, the Supreme Court shielded Ashcroft from being sued by Muslim immigrants in the New York area who said they were arrested and abused in jail after the 9/11 attacks, even though they had no involvement in a terrorism plot. In a 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that the suit against Ashcroft must be dismissed because the plaintiffs could not prove he ordered them to be abused.

The new case arose when Lavoni Kidd, a former football star at the University of Idaho, was arrested and shackled at Washington’s Dulles International Airport in March 2003. He was not taken into custody because he was suspected of a crime, but because he was a supposed “material witness” in another case.

Federal law permits the government in special situations to hold someone as a “material witness” in a pending case. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union accused Ashcroft of a “gross abuse” of this authority. They say he misused the law to arrest innocent people, even when the government lacked the required “probable cause.”

After the 9/11 attacks Ashcroft announced he would use all the legal authority at his disposal to capture terrorists. Hundreds of Muslim men were arrested and held on immigration charges. That option was not available in Kidd’s case because he is a U.S. citizen.

He had converted to Islam in college and changed him name to Abdullah Al-Kidd. He had cooperated with the FBI after the 9/11 attacks and answered questions about another Muslim man in Idaho who was under investigation in connection with his website.

Several months had elapsed since Kidd had heard from the FBI, but when he bought a round-trip ticket to travel to Saudi Arabia, where he had a study scholarship, the FBI moved to have him arrested. An FBI agent wrongly told a magistrate that Kidd had bought a one-way first-class ticket. The magistrate ordered Kidd arrested and held as a witness. A few days later, then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III testified in Congress and mentioned Kidd’s “arrest” as one of the bureau’s recent successes.

Kidd was strip-searched repeatedly and shackled for more than two weeks in a high-security cell where the lights were kept on, according to his complaint. He was then released, but his passport was taken. In 2005, Kidd sued Ashcroft and other officials, contending they had violated his constitutional rights by arresting him without probable cause.

Ashcroft moved to dismiss the suit, arguing that as the nation’s chief prosecutor, he was absolutely immune from such claims. But a federal judge in Idaho and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to dismiss the suit. Judge Milan Smith said it was “repugnant to the Constitution” for the government to say it “has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wants to investigate them for possible wrongdoing.”

This ruling, if allowed to stand, would have allowed the case against Ashcroft to proceed toward a trial.

But Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal appealed to the high court and argued that top prosecutors should be shielded from answering such allegations. “Absolute immunity applies regardless of the prosecutor’s intent,” he said.

The justices announced they will hear the case of Ashcroft vs. Al-Kidd early next year and decide whether the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity requires that the suit be dismissed. New Justice Elena Kagan said she would stay out of the case.

david.savage@latimes.com

Supreme Court to hear civil liberties suit against John Ashcroft

A trio of economics scholars, including an MIT professor whose nomination to the Federal Reserve board has been held up in the Senate, won the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for their studies of markets and how mismatches between buyers and sellers can contribute to such problems as high unemployment.

Peter A. Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fellow American Dale T. Mortensen, a professor at Northwestern University, will share the $1.5 million award with Christopher A. Pissarides, a British and Cypriot citizen who teaches at the London School of Economics.

The three men pioneered and developed models that help explain, among other things, why there are so many jobless people even as there are a large number of job openings — a problem that is particularly relevant today as the United States and other developed countries grapple with stubbornly high unemployment.

The U.S. jobless figure for September was reported Friday at 9.6%.

“The laureates’ models help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the prize.

“This may refer to benefit levels in unemployment insurance or rules in regard to hiring and firing,” the statement said. “One conclusion is that more generous unemployment benefits give rise to higher unemployment and longer search times.”

The idea that more-generous jobless benefits can provide a disincentive for workers to seek or take jobs has been hotly debated in the U.S. as policymakers have continued to face pressure to extend unemployment checks for millions of people.

Mortensen, in a conference call from Denmark, where he is currently a visiting professor at Aarhus University, said his models do show a negative effect of higher jobless benefits.

But he dismissed that as a major factor in the high unemployment, saying instead that the current job troubles are a function of the impaired financial markets.

“I really don’t think this is the time to worry about that,” Mortensen, 71, said of unemployment benefits.

The works of Diamond, who first developed a theoretical framework on “search markets” in the early 1970s, and Mortensen and Pissarides also offer insights into another ongoing debate among economists — whether the high unemployment today reflects structural deficiencies such as mismatches in skills or problems that are more cyclical in nature because of weak demand.

Some economists have argued the troubles are structural, suggesting that unemployment won’t be going back to the normal range of 5%, while others have emphasized that the terrible labor situation demands more substantial government stimulus to bolster demand for goods and services.

Diamond acknowledged that the process of improving the job market “is going to be slow and painful” for the whole economy and people looking for work. But he didn’t view it as a structural problem, suggesting more optimism for the future.

“I think the economy is very adaptive,” he said. “Workers and employers will adapt.”

Diamond, 70, who received his Ph.D. from MIT and has been a professor there since 1966, is considered by peers as a brilliant theorist whose works on social security systems are highly regarded.

Last spring he was nominated by President Obama to fill one of three vacancies on the Fed’s board. But while two other nominees to the Fed board were cleared recently, Diamond’s confirmation was effectively blocked by Senate Republicans.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, questioned whether the MIT professor had enough practical experience to serve as a Fed governor.

Asked about the Fed nomination during a news conference at MIT, Diamond said he would not withdraw his candidacy but declined to comment further.

don.lee@latimes.com
Three share Nobel Prize in economics

Thousands of activists from groups that support the Democratic Party gathered for a march and rally on the National Mall on Saturday in a bid to rejuvenate the enthusiasm of more liberal voters and stave off an expected GOP comeback in next month’s midterm elections.

Organizers said the rally included more than 400 groups representing black, gay and lesbian, labor, environmental and civil rights activists who gathered at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the “One Nation Working Together” rally. People from all 50 states attended the rally demanding improvements on jobs, justice and education.

“We bailed out the banks, we bailed out the insurance companies, now it’s time to bail out the American people. We need to re-build the infrastructure and provide jobs, and savings for the American people,” Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights activist, told the crowd.

After months of planning, the first groups of supporters arrived Saturday and festivities stretched well into afternoon. About 50 speakers and entertainers spoke at the rally including civil rights activists Rev. Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte, NAACP President Benjamin T. Jealous, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

“For the past two years President Obama has had to put up with the word no. Forty people, 40 people in the United States Senate have held down the working man of America. Forty Republicans have decided to say no.” liberal television and radio show host Ed Shultz said.

The progressive groups also focused on energizing democrats during the election season in which republicans and Tea Party activist continue gain momentum. It remains an open question of whether or not group organizers and activist can re-ignite democratic enthusiasm by November.

Laurie Christmas, traveled by bus from Toledo, Ohio to attended the rally. Christmas carried a sign that read “Health care. Not war fare,” on one side and a plea for green energy on the other. Christmas said she was excited to be surround by progressive thinkers but said she still has doubts about sparking progressive enthusiasm for the upcoming elections.

“Where are all the people who represented Obama in 2008,” Christmas asked as she pointed down the Mall. “There should be more people here.”

Cara MacDonald , a 21-year-old political science student from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va, sported her “I love pro-choice boys” T-shirt and said that even though democrats maybe frustrated this election, she does not believe they will shy away from the polls this November.

“It’s hard when people are riding the anti-Obama train,” MacDonald said. “But when democrats get people out to the polls, democrats win.”

The rally in part is a response to conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in August that drew thousands to hear a call to return to American values of liberty and faith. However, organizers said the “One Nation” rally had been planned since April.

A request to stop the One Nation rally was rejected by a Washington D.C. judge on Friday, according to Denise Gray-Felder, spokeswomen for. The request was filed by National Events, one of the companies that helped organized the Beck rally.

Beck has criticized the liberal response, in part because he said it includes members of socialist groups.
Terry Cardwell, 56 of Rome, N.Y., said she viewed the Beck rally as a “white revival,” and on Saturday she carried a sign that read, “Fear of diversity makes a bitter cup of tea.”

“I’m here to support what we started in 2008,” Cardwell said. “We can’t go back to what we’ve already had.”

jordan.steffen@latimes.com

Civil rights, labor groups rally on National Mall

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

By announcing major changes in his economic team ahead of the midterm elections, President Obama is hoping to galvanize a listless Democratic base that has been unimpressed with the administration’s efforts to ease unemployment and buoy the still-troubled housing market.

The two key moves — Lawrence Summers’ exit as top economic advisor and Elizabeth Warren’s ascendance as a consumer protection czar — are widely viewed as overtures to liberal Democrats, a voting bloc that must turn out in large numbers if the party is to stave off deep losses in the Nov. 2 congressional elections.

“Larry Summers was never that popular with the base, and this president is desperately trying to mobilize the base between now and November,” said Stephen Wayne, a government professor at Georgetown University.

“Elizabeth Warren coming and Larry Summers going, these are moves designed to placate the Democratic base and mobilize it as we approach the election,” Wayne said.

At the same time, administration officials insist Obama does not intend a broad retreat from his economic policies.

“The change in personnel is not going to affect the course that we’re on,” said Jared Bernstein, chief economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. “We’re going to build on the momentum that the policies have helped to create.”

Indeed, there is little else Obama can do to lower the jobless rate, reduce home foreclosures or improve growth before the November elections. The economy moves too slowly for that, and so does Congress.

On Thursday, for example, congressional Democrats indicated that they might put off a crucial decision on whether to extend temporary, Bush-era tax cuts until after the November election.

Obama announced this week that Summers would be leaving at the end of the year, the third member of his economic team to make departure plans public in recent weeks. Summers had long planned to return to Harvard, but announcing the move now is seen as giving Obama a political boost ahead of the elections.

A week ago, Obama appointed Warren to set up the new federal agency charged with protecting consumers from abuses by banks, credit card companies and other financial firms. She also joined the White House economic team.

Both Summers and Warren evoke strong emotions among Democrats.

Summers is loathed by many progressives, who see him as tied to Wall Street interests. At the same time, the left praised the arrival of Warren, hailing the Harvard law professor as a champion of the middle class.

But nothing in the new lineup of advisors suggests Obama is abandoning the path out of the deep recession he has plotted over the past 20 months.

Two pivotal vacancies — budget director and chair of the Council of Economic Advisors — have been filled from within the administration. And although the White House has said Obama might tap a corporate executive to replace Summers, the team’s most senior member will continue to be Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, a chief architect of the administration’s economic policy.

Some economists said that strategy was a mistake given the slowing pace of economic growth and continued deep problems in the housing market. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts a modest 2.1% increase in real economic output next year, far too weak to make much of a dent in 9.6% national jobless rate.

“There’s a distinction between shaking up the team and making shifts in policy,” said Robert Shapiro, an economic official in the Clinton administration.

“The question is how much confidence do they have that, without additional measures, the economy will strengthen on its own,” he said. “I think Larry had confidence in that six months ago … but no one has as much confidence in it today.”

While Obama has one eye on the midterms, he is also focused on his reelection in 2012. The president and his economic team have been adamant that the economy is on the right track and that their policies simply need more time to reverse the effects of the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

“We’re moving in the right direction,” Obama said this week during a town hall meeting about the economy.

Obama plays to his base with financial team moves

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan survived a takeover attempt within his own ruling Democratic Party on Tuesday, defeating a crafty and ambitious political boss who had helped set the stage for Kan’s rise to power just three months ago.

Kan’s defeat of challenger Ichiro Ozawa spares the nation, already staggering from a prolonged economic slump and perceived leadership void, from the upheaval of having its third new prime minister in just 12 months, and its sixth in four years.

For many, the results signaled a hard-won victory over Ozawa’s old-school style of backroom political arm-twisting by a pragmatic former civic activist who was able to hold off one of the controversial and entrenched kingpins of Japanese politics.

Yet Kan, 63, did not emerge unscathed from Tuesday’s party leadership vote, which could jeopardize his efforts to rein in Japan’s huge public debt and prolong its fragile recovery, activists said.

Although both politicians pledged before the election to work to support the victor, some analysts said a spurned Ozawa could split the party, fleeing with his loyal faction.

“How much of a victory this is for Kan depends on how Ozawa reacts,” said Wilhelm Vosse, a political scientist at International Christian University in Tokyo. “Given his nickname, ‘the Destroyer,’ Ozawa might come back if Kan gets into trouble, or he might immediately leave and set up his own party. Then Kan would really have a big problem maintaining his party’s majority.”

Known as a shrewd but critically-flawed political strategist, Ozawa is credited with engineering the Democratic Party’s surprise victory last August, ending a half-century of rule by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party.

But the seemingly indecisive Democratic Party soon stumbled. In one ill-timed move that many say further ruptured public confidence, Kan proposed to double Japan’s sales tax to as high as 10%. His party soon lost its upper house majority in a July election.

In August, the enigmatic Ozawa surprised supporters and critics alike when he announced that he would challenge Kan for the party’s presidency and take over as prime minister.

Kan, a plain-spoken fiscal disciplinarian and former finance minister, enjoyed a 4-to-1 margin of support in some public polls. Others interviewing younger Japanese, however, showed Ozawa ahead by the same margin.

Over the weekend, rank-and-file Democratic Party members voted overwhelmingly for Kan, but their ballots counted for only a third of the total. On Tuesday, Kan won slightly more than half the votes cast by the party’s 411 parliamentarians in the Japanese Diet, eventually giving him an unexpectedly wide margin of victory, 721-491.

An Ozawa victory would have been a stunning comeback for the controversial insider, who resigned as the party’s vice president in June amid a lingering funding scandal. He faces indictment as early as next month, but has denied all charges.

Tuesday’s power play could be Ozawa’s last. He has said that vote “wraps up my political life.”

But analysts said his influence in Japanese politics is far from over.

Now Kan is tasked with spearheading the troubled finances of a nation recently surpassed by China as the world’s second-largest economy. He has called for job creation and has threatened to slash wasteful spending.

In a not-so-subtle attack on Ozawa, Kan in recent days pledged to break free from “the old politics of money” and make government more transparent and less dictated by sleazy backroom deals.

With only three months in power — those coming during the slow summer months — analysts said Kan has had little opportunity to show his political prowess.

“Kan’s prevailing wasn’t a big surprise — [he's] only been in office for about three months. There really isn’t a legitimate reason for him to leave his position,” said Kensuke Takayasu, a political scientist at Seikei University.

“I think it would have been pretty difficult for a figure like Ozawa, someone who is undergoing prosecution, to actually lead as prime minister for this country.”

With the clean political slate won on Tuesday, experts say, Kan could stop Japan’s recent revolving door of prime ministers.

“He has momentum — the question is how long that will last,” said Vosse. “Unfortunately for Japanese politicians and especially with prime ministers, the public is fickle.

“In a few weeks or months, he could lose his current support rate, which has risen to 55% during this recent campaign. If he can show voters he is a true leader and wants to grab this opportunity with both hands, he can be successful.”

john.glionna@latimes.com

Yuriko Nagano, a freelance writer based in Tokyo, and Ethan Kim in the Times’ Seoul bureau, contributed to this report.
Japan’s prime minister survives challenge from within his own party

Two years ago, when Californians were voting on an initiative that would have trimmed prison time for nonviolent drug offenders, Bob Wilson, a wealthy New York City investor, spent $2.8 million on the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to get it passed.

Wilson would seem a likely sugar daddy for Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot. He has been giving away much of his fortune, more than $500 million so far, and he believes that pot, which he tried but didn’t much like, ought to be legal.

“There’s no intellectual argument whatever for not legalizing it,” Wilson said. “People who get stoned do much less damage to themselves and others than people who get drunk.”