Four years later, this time with an improving economy threatened by a showdown with Republicans over the debt ceiling, Obama arrived in the East Room for the final news conference of his first term, wearing his party’s color — a blue tie — and issuing an ultimatum.

“Republicans in Congress have two choices here: They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly, and put America through another economic crisis,” he said. “But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.”

As he prepares to take the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts at a small ceremony Sunday in the White House, Democrat Obama has shed the aura of a hopeful consensus builder determined to break partisan gridlock. Instead, he’s adopted a more confrontational stance, refusing to negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling and asserting executive authority on gun control.

“He’s much more battle hardened in terms of understanding that the opposition may not just be subject to sitting down and reasoning together,” said John Podesta, who was former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. “He’s shaping the battlefield now, with a much keener understanding of what the opposition looks like.”

See the full story on Obama’s second term at Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Obama `Battle Hardened’ for Term Two by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

President Barack Obama tours the Copper Mountain Solar Project, the largest photovoltaic plant operating in the country, on March 21, 2012 in Boulder City, Nevada.

Written with Alex Morales

One of the biggest things President Barack Obama can do to fight global warming is to talk about it.

That’s the conclusion of at least seven former presidential aides and advisers serving in three administrations. Their comments came as envoys from more than 190 countries at a United Nations conference in Doha took steps toward completing a treaty by 2015 that would limit fossil fuel emissions starting in 2020.

While Obama is succeeding in shaping the international response to the issue, he hasn’t said enough about it at home, said the officials, led by John Podesta, who oversaw Obama’s transition into office four years ago. Obama’s reticence may make it more difficult to persuade Congress and the public to favor an international deal toward the end of his second term.

“The president really has to start talking about climate change again,” Podesta said in an interview in Washington. “He  as to engage a national conversation, not just one White House meeting, but a big conversation.”

Obama’s re-election and what it means for global-warming policy was the biggest question at the UN talks, which concluded in Doha on Dec. 8. Ministers agreed to streamline their negotiations, focusing on the 2015 goal and reviving the push for a treaty that failed in 2009 in Copenhagen. They also renewed pollution limits under the Kyoto Protocol.

The U.S. joined in backing the consensus at the meeting, signaling its willingness to work toward a treaty that would bind all nations into mandatory cuts for fossil fuel emissions.

Obama can’t win Senate support for a treaty without making a public argument for it now, said Christine Todd Whitman, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001 to 2003 under former President George W. Bush.

“That’s the only way it’s going to move forward, if Obama takes the lead and lays out to the American people the economic liability of not preparing for climate change,” Whitman said in an interview.

Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who co-authored economy-wide “cap-and-trade” legislation passed by the House in 2009, agrees.

“President Obama needs to talk about climate change and help the American public connect the dots between extreme weather, climate change, our energy policy and the progress we are already making on reducing emissions,” Markey said in an e-mailed response to questions. “The public will be more accepting of an international climate deal if they understand what we are already doing” to fight global warming.

See the full climate treaty report at Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Climate Treaty Hinges on Obama — Speaking Out, Former Aides Say by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT/Getty Images

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference.

The divide between the impoverished and privileged in the United States is widening, with a society of once great ideals following a disturbing path toward an unsustainable future — a nation in need of “restoration.”

A new regime of educational accountability is the solution to changing the nation’s course — with stringent standards and testing for schoolchildren, appropriate pay for the most talented teachers, a choice of schools for children attending inadequate classes and an embracement of technology.

This was the message that Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, delivered this morning in his keynote address to nearly 1,000 people assembled for a two-day national summit of his Foundation for Excellence in Education in Washington.

There is an unmistakable political message in this as well.

Bush, whose two terms as governor in Florida from 1999 to 2007 were distinguished by his commitment to an “A-Plus” plan for education that rewarded higher-performing public schools, is widely viewed as one of the Republican Party’s top prospects for a presidential campaign in 2016. And, while he has remained mum about any plans for that following the loss of Republican Mitt Romney on Nov. 6, Bush did meet with some of his longtime political and policy advisers in Washington on the eve of this annual conference — including Neil Newhouse, a Washington-area pollster who campaigned for Romney this year and has served Bush in the past.

(Newhouse polled for Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns in 1998 and 2002, and his partner at Public Opinion Strategies, Bill McInturff, polled  for Bush’s first bid in 1994. The gathering of Newhouse and other past advisers here is a regular event for Bush when he’s in town, Bush associates say — calling any reading of the meeting of the “alums”  as a political sign ridiculous. Newhouse called it an informal gathering of about two dozen mostly policy-oriented people over drinks, with no speeches by Bush or anyone else in that open-doored room.)

Still, Bush is embellishing a message on which his older brother, former President George W. Bush, campaigned for president in 2000: The Texas governor proposed a national regime of school accountability, contending that the nation must combat “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” He pursued that during his first year, winning passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a law signed as the nation’s attention was suddenly turned to terrorism by the attacks of September 11, 2001. The law was enacted by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, though it since has become a target of ridicule for “teaching to the test,” with states complaining that the federal government never supplied the financing necessary to help them meet the national standards.

It’s a durable message for a post-Iraq, and ultimately post-Afghanistan campaign — with the 2016 presidential campaign offering potential anew for a contest centered on domestic issues. Bush, who today called himself “a Texan by birth and a Floridian by choice,” has been pursuing education reform since 1994, when he lost his first election as governor and started a charter school in Miami with the leader of the Urban League there.

“He was a principled governor, principled politician,” said Phil Handy, an Orlando business consultant who chaired Bush’s campaigns. Handy credits Bush with a series of accolades that sound bumper-sticker-ready: “Persistence, courage, principle, strategic thinking.” He likes to say “the job is never done,” Handy told the ballroom crowd at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington today. This room with representatives from 45 states, he said,“attests to the fact that the job isn’t done.”

That job, as Bush tells it, is getting a nation back on track. And it starts in the classroom.

It is, he said, “a cause greater than ourselves” — the “restoration” of America, founded on education.

“Past is prologue… and history has a way of repeating itself, so learning from history is important,” said Bush, citing a recently read book by the sociologist Charles Murray about “this great challenge that faces our nation.” The U.S., Bush said, has moved from a nation of shared ideals to “a country that is changing not for the better.”

“We have these huge gaps in income,” he said, with “people born into poverty who will stay in poverty.”

“This ideal of who we are as a nation… it’s going away, it’s leaving us,” he said, maintaining that “there is one path that can change this course… a child-centered education.”

“Where is the outrage, where is the shame of this?” Bush asked in his keynote address to the fifth annual series of foundation conferences that have roamed from Washington in election years to other venues such as San Francisco. “This is not the America that we love… We ought to shake the complacency off of us… to challenge the complacency of the time.”

“I would suggest to you that high standards — I’m not kidding standards — is the first step,” he said, calling for a system of common measurements nationally and teacher evaluations based on their professional skills, not their union membership or tenure. Those standards, the offering of choices such as charter schools and tuition vouchers and technology that allows students to advance at their own pace are the key, he said. “If we stay true to these five ideals… we can reverse this trend and shake the complacency.”

“All children are not above average… I know that will be a shock to a lot of people,” he said, yet testing will reveal who needs the most improvement. “We’ll have a challenge — will we have the courage to stay the course, to faithfully implement higher standards… and recognize the fact that too many of our children are lagging behind…. We have to start with higher expectations for the next generation.

“If we’ve learned one lesson from reform, it is this: we continually underestimate children…. It will take some adjustment but our kids will rise to the challenge,” Bush said. “We reward the things we want more of… We are not as happy when there is mediocrity… and when there is failure, we should have no tolerance for it.”

The words are familiar.

We’ve heard them from this Bush since 1994, in Florida and at his national conferences. We heard them from his brother from Texas in 2000. And we heard them again today in Washington, a few blocks from the White House.

Original post is Jeb Bush’s American `Restoration’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on the final day of the Republican National Convention (RNC).

Updated at 1:15 pm EST

Jeb Bush is in town.

The former Florida governor, brother of one former president and son of another, is encamped in Washington — in a hotel just a few blocks from the White House, as the National Review Online notes  – ostensibly for another national conference of his Foundation for Excellence in Education. It’s the fifth annual conference, the last one in San Francisco. Bush sets the election year parleys in Washington.

While here, NRO’s Robert Costa reports, Bush held a private, one-hour meeting Monday with some political operatives — including Neil Newhouse, a Washington-area pollster who served as Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign pollster and has a long association with Bush.

Neilhouse, of Alexandria, Va.-based Public Opinion Strategies, polled for both of Bush’s winning campaigns in 1998 and 2002. He tells Political Capital that the get-together yesterday was nothing but an informal gathering of a couple of mostly policy-oriented associates of Bush over drinks — the door to their meeting open, with no speechifying.

Bush, Costa reports, was not ruling out a presidential run of his own in 2016: “I am here to catch up with folks and promote education reform,” he said in an interview — with a reported smile. He called the crew with whom he met in the J.W. Marriott hotel’s Cannon room “an alumni group that I like keeping in touch with.” He maintained that he is “here to focus on educational reform.”

Bush, who served two terms as governor and has long been involved in education reform,  opened his two-day education summit of workshops and speeches at the Marriott this morning as the “keynote” breakfast speaker. They counted 950 people from 45 states.

They’ll be talking about many of the same issues that Bush has explored since starting another foundation following his first, losing, campaign for governor in 1994, when he opened a charter school in Miami with the leader of the Urban League there, T. Willard Fair: School choice. Tuition vouchers are on the agenda today.

True to form, Bush has an ecumenical guest list: With Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, and John Podesta, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, on the speakers’ list. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who had been seen as a potential Republican presidential candidate this year, will deliver the keynote breakfast address tomorrow.

And the keynoters tonight at dinner include: Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state in the administration of Bush’s brother, former President George W. Bush, will join Joel Klein, a former education chancellor for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Original post is Jeb Bush: `Here’ for Education by Political Capital.

Even as now-President Obama continues to eschew donations from lobbyists, the Podestas and scores of others who ply their trade will be a major part of this year’s Democratic conclave in Charlotte, North Carolina — just as many of them were at the Republican National Convention last week in Tampa, Florida.

The Podestas will be hosting brunches Monday and Tuesday. The meals will allow the couple “to introduce people to the world-class Mint Museum and eat great southern farm-to-table cuisine,” Heather Podesta said.

“Yum and fun,” she added.

The Podestas’ clients include BP Plc, Prudential Financial Inc. and Lockheed Martin Corp.

Other good times during the week include a Sept. 5 reception for “transportation policy leaders.” Sponsors include Airlines for America and similar trade groups for the trucking and bus industries.

“We want to make sure they’re hearing our message, ” said Jean Medina, a spokeswoman for Airlines for America.

The reception is similar to one that the groups sponsored for the Republicans.

Also coming to Charlotte after Tampa is an opportunity for convention attendees to take batting practice. The event at the local minor league ballpark will raise money for children’s hospitals in Charlotte and Chicago. The Charlotte Knights are a farm team for the Chicago White Sox and the Illinois delegation, led by Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, will be special guests.

Original post is Obama May Eschew Their Money, But Lobbyists Flock to Charlotte by Political Capital.