Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

White House press secretary Jay Carney, rear, is seen on a television monitor during his daily news briefing at the White House.

In Washington, it’s often more the cover-up than the scandal that undoes a president.

“And when it’s over, we’ll be hard-pressed to remember how it began.”

So wrote Jay Carney, then a correspondent for Time magazine, in 2007, in the midst of the Bush administration’s growing second-term problems.

Carney now serves as press secretary for President Barack Obama as potentially disabling second-term crises have arisen on three fronts: The administration’s handling of the fatal attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya, the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and the Justice Department’s surveillance of reporters’ telephone records in a case of purported national security.

The White House was at the center of only one of these matters — public communication about the Benghazi attack. The IRS and Justice Department brought the other problems to the White House’s doorstep — it appears, with the administration maintaining it knew nothing of either affair at the time it was conducted. Yet the White House stands front and center on the question of what might be done about apparent over-reaching of government police power — the Justice Department, on the receiving and giving end here, has opened a criminal investigation of the IRS. And Attorney General Eric Holder is on the Hill today.

The White House, many of its own allies are saying, has been slow to learning the lesson that, in crisis management, the management is often more important than the crisis. And, as Bloomberg and others are reporting this morning, the Obama White House needs an accelerated learning curve.

“There’s an industrial-scandal complex that exists in Washington, D.C.,” says Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked as a special assistant counsel to Clinton. “You need to have some kind of entity within the building that’s capable of managing these situations.”

The administration’s response “sounded exceedingly passive to me,” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s first press secretary, said in an interview on MSNBC. “The tenor of this briefing would be different if the president had spoken about this on Saturday or Sunday and not on Monday.”

As Carney himself put it, with Time co-author Massimo Calabresi, in 2007:

In Washington, scandals metastasize, growing and changing until we can’t remember what they were about in the beginning. A bungled burglary became a cancer on the presidency, forcing Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. A money-losing Arkansas real estate deal led to Monica, a blue dress and Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Already, the furor over the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys has shifted focus from the crass but essentially routine exercise of political patronage to the essential project of George W. Bush’s presidency: its deliberate and aggressive efforts to expand and protect Executive power.

Which is why divining the true motives behind the dismissals is only part of the battle under way in Washington. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have spent six years expanding presidential powers at the expense of Congress and the judiciary, from authorizing domestic wiretapping to limiting habeas corpus and changing bills through signing statements. Democrats, in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 12 years, are determined to reclaim what they can. And the U.S. Attorneys case gives them powerful new ammunition.

Just getting Karl Rove and other top White House officials to testify could be as important as anything they might say, since it would set a precedent of sorts as Democrats push to investigate internal White House deliberations on everything from Iraq-war contracting to the use of prewar intelligence. Bush is resisting, offering to give only limited interviews with lawmakers with no transcript. Anything more than that, he says, would be an infringement on presidential privilege.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales remains a likely casualty, but the history of past scandals suggests his resignation would not be enough to end the current one. Hearings will be held, subpoenas issued, new investigations launched. And when it’s over, we’ll be hard-pressed to remember how it began.

Original post is Carney: ‘Scandals Metastasize’ — in the Industrial-Scandal Complex by Political Capital.

Photograph by Julio Cortez/AP Photo

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talks during a town hall meeting at Raritan Valley Community College, on April 11, 2013, in Branchburg, N.J.

Six months after Sandy, the shores of New Jersey and New York are still climbing out of the rubble of a super-storm’s wrath.

Billions of dollars in federal aid which took three months to secure from a resistant House are still on hold, as authorities sort out the spending of money that will help people elevate their flood-ruined homes before rebuilding them.

Housing and Urban Development Director Shaun Donovan is joining New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for an announcement about some of this aid today.

And this morning, Christie was reunited on the set of MSMBC’s “Morning Joe,” broadcast live from Jersey Shore, with the little girl who made him cry after the storm, Ginjer, whose family was displaced from their home by Sandy.

Great seeing my friend Ginjer at @morning_joe this AM #6monthssincesandy twitter.com/GovChristie/st…

— Governor Christie (@GovChristie) April 29, 2013

It was Ginjer Doherty, 8 at the time of the storm, who wrote the recent 219-word essay about Christie in Time magazine’s Top-100 most influential people in the world edition — his second appearance on that list.

“The governor told me not to worry — that my parents would take care of everything — and he looked very serious and sad, and he cried. He said he would be back to help our town,” she wrote.

Ginjer got to go to the governor’s mansion too — where she was told: Nobody makes the governor cry.

Christie has nothing to cry about these days. He holds a 60-25 percentage point lead over his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Barbara Buono, in the latest Quinnipiac survey a few months out from Election Day in the Garden State.

His approval rating: 67 percent.

Original post is Christie and Ginjer: 67% and Smiling by Political Capital.

“History has no time for more than one sentence,” she said, according to a Time magazine account, “and it is always a sentence that has an active verb.”

As President Barack Obama prepares for his second inaugural address this morning in Washington, he still is a president in search of a sentence. His aides will point to the passage of Obama-care, bringing the country out of a financial crisis, or ending the war in Iraq.

Yet for a man who came to power with such promise four years ago, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize nine months into his term for what he might do, those accomplishments don’t seem grand enough.

To be sure, he is governing in an era of acute polarization, and that complicates his task. When Roosevelt won passage of Social Security, he had well more than 200 surplus Democratic votes in Congress. When Lyndon Johnson delivered on Medicare, he had more than 130 Democratic votes. Big change usually one comes when a president has big margins.

But great leaders are supposed to overcome impediments, largely through their powers of persuasion. So this morning’s address represents another opportunity for Obama, who as a young high school student wrote of the extraordinary power of words.

Words in many respects got him to this place. His speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, with its appeal for a unity, sameness and oneness, launched his path to the presidency. His campaign in 2008, with its airy slogan of hope and change, only stoked the notion that he would be a transformative leader.

Four years ago, in the frigid cold, 1.8 million people flooded the National Mall, the crowd stretching from the steps of the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a happy, festive occasion, and hope was indeed in the air. That quickly gave way to battles between Republicans and Democrats in Congress, who couldn’t even agree to disagree, and the president did not prove to be a healer.

Today, the streets were less jammed, the crowds cut in half and the expectations lower. But second terms and second inaugural addresses are also about second chances and new beginnings.

Will Barack Obama finally deliver that sentence?

Original post is Obama’s Task: That Elusive Sentence by Political Capital.

Photograph by Time Magazine via AP

President Barack Obama is Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

President Barack Obama, who won re-election last month and is the “author of a new America,” is Time magazine’s Person of the Year for a second time, the publication said today.

The president joins 12 others who have been honored twice.

The announcement was made by managing editor Rick Stengel on NBC’s “Today” show.

“After four of the most challenging years in the nation’s history, his chance to leave office as a great president who was able to face crises and build a new majority coalition remains within reach,” the magazine said.

The weekly news magazine for the past 85 years has selected the person, or sometimes a group or thing, who or that its editors deemed had the single greatest impact during the past year, for better or for worse.

Obama won the same honor in 2008 as president-elect.

See Time’s account.

Original post is Obama Time’s `Person of the Year’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

President Barack Obama at a campaign event at The Ohio State University Oval, on Oct. 9, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio.

While President Barack Obama is virtually tied with Republican Mitt Romney in some Ohio polls, he holds a commanding lead among early voters in one new survey today.

Among Ohioans who have not yet voted, the candidates are in a dead heat, both garnering 45 percent support, according to a Time Magazine poll.

But among respondents who say they’ve already voted, Obama doubles up on Romney by  60-30 percent, Time finds.

Counting both Ohioans who say they will head to the polls on Nov, 6, and those who already have  cast a ballot, Obama holds a 49-44 percent lead, the Time survey shows.

Early voting began Oct. 2 in Ohio and runs through Nov. 5.

About a third of Ohioans voted early in 2008, Time reports.

The poll’s margin of  error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Web link:

Original post is Obama’s Early Ohio Voting a Boon — Five-Point State Lead in Time Poll by Political Capital.

Photograph by Reed Saxon/AP Photo

Luciano Guadalupe joins demonstrators protesting outside the site of a fundraiser for Mitt Romney at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Mitt Romney “on his tippy-toes.”

It’s a curious image to conjure.

Yet there’s a lot of dancing going on in campaign circles today.

As Romney’s campaign accused President Barack Obama of taking special care of his friendly donors, the president’s campaign maintained that Romney is trying to change the subject amid demands for him to release more of his personal financial records.

“President Obama has set a bar of transparency that Mitt Romney has not met, cannot possibly meet, even on his tippy-toes,” Jen Psaki, the president’s traveling campaign press secretary, said today aboard Air Force One en route to Obama’s appearances in Ohio. “We have released bundlers, we release people regularly who visit the White House. We release far more than Mitt Romney has come close to.”

“These are old, tired, haggard attacks,” Psaki said, accusing Romney of trying to “to change the conversation because he doesn’t want to answer questions about his time at Bain Capital.”

Romney is answering a lot of questions about his time at Bain, the private equity firm he co-founded and ran for many years with great success — he maintains that while he held his stake in the firm after leaving in February 1999 to run the Olympics,  he relinquished control over decisions the company made, choices which the Obama campaign now challenges in painting Romney as the “outsourcer-in-chief.”

As for the charges of cronyism, White House press secretary Jay Carney suggested today in the “gaggle” with reporters aboard Air Force One that the Republican-run House has spent a lot of “time and energy” probing all that “and they’ve come out with exactly zero evidence… of improper behavior.”

“He’s treading on thin ice here,” said Psaki, conjuring up yet more dancing imagery.

Joe Klein, seasoned campaign watcher, Time magazine columnist and creator of  “Primary Colors,” says he’s seen this picture before. The Obama campaign, he suggests, is painting the Romney campaign with the same brush with which George H.W. Bush painted Michael Dukakis in 1988 — or with which the “Swift Boat” campaign painted John Kerry in 2004.

(Romney was asked during his round-robin appearances on five network news programs Friday night — on CNN — if he feels he’s being “Swift-Boated,” and he declined to take that bait. So Klein and company on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today went ahead and said it for Romney — he’s being “Swift-Bained.”)

The point, though, is that the art of the campaign dance often involves turning a candidate’s presumed strength into his weakness — making a mockery of Kerry’s multiple medals from the war in Vietnam, for instance, or in this case turning Romney’s great success in private business against him. (Note, too, that Dukakis, Kerry and Romney all hailed from Massachusetts.)

Romney is making his own calculation in this dance.

Think of it as a return on disclosure — much like the return on investment anyone expects in a good business move.

The return, for Romney, in disclosing 23 years of personal federal income tax returns when Arizona Senator John McCain was considering him as a possible running mate in 2004 was great: he could have been a vice presidential contender. The risk was nil. It was part of a private vetting. What was said in Arizona stayed in Arizona.

The return, for Romney is disclosing a dozen of so years of returns in his 2012 bid for the White House could be great in one way: Assuring the voting public that he has nothing to hide. Yet it could carry huge risk: returns that disclose even smaller tax payments than the 13.9 percent  effective tax rate he paid in his one fully disclosed tax return, for 2010 — or perhaps years of no payments. Or income from some of those dealings for which Bain is being most deeply scrutinized. Or more tax havens.

This is a candidate who reported no wages, salaries or tips in 2010 — rather $12.6 million in capital gains, $4.9 million in ordinary dividends and $3.3 million in taxable interest. So it’s little wonder that the Obama campaign, working to turn Romney’s assets into liabilities, thinks it’s keeping Romney on his toes.

Original post is Romney’s `Swift-Baining, Tippy-Toes’ and Possible Return on Disclosure by Political Capital.