Obama softens ban on hiring lobbyists

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | November 12, 2008

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama, who vowed during his campaign that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” said through a spokesman yesterday that he would allow lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs.

Obama’s transition chief laid out ethics rules – which also bar transition staff from lobbying the administration for one year if they become lobbyists later – and portrayed them as the strictest ever for a transfer of presidential power.

But independent analysts said yesterday that the move is less than the wholesale removal of lobbyists that he suggested during the campaign – and shows how difficult it will be to lessen the pervasive influence of more than 40,000 registered lobbyists.

“That is a step back and there is no other way of seeing it,” said Craig Holman, who lobbies on governmental affairs for the watchdog group Public Citizen. Nonetheless, he said, Obama is still making “a very concrete effort to avoid what I consider a potentially corrupting situation.”

Obama, who promised to change how business gets done in Washington, railed against lobbyists in the upper ranks of rival John McCain’s campaign.

The Democrat also refused to take money from federal lobbyists, and lobbyists will be banned from donating to the transition, which is expected to involve 450 employees and cost about $12 million, $5.2 million of that from taxpayers. The remainder is to be raised privately, with a $5,000-per-person contribution limit and a ban on donations from corporations and political action committees, as well as lobbyists.

“Barack Obama has pledged to change the way Washington works and to curb the influence of lobbyists,” John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team, told reporters. “We are announcing rules that are the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.”

To reinforce that point, Obama’s camp office also issued statements from two Washington think tanks often at ideological odds, which praised the rules as tough and bold. Podesta said staff members who lobbied in the last year won’t be allowed to work in their field in the transition and will have to cease all lobbying while they are part of the transition team. He said he would have “more to say” later regarding details about rules for lobbyists in the administration, apparently including whether such people could be hired immediately to work in areas on which they have not lobbied.

During his campaign, Obama declared: “I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race. I don’t take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House.”

That left unclear whether he was referring to the relatively small number of staff members in the West Wing or to the hundreds of political appointees throughout an administration. Obama’s campaign website said a lobbyist could join the administration as long as he or she didn’t work on “regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” He also proposed that political appointees be prohibited from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of the administration, if they left government.

During the campaign, Obama’s anti-lobbyist rules weren’t ironclad. His staff included some lobbyists, though his aides said they stopped all such activities once they joined the campaign full time. He accepted fund-raising help from lobbyists registered with states and took money from associates and family members of federal lobbyists.

Brian Pallasch, president of the American League of Lobbyists, said yesterday that members of his organization grew weary of being pummeled by both presidential candidates. Invoking the right to present their case to lawmakers, thousands of lobbyists represent millions of Americans, Pallasch said.

The change of administration and the prospect of dividing up billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street firms and to stimulate the economy are bound to create more business for lobbyists, he said.

Pallasch said that many lobbyists have expertise on an issue that would prove helpful in improving the efficiency of the large and complex federal government. “They can use that knowledge to make the government better,” he said. “I don’t think that should necessarily be seen as a negative thing.”

Podesta said yesterday that he has heard complaints that Obama’s policy would leave “all the people who know everything out in the cold.”

“So be it,” he said. The American public expects Obama to carry through on his campaign pledges “so that the undue influence of Washington lobbyists and the revolving door of Washington ceases to exist,” said Podesta, who was President Clinton’s chief of staff in the final two years of that administration.

Podesta, in a wide-ranging update on the transition 70 days from the inauguration, said that Obama would like to begin naming Cabinet nominees as soon as possible, but would take the time needed to make the right choices.

He reiterated that Obama wants to provide aid to the troubled auto industry, but said no decisions have been made. Congress may meet next week in a lame-duck session and consider whether to approve an economic stimulus package and more aid to automakers, but it is unclear whether Republicans will support the measures. If Republicans balk, the matter will be held over until after Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration, when Democrats will have a larger majority in Congress.

Podesta also said that Obama has no plans to meet with foreign leaders at a global economic summit in Washington this weekend, hosted by President Bush. “We have one president at a time, and it’s important that the president can speak for the United States at the summit,” Podesta said.

Material from the Associated Press was also used in this report.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama wants to renew the U.S. commitment to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to his national security advisers.

The Obama team believes the Bush administration has downplayed the importance of catching the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist because it has not been able to find him.

“We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority,” Obama said during the presidential debate on October 7.

But tracking down bin Laden won’t be easy.

In May, al Qaeda released an audiotape featuring bin Laden. But U.S. intelligence officials say they haven’t had a solid lead on the terrorist mastermind’s whereabouts since late 2001, when he was nearly captured in a battle with U.S. forces near Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, told CNN he’s talked to “a dozen CIA guys who’ve been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don’t know.” Watch the hunt for bin Laden ¬ª

Intelligence officials believe bin Laden is hiding in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, a remote and primitive region with mountain peaks as tall as 14,000 feet (4,270 meters) that make the terrain difficult to navigate.

“If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie ‘Deliverance,’ multiplied by a factor of 10, that’s really what you’re focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,” said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan.

The region is divided up by tribes, some of them warring. Developing human sources in the area has been extremely difficult. See a timeline of bin Laden’s terror messages ¬ª

“What you literally need to have is an army of individual informants, hopefully focused on the areas that you think bin Laden is most likely to be hiding in,” said Grenier, now a security consultant with Kroll.

“But again, you need to have a whole lot of them because one individual who may have access to the families and the clans in a particular valley, if he goes to the valley next door and starts asking questions, he’s probably gonna end up dead pretty quickly.”

The U.S. government is offering a $25 million reward for information leading to bin Laden’s capture, but officials who have worked in the region say the people living there would consider it dishonorable to take the money.

The United States has had some success killing al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan using unmanned drones equipped with Hellfire missiles, but those attacks have killed innocent civilians as well, complicating the political situation between the two countries.

Obama plans to send more troops into Afghanistan to push back the growing Taliban insurgency, but experts warn there could be severe consequences.

“The president is going to inherit the problem the Soviets had roughly 15 years ago during the Soviet jihad. You cannot tame the people in the North-West Frontier Province and on the border in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Dalton Fury, the commander of special operations at Tora Bora.

“The only army that has been successful has been Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde. They cut off heads and killed everyone in the villages, and since we have self-imposed rules of warfare, we are not going to do what they did.”

Cooperation from Pakistan’s military has been touchy, and most experts agree finding bin Laden is just not a priority for Pakistan’s troops.

Fury says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden. Intelligence officials do not believe he is playing an operational role and so has no reason to move around or communicate.

“I think it’s important to understand that bin Laden had his chance at martyrdom. He was in the mountains of Tora Bora, he ran away. In my opinion, I think we ought to promote this,” Fury said.

He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he’s relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him.

Despite the challenges, many experts agree it is important to capture bin Laden.

“I don’t think the American people will accept him surviving and us leaving. We will be the laughingstock of the world,” Fury said.

Underscoring how widely the public is counting on its new leader, 44 percent of Republicans joined nearly all Democrats and most independents in expressing that belief.

The poll shows trust in Obama’s ability to succeed is even broader, at least for now. Sixty-eight percent said they think when he takes office in January, the new president will be able to enact the policies he pushed during his presidential campaign.

“I don’t think one person, the president or otherwise, can fix the problems,” said Ryan Anderson, 31, a Democrat from Bloomington, Minn. “But I have strong faith that he’ll assemble the right group of individuals to address the problems. I think that’s going to be a benchmark of Obama’s presidency.”

People signaled a willingness to wait on one of the keynotes of his agenda — tax cuts. Only 36 percent said they wanted Obama to make income-tax cuts a top priority when he takes office, and even fewer wanted higher taxes on the rich to be a primary goal.

Instead, 84 percent said strengthening the economy and 80 percent named creating jobs as top-tier priorities. Democrats were a bit likelier than Republicans to say each should be a No. 1 goal.

With Obama ending the GOP’s eight-year hold on the White House under President Bush and about to become the first black president, the AP-GfK poll showed three quarters saying the election made them feel hopeful, six in 10 proud and half expressing excitement. Newly elected presidents often embark on a honeymoon period in which the public has highly positive feelings about them.

Democrats were far likelier to feel upbeat, yet such feelings were not limited to them. Half of Republicans said they were hopeful, a third proud and nearly a fifth excited about the election results. Another quarter in the GOP said they were depressed.

“I feel let down by the American people that they were so blind to many things I’ve seen in him,” said Shelli Pierson, 38, a Republican from Elmira, Ore. Pierson she doubts Obama, a four-year senator from Illinois, has enough experience for the presidency and said she still questions his patriotism.

Nine in 10 said Obama’s race would have no impact on his ability to get things done.

Though Republicans were more negative about the election results, they were consistently more upbeat than Democrats were in 2004 when their candidate, John Kerry, failed to unseat Bush. Forty-four percent of Democrats said they were angry and half said they were depressed in a November 2004 AP-Ipsos poll, double the GOP’s rates this year.

Highlighting anew how the Iraq war has faded as a paramount public concern, only half in Tuesday’s AP-GfK poll said they wanted Obama to make a U.S. troop withdrawal a top focus.

The survey also spotlighted the enduring partisan split over the war. Two-thirds of Democrats want a troop withdrawal to be a top Obama priority, compared with just three in 10 Republicans.

In a November 2004 poll before the economy crashed, Iraq and terrorism were most mentioned as the issues they wanted Bush to make his top priority. Until the weakening economy overtook Iraq as the No. 1 problem on the public’s mind nearly a year ago, Obama’s pledge to set a timetable for withdrawing troops from the war was his highest-profile issue.

Six in 10 cited stabilizing financial institutions and reducing budget deficits as top goals in the AP-GfK survey.

Half said they wanted national health care coverage — another Obama priority — to be a No. 1 concern, with few Republicans agreeing it should be a top goal. Permitting offshore oil drilling, a major GOP campaign issue, drew support as a top priority from just over one-third, mostly Republicans.

Nearly three-quarters ‚Äî including most Democrats ‚Äî said they’d like Obama to name some Republicans in his Cabinet, as the Democrat has said he would do.

Most also expressed no problem with the lock Democrats will have on Washington beginning next year. Four in 10 said Democratic control of the White House and Congress will be good for the country while another 2 in 10 said it would make no difference.

Thirty-six percent said the country is moving in the right direction, about double the 17 percent who said so in last month’s AP-GfK poll. Reflecting the election results, half of Democrats now see things heading the right way ‚Äî quadruple their number who said so in October.

Bush and Congress remained mired in awful ratings, with 28 percent approving of the job Bush is doing and 21 percent approving of Congress.

The AP-GfK poll was conducted Nov. 6-10 and involved cell and landline telephone interviews with 1,001 adults. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

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AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

An excerpt from President-Elect Barack Obama

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Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.

Now they’re gone.

The “agenda” Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a “comprehensive and detailed agenda” that will “bring about the kind of change America needs,” with the individual pages deleted entirely.

A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft’s Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet “a strategic asset,” and establish a $2 billion fund to “counter al-Qaeda propaganda.” Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site.

I’ve posted mirror images of the vanished homeland security section, the technology section, and the newsroom section listing the different topics on the right side of the page.

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: “That section of the Web site is being retooled.”

This isn’t the first time that vanishing or altered documents on a presidential Web site have been noticed: President Bush got some unwelcome attention for this last year. The White House’s Web team also rewrote the May 2003 caption showing Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier after the Iraq occupation proved more problematic than expected (see before and after).

The ephemeral nature of Web publishing does raise some serious issues: if a president-elect circulates a physical press release promising to do something, and then changes his mind, there’s a paper trail. That doesn’t exist when files are added to a Web site and then quietly removed over a weekend.

The Library of Congress and other institutions, including the California Digital Library and the Government Printing Office, are trying to remedy this by doing an “end of term” crawl. That means they’re regularly crawling and archiving all .gov domains that are considered “government sites,” including Change.gov. The crawl started in September and will continue through February 2009.

The project has a varying crawl schedule, so it may not have collected the agenda pages on Change.gov, Abbie Grotke, a digital media project coordinator on the Web capture team in the Library of Congress’ office of strategic initiatives, said on Monday.

The Change.gov site has been added to the list of sites to be crawled as part of the Library’s Election Archives project–a separate effort. Gina Jones, also part of the Library’s office of strategic initiatives, said that since it’s a new site, it hasn’t been collected yet.

CNET News’ Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.

HIGHLAND, Indiana (AFP) ‚Äì Democrat Barack Obama has vowed to avert a “potential meltdown” in the clogged financial system as he listed his top priorities if he is elected America’s first black president next week.

At campaign rallies in Iowa and Indiana, the Illinois senator said Tuesday’s election against John McCain would dismantle Republican politics of divide and rule “once and for all” and chart a new course of national unity.

Addressing more than 40,000 supporters here after visiting his daughters in Chicago for Halloween , Obama said on Friday “Malia and Sasha, each year they’ve got trouble deciding what (costume characters) they want to be for Halloween.”

“John McCain didn’t have that problem. Just like every year, he’s going as George W. Bush,” he said, once again linking his White House rival to the president’s shattered economic legacy .

The Democratic front-runner said the other pressing priorities if he wins would be achieving energy independence and enacting universal health care for Americans reeling from the economic crisis.

“And none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system or the financial system,” he told CNN in Iowa, where he beat Hillary Clinton in the year’s first Democratic nominating clash.

“So that’s priority number one, making sure that the plumbing works in our capitalist system,” Obama said.

He refused to detail his potential choice of Treasury secretary — but noted that his economic advisers include ex-Treasury secretary Larry Summers, former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker and billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

Obama also backed a call by General David Petraeus, the new supremo of US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, to initiate contacts with Taliban elements in Afghanistan.

The Democrat said that if contacts modeled on a US alliance with former Sunni extremists in Iraq can lure those Taliban members away “from the hard-core militants that are aligned with Al-Qaeda, that would be beneficial.”

But first Obama told CNN that he would “want to see some proof, some evidence that in fact there are aspects of the Taliban that are susceptible to reasonable dialogue.”

He pledged to “go after” Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden. “We will kill him or we will capture him, try him, tie the death penalty to him … as necessary.”

Hurtling into the climax of his campaign against McCain, Obama addressed a 25,000-strong crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, a midwestern state where he holds a strong polling lead.

In Indiana, which last backed a Democratic hopeful in 1964, McCain is barely ahead in the polls.

At the day’s rallies, Obama said he had admired McCain in 2000, when the Republican had decried “low road” politics after going down to a vicious smear campaign in his contest against Bush for the Republican nomination that year.

“But the high road didn’t lead him to the White House then, so this time, he decided to take a different route,” the Democrat said.

“But Iowa, at this moment, in this election, we have the chance to do more than just beat back this kind of politics — we have the chance to end it once and for all,” he said in Des Moines.

“We have the chance to prove that the one thing more powerful than the politics of anything-goes — the one thing the cynics don’t count on — is the will of the American people.

“That’s how we’ll steer ourselves out of this crisis — with a new politics for a new time. That’s how we’ll build the future we know is possible — as one people, as one nation.”

On the final weekend of the dramatic campaign, Obama was bidding to lock down western battlegrounds with rallies in Nevada and Colorado Saturday before returning to the bellwether state of Missouri for an evening event.

The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of “hope” and “change” are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.

One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair”.

The aide said that Mr Obama himself was the first to realise that expectations risked being inflated.

In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Mr Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq. “The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference,” he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how “hard” it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.

“I won’t stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy – especially now,” Mr Obama told a rally in Sarasota, Florida, yesterday, citing “the cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq”. Mr Obama’s transition team is headed by John Podesta, a Washington veteran and a former chief-of-staff to Bill Clinton. He has spent months overseeing a virtual Democratic government-in-exile to plan a smooth transition should Mr Obama emerge victorious next week. The plans are so far advanced that an Obama Cabinet has been largely decided upon, with the expectation that most of his senior appointments could be announced shortly after election day.

Yet Mr Obama and his aides are under no illusions about the size of the challenges the Democrat will inherit if he enters the Oval Office. Tom Daschle, the party’s former leader in the US Senate and a strong contender for the post of White House chief-of-staff in an Obama administration, said last month that the winner next week would have only a 50 per cent chance of winning a second term in 2012.

Not only will the next president take office with the country sliding into a potentially long recession — and mired in debt — but the challenges abroad are immense. There is an unfinished war in Iraq, a worsening situation in Afghanistan and an unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan to contend with. Iran appears intent on acquiring the bomb and there remains the ever-present threat from al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists.

If he wins, Mr Obama will inherit a Democratic-controlled Congress, and might even have the benefit of a 60-seat filibuster-proof “supermajority” in the Senate. Such a scenario would allow him to push through legislation largely unfettered by Republican opposition. Yet it also means that should the country still be mired in recession in three years’ time, voters — who have short memories — will probably blame him and the Democrats on Capitol Hill. Those stakes have led Mr Obama to conclude that while expectations need to be tempered, big things need to be achieved very early in his first term, when he will still have the political capital to achieve some of his most ambitious legislative goals.

Having promised “real” change, the pressure will be on him to deliver. In the Colorado interview, Mr Obama added: “The next president has got to come quickly out of the box.”

The early priorities being lined up if he takes power are a mixture of symbolism and substance. He plans to make a major address in a big Muslim country early in his first term. Having pledged on the campaign trail to close Guantanamo Bay, he is also determined to make early moves to rid America of the controversial prison. Yet what to do with the remaining inmates looms as an intractable problem, as many of their home governments refuse to allow them to return.

Mr Obama’s first legislative goals will be to follow through on his pledge to cut taxes for the middle class and raise them for the wealthiest Americans, and to push through a hugely expensive Bill to provide near-universal health insurance.

Obama’s Infomercial

WASHINGTON – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.

Obama’s assertion that “I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond” the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans. His vow to save money by “eliminating programs that don’t work” masks his failure throughout the campaign to specify what those programs are ‚Äî beyond the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

A sampling of what voters heard in the ad, and what he didn’t tell them:

THE SPIN: “That’s why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year.”

THE FACTS: His plan does not lower premiums by $2,500, or any set amount. Obama hopes that by spending $50 billion over five years on electronic medical records and by improving access to proven disease management programs, among other steps, consumers will end up saving money. He uses an optimistic analysis to suggest cost reductions in national health care spending could amount to the equivalent of $2,500 for a family of four. Many economists are skeptical those savings can be achieved, but even if they are, it’s not a certainty that every dollar would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower premiums.

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THE SPIN: “I also believe every American has a right to affordable health care.”

THE FACTS: That belief should not be confused with a guarantee of health coverage for all. He makes no such promise. Obama hinted as much in the ad when he said about the problem of the uninsured: “I want to start doing something about it.” He would mandate coverage for children but not adults. His program is aimed at making insurance more affordable by offering the choice of government-subsidized coverage similar to that in a plan for federal employees and other steps, including requiring larger employers to share costs of insuring workers.

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THE SPIN: “I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond their cost.”

THE FACTS: Independent analysts say both Obama and Republican John McCain would deepen the deficit. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Obama’s policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years ‚Äî and that analysis accepts the savings he claims from spending cuts. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, whose other findings have been quoted approvingly by the Obama campaign, says: “Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next 10 years.” The analysis goes on to say: “Neither candidate’s plan would significantly increase economic growth unless offset by spending cuts or tax increases that the campaigns have not specified.”

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THE SPIN: “Here’s what I’ll do. Cut taxes for every working family making less than $200,000 a year. Give businesses a tax credit for every new employee that they hire right here in the U.S. over the next two years and eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Help homeowners who are making a good faith effort to pay their mortgages, by freezing foreclosures for 90 days. And just like after 9-11, we’ll provide low-cost loans to help small businesses pay their workers and keep their doors open. ”

THE FACTS: His proposals ‚Äî the tax cuts, the low-cost loans, the $15 billion a year he promises for alternative energy, and more ‚Äî cost money, and the country could be facing a record $1 trillion deficit next year. Indeed, Obama recently acknowledged ‚Äî although not in his commercial ‚Äî that: “The next president will have to scale back his agenda and some of his proposals.”