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Obama Faces Many Immediate Decisions; Insurance Issues Take Backseat
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Copyright 2009 Gannett Company, Inc.All Rights Reserved USA TODAY
January 20, 2009 Tuesday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 2180 words
HEADLINE: For Obama, tough decisions from the start; Key deadlines loom for action on Iraq, Iran, terrorism, the budget, auto bailout
BYLINE: Susan Page
WASHINGTON -- Now what?
Barack Obama takes the oath of office at noon today with a clear priority -- the nation's economic meltdown -- and an agenda laid out through the long campaign that he plans to launch with meetings and executive orders on Wednesday.
Like it or not, though, he also will face inconvenient issues with their own timetables. The deadlines and demands of existing laws, foreign pacts and federal courts will force him to handle some questions he might prefer to postpone.
They are hard calls with no cost-free answers.
Among them:
*Should he let free an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist whom prosecutors describe as dangerous? The new administration's legal brief in that case is due Feb. 20 at the Supreme Court.
*Should he accede to pressure from labor leaders to ease workers' concessions in the auto industry's rescue plan? Chrysler and General Motors have until Feb. 17 to produce a blueprint for an overhaul to save the companies from bankruptcy.
*Should he define the words "combat troops" strictly or ambiguously? That semantic exercise will help shape the withdrawal from Iraqi cities that the United States has promised Iraq by the end of June.
These decisions and others don't merely involve difficult trade-offs. They also carry the risk of creating major distractions to an administration determined to keep pushing its $825 billion stimulus plan through Congress and restoring public confidence in the economy.
"People are hurting out there," Obama said in an interview with USA TODAY last week, citing "an enormous sense of urgency" about the economy. "You talk to (Govs.) Ted Strickland in Ohio or (Jennifer) Granholm in Michigan about what's happened, and they are just hemorrhaging from people calling, seeking unemployment insurance."
Obama has cautioned that some of his campaign promises will have to wait because of the nation's most pressing problems.
During the campaign, the Obama team exercised discipline to keep the focus on a few issues -- the economy, health care and energy independence among them -- but that's harder for a president to do.
Ask Bill Clinton: In 1993, when he wanted to talk about the economy and health care, a firestorm over whether to allow gays to serve openly in the military defined the bumpy start of his presidency.
John Podesta, the head of Obama's transition and a Clinton White House veteran, says Obama's transition team has been scouring federal departments to try to identify opportunities and problems, including pending deadlines and brewing controversies.
The goal, Podesta says in an interview, is to make sure the new president can pursue his agenda rather than be driven by other demands and issues.
"He wants to implement his strategic focus, where he wants to take the country -- on energy, the economy, the financial crisis, restoring America's security, health care," Podesta says, "and not be an in-box president."
Here's a look at five issues about to arrive in Obama's in-box that may test that plan.
1.) Let Ali al-Marri go?
Ali al-Marri was a Qatari student living in Peoria when he was arrested three months after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
He was held as a material witness, then charged with credit card fraud, then labeled an unlawful enemy combatant by President Bush and held in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.
He remains there today.
The U.S. government alleges that al-Marri was an al-Qaeda "sleeper agent" who was trying to hack into banking records to disrupt the nation's financial system. Putting him on trial could be problematic, however, because some of the evidence against him from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might not be admissible.
It was obtained through the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning, that U.S. courts say are unacceptable and the Obama team has labeled as torture.
The question of whether the government must put him on trial or set him free -- Qatar has agreed he could be deported there -- comes to a head before the Supreme Court as Obama takes office.
Jonathan Hafetz, the ACLU lawyer representing al-Marri, is due to file his legal brief in the case Wednesday. The deadline for the Justice Department's response is 30 days later.
At issue in the case is the Bush administration's argument that the president has the power to order legal residents of the United States seized and held indefinitely without being charged with a crime.
Obama has criticized Bush's assertions of such expansive powers. He has appointed a fierce critic of those policies to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which under Bush drafted the legal arguments supporting them.
Obama says he will bar the controversial interrogation techniques and close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, but in the interview, he said implementing a process to "manage those situations of genuinely dangerous individuals who we know seek to harm the United States" will be complicated.
The al-Marri case could force him to address those issues soon -- and ignite criticism that the new president is imperiling the nation's safety.
Bush is among those raising questions. "There's still an enemy that would like to come and harm the American people," he warned in an interview with USA TODAY last week, saying the "tools" of those expansive powers have helped prevent another attack on American soil.
Also on the calendar: The war-crimes trial of Omar Khadr, set to start Monday before a military commission at Guantanamo.
The ACLU and other groups are calling on Obama to suspend the trial because Khadr was a 15-year-old "child soldier" when he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier.
2.) When will deficits matter?
Interest groups will scrutinize the budget Obama submits in late February for what it proposes to pay for right away.
"It'll tell us which campaign promises were real," says Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who heads the Urban Institute.
For Reischauer and other analysts, though, the more intriguing question is what the plan outlines for down the road.
The five-year projections included in the budget will be built on assumptions about the economy's course -- when, for instance, the president's economists predict the worst recession since the Depression will turn around.
At that point, Obama has pledged to turn from spending money and cutting taxes to controlling the deficit.
Today's stimulus spending and the retirement of the Baby Boom generation are projected to fuel trillion-dollar shortfalls.
Unaddressed, those unprecedented deficits could swell interest costs in the budget, scare away the investors who are underwriting America's debt and spark a wave of inflation.
"We're in this period of spend-spend and tax cut-tax cut to stimulate the economy, but he said we're going to shift gears at some future point and worry about the long-term deficits, worry about entitlement-program spending," Reischauer says. "The question is: Will he include in his five-year budget any kind of specificity with respect to what he's going to do?"
During the campaign, Obama generally refused to endorse any of the prescriptions for reining in Medicare and Social Security costs, in part because all the options were sure to rile big slices of the electorate.
The clock is ticking to say what he will propose: Increase taxes? Trim Medicare benefits? Raise the retirement age? Or, negotiate what Obama officials have dubbed a "grand bargain" that includes all of those?
3.) Modify the auto deal?
A month ago, Bush reluctantly approved a government rescue plan for General Motors and Chrysler, but the $17.4 billion came with strings attached. The automakers have until Feb. 17 to present a plan for long-term profitability or risk having the loans called as of March 31.
Obama's team will be hammering out the details.
"Barack Obama has got to figure out who's going to run this program, how far will they go in requiring the union to make additional sacrifices and what kinds of sacrifices are required of the banks and the dealers," says Jim Blanchard, a Democrat and former Michigan governor who as a congressman helped negotiate the 1979 Chrysler bailout.
The bailout calls for corporate restructuring and deep cuts in union wages and benefits to bring Detroit's labor costs in line with those of non-union foreign competitors in their U.S. plants.
That was a key demand of powerful Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Richard Shelby of Alabama, the party's ranking member on the Senate banking committee.
The leaders of major unions -- which spent millions to help elect the new president -- hope the Obama administration will be more sympathetic to workers' concerns than the Bush administration was.
"We're waiting to see until President-elect Obama gets in power, then we'll see how this thing comes out," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said last week on WDET-FM, Detroit's public radio station.
Workers "already have made concessions -- pilots, machinists, autoworkers," says Bill Samuel, legislative director of the AFL-CIO. "Maybe it's time for CEOs to make some concessions."
Still, easing provisions on workers could make it harder to demand concessions from the companies, dealers and others, and it could raise Republican complaints that the deal Bush struck has been undone.
4.) Respond to a nuclear Iran?
The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran's nuclear program will be on the table at its Board of Governors meeting March 2.
The question for some analysts: Will the IAEA conclude that Tehran has accumulated enough low-enriched uranium to allow a quick conversion into the highly enriched uranium needed for a weapon?
"It's not what I would describe as a tripwire, but it's a psychological milestone that I think could put pressure on the administration to respond in some way," says Jon Wolfsthal of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Wolfsthal is a proliferation expert who previously served as the American on-site monitor at North Korea's nuclear complex at Yongbyon.
Obama calls a nuclear-armed Iran unacceptable. He has also pledged to launch a diplomatic offensive in the Middle East that includes outreach to Iran.
However, disclosures on the nuclear program's progress could pose a dilemma: Move ahead with diplomacy as promised, but in doing so, seem to reward the Iranian regime's behavior.
For the Bush administration, a decision to open the first U.S. interests section in Tehran since the 1979 hostage crisis was repeatedly delayed by outside developments -- first the Russian invasion of Georgia, then accusations of Iranian meddling in Iraq. The issue finally was left to the incoming administration.
At her confirmation hearing last week, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton declined to say whether the new administration would move ahead with opening the post.
For Obama's team, "they have been operating in an environment where they haven't had to respond to every issue," Wolfsthal says.
"But once Tuesday comes, the way they respond, the types of pressures they're under may change."
5.) What's a 'combat troop?'
During the campaign, Obama said he wanted to withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. In the status-of-forces agreement signed with the Iraqi government last month, the United States promised to withdraw all combat troops from big cities even sooner, by the end of June.
So what's a combat troop?
A strict definition could include just about any servicemember deployed where fighting is taking place.
"It seems to me that anybody serving in the U.S. military is trained at least to some degree to engage in combat," says Leslie Cagan, co-chairwoman of an anti-war coalition called United for Peace and Justice, which wants all U.S. forces out of Iraq. "Otherwise, why do they have a uniform on?"
A loose definition could omit those who are acting as trainers for Iraqi recruits or advisers to local units as well as soldiers assigned to protect U.S. civilians and provide logistical support -- a distinction that could leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq through most of Obama's four-year term.
Dan Senor, a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, questions whether those distinctions are meaningful.
"No commander in chief in their right mind would deploy a 'trainer' or an 'adviser' who isn't combat ready," he says.
On the other hand, the exercise in wordplay could prevent what Senor sees as the dangers of a precipitous pullout.
"The Iraqi security forces are getting better every day," he says, "but the risk you have is when things don't go well, how much lag time is there between a flare-up the Iraqis can't handle" and the ability of U.S. forces to respond?
Maybe so, but that course is likely to dismay supporters who helped launch Obama's presidential ambitions because of his promise to end the war.
"I'm willing to say, 'You made this commitment, and now let's see what you're going to do,' " says Cagan, who says, "People are mobilized. People are in motion" to pressure Obama to "do the right thing."
LOAD-DATE: January 20, 2009
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