Senators led by Charles Schumer offer a proposal in which the chief executive of a corporation or group that is the primary financial sponsor of a political ad would have to claim responsibility for it by appearing on camera. GOP leader Mitch McConnell calls the idea ‘beyond suspicious.’

Reporting from Washington — If corporate and union officials want to pour money into election campaigns, they would have to disclose who they are — and perhaps appear in an ad — under legislation introduced in Congress on Thursday.

The bill is a response to a controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate and interest group spending on elections. In Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission, the court in January struck down most federal limits on corporate spending as a violation of free speech.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), in an announcement at the steps of the Supreme Court, said the measure would “shine a light on the flood of spending unleashed by the Citizens United decision.”

He hopes to win passage of the bill by July 4, in time for any flow of corporate money into the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Schumer said “a good number” of Republicans “are very favorably disposed to the legislation,” but none appeared with him.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called Schumer’s announcement “beyond suspicious,” and charged that the bill is “about election advantage, plain and simple.”

Two Republicans cosponsor the House version of the bill, which would require the chief executive or head of an organization that is the primary financial sponsor of a televised political ad to take responsibility for it by appearing on camera. Corporations, unions and advocacy groups would be required to create traceable campaign accounts and disclose — via the Web and corporate filing statements — the source of donations exceeding $1,000.

The bill also would ban expenditures by government contractors and any domestic corporation if at least 20% of its stock was owned by foreign nationals, or if foreign nationals played a dominant role in the corporation’s leadership.

Companies that received federal bailout funds would be barred from making expenditures until they repaid those funds. Republican Reps. Michael N. Castle of Delaware and Walter B. Jones of North Carolina joined Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in introducing the House version of the bill.

“I don’t see why this issue is a partisan one that should divide us,” Castle said. “This is a serious attempt to have disclosure.”

Los Angeles Times originally published this article on April 29, 2010.

John Reich, who was director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, tells a Senate panel that Washington Mutual’s 2008 collapse resulted from a drop in public confidence, not a failure by his agency.

Reporting from Washington — The former head of the chief banking regulatory agency that oversaw failed Washington Mutual told lawmakers Friday that the giant savings and loan collapsed because of a run on the bank, not failures by him or other regulators.

The testimony of John Reich, who served as head of the Office of Thrift Supervision from 2005 to 2009, came as a Senate subcommittee released the results of an 18-month investigation that blasted regulatory supervisors for doing little to halt risky practices at WaMu that bank examiners had identified as early as 2003.

The criticism was echoed by a report this week on WaMu’s collapse, the largest bank failure in U.S. history, by the inspectors general of the thrift agency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Reich said WaMu was seized by regulators on Sept. 25, 2008, because of a $16.4-billion run on deposits after the sharp decline in the economy throughout the year and the failure of Lehman Bros. and the bailout of American International Group Inc. just days earlier.

“The liquidity failure at WaMu was induced by the decline in public confidence in large financial institutions, brought on by a series of prior significant events in 2008,” Reich said in his prepared testimony.

But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, blasted Reich for his agency’s “pitiful enforcement” and for exacerbating the situation with a petty turf war with the FDIC, the bank’s secondary regulator. Levin said the Office of Thrift Supervision impeded attempts by the FDIC to independently examine WaMu as its condition worsened.

In a particularly heated line of questioning at the hearing Friday, Reich was unable to account for a six-month delay in issuing a memorandum of understanding to WaMu in 2008. The memorandum is an enforcement order meant to signal a bank’s declining situation and subject it to greater regulatory scrutiny. Levin accused Reich of being reluctant to take FDIC advice to downgrade WaMu.

“I do not know why it took so long to implement” the memorandum of understanding, Reich said. “I don’t know if apologetic is the right word, but I regret that there was a six-month delay.”

Further exacerbating the situation was WaMu’s large mortgage holdings in California and Florida, two states hit by the largest price declines after the housing bubble burst, Reich said. And WaMu was hurt by the federal law that requires savings and loans to invest two-thirds of their assets in real-estate-related loans.

In addition, the bank was the victim of bad timing, he said, as federal efforts to stabilize the financial system had yet to kick in.

“Had WaMu’s liquidity crisis occurred two weeks later, there would have been no failure,” Reich said.

Reich said regulators were on top of WaMu’s situation, and during the year before it collapsed, its problems were “discussed informally on virtually a daily basis” by officials at the thrift agency in Washington.

But the probe by the Senate investigations subcommittee said agency supervisors failed to act on concerns and warnings from bank examiners about shoddy lending practices, risky investments and substandard mortgage-backed securities sold into the market. The agency did little to stop the practices because it had too cozy a relationship with WaMu and other banks it regulated, Levin said.

“Instead of policing the economic assault, OTS was more of a spectator on the sidelines, a watchdog with no bite, noting problems and making recommendations, but not acting to correct the flaws and failures it saw,” Levin said.

“The bottom line,” he continued, “is that OTS never said no to any of the high-risk lending or shoddy lending practices that came to undermine WaMu’s portfolio, its stock price, its depositor base and its reputation. The result was a bank failure, a financial system poisoned with toxic mortgages and an economic meltdown.”

The findings of the subcommittee were bipartisan. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said WaMu’s failure was “a classic example of when a bank captures its regulator rather than a regulator doing its job.”

But Coburn also blamed Congress for not doing a better job of overseeing the Office of Thrift Supervision and warned that the Senate was preparing to act too quickly to overhaul the financial regulatory system before the subcommittee’s hearings were completed this month and a bipartisan commission investigating the causes of the financial crisis issues its report in December.

The subcommittee did not blame WaMu’s failure only on regulators. Its investigation slammed WaMu executives for risky practices driven by the quest for higher profit that led to the bank’s seizure and sale to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion.

Turf battles between the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC worsened the problems, the committee and inspectors general report said.

But Reich defended his former agency and said disagreements among regulators helped strengthen oversight.

“Some members of Congress seem to believe that disagreement among regulators is unseemly and an indication the process is broken and needs to be changed. I could not disagree more with that view,” Reich said. “Like the U.S. Congress, differences of opinion are desirable, productive, and usually result in the best policy being adopted.”

This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April, 17, 2010, but the editors omitted my co-byline by accident.

Reporting from Washington — Senate Democrats rejected on Tuesday a Republican demand that next week’s scheduled confirmation hearing on Goodwin Liu’s nomination to a federal appeals court be postponed, setting up an all-out partisan battle over the Berkeley law professor.

Senate Republicans, who complain that Liu had originally failed to respond adequately to numerous questions on a Judiciary Committee questionnaire, pledged to continue pressing for a new hearing date.

Liu, President Obama’s choice for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, had been expected to testify March 24.

But in the aftermath of the March 21 healthcare vote, Senate Republicans forced a postponement by invoking a little-used procedural rule disallowing any committee hearings more than two hours after the start of a Senate session.

Republicans say Liu’s initial documentation omissions are “potentially disqualifying and . . . put his nomination in jeopardy.” They charged that more time is required to review supplementary materials they received only Tuesday.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, denounced those claims.

“Committee members will have had more than seven weeks to review the nominee’s record, and two weeks to review the materials submitted to the committee on April 5,” Leahy said. “I see no reason to further delay this nominee’s opportunity to appear before the committee and respond to the questions its members may have.”

Democrats control a majority on the committee but would need at least one Republican vote for Liu on the Senate floor to stop a Republican filibuster. Any defections from conservative Democrats could make his confirmation doubtful.

In a letter to Leahy on Tuesday, Republican Senate Judiciary Committee members, led by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, pointed out five issues in Liu’s supplemental submissions, calling particular attention to his participation in a panel discussion at a 2004 convention about the historic Brown vs. Board of Education ruling outlawing “separate but equal” education for blacks.

Republicans charged, in their letter to Leahy, that Liu had failed to declare in the questionnaire his participation in that discussion at the American Constitutional Society, a liberal legal group.

But in a statement on the website Legal Ethics Forum, Richard Painter, who was associate White House counsel under President George W. Bush, said the items Liu left out of his original disclosure form “were relatively unimportant and/or redundant of what he had already disclosed.”

“It seems to me that most of these items are the types of things that law professors do routinely and frequently,” Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor, said. “They are nearly impossible to keep track of.”

“I had hoped that in this new year, we could put political rancor aside and come together to openly and fairly debate President Obama’s qualified judicial nominees,” Leahy said in a statement. “I am disappointed that, instead, we have seen the same delays and obstructionist approach toward these nominees on the Senate floor extend to the committee’s consideration.”

Los Angeles Times originally published this article on April 8, 2010.

By Clement Tan and Don Lee

Reporting from Washington — Determined to push a major overhaul of the immigration system to the top of the nation’s political agenda, tens of thousands of people rallied Sunday on the National Mall, challenging Congress to fix laws that they say separate families and hurt the country’s economic and social vitality.

Organizers and supporters of the “March for America” campaign — who demonstrated as House members cast a historic vote on healthcare — want to make an immigration overhaul the next big undertaking in Washington.

“The reality is that immigrants keep jobs in America, they help businesses move forward,” said Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, one of hundreds of community, labor and faith-based groups nationwide that joined the march.

The organizing group, Reform Immigration for America, said Sunday’s rally was larger than the massive Washington demonstration in April 2006, when thousands protested around the country over immigrant rights and enforcement practices. On Sunday, the crowd stretched nearly five blocks on the mall.

Although the event had a festive, almost carnival-like feel to it — young and old in T-shirts walking amid white tents and balloons while drummers and musicians played — many participants came bottled up with frustration or sorrow.

One group carried white crosses etched with names of border crossers who died in the Arizona desert. Crowds chanted in Spanish, “Obama, listen, remember your promise!” — referring to President Obama’s campaign pledge to make overhauling immigration policies a priority in his first year.

Earlier this month, Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed a new blueprint for immigration overhaul, which the White House has endorsed. Among other measures, the plan would require biometric Social Security cards to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs; additional border security; a temporary worker plan; and some path to legalization.

Yet Graham, the lone Republican senator inclined to support the overhaul, has already said he believed that passage of the healthcare overhaul would probably kill the immigration effort this year.

Immigration could also be crowded out by other domestic issues, such as financial regulations and energy policy. And advocates for putting the roughly 11 million illegal residents on a path to citizenship will face resistance from many Republicans, as well as some moderate Democrats, facing the midterm election in November.

With resources and emotions running deep from immigrant rights activists and opponents, “things are on a collision course as they were in 2006 and 2007,” said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that seeks immigration restrictions.

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony alluded to Obama’s promise when he said in a brief interview after his speech at the rally, “The Democrats campaigned for Latino votes with a lot of immigration promises, so we’ll see if they don’t act on what they promised.”

Latinos, in particular, have criticized the Obama administration’s record on enforcement, as the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants increased 5% to 387,790 in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2009.

Others at the rally were blunt, saying that officials will pay a price at the polls if they ignore the calls from a small but fast-growing electorate. “I can’t vote, but I have 60 family members who can,” said Elmo Siap, 55, a Filipino businessman who came from Chicago.

Foreign-born workers account for 15.5% of all U.S. workers, and their jobless rate went up to 9.7% last year from 5.8% in 2008. For native-born workers, the unemployment figure was also 5.8% in 2008 but rose to 9.2% last year, according to the Labor Department.

Julio Salgado, 26, a senior at Cal State Long Beach, hopes the changes come soon.

He came to America when he was 11 and graduated from high school in 2001 with a 3.6 grade-point average, he said. But without a green card or a legal resident status, he said, he couldn’t qualify for federal student loans for college. Even so, he said he would be graduating this spring — nine years after first enrolling in community college.

“We’ve done everything we’ve been told to do as kids, but I’m at a loss here,” he said.

Michael Muskal contributed from Los Angeles.

This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other Tribune newspapers. The accompanying video was reported by another news organization and appended here as a visual element.

Reporting from Washington – Proposed legislation to block foreign companies from contributing money to U.S. elections could end up affecting well-known companies such as Chrysler, Anheuser-Busch and Citgo, according to legal experts and company representatives.

The legislation is a reaction from key House and Senate Democrats to a Supreme Court decision in January that struck down a portion of the nation’s campaign funding laws, allowing corporations to freely contribute to political campaigns.

The high court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission seemed to open the way for U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations to also contribute to campaigns.

The legislators say they are now considering a broad definition of foreign corporations — companies that are more than 20% owned by non-American entities. That could end up banning thousands of corporations from contributing to political activities.

Chrysler would be affected because the Italian automaker Fiat has a 35% stake. The oil company Citgo Petroleum Corp. was started by an American oilman but has been wholly owned by the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company since 1990. St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, the company that brews Budweiser, was bought by Belgian brewing giant InBev for $54.8 billion in 2008.

U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations are concerned about the legislation being prepared by Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), saying it could unfairly label them as foreign entities, changing their status on matters that go beyond politics.

For example, the companies worry that they could be excluded from bidding on certain U.S. government contracts.

The Schumer-Van Hollen legislation, expected to be introduced in the coming week, follows President Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court decision in his State of the Union speech. Obama said the ruling would “open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”

But Jan Baran, a campaign finance expert, said that figuring out “who is foreign and what makes them foreign is not all that cut and dry.”

Trevor Potter, a former commissioner and chairman of the Federal Election Commission, agreed. “Stocks are sold on the stock exchange and owned by a variety of stakeholders,” he said. “It’s going to be quite difficult, for instance, to determine actual foreign ownership if a mutual fund has a stake in a company.”

Van Hollen said his legislative team is “still reviewing the foreign influence issue.”

But he added that it was important to prevent foreign influence on domestic politics. “We must ultimately ensure that Americans decide our elections, not foreign special interests,” he said.

This was originally published in the Los Angeles Times. The accompanying video news feature, produced by Al Jazeera, is a separate story, included to give background and inject a visual element.

Reporting from Washington – A ferocious blizzard, dubbed the “snowpocalypse” and “snowmageddon,” descended Friday on Washington, shutting federal offices early, closing schools and sending residents scurrying to stock up on supplies to carry them through the weekend.

Forecasters predicted 30 inches or more of snow, which would easily break the area’s all-time snowfall record of 28 inches set in 1922. The area has seen more than a foot of snow only 13 times since 1870, according to the National Weather Service.

There were lines that went around the block to get into some grocery stores. Hardware and liquor stores were mobbed, and many shops had already run out of items for their customers.

“I tried to stock up, but the shelves were empty,” said Beth Davies, who went to the Giant supermarket in suburban Silver Spring, Md. “There was only pig feet left” in the meat department.

With snow coming down hard by midday, some federal employees, released from work four hours early, grumbled that they had to come in at all.

“They should have just shut down today,” said Internal Revenue Service employee Jessie Cole as she watched her commuter bus whiz past. “It’s full, again.”

“It’s just no point commuting two hours and just spending three, four hours at work,” said Thanh Pham, who was in front of Cole at the bus stop outside the Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue. “I’m from Central Texas. I’m just not used to this.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) canceled a Friday morning appearance at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting in downtown, apparently to be sure of getting out of Washington before airports closed.

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairing a meeting of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, appeared to use the storm to poke fun at the committee’s absent Republicans, though Democrats were sparse in attendance as well.

“My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, because of the snow, have asked unanimous consent to have their statements placed in the record. And we may have some others coming on the Democratic side, but many people have left because of the snow warning,” she said.

Not every politician was leaving town. President Obama is hosting a Super Bowl party at the White House on Sunday with 30 to 40 people attending, including Congress members from Louisiana and Indiana and military personnel injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A year ago, the newly minted president made a snide comment about schools closing in the nation’s capital after just a dusting of snow and ice. But much has changed both politically and meteorologically in the last 12 months.

“Even a transplanted Hawaiian to Chicago has sufficient respect for a forecast of up to 2 feet of snow,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

NTSB Chairwoman Deborah A.P. Hersman said the pilots’ errors showed their “complacency and confusion that resulted in catastrophe.” She said she would press the Federal Aviation Administration and Congress to change procedures.

“History is repeating itself,” Hersman told reporters during a break in an evidentiary hearing Tuesday. “There are things in this accident we’ve seen before. . . .”

“Today is Groundhog Day, and I feel like we are in that movie,” she said, referring to a 1993 film about a weatherman who repeatedly relives the same day. “We have made recommendations time after time after time. They haven’t been heeded by the FAA.”

Safety issues raised by the Buffalo accident, Hersman said, go beyond the mistakes that caused it. She noted that the crash cast a spotlight on the safety gap between major airlines and regional carriers, where lower-paid pilots are more likely to commute long distances, fly fatigued and receive inadequate training.

In this instance, the pilot commuted from Florida and the copilot from Seattle, where she lived with her parents. Flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air Inc., took off from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey en route to Buffalo Niagara International Airport on Feb. 12, 2009. But the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 crashed into a house in Clarence Center, N.Y., about six miles short of the runway, killing 49 people on the plane and one on the ground.

The FAA responded with a statement late Tuesday, asserting that it had “driven significant improvements in pilot professionalism, training and background checks” in the last year. It promised to “review and evaluate” the NTSB’s recommendations to determine what actions might be needed, and said it would publish rules to prevent pilot fatigue and improve training.

Investigators say Flight 3407 stalled on approach when, in response to an automated stall warning, the pilot pulled back on the control column instead of pushing it forward to gain speed. Even so, investigators think Capt. Marvin Renslow could have regained control if he had pushed the control column forward. Instead, he pulled back on it three more times.

“That’s very unusual behavior and, quite frankly, I’m at a loss to explain it,” said Tom Haueter, director of the NTSB’s Office of Aviation Safety.

In its report, the board also cited inattention to airspeed, unnecessary cockpit conversation and some of the carrier’s procedures. It issued 25 safety recommendations.

NTSB member Robert Sumwalt, a former airline pilot, zeroed in on the unusual amount of cockpit chatter by Renslow, 47, who had a one-sided conversation with copilot Rebecca Shaw, 24. Shaw had complained to Renslow before takeoff that she felt ill.

“It was as if the flight was just a means for the captain to conduct a conversation with this young first officer,” Sumwalt said, adding the cockpit chatter could have squandered the time and attention the pilots needed to recover from the stall.

The NTSB found that icing was not a factor, nor was the copilot’s illness. But the agency chastised Shaw for sending a text message from the cockpit before takeoff.

“Distractions caused by personal portable electronic devices affect flight safety because they can detract from a flight crew’s ability to monitor and cross-check instruments, detect hazards, and avoid errors,” the NTSB report says.

This story originally appeared in the Feb. 3, 2010 print edition of the Los Angeles Times. A shorter version of this article is available online.

The New York Times couldn’t confirm it, but reported a disparaging comment written by somebody of a similar name anyway. The Associated Press ran a full, related story — based on unconfirmed quotes — on the alleged Muslim perpetrator of Thursday’s unfortunate shooting incident at Fort Hood allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he fired on his unsuspecting victims. The Daily Beast decided to run this same tidbit as a lead on their landing page too. See this visual comparison between The Times and The Daily Beast.

How is this going to help the American public form a coherent picture of reality in their heads? How is this not going to further inflame American public sentiment towards Muslims? I am not saying to conceal such elements in reporting a story, but being self-reflexive and according a person’s ethnicity and religious beliefs adequate context is also part of the reporting process. It’s about being fair and balanced, no?

And when news commentators — and it’s not just Fox News and “conservative” outlets this time — start asking why and then proceeds to frame it as “an act of terror,” they ignore facts such as the man’s long record of service in the army before that and more importantly, how his state of mind could have been the result of stress caused by his impending field deployment.

One of the gravest first lessons I learnt at the Columbia Journalism School is not to make an issue out of a person’s ethnicity more than it is necessary. Sure, it’s a call on news judgment. But when in doubt, I remembered my RW1 instructors tell me, don’t make it your lede and the main point of your story. If you decide to use it as a factor, use it further down in the story. Provide adequate context, but don’t distort reality was the message I learnt.

Just because the person at the center of the unfortunate Fort Hood shootings yesterday (Wednesday) was a devout Muslim does not automatically make his actions necessarily a terrorist one. I am not defending Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s alleged position here, I am attacking the obsession that American media outlets have with equating any unfortunate acts committed by Muslims as “acts of terror”.

Sure, my teachers might have been Hispanic and African Americans and some might say, they are therefore more predisposed to recognizing such biases, but that argument is moot because everybody have their own set of biases. As a reporter, it’s about recognizing what they are and then deciding how much mitigating you need to do, to prevent them from distorting a story. Failure to do so would just reflect a reporter’s ignorance and lack of reporting nous, than the reality of the situation.

If anything, the way this story is covered is a reflection of the biases of the journalists and editors who are reporting the story. James Fallows wisely and almost prophetically laments how the American media would cover the latest shootings in America. To be sure, The Times did a reasonable job with fairness and balance, with this, but there’s only one New York Times, and a gazillion other network television stations, for whom the issue of Hasan’s psychiatric condition would be lost in the myriad of conspiracy theories of how he was a homegrown terrorist and all those things that make the rest of the world and Americans who know better all roll their eyes and collectively sigh in resignation.

Because at the end of the day, nobody will ever know for sure why Hasan did what he did in that fit of madness, even if he does go on to say whatever he goes on to say to investigators and presumably the public trial. So while his Muslim faith might be a factor, it is not the only one. If you are looking for a reason why this madness occurred, why not see how this incident brings to fore the difficult position Muslims occupy in American society and how when that is further complicated by the stress and fear of impending military deployment to a war zone, fighting fellow Muslims. It would be then interesting to see how that would complicate Obama’s eventual Afghanistan decision if that eventually becomes the MAIN talking point.

Instead of that “more constructive” consequence though, I am pretty sure something of a vicious self-perpetuating cycle would result…which is just unfortunate, to say the least.

This first appeared at AsianCorrespondent.com.

The “big” news of Election Night 2009 was that the Republicans have retaken the governorships of the states of Virginia and New Jersey and how the Democrats punctured the Republicans feel-good bounce-back story with a surprising win in an obscure special election held in upstate New York, in the 23rd district (NY-23) – where the Republican party nominee pulled out and pledged her support for the Democrat candidate, Bill Owens, who eventually beat the Conservative Party and Sarah Palin-endorsed candidate, Doug Hoffman. And oh, who can forget Michael Bloomberg’s unexpected narrow victory for an unprecedented third term in the New York city mayoral race.

As the messianic hope and euphoria have ostensibly died a year since Obama’s historic election victory, most Americans seem split on President Obama. The Republican party is keen and was quick to say their two governor wins were the voters’ way of rejecting Obama’s leadership. But there are polls suggesting these governor races were settled on mainly local issues – President Obama has a 57% approval rating in New Jersey where Democrat incumbent Jon Corzine was ousted by his Republican challenger, Chris Christie, and 49% approval rating in Virginia, where Republican Bob McDonnell looked to have wrapped up the win over his Democrat rival, Creigh Deeds, even before Virginians went to the polls.

But whatever the spin on the results would be, it is telling that the youth vote that propelled Obama to victory last year, was sorely absent. And there’s a reason why history suggests off-year election are non-events and too soon to be seen as a verdict on a one-year-old presidency. The media is hard pressed to make the elections news worthy because well, they’ve got their bottom lines to meet. The real cracker would be the mid-term elections next year, where regular elections for Congress and Senate seats will be due. Team Obama has another year to sort his agenda out and to make sure a op-ed piece like this, as well-written as it might be, would not be the case come November 2010.

For people like me — young, college-educated and politically independent “millenials” — Barack Obama was and stilll remains the college-professor-we-wished-became-president, who actually became president of the United States. His “Yes, We Can” campaign tagline and exhortation for young ones to enter public service resonated strongly, but much to the surprise of those who know my politics, I was rooting for Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. It wasn’t so much a vote against Obama than a vote for Mrs Clinton. We all know who won.

Sure, there were concerns over baggage from her husband’s presidency, but she also had the experience and the verve to negotiate the murky waters of Congressional politics, an important aspect of legislative strategy. I thought Obama could have done with some more political experience as either Hillary’s vice-president or Secretary of State, which would then prepare him for a run in 2016. After all, he’s much younger than Hillary. If there were anybody more equipped to clean up the mess created by a spoilt brat who didn’t know better and allowed two wily old foxes to hijack his presidency, it was perhaps a strong and smart motherly figure who would be able to stand up to the egos that dot politics. Simply put, America needs to be rehabilitated.

Those same friends thought I was cynical for thinking that, but politics is cynical. You have to fight cynical with cynical and then somehow rise above that. Not many political progressives are capable of that because they usually get lynched by the GOP for their politics, which are easily cast as “limp” and “gutless” and therefore “bad for America” by their more hawkish opponents. Both Obama and Hillary want to rise above that, but I wasn’t sure if Obama had what it takes to move beyond cynical hell. I was enthralled by the idea of an Obama presidency, but I wasn’t too hot about the reality of it.

Almost a year after his historical electoral win last November, my concerns seem to be (sadly) validated. His tumbling approval ratings aside — he started way too popular that the only way was down after that — I’ve been quite stunned by how sharply Team Obama’s lacked political discipline and nous after the elections contrasted with their disciplined calibration of his election campaign. Nobody can reasonably expect Obama’s team to possess a Ted Kennedy-esque detailed understanding of Congressional politics because that took years of experience, but I wonder if the gridlock in almost every of his major legislative initiatives could have been avoided with greater foresight.

One of Obama’s main gaffes came from his personal intervention in state politics, with mid term elections coming up in 2010. Knowing that his mandate would be stymied if as historically expected, the President’s party loses ground, Obama has made his preferences known about controversies in Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Colorado. But the way his preference that current New York Governor David Paterson not run for re-election was made public suggests there wasn’t a lot of thought put into such a strategy. If this was done more privately, President Obama might have had more success with persuading the unpopular incumbent not to run again.

The Congressional mess that is the healthcare reforms is legendary by now. To be fair, many of Obama’s presidential predecessors haven’t had any success with this, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a surprise it was this difficult…but you can’t help but feel his special Congressional address came a little too late in the game. We probably won’t know until much farther into the future why Obama kept, almost foolishly, insisting on a bipartisan agreement when it might have been more prudent to focus on getting a consensus from his Democratic party since they have a rare majority in both Houses. The White House’s recent take-down of Fox News Channel might be a sign that they are wising up to the polarized state of politics, both inside Washington and in the news media, but it’s a wait-and-see at this point.

The list goes on, but it is largely a list of issues that got overshadowed by the healthcare issue. Obama has just begun to switch his attention to his climate change agenda, with the meeting in Copenhagen meeting less than 45 days away and the financial sector reforms, with the administration moving, a few days ago, to reclaim bonuses and cap executive pay in TARP-recipient companies.National Journal has a wonderful piece on whether Obama is “tough enough” (free access only for limited period) that outlines most of my concerns in much detail, so I won’t repeat them here.

But I would expand a little more on foreign policy. Obama’s cerebral style works best with other countries who make it possible for such studied diplomatic engagement. His Nobel Peace Prize “win” which stunned even the President himself, was a visceral example of the political catharsis in the developed world that came with his election win. But with nation-states that are not ostensibly democratic, his cerebral approach may not be the best way forward. For now though, his commitment to engagement with most countries around the world, most notably Iran, North Korea and Burma, are steps in the right direction. But it cannot go on indefinitely, without any clearly stated goals.

His biggest foreign policy decision in this first time would probably be on Afghanistan. If Bush owned Iraq, Afghanistan is Obama’s “war of necessity” (free access only for limited period) — whether or not he acts on General McChrystal’s 40,000-troop increase request remains to be seen, but this could very well be a key determinant of his presidential legacy. There has been a lot of noise debate in the American media lately as Obama studies the situation, but he’s basically stuck between a rock and a hard place — so, as it has been argued elsewhere, even if Obama changes his mind, it is better to be inconsistent than wrong.

There are plenty of America nay-sayers warning about the decline of America, but I highly doubt it — if changes are effected. Although reforms to economic and financial fundamentals are required, people forget America is STILL the dominant economy in the world. The Wall Street meltdown last year points to the centrality of the U.S. economy to the world. China and the rest of Asia may be rebounding quicker than America and other countries in the Western hemisphere, but they don’t have America’s debt levels and many analysts are saying these quick rebounds are immediate effects of their immense government stimulus injections.

I hope for the love of God and whatever else, that Obama goes on to get Afghanistan and his other key decisions spot on. Because unlike professors in college who have tenure to fall back on, President Obama doesn’t quite have that luxury. Professors also however don’t get to create history, but presidents do — and if Obama succeeds in all the big things he’s trying to do, then maybe the reality of his presidency would probably match the idea of it.

This first appeared at my blog at AsianCorrespondent.com.