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Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Barack Obama proved Friday he’s got grit. He enforced trade laws.

These are special trade safeguard rules, called “Section 421,”  that the Chinese had agreed to obey to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are, however, laws that had gone unenforced by the U.S. in the past.

President Obama used these safeguard rules to imposed tariffs on tires manufactured in China and imported into the U.S., following a recommendation by the International Trade Commission, an independent, bi-partisan group. The action made Obama the first president to execute sanctions under “Section 421.”

The International Trade Commission recommended sanctions under “Section 421” four times before Obama took office. Nothing was done. The result was closed American factories, lost American manufacturing jobs, diminished American dreams.

Not this time though. Not this president. Obama showed he’s made of tougher stuff. By placing tariffs on imported Chinese tires, President Obama put himself in the line of fire for the jobs of U.S. workers, for the preservation of U.S. manufacturing and, ultimately, for the stabilization of the U.S. economy.

Don’t kid yourself. This is a battle. For the U.S. to maintain a viable economy, it must sustain a strong manufacturing base. It must make products of value that can be sold here and overseas – not just swap paper, some of it bogus on Wall Street.

The U.S. economy is under attack by countries engaging in unfair trade. In the past decade, we’ve lost 40,000 manufacturing facilities. In just the 21 months since the Great Recession began, more than 2 million manufacturing workers have lost their jobs, making their unemployment rate 11.8 percent, significantly higher than the 9.7 percent rate for the average worker.

That’s what the Chinese tire case was all about. My union, the United Steelworkers (USW) filed it in April. We demanded penalties against China because it has smothered the U.S. market with tires. In 2004, its share of the U.S market was 4.7 percent. Four years later, it was 16.7 percent. In that time, the number of tires it sold rose from 14.6 million to 46 million. As a result, four U.S. tire manufacturing plants closed and 5,100 workers lost their jobs. Another three plants will close before year’s end, throwing 3,000 more U.S. workers on the street.

We filed for relief under “Section 421” for two reasons. One is that it provides quicker relief than other trade remedies. The other is that China consented to its provisions. When China wanted to get into the World Trade Organization in 2000, it secured U.S. support by agreeing to abide by Section 421 until 2013. Section 421 was designed to protect the U.S. economy by providing ways to combat unfair and damaging surges of particular Chinese imports.

In the past, corporations had asked for Section 421 tariffs. And we had joined them. This time, not one tire company joined us, though, to be clear, Goodyear was openly neutral. By contrast, Ohio-based Cooper, fought us. As did a collection of rag-tag import firms, one of which had nearly gone bankrupt after importing defective Chinese tires that had to be recalled after a series of crashes.

 Cooper, in testimony to the International Trade Commission, reported that all of the tires it makes at its Chinese plant, under its licensing agreement with the Chinese, must be exported until May, 2012. So it has a clear financial interest in preventing tariffs on imported tires to the U.S. The tire import companies have the same interest. For them, it’s about the money they make today, no matter how or where it’s made. They’ve got no allegiance to the U.S. and don’t care what happens to America’s future manufacturing capability or financial stability.

President Obama, by contrast, is a patriot who sees the big picture and takes the long view. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio was right when he said after the tire tariffs were announced:

“Today the President courageously stood up and enforced fair trade rules that will save jobs and help our communities. Since China joined the World Trade Organization, American workers have not been assured that the government would defend them against unfair trade. With this “Section 421” decision, President Obama has taken the side of American workers and manufacturers.

“Rigorous trade enforcement is a major piece of our manufacturing and global competitiveness strategy. If American workers and manufacturers are going to compete in the global market, they need to have a government that uses trade enforcement tools, including the Section 421 safeguard.”

American workers and American manufacturers can compete – when trade is fair. It’s unfair when countries don’t enforce their own labor regulations, including their own minimum wage laws. It’s unfair when U.S. companies abide by strict environmental regulations and those in other countries openly pollute air and water. It’s unfair when other countries allow their firms to steal trade secrets, when other countries demand that firms export all of their products for a certain number of years and when other countries manipulate the value of their currencies.

If trade laws aren’t enforced, America will lose virtually all manufacturing and become nothing but a dumping ground – a place where the rest of the world sells the stuff it makes. Fewer and fewer citizens in that America would be able to buy stuff after the factories close and all the jobs that they support disappear.

In announcing the tire trade sanctions — tariffs of 35 percent for a year beginning Sept. 26, 30 percent for a year after that, and 25 percent in the final year — U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said, “Enforcing trade laws is key to maintaining an open and free trading system.”

Unfair trade isn’t free.

President Obama is bold enough to draw that line of distinction for America.

Sometime before Sept. 17, President Obama has to make a decision that will tell us a lot about his commitment to American manufacturing. By that date, Obama has to accept, reject or modify a recommendation from the International Trade Commission (ITC) to impose tariffs on the Chinese-made tires that are swamping the U.S. market.

The importance of this battle goes well beyond its impact on the tire industry. Much of Americans’ skepticism toward free trade comes from their empirically verifiable sense that their government has been reluctant to enforce its own trade laws — an issue that candidate Obama tackled head-on last year by his repeated pledges to enforce those laws.

Between 2004 and 2008, tire imports from China increased 215 percent, while imports from other nations decreased 5 percent and U.S. tire production declined 27 percent. The ITC found this a clear violation of a provision in the Trade Act (Section 421), added with Beijing’s consent during the negotiations preceding Congress’s 2000 enactment of Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with China, that allowed the U.S. government to levy tariffs on surging Chinese imports that were eviscerating an American industry.

Indeed, China’s agreement to the anti-surge provision was a key argument in persuading Congress to permanently normalize trade relations. Section 421, contended Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a leading free-trader, “ensures that if shifts in trade patterns, following China’s entry into the world trading system, cause or threaten dislocations to American workers, businesses and farmers, they will be able to obtain relief quickly.”

Or not, as the case may be. Four times during George W. Bush’s presidency the ITC — a bipartisan, presidentially appointed commission — recommended invoking Section 421 to counter surges of Chinese imports that were damaging American industries, and four times Bush declined its advice. The Chinese tire ruling is the first such case to reach Obama’s desk; the ITC that sent it there comprises Bush appointees and one Clinton appointee, but none as yet from Obama.

Whatever its outcome, the case of the Chinese tires provides a revealing snapshot of the U.S. economy in the early 21st century. For one thing, the petitioner is the United Steelworkers union, which the rubber workers union merged into some years back. No U.S. tire companies joined the complaint, and it’s easy to understand why: Almost all the leading tire manufacturers with major production facilities here — including Bridgestone, Cooper, Goodyear, Michelin and Pirelli — also have factories in China. What’s more, the Chinese government often requires those factories to export all the tires they make. Cooper has opened two such factories under a government mandate stipulating that every one of their tires be exported for their first five years.

America’s leading manufacturers, whether U.S.- or foreign-owned, no longer have American interests. In fact, by producing in China, they almost invariably opt, like Cooper, to serve Chinese interests. American workers, by contrast, can’t generally cross oceans to follow their erstwhile employers, and the jobs they pick up when their factories close are likely to be in the lower-paying retail and service sectors.

Critics of the ITC ruling have argued that U.S. tire factories no longer produce the kind of low-end tires that China exports, but the ITC concluded that fully 20 percent of U.S.-made tires are inexpensive and directly compete with their Chinese counterparts. Critics have also predicted a soaring increase in the cost of tires, but the ITC’s staff analysis forecast an increase of only $3.50 per tire — not nothing, to be sure, but a cost that has to be measured against the possibility of tens of thousands of job losses in U.S. tire factories (where more than 5,000 jobs already have been lost because of Chinese imports).

The implications of Obama’s decision go well beyond tires. Section 421 was created to provide some protection for American workers while allowing China entry to our markets. If Obama opts not to enforce it, why would anyone concerned about American jobs believe such provisions in future trade agreements? Why would U.S. manufacturers maintain their domestic production if they know that none of the legal protections they’ve been promised will ever be invoked?

The financial crisis that was already raging when Obama became president compelled him to do more to rescue Wall Street than he surely ever wished. Endorsing the ITC’s recommendation would not only honor his campaign promises and fulfill the mandates of our trade laws, but would also allow him to rescue the very Americans who, rightly or wrongly, have felt left out of his efforts to save the nation’s economy.

***

Harold Meyerson also is political editor and columnist for the L.A. Weekly, the nation’s largest metropolitan weekly, and a regular contributor to The Washington Post, where this piece originally appeared.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

During a webcast meeting with Organizing for America on Thursday, President Barack Obama outed the covert Republican plot to strangle Medicare to financial death.

He explained to the group that if Congress does nothing, if health care reform fails, “Medicare will run out of money in eight years.”

Obama and the Democrats are pressing for health care reform to provide people under 65 with some semblance of what those over 65 have – government-assured affordable medical insurance. At the same time, for Medicare, Obama said, “Part of what we want to do is strengthen it, so it is there over the long haul.”

“It is not as if,” he said, “if we just stand still, everything is going to be okay.” 

Immobility is exactly what Republicans want, however. “No change” is their slogan.  They’ve offered zero substantive reform for health care. In the years when they controlled Congress and the White House under former President George W. Bush, they did nothing to repair financial problems with Medicare. In fact, they falsely minimized the price tag of the new prescription drug program, Medicare Part D, and drove up the cost by forbidding government negotiation for lower medicine prices. In addition, although they failed to accomplish it, they pressed to privatize that socialist program called Social Security — just months before the stock market tanked. 

This is philosophical warfare, and for the Republicans, Medicare is an appropriate casualty. The GOP has made it clear they believe the public option being proposed in health care reform is socialism – an evil that must be eradicated at all costs. Of course, Medicare, a government-sponsored health care program for all people over 65 actually is socialist.

It’s a slippery slope. First Republicans kill the opportunity for all Americans under the age of 65 to choose their own private insurance or get government-sponsored health care under the public option. Then, by doing nothing, Republicans destroy the ability of those over 65 to retain their government-sponsored health care.

Senior citizens are more frightened about health care reform than anyone else. That may be, President Obama said, because they routinely need health care more than any other group. So lying to them about it, especially for political gain, is cruel and despicable.

It’s true, Democrats want change. They seek to reform and improve the health care system so that Medicare is strengthened and funded for the future. For example, Obama noted, under the Democrats’ plan, the “donut hole” in Medicare Part D, during which senior citizens must pay for their prescription medications, would be eliminated. President Obama got the pharmaceutical companies to step up and pay more – if Congress manages to pass reform.

A huge portion of the cost of health care reform would come from changes in the way the federal government pays for Medicaid and Medicare. What the Democrats want to change are payment methods that are just wrong. No bid contracts, for example. Introducing real capitalist competition in the system would reduce costs without affecting benefits. “No one is talking about messing with your Medicare benefits,” Obama said, attempting in a mere statement to counter screaming “tea baggers” featured continuously on Fox News. Of the Democrats he said, “We think Medicare is a sacred trust.”

On health care reform, the Republican plan to do nothing means death. Death for the public option. But also death for Medicare. 

President Obama explained: “The status quo is unsustainable. If you like what you have now, unless we make some changes, you are not going to have what you like because health care costs are rising three times faster than wages. . . If you have a private plan, you have something to worry about. If you are on Medicare, you have something to worry about because we are going to run out of money.”

Democrats are trying to resuscitate Medicare and deliver health care reform. Republicans are forming death panels to kill all of it.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

In the months following the Wall Street meltdown, we’ve seen a stealth marketing campaign that is profound for its boldness — a marketing campaign designed to make us believe that very wealthy people are suffering the most.

We’ve seen this campaign in Wall Street spokespeople insisting that a $500,000-a-year salary isn’t very big, in a New York Times style section that asserts that it’s impossible to live in the city on a half million dollars; in a punditburo that says millionaires are oppressed and can’t afford to pay $9,000 a year more in taxes for universal health care; and in a national press corps that seeks to portray any effort to raise taxes on the richest 1 percent as unfair; and a business press that threatens a class war if President Obama moves forward with his promise to make the payroll tax more progressive. As I said, this is a marketing campaign, and a fairly well coordinated one.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see this audacious Washington Post piece over the weekend which reports — with a straight face — that those making $300,000 a year are “barely squeaking by” in this economy. I s*** you not:

Laura Steins doesn’t mind saying that she is barely squeaking by on $300,000 a year… As a vice president at MasterCard’s corporate office in Purchase, N.Y., she earns a base pay of $150,000 plus a bonus. This year she’ll take home 10 percent less because of a smaller bonus. She receives $75,000 a year in child support from her ex-husband. She figures she will pull an additional $50,000 from a personal investment account to “pick up the slack.”

The nanny and property taxes take $75,000 right off the top, but Steins considers both non-negotiable facts of her life and not discretionary. When she bought out her husband’s share of the house after their 2006 divorce, she assumed the costs of keeping it afloat — $8,000 to $10,000 a month. There’s a pool man, a gardener and someone to plow the snow from the quarter-mile-long driveway.

As tight as money is, she has decided that living in a 4,000-square-foot house on three acres is the practical thing to do.

I’m not going to take up text space going off about how absurd this all is, except to say (as I have before) that in a country where the recession is obviously most crushing the middle-class, I’m playing the smallest violin in the world for those making $300,000 a year (ie. the top 5 percent of the country) — especially those who whine about their plight while refusing to cut back on their nannys and gardeners.

What’s fascinating here is not how incredibly out of touch with Middle American reality the super wealthy are, but how willing the media are to promote the super wealthy’s whines as legitimate and justified. The entire economic narrative on Main Street is about how the average family making $50,000 a year is going to put food on the table — and the entire economic narrative in the elite media is about the top 5 percent’s concerns that they might have to cut back on mansion expenses.

This is the real “Two Americas” — the elites and the media outlets they control, and the Rest of Us. And clearly, the former doesn’t give a s*** about the latter. David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Just days ago, America celebrated her birthday with fireworks, spontaneous renditions of the Star Spangled Banner and chants of, “We’re Number One!”

In a crucial area, health care, the chant is untrue. Many of us love the individual doctors who may have saved our lives or the lives of loved ones. But the health care system in this country is not top-ranked.  It’s not even close to number two. Its poor quality and excessive expense are sucking the life out of America. For the health of the nation, both physically and economically, we need a system with a public option – that means a government-sponsored and managed alternative. And we need it now.

First, the issue of ranking. In the year 2000, the last time the World Health Organization stacked up countries’ health systems, the United States came in 37^th, behind the likes of Chile, Morocco, Cyprus, even drug war-torn Colombia, to which the U.S. donates hundreds of millions in foreign aid. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pointed out late last year that the U.S. ranked 29^th in the world for infant mortality in 2004, a statistic that steadily worsened since 1960, when the U.S. ranked 12^th. Twenty-two countries’ rates were below 5 deaths per 1,000 live births. The U.S. rate was 6.78 deaths.

Similarly, the U.S. ranks 42^nd for life expectancy, down from 11^th two decades ago. Contributing to that decline is the parallel drop in Americans covered by health insurance, researchers said. While 46 million Americans lack insurance, Canadians and residents of European Union countries benefit from universal health care.

We are 37^th – Yea! We are 29^th – and falling! We are 42^nd — and dying! These are not the chants of proud Americans. These are not the chants of vibrant Americans. In fact, these are not the chants of Americans who could continue financially supporting this sick system even if they wanted to. And they don’t.

The cost of the American system, with its private health insurance industry in the business of profiting off of illness by limiting care, cutting corners and denying access to those with “pre-existing conditions,” is suffocating the U.S. economy. In this one unenviable area – spending — the U.S. is number one. Health care expenditures are a shocking 16 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (the value of all goods and services produced in a nation in a year), far ahead of the closest competitor. That would be France, where it’s only 11 percent. That’s followed by Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Canada and Austria, where it ranges from 10.8 down to 10.1 percent. These are all countries that provide national health care.

Looking at it another way, the average expenditure per individual, America remains in the undesirable position of most profligate spender. The average for an American was $7,290 in 2007, the latest year for which comparable statistics were available. But the average for the 30 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development was a mere $2,964, with the closest to the U.S. being Norway at $4,763.

Those costs marginalize U.S. manufacturers as they attempt to do right by their American workers while scrambling to compete in international markets. Here’s how Dr. Atul Gawande put it in his June article, “The Cost Conundrum,” in “The New Yorker:” “Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn. The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance . . . By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It’s not even close.”

President Obama warned the American Medical Association, which opposes national health care, about exactly the same thing in June when he said this: “If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of G.M.” Would those wealthy physicians bail out the government then?

Clearly these costs don’t contribute to quality since U.S. rates of infant mortality and life expectancy are so relatively poor. And they factor large in personal bankruptcies and delay of care as individuals are unable to keep up with medical care’s morbidly obese costs.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in February found that 53 percent of Americans cut health care because of cost in the previous year. A quarter reported putting off health care they needed such as doctor’s visits and surgery, and twenty percent said they have not filled a prescription. Another part of the poll explains this: “13 percent say they have used up all or most of their savings trying to pay off high medical bills in the past 12 months, and just as many say their medical debt means they have difficulty paying other bills.  A similar proportion (12%) say they have been contacted by a collection agency, while a smaller share (7%) report being unable to pay for basic necessities like food, heat or housing.”

We are Number One? This is cruel. This is wrong. This must stop.

I know that many Americans view my native land, Canada, not as a country, but as an unofficial 51^st state. But the difference between Canada and the 50 states is that Canada has national health care, thanks to Tommy Douglas, the former premier of Saskatchewan, and a party leader. One huge difference between the American system and Canada’s national health care is the extreme cost of administering private insurance in the U.S. A study published in 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that administrative costs were $1,059 per person in the U.S. but only $307 per person in Canada. That excessive $752 in administration costs paid in the U.S. for each insured person has only grown larger in the ensuing years. The study concluded: “A large sum might be saved in the United States if administrative costs could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style health care system.”

In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Company conducted a poll to determine the country’s greatest citizen. People everywhere could vote, for anyone they wanted, so an actor, like Tommy Douglas’ grandson, Kiefer Sutherland, could have won, or a famous singer like Celine Dion or Shania Twain. But Canadians chose a politician — Tommy Douglas, the father of national health care. That’s how we feel about the national health care system in Canada.

Don’t let the Republican Party-of-No stop this. Don’t let big vested interests like the pharmaceutical, insurance, and for-profit hospital corporations keep America down. In poll after poll, Americans have made it clear they want a public option. They want care as good as Canadians get. They’re paying more than twice the price for it. To ensure that America is Number One, Congress better deliver it before the end of August.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populists Revolt” 

The most-stunning and least-reported news about President Obama’s press conference with health-industry executives this week wasn’t those executives’ willingness to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat’s eagerness to involve those executives in a discussion about health-care reform even as they revealed their previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans.

That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle administration officials called a health-care “game changer”: In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year off the country’s medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, health-care companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers, and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry’s business is based not on respectable returns, but on grotesque profiteering and waste – the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.

Chief among the profiteers at the White House event were insurance companies, which have raised premiums by 119 percent since 1999, and one obvious question is why – why would Obama engage those particular thieves?

It’s a difficult query to answer, because Obama is a health-care mystery, struggling to muster consistent positions on the issue.

Listening to a 2003 Obama speech, it’s hard to believe he has become such an enigma. Back then, he declared himself “a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program” – i.e., one eliminating private insurers and their overhead costs by having government finance health care. Obama’s position was as controversial then as today – which is to say, controversial among political elites, but not among the general public. ABC’s 2003 poll showed almost two-thirds of Americans desiring a single-payer system “run by the government and financed by taxpayers,” just like CBS’s 2009 poll shows roughly the same percentage today.

In that speech six years ago, Obama said the only reason single-payer proponents should tolerate delay is “because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

This might explain why when Illinois contemplated a 2004 health-care proposal raising insurance lobbyists’ “fears that it would result in a single-payer system,” those lobbyists “found a sympathetic ear in Obama, who amended (read: gutted) the bill more to their liking,” according to The Boston Globe. Maybe Obama didn’t think single-payer was achievable without a Democratic Washington. And when in a 2006 interview he told me he was “not convinced that (single payer) is the best way to achieve universal health care,” perhaps he was following the same rationale, considering his insistence that he must “take into account what is possible.”

Of course, even as a senator aiming for the “possible” in a Republican Congress, Obama promised to never “shy away from a debate about single payer.” And after the 2008 election fulfilled his single-payer precondition of Democratic dominance, it was only logical to expect him to initiate that debate.

That’s why the White House’s current posture is so puzzling. As The Associated Press reports, Obama aides are trying to squelch any single-payer discussion, deploying their health-care point-person, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to announce that “everything is on the table with the single exception of single-payer.”

So it’s back to why – why Obama’s insurance-industry-coddling inconsistency? Is it a pol’s payback for campaign cash? Is it an overly cautious lawmaker’s paralysis? Is it a conciliator’s desire to appease powerful interests? Or is it something else?

For a president who spends so much time on camera answering questions, these have become the biggest unanswered questions of all.

***

 David Sirota is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

“He’s a real nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.”

These lyrics to “Nowhere Man,” written and recorded in 1965 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, describe the Republican Party of 2009. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter rejected that party and returned to his Democratic roots because, even at the age of 79, he’s got plans that go somewhere.

The GOP’s leaders and their inactions have placed the party at the corner of Unpopular and Nowhere. GOP voter registration fell in every western state in 2008, including Colorado where it dropped a whopping 9 percent. That year, the Pew Research Center found that voters calling themselves Republicans declined six points over four years, for the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of Pew polling.

Pennsylvania voters, not always in step, were this time. More than 200,000 Republicans switched registration to Democrat in 2008. Arlen Specter, who was a Democrat the first 16 years of his adult life, this spring joined those fellow Pennsylvania Republicans and returned to his Democratic roots.

The Republican response typifies why voters continue to convert the GOP to D on their party membership cards. The Republican National Committee posted on its web site nasty automatic e-mails to Specter that can be sent with the click of a mouse. Mean spirited is bad enough, but these lack a certain introspection.

One is supposed to be the White House teleprompter welcoming Specter to the Democratic Party. The text says, “Welcome to the Democrats. I look forward to working together to borrow more money from China.” Another is supposed to be a welcome from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, saying, “You’ll love how much we can spend taxpayer money.” Both are blind to a fact that taxpayers clearly see – Republican majorities during the Bush administration spent so much that they created the largest budget deficits known to man or nation, compelling excessive borrowing from China.

He’s as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all? – Nowhere Man

The leader of Specter’s new party – President Barack Obama – stood before the American people on his 100^th day in office, assessing progress and promising to press forward to aid people in need during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

He spoke of accomplishments, such as the stimulus bill that will create or save 3.5 million jobs, the extension of health insurance for 11 million children whose parents work full-time, and a measure to help homeowners refinance their mortgages. He talked of changing the tone of foreign policy from threats to diplomacy, forbidding torture and closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

This Democrat has his sights set on the next hundreds and hundreds of days and pledged to continue working on priorities he established during his campaign, including health care reform and clean energy development.

Even those who disagree with him know he’s got plans. He’s going places.  This guy’s definitely not at the corner of Unpopular and Nowhere.

He has offered to bring Republicans along with him, to negotiate with them, to include them in the process. But they’ve smacked him down at every turn. They’re not just fighting with him, either. They’re also bickering among themselves. And it isn’t pretty.

There was the infamous back and forth between GOP mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh who is calling for the president of his country to fail, and GOP chairman Michael Steele, who made himself famous by promising an “off the hook” public relations blitz “to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”  After Obama’s chief of staff said Limbaugh was the representative of the GOP, Steele shot back saying he was the head of the party, adding that Limbaugh was incendiary and “ugly.” Limbaugh responded with a rant on radio that Steele was unfit to lead, to which Steele responded by crawling on his belly to apologize to the “ugly” one.  There’s some inspiring leaders for you!

Now a group of Republicans has split from the RNC, calling itself the National Council for a New America. They contend they are upset that the GOP has failed to provide alternatives to the Democrats’ plans. The group includes former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. “It’s no secret that we’re in a seriously troubling time for the Republicans,” said Mike Murphy, a strategist who has advised Romney and Sen. John McCain.

It’s also seriously troubling that this new cabal, supposedly trying to solve the old group’s problems, called itself National Council for a New America. Clearly they are not satisfied with the current America, the America that is rejecting Republicans. So their plan is to remake America rather than to remake themselves.  Good luck with that.

Actually, there’s a much easier option. Obama described it to Republicans during the press conference on his 100^th day in office. Even with Specter in the Democratic fold and the potential of a 60-vote supermajority for Democrats in the Senate, the President said he would like to work with Republicans. He said the majority will likely rule on core issues. But there are many matters on which Republicans could exert influence if they would come to the table and negotiate in good faith.

Republicans can continue to simply vote NO on everything. They can bicker among themselves and look ridiculous to the American people. They can get nothing done and be the party of “I’m-in-control-NO-I’m-in-control” nonsense. They can continue to lose members and statesmen like Specter. Obama suggested that would be an unwise strategy.

That would be a nowhere strategy.