If you ever wondered what Illinois and Iran might have in common, here’s one answer: President Obama is most definitely not picking sides in their elections.
 
So insists the White House.
 
“Our response … on this has been, from the very beginning, consistent,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told a briefing Thursday when asked about the post-election turmoil in Iran.
 
“The American people and this government are not going to pick the next leader of Iran,” he said. “That’s something that the Iranians have to do.”
 
That doesn’t mean they won’t tsk-tsk loudly from the sidelines as the opportunity permits.
 
The administration has voiced concern about how the election was conducted, but shied away from suggesting any fraud was involved in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s defeat of challenger Mirhossein Mousavi.
 
They say they don’t favor either candidate, but insist the challenger’s supporters have a right to continue their protests a week after the vote.
 
“We have to ensure that we express our views, as I’ve said, about ensuring that people can demonstrate, have their causes and concerns heard,” the White House spokesman said.
 
Obama’s also steering clear of the U.S. Senate race in Illinois, Gibbs said, even though he met last Friday with Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
 
Chicago papers say the Obama administration is pushing her to run for the president’s former U.S. Senate seat in 2010, but the White House begs to differ.
 
“Let me be explicit,” Gibbs said. “The president is not going to pick a candidate in the Illinois Senate race.”
 
And the meeting at the White House with Obama, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser Valerie Jarret? Why, Madigan and Obama are just old friends and Obama has “enormous respect for what she accomplished,” Gibbs said.
 
And oh, by the way …
 
“I think she’d be a terrific candidate. But we’re not going to get involved in picking that candidate in Illinois.”
 
For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama speaks at a fundraiser Thursday night)

He’s been preparing for this moment since long before he came to the White House, so President Barack Obama might wonder how his Cairo speech to the Muslim world went over. He wouldn’t have to wait long — within minutes after he ended his address, the reviews started flooding in.

The Washington Post said Obama did well, but basically, talk’s cheap: “Perhaps today’s words, from the son of a Muslim, will be viewed as a welcome olive branch. But it’s still just a speech. And even stirring words can’t paper over the seemingly intractable differences in the Mideast.”

The New York Post got a bit snarky: “If world peace is attained by complimenting those on the other side into submission, he made some serious progress. Obama really buttered them up in Cairo.”

The Drudge Report noted how long the speech was: the Web site showed a photo of Obama speaking, over the line “6,000 words”.

In Iran, there was a sort of pre-emptive review, issued even before Obama spoke: Iran’s supreme leader said United States was deeply hated in the Middle East, and warned Obama that “beautiful” speeches alone would not improve the U.S. image in the Muslim world.

More reviews are definitely expected to trickle in, since Obama’s speech was a multimedia event. If you missed the live broadcast, you could also see part or all of the speech online at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. The White House ran the speech live on its website, and the State Department streamed it as part of a live chat – and the chat continued long after the speech ended.

One comment found there sounded like a rave: “Barack Hussein Obama is definitely an ”Elevation” leader that makes one vibrate while listening to him!”

Around Washington today, Israeli Defense Miniser Ehud Barak meets with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Admiral Eric Olson, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, testifies next year’s budget request, and FBI Director Robert Mueller appears before a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

For more Reuters political news, please click here.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih (Egyptian citizens watch Obama’s speech in Cairo)

Guess what? There’s more bad news about the economy today.

Numbers out today show the unemployment rate has risen to its highest rate in 25 years as companies buckled under the strain of a recession that is showing no signs of ending.

Want to hear more? The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Keith Hall, testifies to Congress about the employment picture at 9:30.

In the Obama administration’s first public overture to Tehran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has invited Iran to a conference on Afghanistan planned for this month. Traveling in Brussels, Clinton also said the problems of climate change and the economy should be tackled simultaneously.

President Obama travels to Columbus, Ohio to show the $787 billion stimulus package at work: police cadets who would have been let go will instead be sworn in as officers. Attorney Eric Holder joins him.

photo credit: REUTERS/Mike Segar (People wait in line at a job fair in New York, March 5)

For more Reuters political coverage, click here.

Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee didn’t attend the latest U.N. Security Council meeting on Iraq. But the moment the 3-hour session was over the Iranian delegation was circulating a strongly worded letter from Khazaee that had a very clear message for the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama: Stop talking like Bush.

He was responding to less than two dozen words on Iran in U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice’s speech to the council during a routine review of U.N. activities in Iraq. Rice said that U.S. policy "will seek an end to Iran's ambition to acquire an illicit nuclear capacity and its support for terrorism.”

Those words clearly infuriated the Iranians, who have been toning down their anti-U.S. rhetoric since Obama took over from George W. Bush five weeks ago.

"It is unfortunate that, yet again, we are hearing the same tired, unwarranted and groundless allegations that used to be unjustifiably and futilely repeated by the previous administration," Khazaee said in a letter to the council's current president, Japanese Ambassador Yukio Takasu.

"Instead of raising allegations against others, the United States had better take concrete and meaningful steps in correcting its past wrong policies and practices vis-a-vis other nations, including the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Khazaee's remarks were among the most critical of the new U.S. administration by a senior Iranian official to date.

Is the Obama administration simply repeating the “same tired” language of the Bush administration? The accusations aren’t new, U.N. diplomats say, but the promises of a new approach could herald a radical shift in U.S. policy on Iran.

Obama, Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have said repeatedly that Washington would use all tools, including direct talks, to deal with Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes.

Iran has reacted cautiously, saying it’s open to fair talks while demanding fundamental changes in U.S. policy. Western envoys in New York say that not everyone in the Islamic Republic is happy about the outstretched hand of Obama and his promises of change.

Tehran had often criticized the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, which labeled Iran a member of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and pre-war Iraq. It’s harder to criticize Obama at the moment, diplomats say. That could be one of the reasons Khazaee seized the opportunity to attack Rice’s speech to the council.

“The hardliners in Tehran find it easier to have a U.S. administration that turns its back on them,” said a European diplomat. “It’s easier to deal with a ‘Great Satan’. It gives them someone to blame their troubles on.”

It’s nearly three decades since Washington severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980 after militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took a group of U.S. diplomats and officials hostage.

Present-day Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that Israel should be “wiped off the map”, has repeatedly ruled out a suspension of the country’s uranium enrichment program, prompting the Security Council to impose three rounds of sanctions.

U.N. diplomats say that Obama administration officials have signaled that they do not believe the Iranian nuclear program can be stopped with U.S. or Israeli air strikes. Instead, Obama wants to use a combination of pressure – possibly by imposing further U.N. sanctions – and inducements to persuade the Iranians to halt their enrichment program. The details of the new approach are being worked out in a thorough review of the U.S. policy on Iran, U.S. officials say.

“Will a kindler, gentler U.S. approach work?” asked the European diplomat. “We’ll have to wait and see. Iran’s one of the countries that invented chess and it’s a very good player.”

Will Israel and India -- the first the United States' closest ally and the second fast becoming one of the closest -- emerge as the trickiest adversaries in any attempt by the United States to seek a regional solution to Afghanistan?

The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan — including possible talks with Iran.

The idea has been fashionable among foreign policy analysts for a while, as I have discussed in previous posts here and here. The aim would be to capitalise on Shi'ite Iran's traditional hostility to the hardline brand of Sunni Islam espoused by the Taliban and al Qaeda to seek its help in neighbouring Afghanistan. At the same time India would be encouraged to make peace with Pakistan over Kashmir to end a cause of tension that has underpinned the rise of Islamist militancy in Pakistan and left both countries vying for influence in Afghanistan.

But Israel has already cautioned Obama against talking to Iran, which it said would be a seen as a sign of weakness in efforts to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear programme. And Obama's suggestion that the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute has raised hackles in India, which resents any outside interference in what it sees as a bilateral dispute. That could make the two countries important allies in combating -- or at least reshaping -- any attempt to remould U.S. strategy. 

India and Israel have already built close defence ties, as underlined by this Times of India article.  And according to this Asia Times article by former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, India's growing relationship with Israel, combined with U.S. pressure, is pushing Delhi to break off what was once a strategic partnership with Tehran. "At the root of it lies unprecedented US-Israeli interference in India's Iran policy," he writes.

Are we going to see more signs of Israel and India working together -- if necessary to resist rather than support U.S. policy? And in an increasingly multi-polar world, will Obama discover that he needs to watch the United States' friends as closely as its enemies to drive through his plans for change?

WASHINGTON - Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin sounds a bit wary about her upcoming debate with her really, really, really experienced Democratic rival.
 
“Senator (Joe) Biden has a tremendous amount of experience,” she told Fox News. “I think he was first elected when I was like in the second grade.”
 
If her running mate John McCain, 72, wasn’t hoping to be the oldest person to begin a first term as president, one might think Palin was suggesting Biden, 65, was old. 
 
“He’s been in there a long, long, long time,” Palin said. “So he’s got the experience. He probably has the sound bites. He has the rhetoric. He knows what’s expected of him. He is a great debater, also.”
 
“So yes, it’s going to be quite a task in front of me,” she said.
 
Palin also said she didn’t mean to insult Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in her nominating speech when she belittled his experience as a community organizer. 

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” she told the Republican convention.
 
“I certainly didn’t mean to hurt his feelings,” Palin told Fox News. “Didn’t mean to offend any community organizers either.”
 
She said she did it because Obama had taken a shot at small town mayors.
 
The Alaska governor, little-known before being chosen as McCain’s running mate, said she respected former Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton but disagreed with her on the issues.
 
Clinton has been campaigning on behalf of Obama since losing the Democratic nomination, but she has avoided direct confrontation with Palin.
 
Clinton planned to speak at a demonstration against the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, near the United Nations which convenes its annual General Assembly next week but she canceled the appearance on Wednesday after learning Palin would also address the crowd.
 
A Clinton adviser said the protest had not been billed as a partisan political event.
 
Organizers of the demonstration subsequently announced Thursday they had decided not to let any American political personalities appear.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush stirred up the U.S. presidential campaign Thursday by suggesting that Democratic front-runner Barack Obama’s pledge to talk to Iran’s leader amounted to “the false comfort of appeasement.”

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said in a speech to the Israeli parliament marking Israel’s 60th anniversary.

Without mentioning Obama by name, he compared “this foolish delusion” to the appeasement of the Nazis ahead of World War Two. 

“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement,” Bush said.

The remark drew swift response from Obama, who argues the United States blunders by refusing to talk to the leaders of hostile nations like Iran, Syria and Cuba.

“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack,” Obama said.

“The president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel,” he said.

Republican candidate John McCain criticized Obama’s pledge to speak directly to U.S. foes, saying “it shows naivete and inexperience and lack of judgment” to consider sitting down with a country like Iran that wants to destroy Israel. “My question is, what does he want to talk about?” McCain said.

Not everyone in Bush’s administration is opposed to talking to Iran. Defense Secretary Robert Gates offered his own ideas just a day before the president’s Knesset speech, telling a diplomatic forum: “We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.