The Great Debate

President Barack Obama’s budget, released Wednesday, is getting a lot of criticism from ideologues on the right and left. That is one of the most encouraging things about it.

Though the president’s budget falls short in several important ways, it demonstrates his willingness to compromise — something most Democratic and Republican legislators have resisted. Now comes the critical stage in any real effort to achieve a “grand bargain,” when the president can show true leadership by bridging the divide between the parties and using the bully pulpit to address the American people in a constructive fashion that can lead to a deal.

The most helpful thing about the Obama budget is that, for the first time, the president has publicly proposed reforms to two key social insurance programs. By adopting a GOP-backed change in the inflation calculator — the so-called chained CPI — the president is accepting adjustments in the cost of living payments for those receiving Social Security.

He is also renewing his verbal offer to Republicans from last December’s negotiations for more than $400 billion in healthcare savings – including roughly $370 billion in Medicare spending over the next 10 years. His budget proposes to expand means testing for Medicare premium subsidies.

These proposals don’t go far enough. But they put social insurance programs on the table for discussion. That is a positive step.

The immigration bill being drafted by Congress has bipartisan support on three broad concepts ‑ a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, streamlining legal immigration and more stringent enforcement of the laws against hiring illegal workers. Each presents complex problems to solve, however, and obtaining consensus on the details will be far more problematic than agreeing on the principles.

Partially unpacking these three concepts shows why.

Streamlining the legal immigration system is no easy matter; there is no single approach that can produce a fair, workable, efficient and equitable immigration system. If the approximately 11 million undocumented persons in the United States are to be given a place in line to obtain residency and then citizenship, they are competing with millions of others already in line.

Even that statement is overly simplistic. For starters, there is no single “line” but rather multiple pathways and categories – and every immigrant must be eligible for one or more categories, wait to receive one of a limited number of visas in that category and satisfy a number of criteria at the time the visa becomes available. In addition, there are  six categories of family-based immigrants for which visas are allocated, with a certain number of visas set aside (and capped) each year, plus five employment-based categories with yearly caps.

For years governments told us in meetings that an Arms Trade Treaty was a fanciful idea – merely a twinkle in our campaigning eye. But earlier this month an Arms Trade Treaty was adopted by an overwhelming majority at the United Nations General Assembly. Thanks to the democratic process, international law will for the first time regulate the $70 billion global arms trade.

When we launched the Control Arms campaign more than a decade ago, only Mali, Costa Rica and Cambodia were prepared to publicly stand with us in demanding the treaty.

But things started to change.

Dogged perseverance, growing recognition that the arms trade was out of control and a campaign around the world began to pay off. The UK government’s announcement of support in 2004 was a turning point; many other major arms exporters followed suit. By 2005, more than 50 countries supported the idea.

She was, beyond a doubt, the greatest British political leader since Winston Churchill and, like him, she was cordially hated by many grandees of the party she led.

The entire British establishment, from the royal family down, often wished she would just go away. In the end, a Cabinet cabal proved too much for her and drove her into exile.

Britain hates talent, at least in its rulers. Maggie Roberts wasn’t just talented – she was the incarnation of everything the 20th century British establishment loathed.

The era of “simple” environmental problems is over. Today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state regulators face issues, like climate change, that are complex from all angles: scientific, economic and political. At the same time, some of the EPA’s regulatory tools—like the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a law that was crafted decades ago—are cumbersome or inadequate. And there is virtually no chance that our gridlocked Congress will come to the rescue and agree on how to modernize reforms.

This complexity makes Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s nominee for EPA Administrator, precisely the kind of leader the agency needs. McCarthy is a strong environmental advocate, but she is pragmatic about how to achieve an end. She has worked across the aisle and with industry leaders to accomplish the EPA’s goals. As an executive at Intel, I’ve worked with McCarthy over the past four years, while she led the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. She is a problem solver who relies on science, economics and common sense.

One key example is the way she applied a Supreme Court ruling that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Under McCarthy’s leadership, the EPA found a way to address the major sources of air pollution without regulating every neighborhood dry cleaner and gas station, as the act seemed to require. She focused the agency’s new permitting regulations on the bigger, more environmentally significant sources of greenhouse emissions—an approach that helped protect the environment while also growing the economy and encouraging innovation.

Last year, Congress failed to forge a workable framework for cybersecurity to protect the United States against a fast-growing national security and economic threat. Our cyber-networks remain dangerously vulnerable to outside attack and are the repeated targets of foreign governments intent on stealing the fruits of our intellectual and business efforts. Congress must address this crucial issue.

The threat to our critical infrastructure, national security and economic prosperity was laid out in a February report by Mandiant, a respected U.S. computer security firm. An elite unit of Chinese hackers affiliated with China’s People Liberation Army, the report concluded, is likely behind a wave of attacks on U.S. government and business computer systems.

Since 2006, according to the report, the Chinese unit has stolen data – including blueprints, test results, business plans and emails – from at least 115 U.S. companies across a wide spectrum of major industries.

My immediate and lasting  memory of Mrs. Thatcher — Maggie as we called her — is sitting next to her in the late sixties at a dinner table as she scorched a bunch of City of London financial types. I was astonished. She wasn’t yet the Iron Lady. She wasn’t  in government. Labour was in power. She was  an obscure back bench Conservative MP, elected only in 1959, noticed in those sexist days (has much changed?) as much for her hats and aggressive hair style as for  her passionate defence of grammar schools under threat of closure from Labour.

What she did with the City of London men  was later characterised as a  “hand-bagging.” A black Asprey bag she always carried was metaphorically wielded against people she saw as standing in the way of the greatness of Britain as Boudica, the leader of a British tribe, wielded a lance against the Roman occupiers. I suppose that as a new national editor (of The Sunday Times), and with normal male presumption , I had expected to lead the questioning of the ten or so big names and the table. I didn’t stand a chance. Maggie pounded and pummeled them all by herself for an hour. I can’t pretend this is verbatim but it went something like this: “All you people are interested in is moving paper around, making money not things. What are you doing for British industry? When are you going to help business stand up to  the unions?”  They murmured, they shuffled, they were outclassed. British elections — six weeks to  a vote and no paid television ads — have never been as corrupted by money as much as American, so she was not turning off a potential source of funding as an American candidate would fear to do. Still these were  men — all men of course  — who were influential and articulate and used to reverence not rebuke.

Maggie could be seductive in private conversation one on one, more so as she matured,  the strident voice of the public halls giving way to a softer, more seductive style, hand on an arm, intent eye to eye in persuasion. She was afraid of nobody, respecter of no convention she considered archaic. The British custom at dinner parties was always for the host to murmur “coffee?” which was signal for “the ladies” to leave for the powder room while the men, over cigars and port, got down to serious business. It was  a small sensation — regarded in some circles as a grave breach of etiquette — when at a dinner party I attended thrown by her egregious confidante Woodrow Wyatt, Maggie stayed in her seat unabashed, uninvited,  and unfazed by the  arguments over the cigars (in this case by a couple of captains of industry who wanted to be part of Europe and she defiantly raised the Union Jack).

Defying your base is always risky. It can either bring you down — or it can make you look stronger.

Right now, politicians in both parties are trying to pull it off.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) – a likely contender for the 2016 Republican nomination – is preparing to challenge conservatives on immigration reform. President Barack Obama is defying liberals on entitlement reform. What are they thinking?

Your base is people who are with you when you’re wrong.  Sooner or later, every politician gets in trouble. He needs people to stick up for him — people who say, “He was there for us and we’ll be there for him.” President Ronald Reagan’s base, for example, stuck with him during the Iran-contra scandal. So did President Bill Clinton’s base during impeachment.

More than eight months after losing a case at the World Trade Organization, the United States has finally begun changing its protectionist regulations for mandatory country-of-origin labels (COOL) on meat. Unfortunately, while the Obama administration claims that it is implementing the WTO’s recommendations, it is actually making the regulations more protectionist.

Congressional intervention now seems the only avenue left to defend consumer interests from the Big Cattle lobby and restore what’s left of America’s reputation in the global trading system.

Here is the back-story: Regulations now require meat from cattle or hogs slaughtered in the United States to carry labels with the country or countries involved in production. If the animal was born and raised in the United States, for example, the meat must be labeled “Product of the United States.” If the animal was born or raised outside the United States and then brought here for slaughter, the meat must carry a label revealing this and listing the countries.

Diplomats from six world powers  are due back in Kazakhstan on Friday for talks with Iran about its controversial nuclear program. From the hawkish “bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” crowd to the “jaw-jaw-not-war-war” folks, there is no shortage of ideas about how to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue.

Lost in the din is the prospect that the United Nations agency charged with monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities could settle the most pressing issue – by helping Iran convert its enriched uranium gas stockpile to safer metal form. If only the world powers will encourage it to do its job.

The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) not only monitors member states’ nuclear programs to make sure they are in compliance with required safeguards obligations, but it also provides technical cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear technology.