Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
Five weeks: It’s an eternity in the world of politics
By Christopher Doering
Five weeks: It may not be a lot of time for many people, but with the pivotal mid-term elections looming on Nov. 2 Delaware Senator Tom Carper said five weeks is an eternity for Democrats to use to turn the tide in their favor.
“Today, five weeks a lot happens. A lot of minds change in five weeks,” Carper, a self-proclaimed “optimist”, told the Reuters Washington Summit.
“What we have to do is to be able to remind people if there is some good news here in the next five weeks of what that is and get people to focus on the future.”
Carper, a former Delaware governor, said there is a slew of economic data coming out between now and the election that Democrats could embrace. He pointed to another unemployment report next week, and several more weekly jobless claims.
“If the election were held today we’d lose seats in the House, I don’t know if we’d lose the house,” the Democrat said. “We’d lose seats in the Senate. That usually happens in the off year election.”
Carper is up for reelection in 2012.
After a hard day’s work in Afghanistan, Petraeus reads… about Afghanistan
After spending 16-plus hours each day running the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, American General David Petraeus tries to thumb through a few pages of a book each night before his eyes close and it falls to the ground. The most recent topic? Afghanistan of course.
The four-star general told Reuters that currently on his nightstand is a book by a leading expert on the country: Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: a Cultural and Political History, a book ranked 21,047 on Amazon.com (as this blog was being published).
The general, speaking in a telephone interview as part of the Reuters Washington Summit, acknowledged that he probably only gets through a few pages each night.
“When you start at working at 5:30 in the morning, and I mean really start working, and you go down somewhere around 2200-2300 (10 p.m.-11 p.m.), you don’t get more than a couple of pages into whatever book you read before it falls on the floor,” he said.
In the preface of the book, Barfield said he embarked on writing the book during what he described as a “period of neglect” of Afghanistan by the Bush administration. Barfield first visited Afghanistan nearly four decades ago as a student and said he decided to write the new book because of the renewed focus on the country by the Obama administration.
Petraeus, widely hailed by both Democrats and Republicans, was tapped by President Barack Obama to oversee the war effort in Afghanistan after his tour leading the U.S. military in Iraq.
Barfield, an anthropology professor at Boston University and head of the American Institute for Afghanistan Studies, was just in Afghanistan and visited the general’s office the other day, Petraeus said.
Gregg sees Republican victory in November as keeping Obama in check
If Republicans are able to capture either chamber of the U.S. Congress in the November election, they will use that power to try to block any further expansion of the federal government by the Obama administration, Republican Senator Judd Gregg said on Wednesday.
“I think clearly going into the next Congress, if you have one or the other houses controlled by the Republican party, you’re going to have much more financial discipline, there’s no question of that,” Gregg, who is from New Hampshire and is retiring after the election, told the Reuters Washington Summit.
Republicans lost control of both the House and Senate in the last two election cycles, in part because they strayed from their position of holding the line on federal spending during the Bush administration. As the economy slowly recovers from the worst recession in decades, the deficit and the mounting debt have become major themes in the 2010 congressional elections.
“We won’t be able to set the agenda in the sense that the president sets the agenda, but we will at least be able to control the expansiveness of the government and slow the rate of growth and start to raise the issues that are important for being fiscally disciplined,” Gregg said, noting that “we can’t overpromise because we don’t control the presidency.”
He said that New Hampshire voters chose Democrats in the last two elections because they thought Republicans had walked away from their traditional principle of fiscal discipline and supported the Iraq war. Candidates running in the state this time are dedicated to returning to fiscal conservativism, he said.
However, he offered some caution that Republicans can only do so much without controlling the White House.
“The presidency is still extremely strong, and I don’t think anybody is overpromising what can occur,” he said.
With end of TARP, investigations into fraud take center stage
While the much maligned $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has officially ended, not everything has wrapped up — auditors are just starting to hit their stride investigating scores of cases of possible malfeasance.
Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the program, nicknamed SIGTARP, said his office has more than 120 criminal investigations underway. They are looking into whether the money loaned to financial institutions and automakers was used properly or not, if there was fraud in applications for TARP financial backing and other wrongdoing.
“Our focus on investigations is growing and that’s an area where we are definitely in a ramp-up phase,” Barofsky told the Reuters Washington Summit. “The crimes that have been committed were committed in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The most common statute of limitation for fraud is five years and there’s a reason for that, it takes a while for these type of sophisticated while collar investigations … to hit, for fraud to be discovered and it takes a while to investigate them.”
Barofsky lamented that finding experienced people willing to come to work for a temporary agency was proving to be a challenge.
“We’re looking for experienced, white collar investigators who want to come over to a temporary agency, that is not the deepest of pools, to be honest with you, if I could find more I would hire more,” he said.
Additionally, Barofsky plans to launch an after-action audit of the U.S. Treasury Department’s role in General Motors’ initial public offering, which would include examining the decision-making process and whether it maximized the return for taxpayers.
“I expect it will be a broad inquiry that goes into this. In many ways, this is a pretty unprecedented activity for a government to be selling its shares to the public in an IPO like this,” he said, adding that he expected other such audits of other companies that the federal government has stakes in and plan to go public.
If Democrats hold US House, Pelosi seen concentrating power-lobbyist
If Democrats are able to hang on to the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2 elections, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will likely be able to concentrate her power because there will be fewer conservative Democrats giving her a hard time on critical votes, according to top senior lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Political prognosticators have said that Republicans are within striking distance of taking control of the House in November, with Republicans needing a net gain of 40 seats and polls showing them closing in on that target.
“She’ll have a much more cohesive conference than she has now because it’s the middle that’s anticipated to get cratered in this election,” Bruce Josten told the Reuters Washington Summit. “Most of the seat losses anticipated come from the people that are the hardest votes to get on party-line unity votes.”
Pelosi has had a tough time over the last few years holding onto votes from conservative Democrats, like the Blue Dog Democrats who have lobbied hard to ensure most legislation does not add to the bloated federal deficit.
“She’ll have a lot less negotiating to have to do, she’ll have a stronger more cohesive conference, oddly enough, than what she has had,” Josten said, adding a cautionary note that “she’ll have less margin … but literally most of the members of the Progressive Caucus are in safe districts.”
Many of the Blue Dog Democrats have decided against running for re-election or are facing tough bids to return to Washington.
Josten also said that if Republicans are able to win control of the House, predictions that they will be able to significantly alter the health care law that was passed earlier this year are probably overblown.
Berman: House may be “lame” after elections but won’t be paralyzed
The chairman of the House of Representatives committee on foreign affairs hasn’t lost his sense of humor…yet.
Representative Howard Berman said he has been struggling for 24 years to get Congress to ease up on travel restrictions for Americans who want to go to Cuba. He’s determined to get it through his committee this year, even if it doesn’t happen until after the November election when the lawmakers are in “lame duck” session.
“We’re lame but we’re not paralyzed,” he told the Reuters Washington Summit when asked if it was possible to still get bills out of committee and to the full House for a vote during the time between the November election and the beginning of the new session in January.
Berman said he does not want to bring the topic up for a vote until he knows it can pass. So far, that is apparently not the case.
Though he could joke about the lame duck session he got in a few digs about the conservative Tea Party movement and then fiercely defended House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“She is always under-estimated. Yes she wants to get certain things done, and there are people who don’t want to be pushed to do those things and so that can always cause a little bit of tension,” he said.
“I think anybody who reaches the conclusion that she is part of our problems is really misreading everything about the last year and a half.”
