Washington Extra – ‘Wild ride’ ends
The sharpest debater in the 2012 field of Republican presidential candidates exited the race touting a hodgepodge of initiatives that made his failed race so colorful.
“Suspending the campaign does not mean suspending citizenship,” Newt Gingrich warned in his long-awaited announcement that he was quitting. He then ticked off the vision of America he will continue to pursue as a private citizen:
His fabled U.S. colony on the Moon, holograms in houses, cures for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, not to mention a national energy policy/balanced budget that would free the United States from “radical Islam, Saudi kings and Chinese bondholders.”
The bombastic former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives brought an element of unpredictability to the Republican presidential nominating contest. His come-from-behind victory in South Carolina in January briefly led some to wonder whether Mitt Romney really could be knocked off.
Not so. As primary defeats began to pile up, Gingrich’s campaign became less about his big ideas and more about the St. Louis zoo penguin who had the nerve to peck at the hand of this notorious animal lover.
“It was a truly wild ride,” a tired-looking Gingrich said as he bowed out, refusing to answer reporters’ questions.
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Washington Extra – Gift of the gas
After negotiating a tricky stretch of road, the Obama campaign may be easing into the straightaway in the gas-driven presidential race.
News on Monday of a delay in the planned closure of the largest refinery on the East Coast could mean an end to skyrocketing gas prices. And that would effectively take the wind out of a forceful Republican line of attack — that the president is to be blamed for $4 a gallon gas, arguably the most visible price in the American economy today.
The narrative was working against the president, who currently gets some of his lowest poll marks for his handling of energy prices, even though the causes of higher prices are largely beyond his control. Even so, we shouldn’t expect the Republicans to simply drop the rhetoric.
“Until we are at the point where people don’t feel like they’re squeezing their entire paychecks into the gas tank, it’s an issue that Republicans are going to keep talking about,” said a Senate Republican aide.
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Signs of cheaper gas could brighten Obama campaign – New signs of lower gas prices could give a boost to President Obama’s re-election hopes and blunt a potent weapon that Republicans have used to attack him. News of a month long delay in the planned closure of the largest refinery on the East Coast was the latest indication sky-rocketing gasoline prices may have peaked. Industry experts say keeping Sunoco’s Philadelphia refinery open will ease supply concerns and help underpin a gradual decline in gasoline prices during the summer. For more of this story by Alister Bull, read here.
Tending to China-US relations
Valentine’s Day is as good a day as any for China and the United States to work on the kinks in their relationship.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping signaled beforehand that tending to the state of the “dynamic and promising” U.S.-China connection would be the at the heart of his White House visit on Tuesday.
The economic and trade relationship between the two countries is far too important to be frayed by “frictions and differences,” Xi wrote in a Q&A submitted to the Washington Post and published on the eve of his White House meeting with President Barack Obama.
“What is important is that we properly handle these differences through coordination based on equality, mutual benefit, mutual understanding and mutual accommodation. We must not allow frictions and differences to undermine the larger interests of our business cooperation,” Xi wrote.
The man many see as China’s leader-in-waiting promised to do better and called on the United States to make an effort too — but he might not be feeling any love from the Republicans seeking to upset Obama in the Nov. 6 election.
Tough talk on China has been a recurring theme on the campaign trail — especially for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. He calls China a cheater and says, if elected, he’d work to get Bejing labeled a currency manipulator, something the U.S. Treasury has so far refrained from doing.
In a speech last week, the Republican lumped China with Russia and jihadism. (It didn’t have the same ring of George W. Bush’s axis of evil, but the point was made.) Romney, a leading candidate now tied in recent polls, said that trio threatened to compete with the United States and the West for world leadership.
Washington Extra – A Deng Xiaoping Moment?
Maybe it’s the careful, consensus-oriented system that produces them, but China’s leaders in recent years have not exactly exuded personality. President Hu Jintao is famous for his stiff manner and scripted speaking style. Jiang Zemin was slightly more relaxed, and enjoyed showing off his English language skills and knowledge of U.S. history.
Washington on Tuesday will get its first close look at China’s next president, current Vice President Xi Jinping, who has a reputation for being more open and refreshingly direct than some of his predecessors. It may be too much to hope for a “Deng Xiaoping moment,” a 1979 turning point in Sino-American cultural relations when the diminutive Deng, China’s great modernizer, attended a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, donned a giant cowboy hat and wowed the crowd. Deng was then China’s vice premier.
Xi has conflicting needs on this visit. He wants to show peers and the public back home that he can handle the American account, China’s most important relationship. He visited Iowa in 1985 and, by all accounts, the experience affected him. He also wants to strike a good working relationship with the White House and Capitol Hill, which could help both sides handle a daunting array of disagreements: human rights, the South China Sea, China’s currency, and Obama’s more aggressive posture in Asia, to name a few.
But Xi also won’t want to make any waves that could complicate his ascendance to the top of China’s pyramid, still 13 months away. So a jaunty tractor ride when he returns to Iowa later this week may not be in the cards.
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Obama election-year budget aims to spur hiring President Barack Obama called for new spending to boost growth and higher taxes on the rich, laying out an election-year vision for America in a budget that drew heavy fire from Republicans for failing to curb huge deficits. Obama’s 2013 spending proposal is expected to go nowhere in a divided Congress and is widely seen as more of a campaign document that frames his economic pitch to voters and seeks to shift the focus from deficits to economic growth. For more of this story by Alister Bull and Laura MacInnis, read here. For a story on the Arab Spring and the budget by Susan Cornwell, read here. For a story on proposed dividend tax hike by Kim Dixon and Patrick Temple-West, read here.
Washington Extra – God awful
As welcomes go, this might be one of the most colorful (and perplexing) in recent memory. One week before he is to help host Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden took a double jab at China’s economic growth prospects and its one-child policy.
“Because of that God-awful one-child policy they have, what happens now is in the next 20 years they’re going to have such an inverse proportion of the number of people working to the number of people retired that there is no way they can sustain that growth,” Biden said.
The apparently unscripted remarks came during a speech about college affordability in Florida. He was trying to make the case that the United States remains the world’s largest economy and is “better positioned than any other country in the world to lead the 21st century.”
Biden is famous for speaking off the cuff, a penchant that has landed him in hot water a few times. But could it be that he was asked to be tough on China – at a time that U.S. voters are looking to President Obama to stand up to the Asian giant?
It’s hard to know, but Biden did make clear he had a role…sort of. “I’ve been sort of given part of the China portfolio here,” he said. We’ll see how that’s going when Xi rolls into Washington. Xi, by the way, is no mere vice president in a supporting role. He is expected to become China’s president next year.
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Huntsman wouldn’t be the only U.S. president to speak Chinese
Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman’s language skills have been in the spotlight since Saturday, when he said during a presidential candidates’ debate that his rival Mitt Romney does not understand U.S. relations with China — underscoring his point by saying so in Mandarin.
Huntsman is a former U.S. ambassador to China who learned the language as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan in the late 1980s. His campaign says the former governor of Utah also speaks Hokkien, a Chinese dialect used in Taiwan.
Polls give Huntsman only a slim chance of making it to the White House, perhaps because some Republican voters view him as too moderate for serving as Democratic President Barack Obama’s emissary in Beijing. He has only about 3 percent support in the race for the Republican nomination to oppose Obama’s re-election bid, according to polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.com.
But if he were to overcome the odds, he would not be the first Chinese speaker to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Herbert Hoover, who was president from 1929 to 1933, also spoke Chinese. Hoover learned the language when he worked as a mining engineer in China as a young man, said Spencer Howard, of the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa.
Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, traveled to China in 1899, the day after they were married. Mrs. Hoover learned to speak and write Chinese as her husband worked under contract to the Chinese government to investigate mining conditions. The couple’s time in China was not without adventure — they were caught in the middle of the Boxer Rebellion against foreigners.
Howard said the Hoover library has diaries from aides describing how the first couple spoke Chinese as a way of having private conversations in the White House, and that the first lady had a good grasp of the language although Hoover is believed to have known only about 100 words.
So sad that the GOP ignores, by far, their best candidate. Mostly because he put country before politics and accepted the position in the Obama administration as ambassador to China.
Newt goes back to school
Newt Gingrich may not have thrilled a crowd of Iowa school kids with all of his answers on Tuesday, but he cannot be accused of pandering to them.
Gingrich didn’t score points with the 200 or so middle and high schoolers in Osage, Iowa, with his answer to the U.S. falling behind in the brain race with China.
“You’ve got to study more,” he told the kids, who stared back. “Scores in the end aren’t the teacher’s problem; they are the student’s problem.”
The kids were quiet and attentive for the 45 minutes the former US House Speaker spent with them in the gym at Osage Middle School, but their reactions afterward were decidedly mixed.
Some were thrilled with Gingrich’s visit, including Alexandra Burns, 14, the daughter of a local Republican legislator who invited Gingrich after meeting him with her father.
“How cool was that?” she shouted after Gingrich left.
I don’t agree with much Newt Gingrich has to say, but he is correct when he says that the responsibility to do well in school lies with the students. I used to be a teacher and I can tell you firsthand, students aren’t held accountable for anything anymore.
Washington Extra – One more for the road
Jon Huntsman is in. Well, technically, the Republican announced that he will announce that he is in next Tuesday.
“I intend to announce that I will be a candidate for the presidency a week from today,” the former U.S. ambassador to China said at a Thomson Reuters event in New York.
He advocated “getting our own house in order” to improve ties with China. “As we have a very weak economic core, we are less able to project the goodness and the power and the might of the United States,” Huntsman said.
“We sit diminished and discounted at the negotiating table and everybody knows that. So if you want a strong U.S.-China relationship, I would argue that we probably have a little bit of work here in our own backyard,” the ex-Utah governor said.
China, the largest foreign creditor holding more than $1 trillion in Treasury debt as of March, has expressed concern that the U.S. might default on its debt due to politics.
In Washington, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke issued a stark warning that failure to lift the debt ceiling risked a loss of confidence in America’s creditworthiness and might damage the dollar’s reserve currency status.
Republicans have so far appeared immune to the “sky is falling” scenario, and all eyes are on Vice President Joe Biden to see if he can maneuver a deal.
Washington Extra – Royal news
Calling Bahrain.
As is increasingly the case, the United States is finding that talking pro-democracy is one thing. Dealing with the aftermath of uprisings another.
U.S. officials have been on the telephone with officials in Bahrain urging restraint after police attacked anti-government protesters.
The tiny Gulf kingdom that is home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet becomes another U.S. ally in the Middle East seeing unrest with protesters wanting their leaders gone.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmed al-Khalifa. Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke by telephone with Crown Prince Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa.
Other royal news. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are going to visit the Queen of England in May. (They are not going to THE WEDDING which is in April, they weren’t invited – gasp!)
Remember all the commotion about Obama giving the British monarch an iPod during his visit to Buckingham Palace in 2009? Wondering whether it will be an iPad this time.
Trump accepts high marks for CPAC
Donald Trump went to CPAC this week and aced his performance as a prospective White House Wannabe. Any doubts? Just ask him.
“I tell the truth. I tell it like it is, and people understand what I’m saying, and the place did go crazy,” The Donald tells MSNBC’s Morning Joe today. ”That’s what I said in the speech. And that’s why I got 10 standing ovations.”
Remarks like that, taken out of context, might sound like the words of a talking ego.
But the billionaire New York real estate developer’s speech did get high marks from Politico. An A-minus, in fact, which put him right up there with Newt Gingrich and out in front of former Senator Rick Santorum (C-plus) and House Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann (B).
Bully for him, especially when you consider the seemingly tenuous circumstances that brought him to Washington.
“I was sitting in my office building buildings and doing things,” he says. ”I got a call from CPAC: Would I come and speak? And I just happened to be in the right mood. I got on my plane, I went down to Washington.”
In the right mood … just happened to be.
LOL–Well, he certainly knows a thing or two about bankruptcy…
