Boehner cuts House members’ greatest perk

House speaker John Boehner speaking to reporters Tuesday
(J. Scott Applewhite - AP)
House Speaker John Boehner, citing the impending sequester cuts to the federal budget, Wednesday canceled all House congressional delegation (codel) travel on military jets, our colleague Paul Kane reported, citing GOP sources in the room

Members may still be able to fly commercially however.

Of course, as we noted on Friday, budget cuts to the Air Force may well end that spectacular perk — full-service, business-class-only — for the House — and the Senate.

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Washington’s a hard place to leave

Marine One takes off Feb. 6 from the South Lawn of the White House
(Mandel Ngan - AFP/Getty Images)
We kept hearing back in 2009 that Jake Sullivan, deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and before that on the Clinton primary campaign — was leaving after a couple years to return to his home state of Minnesota and run for office.

Sullivan, a Yale law graduate, Rhodes scholar, former Supreme Court clerk, second place in the 2000 world debating championship, did appear to be on his way out in 2011.

But Clinton offered him the job of heading State’s policy planning office (in the footsteps of foreign policy legends like George Kennan and Paul Nitze), so he remained in town.

Still, that was going to be for two years, just until Clinton left office, and then it was off to Minneapolis to practice law and run for office. For sure.

The White House announced on Monday that Sullivan, 36, was Vice President Biden’s pick to be his national security adviser. Well, he better not stay in that job for long. He’s already five years older than Biden was when he became a senator.

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Obama’s legacy likely to be determined by upcoming battles

President Obama’s legacy ultimately could be determined over the next few months by a series of showdowns — both with Republicans, and, potentially, with fellow Democrats — slated to take place.

Guns. Immigration. Climate change. Debt and spending. The matters that Obama is either moving on or has promised to move on are the sorts of big issues that the two parties (and their presidents) have tangled with for decades and for which no easy solutions present themselves.

Solve them and Obama will write his name in the history books as one of the most influential presidents of the modern era. (Don’t forget he has already achieved a major overhaul of the nation’s health care system.) Fail to find solutions and Obama likely will join the long list of presidents who promised to change Washington but ultimately came up short .

There’s little question of how Obama sees himself — particularly following his reelection victory in November. In a series of speeches since then, Obama has cast his proposals — on guns, the fiscal cliff, the sequester — as designed to help people achieve the American Dream.

“It can feel like for a lot of young people that the future only extends to the next street corner or the outskirts of town; that no matter how much you work or how hard you try, your destiny was determined the moment you were born,” Obama said, discussing his proposal to curb gun violence in a speech in Chicago last week. Later, he added: “We all share a responsibility to move this country closer to our founding vision that no matter who you are, or where you come from, here in America, you can decide your own destiny.”

While Obama’s rhetoric is clear about the grand aims he holds for his second term, the political realities around these issues seem to point to the sort of small-bore solutions that he has long rejected.

Take guns. There seems to be little expectation that an assault-weapons ban can be passed though Congress, a feat that even Bill Clinton, whose presidency was defined, largely, by its dearth of monumental challenges, was able to accomplish. Obama himself has acknowledged as much; in his State of the Union speech his call to action was not for Congress to pass his proposals to lessen gun violence, but rather to simply allow them to be voted on — something short of a historic stand on a controversial issue.

Ditto on the fight over how to reduce the country's debt . The distance between the two parties over what mix of tax increases and spending cuts is the right one has been on stark display in the runup to the March 1 sequestration deadline. To say negotiations have broken down over how to avert the $1.2 trillion in automatic, across-the-board cuts assumes that they ever really began in earnest — which they didn’t. While most polling suggests that Obama enjoys the political upper hand on the issue, that won’t bridge the massive ideological divide that separates the two sides.

Movement on climate change is even more politically fraught, with even small-scale solutions somewhat unlikely to make it through Congress. (Many Congressional Democrats are still reeling from the House passage of a cap and trade measure in 2009, a piece of legislation that went nowhere and is blamed by some within the party for the loss of the chamber the following year.)

Of the second-term issues where Obama’s legacy will be made (or not), immigration reform seems to be the one with the highest probability of a “big” solution — given that a bipartisan group of Senators is working on a compromise proposal. Even there, however, passage of a major piece of legislation will be a heavy lift.

Obama wants to go big. But, he oversees a legislative and political process that seems forever bent toward incrementalism. And, as much as his allies insist that Obama can do little about the alleged intransigence of Republicans in Congress, he will almost certainly need to find a way to bend the other party (or at least a few dozen of them) to his political will if he wants to leave the sort of mark on the presidency— and the country — that he so clearly desires to do.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the Post’s Politics Discussion Forums.

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Governors express frustration with Washington gridlock, sequestration

The nation’s governors had a message Saturday for Americans frustrated that Washington’s persistent partisan gridlock appears likely to trigger an across-the-board budget cut March 1 that could delay airline travel and result in hundreds of thousands of layoffs: They’re frustrated too.

Meeting in Washington for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, state chief executives from both parties expressed deepening concern about the mindlessness of the $85 billion budget cut, which will be split between military and domestic programs but will otherwise offer an equal whack to every affected government program. They asked to be allowed more discretion in how spending cuts are implemented.

It’s the result of Congress’ failure to agree on a more targeted deficit reduction package. Congress will return to work Monday after a week-long recess, but despite political posturing, there’s been no sign of serious negotiations between the parties to prevent the cut from hitting on schedule Friday.

Republican governors Saturday stressed they are on board with reductions in federal spending even if they could result in further cuts to already stressed state budgets. But many slammed the across-the-board hack as a silly way to go about deficit reduction.

In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Haslam (R) said he fears what Washington has dubbed “sequestration” could result in delays to toxic-waste cleanup at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Every line item gets cut, regardless of what it is,” he said. “This is not a smart way to do government.”

In Hawaii, 19,000 workers at the naval station at Pearl Harbor could face furloughs, which Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) said would undermine military preparedness.

Abercrombie said Pearl Harbor, where a surprise Japanese attack in 1941 propelled the United States into World War II, is a place that “everybody can understand symbolizes . . . what happens when you’re not prepared.”

Governors in both parties said they worried that the latest of a series of Washington budget crisis moments could inject new uncertainty into state economies that had only just begun to fully stabilize after the end of the recession.

“We’re talking about real lives. We’re talking about families. We’re talking about their pocket books,” said Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), the association’s vice-chairman. “It is not good to have the sequester talk every couple of months.”

After attending weekend sessions on tax reform, cybersecurity and coping with extreme weather, the bipartisan group of governors will meet with President Obama on Monday, with the looming budget ax likely to be a central topic of discussion.

Democratic governors also met separately with Obama on Friday and emerged from the White House to blame Republicans for cuts they said would hit police, firefighters, teachers and National Guard units.

Although governors on a bipartisan basis Saturday pressed Congress and Obama to come up with a more surgical plan than sequestration, they offered no joint solution to the central issue dividing Washington: Whether more tax revenue should be used alongside additional spending cuts.

Democrats agreed with the president that a balanced plan should include both — and blamed the imminent cut on the GOP’s unwillingness to consider higher taxes in a plan to avert them.

“It seems like every three months, the House Republicans find another way to fell a tree in the path of our economic recovery,” said Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D). He warned of particularly damage to the Washington area economy.

Republicans, however, agreed with their congressional counterparts that higher taxes would hurt the economy and the across-the-board cut should be replaced with other spending cuts. Many stressed their desire to see the federal government shrink in other ways, pointing to their own experiences balancing state budgets.

“I’m just worried about the federal government really destroying the economy of this country by continuing to spend more than they take in and not making the tough decisions,” said Gov. Terry E. Branstad (R). “And the president has provided no leadership. He’s not really brought people together.”

Some noted that the Republican-held House twice last year passed bills that would have spared military spending by shifting defense cuts onto other domestic programs. Democrats rejected that approach as hitting the social safety net too hard.

This week, the Senate will consider a Democratic alternative that would replace the sequester with cuts to agriculture subsidies and higher taxes on those making more than $1 million a year. That measure is unlikely to survive a filibuster.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the Post’s Politics Discussion Forums.

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Group releases list of 90 medical ‘don’ts’

Don’t use feeding tubes in patients with advanced dementia. Don’t use drugs to aggressively treat diabetes in those older than 65. Don’t automati­cally use imaging technology for minor head injuries in children and headaches in adults. And don’t give antacids to babies with reflux.

Those are among the 90 medical “don’ts” on a list being released Thursday by a coalition of doctor and consumer groups. They are trying to discourage the use of tests and treatments that have become common practice but may cause harm to patients or unnecessarily drive up the cost of health care.

It is the second set of recommendations from the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s “Choosing Wisely” campaign, which launched last year amid nationwide efforts to improve medical care in the United States while making it more affordable.

The recommendations run the gamut, from geriatrics to opthalmology to maternal health. Together, they are meant to convey the message that in medicine, “sometimes less is better,” said Daniel Wolfson, executive vice president of the foundation, which funded the effort.

“Sometimes, it’s easier [for a physician] to just order the test rather than to explain to the patient why the test is not necessary,” Wolfson said. But “this is a new era. People are looking at quality and safety and real outcomes in different ways.”

The guidelines were penned by more than a dozen medical professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and ­Gynecologists.

The groups discourage the use of antibiotics in a number of instances in which they are commonly prescribed, such as for sinus infections and pink eye. They caution against using certain sedatives in the elderly and cold medicines in the very young.

In some cases, studies show that the test or treatment is costly but does not improve the quality of care for the patient, according to the groups.

But in many cases, the groups contend, the intervention could cause pain, discomfort or even death. For example, feeding tubes are often used to provide sustenance to dementia patients who cannot feed themselves, even though oral feeding is more effective and humane. And CT scans that are commonly used when children suffer minor head trauma may expose them to cancer-causing radiation.

While the recommendations are aimed in large part at physicians, they are also designed to arm patients with more information in the exam room.

“If you’re a healthy person and you’re having a straightforward surgery, and you get a list of multiple tests you need to have, we want you to sit down and talk with your doctor about whether you need to do these things,” said John Santa, director of the health ratings center at Consumer Reports, which is part of the coalition that created the guidelines.

Health-care spending in the United States has reached 17.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and continues to rise, despite efforts to contain costs. U.S. health-care spending grew 3.9 percent in 2011, reaching $2.7 trillion, according to the journal Health Affairs.

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Adam Laxalt: A look at the secret son of former Sen. Pete Domenici

Adam
Laxalt has some serious political genes: Grandfather Paul Laxalt is a former senator and governor of Nevada, not to mention a best friend of Ronald Reagan; mother Michelle a high-profile Washington lobbyist.

Former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) on Capitol Hill last week.
(Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Now we know there’s more to the story: Retired New Mexico senator Pete Domenici, 80, announced this week that Adam is his illegitimate son.

“More than 30 years ago, I fathered a child outside of my marriage,” Domenici said in a statement to the Albuquerque Journal. “The mother of that child made me pledge that we would never reveal that parenthood, and I have tried to honor that pledge and so has she.”

But the carefully protected secret went public Wednesday, throwing the 34-year-old lawyer into the spotlight.

“I have lived my entire life as a private citizen and intend to remain one,” he told our colleague Rachel Weiner. “I plan to address personal issues privately and will not be commenting or joining any public discussion.”

Laxalt, who grew up in Alexandria and now practices law in Las Vegas, boasts an impressive resume: Jobs with Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Sen. John Warner, then five years as an officer and lawyer in the Navy including a deployment in Iraq.

Recently married, the strikingly handsome lawyer is a vocal conservative who has written op-eds for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, National Review Online, and American Spectator. He also appears to be a burgeoning community leader, recently named to the board of the local Catholic Charities.

All this came after a troubled adolescence. In a 1999 profile in Washingtonian magazine, Laxalt discussed his teenage alcoholism: He started drinking as a freshman at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, and hit bottom at Tulane in New Orleans. “I got down there and it was just too much fun, too many women, and too much booze,” he told Chuck Conconi. “Campus bars were open until 6 a.m. and Bourbon Street was open until 6 or 7 a.m.” After treatment at Hazelden, he transferred to Georgetown, where he got both his bachelors and law degree.

It is still unclear if Laxalt grew up knowing that Domenici was his father. In her statement to the Journal, she said the pregnancy was the result of “one night’s mistake” and that she chose to raise Adam as a single parent. Both her father and Domenici were Republican senators at the time; she said she asked the married Domenici, who has eight other children, to keep the matter “private between the two of us.”

Very private, it seems. Even Michelle’s sister, Kathleen, said she didn’t know the identity of of Adam’s father. “It was a big surprise to me,” she told us Wednesday. The subject was never discussed: “That was sort of a private thing for Michelle, and we respected that all these years.”

Also unclear: Why the news emerged now, more than three decades after Adam’s birth. In their statements, both parents suggest their hand was forced. “Recently information has come to me that this sacred situation might be twisted, re-written out of whole cloth, and shopped to press outlets large and small in a vicious attempt to smear, hurt and diminish Pete Domenici, an honorable man, his extraordinary wife, Nancy, and other innocents.” wrote Michelle.

Also in The Reliable Source:

In other news: Patricia Cornwell wins $51 million from former money managers

Read this: Conan O’Brien; Bryce Harper; Pete Domenici; Soupergirl

Gavin Newsom, America’s preeminent lieutenant governor, promotes his new book, ‘Citizenville’

Kennedy Center orders white-tie for ‘Nordic Cool’ dinner — but will anyone wear it?

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Postmaster takes case for five-day mail delivery to skeptical senators

Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe took his controversial plan for five-day mail delivery before a congressional hearing Wednesday, where he told senators that the Postal Service “needs your help.”

Donahoe’s refrain was familiar.

●The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is losing $25 million a day.

●Last year, the Postal Service lost $15.9 billion.

●It defaulted on $11.1 billion owed to the Treasury.

As he has before, Donahoe pleaded with Congress, this time the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to approve comprehensive postal reform legislation. Now, more than before, it looks as though Congress will do so.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, told the Senate panel that after two months of negotiations, “we are close, very close” to agreement on a bipartisan, bicameral bill.

Without some assistance from Congress, said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate committee, “the Postal Service will drift toward insolvency and, eventually, the point at which it must shut its doors. . . . We have never been closer to losing the Postal Service.”

Although in some ways Donahoe’s appearance echoed his many other pleas for congressional action, this hearing drew a standing-room-only crowd on the third floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. That was probably influenced by all the attention generated by his surprise announcement last week that Saturday mail delivery will end in August.

Donahoe’s written testimony outlined several key legislative goals, but five-day mail delivery was not specifically listed among them. After repeatedly urging Congress to end the six-day requirement, Donahoe said postal officials had determined that he could take that action without congressional approval.

Moving to five-day delivery would close just 10 percent of the postal budget gap, Donahoe said, yet the controversy surrounding it stole the focus from other important financial issues.

Among them is a controversial proposal to move postal employees from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which serves all federal workers, to a health insurance program run by the USPS.

Donahoe presented an updated health insurance proposal, but it received little attention compared with his five-day delivery plan.

Last year the Senate approved legislation, co-sponsored by Carper, that would allow five-day delivery two years after its enactment. The delay was designed to allow the Postal Service to study the impact of five-day delivery. Carper was among those who have expressed disappointment with Donahoe’s plan to implement it unilaterally.

“We are taking every reasonable and responsible step in our power to strengthen our finances immediately,” Donahoe told the committee. “We would urge Congress to eliminate any impediments to our new delivery schedule.

“Although discussion about our delivery schedule gets a lot of attention, it is just one important part of a larger strategy to close our budgetary gap,” he added. “It accounts for $2 billion in cost reductions while we are seeking to fill a $20 billion budget gap.”

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Obama urges a move away from narrow focus on politics of austerity

Just about every argument in Washington since the 2010 midterm elections, which returned control of the House to Republicans, has centered on reducing the federal deficit. On Tuesday night, President Obama leaned into his second term by declaring that a single-minded focus on deficit reduction would jeopardize the nation’s future. And he sounded an urgent call to rebuild.

Reelected by an ascendent coalition, the president spoke from a position of strength in his fourth State of the Union address. The economy is improving. The Republican Party is in disarray. The time has come, Obama indicated, to pivot away from the politics of austerity.

“Most of us agree that a plan to reduce the deficit must be part of the agenda,” he said. “But let’s be clear: Deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan. A growing economy that creates good middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.”

The president rejected the fiscal brinkmanship that defined the past two years. Instead, he framed future fiscal debates as opportunities to shape a “smarter government” — one with new investments in science and innovation, with a rising minimum wage, with tax reform that eliminates loopholes and deductions for what the president labeled “the well-off and well-connected.”

Second-term presidents have a narrow window of time to enact significant change before they become lame ducks, and Obama, while echoing campaign themes of reinforcing the middle class, made an urgent case for a more pragmatic version of populism, one that emphasizes economic prosperity as the cornerstone of a fair society.

Over and over, he noted that the time to rebuild is now.

The “Fix-It-First” program that Obama outlined to put people to work on “urgent repairs,” such as structurally deficient bridges, bore echoes of President Bill Clinton’s call in his 1999 State of the Union address to “save Social Security first.” Clinton’s was an effective line, one that stopped — at least until President George W. Bush took office two years later — a Republican drive to use the budget surplus to cut taxes.

Although Obama’s speech lacked the conciliatory notes of some of his earlier State of the Union addresses, he did make overtures to Republicans and cited Mitt Romney, his presidential challenger, by name.

He combined tough talk about securing the border, which brought Republicans to their feet, with a pledge to entertain reasonable reforms to Medicare, the federal entitlement program that fellow Democrats are fighting to protect.

“Those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms,” he said.

Obama also pledged to cut U.S. dependence on energy imports by expanding oil and gas development. And he singled out one area where he and Romney found agreement in last year’s campaign: linking increases in the minimum wage to the cost of living.

Obama set a bipartisan tone at the start of his speech, quoting from President John F. Kennedy’s address to Congress 51 years earlier when he said, “The Constitution makes us not rivals for power, but partners for progress.”

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Obama should focus on deficit in State of the Union

President Obama is preparing to deliver his fourth State of the Union address on Tuesday at — or close to— the height of his political power. He has been reelected convincingly, won legislative showdowns with Republicans on debt and spending issues, and is basking in some of his highest approval ratings in years.

Of course, modern political history has shown that political momentum can disappear — or at least erode — rapidly. That’s especially true for a second-term president, who probably has until the midterm election — 2014 in Obama’s case — to either use or lose his political power.

So, how can Obama use the speech to keep on his current political roll? Here are three ideas.

It’s the deficit, stupid. A look back at Obama’s first three State of the Union speeches, plus the address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, suggests a similar thematic pattern: He starts with the economy, moves to education and then, in the middle section of the speech, addresses the deficit. (The exception was in 2011, when Obama began his speech with a riff on partisanship.) In 2012, Obama spent just five minutes on the debt — less time than he spent on partisanship (5¹/
₂ minutes) or foreign policy (six minutes).

He should flip that script in this State of the Union and spend the bulk of his time talking about the deficit. Here’s why: In January 2009 polling by Pew Research Center, 53 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit was a “top priority.” In January 2013, that number soared to 72 percent, by far the biggest increase of any issue over that time. (By contrast, 85 percent said strengthening the economy was a top priority in 2009, while 86 percent said so at the start of this year.)

The debt is the issue of the day, and one that, if Obama is beginning to eye his legacy as president, could go a long way toward shaping how history remembers him. Make this speech a deficit speech.

Pressure Republicans. Much of Obama’s success since the November election has been born of a willingness to take advantage of the fact that congressional Republicans are not only deeply unpopular with the public at large but internally divided over the future of the party — and without a clear leader to guide them. (The choice of Marco Rubio as the Republican responder to Obama’s State of the Union address suggests the GOP establishment would like the Florida senator to be that leader.)

Polling tells the story. While Obama’s job approval rating was at 55 percent in a January Washington Post-ABC News survey, just 24 percent of respondents approved of the job performance of Republicans in Congress. And two-thirds of the sample (67 percent) said Republicans were doing too little to compromise with the president on major issues.

Given those numbers, there’s every reason for Obama to continue the aggressive approach he has taken in his dealings with Republicans since winning a second term in November. Act, oratorically speaking, and force Republicans to react.

Pick a pet issue, just one. A look at the Pew priorities polling conducted last month is a telling indicator of the public’s priorities. Of 21 issues tested, global warming ranked dead last among those priorities, while strengthening gun laws came in 18th and illegal immigration 17th.

And yet, that trio of issues — along with the economy — has been at the forefront of political and policy discussions in Washington over the past few months. (Circumstances obviously matter here; the shootings in Newtown, Conn., thrust gun laws into a spotlight they would never have had if that tragedy had not happened.)

What that discrepancy should tell Obama is that he needs to tread carefully on those issues in his State of the Union speech, and beyond. While most people would like to see all of them addressed, none are even close to the priority of fixing the economy or reducing the debt. And so, Obama would be smart to pick one — guns seems by far the most likely — and spend real time on it in the speech, with only a passing reference or two to the others.

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Michelle Obama mourns slain teenager at Chicago funeral

CHICAGO — First lady Michelle Obama attended the funeral here Saturday of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who went to school only a mile from the Obama family home and was gunned down a few days after visiting Washington for President Obama’s second inauguration.

Obama did not know Pendleton, nor did scores of other political dignitaries who filed into the Greater Harvest Baptist Church in Chicago’s South Side for the service. But by returning to her home town of Chicago to honor Pendleton, the first lady spotlighted the everyday gun violence that plagues the nation’s biggest cities at a time when the president is pushing Congress to pass tougher gun laws.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett accompanied the first lady to the service. All three have long ties to the South Side.

Although the president did not travel here Saturday, the back of a glossy obituary program distributed to mourners included a handwritten note from him to Pendleton’s parents, Cleopatra and Nathaniel.

“Michelle and I just wanted you to know how heartbroken we are to have heard about Hadiya’s passing,” he wrote in the letter. “We know that no words from us can soothe the pain, but rest assured that we are praying for you, and that we will continue to work as hard as we can to end this senseless violence. God Bless, Barack Obama.”

As hundreds of people filed into the church Saturday morning, a heart-shaped pillow rested beside Pendleton’s casket, which was lined in purple, her favorite color. The pillow featured a smiling image of the girl, signed by “mom and dad.”

Some of Pendleton’s classmates and fellow majorettes in the King College Prep’s band wore their black and yellow warm-up suits and carried roses.

Pendleton was remembered as an honors student who enjoyed cheerleading, debate and volleyball. She loved eating Chinese food, cheeseburgers and Fig Newtons; her favorite class in school was Latin; and she aspired to major in pharmacology or journalism in college.

During the service, Eric Thomas, pastor at Greater Harvest Baptist Church, asked that God “let the family know — her parents know — that her life has not been in vain. Because of this day, there will be many others saved.”

President Obama has spoken out repeatedly about finding ways to end not only mass shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., but also the daily gun violence on street corners in cities such as Chicago, the nation’s third-largest.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Rep. Danny Davis (Ill.), all Democrats, attended Saturday’s service, as did the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who stood at the front of the church near Pendleton’s casket for a while before taking his seat in the congregation.

Quinn mentioned Pendleton in his “State of the State” address this week, in which he called for tougher gun control measures. And Emanuel, who was President Obama’s first White House chief of staff before being elected mayor, has become emotional recently when talking about Chicago’s frighteningly high homicide rate.

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Brennan defends drone strike policies

John O. Brennan, testifying at a confirmation hearing Thursday as President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency during his second term, defended drone strikes against terrorist targets but insisted that it was better to detain terrorists than kill them.

Appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Brennan also rebutted accusations that he did not follow through on his concerns about harsh interrogation techniques by taking his reservations to superiors in the CIA.

In response to questions from Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the top Republican on the committee, Brennan disputed the suggestion that it was “better to kill [terrorists] with a drone” than for the CIA to detain them. “I never believe it’s better to kill a terrorist than to detain him,” Brennan said. He said he did not want the CIA to be in the detention business but that detaining and interrogating terrorists could produce valuable information to prevent further attacks.

As Brennan began testifying Thursday, he was repeatedly interrupted by antiwar protesters, who were escorted out by guards. One protester carried a sign that read, “Stop CIA murder.”

After several such disruptions, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the committee, ordered the hearing room cleared.

Brennan, 57, a 25-year veteran of the CIA who currently serves as Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, appeared before the panel after submitting written testimony in which he defended drone strikes and warned of continuing threats from al-Qaeda, cyberattacks and nuclear proliferation.

Brennan told senators that drone strikes against terrorist targets meet “rigorous standards” and that no new legislation is needed to govern them.

In opening the hearing, Feinstein said it was important to “ensure that drone strikes are carried out in a manner consistent with our values.”

She said she planned to ask about civilian casualties from drone strikes — one of strongest criticisms of the program by opponents. While Brennan once said he had no “confirmed” reports of civilian casualties, he later revised those remarks in the face of widespread reports on the ground, especially in Pakistan.

According to the New America Foundation, which tracks drone strikes, the number of civilian casualties has dropped fairly dramatically in Pakistan, with no civilian deaths reported yet this year and only five last year in 48 strikes, compared to between 56 and 64 in 73 strikes during 2011. Other trackers have placed the figures somewhat higher, and new criticism about civilian deaths has risen in Yemen, where the number of drone strikes is fast increasing.

In written responses to questions from the committee, Brennan said that drone strikes “are conducted in full compliance with the law” to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and save American lives.

“We must, however, use these technologies carefully and responsibly” he wrote in answering the “prehearing questions,” which the committee released Wednesday. “Consequently, we apply rigorous standards and a rigorous process of review.” He added that “we are working to refine, clarify and strengthen this process and our standards.” But the government currently has the authority to conduct drone strikes “against al-Qaeda and associated forces” without “geographical limitation,” he said. “Consequently, I do not believe additional legislation along these lines is necessary.”

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Strengthening security at the nation’s airports

Most people think of airport security as their walk through the metal detector and the eyeballing by transportation security officers (TSOs). Dan Liddell, whose job it is to protect the flying public at seven airports in central New York, instead sees 17 zones of worker responsibility and hundreds of different tasks.

In pursuit of safeguarding the public, Liddell, a federal security director based in Syracuse, has written a book that is now used to train TSOs. It’s called the “National Standardization Guide to Improving Security Effectiveness.” Tasks at each duty area have been inventoried and cataloged, and the “knowledge, values and skills” associated with the airport security jobs have been identified under what Liddell describes as a systems approach to training.

As important as it is to use X-ray machines and explosive trace-detection equipment and to have the correct rules and procedures in place, Liddell said transportation security relies on the skills of the people responsible for it.

“People performance is the cornerstone,” he said. “When I set out to improve things, I look at the people. I look at their proficiency, their skill in doing something and how well they’re doing that job.”

Even when people have the skills to do their jobs, they don’t necessarily do them well each time, especially when conditions can vary with each day and every passenger. To keep performance high, TSOs are tested covertly at unexpected times. A banned item will be sent through a checkpoint and the reaction and activities that take place are monitored.

Whether or not TSOs spot contraband, everyone at that checkpoint during the test participates in an “after-action” review. “It’s the learning experience that’s relevant,” Liddell said. “We’re doing a review of actual performance and you can always improve.”

Liddell is sensitive to the pressure that airport security personnel face. TSOs have the tough of performing multiple tasks under constant camera surveillance and public scrutiny, often interacting with tired or irritated travelers. The testing and training helps them continually up their game.

Thirty airports around the country that helped test the training system and now use a version of it. Paul Armes, federal security director at Nashville International Airport, was interested in creating such a system with a colleague when they both worked in Arizona, but it “never got traction.”

When he learned about what Liddell was doing, he was eager to participate. “Typical of Dan, he built it himself and practiced it so he had hard metric results, and then he started reaching out to some of us, working with his counterparts around the country to get a good representative sample,” Armes said. “He sees things others don’t see sometimes and he has the capability to drill down into the details.”

Liddell began the “pretty long process” of analyzing how people were performing at checkpoints in 2009. He sat down with subject-matter experts to produce the task inventory he now uses. In 2010, he improved the review and reporting process that occurs after covert tests events and instituted the security practices he refined at the other New York airports he oversees, including Greater Binghamton, Ithaca and four others. “I love breaking it down,” he said. “I’ve got a quest for improvement.”

In a less sneaky version of the television show, “Undercover Boss,” Liddell went through the new-hire training program for his employees to understand as much as he could about the jobs and the training provided for them, he said.

If pursuing knowledge is in Liddell’s genes, it may be because his parents were both in education. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a fifth-grade teacher. His teaching manifested itself instead in the training realm, where he strives to educate security employees as effectively as possible, inside the classroom and out.

“It’s always a challenge to meet that right balance of really great effectiveness and really great efficiency,” he said. “There are always challenges. It’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to improve.”

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.

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In revamped cafeterias, USDA gets a taste of its own medicine

Ken Choi, chief operating officer for I.L. Creations in Rockville, has a good idea of what federal workers like to eat. The food service company runs cafeterias at the Department of Energy, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and the State Department, and while I.L. Creations has been touted for its healthful offerings, Choi knows that some of his most popular Western items include foods dipped in a hot-oil bath: fried chicken, fried catfish and french fries.

Which explains why I.L. Creations’ newest government contract presents such a challenge. The Agriculture Department — the agency tasked with, among other things, improving the public health — made a groundbreaking decision last year when soliciting bids for cafeteria vendors at its headquarters: The USDA would go fryer-less. As in not a single deep-fat fryer in the department’s Whitten and South building cafeterias, which serve more than 40,000 people a month, including members of the public.

And that’s just the most obvious change at the revamped USDA cafeterias, which debut today. The agency — one of the chief architects of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which counsels citizens to reduce their red meat and salt intakes — has fully embraced its own recommendations (possibly this time without alienating lawmakers from livestock states who were furious last year over the USDA’s suggestion that employees avoid meat one day a week).

The new USDA cafeterias will automatically serve diners 100 percent whole-wheat breads and pastas unless employees specifically ask for white-bread slices or some other option. One station in the main cafeteria in the South Building will prepare food that conforms to the low-sodium, low-fat, low-cholesterol and low-calorie requirements of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans; the station will also display a daily MyPlate example to model the basics of a proper meal — not that anyone will be required to follow it .

There will even be a full-time dietitian on site to answer employee questions, which Choi believes is key in this transition to a fryer-less world. After all, USDA workers can easily sidestep the whole healthful-eating program; they could, for example, just take a short trip down Independence Avenue to the Department of Energy cafeteria, where the deep fryers are still bubbling.

“I think it’s really vital that we have education,” said Choi of I.L. Creations. “Because you can’t just give them a different option that’s healthy and tell them to buy it and eat it.”

The federal government had already been moving in a more healthful direction with its cafeterias, part of the Obama Administration’s mission to shrink the American waistline. About three years ago, as part of a plan to improve the nutrition and sustainability of the food served to government workers, the General Services Administration, which contracts vendors at 32 federal cafeterias in this region, banned trans fats and limited deep-fried entrees “to no more than one choice per day.”

The GSA also started requiring vendors to reduce sodium levels across the board: 230 milligrams or less for vegetable dishes and 480 milligrams or less for 40 percent of the remaining dishes on the menu. (The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends less than 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day for those without hypertension or other health issues.) What’s more, the GSA mandates that 25 percent of a vendor’s product line be organic, local or sustainably grown.

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VA study finds more veterans committing suicide

Every day about 22 veterans in the United States kill themselves, a rate that is about 20 percent higher than the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2007 estimate, according to a two-year study by a VA researcher.

The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.

The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”

Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers.

An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.

To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.

Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

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Bipartisan group of senators to unveil framework for immigration overhaul

A key group of senators from both parties will unveil on Monday the framework of a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, including a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million illegal immigrants.

The detailed, four-page statement of principles will carry the signatures of four Republicans and four Democrats, a bipartisan push that would have been unimaginable just months ago on one of the country’s most emotionally divisive issues.

The document is intended to provide guideposts that would allow legislation to be drafted by the end of March, including a potentially controversial “tough but fair” route to citizenship for those now living in the country illegally.

[Do you think the new immigration plan will work? Discuss this and other immigration issues in The Washington Post’s new political forums.]

It would allow undocumented immigrants with otherwise clean criminal records to quickly achieve probationary legal residency after paying a fine and back taxes.

But they could pursue full citizenship — giving them the right to vote and access to government benefits — only after new measures are in place to prevent a future influx of illegal immigrants.

Those would include additional border security, a new program to help employers verify the legal status of their employees and more-stringent checks to prevent immigrants from overstaying visas.

And those undocumented immigrants seeking citizenship would be required to go to the end of the waiting list to get a green card that would allow permanent residency and eventual citizenship, behind those who had already legally applied at the time of the law’s enactment.

The goal is to balance a fervent desire by advocates and many Democrats to allow illegal immigrants to emerge from society’s shadows without fear of deportation with a concern held by many Republicans that doing so would only encourage more illegal immigration.

“We will ensure that this is a successful permanent reform to our immigration system that will not need to be revisited,” the group asserts in its statement of principles.

The framework identifies two groups as deserving of special consideration for a separate and potentially speedier pathway to full citizenship: young people who were brought to the country illegally as minors and agricultural workers whose labor, often at subsistence wages, has long been critical to the nation’s food supply.

Expanding visas

The plan also addresses the need to expand available visas for high-tech workers and promises to make green cards available for those who pursue graduate education in certain fields in the United States.

“We must reduce backlogs in the family and employment visa categories so that future immigrants view our future legal immigration system as the exclusive means for entry into the United States,” the group will declare.

The new proposal marks the most substantive bipartisan step Congress has taken toward new immigration laws since a comprehensive reform bill failed on the floor of the Senate in 2007.

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Artur Davis considers bid for Virginia Senate or Congress

RICHMOND — Former congressman Artur Davis, who represented Alabama as a Democrat before moving to Virginia and the Republican Party, is considering a bid for the Virginia state senate or Congress, according to three Republicans with knowledge of his thinking.

Davis has met with a Virginia campaign consultant and several operatives to assess the viability of running for state Senate in 2015 or seeking the U.S. House seat held by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) if the congressman retires, according to two of those people, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a private matter. He has no intention of challenging Wolf, they said.

The third person, former Republican congressman Tom Davis, confirmed that Artur Davis talked to him recently about possible runs for various offices, including state Senate.

“If there’s a Senate seat that’s winnable, I’m sure he’d be interested,” said Tom Davis, who represented Northern Virginia. “He’d be an instant star.”

Davis, who lives in heavily Democratic Arlington, is said to be considering moving into a more competitive district. Reached via e-mail Saturday, he declined to comment.

“More and more people are moving into districts to run,” Tom Davis said. “Twenty years ago, that didn’t happen.”

The Virginian-Pilot reported that a new Senate map the GOP rammed through the chamber Monday has Artur Davis considering a Senate bid from Northern Virginia, perhaps for the seat held by Sen. Dave Marsden (D-Fairfax).

Tom Davis and the two other Republicans familiar with Artur Davis’s thinking said his interest in the Senate predates the surprise redistricting plan. Artur Davis is said to have been exploring his options since late December.

But the new map, which makes several districts more favorable to Republicans, seems to have moved his planning to the front burner.

“Republicans have told Davis that the map requires potential Republican candidates to get a stronger head start given that the affected Democratic incumbents will be ramping up their efforts, and that if it stands, it has upped the timetable for decision-making, given the certainty that a number of local Republicans will be looking at these districts too,” one of the Republicans familiar with Davis’s planning said via e-mail.

The redistricting measure creates a new majority-black district in Southside but also dilutes the black vote in at least eight other districts, making them more heavily Republican. The plan still must get past the House, Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) and a near-certain legal challenge from Democrats before it could take effect in 2015.

Time in the state Senate could help Davis establish himself for voters as both a Virginian and a Republican, several political observers said. In 2008, when he was still a Democratic congressman, Davis heartily seconded the nomination of Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention. He went on from there to lose a bid for Alabama governor, move to Virginia and declare himself a Republican — one featured speaker at last year’s Republican National Convention.

“He would be a very strong candidate for anything he wants to do, and I think right now he’s earning his stripes,” Tom Davis said.

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Update: Obama claim on background checks moved from ‘verdict pending' to 2 Pinocchios

(Larry Downing/Reuters)

“The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.”

— President Obama, remarks on gun violence, Jan. 16, 2013

“Studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement.”

— “Now Is the Time: The president’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence,” released Jan. 16

Earlier this week, we gave this claim a “verdict pending.” We said we faced a bit of a conundrum because the 40 percent statistic was based on a single, relatively small survey of 251 people from nearly two decades ago — but that foes of gun control had made it difficult for further research to be conducted.

We also gave kudos to Vice President Biden for acknowledging that the statistic might not be accurate. So we said we would be watching carefully for how the statistic would be used by gun-control advocates in the future.

We also noted that the microdata used in the original survey could be accessed by researchers. A pair of readers, including John R. Lott Jr. (a noted skeptic of gun restrictions) downloaded the data and presented us with an Excel analysis to argue that the words used by the President and the White House—“gun purchases” and “gun sales” — were inaccurate. That’s because the original report on the survey, from which the statistic is derived, referred to “gun acquisitions” and “transactions” — much broader categories of data.

So we went back to Jens Ludwig, one of the original researchers. He patiently reran his data and explained how he and his colleague, Philip Cook, had reached their conclusions. We won’t get into the weeds of the discussion, but Lott and Ludwig looked at the data in different ways.

Part of the difference was that Ludwig and Cook looked across a variety of different answers in order to spot inconsistencies, rather than immediately assume the gun had been purchased from a licensed dealer, also known as the primary market. “Our approach with the rest of the cases (don’t know source of gun, refused to report source of gun) was to be conservative in estimating what fraction of sales are in the primary market,” Ludwig said.

Still, the data as presented in Ludwig and Cook’s 1996 report on the survey (see Table 3.14) did not give us enough information to test whether the president’s use of the words “gun purchases” was accurate. So Ludwig examined the data yet again at our request and came up with the following results:

Percent of Secondary (“off the books”) market purchases

Cash purchase from gun, hardware or department store, from pawnshop, or from seller at gun show, flea market or military, or through mail that respondent says “yes” was FFL [federally licensed dealer]: 22 percent

Add cash purchase from seller at gun show, flea market or military, or though the mail that respondent says “probably was/think so:” 20 percent

Add cash purchases, trades with family, friends/acquaintance that respondent says are or probably are FFL: 14 percent

In other words, rather than being 30 to 40 percent (the original estimate of the range) or “up to 40 percent” (Obama’s words), gun purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent. And since the survey sample is so small, that means the results have a survey caveat: plus or minus six percentage points.

Moreover, as we noted before, the survey was taken in late 1994, eight months after the Brady law went into effect, and the questions were asked about gun purchases in the previous two years. So some of the answers concerned gun purchases that took place in a pre-Brady environment.

Ludwig noted that “if you look at where gun criminals obtained their guns (as indicated from surveys of people in prison or arrestees detained in jail), people have typically found that 80-90 percent of that population get their guns in the secondary market.” We referenced some of that data in our earlier column, and gun-control advocates might argue that it bolsters the need for universal background checks. But that is not the statistic used by Obama.

We can understand why the president might want to use a word like “purchases” rather than “transactions.” And certainly there is a pressing need for additional and up-to-date research on gun purchases in the secondary market. But that is no excuse for the president’s language, especially because the survey data is already nearly two decades old. (The White House declined to comment.)

So we are changing our ruling in this matter from “Verdict Pending” to Two Pinocchios.

Two Pinocchios

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Senate Democrats’ budget plan will reopen battle over taxes

Senate Democrats plan to draft a budget blueprint that calls for significantly higher taxes on the wealthy, oil and gas companies and corporations doing business overseas, reopening a battle over taxes Republicans had hoped to lay to rest with the “fiscal cliff.”

For nearly four years, Senate leaders have ducked their legal duty to craft a comprehensive budget framework. Now, however, Democrats see the budget process as “a great opportunity” to pursue additional tax increases — and to create a fast-track process to push them through the Senate, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“There’s going to have to be some spending cuts, and those will be negotiated,” Schumer, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, said in an interview after the show. “But doing a budget is the best way for us to get revenues.”

The announcement comes days after House Republicans offered to forgo a potentially damaging clash over the federal debt limit, saying they would vote this week to permit the government to continue borrowing through mid-April. In return, House leaders demanded that the Senate revive the traditional budget process, by which the two chambers adopt their own blueprints and work out differences in conference committee.

With the offer, the GOP backed off its hard-line stance that any increase in the debt limit be paired with spending cuts of equal size — “a major victory for the president,” Schumer said.

The move also suggests a desire by Republican leaders to create a more orderly forum for the partisan clash over record budget deficits. White House political adviser David Plouffe welcomed that move Sunday in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“I think it’s a significant moment that the Republican Party now has moved off their position that the only way they’re going to pay their bills is if they get the correct kind of concessions,” Plouffe said. “I think we’d all be better served to go back to a little bit more regular order in Congress so we’re not careening crisis-to-crisis.”

Fresh deadlines loom in March: Sharp automatic spending cuts are due to hit the Pentagon and other federal agencies at the beginning of the month. And a temporary funding measure will expire at the end of the month, shutting down the government unless Congress acts.

But the developments of the past few days suggest that both parties are looking to continue the argument without sparking panic in financial markets and causing unnecessary harm to the broader economy.

Reviving the budget process is critical to that effort.

Because they are fraught with political pitfalls, budgets are protected from filibuster in the Senate, so Democrats could pass a budget without Republican votes. A budget blueprint is also the only way to create a fast-track process for deficit reduction, known as reconciliation, which is also protected from filibuster.

House Republicans are eager to draft a reconciliation bill to cut spending on federal health programs and to overhaul the tax code, in part by cutting rates. And Democrats are eager to draft a reconciliation bill that would raise additional revenue, in part by limiting tax breaks for wealthy individuals, oil and gas companies and multinational corporations.

During the fight over the “fiscal cliff,” Congress voted this month to raise rates on income over $450,000 a year. Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), argued that should end the fight over taxes.

But the “fiscal cliff” measure is projected to generate only about $600 billion over the next decade, well short of President Obama’s goal of $1.6 trillion. On Sunday, Schumer said Democrats plan to fight on.

“We’ll have tax reform . . . but’s it’s going to include revenue,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity to get us some more revenue to help” replace the automatic spending cuts, which are scheduled to slice nearly $1 trillion out of agency budgets over the next decade.

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Opposing views on Obama and future of the country split Ohio community

FREMONT, Ohio — On the same day, in the same county of northern Ohio, two new grandparents prepared to drive to the same factory for work. They had started their careers at Arm & Hammer in the same year, and for more than two decades they had stood together on a concrete floor and watched baking soda roll down an 80-foot production line. But, on this morning, what they saw looked nothing alike.

Bill Herr, 61, left a house that had declined in value by 20 percent, in a neighborhood blemished by foreclosures, in a town where he believed the economy for the middle class was “falling apart.” He said goodbye to a wife who was recovering from open-heart surgery, which she blamed in small part on the stress and disappointment of the presidential election. He grabbed a coat purchased for $6 at Goodwill and walked out a front door where he had recently hung a sign created by a local Christian motorcycle group: “AMERICA NEEDS GOD’S HELP! PRAYER OUR ONLY HOPE.”

Cathy Morris, 53 left a home she had bought with the help of a middle-class tax break and then drove by the mailbox where she sent regular $25 checks to President Obama. She passed through a town that she believed was “almost back” and pulled into an Arm & Hammer factory where orders had increased by 5 percent and management was once again hiring. “Obama,” she said. “Thank goodness.”

This is the America that President Obama will govern in his second term: A place divided not only by ideology, race and class, but also by the very perception of reality. Four years since Obama first took office, is the country better or worse off? Safer or more at risk? Principled or desperately lost?

Here in Fremont, as in much of America, it all depends on whom you ask. In this rural, Rust Belt county where Obama won exactly 50 percent of the vote, located in a state where he won 50 percent, residents expect Obama to either ruin the country or rescue it. The president who spoke ambitiously at his first inauguration about uniting America instead arrives at his second with the country further divided. Fourteen percent of Republicans think he’s doing a good job, compared with 88 percent of Democrats. The goal is no longer to effect sweeping conciliation so much as to find fractional compromise in a diminishing common ground.

Inside an Arm & Hammer factory that billows smoke across the farmlands of Ohio, 180 employees now self-segregate into what Morris calls “ideological islands.” Co-workers who were once moderate Democrats or Republicans shifted fully to their sides over the past four years, intensifying the disconnect.

There are free copies of a National Rifle Association monthly magazine in one break room and, as of late last year, a life-size cardboard cutout of Obama in the other. There are workers who share copies of Obama’s biography, “Dreams of My Father,” and others who distribute the movie-version parody, “Dreams of My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception.”

And then there are Morris and Herr, two longtime employees working side-by-side, each anticipating Obama’s second inauguration as a seminal moment.

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Earl Smith is the man behind a military patch that President Obama prizes

AUSTIN, Tex. — That February morning in 2008 found Barack Obama decidedly out of sorts.

He was locked in one battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination that showed no signs of ending — and another with a vicious cold that felt the same way.

As he rode the service elevator in the backway of a convention hotel here, the snowy-haired African American operating it turned suddenly. He held out a black-and-gold bit of fabric embroidered with a screaming eagle.

“Senator Obama, I have something I want to give you,” the man said. “I’ve carried this military patch with me every day for 40 years, and I want you to carry it, and it will keep you safe in your journey.” Obama tried to refuse, but the older man persisted.

Big endeavors can find their meaning in small moments.

Later that day, Obama and his aides discussed the encounter. The future president pulled the patch from his pocket, along with about a dozen other items people had pressed upon him.

“This is why I do this,” he said. “Because people have their hopes and dreams about what we can do together.”

Two American stories intersected that morning in that elevator. The more famous, of course, is the one that begins its next chapter on Monday, as the nation’s first black president takes the oath of office for a second term.

But the other story also tells a lot about where this country has been and how far it has come.

No one in Obama’s small party that day noticed the man’s name tag or, if anyone did, the fact that it said Earl Smith was quickly forgotten.

No one knew how much of Smith’s life had been woven into a patch that, over four decades, found its way from the shoulder of an Army private to the pocket of a future commander-in-chief.

It was the only shred of cloth he had saved from the uniform of a nightmarish year in Vietnam. Smith fired artillery with a brigade that suffered 10,041 casualties during the course of the war. The brigade’s soldiers received 13 Congressional Medals of Honor.

The patch was waiting among his possessions when Smith was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1977 after spending three years in prison for a crime he claimed was self-defense.

Smith kept it close as his lucky charm while he rebuilt his life and his reputation, starting with a job vacuuming hallways and changing sheets in an Atlanta Marriott. He carried it with him as he traveled halfway around the world again, to positions in hotels far from home, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Along the way, as he tended to travelers and made sure VIP gatherings went smoothly, he met three U.S. presidents.

His instincts told him Obama would make it four.

Like just about anyone else who was alive on Nov. 22, 1963, Smith can describe exactly where he was when he heard the horrific news: He was coming off a high school football practice field in his home town of San Benito, Tex.

Though not yet old enough to have voted for the man slain in Dallas, “I was devastated — a lot of us young people were — because John Kennedy was the young president,” recalled Smith, now 68.

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