Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair (James Berglie/ZUMA Press)

If President Obama didn’t have enough headaches after the loss of the Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate majority on Tuesday night, another one emerged for him at a Senate hearing on Wednesday morning: Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence.

During the first in a battery of congressional hearings about the failed bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253, Blair, the nation’s top intelligence official, declined to endorse the Obama administration’s decision to try would-be bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in federal civilian court — a decision that Republicans and conservatives have subjected to weeks of criticism. Asked by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) whether Abdulmutallab should be tried by a civilian court or a military commission, Blair replied, “I’m not ready to offer an opinion on that in open session.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“We did not invoke the HIG,” Blair said. “In this instance, we should have.” The HIG — which reports to the FBI and the National Security Council, not the director of national intelligence — has been previously described by knowledgeable administration officials as a tool for use almost exclusively in the interrogation of foreign-held detainees. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) quickly pounced on Blair’s statement, calling it a “guarantee” from the administration to opt out of the civilian criminal justice system in future cases of foreign citizens apprehended on U.S. soil in connection to terrorism, as many Republicans desire.

A senior administration official, speaking on background, contradicted Blair, saying the HIG is not yet operational — and, in any case, is supposed to be used for terrorism suspects detained overseas. “This is very basic, very clear,” the official said, expressing surprise that Blair would say the HIG should have been involved.

Blair — who is expected to appear before a classified hearing Thursday morning in the Senate intelligence committee — suggested that Abdulmutallab’s Christmas-time apprehension after Flight 253 landed in Detroit was more ad hoc and chaotic than the Obama administration has portrayed. Joined by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security and Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Blair said he was not consulted on the decision to charge Abdulmutallab. In a separate, simultaneous hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller said he was also out of the loop. Shortly after the incident, Napolitano famously said “the system worked” after Abdulmutallab was subdued on Flight 253.

“We need to make those decisions more carefully,” Blair said about not using the HIG for Abdulmutallab and the decision to charge him in federal court. “It was made on the scene.” Asked later to clarify who was responsible for deciding to Mirandize the would-be bomber, Blair replied, “The FBI agent in charge on the scene.” Mueller stated at his own hearing that “the decision to arrest [Abdulmutallab] and put him in criminal courts” was made by FBI “agents on the ground.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) expressed surprise that the decision to prosecute Abdulmutallab did not come from a more senior official.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the White House declined to comment on Blair’s remarks to the Senate panel, referring questions back to Blair’s office. But hours after the hearing concluded, Blair issued a statement conceding that the HIG would not have been a viable interrogation option in this case.

“My remarks today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have been misconstrued,” Blair said in the statement. “The FBI interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab when they took him into custody. They received important intelligence at that time, drawing on the FBI’s expertise in interrogation that will be available in the HIG once it is fully operational.”

Blair, a retired four-star admiral and former commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, has had a rocky tenure as director of national intelligence since Obama appointed him to the post last January. Last year, he tussled with the CIA director, Leon Panetta — technically Blair’s subordinate — over control of the CIA’s top intelligence officers in foreign stations. Blair lost that dispute, which had to be mediated by the White House. At Wednesday’s hearing, Blair occasionally appeared lost, misunderstanding senators’ questions and saying he wished intelligence officials leaking to the press would “shut the hell up.”

But Blair did not give cover to another line of attack from Republican senators: that Abdulmutallab should be tortured. Ensign asked Blair why it made sense to restrict interrogations of terrorism suspects to the techniques listed in the mostly-Geneva-Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, as Obama insisted in one of the first executive orders of his presidency. Blair strongly strongly defended the decision. “We looked at that quite carefully,” Blair said. “We do not know if the same information obtained through extra-judicial measures [could not] have been obtained without them.”

Some civil libertarians were concerned by the hearing’s occasional tendency to relitigate the principles of trying terrorism detainees in civilian courts and treating them humanely. “The senators’ claim that the government had the right to seize [Abdulmutallab] and turn him over to the military for secret imprisonment and harsh interrogation is the same radical and discredited claim that President Bush made about his authority to seize anyone, including citizens, found in the U.S. and hold them without charge,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. “The government went down that path, it flouted the rule of law and eventually had to be fixed by bringing criminal prosecutions.”

Additionally, some counterterrorism officials and outside experts have pushed back recently against the GOP talking point that Mirandization inhibits interrogation. According to a paper released Wednesday by the Center for American Progress’s Ken Gude, a detainee’s access to legal counsel is also not an obstacle to intelligence collection. “Terrorist suspects have given what U.S. officials call ‘an intelligence goldmine’ after meeting with attorneys,” Gude writes.

In the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Mueller backed up that proposition. “We’ve had a number of cases in which through the process — the criminal justice process of the United States — individuals have decided to cooperate and provided tremendous intelligence,” Mueller said. “That is not to say that there may not be other ways of obtaining that intelligence. But, yes, in answer to your question, the criminal justice system has been a — a fount of intelligence in the years since September 11th.”

Update: This piece has been edited for clarity.

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged driver, was held in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay prison camp like these detainees. (Department of Defense photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy)

As the Obama administration nears its deadline for deciding where to try the men suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks, there are strong indications that those trials could take place in federal courts in the United States. That’s prompting fervent opposition from Republicans, who say the 9/11 terrorists should never be allowed anywhere on U.S. soil, let alone in a civilian U.S. court.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Military Commissions lead prosecutor Capt. John F. Murphy told reporters in September that four different U.S. attorneys offices in New York, Washington and Virginia were vying for the opportunity to try the five now-infamous defendants, which include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarek Bin ‘Attash; Ramzi Binalshibh; Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi are the other four. According to Murphy, the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, based in Brooklyn and Manhattan, respectively; the Eastern District of Virginia, based in Alexandria; and the District of Columbia had all submitted requests to hold the high-profile trials in their courthouses, and to detain the suspects in their jails during trial. The military commissions are also seeking to try the defendants.

Meanwhile, White House lawyers, a task force advising the president, and President Obama have all said that their preference is to try terror suspects in federal courts whenever possible, although they have not ruled out the possibility of using military commissions to try some of them. It remains unclear which ones.

The administration has promised to make its final decision on where to try the 9/11 suspects by Nov. 16. Fearing that the administration is inching toward bringing them to New York City or the Washington, D.C., area, opponents of trying high-level terrorists in U.S. federal courts are stepping up their efforts to keep the five men out of the United States for any purpose. On Oct. 9, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he’d attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that would prohibit the Obama administration from spending money on prosecuting and trying these five alleged terrorists in U.S. civilian federal courts.”Khalid Sheik Mohammed needs to be tried in a military tribunal,”Graham told McClatchy Newspapers. “He’s not a common criminal. He took up arms against the United States.”

Graham is not alone in that view. In August, he joined Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Jim Webb (D-Va.) in sending a letter to President Obama expressing concern over reports that the Administration may try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other alleged war criminals in civilian courts. The senators urged the administration to try them in military commissions instead, saying in part:

The bill, H.R.2847, is pending in the Senate as an amendment to an appropriations bill.

On Tuesday, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey made a similar argument against allowing the 9/11 defendants to be tried in a civilian federal court in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Mukasey warned that the costs and burdens of security would be enormous, that housing suspected terrorists in U.S. prisons would threaten national security, and that a public trial would elicit sensitive evidence that would compromise intelligence sources and that terrorists will later use against us.

Those sorts of arguments outrage many legal experts and former military officers, who say that only a public trial in a U.S. federal court that affords terror suspects the same rights as all ordinary criminal suspects will carry the legitimacy necessary for such an important trial. And they dismiss the claims that housing terrorists in U.S. maximum security prisons, where terror suspects have been imprisoned for many years, would create any danger at all.

“The federal criminal justice system has adjudicated nearly 200 cases involving international terrorism in the year shortly before and since 9/11,” said Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First, which opposes the use of military commissions to try any Guantanamo detainees. “The idea that it cannot handle classified evidence, evidence from abroad, evidence obtained in the context of armed conflict, all of those have been proven false by the existence and the adjudication of all of those case in the federal criminal justice system, and many of those cases feature precisely those problems.”

“The bulk of resistance to bringing Guantanamo detainees to the U.S. is simply uninformed,” Rona continued. “The ‘not in my backyard idea,’ which I think is a crazy notion of people fearing that they’re going to have to be sitting next to a member of al-Qaeda when they go into Starbucks, is just nuts. We’re not talking about releasing suspected or known terrorists into the streets. We’re talking about transferring them to highly secure correctional and detention facilities for purpose of trial. If they’re found not guilty or guilty and they serve sentences, they’re still not entitled to be in the U.S., they will be deported. I think the administration is confident, and should be confident about being able to convey that this is not a situation that involves risk to Americans.”

Some former military officials hope the president will see it that way as well. On Tuesday, a group of retired generals sent an open letter to Congress, kicking off a campaign to close Guantanamo Bay and have the detainees brought to the United States for federal court trials.

“With 145 convicted international terrorists being held in our prison system, there has been no escape from a supermax correctional facility in the United States,” said retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, Chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. “It does not threaten the security of this country to move however many of the remaining 226 detainees that we cannot farm to other countries or try and incarcerate, to move them from Guantanamo into our supermax facilities. The claim from members of Congress that this threatens American security is shameful and without a basis.”

Still, even some civil libertarians believe it would be legitimate for the administration to try the Sept. 11 suspects in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay or on U.S. military bases. “Our view is that as a legal matter, the 9/11 conspirators, unlike some other detainees at Guantanamo, could be tried in either federal court or military commissions,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. “Then it’s a matter of policy considerations.”

Although Martin says a defendant could get a fair trial in a military commission, that’s not necessarily the case under the current Military Commissions Act, even if recent amendments passed by the House were adopted. “One of the hallmarks of a fair trial is that it’s public,” and the military commissions have so far severely restricted public access. “If they choose the forum based on an interest in keeping parts of the trial secret, then they will lose their legitimacy right there,” she said.

Some military commission critics claim that one reason some Republicans support using military commissions is to keep hidden any evidence that the detainees were tortured by U.S. authorities, which the defendants or their lawyers would almost certainly present in their trials.

“There is a second objective in everything that someone like Mukasey is saying,” said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denise LeBoeuf, who directs the John Adams Project, which organizes defense lawyers to represent the Guantanamo detainees. “That is covering up the details and the identities of torturers. This country had a systematic system of torture through the military and through contractors. Some of those people objecting to federal court trials now either implemented it, or knew about it and should have said something,” she said, adding that some are still in the administration and have an interest in preventing the information from surfacing.

Indeed, according to Justice Department memos revealed earlier this year, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was waterboarded 183 times. Details of his treatment would likely come up in his defense, if he were to present one. On the other hand, he has confessed and even boasted to having masterminded the attacks numerous times, and has said he does not want a lawyer and wants to be martyred. He still could bring up his treatment by U.S. authorities in a trial, however.

LeBoeuf and other lawyers involved in the defense of high-level detainees say they’ve heard rumors that the administration wants to try the 9/11 detainees in federal court, but it’s impossible to know for sure what U.S. officials will do until they issue their decision.

To LeBoeuf, the fact that the 9/11 case is so high-profile is a strong reason for trying the suspects in public, in a civilian federal court in the United States.

“When you say the whole world is watching a case, this is the one,” LeBoeuf said. “This is the one where the administration has the greatest urgency and pressure to do it in a fair court. It’s also the one where there are mountains of evidence — for both sides. It’s the most investigated crime in the history of the United States. If you can’t put this case into a federal court, then what case can you?”

Methodology: Classifications are based on senators’ stated positions on the public option — a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. “Likely supporters” are senators who have indicated that they would probably vote for a bill with a strong, untriggered public option. “Likely opponents” are senators who have indicated that they would not vote for a bill with any kind of public option. “On the fence” senators have expressed reservations about a strong public option, displayed openness to weaker public option proposals (such as a trigger or an opt-in or opt-out option), or, in the case of Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.), have not yet expressed any views on the public option. These classifications are necessarily fluid and inexact. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), for example, has expressed support for a public option, but he has said that a public option could not pass the Senate, and his Finance Committee bill does not contain a public option; he is listed as “on the fence.”

It also bears noting that while people tend to toss around 60 votes as the magic number for passage, 50 supporters could theoretically suffice here. Some conservative Democrats, like Mary Landrieu (La.), have expressed strong reservations about the public option yet say they are unlikely to support a filibuster. If all Democrats and Independents vote for cloture, only 50 votes (plus Vice President Biden’s tie-breaker) would be needed for passage.

We will update this scoreboard frequently as senators change and clarify their views on health care legislation. Stop by daily for the latest news!

Doug Ollivant (Photo courtesy Doug Ollivant)

In the spring of 2006, with sectarian violence in Baghdad claiming hundreds of lives every week, an officer with the First Cavalry Division submitted an essay to a counterinsurgency writing competition on how the U.S. military needed to adapt for a confusing war. Drawing on the writings of the obscure midcentury French counterinsurgent David Galula, the officer issued a series of observations at odds with the military strategy on display in the country. “For the local people to feel secure and provide intelligence, they must have 24-hour access to the counterinsurgent force,” advised Lt. Col. Doug Ollivant, the division’s chief of plans, in an influential paper called “Producing Victory,” published in “Military Review” that summer. Ollivant, like many in the military’s growing community of counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners, had already experienced the Iraq war from its most dangerous places: Najaf, Baghdad, and Fallujah.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

One of the paper’s most attentive readers was Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. Army’s chief counterinsurgency scholar. In advance of deploying for Iraq in January 2007 to take command of a faltering war, Petraeus emailed Ollivant and asked him if his essay’s premises still applied; Ollivant said that for the most part they did.

The conversation would be a prologue to several tense and historic months. Ollivant’s division had returned to Baghdad the previous November. As planning chief — and a member of Petraeus’ brain trust — he would have a key role in shaping the battle for Baghdad, the major theater of the counterinsurgency fight in 2007 commonly referred to as the troop surge. Ollivant’s emphasis on a constant security presence to protect an at-risk population from an insurgency, shared by the officers around Petraeus, was diametrically opposed to the previous strategy, which emphasized protecting U.S. troops above Iraqi civilians. Now it is counterinsurgent conventional wisdom and is being adapted for the Afghanistan war.

What came next was perhaps less expected. The following year, Ollivant left Iraq for the White House, where he became a director for Iraq at the National Security Council in March 2008. Working for Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Bush administration’s so-called War Czar, Ollivant’s next big planning job involved herding the vast national-security bureaucracy to sustain the reduction in violence that the surge contributed to achieving. He said he was “still not certain” why Lute hired him, but suspects Petraeus or Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Ollivant’s former division commander who now serves as the Army’s vice chief of staff, had something to do with it.

When President Obama asked Lute to stay on through the change in administrations, Ollivant, an Oregon native who joined the Army to help pay for college, stayed as well — for a time. Ollivant left the White House on June 16, and on July 1, Lute presided over a ceremony at the White House in honor of Ollivant’s retirement from the Army. As an example of the new generation of Iraq- and Afghanistan-experienced military leaders, Ollivant’s service is both unique and yet still familiar to soldiers and Marines who have had to act as warfighters, diplomats and development workers rolled into one, improvising and recasting strategy in the absence of clear guidance from their superior officers and from Washington. But when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visits Obama at the White House on Wednesday, Ollivant, for the first time in five years, will be an observer.

The transition may be difficult. “There’s a part of me that would really like to put Iraq behind me,” Ollivant said in a recent interview at a Dupont Circle Starbucks, his first on-the-record talk since leaving the administration. “I feel strangely connected to it. I’ve been working Iraq for five years now, since I went there in the summer of 2004. That’s hard to put behind you.”

As someone who played a significant role in both calming Iraq and in managing the conditions for ultimate U.S. withdrawal, it should come as little surprise when Ollivant — a youthful 20-year Army veteran who can be intense in one breath before breaking into a smile during the next — says he’s “pretty sanguine about the situation in Iraq” and thinks the Obama administration, and the country at large, should turn its attention to cementing a post-withdrawal alliance.

Violence will continue in Iraq, particularly around major political events like next year’s national elections, but that violence will be driven by specific, localized grievances, Ollivant said, not a rekindling of the sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq before the surge. “The Sunni-Shiite civil war is over, and the Sunni-Shiite civil war is over because the Sunnis lost,” he said. There is no more confusion between the “relative strengths of the parties,” a confusion that contributed to the civil war. Even in the volatile north of the country, where Kurds and Arabs have laid claim to many of the same oil-rich areas, Ollivant sees the dispute as more amenable to negotiations than open war: “Everyone knows what the relative strengths are. Everyone knows what the other side wants.” The last quarterly report by the Pentagon on Iraq, issued in March, found practically no deaths resulting ethno-sectarian violence in Iraq in early 2009, compared to between 600 and 1200 in Baghdad alone at the time Ollivant published “Producing Victory.”

What the various political actors in Iraq want from the United States is a different story. Maliki declared the departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities and towns — the first milestone in last year’s U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement leading to final troop withdrawals in 2011 — a national holiday. Yet despite potent anti-occupation politics in Iraq, some Iraqi legislators and generals have expressed unease about the pace of U.S. withdrawal, with former national security adviser Qassim Daoud calling for U.S. troops to stay until at least 2020 or 2025. When Vice President Joseph Biden traveled to Iraq earlier this month to press Iraqi leaders on political compromise, the chief spokesman for the Maliki government, Ali al-Dabbagh, replied, “national reconciliation is an Iraqi issue and involvement of a non-Iraqi party won’t make it more successful.”

Antipathy to political pressure from the United States cuts across Iraqi political boundaries. “The same Iraqi political figures who say ’stay out of our business, let us run our own country’ are almost certainly the same ones who a few months ago said, ‘Why don’t we have an ambassador yet, have you forgotten us?’” Ollivant said. “And those are both legitimate points for the Iraqis to raise.”

Ollivant said his interactions with Iraqi leaders over the past year have revolved around their desire to deepen a sustainable relationship after U.S. troops depart — particularly a commercial relationship. “They want more American companies, particularly in the oil sector,” he said. Oil revenue still accounts for the vast majority of the Iraqi budget, despite U.S. and international pressure to diversify, and a variety of schemes have emerged in the Iraqi legislature and in the autonomous Kurdish provinces to entice foreign oil companies. Yet a weak legal system and lingering perceptions of poor security have hindered American willingness to invest. Ollivant called it an issue worth high-level attention.

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a major figure stating to American companies that it would be a patriotic act to continue the American rebuilding project in Iraq as a civilian effort, led by corporate America rather than the military,” he said. That advice may personally benefit Ollivant, who said he’s currently working as “an independent business and defense consultant, with a focus on Iraq and various ’small war’ contingencies,” yet Maliki is anticipated to make a similar plea for commercial ties in his discussions with the administration.

Similarly, the future of the U.S. military and diplomatic commitments to Iraq will broaden and normalize. “We’ll continue to hear them ask for diplomatic assistance and assistance at the U.N.,” he said. Militarily, Ollivant said the Obama administration is “serious about getting out of Iraq as soon as prudently possible,” and so post-2011 military ties to Iraq will look like “the same types of ties we have to many other countries in the region,” with U.S. military or security companies continuing to provide advice and training to Iraqi security forces and “selling American equipment, which means a continuing supply of American spare parts.”

The Obama administration has met its share of skepticism on Iraq. In this spring, Republican senators criticized Obama for nominating Christopher Hill, a respected diplomat without experience in the Arab world, as his ambassador to Baghdad. Kori Schake, a State Department veteran and foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign, has written that Obama’s commitment to withdrawal risks “pull[ing] the plug on a war we’re winning to concentrate on a war we cannot win” in Afghanistan. Reidar Visser, a prominent analyst of Iraqi politics based in Norway, observed that Biden’s focus on sectarianism at a time when Iraqis are beginning to form cross-sectarian political coalitions “suggest that while Iraq itself may be maturing, U.S. policy in Iraq is not.” There is widespread agreement that the Obama administration has spent less time on Iraq than on the war in Afghanistan. Ollivant’s former boss, Lt. Gen. Lute, had his portfolio expanded at the NSC, but Iraq policy is no longer part of it.

Having worked for the Bush administration, Ollivant doesn’t dispute that Obama doesn’t share Bush’s “laser-like” focus on Iraq during his administration’s final year in office, a focus that emerged partially out of concern for Bush’s legacy. But Ollivant stresses that the policy options for the United States have narrowed after Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement guaranteeing a date for U.S. withdrawal, something the Iraqis compelled the administration to sign in an unexpected policy reversal. The so-called SOFA “narrowed the political discourse in this country” on Iraq,” Ollivant said. “The Bush administration’s final position ended up close enough to the Obama campaign’s rhetoric that you really have the two sides coming together at a place of common ground.”

Not all observers are as sanguine as Ollivant. “Iraq certainly seems to be an afterthought at the moment,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East expert at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “All of a sudden I find myself writing about the need to think about how we do still retain some levers of influence in the country. This is a transition and it is an awkward period where new sorts of relations are being sorted out, the military interaction receiving the lion’s share of the attention.” Without a sharpening of administration focus, Hanna said he feared that “rest of the [Obama administration's] agenda for the region will never survive if Iraq backslides into broader violence.”

Ollivant drew a distinction between the continued, diminished levels of violence in Iraq and the strategic threat of a renewed sectarian upheaval. “There’s a huge difference between a Sunni leader being assassinated because he’s leading a political movement and is a threat to an established power base or a rival power base or an up-and-coming power base and a Sunni leader being assassinated because he’s a Sunni,” he said. That distinction is what prevented widespread conflagrations when, in the spring, Iraqi security forces in Baghdad arrested several leaders of the mostly-Sunni auxiliary militia known as the Sons of Iraq or the Awakening on various criminal charges. “It’s still an unstable country,” Ollivant said, “but I think we have to distinguish between political violence and sectarian violence.”

He didn’t always know that such a distinction would be meaningful in Iraq. His first Iraq tour, as operations chief for the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, overlapped with much of the first sustained period of crisis during the war — June 2004 to February 2005 — and took him to some of the war’s toughest fighting: the Shiite graveyards of Najaf, the Marine-led invasion of Fallujah and the restive Shiite neighborhood of Khadimiya in Baghdad. Like many officers with Iraq experience during the war’s deteriorating fortunes, Ollivant and “Producing Victory’s” co-author, Lt. Eric Chewning, studied counterinsurgency theory and wrote their paper “almost as catharsis.” In Baghdad during the surge, Ollivant would wake early and work until “11, midnight, 1 a.m.,” swallowing Ambien so his thoughts would let him sleep.

“My confidence in the strategy waxed and waned over time,” he said when asked if he thought the surge would succeed in reducing violence in Iraq.

Asked what his proudest moment of service was, Ollivant equivocated. “I had three very very different experiences in Iraq,” he said. “I’m glad I smelled cordite in Iraq. I’m glad I was at [Multinational Division-Baghdad] when we did the surge and I was part of putting that together. And I was immensely proud and honored to have worked at the White House for two administrations.”

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) (WDCpix)

President Obama’s plan to reduce carbon emissions has raised hopes for a renewed international push to address global warming. But if the reaction of Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) is any indication, the White House faces big obstacles in its effort to get bipartisan support for revamping the energy economy in a time of recession.

“It’s a stalking horse for raising taxes and spending it on special interests.” Gregg said of the Obama plan in a telephone interview. “It’s a non-starter.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Last week, the president proposed establishing a so-called cap and trade system that would auction off tradable “permits” allowing utilities and business to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. By establishing a market price for carbon emissions, the administration hopes to create incentives for companies to use energy technologies that don’t generate the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

The White House estimates the plan would generate $676 billion in revenue through 2019 (pdf). Acknowledging the new system would raise energy costs for most Americans, the administration proposed returning $550.7 billion, or 82 percent to taxpayers via an income tax credit. The rest of the money, $120 billion, would be allocated to unspecified “clean energy technologies” over eight years.

Gregg’s reaction could signal a broad, if quiet, Republican retreat from the cap and trade concept. Less than a year ago Gregg backed the cap and trade concept behind Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and since-retired John Warner’s (R-Va.) Climate Security Act, which Time magazine described as “the strongest global warming bill ever to make it to the Senate floor. Besides McCain and Gregg, Republicans favoring consideration of the bill included Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Arlen Specter (Penn.). Gregg said his “main reservation” was that their bill did not include a provision to return to taxpayers all of the revenues raised by selling emission allowances adding “I look forward to working with my colleagues on ways to fix this concern.” After some Democratic amendments, McCain, Gregg and many other Republicans abandoned the revised bill and it failed.

After Obama offered his proposal in February, the one-time GOP supporters of cap and trade seem distinctly less interested in the concept or in figuring out how to make it work. Corker joined Gregg in criticizing it while Specter issued a statement saying only that the revenue estimates were “entirely speculative.” Spokesmen for McCain, Lugar, Martinez, and Collins did not respond to requests for comment.

In the interview, Gregg objected most strongly to Obama’s proposal to devote 18 percent of cap-and-trade revenues to fund clean energy projects.

“A hundred twenty billion is a lot of money,” said the three-term moderate. “It’s obscene.”

Asked how much of cap-and-trade revenues should be returned to consumers, Gregg said, “It has to be 100 percent if youre going to put that kind of tax” on carbon emissions.

“They shouldn’t using it as stalking horse for his [Obama’s] special interests,” he said. “That’s the Al Gore fund.”

Gregg was more open to Obama’s idea of auctioning off 100 percent of the emission allowances, saying there was room for debate over whether all of the allowances should be auctioned or, some should be given away in return for other carbon emission reductions, as advocated by the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a business-environmental coalition.

“That’s negotiable point,” Gregg said. “There’s some middle ground there.”

“The way forward [for the Obama administration] is to have a little integrity in the process,” Gregg concluded. “If you’re going to hit the American consumer with a sales tax, which is essentially what this is, we shouldn’t be using it to change the size of government.”

Obama’s plan also failed to get any support from Corker of Tennessee, another Republican who previously expressed support for the cap and trade concept.

In January, Corker advocated a cap and trade provision identical to one in Obama’s plan. In a “Dear Colleague” letter to fellow Senators, he criticized past cap and trade bills and the USCAP proposal because, because he said they “would give away for free significant emission allowances that have real monetary value instead of auctioning these allowance and sending the proceeds back to American system who will bear the brunt of any cap-and-trade system.”

Instead, Corker wrote, “we should auction a vast majority—if not all—of the allowances and send 100 percent of the revenues back to consumers.”

Last week, after the release of Obama’s proposal which would auction off all of the allowances, Corker described it as a “climate tax.” The proposal to return 82 percent to taxpayers and dedicate the rest to government-funded energy projects, he said in a statement, was “a major sleight of hand.”

Corker believes that one component of a simple and transparent cap-and-trade proposal would be an auction of all allowances,” a spokesman for his office said Monday afternoon. “He also firmly believes 100 percent of the revenue should be returned to the American people.”

The partisan politics enveloping the issue have already prompted one cap-and trade advocate, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), to contemplate bypassing the Senate legislative process, which would require 60 votes to defeat a Republican filibuster, and putting the legislation in a budget resolution which would only require 51 votes, a move likely to inflame Republicans.

The struggle to revamp the energy system promises to be one of the many big lobbying battles to come in Obama’s first years in office. The number of registered lobbyists working on climate change has grown 300 percent in the last five years, the Center for Responsive Politics reported last week.

President-elect Barack Obama will need to work effectively with Congress if he hopes to enact his legislative agenda. (WDCpix)

As President-elect Barack Obama assembles his administration, the final scenes of the 2008 campaign shift to Capitol Hill, where a lame-duck session shadowboxes over economic recovery measures. At the same time, the unresolved races in Georgia and Minnesota, the fate of renegade Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and the Democrats’ quest to construct a “filibuster-proof majority” highlight the crucial challenge for the incoming president: his ability to push legislation through both houses of Congress and appointments through the Senate.

Even with Obama’s party in power on Capitol Hill, that task will not prove simple. Nobody should expect a reprise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days, when Congress rushed to enact banking reforms without even getting the chance to read the legislation.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Indeed, an electoral mandate and majorities in both houses offer no guarantee of legislative success. President Jimmy Carter could not navigate his energy plan through a Democratic Congress (remember the cardigan?), nor could President Bill Clinton win support for his health-care plan (remember the Health Security Card?).

Republicans have fared no better. Fresh off his re-election victory in 2004, George W. Bush told the White House press corps that he had “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.“ He staked much of it on a proposal to privatize Social Security that failed to move through the GOP-controlled Congress.

How, then, might Obama avoid such pitfalls? The career of another senator-turned-president suggests some valuable lessons. During the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson transformed the relationship between the legislative and executive branches. A former Senate leader, LBJ immersed himself and his staff in all the details of legislation from “the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as the law of the land.”

Johnson visited the Capitol frequently and met constantly with congressional leaders. “There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress,” he said, “and that is continuously, incessantly and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.”

Johnson ordered his staff to give congressional relations the highest priority. “You are going to get a lot of phone calls,” LBJ warned his White House advisers. “People are going to court you and flatter you because you have access to the president. You are going to find yourself a social lion and a fellow with more charm than you ever thought you had. And you will be all this because of the job you hold.” But, LBJ commanded, “the most important people you will talk to are senators and congressmen. You treat them as if they were president. Answer their calls immediately.”

Lyndon Johnson's relationship with Congress allowed him to pass the Civil Rights Bill in 1968. (Wikimedia Commons)

When Congress was in session, Johnson breakfasted every week with the legislative leadership. As they feasted on eggs, toasted homemade bread and links of the special deer sausage Johnson flew in from Texas, the president worked through a large posterboard sitting on an easel. The poster mapped out all the pending legislation in the House and Senate, plotting its path through the various committees down into a bowl drawn on the bottom of the chart to represent final passage of the law.

As they ate, LBJ applied the “Treatment,” cajoling, flattering and persuading the congressional leaders to move his bills forward. The chart accompanied Johnson to Cabinet meetings and his conferences with influential citizens. During 1965, it seemed to follow him everywhere.

Managing Congress also meant knowing when not to ask for a vote; understanding that allies — particularly in a broad, unstable majority — sometimes could not vote with the president. This is something Obama also needs to know. With more than 50 “Blue Dog Democrats” in the House, including conservative Southern and Western congressmen from districts carried strongly by Sen. John McCain, Obama will have to know when he can count on their votes, and when he must expect (and even approve) their opposition to preserve the long-term health of his majority.

For example, Johnson, who was determined to pass the civil-rights law that had stalled in Congress for decades, knew it was fruitless to apply pressure to Southern senators in his own party. “I can’t make a Southerner change his spots,” he told one civil-rights leader, “any more than I can make a leopard change them.” To shut off the inevitable filibuster, Johnson needed Republican votes — especially the support of the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

Johnson began a campaign of flattery — praising Dirksen’s statesmanship, asking his “advice” on appointments, granting him small victories against the White House. “You know this bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” Johnson told his floor manager for civil rights, Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.). “You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.” In the end, they got Dirksen and more than enough Republican votes to end the filibuster and pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With the Blue Dogs in the House and fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, Obama will need to build and rebuild a shifting series of coalitions. Even if the Democrats do reach 60 votes in the Senate, that majority will only be “filibuster-proof” if the leadership can deliver every single vote for cloture. On few issues is a caucus that includes Lieberman and Edward M. Kennedy, Virginia’s Jim Webb, North Dakota’s Tim Johnson, and California’s Barbara Boxer likely to find unanimity.

Those ad hoc majorities were central to LBJ’s dealings with Congress. On civil rights, he needed northern Republicans. On Medicare and Food Stamps, he brought together conservative Southerners in his own party with liberal Northerners to overcome Republican opposition.

Sometimes, Johnson made concessions to influential congressmen, like Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas), chairman of the Ways-and-Means Committee. Other times he built broad coalitions by strategically larding bills with goodies for key legislators. A number of conservative Southern senators supported the food stamp program, for example, because Johnson made sure it was as generous to farmers as to the poor and hungry.

While Johnson’s White House almost never explicitly traded favors for particular votes, every member of Congress understood that cooperation brought benefits: invitations on foreign trips, influence on appointments, projects for the home district. When they voted against the president, recalcitrant members knew they would pay a price.

Defending a key vote against the administration, Sen. Frank Church told the president that celebrated newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann had endorsed his views. “I’ll tell you what, Frank,” the president replied, “next time you want a dam in Idaho, you call Walter Lippmann and let him put it through for you.”

So President Obama must know when to ease off, but he must also recognize when to push.

Johnson began the 89th Congress, the 1965 legislative session, with a commanding Democratic majority — 295 out of 435 votes in the House. For the first time in decades, the wide margin ensured a sympathetic majority for liberal measures.

Despite his popularity, John F. Kennedy had trouble getting his agenda passed. (Wikimedia Commons)

Even without the support of conservative Southern Democrats, the administration could count on enough votes to enact its reform agenda. As one of Johnson’s congressional liaisons put it, “When we have a fat Congress as we did in the 89th, then we can hike up our demands to fit the situation. When the votes are not razor thin,” he explained, then the administration had not pushed far enough.

The last time a sitting senator moved straight into the White House, familiarity with Congress bred only contempt. John F. Kennedy championed a slew of new programs, but with only a few exceptions the president could not get them enacted. The principal objectives of Kennedy’s domestic agenda — federal aid to education, a tax cut, and civil rights legislation — stalled on Capitol Hill.

The New York Times political reporter, Tom Wicker, described Kennedy’s inability to manage the Congress as one of the “great ironies of American politics. He wondered why “JFK, the immensely popular president, could not reach his legislative goals.” The stubborn opposition surprised Kennedy himself. “When I was a congressman,” the thwarted president mused, “I never realized how important Congress was. Now I do.”

Americans might hope that Obama learns that lesson sooner and better than his role model.

Bruce J. Schulman is the Huntington professor of American history at Boston University. His latest book, co-edited with Julian E. Zelizer, is “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.” He is the author of “The ’70s: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics,” “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism” and “From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980.”

Letting us know what it’s like in the press center, here’s her first Election Day video:

While my colleague Ari Melber marvels at the “coolness” of the candidate, the fact remains that he hasn’t made many friends in the traveling press corps.  Obama seldom comes to the back of the plane, and his general press availability has been scant.

Obama still receives good press — particularly from me. But that’s been in lieu of his access not because of it.

Should candidate Obama become President Obama, he may have to shed some of his coolness and speak more frankly and often to the members of the “media filter” if he’s to govern effectively. While often maligned, especially by Republicans, as ideologically biased, most journalists are just trying to do their jobs.

And while the “media filter” can put up with much, an Obama administration should be wary of what can happen if the press is continually kept at arms’ length. Throughout the Bush administration’s first term, reporters frequently grumbled about their treatment at the hands of the White House. But they were essentially ignored as the president’s approval ratings soared in the wake of 9/11.

But the moment things began to go awry, those same journalists struck back, which was not helpful to an administration struggling to get its message to the public.

By opening himself up more to the press, Obama can avoid a smiliar fate should his administration encounter political turbulence.

Sen. Barack Obama’s day is more leisurely, with three events in Jacksonville, FL, Charlotte, NC, and Manassas, VA. His day ends around 10 p.m. CST.

Obama’s load is further lightened by the absence of a large press corps. As has been reported elsewhere, his campaign decided against adding another charter plane to the entourage to seat the dozens of journalists that typically — and understandably — hop on a campaign to report on its final days. Some have interpreted this refusal as a form of revenge on outlets that endorsed McCain; the campaign itself argues that a second plane would have slowed it down. The latter is arguable.

The second McCain plane — affectionately known as the “ass plane” — tends to be ahead of the primary plane, but any time you add another person to an entourage, no matter where he or she is traveling, you increase the possibility of delays.

We know that the Obama campaign’s decision not to add another charter wasn’t because it didn’t want to spend the money. While enormously expensive, charters are ultimately billed to news organizations.

I suspect Team Obama skipped the charter because, at this point, it doesn’t need the press to be there to write about them. Heck, at this point, it barely needs the press at all.

For all the talk of the Bush administration’s contempt for the media, and its attempts to work around the “filter” of the MSM, it’s the Obama campaign that’s all but perfected the smooth integration of the public into a message-distribution machine. From its incredible, promoting-from-without volunteer ground game to its cellphone-list-calling ventures, many of Obama’s most ambitious aides have used “earned media” (what political professionals call media you don’t pay for) as almost an afterthought.

Thus McCain’s second plane, as lucky as I feel to be on it (snarky video below notwithstanding), seems less like a luxury than another sign that the Republicans have been lapped, tactics-wise — if not according to mileage specifically.

Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger!

Less than 24 hours after he told National Public Radio that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is thoroughly unqualified to assume the presidency, should the need arise, a despondent and, at times, stammering Eagleburger appeared today on Fox News to repent and offer a nearly 180-degree endorsement of Palin. Take a look:

Just to review, per Eagleburger:

a) He’s stupid;

b) Palin is chockful of experience and is a quick learner;

c) Obama is a flim-flam artist who has never done anything of value.

Did anyone else get the impression that just off-camera there may have been a high-level McCain staffer pressing a pistol into Eagleburger’s ribs?

Also, is it just me, or was the anchor using Jedi mind tricks around 1:52 in?

(Via TPM)