This week Paul issued a statement of his budget priorities were he to be put in the White House.

His second point of action — after “vetoing any spending bills that contribute to an unbalanced budget,” would be to “veto any spending bill that contains funding for Planned Parenthood, facilities that perform abortion and all government family planning schemes.”

“Like millions of Americans, I believe that innocent life deserves protection and I am deeply offended by abortion,” Paul said in the statement, without explaining what he means by “government family planning schemes.”

“As a Congressman, I’ve never voted for any budget that includes funding for Planned Parenthood. Instead, I’ve introduced the Taxpayers’ Freedom of Conscience Act to cut off all taxpayer funding of abortions, so-called ‘family planning’ services and international abortionists.”

Paul’s other economic plans include ending “ObamaCare” and repealing “unconstitutional and burdensome” regulations on businesses.

As the Iowa Independent recently reported, Paul is among five GOP presidential hopefuls that signed the SBA pledge, essentially making four promises:

“To nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;

To select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;

To advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;

To advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.”

Since Paul’s post-pledge pledge, SBA List has dubbed him a “Libertarian for Life.”

Presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Gary Johnson and Herman Cain have not signed the pledge, despite pressure within the Republican Party.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, Huntsman made a point of noting his families ties to Florida, which many consider to be a crucial state in determining the outcome of a presidential election. Calling her his “Florida better half,” Huntsman mentioned that his wife, Mary Kaye Hunstman, was born in Orlando and that his daughter married a Dunedin native. #

Huntsman’s political ambitions aren’t surprising. As Utah’s governor, he enjoyed high approval ratings. But his close ties to President Obama could prove a set-back for his campaign. The President himself has even made light of Huntsman’s departure from his post as ambassador. “I’m sure that him having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary,” Obama joked during a January news conference announcing Huntsman’s resignation. #

Though Huntsman seems to be getting a later start than his counterparts, he seems to be making strides already. A Political Action Committee was set up for Huntsman as early as January, and it has ties to Florida. “Horizon PAC” is run by Susie Wiles, the Republican strategist who successfully managed the campaign of newly-inaugurated Gov. Rick Scott. #

Pawlenty told the Vanderbilt Hustler, a college newspaper, young voters feel “duped” for having voted for Obama in 2008. He said the President has not delivered since his election. Although Obama pushed through student loan reform, and his landmark health insurance overhall included more protection for young people, they have had a much higher unemployment rate in recent years as well.

“For a candidate, I am relatively young. I have a more recent connection to the younger generation than some have or might have had in the past,” Pawlenty said. “We really understand the new era of communications, and that’s why I spend time on Jon Stewart and love to do it. ”

But not so fast, Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Jim Davnie said Friday. At the end of his governorship in Minnesota, Pawlenty cut public higher education by $100 million in 2009, then proposed cutting $47 million in 2010 while saying he would’ve cut more.

“The reduction in state support for higher education opportunities, the high debt load that students leave college with here, and the low, almost non-existence job growth and job development during his tenure all puts together a picture that isn’t inviting to a young voter who wants to get an education, get engaged, get into the world and get a good job,” Davnie told The Iowa Independent.

Davnie was pressed about the similarities between the recent decline of state support to public universities in Minnesota and the tuition increases with what happened in Iowa under two Democratic governors. While Davnie said tuition went up 90 percent at state universities over 10 years, starting in 2001, in-state tuition in Iowa went up 99.7 percent over the same 10 year period.

Iowa has also been ahead of Minnesota every year that the Project on Student Debt has ranked average student debt burdens.

Davnie largely avoided the question, saying he couldn’t speak to situations in other states, but claimed 40 percent of college students were taking non-credit remedial classes as they entered college.

Alex Conant, spokesman for Pawlenty, said, “Gov. Tim Pawlenty made the tough choices necessary to cut out-of-control government spending in Minnesota. Democrats are clearly worried that as more voters get to know Governor Pawlenty, they’ll like his fiscally responsible record and optimistic vision for America.”

But Norm Sterzenbach, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, warned not to read into Pawlenty being the first Republican candidate the party has gone after as their reading of Pawlenty as a front-runner.

“We will be taking a hard look at all Republican candidates as they come through,” Sterzenbach said. Since Pawlenty is speaking to college Republicans tonight in Des Moines, they said he happened to be the first target.

Obama won 66 percent of the youth vote in 2008, and recent polling by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found millenials — ages 18 to 29 — gave a 55 percent approval rating of the President. Among students at four-year colleges, Obama’s numbers have increased nine points since last fall to a 60 percent approval rating.

A recent Gallup poll found Pawlenty is still struggling in name recognition among Republicans, behind U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss.).

President Obama spoke for roughly thirty minutes with President Preval of Haiti this morning. President Obama said that the world has been devastated by the loss and suffering in Haiti, and pledged the full support of the American people for the government and people of Haiti as it relates to both the immediate recovery effort, and the long-term rebuilding effort. President Preval said that he has been touched by the friendship of the American people, and expressed his condolences for the loss of American citizens in Haiti. He said that the needs are great, that relief is now flowing in to the people of Haiti, and noted the support that has come from both America and many other countries from the region and around the world. The two Presidents underscored the need to closely coordinate assistance efforts among the various parties, including the Haitian government, the United Nations, the United States and the many international partners and aid organizations on the ground. President Obama underscored his commitment to supporting the government and people of Haiti through his team on the ground. President Preval closed by passing a message to the American people, “from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the Haitian people, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

One example of how the divergence squeezes candidates came in 2000, when most voters approved of President Bill Clinton’s work, but most had an “unfavorable” view of his post-impeachment character. That flummoxed Al Gore’s campaign when it thought about how to handle Clinton. According to Gore campaign vets like Bob Shrum, Clinton was toxic in states that he’d won twice and where the economy was booming, like Iowa.

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t have a job outside of her book tour, her “favorable” rating is all she has. Not only is it lower than Barack Obama’s favorable rating, it’s lower than a credible national candidate can really stand — Republicans argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be unelectable as a presidential candidate when her “unfavorable” rating was a good 10 points lower than Palin’s.

What reason is there to believe that Dobbs, a bottom-feeding broadcaster who struggled to draw 800,000 nightly viewers, has a ready pool of voters waiting for him? All I see is a 2006 Rasmussen Reports poll suggesting that a third-party candidate who talked about ending immigration, as Dobbs does, would score 30 percent of the vote. A Dobbs boomlet makes more sense that the truly foolish “Unity 08″ boomlet of 2007, when some retired campaign consultants suggested that some combination of independent-minded politicians should run for office, just because.

“If I felt that’s what the Lord was calling me to do, I would do it,” she answered. “When I have sensed that the Lord is calling me to do something, I’ve said yes to it. But I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it. That’s really my standard.

“If I am called to serve in that realm I would serve,” she concluded, “but if I am not called, I wouldn’t do it.

Should Democrats be concerned? As Birkey notes, God already told her to run for Congress.

I caught up with the governor following his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today. After chatting about energy policy (more on this below), I asked him if, given the shrinking pool of potential 2012 candidates, he was considering throwing his hat in the ring. He replied:

I’ve said, when I was chairman of our party in 1993 and [1994], that in the first two years of a Democratic presidency, we need to focus all our attention on those two years — in this case, ’09 and ’10. And any Republican who’s thinking about 2012 doesn’t have his eye on the ball. I’ve told thousands of people that, and I’m taking my own advice.

“But you’re not ruling it out?” I followed. At which point he uttered a drawn-out “Uhh” and mumbled something about how he was “just seeing that clock.” Then he took his leave.

He was more loquacious on the topic of cap-and-trade legislation, though, where he had this folksy analogy to offer:

When you grow up in the country, like I did, when you cook a frog, you don’t drop him into hot water, cause he’ll jump out. You drop him into cool water, and then you turn up the heat, and it heats up slowly. And politically, the left has tried to protect themselves by pushing the effects off a few years. Because they know once the job losses start and the higher costs kick in, which they inevitably will, that will be bad for them.

When I asked him if he thought it was necessary to take action to address climate change, he distanced himself from many of his Republican colleagues in the Senate by replying, “I do. I do. I do.”

But he added:

I do not think that the need to address climate change is urgent, that it’s more important than the economy. I’m like most Americans. I don’t think we ought to sink our economy in the name of climate change.

President-elect Barack Obama (WDCpix)

“And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help and I will be your president too.”

So said President-elect Barack Obama, in one of the most revealing sentences in his victory speech Tuesday. In his rejection of standard political divisions, his emphasis on “e pluribus unum,” and his gracious inclusion of those whose support he has “yet to earn,” we can find a clue to what makes our new president-elect so remarkable — perhaps even unique in the nation’s long history.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Some public officials are minimalists. They do not like to reject the fundamental commitments of their fellow citizens. On environmental questions, sex equality, national security and economic policy, they try to bracket our deepest disagreements. They seek to obtain a consensus on what to do — not on why to do it.
Minimalists favor their approach because they think, as a pragmatic matter, it is most likely to work. They also insist that their approach, putting fundamental differences to one side, shows respect to their fellow citizens.

Political minimalism has a distinguished tradition in U.S. politics. In recent history, President George H.W. Bush stands as the leading minimalist. To the extent that Bush succeeded, especially in foreign affairs, it was because he enlisted diverse people, and diverse views, on behalf of the policies he chose.

Other public officials are visionaries. They have a large-scale vision about the direction in which the nation should go. They believe in big steps, not small ones.

Above all, these visionaries seek to alter the nation’s self-conception. In changing policy on the economy, or on national defense, they are entirely comfortable with asserting that their vision is the superior one and that alternative visions should be rejected. When they succeed, they transform how the nation understands itself.

Our greatest presidents — including Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt — have been visionaries. In recent American history, President Ronald Reagan stands as the leading visionary.

Obama is something new in American politics — and not just for the obvious reasons. He is a visionary minimalist. This is a key both to his extraordinary campaign and to his unique promise. It even helps explain his conception of public service.

Obama’s minimalism lies in his consistent rejection of the standard social divisions — between red states and blue states, liberal and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. As he said in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.”

Ronald Reagan (Wikimedia)

Obama shows unfailing respect for those with competing views. In designing policies — on climate change, tax reform, energy conservation, foreign policy — he attempts to produce solutions that will accommodate, rather than repudiate, the defining commitments of his fellow citizens. Even on the most divisive issues of separation of church and state, Obama favors approaches that will attract support from all sides.

But Obama is a visionary too. Unlike most minimalists, he is willing to think big.

When he speaks of change, he means to include ambitious plans for energy independence, universal health care and educational reform. No less than Reagan, he wants to transform the nation’s self-understanding. He seeks not only to go beyond the divisions of the 1960s, but also to synthesize deeper strands in our history.

Thus Obama recognizes and celebrates the individualist strain in American culture. But he draws attention to a counterpoint — one that emphasizes mutual obligations.
As he said in 2004 and has often repeated since, “If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. . . . It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper – that makes this country work.”

With the election of a new president, I expect that we will soon enter a novel period of American life, in which a commitment to public service, sacrifice and a sense of mutual obligations will play a far larger role. That commitment will be anything but partisan. It will be felt in red states and blue states alike.

And it will be made possible, and fueled, by the visionary minimalism of America’s president-elect.

Cass R. Sunstein is Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard Law School. He will be the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor at University of Chicago Law School in January 2009. His most recent book, which he co-wrote with Richard Thaler, is “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” His books include “Are Judges Political? An Empirical Analysis of the Federal Judiciary” and “The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever.”

President-elect Barack Obama (WDCpix)

It would be lovely for there to be — if not a full honeymoon period — just a quiet reflective day or two to take stock of what just happened. Whatever the reason, a tanking economy and a wildly unpopular incumbent no doubt high on the list, America just voted a black man into the highest office in the land.

In the polling booths and on the streets after, people smiled at the immensity of what had happened, what they, with the touch of a screen or the mark of a ballot, had participated in: history. Not just history, but a redress of that history.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

There were tears when the victory was announced. Not just in the big crowd in Chicago, where President-elect Barack Obama spoke, but in living rooms everywhere. I know. I saw them in my own living room. I shed a few.

With his rare oratorical gifts, his eloquence, Obama caught that tone in his post-victory speech. He nodded hard at America’s complicated history, but he didn’t dwell there. His was not a racial victory — not just that anyway.

At every turn, Obama eschews the divisive and goes big — raising expectations for everyone. His is a big, wide call for us to band together and be our better selves, post-partisan, patriotic, a word he uses not as a cudgel but as an invitation.

No question, that invitation is resonating. Not just with the young, who are just stepping up for their turn at the bat and who voted in record numbers. They canvassed and called; they traveled the country, eager and earnest and lit up with the chance to be participants.

But the Obama invitation works for many of the older folk, too, the baby boomers, the Clinton and Bush cohort. There is a sense among them — among us, I should say, as I am in this number — of a kind of long hang-over, a sense that we did not keep up the promises of our own youthful days. Instead, we got bogged down in an internecine generational battle, in materialistic pleasures, those SUVS and wide-screen TVs. Of course, even in our self-judgment, there is the inevitable tinge of narcissism.

Obama’s victory turns the page, at last. But again, he does not play the generation card, just as he ran a post-racial campaign as much as possible. Though he is so clearly a post-60’s child himself, he offers a chance of redemption even to the boomers, a chance to be staked again to the country.

In short, Obama has raised the expectations for any and all of us, patriotic expectations, moral expectations, expectations of what it means to be a citizen, a voter whose vote can change history.

But as the president-elect raises those expectations, he must also lower them. That’s the trick, the balancing act.

Because we are in a downward spiral, a tough economic contraction that will, if he is not careful, threaten to nibble away at the energy and optimism he brings to the table. It’s going to be tough. There are going to be sacrifices. More people are going to lose jobs and homes and health care.

He knows it. We know it. He has to be able to lower our expectations — while raising them at the same time, not just with his verbal gifts, but with his first appointments and actions.

He has to keep us excited, on board, even as we are uncertain and fearful of what lies ahead. No question, this is going to be a tough Christmas. You can feel it out there in the shops and the malls. People are not going to spend. It’s going to be harsh.

We have been in a long, prosperous boom — really since the early 80s — more and more stuff, bigger and bigger houses and toys, a rip-roaring economy going more and more global. As many became ever more successful in their private and professional lives, they grew farther from a sense of a communal, civic life.

The go-it-alone atmosphere of the Bush administration — what Obama called the “ownership socieity” meaning “you’re on your own” — did not help. There has been a real paternalistic swagger to the Bush folk, much diminished, of course, in the final throes, by the economic down-turn. But for a long time, they strode the world stage full of certitude and secrecy.

The Clinton administration toyed with raising bigger expectations for any and all, but they were, in a sense, personal expectations, that we would do well for ourselves, achieve a lot. Certainly the economy boomed. But, let’s be honest, some of the big de-regulating that we now have to pay for happened then, too, not just in the Bush years.

There was peace, though the Clinton folk, arguably, did not focus hard on the first acts of terrorism, a forerunner of what was to come. By that time, in his second term, Clinton was bogged down in defending himself after a dalliance with a bouncy intern in a beret.

Bye-bye boomers. The new guys are coming, Obama at their helm. Calm, steely, deeply married, a devoted father of young kids, he comes with the promise of a new beginning on every level.

But he is a child of that economic boom, too; a product of a great education, high achievement, a big house. It will fall to him, right off the bat, to deal with the nation’s fears while keeping our optimism up, to calm the country while beckoning it to make tough, expensive choices about health care and education.

It is a big, nuanced balancing act: lowering expectations while raising them at the same time. Obama must now lead a country full of both hope—and fear.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” She is the author of a memoir, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey.”