Brown Town: Scott Brown arrives in rudderless Washington

By Rick Klein Scott Brown can’t wait to get here — for what, exactly? For some reason, it just doesn’t feel like he’s joining the second-smallest Senate minority in a generation. He gets to be part of the dominant sentiment of the moment in Washington — fear. There’s fear of action, and there’s fear of inaction. There’s fear on the left, and there’s fear on the right. There’s fear of campaigning, and there’s fear of governing in the run-up to those campaigns. The defense-as-offense on national security shows the potency of an issue that’s long haunted Democrats. Senate Democrats Thursday morning put forward their job-creation agenda — coming a full 50 weeks after the stimulus bill became law. And a quick spin through what’s left of the Democrats’ agenda tells you that nobody is quite sure of even where things stand. (Quick — you tell us what big item comes next on the congressional docket?) “I promise you the answer is not to do nothing,” the president told Senate Democrats Wednesday (not quite saying what should replace it). “We still have to lead.” This is the Washington that Sen.-elect Scott Brown, R-Mass., arrives in Thursday — by plane — for his late afternoon swearing-in. On leadership (and “question time” is just a tad more interesting when it’s just a tad less scripted): “At times, the president’s appearance took on the air of a pep rally, complete with back-slapping jokes and stinging criticism of Republicans,” Jeff Zeleny writes in The New York Times. “But at other points it seemed as though the senators had been summoned to the principal’s office, with Mr. Obama delivering a stern reminder to do better, work harder and live up to their potential.”  About the leading thing: “All but two of the eight questioners who were chosen face stiff challenges, and most of their questions addressed topics central to their campaigns. There was minimal discussion of how to move forward with health care, energy, financial regulation, education or other tough issues stuck in Congress,” Laura Meckler writes in The Wall Street Journal. Out of camera range… “Once the president left and reporters were escorted out of the room, senators pressed White House officials about healthcare reform, according to those at the meeting,” The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports. “Democrats expressed their frustration with the lack of a clear plan for passing healthcare reform, according to one person in the room. … ‘It wasn’t a discussion about how to get from Point A to Point B; it was a discussion about the lack of a plan to get from Point A to Point B,’ said a person who attended the meeting.”   Doing something — on jobs. Senate Democrats unveil the first phase of their jobs agenda, with a Thursday morning press conference. From Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s prepared remarks: “Our agenda is not about politics or partisanship. It is about putting people back to work. Our motivation is to help every American sleep a little easier. Our mission is to not stop until every American who wants a job can get one. And our message is this: for Senate Democrats, creating jobs is job one.” Brown in town: After a quick flurry of maneuvering, Scott Brown is coming to Washington Thursday to be sworn in as a senator. “As recently as Tuesday, Brown said he planned to take the oath of office next week,” The Boston Globe’s Matt Viser reports. “It was unclear exactly what prompted Brown’s change of heart. His aides said they were made aware of votes in the Senate in the next several days and decided he should assume office right away. State officials had already planned to certify Brown’s election by this morning, and thus had no objections yesterday to the new timetable.” About that fear: “As Congress begins picking through President Obama's vast election-year budget, many Democratic incumbents and candidates seem to be finding something they love — to campaign against,” the Los Angeles Times’ Janet Hook and Christi Parsons write. “Obama's budget gives his fellow Democrats an unlikely campaign tool — a catalog of ways to establish their distance from controversial aspects of his administration,” they write. “All that underscores a potential gap between Obama's governing agenda and congressional Democrats' political interests.” The growing sense: “A Republican takeover on Capitol Hill is still a long shot. But strategists in both parties now see at least narrow paths by which the GOP could win the House and, if the troubled environment for Democrats deteriorates further, possibly even the Senate,” the AP’s Liz Sidoti writes.  “Republicans suddenly have a conceivable path to winning back the Senate in November, after locking in top-flight candidates overnight in Illinois and Indiana,” Jim VandeHei and Alexander Burns write for Politico. Of dashed hopes, and altered expectations — Lawrence Lessig, in The Nation: “A year into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed. Not because it is too conservative. Not because it is too liberal. But because it is too conventional. Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign–a campaign that promised to ‘challenge the broken system in Washington’ and to ‘fundamentally change the way Washington works.’ Indeed, ‘fundamental change’ is no longer even a hint.”  From the other side — incentive for cooperation, either lost or thrown away. Karl Rove, in his Wall Street Journal column: “Mr. Obama's problems remain reality rather than optics. Over the past year, he hemmed himself in by leaving it to Democratic congressional leaders to draft his health-care reform and other items of his agenda and by not pressing those leaders to negotiate with Republicans.”   Maybe by design? “The Republican response to this barrage was, well, incoherent. But in most cases the need to demonize Obama trumped the party's ideological beliefs,” Time’s Joe Klein writes.  What next? Any ideas? Any at all? “House and Senate Democrats seem to agree that health care reform and job creation must be their top domestic priorities. But the agreement stops there,” Roll Call’s Steven T. Dennis and Emily Pierce write. Does this count as a new path? “Democrats also took note when Obama described a process for completing the bill that would take place ‘in an open way, in a transparent way, in a spirit that says to our political opponents that we welcome their ideas.’ That description bore little resemblance to the backroom negotiations now underway between Reid and Pelosi,” Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane report in The Washington Post. Same as the old path? “The health care bill is in trouble, but a series of narrow deals — each designed to win over a wavering senator or key interest group — is alive and well, despite voter anger over the parochial horse-trading that marked the rush toward passage before Christmas,” Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Patrick O’Connor write. It may look the same, at least: “Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, told Congress on Wednesday that she could not guarantee greater openness in negotiations over legislation to remake the nation’s health care system,” Robert Pear reports in The New York Times. The president does the tour of DC Hiltons on Thursday — starting with the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton, and later with a DNC fundraiser at the Capital Hilton. And then there’s a second DNC fundraising dinner, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.  With the national-security wrangling — whose terrain are we on? “Obama has made a calculated effort in the past week to showcase GOP recalcitrance toward his plans for health care, energy policy and deficit reduction. Republicans have steered the debate toward national security as the White House reconsiders its decision to try alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a Lower Manhattan courtroom and struggles to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut report in The Washington Post.   The fight heats up: “Attorney General Eric Holder wrote an assertive letter to Republican critics [Wednesday], part of an apparent campaign by the Obama administration to more aggressively combat criticism of how the president is waging the war on terrorism,” ABC’s Jake Tapper reports. “Holder wrote that the ‘decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab in federal court, and the methods used to interrogate him, are fully consistent with the long-established and publicly known policies and practices’ of US law enforcement, adding that the practices ‘were not criticized when employed by previous Administrations.’ ” Details, details: “FBI officials flew in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's mother and uncle from Nigeria last month to meet with the Christmas Day bombing suspect for 10 days, law enforcement sources said today,” ABC’s Pierre Thomas, Huma Khan, and Jason Ryan report. “The terror suspect's family played a pivotal role in getting him to cooperate with federal authorities in sharing information about al Qaeda, according to senior administration officials. The suspect has talked to the FBI for hours in recent days, offering what sources say is valuable, sometimes chilling, intelligence.” Politico’s Josh Gerstein: “It’s the kind of muscular response of that many Democratic-leaning national security experts have been urging the White House and Justice Department to put forward for weeks.” Pushing back at the pushback: “Seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are calling on Democrats to force Attorney General Eric Holder to testify before Congress on the attempted Christmas Day bombing, escalating a political battle over the incident’s fallout.”  Always with the chance to be the big, big story, or stories: “Lawyers for President Obama have been working behind the scenes to prepare for the possibility of one, and maybe two Supreme Court vacancies this spring,” ABC’s Ariane de Vogue reports. “Court watchers believe two of the more liberal members of the court, justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could decide to step aside for reasons of age and health. That would give the president his second and third chance to shape his legacy on the Supreme Court.” Things you never knew about your president’s BlackBerry: “Every morning, sometimes as early as 5:30 a.m., a short religious passage comes across President Obama's BlackBerry, sent by one of his aides,” The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut writes. “At other moments, Obama prays privately, his advisers said. And when he takes his family to Camp David on the weekends, a Navy chaplain ministers to them, with the daughters attending a form of Sunday school there.” New worries, in Illinois: “The newly minted Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor said Wednesday he doesn’t think a 2005 domestic battery arrest should hurt him in the fall general election, although records in the case raise questions about his version of events,” David Heinzmann and Ray Long report in the Chicago Tribune. Sounds of Nashville — the Tea Party Convention gets going in Tennessee. “Organizers hope the event will ‘galvanize’ the populist movement and help it gather momentum in the wake of a string of recent conservative electoral victories,” ABC’s Steven Portnoy reports. “But some wonder what gives organizers the right to hold the event in the first place, never mind to charge hundreds of dollars for admission.” Forget the CW: “The widely anticipated civil war within the Republican Party is off to a decidedly dull start,” Politico’s Jonathan Martin writes. “Defying predictions from last year, early evidence suggests that party leaders and even most grass-roots activists are more interested in winning elections than in ideological bloodletting.”  The gathering is really going to about Sarah Palin’s speech Saturday night: “Imagine her political clout if only she can keep the motivated Tea Party crowd within the Republican Party,” Andrew Malcolm blogs for the Los Angeles Times. More conventional GOP gatherings: A new Republican idea factory. “The organizers, including former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the senior policy adviser to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, describe their emerging American Action Network as a center-right version of the Center for American Progress, the six-year-old group for progressive policies that was founded by John Podesta,” Jackie Calmes writes for The New York Times.  The Hayworth manifesto: former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz.,makes his case against Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at RedState.com: “The John McCain I supported for president in 2000 is not the same John McCain I’ve watched frustrate conservatives time and again as our senator. He still fights hard, all right, but too often for the wrong causes.” (Hayworth will be a guest on ABC’s “Top Line” Thursday, live noon ET at ABCNews.com.) Staffing up: “Brian Rogers, a battle-hardened veteran of Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, is reuniting with the Arizona Republican as his 2010 re-election campaign's director of communications,” Dan Nowicki reports in the Arizona Republic. Singer to Cuomo: ”The Andrew Cuomo 2010 campaign will be retaining Phil Singer as a consultant to help with communications,” Cuomo spokeswoman Jennifer Bayer tells the New York Observer’s Azi Paybarah.
The Kicker: “… Men like Tom Campbell, who would never leave us astray, his pedestal so high…” — Carly Fiorina campaign Web video, depicting her GOP Senate rival as a sheep that for some reason has red eyes when lightning strikes, in a campaign move so odd that Campbell is now using it in a fund-raising pitch.  “You're lucky you're not hanging from your thumbs.” — Bill O’Reilly, to Jon Stewart, after Stewart asked for a “soft chair” in his trip into the lion’s den.
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