The Note: Follow The Money

— -- WASHINGTON, March 9 --

NEWS SUMMARY

The highlight of the political day on Tuesday occurred at around 12:07 pm ET, when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Bill Clinton had released details about his Thursday surgery right after President Bush's historic speech about peace and democracy in order to have the former step on the latter.

This analysis gives rise to two thoughts:

1. Right-leaning talk radio hosts owe Bill Clinton a LOT of money.

2. At some point some very smart subset of the Gang of 500 is going to have to figure out if the 41/42 buddyfest is, in the end, going to do more to help 43's legislative agenda or Sen. Clinton's presidential aspirations.

(Check out how big the cable coverage is of the 41/42 10:30ish pre-golf presser today.)

So with 42's heart news canceling out 43's speech (that's a cosmic media calculation we found scrawled in monkey handwriting on the back of an envelope when we walked in today), let's move to Wednesday's agenda:

There's Republican attempts to fit the 10,000-pound square sack of budgetary flour into the round hole of the President's budget wishes on Capitol Hill; there's the need to see if Los Angeles Mayor Hahn will make it into a run-off rematch with Antonio Villaraigosa (We should know for sure within the next few hours . . .); there's the Democrats growing realization that the President's agenda (minus -- so far -- Social Security) is moving fast; and a day of seminal Social Security events.

President Bush meets the President of Romania at 10:55 am ET, choppers to Columbus, OH, where he tours the Battelle Memorial Institute at 1:20 pm ET, motorcades to the Franklin County Veterans Memorial, where he is slated to speak on the need for energy policy legislation at 1:50 pm ET.

At 10:40 am ET, First Lady Laura Bush delivers remarks on the "Helping America's Youth" initiative in Atlanta

At 10:30 am ET, the House Ways and Committee holds its first formal hearing on Social Security reform, hearing from two Social Security trustees and the GAO's David Walker.

The Senate continues to consider the soon-to-be-passed bankruptcy restructuring bill. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears before the House Appropriations subcommittee at 2:30 pm ET.

Sen. Hillary Clinton keynotes a speech on media and kids at mid-morning at Kaiser Family Foundation health care conference in Washington. At 3:00 pm ET, Sens. Clinton, Brownback, Santorum, and Lieberman will reintroduce the Children and Media Research Advancement Act (CAMRA), a bill that would "authorize funding for research into the effects of all forms of media on children's (toddlers through adolescents) cognitive, social, emotional, physical and behavioral development," according to a news release.

Sen. John Kerry holds a press conference at noon today in the Senate, where an aide says he'll unveil supporters of his KidsFirst Health Care legislation.

Kyoto protocaller and former Vice President Al Gore speaks today at an environmental conference in Knoxville, TN. We hear he will use his nifty Power Point presentation.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush play golf with Greg Norman and raise $$$ for tsunami relief in the process in Hope Sound, FL.

President Clinton:
The Palm Beach Post article on the Bush/Clinton/Norman extravaganza is perfunctory . . . it's not as if the region doesn't get it share of presidents, candidates and motorcades. LINK

Bill Clinton's health+Elisabeth Bumiller's pen=front page of the New York Times. LINK

The consensus diagnosis of all the experts consulted by the media: a rare condition, relatively unrisky surgery.

The Washington Post's David Brown explains President Clinton's heart procedure planned for tomorrow. LINK

The Los Angeles Times' Josh Getlin and Karen Kaplan Note that Sen. Hillary Clinton will be with her husband at the hospital. LINK

Social Security: the politics:
The Washington Post's Mike Allen reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham said in an ed board meeting with the Post that Republicans erred in pushing so hard for individual investment accounts, creating a fight over a "sideshow." LINK

A caustic, must-read Wall Street Journal editorial blasts the idea of add-on accounts, wondering why on earth Republicans would want to add anything to a huge entitlement?

Those who blithely assume that there is a compromise hovering out there just waiting for the passage of time to emerge need to read this cautionary tale.

At the same time, personal accounts aren't flying with voters, Republican pollsters told their party's House members yesterday. LINK

Bloomberg's Dick Keil details Vice President Cheney's growing role in selling Social Security reform, with "10 to 15 trips . . . over the next six weeks . . . "

Keil says one Cheney stop will be a town meeting with Chairman Bill Thomas

"Suzanne Granville, who is coordinating the AFL-CIO's campaign opposing Bush's plan, said in an interview she `would never underestimate Dick Cheney on the road, trying to sell their programs.'"

On the other hand, Keil gets at least one person to say Cheney will not help:

"'To get this done, the president is going to need Democrats, and the vice president is one of the most divisive political figures in America,' said strategist Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton and a top adviser to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democrat Bush defeated last year. `It's the wrong messenger.'"

The Los Angeles Times' Warren Vieth looks at the dueling Social Security ads on the air by TrueMajority (spending $54,000 to run for a week in the district of Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) and Washington) and Progress for America (spending $2 million to run for three weeks on national cable), which follow the $10 million the AARP has spent on full-page ads in national and regional newspapers. LINK

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus heard something she liked in the "progressive indexing" plan for Social Security proposed by Bob Pozen, a registered Democrat, chairman of MFS Investment Management and a former vice chairman of Fidelity Investments Inc., who served on President Bush's Social Security commission and former economic adviser of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Personal accounts are a "sweetener," he says, but don't help the program's solvency, and he doesn't favor raising the retirement age. LINK

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne claims that President Bush is so far looking at a tough hand on Social Security because he hasn't laid his cards on the table. LINK

The New York Times' Eduardo Porter reviews the legacy of Social Security and puzzles out who might win and who might lose if President Bush gets his way. It's not as simple as both parties would have it. LINK

Economist Thomas Saving (!) makes the case for entitlement reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, projecting that current programs will ultimately be underfunded by $74 trillion. Not that he's pushing for personal accounts, as his well-edited last paragraph makes clear.

Bush agenda:
A new regulatory reform push from the Bush Administration is in the works, the Wall Street Journal's John McKinnon reports.

"The stated aim is to improve the overall climate for U.S. manufacturing, a sector hammered by recession and overseas competition during much of President Bush's first term."

"OIRA gave what some experts regard as a preview of the regulatory-review effort in December, when it published several lists of rules for which either the administration or business and other private-sector groups had sought overhaul. Much of the new initiative is expected to focus on industry-nominated changes. But an OMB official said yesterday only that the agency was finalizing plans to release its report on rules to be revisited. OMB will take into consideration the recommendations it received but "won't necessarily implement all these," the official said."

The New York Times' Todd Purdum Notes that even Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy give President Bush some credit for the transformational developments in the Middle East and quotes a White House official who urges caution over triumphalism. LINK