This week, President Obama put his signature on perhaps the hallmark foreign policy achievement of his young presidency - a renewed START treaty agreement with Russia that calls for dramatic bilateral cuts in the nuclear stockpiles of both countries. This is a huge political victory in the international arena for Obama, breathing life into a souring relationship with Moscow, and way-siding the lack of progress in Israel-Palestine peace talks throughout the last year. This is undoubtedly a massive step toward the President’s eventual (and yes, perhaps idealistic) goal of a nuclear-free world.

The only obstacle left in the way of this ambitious initiative is ratification in the US Congress. Simple, right? Not so much. Political gridlock in Washington pervades not on domestic, but also these paramount and seemingly non-controversial foreign issues and initiatives.

Ratification of the treaty in the Senate requires 67 votes as per the constitution, and it will be extremely difficult for the President and Harry Reid’s Democratic leadership to find 8 Republican “yes” votes, or even corral the conservative Democrats (such as Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln, among others) whose constituents may be wary of the scale and speed of disarmament that this treaty calls for. Many on the right side of the aisle are irrationally afraid of Nuclear attacks from rogue states such as Iran (eventually) and North Korea, and that diminishing missile shields in Europe will enable Russia to gain more strategic initiative throughout Europe, as Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) suggested in a Sunday interview on Fox.

These counts seem patently wrong: The vast majority of those weapons this treaty eliminates are archaic and ineffective, of the Cold War era. North Korea is a proliferation threat, not a military threat, as Pyongyang is well aware that they would theoretically be annihilated in a retaliatory attack. Iran is probably of the same flock: its uranium enrichment levels are not particularly high, and domestic institutional instability would disallow the Islamic Republic from using such offensive force against another nation. Perhaps Iran’s missiles are capable, as some suggest, of striking Europe, but it’s hard to imagine them being so bold (despite the vehemence of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric). Furthermore, Russia’s strategic leverage over mainland Europe is primarily economic (in petrol dollars), and domestic stockpiles in the UK and France, among other EU nations, should be deterrent enough.

But the Senate is an irrational place where hypothetical political objectives often rule out common sense. This treaty, while not as transformative as some would hope, is a phenomenal start to Obama’s diplomatic resume (he’s beginning to earn that Nobel). Let’s hope he can capitalize on it.

It seems we’re very close to the end of a long, trying fight that has lasted nearly the entire course of Barack Obama’s young presidency and cost him most of his political capital. The House tonight, in spite of unanimous Republican opposition, passed the most comprehensive and historic social legislation since Medicare and Medicaid. This is a momentous occasion, and the credit is largely owed to the Congresswoman from California’s 8th District: Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Sure, I’m willing to cede that the Democratic leadership in congress has misplayed their cards on a whole host of issues, and are largely responsible for losing control of this fight last summer. But in January, when Healthcare was apparently doomed by Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts and the President was ready to announce plans to scale back the legislation, Pelosi urged him to stay the course. Vote by vote, she pushed the unpopular December senate bill back through the House, forming a patchwork coalition of liberal democrats, anti-abortion crusaders, and moderates in swing districts without resorting to the ridiculous dealmaking that ensured the passage of the bill in December.

The work is now nearly finished. We don’t know how this will play for us politically in the short-term, as the President has said on numerous occasions, but once again, our party has shown themselves to be truly “progressive.” Over the past century, it has been Democratic administrations and congresses that have introduced those systemic reforms that have redefined the status quo, time and again. From the New Deal to Medicare, from the Civil Rights act to today’s momentous victory.

But in January, this result hung in the balance. It was Pelosi’s drive and determination that got us here. It was Pelosi who was instrumental in redefining history.

This weekend’s controversial “Tea Party” convention, boycotted by some fiscal conservative stalwarts such as Michelle Bachmann, may have been hindersome to the GOP’s populist momentum. With a recession-friendly price-tag of over 800 dollars (to see all of the convention speakers and the keynote), Tea Partiers were treated to Sarah Palin’s down-home rhetorical flashes (read straight from the palm of her hand) and the superstar power and charisma of other familiar faces from the far-right, such as Tom Tancredo, who decried President Obama as a “committed socialist ideologue” elected by “people who could not even spell the word vote or say it in English.”

But snide remarks from political featherweights aside, fringe conservatives hoped to accomplish two things with this weekend’s convention: to solidify an elite, faithful donor base and to build positive PR for their grassroots campaign that would survive for a few news cycles (simultaneously bolstering far right candidates for November such as Danny Tarkinian in Nevada and Marco Rubio in Florida while pushing Conservatives in Congress to further their efforts to veto the Obama agenda).

They seemingly failed on both counts. While it’s difficult to gauge how their donor base is moving, what is clear is that by attempting to bring their movement to the national stage, Conservatives revealed its ideological instability and its lack of political staying power. As even Bill O’ Reilly noted, the platform of the movement is essentially a dislike of “the liberal vision of big government and [its] stance on terrorism.” Surely there are millions of Americans who subscribe to similar ideas who fall far outside the rungs of this camp. Such vague notions of political philosophical are far from enough to sustain the Tea Party for long.

If the Republicans hope to be truly successful in 2010, they need to put their best foot forward to prove they are committed to working with the President to reduce the budget deficit, pass healthcare legislation and complete the economic turnaround. They cannot count on diffuse populist rage to win them back the House and Senate. Obama is still more popular than his policies, and if he can land the proverbial one-two punch of Healthcare and Financial Reform (perhaps hawking Senate votes from the more liberal Northeastern states…yes Scott Brown, I’m talking to you too), with “Tea Party” momentum potentially stagnant, Republican candidates may quickly find themselves reeling in the polls. The televised beat-down the President put on GOP congressmen was especially telling. The President is beginning to feel the wind at his back, and he has the chance to capitalize in a big way. After all, the Tea Party only materialized in the first place due to Conservative dissatisfaction with the direction of the Republican Party.

The legislative process is indisputably messy and taxing, and driving this legislation through congress, especially without a sixty vote democratic supermajority, will be no easy task. But regardless of the trials and tribulations of the last year, this moment is as ripe for change as was January 20^th, 2009.

With Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts last week, our party’s fears of hemorrhaging House and Senate seats in the 2010 cycle were drastically exacerbated.

President Obama, who attempted to salvage Coakley’s flagging candidacy with an eleventh hour visit on the weekend proceeding Tuesday’s election, has moved to centralize control over his party’s strategy for November, recruiting former campaign manager David Plouffe to oversee all House, Governor and Senate races, apparently a slap on the wrist for DNC head Tim Kaine, who so far hasn’t enjoyed a successful tenure (as Democrats are continuously outraised by Republicans on a month-by-month basis). This is a high stakes move for a President who often prefers compromise (though largely by necessity) to rolling the dice on more controversial, left of center measures (as he proved by quickly abandoning the public option).

Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was not as much of a product of an outpouring of populist rage as it was a blatant misreading of the electorate. Coakley, though well liked as Attorney General, was hardly an inspiring candidate, and coasted on double-digit poll leads until it was far too late (refusing to engage her prolific political machine and resting on a loaded campaign war-chest). Ultimately, this blue-blooded state, though erring on the left of center, is fiercely independent politically, a spirit born from a long tradition of moderate New England Republicans (from John Chafee to William Weld) dating back well into the 19^th Century.

To paraphrase the ill-fated Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds, reports of our demise are exaggerated. Still, whether you like or dislike the President’s policies, he has not proven an effective advocate for them, or for democratic candidates. He waited to play his hand in the health care debate for far too long, overseeing the process from a distance and giving the reigns to a weak democratic leadership, allowing a fringe conservative misinformation campaign from the far right destroy approval for the legislation and his presidency.

Obama has lost control of the economic debate. The question now whether or not he can win it back. The party now must decide its standing on the political spectrum going into November. The potential Senate primary matchup in New York is a microcosm of this struggle, as appointed Junior Senator Kirsten Gillibrand lines up for a challenge from Harold Ford, a fiscally conservative Tennessee Democrat who migrated north following his unsuccessful run for Bill Frist’s former seat.

Gillibrand sees herself in the mold of Chuck Schumer, the liberal stalwart from New York, far more socially and fiscally left-leaning than her potential opponent. Ford this week refered to her as “parakeet,” arguing that New Yorkers are increasingly frustrated with her willingness to go ahead to with every item on Obama’s agenda and that the state needs a more independent voice in the senate. Ford instead sees himself in Bill Clinton’s mold, an extremely moderate, fiscally conservative Democrat hesitant to initiate major spending programs, and hopes the party will initiate a shift to the center in order to staunch the potential bleeding of house and senate seats in the Fall.

While Ford’s message may not be evidenced in the polls quite yet (Gillibrand still holds slim leads over Republicans George Pataki and Rudi Giuliani in most opinion polls and beats Ford by double digits), Obama’s State of the Union address Thursday will represent a massive strategic shift for the party with the President’s announcement of a spending freeze, stopping most domestic reforms for the time being.

This certainly puts the President in an awkward position, as he is becoming politically isolated from much of the liberal mainstream of his party and is unable to count on any support from the other side of the aisle (proven by John Boehner’s pre-rebuttal to the State of the Union address). Throughout the campaign he argued against freezing spending, and some of his former allies may never forgive this switch.

Obama now has let loose the dice onto the table, perhaps gambling his political future with this move. The Democratic Party faithful and the entire nation now attentively await the result.

If you have read my posts on this blog with any regularity, I probably have begun to ring hopelessly optimistic. I like to think of myself as an optimistic realist, but really, who cares?

Anyway, we’ve just a tough election cycle coming up that won’t get any easier, especially with the departure of Senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan. Bill Ritter’s exit in Colorado has Democrats afraid that Ken Salazar’s caretaker, Sen. Michael Bennett may be facing a politically toxic environment on the western front.

Point is we have eleven months to win back the message.

The correct argument is not that the Republican Party is the “party of no.” That is merely stating the obvious, and the Democratic economic agenda is not nearly popular enough to defend so meekly. The correct argument is to say the same thing, but far more substantively: that staunch Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda represents a cop out on the American people solely for political gain.

We have long been ignoring the obvious: we do live in a center-right country, and Americans are troubled by being so deep in the red, regardless of whether the $787 billion dollar Stimulus Package averted another depression. As much as they disgust some Democrats, the Tea Party argument is appealing to middle of the road, working class voters easily seduced by populism and angered by the Obama administration’s rapid expansion of government and inability to effectively combat Wall Street’s fiscal recklessness, punctuated by the AIG bonus debacle of last summer.

I’m certainly not going to argue that Obama “misread his mandate,” as many pundits have opined, but his levelheadedness in addressing the public on financial issues may not have proven to be a virtue. The health care debate dominated the legislative agenda for most of the year, paralyzing the president’s remaining economic agenda in the short term as he failed to connect the conceptual dots (although Chris Dodd remains hard at work on his last great hurrah, a tough financial reform bill).

The Tea Party has taken advantage of America’s populist rage, and bended it to suit conservative sympathies. But it’s not too late for the president to win bend it back. After all, this is how Franklin Delano Roosevelt ultimately won support for the new deal, taking control of an angry, empowered, populist center and with its support, declaring himself outright an ‘enemy of the banks,’ and in so doing, embarking upon the legislative road to recovery. Now, Barack Obama must do the exact same thing.

While the U.N. conference in Copenhagen fell flat in yielding substantive commitments in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the Democrat’s Cap and Trade bill is dwindling on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, likely headed for a landslide defeat in Britain’s June elections, has unveiled a two-pronged approach to employ “smart” power throughout the country. By placing smart energy meters in every British home by 2020 that read consumption levels and calculate costs in real time, along with a smart grid system that connects the entire country and estimates energy demand and production, affording U.K. consumers the ability to be energy and cost efficient. British Gas estimates that the company will create 2,600 jobs by 2012 by converting to smart meters.

Though Obama’s stand against global warming is far superior to that of his predecessor, who largely ignored the issue, a 17% cut in emissions by 2020 is not adequate, considering India’s pledge to cut emissions by 25% and China’s pledge to cut roughly between 40 and 45 per cent of emissions. Certainly, extraneous intangibles are abound, but these ambitious countries will out-compete us tomorrow unless we ramp up our efforts today.

In the fight against climate change, we must set a higher standard. This president has also made steps, albeit baby steps in developing similar smart grid and meter technology, in October offering out 3.4 billion in grants to over 100 companies to fund development.

Creating jobs through funding of sustainable energy projects isn’t just cut and dry, though. Many of the jobs in the industry are for engineers and scientists, requiring credentials that don’t match those of scores of unemployed. Converting to alternative sources of energy, as the Brits are showing, is a revolutionary concept for spurring modern economic growth. While the CBO projects that Cap and Trade proposals will make marginal cuts in GDP over the next few decades, small-scale, green tech efforts will bolster our flagging economy in the short term and ensure environmental sustainability in the long run.

As the legislation moves to conference committee (a process that completely excludes Congressional Republicans), Democratic leaders have to keep the balance between the moderates and the progressives in a process that will almost surely be dictated by the White House. President Obama, who has generally left Congress to their own devices over the past year, has announced that he will actively participate in the negotiations between Harry Reid’s Senate caucus and the House Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Moderates, such as the Blue Dogs in the House and the small group in the Senate led by Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, will try to tone down the sweeping changes that reform calls for. Meanwhile, the liberals, defined by the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House (most visibly represented by Raul Grijalva, Barbara Lee, Louise Slaughter, and others) will join well-known Senate liberals such as Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, will push for stronger, more sweeping changes.

With the Republicans excluded, debate in conference committee will center on the differences between the liberals and the moderates in the Democratic caucus. The liberals have been pushing all year for the inclusion of a government-funded insurance plan (the “public option”), a component that moderates have strongly opposed. The public option is the most effective controller of costs, but moderate opposition has all but doomed the plan for this year’s package. Prominent liberals such as Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, having given up on the fight for the public option, are no longer pushing for the public option, instead promising to revisit reform after this package is passed. Thus, it seems probable that a public option will not be included in the conference report that emerges from committee. Another alternative to expand options and cut costs–the buy-in to Medicare for those 55 and older–has also been nixed by the moderates such as Lieberman, although it could emerge in negotiations if liberals decide to get aggressive.

Another contentious issue to emerge in conference negotiations will be the issue of abortion. The House package contains the controversial Stupak-Pitts Amendment, pushed by anti-choice advocates and Blue Dogs, which goes further than any law in restricting a woman’s right to choose. Ben Nelson, one of the few anti-choice Democrats in the Senate, attempted to include such language in the Senate bill. But Nelson’s attempts were met with hostile resistance from the large pro-choice caucus in the Senate, led by Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray. Conference negotiators will have to strike a delicate balance between the pro-choice Democratic caucus in the Senate and the Blue Dogs in the House, although it’s likely that the standing law–the Hyde Amendment–will merely be reaffirmed. Look out for the Catholic Church sticking its nose into the debate in an attempt to influence the abortion language in the final product. The Catholic Church, empowered by pushing Stupak-Pitts into the House bill, will also attempt to use its influence to change the language on illegal immigrants. The House version bars federal money from assisting illegal immigrants, but allows them to use their own money to buy plans in the health insurance exchange. The Senate bill bars illegal immigrants from both using federal money and using their own money. This will likely be a flare-up between negotiators that will receive major press coverage.

However, there is a lot of language that the two houses of Congress will instantly agree upon. The House and the Senate bills both contain language initiating an individual mandate for health insurance–a provision that was popular when the public options were included. Some argue that, without the public option, the mandate makes no sense and should not be included. However, it is likely that it will remain. Both bills also contain provisions barring insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions or charging more for premiums based on gender or pre-existing conditions. The Senate bill also extends the coverage for children, allowing them to remain on their parents’ plan until age 26. That provision was something that GW College Democrats personally lobbied for on Capitol Hill earlier this year.

The House and Senate will also have to pay special attention to the cost of the final bill, as there are major concerns about spending. The House bill costs just over $1 trillion over ten years, whereas the Senate bill costs $871 billion over ten years. Both bills are also conscious of the deficit and work to reduce it over time. President Obama has set a personal goal of $900 billion over ten years, but the cost could fluctuate anywhere within this range. Many of the swing votes in the Senate are budget-hawks, such as Kent Conrad, and creating a deficit-neutral bill will be an imperative task for the conference committee.

As negotiations begin after the winter holiday, the health care debate will be entering the final stretch. Although the final bill isn’t due to be completed until mid-February, after President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Democratic leaders will work quickly to resolve the differences between the two bills and come up with a compromise that appeals to the entire Democratic caucus. Although the bill passed by the Senate does not answer all of the problems with health care in America, it is a substantial step forward and will likely be remembered in history as an equivalent of Social Security under President Roosevelt or Medicare under President Johnson. After all, health care has been a definitive struggle over the 20th century, ever since President Theodore Roosevelt pushed for health care in 1912. Likewise, other liberal icons such as Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton made substantial attempts to achieve what is being accomplished under the Pelosi-Reid Congress.

Congratulations today to Leader Reid for his hard work in ensuring today’s vote. The Leader is often attacked by the left, but he has done a terrific job as Leader to build this compromise, given the sixty senators he’s working with. Reid took the time to reflect on the lifetime passion of Senator Ted Kennedy, whom was sorely missed during the debate after his August death and deserves much credit for his push in favor of this legislation. Speaker Pelosi also deserves praise for the job she did in the House earlier this year. It will be interesting to see the compromises between the two bills, sending us forward to next year when, one bright day, President Obama will sign the greatest reform of health care in America since Johnson’s Medicare in the 1960s.

The sweetness of the bill resides in one word: subsidies. These subsides - to the tune of $900 billion - will make an enormous difference in providing health care to those who need it most. In addition, health insurance companies would be prohibited from denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions or from dropping coverage from those who are sick. If this doesn’t close the deal, tax breaks would also be provided to small businesses to provide coverage for their employees. Even for low and middle income individuals, premiums would fall. Any way you look at it, more people will be getting covered, and this is something that we can’t afford to give up.

Unfortunately, it seems that some Democrats and interest groups, such as the AFL-CIO, are playing political games. I understand that they feel the bill would be handing over a victory to the right - but think of what would happen if we didn’t pass the bill. More likely than not, disillusioned voters would react in the midterm elections by cutting Democratic seats. A weakened Obama might not even be able to win presidential re-election. The next time this country would see the reemergence of a serious health care debate, if fortune allows, would be in 2012.

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, looks to history as a guide to determine whether we should support this bill. “Social insurance programs tend to start out highly imperfect and incomplete,” he reasons, “but get better and more comprehensive as the years go by.” He points to Social Security as an example, which started out with serious gaps in coverage but has become the foundation of our social safety net. Consequently, passing this bill would at the very least provide a foundation for future reforms in health care. Not passing it would provide, well, nothing.

Let’s not sink to the immature level of the Republicans, who seem to invoke the filibuster in their sleep, by stubbornly blocking this piece of legislation. Call your senator, tell him or her to pass this bill. We can push Obama to live up to his promises, censure Joe Lieberman, and work on dismantling the Republican fringe group tomorrow. But today, let’s pass this bill.

So it’s been a little over a week since we Democrats suffered sobering defeats at the polls in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere. Ever since, conservative spinmasters from Pat Buchanan to Charles Krauthammer to Glenn Beck have been mercilessly proliferating the airwaves, forecasting, as usual, Democratic political doom in 2010 and the death of Barack Obama’s purportedly “socialist agenda.”

Not so fast.

The reality is, we lost a news cycle. Get over it. Isolated state races are hardly a referendum on national policymaking. Corzine was a poor chief executive who failed to contain rampant corruption in the Garden State. No amount of Wall Street money is going to change that (though it did significantly narrow Christie’s lead in the polls). Corzine was essentially brought into Trenton in 2005 as a technocrat: politically saavy, fiscally competent, and able to manage a state that falls out of control. He failed miserably.

No party wins an election without good, inspiring candidates. In these governor’s races, we failed miserably. Creigh Deeds’ inability to solidify the party base and bring minority voters in Virginia into the democratic fold, the key factors in Barack Obama’s seven-point victory over John McCain in the state nearly a year ago, were telling notions underlying our party’s defeat here.

Political gravity, as most party politicians find out, is a very difficult force to resist. Weariness with Democratic rule, in these isolated incidences, clearly played a role. Both offices had been occupied by Democrats for more than a term. If anything, the congressional races in New York’s 23^rd District and California’s 10^th District were referendums on Democratic rule, and our party once again passed with flying colors.

I am not arguing that resisting this force will not be a challenge in 2010 and beyond. It will be. But still, Democrats, I think we can look towards our political futures with some optimism. As the economy continues to recover, and job losses creep out of the red, Republicans will be forced to provide answers for what they’ve done to advance our collective fortunes, as a nation, since 2008. I wish them good luck. Certainly on the issues of Health Care Reform and Stimulus funds they were an entirely uncooperative bunch, and demonstrated a tendency to place short-term party political goals over long-term economic security for the American people.

It seems to me as if the Republicans have done little so far, in this congress, to reverse the shift in political gravity. The Bush legacy is evaporating, leaving party “leaders” such as Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Charlie Crist, and Sarah Palin to re-evaluate the schizophrenic chrysalis of the party in town hall meetings across the country.

At the end of the day, Americans vote on results. It seems as if Healthcare is bound to pass this year, and cap and trade may soon follow. What have the Republicans been up to, anyway?

I’m Chris Z., a GW freshman. Starting tonight, I’ll be toiling in order to make at least one blog posting per week–my posts may all-in-all be multifarious in nature, with no specific interconnection amongst them.

So, tonight is of course election night. In just twenty-one minutes, the polls will be closing across the Potomac in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where voters all day have been casting their ballots in one of this year’s most influential and foreshadowing political races.

Let’s make some quick analyses based upon data and the factors that may serve as indications of tonight’s results:

Despite:

1. Explosive population growth in Northern Virginia that–with such an educated, affluent, and politically liberal to moderate populace–has favored Democratic candidates, particularly in Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax County’s inner suburbs;

2. President Obama’s public support of Deed’s gubernatorial candidacy in Virginia;

3. President Obama’s recent visits to Virginia’s Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads area, Virginia’s swing area in last year’s election;

4. Bob McDonnell’s contentious graduate school thesis paper that highlighted the incompatibility of working women and a productive world, which marginalized suburban Washingtonian women from his campaign,

and

5. Virginia’s trending towards the Democrats in all recent statewide elections, particularly because of the explosive growth of NOVA,

McDonnell has consistently (in fact, has always, in terms of the trendline) polled ahead of Deeds according to Pollster’s posted statistics.

According to Nate Silver at http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/, McDonnell has a 98% chance of winning.

With only 21 1 (less than!) minute until Virginia’s poll stations close, I’m predicting that Deeds will lose and McDonnell will emerge as the race’s victor.