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Show Thursday, February 12, 2009 Page 2 DAILY HERALD Obama should remember LBJ's political strategies Martin Schram A quick learner can soak up a lot in four years in the U.S. Senate, but to master the way games are played and won in the sandboxes beneath the Capitol Dome, President Obama could have learned a lot from Lyndon B. Johnson. John-son. For example. Obama might have gotten a smarter, surer start on his stimulus bill if he'd only known the old story of President Johnson and the Courthouse. Specifically, how wily old LBJ, who mastered the arts of political gaming in his years as Senate Majority Leader, later created a political game for something as mundane mun-dane as a new courthouse for Nassau County, on New York's Long Island and even choreographed cho-reographed all the players' moves. . Back in the mid-1960s, the notion of a new courthouse was considered prized pork for Long Island, a longtime Republican stronghold that had grown to three million people, and where Democrats held three of the island's five congressional districts, thanks to LBJ's 1964 landslide victory over coaservative icon Barry Goldwater. Now Johnson was out to keep things that way and so he had a White House aide pass the word to Democratic Rep. Herbert Ten-zer's Ten-zer's assistant that the president's next budget would fund the new courthouse. Great, said the congressional aide, can we put out a press release announcing it? No, said the White House aide, LBJ has something better in mind. First, the White House will put out the word that the new budget has no funds for the courthouse. Next, you announce that your congressman is coming to the Oval Office to argue the case. You meet with the president for a few minutes, then leave and immediately you hold a press conference. There your congressman will announce that he convinced the president to change his mind and that the new courthouse is now funded in the president's budget! And lo, it came to pass. Fast -forward to 2009. The president who made it his mission to make the 1964 Civil Rights Act the law of a still segregated land may not have believed his eyes as he saw Ba-rack Ba-rack Obama sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office. But Johnson might have given America's Ameri-ca's 44th president a good ol' Texas backslap if only President Obama had adapted LBJs old Courthouse ruse to try to get some real Republican Repub-lican support for his stimulus bill at the start of the game. Indeed, from wherever he was watching television Monday night, the late LBJ (who installed three TV sets in his Oval Office one for each network, ABC, CBS, and NBC and had a specially created, pre-remote-control device de-vice with three buttons so he could turn up the sound on each if news erupted) may well have allowed himself a wink-and-a-nod at a certain moment in President Obama's first prime-time news conference. Namely, the last answer of the night, when Obama, still a Washington newcomer by Johnsonian standards, confessed that maybe he'd just learned a lesson in the gamesmanship of the economic $800 billion-plus billion-plus stimulus bill. Remember Obama's starting stimulus bill strategy if it were a card game, he'd have been playing with all his cards face-up. Knowing Know-ing Republicans wanted a bill with big tax cuts, Obama initially put in the ones he wanted. But not one Republican voted for the House version; a Senate compromise attracted just three Republicans, barely enough to avoid parliamentary par-liamentary death by filibuster. So, Obama was asked, what had he'd learned about bipartisanship bipartisan-ship in Washington? "I suppose what I could have done is started off with no tax cuts, knowing that I was going to want some, and then let them take credit for all of them," said America's quick -learning 44th president. "And maybe that's the lesson I learned." Then Obama turned and as he walked away, down the red carpeted hallway of his new home, I thought I saw an unseen hand reach down and bestow an "atta-boy" back -slap, LBJ's gift for a lesson learned. I Martin Schram ivn'tes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. 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Cyr SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE The European security conference in Munich, Germany has provided a boost for President Barack Obama, even though he was not there and Vice President Joe Biden led the U.S. delegation. The event also has strengthened trans-Atlantic ties after years of discord and tension during the tenure of President George W. Bush During the U.S. presidential campaign, Obama's selection of Biden as his running mate caused some debate, though generally muted. Illinois Senator Obama was promising change but Delaware Senator Biden, one of the longest serving serv-ing in the upper house of Congress, Con-gress, seemed to personify the Washington status quo. While Biden's liberal voting record is appealing to many fervent Obama supporters, he also has ties to a number of the many corporations headquartered headquar-tered in his state. In foreign policy, Biden supported the invasion of Iraq, which Obama opposed. The Munich meeting has been a useful opportunity for Biden to demonstrate foreign -policy expertise - and interpersonal interper-sonal skills - at stage center. Long service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has given him a very broad knowledge base, and he put that to good use. The security gathering also has been extremely helpful to NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), a durable institution in-stitution beleaguered during the past eight years. President Bush and in particular Vice President Dick Cheney constantly con-stantly pressed for expansion of alliance membership into Eastern Europe, which Russia opposes. The NATO summit last spring in Bucharest Romania, a state in the old Soviet empire, was highlighted by heavy Bush administration pressure to admit ad-mit both Georgia and Ukraine. Later that year, the Russian i SlL FRANK AUGSTEINAssociated Press U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Sergei Ivanov for bilateral talks during the International Conference on Security Policy, Sicherheitskonferenz, at a hotel in Munich, Germany, on Sunday. army invaded Georgia under the pretext of protecting ethnic minorities, but also to remind Washington of power realities in the region. The alliance is fundamentally anomalous. An organization founded to oppose Soviet expansion ex-pansion saw that mission end successfully two decades ago. yet continues to exist. Cold War victory has resulted in debate about best future roles, not abandonment of the alliance. Terrorist killers on 9-11 triggered trig-gered NATO for the first time to defend an ally under attack. French aircraft patrolled North American skies to free our own for attacks in Afghanistan, Afghani-stan, which remains a NATO theatre of operations. One American Munich mission, directly reflected in Biden's principal address, was to underscore un-derscore the vital importance of more European participation in the allied effort against al Qaeda and the Taliban. In looking to the future, and building directly on Munich, the Obama administration should focus on specific U.S. national interests and encourage encour-age more collaboration under the NATO umbrella. Afghanistan Afghani-stan must continue to be a priority. Greater cooperation with Turkey, historically a close ally and a major military power, but fiercely opposed to the invasion of Iraq, should be a Washington priority. Historically, Munich has served as a shorthand reference refer-ence to appeasement, thanks to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's acquiescence to Adolf Hitler's territorial demands at a meeting there before World War II. The end of the Cold War was a great victory for the policy pol-icy of restraint and deterrence, termed 'Containment', supported sup-ported by every U.S. president from Harrv Truman onward. NATO was vital to the Cold War victory, and reflects the importance of handling military challenges through alliance structures whenever when-ever possible, a basic lesson of World War II. This Munich conference has provided a good foundation for the next policy moves of the Obama administration. ad-ministration. I Arthur I. Cyr is Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin. Contact him at acyrcarthage.edu. 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