Stymied by a GOP House, Obama looks ahead to 2014 to cement his legacy

President Obama, now facing the consequences of automatic spending cuts and the complications they raise for his broader domestic agenda, is taking the most specific steps of his administration in an attempt to ensure the election of a Democratic-controlled Congress in two years.

“What I can’t do is force Congress to do the right thing,” Obama told reporters at the White House on Friday after a fruitless meeting with Republican leaders to avert the country’s latest fiscal crisis, known as the sequester. “The American people may have the capacity to do that.”

Obama, fresh off his November reelection, began almost at once executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president. He is doing so by trying to articulate for the American electorate his own feelings — an exasperation with an opposition party that blocks even the most politically popular elements of his agenda.

Obama has committed to raising money for fellow Democrats, agreed to help recruit viable candidates, and launched a political nonprofit group dedicated to furthering his agenda and that of his congressional allies. The goal is to flip the Republican-held House back to Democratic control, allowing Obama to push forward with a progressive agenda on gun control, immigration, climate change and the economy during his final two years in office, according to congressional Democrats, strategists and others familiar with Obama’s thinking.

“The president understands that to get anything done, he needs a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “To have a legacy in 2016, he will need a House majority in 2014, and that work has to start now.”

An evolution in strategy

This approach marks a significant shift in the way Obama has worked with a divided Congress. He has compromised and badgered, but rarely — and never so early — campaigned to change its composition.

Democrats would have to gain 17 House seats to win back the majority they lost in 2010, and their challenge involves developing a persuasive argument for why the party deserves another chance controlling both Congress and the presidency. In the last election, American voters reaffirmed the political status quo in Washington, choosing to retain a divided government.

Of all the presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only Bill Clinton picked up House seats for his party in the midterm election of his second term
. His approval rating on the eve of the 1998 contest was 65 percent, 14 points above Obama’s current public standing.

The specific steps Obama is taking to win back the House for his party mark an evolution for a president long consumed by the independence of his political brand.

Obama has committed to eight fundraisers for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee this year, compared with just two events in 2009. The Democrats lost the House the following year, and Obama’s legislative agenda has largely stalled since then.

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Senate postpones deliberation of gun bills

Senators working on legislation to curb gun violence postponed consideration of the measures for at least a week Thursday, a move that gives a bipartisan group working on a plan to expand the nation’s gun background check system more time to reach an agreement.

The Senate Judiciary Committee agreed to reconvene March 7 to begin considering bills sponsored by Democrats to revamp the background check system, make gun trafficking a federal crime for the first time, bolster school security programs and ban hundreds of military-style assault weapons and parts.

The background-checks bill is expected to earn the most bipartisan support if a deal can be reached between two Democrats and two Republicans trying to draft a compromise.

“They’re not over; everybody’s still working,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) said of the talks as he emerged from a meeting with fellow negotiators on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon. “Everybody’s working in good faith.”

Manchin is joined in the talks by Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).

Although there is general agreement on the proposal’s broad outlines, Coburn is strongly opposed to adding language to the bill that would require gun owners to keep transactional records of private firearm sales, according to aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations.

The Judiciary Committee’s decision to postpone consideration of the legislation was expected, something that can occur whenever a member of the panel requests more time for review, aides said. In this case, Republicans signaled that they would like more time to consider the proposals and potentially propose amendments.

When the committee reconvenes, “we will spend as much time as it takes” to review the bills, Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said at a brief hearing. The proposed assault-weapons ban, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), will get an up-or-down vote in the committee despite strong objections from Republicans and moderate Democrats, Leahy said.

“We will have votes on her legislation — it’s a serious piece of legislation, it is not a frivolous matter by any example and she deserves hearings, she deserves votes and she will have them,” Leahy said of Feinstein’s bill.

But the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), said that Feinstein’s bill “raises a lot of constitutional questions” and that his GOP colleagues have several concerns about it. Citing disagreements over automatic spending cuts set to take effect Friday, Grassley also said he is worried about the potential costs of a bill proposed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to provide more federal money for school security.

Grassley said the Justice Department needs to increase its enforcement of current gun laws, but said Republicans are not universally opposed to reforming them.

“We ought to be determined to take effective, constitutional action that would prevent future catastrophe and make this world safer,” he said.

Discuss this topic and other political issues in the politics discussion forums.

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Sequester spin gets ahead of reality

The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape coming from the Obama administration have been alarming, specific — and, in at least some cases, hyped.

Take the claim by Education Secretary Arne Duncan that there are “literally teachers now who are getting pink slips.”

When he was pressed in a White House briefing Wednesday to name an example, Duncan came up with one school district, in West Virginia, and he acknowledged, “Whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know.”

As it turns out, it isn’t. What Kanawha County is actually doing is sending transfer notices to 104 educators in response to an unrelated change in the way federal dollars are allocated.

“It’s not like we’re cutting people’s jobs at this point,” said Pam Padon, who administers the county’s federal aid for poor students. “This is not due to sequestration.”

Despite the reams of fact sheets the White House has been putting out, no one really knows how bad things are likely to get — including Republicans who have criticized the president for exaggerating the effects.

Simple arithmetic can show the impact on some programs — the checks the federal government sends to unemployed people will be smaller, for instance.

But many of the reductions, such as those in education spending, will not be felt for months in most school systems, which gives individual districts some time to make adjustments and allowances for the lost funds.

That means the administration’s dire projection that “as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs” is guesswork at best; most school districts will not start sending out layoff notices for the next school year until around May.

State and local governments could also shift money around to blunt the impact on some popular programs such as Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to homebound elderly people and is funded with flexible federal grant money.

And some of the scariest scenarios — say, concerns that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which stands to lose more than $300 million, will not have the resources it needs to spot and contain the next deadly disease outbreak — are by their nature impossible to quantify.

“The threats aren’t decreasing,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden. “I can’t predict when an outbreak is going to happen.”

While the country has lived through five temporary government shutdowns since 1981, “we actually haven’t had something quite like this before,” said David Kamin, formerly special assistant to the president for economic policy in the Obama White House and now a New York University law professor. “We’ve never had an across-the-board cut of this magnitude applied.”

What is not new, however, is the impulse of officials to resort to melodrama when they are faced with budget cuts. Getting people’s attention has been a challenge in the case of the sequester. In the latest Washington Post-Pew Research Center survey, only one in four said they were closely following news about the automatic spending cuts.

The ploy even has a name: the “Washington Monument” syndrome, a reference to the National Park Service’s decision to close that landmark and the Grand Canyon for two days a week after the Nixon administration cut funding in 1969.

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Titles for Hillary’s book

The Oscars — all 3¹/
₂ hours — are over.

So now it’s time to announce far more important contest winners — the five best entries in the In the Loop “Title Hillary’s Memoir” contest.

In January, with her tenure as secretary of state ending, Hillary Rodham Clinton said she would pen a memoir, and we had asked Loop Fans to help her with a title.

A large percentage of the hundreds of entries came from overseas — probably reflecting Clinton’s global footprint.

In addition, hundreds of entries came via Twitter from France (fortunately 99 percent in English) after our pal
Laurence Haim
, the Canal Plus Television U.S. bureau chief, tweeted the contest to her followers. (She forwarded a bunch to us.)

And now, the winners:

●“The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112 Countries and It’s Still All About My Hair.” — Stephanie Whittaker, who heads marketing for a large consulting firm in London.

●“If It’s 3 a.m., the Machine Can Get It.” — Kevin Dopart, a federal contractor in Washington. He also submitted “Bossypantsuit.”

●“Hard Times, Soft Power.” — Alfred Friendly Jr., a retired editor in Washington. He’s a former reporter with Newsweek and the New York Times.

●“Miles to Go.” — Jane Woodfin, a retired former Senate staffer from McLean. (She noted that, much like her old boss Joe Biden’s memoir, “Promises to Keep,” the title implies there’s more to come.)

●“Stuck With the Bill.” — Steve Bienstock, a lawyer in Rockville.

And there are two winners from the French entrants:

●“Dame de Guerre,” or “Lady of War,” which is an odd title for a diplomat, but it sounds really good if you say it in French. — Apparently submitted by a woman in Paris, identified on Twitter as @nasnacera.

●“It Takes a World.” — Fabienne Sintes, a correspondent here for Radio France, taking off on Clinton’s bestseller “It Takes a Village.”

Congrats to the winners. Thanks to our judges — Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, Outlook Editor Carlos Lozada and editor-at-large Ann Gerhart — for their efforts. And thanks to all for entering.

Not feeling Minnesota

We kept hearing back in 2009 that
Jake Sullivan
, deputy chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Clinton and before that on the Clinton primary campaign — was leaving after a couple of years to return to his home state of Minnesota and run for office.

Sullivan — Yale law graduate, Rhodes scholar, former Supreme Court clerk, second place in the 2000 world debating championship — did appear to be on his way out in 2011.

But Clinton offered him the job of heading the State Department’s policy planning office (in the footsteps of such foreign policy legends as
George Kennan
and
Paul Nitze
), so he remained in town.

Still, that was going to be for two years, just until Clinton left office, and then it was off to Minneapolis to practice law and run for office. For sure.

The White House announced Tuesday that Sullivan was Vice President Biden’s pick to be his national security adviser. Well, he’d better not stay in that job for long. He’s already about five years older than Biden was when he became a senator.

And he’s a Republican

Since leaving public office,
Dick Cheney
has made the rounds on cable TV and did a stint in the hospital for a heart transplant. But one congressman suggests there’s an even more unpleasant destination awaiting the former vice president: the fiery blazes of H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

Rep. Walter Jones
(R-N.C.) said as much in a speech Saturday, as seen in a video unearthed by Talking Points Memo. Jones suggested that Cheney’s support for the Iraq war warranted repayment in the hereafter.

“Congress will not hold anyone to blame,” Jones said at a meeting of the Young Americans for Liberty in Raleigh. “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.”

The envelope, please

And the winner in the bizarro category is . . .

Fars News, the hard-line Iranian media outlet, which took a different — and much dimmer — view of the Oscar win for “Argo,” the Ben Affleck-directed flick set during the Iranian hostage crisis, than most Western outlets did.

Our colleague and correspondent in Tehran,
Jason Rezaian, cites Fars News’s write-up of the awards: “In a rare occasion in Oscar history, the First Lady announced the winner for Best Picture for the anti-Iran Film ‘Argo,’ which is produced by the Zionist company Warner Bros.”

Once a banker . . .

Home again. Former deputy secretary of state Tom Nides is back at mega-investment bank Morgan Stanley after his two-year stint in Foggy Bottom.

Nides was chief operating officer at Morgan Stanley from 2005 to 2010. He’s also been CEO of Burson-Marsteller and chief administrative officer at Credit Suisse First Boston.

In his new job at Morgan Stanley, Nides will be vice chairman, the bank’s announcement Tuesday morning said, focusing on “the firm’s global clients and other key constituencies around the world.”

Nides will be commuting to New York. His wife, Virginia Moseley, is a CNN vice president and deputy bureau chief in Washington.

With Emily Heil

The blog: washingtonpost.com/
intheloop. Twitter: @InTheLoopWP.

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Legislative branch prepares for spending cuts

Lawmakers will return to work Monday after a week-long break, with $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to take effect in four days.

Congressional offices and agencies have remained largely quiet on the issue compared with the executive branch, where top officials — from President Obama to Cabinet members such as Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta — have warmed against the budget cuts known as sequestration, in speeches and with testimonies before congressional committees.

But that doesn’t mean the legislative branch would escape cuts.

The sequester would not affect lawmaker salaries, since their pay does not come from discretionary spending. But the reductions would hit their individual offices, as well as all legislative-branch agencies such as the Library of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office and U.S. Capitol Police.

Agencies that have sent letters to employees have noted similar strategies: imposing hiring freezes, reducing travel expenses, trimming funding for technology upgrades and reworking some contracts.

Furloughs stand out as one of the greatest concerns among federal workers, because they mean less pay for the year and fewer days for employees to do their jobs.

Some congressional agencies have said they expect to avoid upaid leave if the sequester happens, while others have said they may resort to the measure for a few days.

The Government Accountability Office told employees in a memo last week that furloughs probably wouldn’t be necessary for the agency, based on the latests estimates for a reduction target.

“We have been allocating our funds since the start of the fiscal year in a very conservative manner, recognizing that sequestration might go into effect,” Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro said in the memo.

“We project that we would no longer require furloughs at GAO this year to absorb the potential reduction associated with sequestration,” Dodaro added.

Likewise, a spokesman for the Architect of the Capitol said in an e-mail last week that the organization doesn’t think furloughs will be necessary to meet the reduction target.

What remains to be seen is just what the reduction targets would be. The latest estimate from the White House budget office said the sequester would require across-the-board cuts of “roughly 5 percent for non-Defense programs.” The Congressional Budget Office calculated 5.3 percent for the same category.

Even based on those estimates, some legislative agencies don’t think they can avoid furloughs under the sequester.

The Library of Congress last week warned its employees that the cuts would probably require four days of unpaid leave, with individual workers scheduling one of those days in coordination with supervisors, while the other three would come during library closings at times when the facilities would normally be open.

The Government Printing Office wasn’t so specific, saying by e-mail that “furloughs may also have to be implemented” in addition to plans for a hiring freeze, limits on overtime and reductions in travel and training.

Although the sequester could impact lawmakers’ local and Capitol Hill offices, it remains unclear how many members of Congress would impose layoffs, furloughs or pay cuts to meet the reduction targets. Only those who expect to avoid such measures commented for this report.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said his office prepared for the sequester during the past year by stopping pay raises, reducing travel, eliminating its staff retreat and cutting back on mailings — resorting to more cost-effective digital communications instead.

“We’ve kept awfully lean this year just on the assumption that this might happen,” Cole said. “We’ll make the adjustments, but we won’t have to furlough and we won’t reduce services in terms of case work or answering constituent questions.”

The automatic cuts were established with the intent that they would be so undesirable that lawmakers would be motivated to reach a budget compromise. But with the cuts days away and Democrats and Republicans as far apart as ever, observers say the reductions appear to be inevitable.

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Senators near a deal on background checks for most private gun sales

A bipartisan group of senators is on the verge of a deal that would expand background checks to all private firearms sales with limited exemptions, but significant disagreements remain on the issue of keeping records of private gun sales, according to aides familiar with the talks.

An agreement would be a bold first step toward consideration of legislation to limit gun violence in the wake of the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school in December and comes as the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected this week to begin considering new proposals to limit gun violence.

The talks, led by two Democrats and two Republicans, are expected to earn more GOP support in the coming days and likely enough to move the bill through the Senate, according to senior aides of both parties who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“These negotiations are challenging, as you’d expect on an issue as complicated as guns,” the chief negotiator, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), said in a statement Saturday. “But all of the senators involved are approaching this in good faith. We are all serious about wanting to get something done, and we are going to keep trying.”

Resolution of whether to keep records of private sales is key to earning the support of one of the Republicans involved in the talks, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who has a solid A-rating from the influential National Rifle Association and could provide political cover for lawmakers of both parties who are wary of supporting the plan.

Coburn has declined to comment on the talks, saying recently that “I don’t negotiate through the press.”

Democrats say that keeping records of private sales is necessary to enforce any new law and because current federal law requires licensed firearm dealers to keep records. Records of private sales also would help law enforcement trace back the history of a gun used in a crime, according to Democratic aides. Republicans, however, believe that records of private sales could put an undue burden on gun owners or could be perceived by gun rights advocates as a precursor to a national gun registry.

Coburn and Schumer are joined in their talks by Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), while aides in both parties anticipate that Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Susan Collins (Maine) could also endorse the plan soon. McCain and Collins have said they generally support legislation expanding background checks, while a Flake spokeswoman said Saturday that he is still reviewing the proposal.

More Republican support is anticipated in part because the four senators involved in the talks have agreed that any new background check program would exempt private transactions between family members or people who completed a background check in order to obtain a concealed-carry permit, according to aides.

But the four senators are grappling with how to make the process of obtaining a background check as seamless as possible for private dealers while also ensuring that someone keeps a record of the transaction.

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Group releases list of 90 medical ‘don’ts’

Don’t use feeding tubes in patients with advanced dementia. Don’t use drugs to aggressively treat diabetes in those older than 65. Don’t automati­cally use imaging technology for minor head injuries in children and headaches in adults. And don’t give antacids to babies with reflux.

Those are among the 90 medical “don’ts” on a list being released Thursday by a coalition of doctor and consumer groups. They are trying to discourage the use of tests and treatments that have become common practice but may cause harm to patients or unnecessarily drive up the cost of health care.

It is the second set of recommendations from the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s “Choosing Wisely” campaign, which launched last year amid nationwide efforts to improve medical care in the United States while making it more affordable.

The recommendations run the gamut, from geriatrics to opthalmology to maternal health. Together, they are meant to convey the message that in medicine, “sometimes less is better,” said Daniel Wolfson, executive vice president of the foundation, which funded the effort.

“Sometimes, it’s easier [for a physician] to just order the test rather than to explain to the patient why the test is not necessary,” Wolfson said. But “this is a new era. People are looking at quality and safety and real outcomes in different ways.”

The guidelines were penned by more than a dozen medical professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and ­Gynecologists.

The groups discourage the use of antibiotics in a number of instances in which they are commonly prescribed, such as for sinus infections and pink eye. They caution against using certain sedatives in the elderly and cold medicines in the very young.

In some cases, studies show that the test or treatment is costly but does not improve the quality of care for the patient, according to the groups.

But in many cases, the groups contend, the intervention could cause pain, discomfort or even death. For example, feeding tubes are often used to provide sustenance to dementia patients who cannot feed themselves, even though oral feeding is more effective and humane. And CT scans that are commonly used when children suffer minor head trauma may expose them to cancer-causing radiation.

While the recommendations are aimed in large part at physicians, they are also designed to arm patients with more information in the exam room.

“If you’re a healthy person and you’re having a straightforward surgery, and you get a list of multiple tests you need to have, we want you to sit down and talk with your doctor about whether you need to do these things,” said John Santa, director of the health ratings center at Consumer Reports, which is part of the coalition that created the guidelines.

Health-care spending in the United States has reached 17.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and continues to rise, despite efforts to contain costs. U.S. health-care spending grew 3.9 percent in 2011, reaching $2.7 trillion, according to the journal Health Affairs.

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Mixing it up in the Cabinet

With President Obama expected to soon name Gina McCarthy as his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, he’s adding women to his Cabinet at a pretty decent clip. But he’s running out of chances to ensure racial diversity in his circle of top advisers.

Last month, funnyman Jon Stewart zinged the White House for its “Zero Dark Appointees” in a “Daily Show” segment about Obama’s all-white initial round of picks (for secretary of state, defense secretary, Treasury secretary and CIA director). But close to two nominations later, it could be no laughing matter.

The drain of minorities from the Cabinet is evident: Two of its four black members and both its Hispanic members have left or have announced they are leaving. Only one of the two Asian Americans who served during Obama’s first term remains.

Meanwhile, the White House will have only seven Cabinet-level posts to fill: the secretaries of commerce, labor, energy and transportation; the U.S. trade representative; and the heads of the Office of Management and Budget and the Small Business Administration.

If the rest of the Cabinet remains stable, Obama will have to name a minority to five of those seven jobs to maintain the level of diversity he reached in his first term.

Couldn’t be a shortage of qualified candidates, some say. In fact, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) recently complained that the White House hasn’t made use of the “binder” of suitable nominees that the Congressional Black Caucus provided.

“The Black Caucus of Congress . . . sent 61 names to the White House,” Hastings reportedly said late last month at a conference of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. “Time went by. Not one of that 61 was selected — not one.”

A spokeswoman for the CBC said she wasn’t aware of the list but pointed to letters written by the group’s chairwoman, Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), backing three CBC members: Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) for commerce secretary, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for labor secretary and Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) for transportation secretary.

The password is . . .

Sounds as if
Philip Mudd
, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, had a bad day.

A number of people apparently got an e-mail from him Wednesday morning with the subject line “Need your help! (Phil Mudd).”

“Hope you get this on time,” Mudd began. “I made a trip to Manila (Philippines) and had my bag stolen from me with my passport and personal effects therein.”

Oh, no! “The embassy has just issued me a temporary passport,” he said, so there’s some good news, “but I have to pay for a ticket and settle my hotel bills with the Manager.”

“I have made contact with my bank,” he said, “but it would take me 3-5 working days to access funds in my account” — wouldn’t you know it? — “but the bad news is my flight will be leaving in less than 8-hrs from now but I am having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let me leave until I settle the bills.”

This sounds really serious. “I need your help/LOAN financially and I promise to make the refund once I get back home,” he wrote, “you are my last resort and hope. Please let me know if I can count on you and I need you to keep checking your email because it’s the only way I can reach you. Thanks!”

Mudd, a former high-ranking CIA counterterrorism official and former deputy director of the FBI’s national security branch, is waiting for your response.

Don’t do it. This scam is a variant of the Nigerian classic about how “my late uncle left me $10 million but I need to raise money to claim the inheritance.” This is an oft-used tale of woe about traveling abroad, getting stuck without passport or money and such. (Perhaps a claim of being stranded on a crippled cruise ship would be more credible?)

His e-mail account must have been hacked. Seems it can happen to anyone. (He assures us that he’s changed his password.)

Traveling with baggage

Afghan President
Hamid Karzai
is not exactly known for a droll sense of humor.

But when new the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Bob Menendez
(D-N.J.), came calling Tuesday in Kabul — his first stop on his first trip abroad as chairman — Karzai seemed to be trying to tweak Menendez.

Menendez has come under intense fire of late over ties to and favors for a wealthy donor,
Salomon Melgen
. Menendez had to repay nearly $60,000 to Melgen for flights to the Dominican Republic on Melgen’s private jet. And questions have been raised about the senator’s support for a Dominican port-security contract in which Melgen had an investment.

Menendez has denied any intentional wrongdoing.

After their Kabul meeting, Karzai, whose notoriously corrupt regime has been much criticized by Washington, put out a news release with this headline:

“President Karzai: Fight against corruption requires earnest and sincere cooperation of the international community, particularly of the United States of America.”

Hmmm. Well, at least there won’t be a port-security problem in landlocked Afghanistan.

With Emily Heil

The blog: washingtonpost.com/
intheloop. Twitter: @InTheLoopWP.

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Obama reaches out to Republican senators on immigration overhaul

Facing criticism for failing to reach out to Republicans negotiating an immigration overhaul, President Obama placed phone calls Tuesday afternoon to three GOP senators involved in an eight-member bipartisan group working on the issue.

Obama spoke separately to Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and John McCain (Ariz.) about their efforts to negotiate a bill, White House officials said.

The president told the senators that he shared their commitment to an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws and said he hopes they will be able to introduce legislation as soon as possible, the White House said.

The Senate group — four Democrats and four Republicans — unveiled a set of principles to guide reform last month and has said it hopes to translate its ideas into legislation by March.

The calls from Obama represented unusually direct outreach by a president who has rarely engaged the Republican rank-and-file in difficult legislative debates, often preferring to ratchet up public pressure instead. The strategy comes in part because many GOP lawmakers do not wish to be seen as working directly with the Democratic president.

But the White House was working Tuesday to get the immigration talks back on track after the weekend leak to USA Today of a draft bill written by Obama administration officials. Republicans quickly criticized the White House draft and sought to differentiate it from the emerging Senate blueprint.

Obama’s bill would not tie permanent residency for the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants to new border security measures, as the senators have discussed. It also does not include the creation of a guest worker program to let businesses attract temporary immigrant labor in the future, a key priority of many Republicans.

White House aides had also tangled earlier Tuesday with staffers for Rubio — the loudest critic of the leaked White House draft — over whether the president and his staff had been engaged enough in the process.

A spokesman for Rubio said that he had appreciated receiving Obama’s call.

“The senator told the president that he feels good about the ongoing negotiations in the Senate and is hopeful the final product is something that can pass the Senate with strong bipartisan support,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said.

White House officials indicated that Obama told the senators that he thinks reform should include strengthening border security as well as an earned path to citizenship for immigrants now in the country illegally, a newly streamlined legal immigration system and accountability for employers.

Obama met with the group’s four Democrats at the White House last week.

White House officials said Obama did not reach the group’s fourth Republican, Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), who was traveling, but would speak with him soon.

David Nakamura contributed to this report. Discuss this topic and other political issues on The Washington Post’s
Politics Forums.

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Other countries court skilled immigrants frustrated by U.S. visa laws

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The contraption sits in a basement lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a mish-mash of hoses, wires, whirring pumps and a 12-foot high plastic tower filled with dripping water, all set on plastic milk crates.

It looks like a high school science project, but it was developed by two post-doctoral mechanical engineers at MIT. And it just might be a break-through that creates wealth and jobs in the United States and transforms the white-hot industry of oil and natural gas hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

That is, as long as the foreign-born inventors aren’t forced to leave the country.

Anurag Bajpayee and Prakash Narayan Govindan, both from India, have started a company to sell the system to oil companies that are desperate for a cheaper, cleaner way to dispose of the billions of gallons of contaminated water produced by fracking.

Oil companies have flown them to Texas and North Dakota. They say they are about to close on millions of dollars in financing, and they anticipate hiring 100 employees in the next couple of years. Scientific American magazine called water-decontamination technology developed by Bajpayee one of the top ten
“world-changing ideas”
of 2012.

But their student visas expire soon, both before July, and because of the restrictive U.S. visa system, they may have to move their company to India or another country. “We love it here,” said Bajpayee, a cheerful 27-year-old in an argyle sweater and jeans. “But there are so many hoops you have to jump through. And you risk getting deported while you are creating jobs.”

Much of the current immigration debate in Washington has centered on the 11 million undocumented migrants in the country. But, from the halls of MIT to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, business and academic leaders are more focused on what they call an even greater threat to the U.S. economy: immigration laws that chase away highly skilled foreigners educated in U.S. universities, often with degrees funded by U.S. taxpayers.

While other countries are actively recruiting foreign-born U.S. graduates, the United States has strict limits on visas for highly skilled workers that often lead to waiting lists of many years. And unlike Canada and other countries, the U.S. offers no specific visa for young entrepreneurs like Bajpayee and Narayan who want to start a new business in America.

“These are bright people who want to stay and make this country more competitive, and we treat them like dirt and drive them away,” said Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur and academic who writes frequently about immigration and the “reverse brain drain.”

President Obama supports making it easier for foreigners who earn master’s degrees or PhDs at U.S. universities to get green cards, and so does a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators who recently announced their immigration reform proposals. The idea has wide support, but it is stuck in partisan infighting over how to craft comprehensive reforms that address both skilled and unskilled immigrants.

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Will young adults face ‘rate shock’ because of the health-care law?

Many young, healthy Americans could soon see a jump in their health-insurance costs, and insurance companies are saying: It’s not our fault.

The nation’s insurers are engaged in an all-out, last-ditch effort to shield themselves from blame for what they predict will be rate increases on new policies they must unveil this spring to comply with President Obama’s health-care law.

Insurers point to several reasons that premiums will rise. They will soon be required to offer more-comprehensive coverage than many currently provide. Also, their costs will increase because they will be barred from rejecting the sick, and they will no longer be allowed to charge older customers sharply higher premiums than younger ones.

Supporters of the law counter that concerns about price hikes are overstated, partly because federal subsidies will cushion the blow.

The insurers’ public relations blitz is being propelled by a growing cast of executives, lobbyists, conservative activists and state health officials. They increasingly use the same catchphrase — “rate shock” — to warn about the potential for price surges.

Aetna chief executive Mark T. Bertolini invoked the term at his company’s recent annual investor conference, cautioning that premiums for plans sold to individuals could rise as much as 50 percent on average and could more than double for particular groups such as the young and healthy.

The danger of “rate shock” has also become the favored weapon of conservative opponents of the law, repeated in a drumbeat of op-eds and policy papers in recent weeks.

The argument is a powerful one because the success of the law, which was the signature domestic accomplishment of Obama’s first term, depends on enough people signing up for insurance, particularly healthy people. The issue is surfacing as the most recent significant challenge in implementing the health-care overhaul.

Supporters of the law complain that the warnings amount to a smear attack by special interests and political partisans, akin to earlier claims that the law would allow bureaucrats to deny life-saving care to save money.

“ ‘Rate shock’ is the new ‘death panels,’ ” said Wendell Potter, a former head of communications for the health insurer Cigna who is now a critic of the industry. “They’ve chosen these words very carefully to scare people. It’s the ideal term for what is, at its core, a fear-based campaign.”

Yet even analysts who favor the law concede that it will result in higher costs for some young, healthy people.

Most of the new rules that could push up premiums will not apply to plans sponsored by large employers, only to those sold to individuals and small businesses. These policies will be available on insurance marketplaces, or “exchanges,” that the law sets up in each state beginning in 2014, and that are ultimately expected to serve about 26 million people.

The law will require insurers to offer a generous package of benefits for exchange plans, including coverage of maternity care, prescription drugs and treatment for mental illness. It also caps customers’ out-of-pocket expenses.

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Postmaster takes case for five-day mail delivery to skeptical senators

Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe took his controversial plan for five-day mail delivery before a congressional hearing Wednesday, where he told senators that the Postal Service “needs your help.”

Donahoe’s refrain was familiar.

●The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is losing $25 million a day.

●Last year, the Postal Service lost $15.9 billion.

●It defaulted on $11.1 billion owed to the Treasury.

As he has before, Donahoe pleaded with Congress, this time the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to approve comprehensive postal reform legislation. Now, more than before, it looks as though Congress will do so.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, told the Senate panel that after two months of negotiations, “we are close, very close” to agreement on a bipartisan, bicameral bill.

Without some assistance from Congress, said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate committee, “the Postal Service will drift toward insolvency and, eventually, the point at which it must shut its doors. . . . We have never been closer to losing the Postal Service.”

Although in some ways Donahoe’s appearance echoed his many other pleas for congressional action, this hearing drew a standing-room-only crowd on the third floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. That was probably influenced by all the attention generated by his surprise announcement last week that Saturday mail delivery will end in August.

Donahoe’s written testimony outlined several key legislative goals, but five-day mail delivery was not specifically listed among them. After repeatedly urging Congress to end the six-day requirement, Donahoe said postal officials had determined that he could take that action without congressional approval.

Moving to five-day delivery would close just 10 percent of the postal budget gap, Donahoe said, yet the controversy surrounding it stole the focus from other important financial issues.

Among them is a controversial proposal to move postal employees from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which serves all federal workers, to a health insurance program run by the USPS.

Donahoe presented an updated health insurance proposal, but it received little attention compared with his five-day delivery plan.

Last year the Senate approved legislation, co-sponsored by Carper, that would allow five-day delivery two years after its enactment. The delay was designed to allow the Postal Service to study the impact of five-day delivery. Carper was among those who have expressed disappointment with Donahoe’s plan to implement it unilaterally.

“We are taking every reasonable and responsible step in our power to strengthen our finances immediately,” Donahoe told the committee. “We would urge Congress to eliminate any impediments to our new delivery schedule.

“Although discussion about our delivery schedule gets a lot of attention, it is just one important part of a larger strategy to close our budgetary gap,” he added. “It accounts for $2 billion in cost reductions while we are seeking to fill a $20 billion budget gap.”

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Obama urges a move away from narrow focus on politics of austerity

Just about every argument in Washington since the 2010 midterm elections, which returned control of the House to Republicans, has centered on reducing the federal deficit. On Tuesday night, President Obama leaned into his second term by declaring that a single-minded focus on deficit reduction would jeopardize the nation’s future. And he sounded an urgent call to rebuild.

Reelected by an ascendent coalition, the president spoke from a position of strength in his fourth State of the Union address. The economy is improving. The Republican Party is in disarray. The time has come, Obama indicated, to pivot away from the politics of austerity.

“Most of us agree that a plan to reduce the deficit must be part of the agenda,” he said. “But let’s be clear: Deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan. A growing economy that creates good middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.”

The president rejected the fiscal brinkmanship that defined the past two years. Instead, he framed future fiscal debates as opportunities to shape a “smarter government” — one with new investments in science and innovation, with a rising minimum wage, with tax reform that eliminates loopholes and deductions for what the president labeled “the well-off and well-connected.”

Second-term presidents have a narrow window of time to enact significant change before they become lame ducks, and Obama, while echoing campaign themes of reinforcing the middle class, made an urgent case for a more pragmatic version of populism, one that emphasizes economic prosperity as the cornerstone of a fair society.

Over and over, he noted that the time to rebuild is now.

The “Fix-It-First” program that Obama outlined to put people to work on “urgent repairs,” such as structurally deficient bridges, bore echoes of President Bill Clinton’s call in his 1999 State of the Union address to “save Social Security first.” Clinton’s was an effective line, one that stopped — at least until President George W. Bush took office two years later — a Republican drive to use the budget surplus to cut taxes.

Although Obama’s speech lacked the conciliatory notes of some of his earlier State of the Union addresses, he did make overtures to Republicans and cited Mitt Romney, his presidential challenger, by name.

He combined tough talk about securing the border, which brought Republicans to their feet, with a pledge to entertain reasonable reforms to Medicare, the federal entitlement program that fellow Democrats are fighting to protect.

“Those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms,” he said.

Obama also pledged to cut U.S. dependence on energy imports by expanding oil and gas development. And he singled out one area where he and Romney found agreement in last year’s campaign: linking increases in the minimum wage to the cost of living.

Obama set a bipartisan tone at the start of his speech, quoting from President John F. Kennedy’s address to Congress 51 years earlier when he said, “The Constitution makes us not rivals for power, but partners for progress.”

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A taste for diplomacy

Critical Loop Information Bulletin for heads of state, foreign ministers and their chefs:

An excellent meal of fine food and wine has often been the key to successful diplomatic negotiations. So if you’re hosting Secretary of State John Kerry
, here are some pointers.

In arranging a dinner with the former senator last year, one host asked whether Kerry had meal preferences.

One aide e-mailed: “Anything is good, as long as there is no celery involved.” Celery?

Shades of President George H.W. Bush’s war on broccoli back in 1990, when he famously declared: “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid, and my mother made me eat it. I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”

The edict, banning the offending vegetable from the White House and Air Force One, outraged broccoli farmers and the nutrition-minded.

But simply eschewing celery — while sure to upset the farmers — isn’t very much to go on when you’re putting on a full dinner.

So a second aide, apparently speaking with deep knowledge, refined the menu suggestions:

“He particularly enjoys scallops. . . . You’ll also do well with lamb chops, shepherd's pie, simple salad, clam chowder, chocolate desserts, ice cream. Apple juice, water, Zinfandel wine, Sauv Blanc. He doesn’t drink coffee and the celery restriction is accurate.”

Sounds very New England, maybe a bit old-fashioned. (But best not go overboard into a New England boiled dinner or creamed chipped beef.) In addition, we’ve heard it’s best not to serve farm-raised salmon. Good to know Kerry drinks water. It’s unclear whether sparkling or still, so offer both, just not tap.

Remember, a well-fed secretary of state could be the margin of difference in tense negotiations.

Closed doors, open windows

Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm’s name has been floated for many Cabinet jobs, including secretary of labor or transportation or energy.

But she’s thinking she may be out of the running.

Granholm, who last year hosted a show called “The War Room” on Current TV — the network Al Gore sold in January to al-Jazeera — said Sunday that she’s “probably” going to work at the Pew Charitable Trusts as a spokeswoman on clean-energy matters, though it’s not a “done deal.” (Quite so — a source at Pew says it’s not going to happen.)

Granholm, interviewed on “Platts Energy Week,” an all-energy news and talk show, said she’d been watching confirmation hearings in the past few weeks.

“If you think it was hard getting Hagel confirmed,” she said, referring to Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary, “imagine somebody who has run a progressive talk show for the past year, probably poking a few Republicans in the eye,” maybe even some who will be voting on her nomination.

“I might be a little bit of a tough” challenge to confirm, Gran­holm said, “but I’m going to do all sorts of stuff serving on the outside, for sure.”

Sounds as though a Cabinet post is not in her future. On the other hand, there are good jobs that don’t require confirmation.

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Marco Rubio emerges as GOP’s star. But is he the answer for Republicans?

Lately, it seems just about everyone is fascinated by the junior senator from Florida.

Time’s current cover proclaims Marco Rubio “The Republican Savior.” The Web site BuzzFeed last week solicited his views on immigration, climate change, gay rights — and the relative artistic merits of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. That test of his hip-hop fluency came after Rubio released a Spotify playlist of 16 songs he is listening to, generating a flood of instant analysis in the blogosphere.

Next up: On Tuesday night, Rubio will give the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union address — in English and Spanish.

“He carries our party’s banner of freedom, opportunity and prosperity in a way few others can,” House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in announcing Rubio’s selection to deliver the rebuttal. Republican uber-strategist Karl Rove has called Rubio “the best communicator since Ronald Reagan.”

Rubio is indeed a politician of unusual gifts. But the spotlight that has fallen on this relatively new arrival to the national scene says as much about the state of the Republican Party as it does about the 41-year-old senator. And it remains to be seen whether he represents the solution to the GOP’s problems, or whether the party’s sky-high hopes in an untested newcomer are just another measure of its drift.

His appeal starts with the fact that Rubio embodies two demographic groups with which the GOP needs to connect: young people and Hispanics.

And he has been trying to add substance to his sizzle. Rubio, in the first high-profile tryout of his legislative skills, is taking a leading role in shaping an overhaul of immigration law.

He is part of a bipartisan group of eight senators who put together a carefully calibrated set of principles that include a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million-plus immigrants in this country illegally. Rubio is the group’s point man tasked with selling that idea to the hard-liners on the right, who see it as heresy.

Rubio declined to be interviewed for this article. Aides explained that Rubio wants to dial things back a bit between now and the State of the Union response. When the Time cover appeared, he tweeted: “There is only one savior, and it is not me. #Jesus.”

“Like most things in politics, we are keenly aware of how fleeting this all is and how most news hype is all sound and no fury,” said Rubio’s senior strategist, Todd Harris. “You run the risk of becoming overexposed and overserved, not to mention the fact you might screw up.”

Rubio’s new prominence also comes at a difficult time for his party. Schisms have developed within the GOP as it searches for a path out of the electoral badlands after two presidential defeats.

He is that rare Republican who is beloved by both the party establishment, which is focused on reaching out to centrist and independent voters, and by the anti-establishment insurgent forces who say the party has erred in not holding true to its most conservative principles.

The Florida senator argues for both. Admirers often point to his 2011 declaration that “we don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system.” It neatly skirted the charge, prosecuted to great effect by Democrats, that Republicans were simply favoring the rich.

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Panetta fighting to the end against proposed defense spending cuts

As he prepares to retire to his California walnut farm this month, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is still fighting the battle that has consumed his entire tenure at the Pentagon: an increasingly desperate campaign to persuade Congress not to whack defense spending.

In recent days, Panetta, 74, has uttered near-apocalyptic warnings about what will happen if Congress does not do something by March 1 to avert a “doomsday scenario” under which the Defense Department could be required to slash $43 billion in spending in the next seven months, and as much as $500 billion in the next decade.

Those cuts, he told lawmakers last week, would turn the mighty U.S. military “into a second-rate power” and would force the Obama administration to throw its entire national-security strategy “out the window.”

He has warned that naval operations in the Pacific would shrink by a third. All military training would slow to a crawl. And almost every civilian employee at Defense could be furloughed, as much as one day a week for the rest of the fiscal year.

At a farewell ceremony Friday at Fort Myer, President Obama praised Panetta, saying, “No one has raised their voice as firmly or as forcefully on behalf of our troops as you have.”

Obama also urged Congress to work out a new deal with him to avoid what he called “massive, indiscriminate cuts that could have a severe impact on our military preparedness.”

He added, “There is no reason, no reason for that to happen.”

It is the same message that Panetta has delivered, so far to no avail, almost every day since he took over as defense secretary in July 2011. The next month, he was saddled with the task of shrinking the military after Obama and Congress agreed to cut $487 billion in projected defense spending for the next 10 years.

But that was just the first swing of the ax. Under the rest of the deal, the Pentagon would be forced to cut $500 billion more in the same period if lawmakers and the White House could not come up with another, more palatable way to reduce the nation’s record deficits.

It appears highly unlikely that Congress and the White House will reach a deal to spare the Pentagon before Panetta retires. It will fall to his successor — Obama has nominated former senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) for the job — to manage any further cuts. But Panetta’s failure to prevent what he described as the worst-case scenario will mark the end of an otherwise influential and colorful career in Washington that has spanned four decades.

The high point came in May 2011 when, as CIA director, Panetta oversaw the successful and daring strike that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Along the way, he served as White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration and as chairman of the House Budget Committee, where he earned a reputation as a skillful negotiator on fiscal issues.

It was largely for his budget and legislative expertise that Obama tapped Panetta to lead the Pentagon, which now faces a wrenching consolidation after years of growth fueled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Lawmakers propose giving federal judges role in drone strikes, but hurdles await

A proposal to give federal judges a direct role in the nation’s drone campaign gained new momentum this week with a signal from senior lawmakers that they intend to consider creating a special court to oversee the selection of targets for lethal strikes.

But the idea, cited by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), among others, as a way to impose new accountability on the drone program, faces significant legal and logistical hurdles, according to U.S. officials and legal experts.

Among the main obstacles is almost certain opposition from the executive branch to a dilution of the president’s authority to protect the country against looming threats. Others include the difficulty of putting judges in a position to approve the killing of individuals — possibly including American citizens — even if they have not been convicted of a crime.

In more practical terms, U.S. officials expressed concern that a judicial review would lead to delays that might erode the country’s ability to preempt terrorist attacks.

The idea “is politically and practically difficult and therefore unlikely to happen in the end,” said Robert Chesney, an expert on national security law at the University of Texas. “But it seems more likely today than it did just a few weeks ago.”

That is largely because comments from Feinstein and others during a confirmation hearing Thursday on the nomination of John O. Brennan to serve as CIA director made clear that the idea of a special drone court has gained new backing on Capitol Hill.

Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the panel would evaluate having judges review targeting decisions much like a special court scrutinizes certain U.S. wiretapping operations in the United States.

The drone panel, Feinstein said, would be “an analogue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” a panel that meets in secret and rules on government requests to wiretap terrorism suspects inside the United States without traditional court warrants.

A congressional aide said that the Senate committee has not drafted any legislative language and has only begun to consult with legal experts.

The administration has been considering ways to establish an independent review of counterterrorism actions, “including a possible judicial review,” for more than a year, an administration official said on the condition of anonymity.

“We have identified a number of ways . . . some executive, some would require legislation,” the official said, adding that deliberations were ongoing.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) endorsed the idea of a special court at Thursday’s hearing and cited growing discomfort with the way the Obama administration has carried out hundreds of strikes through a secret process sealed off from other branches of government.

“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner all in one is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country,” King said.

Brennan, who served as Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser for the past four years, responded lukewarmly, saying that preempting a terrorist attack is fundamentally different from determining after the fact whether someone is guilty or innocent of a crime.

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Immigration advocates push Republicans to support path to citizenship

Immigration advocates, backed by the White House, have begun a nationwide lobbying campaign, including rallies in more than a dozen cities and a planned demonstration on the Mall.

The loosely coordinated effort is aimed in part at influencing an ongoing debate in the Republican Party over whether to provide a path to citizenship for more than 11 million illegal immigrants, organizers said.

The campaign includes liberal-leaning Hispanic, Asian and African American groups and labor unions, as well as a more centrist coalition of faith, law enforcement and business representatives. Organizers said they are intent on making their voices heard at a time when some GOP leaders have called for granting undocumented residents legal status, but have stopped short of citizenship.

The debate is one of the key points of conflict between President Obama and lawmakers, who are attempting to negotiate the largest overhaul of immigration laws in three decades.

“The election sent Republicans a strong message to work with President Obama to fix our broken system or else face political suicide,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, whose organization announced plans Tuesday for 14 rallies in big cities, along with phone calls, leaflets and television ads. “Our focus is citizenship, getting people to have the same rights as anybody else.”

In recent days, an increasing number of congressional Republicans have embraced what they described as a middle ground between full citizenship and the position long held by many in the GOP that illegal immigrants be required to return to their home countries.

Some House Republicans have argued that illegal immigrants could be allowed to live and work in the United States without fear of deportation, but should not be granted the full benefits of being a citizen, including the right to vote.

“If we can find a solution that is short of pathway to citizenship but better than just kicking 12 million people out, why is that not a good solution?” Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho) said this week during an immigration hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

Clarissa Martinez de Castro, an official with the National Council of La Raza, told reporters in a conference call this week that the Republican tactic creates a “false choice” between the extremes of mass deportation and immediate citizenship. In reality, she said, both Obama and a bipartisan Senate working group have advocated a fairly arduous route that would require illegal immigrants to pay back taxes and learn English, among other requirements, before some would earn citizenship.

“To try to paint that rigorous path as amnesty or as extreme is simply incorrect and frankly out of step with where the American people are,” she said.

Obama, whose reelection was powered with overwhelming support from Latino and Asian voters, has vowed not to settle for a bill that does not include a citizenship provision. At a meeting with advocates this week, he urged them to help the administration keep the pressure on Capitol Hill.

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Lobbying down, but advocacy up

Is the lobbying business shrinking or just changing? It’s hard to say.

Disclosure reports filed with Congress show that the amount of money spent on lobbying fell for the second year in a row in 2012, according to a tally from the Center for Responsive Politics. Companies and lobbying firms spent $3.3 billion on the influence game last year, down about 1 percent from 2011 — which was itself down 6 percent from the $3.5 billion record set in 2010.

That small shrinkage is notable because it marks the end of what had been more than a decade of steady growth. Many top Washington firms reported shrinking revenue in 2012, including giants Akin Gump, Ogilvy Government Relations and Cassidy & Associates, which all reported double-digit drops in lobbying revenue last year.

The most common reasons cited for the decrease are political gridlock and the distraction of a major election. Those are important reasons, but there could be several other factors at work as well.

For one, there’s now a strong disincentive for lobbyists to report their work following the Obama administration’s tough new ethics rules targeting lobbyists. The number of registered lobbyists has fallen 19 percent from a high of 14,852 in 2007, according to the center.

Major corporations also have reported smaller dollar figures in recent years, but that doesn’t mean they are cutting back on their Washington footprint. Lobbyists are spending an increasing amount of time talking to the bureaucrats who are turning big legislative accomplishments from President Obama’s first term into regulations. Only high-level contacts with executive branch agencies are reported as “lobbying” under the law, however.

There is also a less-cited but perhaps much bigger trend at work: The business of lobbying is changing in response to an evolving political culture and advances in communications technology, in particular fractured mass media and online social networks.

The ease of grass-roots mobilization and the importance of shaping public discussions have made time spent away from Capitol Hill a more important part of the Washington influencer’s tool box.

“It used to be that Washington only had an army,” said Kevin O’Neill, deputy director of public policy at Patton Boggs. “Now we’ve got a navy, a coast guard and an air force.”

The change can be seen in a rash of mergers between traditional lobbying shops and public relations firms in recent years, such as the 2011 merger of Dutko Worldwide and Grayling, a public relations company.

Official reports of “lobbying” only capture time spent in direct contact with lawmakers, but employment in firms specializing in the broad category of public relations — which includes lobbying — actually increased in Washington in 2011, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The National Law Journal surveys top firms to get a broader look at their revenue from advocacy, and in many cases, the results contradict the figures reported to Congress. For example, Holland and Knight reported a 10 percent drop in lobbying revenue to Congress in 2011, down to $18.7 million, but under the broader definition of advocacy — which the journal said included “all activities intended to shape laws or regulations on behalf of a client” — revenue increased to $62.9 million.

“There is an evolution in the advocacy profession,” said Rich Gold, head of the public policy group at Holland and Knight. “Back in the old days, lobbying was more of a physical contact activity where the relationships you had made you a player in town.”

These days, both the Obama administration and tea party lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are highly attuned to their respective constituencies, meaning that often the best way to influence means spending time with the base.

Obama’s reelection campaign recently announced that it was rebooting as an issues advocacy group pushing his agenda from gun control to immigration. It will likely spend big money and become a powerful force guiding Washington policy. But not a penny of that spending will be disclosed to Congress as “lobbying.”

For previous Influence Industry columns, go to washingtonpost.com/fedpage.

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Strengthening security at the nation’s airports

Most people think of airport security as their walk through the metal detector and the eyeballing by transportation security officers (TSOs). Dan Liddell, whose job it is to protect the flying public at seven airports in central New York, instead sees 17 zones of worker responsibility and hundreds of different tasks.

In pursuit of safeguarding the public, Liddell, a federal security director based in Syracuse, has written a book that is now used to train TSOs. It’s called the “National Standardization Guide to Improving Security Effectiveness.” Tasks at each duty area have been inventoried and cataloged, and the “knowledge, values and skills” associated with the airport security jobs have been identified under what Liddell describes as a systems approach to training.

As important as it is to use X-ray machines and explosive trace-detection equipment and to have the correct rules and procedures in place, Liddell said transportation security relies on the skills of the people responsible for it.

“People performance is the cornerstone,” he said. “When I set out to improve things, I look at the people. I look at their proficiency, their skill in doing something and how well they’re doing that job.”

Even when people have the skills to do their jobs, they don’t necessarily do them well each time, especially when conditions can vary with each day and every passenger. To keep performance high, TSOs are tested covertly at unexpected times. A banned item will be sent through a checkpoint and the reaction and activities that take place are monitored.

Whether or not TSOs spot contraband, everyone at that checkpoint during the test participates in an “after-action” review. “It’s the learning experience that’s relevant,” Liddell said. “We’re doing a review of actual performance and you can always improve.”

Liddell is sensitive to the pressure that airport security personnel face. TSOs have the tough of performing multiple tasks under constant camera surveillance and public scrutiny, often interacting with tired or irritated travelers. The testing and training helps them continually up their game.

Thirty airports around the country that helped test the training system and now use a version of it. Paul Armes, federal security director at Nashville International Airport, was interested in creating such a system with a colleague when they both worked in Arizona, but it “never got traction.”

When he learned about what Liddell was doing, he was eager to participate. “Typical of Dan, he built it himself and practiced it so he had hard metric results, and then he started reaching out to some of us, working with his counterparts around the country to get a good representative sample,” Armes said. “He sees things others don’t see sometimes and he has the capability to drill down into the details.”

Liddell began the “pretty long process” of analyzing how people were performing at checkpoints in 2009. He sat down with subject-matter experts to produce the task inventory he now uses. In 2010, he improved the review and reporting process that occurs after covert tests events and instituted the security practices he refined at the other New York airports he oversees, including Greater Binghamton, Ithaca and four others. “I love breaking it down,” he said. “I’ve got a quest for improvement.”

In a less sneaky version of the television show, “Undercover Boss,” Liddell went through the new-hire training program for his employees to understand as much as he could about the jobs and the training provided for them, he said.

If pursuing knowledge is in Liddell’s genes, it may be because his parents were both in education. His father was a high school principal and his mother was a fifth-grade teacher. His teaching manifested itself instead in the training realm, where he strives to educate security employees as effectively as possible, inside the classroom and out.

“It’s always a challenge to meet that right balance of really great effectiveness and really great efficiency,” he said. “There are always challenges. It’s what gets me up in the morning, trying to improve.”

This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government, and washingtonpost.com. Go to http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/fedpage/players/ to read about other federal workers who are making a difference.

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