New Era in Politics, New Focus for ’24’

January 8, 2009

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES — Can Jack Bauer make it in the age of Obama?

Bauer, the counterterrorism agent at the center of Fox’s serialized hit “24,” is an archetype of the Bush years. The series made its debut just two months after 9/11, at a time when the nation seemed ready to embrace a hero who did not stop to ask questions about legal niceties in his pursuit of the bad guys.

Five years later the series, like the Bush administration, was engulfed in controversy over how it treated suspected terrorists. In fall 2006 the creators of “24” received a visit from the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point and other experts in military interrogation, who told them that West Point cadets and soldiers in Iraq were being influenced by the uninhibited — and unrepentant — use of torture on the series.

When “24” begins its seventh season on Sunday with a two-night, four-hour premiere, much will have changed in the world since Bauer was last on the job. The show opens with Bauer testifying before a Senate committee investigating the use of torture by his dismantled Counter Terrorist Unit, and the producers face the daunting task of acknowledging that the public’s view of Bauer’s methods might have changed without sacrificing their hero and making him renounce all that he has stood for.

Fox faces an equally challenging task in trying to revive a series that suffered a sharp decline in its audience over the course of its sixth season, which ended in May 2007 and was viewed by many fans and most critics as being among the weakest since the show began.

During its nearly 20 months off the air — a hiatus that was extended by last year’s strike by television writers — overall viewing of network television programs has declined precipitously, especially among serialized shows like “24,” which, with their season-long story lines, require viewers to keep abreast of weekly developments.

“I think we all took this year as somewhat of a challenge, in the wake of some of the criticism that had been leveled at Season 6 and politically some of the things that the show had weathered,” Howard Gordon, an executive producer of “24,” said in an interview last month at the show’s production facilities in the Chatsworth neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley here.

Peter Liguori, chairman of Fox Entertainment, said he was confident the fans would return to the series, citing the 12 million viewers who tuned in to a two-hour prequel episode in November. That was only slightly below the estimated 13 million viewers who, on average, watched each episode in the sixth season, according to Nielsen Media Research. “It’s a wildly loyal audience,” Mr. Liguori said, one that includes a large number of so-called time-shifters, who record the show for later viewing.

That optimism notwithstanding, the writers’ strike probably came at the best possible time for “24.”

“Season 6 was our weakest year creatively,” said Mr. Gordon, who is the show’s lead writer and responsible for day-to-day operations. “That said, the reaction to it was outsized to the quality of the show itself.”

As the writers and producers sat down in spring 2007 to draw the outlines of Season 7, they knew, Mr. Gordon said, that most of the low-hanging fruit in the action genre had already been picked: Bauer had foiled assassination attempts, interrupted bomb plots, saved his family, lost his family and been imprisoned and tortured.

The new season was to be set in Africa, but that plan was scrapped when the strike interrupted production after eight episodes. When it became apparent that filming wouldn’t resume in time to get a full season on the air until early 2009, Fox urged the producers to create a sort of interstitial episode to reintroduce the series.

That resulted in “24: Redemption,” the movie that was broadcast in November and used the Africa setting. (For his role in the prequel, Kiefer Sutherland, who has previously won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Jack Bauer, has been nominated for another Golden Globe, and the awards will be handed out Sunday on NBC at the same time that “24” resumes on Fox.) Meanwhile the new season kept Africa as a backdrop but moved the primary setting to Washington for a fortuitously timed change in administrations, both on the series and in real life.

Mr. Gordon and his staff also had more time to contemplate the political firestorm that erupted after a February 2007 article in The New Yorker magazine revealed the military’s concern about the show’s effect on soldiers. Mr. Gordon said that too helped the series gain a new focus.

It also led Mr. Gordon to participate in “Primetime Torture,” a short film produced by Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization that helped bring the “24” producers together with the military advisers. David Danzig, who oversaw the production, created the film for use by military educators. It uses interviews with former military interrogators to emphasize that techniques popularized on shows like “24” are rarely effective — or legal — in real life.

Nevertheless Mr. Danzig said he was nervous about the degree to which the new season of “24” would take the film’s lessons to heart. “Howard Gordon deserves a lot of credit, outside the lines of the show, for trying to do the responsible thing,” Mr. Danzig said.

But he said he had doubts that those views would completely translate into the program’s plot. Mr. Danzig noted that previews portray Jack Bauer as vigorously defiant in defending his methods of interrogation, which have included beatings, stabbings, electrocutions and the use of drugs, suffocation and other coercive measures. “I fear that the result,” he said, “will be for the show to contend that Bauer has always been right.”

Early on, Bauer does begin to show a softer side, becoming reflective about the questions he is being asked. “We’ve done so many secret things over the years in the name of protecting this country, we’ve created two worlds — ours and the people we promise to protect,” Bauer says. “They deserve to know the truth. Then they can decide how far they want to let us go.”

Mr. Gordon said that Bauer’s more nuanced worldview “wasn’t designed to answer directly to The New Yorker piece or the visit from the generals.”

“It was to sort of account for the fact that the world has changed,” he added, “that things are much more complex than maybe we thought, and that some of our actions have had consequences in the world.”

At times Mr. Gordon appears uneasily to straddle the two sides in the debate over the program’s depictions of torture. On the one hand he defends the show against the claims that it causes anyone to commit acts that he wouldn’t be inclined to commit anyway. “If our field interrogators are being more impacted by Jack Bauer than by their training, then obviously ‘24’ shouldn’t be the one being skewered, it should be the training and the supervision of these field interrogators,” he said.

But he also said that he has sometimes hidden behind the claim that “24” is just a television show, but that he no longer believes so. The debates “have made us more sensitive to some of the things we’ve done, and that is why I think we’ve actually dug deeper,” he said. “You’ll see very key scenes throughout the course of the year reflecting, I think, some fairly nuanced arguments on these very subjects.”

Over the years the creators of “24” have bragged that it has drawn accolades from fans as diverse as Rush Limbaugh and Barbra Streisand. This year, in addition to Cherry Jones in the role of the president, new cast members include Janeane Garofalo, the comic and former host of a liberal radio talk show, and Jon Voigt, an ardent conservative.

Their participation, Mr. Gordon said, implies that the show does not serve one political agenda. He also said that anyone who claims that “24” has promoted torture should also acknowledge that with Dennis Haysbert it cast an African-American president seven years ago.

“If we’re going to take the blame for Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, I think we should at least get the credit for Obama,” he said. “It’s the other side of the same coin.”


http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc

Obama Assembles Powerful West Wing

Influential Advisers May Compete With Cabinet

By Michael D. Shear and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 8, 2009; A01

President-elect Barack Obama is assembling a new and influential cadre of counselors just steps from the Oval Office whose power to direct domestic policy will rival, if not exceed, the authority of his Cabinet.

Presidents have long strived to centralize influence in the White House, often to the frustration of their Cabinet secretaries. But not since Richard M. Nixon tried to abolish the majority of his Cabinet has a president gone so far in attempting to build a West Wing-based clutch of advisers with a mandate to cut through -- or leapfrog -- the traditional bureaucracy.

Obama's emerging "super-Cabinet" is intended to ensure that his domestic priorities -- health reform, the environment and urban affairs -- don't get mired in agency red tape or brushed aside by the ongoing economic meltdown and international crises. Half a dozen new White House positions have been filled by well-known leaders with experience navigating Washington turf wars.

But some see the potential for chaos within the administration.

"We're going to have so many czars," said Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's going to be a lot of fun, seeing the czars and the regulators and the czars and the Cabinet secretaries debate."

Carol M. Browner, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, is taking on a broad new portfolio with responsibility for Obama's ambitious agenda on the environment, energy and climate change.

Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion Jr. is expected to serve in another new White House post, implementing Obama's education and housing agenda for cities.

Former senator Thomas A. Daschle will become the first Cabinet secretary in decades to have an office in the West Wing and a separate, newly created White House title: director of the Office of Health Reform.

Daschle's confirmation hearing to become secretary of health and human services begins today.

In interviews, several top Obama advisers said they are extending to domestic affairs a model of governance that has long been used in foreign policy, in which the national security adviser manages diplomatic and military matters from a perch in the White House that offers him or her ready access to the president.

"Given the enormity of the challenges we face, it is critical to have someone in the White House every day, reporting to the president, coordinating policy and giving these issues the important focus they deserve," said Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter. "It allows for efficient, streamlined decision-making."

But Bruce Herschensohn, a professor of foreign policy at Pepperdine University who was deputy special assistant to Nixon, said Obama's plans for the White House could do the opposite.

"It's adding a layer of bureaucracy rather than really eliminating one," said Herschensohn, recalling Nixon's failed attempt to eliminate all but four Cabinet agencies. "Everyone will be fighting with everybody. You'll have conflict with every Cabinet officer who will now have a superior in the West Wing or" the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

If executed poorly, empowering a small team inside the White House can lead to insular decision making and the alienation of those Cabinet secretaries outside the loop, said historian I.M. Destler, a professor at the University of Maryland's public policy school.

"It tends to lead to disruption, and sometimes chaos, in terms of how the larger government works," Destler said. "It cuts out other people. They think the worst about what's going on in the White House. Loyalty to the president is diminished."

There is also a danger that a weak adviser, or one who is perceived as having lost the backing of the president, will not be able to corral the necessary government resources, becoming ineffective or irrelevant.

"Are all these people really going to have the relationship with the president that they need?" Destler asked. "He seems to be placing a lot of faith in his own ability to manage a team. How much is he going to do it directly?"

G. Calvin Mackenzie, a professor of politics at Colby College, said Obama also risks bogging his White House down with minutiae better left to the Cabinet agencies.

"The dark side of that is that inevitably the White House gets into micromanaging and it minimizes the importance of the Cabinet secretaries," Mackenzie said. "The thing that might make it less than inevitable is that they are starting with this structure in place from the beginning."

Top Obama advisers spent months studying the internal workings of previous administrations and came away convinced that high-priority issues require a White House coordinator akin to the national security adviser. White House veterans say the new posts are the clearest signal yet that the incoming president has no patience for the resistance to change that permeates the capital.

"He's taking his top priorities and doubling down by making sure they are operating in full coordination in the White House as well as in the agencies," said Patrick J. Griffin, who served as President Bill Clinton's legislative affairs director. "It really is a way of him maximizing the opportunity to control all aspects of these efforts."

But the national security model is far from perfect, having produced memorable conflicts between White House advisers and secretaries of defense and state.

As national security adviser during President Bush's first term, Condoleezza Rice famously failed to resolve clashes among Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Much depends on personalities, said Roy Neel, who was deputy chief of staff for Clinton. Bush's foreign policy arrangement was a "nightmare situation," he said. Far more successful, Neel said, was Clinton's creation of the National Economic Council with Robert E. Rubin stationed in the White House and serving as its chief.

"That organizational change was built on the notion that that White House was all about turning the economy around," Neel said. "Rubin and [Treasury Secretary] Lloyd Bentsen worked pretty well together."

But Obama's approach is designed to go much further.

Browner, for example, in promoting Obama's "green" agenda, will attempt to exert authority across half a dozen federal departments and agencies, including Energy, Interior, Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In announcing her appointment, Obama promised a new level of "coordination across the government, and my personal engagement as president" on energy and climate policy. He said Browner will have the power to "demand integration among different agencies; cooperation between federal, state and local governments; and partnership with the private sector."

Daniel J. Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said, "The energy and global warming problems are so broad, it's a necessity to have a quarterback."

Similarly, Daschle, with his White House title, will have much broader authority than the typical health secretary. In coordinating a new approach to health care, he will touch on programs serving veterans, active military members and federal employees -- areas not within the jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services.

In addition to Daschle, Browner and Carrion, Obama is hiring advisers to coordinate policy in the broad areas of technology, homeland security and government reform.

"It's unprecedented in the formality of it," Mackenzie said.

Staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc

Obama's Big-Tent Stimulus

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, January 9, 2009; A17

It has been so long since Congress needed to pass a huge and urgent package of spending increases and tax cuts that few people understand how the politics of such a thing might work.

For at least two decades, Washington has focused (if sometimes only rhetorically) on the politics of deficit reduction. Nobody has a playbook for consciously and intentionally embarking on large-scale deficit spending. President-elect Barack Obama's economic speech yesterday was an attempt to write a first draft.

The substantive issues surrounding an economic stimulus -- will the package be big enough and what mix of spending and tax cuts would do the job best? -- are clearer than the politics of getting it passed fast. Here's how Obama is trying to weave the politics and the substance together.

To begin with, there is deep resistance to deficits from the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, for whom deficit reduction has been akin to a religious commitment. That's one reason Obama has been talking about controlling future entitlement spending and why he is touting plans to root out inefficiencies in government -- witness the attention he gave to naming Nancy Killefer, a management consultant, as his "chief performance officer."

For Obama, a highly public war against waste and fraud will ease passage of the stimulus while also showing that Democrats, who propose using government as the instrument for solving a lot of problems, intend to make reform a high priority.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to do her part as early as next week by bringing up a bill sponsored by Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) that would require agency-by-agency audits to eliminate waste.

The effort to win over the more conservative Democrats is working. On Wednesday, for example, Rep. Jim Cooper, also of Tennessee and a leading advocate of entitlement reform, praised Obama for insisting that "we can stimulate the economy and address our long-term problems at the same time."

Obama may also face a conflict between getting his package passed fast and having it contain the most effective proposals. Many economists, particularly but not exclusively liberals, argue that government spending programs stimulate the economy more quickly than tax cuts. Recipients of tax cuts might choose to save rather than spend the money they get back or use it to pay down debt.

Obama solves this problem in part by focusing much of his tax relief on middle- and low-income Americans, who are more likely to use the money for consumption. And the bulk of the package involves new spending, particularly on infrastructure and new environmental and technological investments. He is also pushing programs especially important to liberals: increases in unemployment benefits and food stamps, and fiscal relief to states for Medicaid and education expenditures.

Help to the state governments is crucial because they face a shortfall of more than $350 billion between now and 2011, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In squeezing their own budgets, states could counteract the impact of a federal stimulus. That's why Obama went out of his way to pledge to "help struggling states avoid harmful budget cuts."

But about $100 billion of the package is expected to go to a variety of business tax cuts, some likely to be at best marginally stimulative. Why is Obama doing this? One Capitol Hill Democrat familiar with the president-elect's recent meeting with congressional leaders said that Obama told Republicans that while he could probably get his program through with mostly Democratic votes, he preferred to win GOP support so that his program could pass quickly and be sustainable over time.

The price may be worth paying, but only if the business tax cuts would actually promote a quick recovery. Wasting part of the economic package on ancient business wish lists would violate Obama's own call for political leaders to "put the urgent needs of our nation above our own narrow interests."

Nonetheless, the most striking aspect of Obama's approach is how attuned he has been to his task as politician in chief. He has, so far, managed to maneuver around potential roadblocks rather than blast through them, even as he proposes a reorientation of our politics.

"Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy," Obama declared yesterday. Considering how profoundly this view contrasts with the old conventional wisdom -- "the era of big government is over," "government is the problem" -- it may be worth making a few concessions to put the country on a very different path.

postchat@aol.com

http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc

Hard Lesson for Israel

By Jackson Diehl
Friday, January 9, 2009; A17

Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip is failing, but there may be a silver lining. The war against Hamas is proving -- once again -- that the Middle East's extremist movements cannot be eliminated by military means. If the incoming Obama administration absorbs that lesson, it will have a better chance of neutralizing Iranian-backed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and of eventually brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

Israel's bet was that it could substantially reduce Hamas's military capacity and then force it to accept a cease-fire with improved terms for Israel. Hamas, predictably, has refused to play by those rules. It has defined victory as its own survival; by that standard, it has no incentive to agree to a new truce unless it receives major benefits in return, such as an end to Israel's economic blockade.

That means Israel must choose among attempting to drive the Islamic movement from power (which would be hugely costly and leave its troops stuck in Gaza indefinitely), making significant concessions to Hamas or withdrawing without any assurance that rocket fire against its cities would cease.

At best, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might win an agreement for international forces to help stop the smuggling of new weapons from Egypt into Gaza, something that doesn't necessarily require Hamas's consent. But that won't stop Hamas from continuing to build its own rockets or from claiming that -- like Hezbollah in Lebanon -- it successfully resisted an Israeli invasion.

The trap that Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have created for themselves lies not just in Hamas's ability to withdraw its fighters and rockets into mosques, schools and densely populated neighborhoods, where they could probably survive weeks of bloody fighting or go underground. The larger fallacy is the persistent conceit among Israeli leaders that Hamas can somehow be wiped out by economic strangulation or force of arms.

Unlike al-Qaeda, Hamas is not merely a terrorist organization but a social and political movement with considerable support. Its ideology, however repugnant to Israel and the West, is shared by a considerable slice of the population in every Arab country from Morocco to Iraq. Because it is extremist, it thrives on war, the suffering it inflicts on Palestinians, and the anger generated by the endless, graphic and one-sided coverage of the Middle East's satellite television channels. Every day this war continues, Hamas grows politically stronger, as do its allies in other countries and its sponsor, Iran.

Though Israel must defend its citizens against rockets and suicide bombings, the only means of defeating Hamas are political. Palestinians, who have no history of attraction to religious fundamentalism, have to be persuaded to choose more moderate leaders, such as the secular Fatah. In the meantime, Hamas's existence must be tolerated, and it should be encouraged to channel its ambitions into politics rather than military activity. That means, yes, elections -- like those Hamas won in 2006, when it took control of the Palestinian legislature.

Those elections took place over Israel's objections, and the outcome caused the Bush administration, which had championed democracy in the Middle East, to lose its nerve. But during the relative quiet of the past six months, when Israel and Hamas observed a semi-truce, politics was beginning to work. Polls conducted by Palestinians showed that Hamas's support was falling in Gaza and the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president and Fatah leader, was beginning to talk about holding new elections for president and the legislature; he thought he could win both.

Egypt was working on brokering a deal between the two Palestinian parties. A split began to emerge in Hamas between leaders who wanted to make that deal and extend the peace with Israel, and Iranian-backed hard-liners who wanted to draw Israel into a fight. Israel probably could have ensured that the moderates won the argument by offering to lift its economic blockade of Gaza in exchange for a continued cease-fire. It then could have focused on negotiating a two-state settlement with Abbas and on improving life for Palestinians in the West Bank, while Hamas absorbed the blame for the unremediable misery of Gazans.

Instead, Israel took the Iranian bait and chose to fight. Now, bogged down, suffering casualties and inflicting many more, creating terrible pictures for television, it will have to accept an unsatisfying settlement -- or prolong its agony indefinitely. It should settle so that the leaders chosen by Israeli voters in an election next month will have the chance to work with a fresh American administration on a smarter and more effective strategy for countering Iran and its clients -- one grounded in politics rather than bombs.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc

ISRAEL "SERIAL KILLER" A T-IL REVEILLE BARACK OBAMA ????

« Israël a le droit de se défendre ! »

Qui a dit qu’Israël agissait en état de légitime défense depuis le lancement de son opération militaire contre la colonie palestinienne de Gaza ? Pour avoir une idée de la « légitime défense » selon l’Etat hébreu, il n’y a qu’à regarder la très timide presse française, à l'exception du quotidien L’Humanité ( 07/01/09). Cela donne envie de gerber, le mot n’est pas assez fort. Des corps déchiquetés, des mères palestiniennes qui pleurent la mort de leurs enfants, maris et connaissances. Et comble de l’horreur absolue, à la Une, il y a la photo de cette gamine, à peine 5 ans, dont il ne reste plus que la tête. Pour information, ça devrait intéresser les « amis d’Israël », Près d'un tiers des 689 Palestiniens tués par l'armée israélienne lors de son offensive contre le Hamas à Gaza, sont des enfants et des adolescents âgés de moins de seize ans, ont annoncé mercredi 7 janvier les services d'urgence et dont les ONG étrangères. Vous avez dit « légitime défense » ? Parlons plutôt de Crime contre l’Humanité, de génocide et d’extermination des palestiniens, en particulier les enfants.

Barack Obama n’est plus porté disparu !

Pendant ce temps, on peut « quand même » se réjouir d’avoir retrouvé les traces du futur président « élu » des Etats-Unis, qui doit être investi dans quelques jours, le 20 janvier prochain. On se demandait où était passé Barack Obama, l’homme dont le silence face à la BUSHERIE israélienne est stupéfiant. Où se cachait donc le futur locataire de la « Maison Blanche » ? Etait-il coupé du reste du monde depuis son lieu de vacances sur les terres hawaïennes ? S’est-il enfermé dans un bunker pour ne pas voir ce qui se passe du côté de Gaza ? Que nenni !

Le prochain président étatsunien aurait, semble t-il, volontairement choisi de garder le silence, histoire de ne pas contredire, selon ses proches, celui qu’il devrait remplacer, George W Bush. Quel grossier prétexte ! Comment peut-on se taire devant des Crimes contre l’humanité au nom du respect de la constitution américaine ? Scandaleux ! Faut-il rafraîchir la mémoire à la « team Obama » en rappelant que Barack Obama n’avait pas eu la même attitude lors des derniers attentats à Bombay. N’avait-il pas dénoncé les terroristes tout en apportant son soutien à l’Inde dans sa lutte contre les « fanatiques » ? Est-il donc plus facile de condamner les « terroristes islamistes » ? Sans aucun doute ! En revanche, il n’y a rien à dire concernant le « terrorisme d’Etat » exercé par le pouvoir israélien ? Circulez y’ a rien à voir !

Le moins qu’on puisse dire, c’est que le flamboyant futur président des Etats-Unis ferait mieux de rompre avec la complaisance traditionnelle des Etats-Unis à l’égard de leur protégé israélien. A défaut, il sera considéré comme un héritier de l’administration Bush, donc traité comme co-responsable du bilan catastrophique des néoconservateurs. A bon entendeur.

A2N

http://my.barackobama.com/page/dashboard/public/gGWdjc