by Mark Silva

With the Senate's 60-39 vote to proceed to debate, after Thanksgiving, on a health-care bill that the president is seeking by year's end, the debate of the 2010 midterm elections has been joined:

For the Democrats, in control of the White House and Congress, the congressional elections will be presented to the public as a question of fulfilling an agenda of progress and change and keeping "the party of no,'' the intransigent GOP, in check.

For the Republicans, the midterms will be presented as a chance to retake at least part of Congress from a government trying to take over more than health care, but also every aspect of life, with big-government, big-spending and taxation - "socialization,'' a leading Republican senator calls it.

If President Barack Obama is unable to sign a health-care overhaul into law by the mid-term vote, the GOP will be painting a picture of a president unable to work his will with his own party in control. If there is health-care reform and more to present at the polls in 2010, the GOP will be cast by the people in power as an obstructionist, no-solution party.

We could hear it in the words of the Florida Democratic Party, where one of the signal Senate campaigns is playing out: A 2010 contest featuring a popular Republican governor, Charlie Crist, whose own party is challenging him for siding with President Barack Obama on the first of the White House's spending sprees, the economic stimulus, and where the Democratic Party has weighed in with this volley for the Crist-appointee, the interim Sen. George LeMieux, who was among the 39 Republicans voting to block the health care bill from debate last night.

"Instead of standing with his constituents, Sen. LeMieux has decided to stand with the Republican 'Party of NO," which is offering no real alternatives and no real solutions,'' the Democrats wrote in an overnight email to their forces in Florida. "Sen. LeMieux's unwillingness to even discuss the issue of health insurance in our country--which has been on the minds of Floridians for many years--shows that neither he nor Gov. Charlie Crist are interested in fixing our broken health insurance system and are only interested in seeing Democrats and President Obama fail.''

We could hear it in Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele's response to the Senate vote, in which all the Republicans but the absent Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio voted against taking the health-care bill to debate - just as all the House's Republicans, except for Rep. Joseph Cao of New Orleans, voted against the House health bill.

"Make no mistake: this was not a free vote,'' Steele said. "A vote in favor of this procedural motion paves the way for the bill's final adoption, which would impose a government-run health care experiment on America that increases premiums, increases taxes, cuts Medicare and allows for taxpayer-funded abortions.

" President Obama, (Senate Majoirty Leader) Harry Reid and their liberal Senate allies will surely gloat and pat themselves on the back for winning tonight's vote in the dark of night during a rare Saturday session, while Americans were home with their families,'' Steele said. "But as they do, those moderate Democrats who voted for Harry Reid's bill will have to answer to their constituents."

That means November, 2010.

President Barack Obama's public approval stood at 69 percent in the days after his inauguration in January, shown above, and reached a new low of 49 percent this week in the Gallup Poll's daily tracking surveys.

by Mark Silva

Public approval of the job that President Barack Obama is performing has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in the Gallup Poll's daily tracking of opinion.

The 49-percent approval for Obama's performance, measured this week over a three-day average of surveys between Tuesday and Thursday, marks a 20-point decline from the 69-percentage point approval that Obama enjoyed in the days after his inauguration in January.

This also marks the fourth-swifted slide of a president's approval below 50 since Gallup started tracking President Harry Truman's performance. Other surveys have put the president's approval rating below 50 and others have shown his approval hovering in the low to mid-50s, but for consistency and comparison's sake, we've always favored the Gallup findings as a number that comes with benchmarks.

"Although the current decline below 50 percent has symbolic significance, most of the recent decline in support for Obama occurred in July and August,'' Gallup's Jeffrey Jones notes. "He began July at 60 percent approval.

"The ongoing, contentious debate over national healthcare reform has likely served as a drag on his public support, as have continuing economic problems. Americans are also concerned about the Obama administration's reliance on government spending to solve the nation's problems and the growing federal budget deficit.

"Of the post-World War II presidents, Obama now is the fourth fastest to drop below the majority approval level, doing so in his 10th month on the job. Gerald Ford dropped below 50 percent approval during his third month in office, and Bill Clinton did so in his fourth month,'' Jones notes. "Ronald Reagan, like Obama, also dropped below 50 percent in his 10th month in office, though Reagan's drop occurred a few days sooner in that month (Nov. 13-16, 1981) than did Obama's (Nov. 17-19, 2009).

He also notes this, which is another reason that Gallup's numbers are worth watching: "All presidents except John Kennedy dropped below the majority approval level at some point in their presidencies, and all recovered after the first time below this mark to go back above 50 percent approval.''

For more, see the full Gallup report,.

And forgive us, please, if the pace of postings in the Swamp slows this week for a much needed Thanksgiving week break.

The Swamp wishes a Happy Thanksgiving to all.

by Mark Silva

As the Senate nears a vote on advancing to debate over health-care, Republicans are holding ground against a bill which they insist will only grow the government and raise taxes.

They don't accept the $848-billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office has placed on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's bill, and they don't buy the idea that it can cut the defict over 10 years by more than $120 billion.

"We are already experiencing record deficits and debt, and yet, this bill creates a massive expansion of government, growing the size of the federal government by over $2.4 trillion over ten full years of implementation,'' Sen. Mke Crapo of Idaho says in the Republican Party's weekly address today.

"When you take away the budget gimmicks used in the early years of the implementation that make the total cost look smaller, the truth is glaring and the Congressional Budget Office agrees: this plan will increase federal spending and health costs, not lower them. That means both you and the federal government will see costs go up.''

See the address above and read the text below:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, returned from a weeklong tour of Asia where he is promoting "a new era of American engagement," says the continent holds promise for Americn exports that can spur new jobs at home.

"Asia is a region where we now buy more goods and do more trade with than any other place in the world - commerce that supports millions of jobs back home,'' the president says in a weekly address today that was taped in Seoul, South Korea.

"It's also a place where the risk of a nuclear arms race threatens our security, and where extremists plan attacks on America's soil,'' Obama says, "And since this region includes some of the fastest-growing nations, there can be no solution to the challenge of climate change without the cooperation of the Asia Pacific.

" With this in mind, I traveled to Asia to open a new era of American engagement,'' the president says. "But above all, I spoke with leaders in every nation I visited about what we can do to sustain this economic recovery and bring back jobs and prosperity for our people - a task I will continue to focus on relentlessly in the weeks and months ahead.''

See the address above and read it below:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama is home.

Home, where the hard work is.

With stops in 20 nations behind him, said to be the most ambitious international itinerary of any first-year president, Obama faces the closing innings of a domestic policy year in which he insisted upon a sweeping health-care reform - by year's end, the president insisted.

Talk on Capitol Hill already has turned to a new deadline for passage of the legislation: The president's first State of the Union address in January, a fitting stage upon which to hail the health-care initiatives which he made the singular most important demand of his first year.

This isn't the only moving goal post: Obama, during his first days in office, vowed to close the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in one year. This week, he allowed that Guantanamo will take a little longer -- the closing promised sometime next year.

The sheer breadth of Obama's first-year agenda - health-care, alternative energy development, recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression and the charting of a new course in Afghanistan while withdrawing American forces from Iraq - may defie the setting of hard deadlines. The depth of the partisan divide on Capitol Hill is another factor - as evidenced by an economic stimulus that passed without a single Republican vote in the House, a health-care bill that passed the House by 220-215, with but one Republican vote, an energy bill with "cap and trade'' limits on greenhouse gas emissions that cleared the House only with the help of a handful of Republicans, eight.

Of all this, only the economic stimulus has found its way into law so far, and the White House was having trouble this week accounting for where the money is going.

And as the sun rose in Washington today, with the president just returned from an eight-day trek across Asia at a time in which the international goals which the president has set appear no closer to achievement than they were at the start of this year, the American public's approval of the job that the president is performing stood at just 50 percent in the daily tracking of the Gallup Poll -- a floor which the president has seen several times since August.

Obama is home for the holidays -- no real political break, though.

He's getting grey, he acknowledged this week.

Near the end of 2009, the president maintains that he isn't even thinking of 2012 at this point - and says that he is content to let the chips fall where they may. He said this, in an interview with CNN:

"If I feel like I've made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it, and my, you know, poll numbers are in the tank because we've gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically I'm in a tough spot, I'll feel all right about myself,'' he said. "I'd feel a lot worse, if at a time of such urgency for the American people I was spending a lot of time thinking about how I could position myself to ensure reelection.

"Because if I were doing that right now, I wouldn't have taken on health care, I wouldn't be taking on things that are unpopular,'' the president said. "I wouldn't be closing Guantanamo. There are a whole series of choices that I'm making that I know are going to create some political turbulence. But I think they're the right thing to do, and history will bear out my theories or not.''

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin was box office on FOX News this week - handing Sean Hannity one of his highest-rated shows.

Someone else drew a crowd at FOX this week, too: President Barack Obama.

While Hannity's audience of more than 4 million viewers with the author of Going Rogue aboard at the start of her national book tour well exceeded the 2 million-plus turnout that the FOX evening news got with a long-sought Obama interview, both shows were ratings leaders for the No. 1 cable news network:

Hannity's ratings were his second-highest for the year, according to the Nielsen Media Research count, and he beat the network's top-drawing Bill O'Reilly, who had 3.868 million viewers Wednesday night.

Nielsen found that FOX News Channel's Hannity drew 4.2 million viewers with Palin's appearance - far surpassing the competition in the time slot: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, with 957,000 viewers, and CNN's Larry King, with 835,000.

FOX's Special Report with Bret Baier, airing an interview of Obama conducted by FOX White House correspondent Major Garrett in China, drew 2.235 million viewers - a number which FOX will take as a sign of playng to a wide audience.

Baier's competition in the time-slot trailed, as it usually does in FOX's audience share of the cable news market - with CNN's Situation Room drawing 546,000 viewers and MSNBC's Ed Show drawing 495,000 viewers - Nielsen reported of the night's run of cable news viewership.

Palin told Hannity that the military should have used a little profiling in the case of Nadal Malik Hasan, the Army major accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, in a shooting rampage: "I say profiling in the context of doing whatever we can to save innocent American lives, I'm all for it, then."

And Obama allowed in his interview with Garrett that the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, won't be closed by the January deadlne he set -- but rather sometime next year.

"I'm not disappointed,'' Obama said. "I knew this was going to be hard, it's hard not only because of the politics, people I think understandably are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keeping terrorists out. ''

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama says he "probably won't'' be reading Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, so radio's Mark Levin asked Palin: Has she considered sending him the TelePrompTer edition?

"You know what,'' Palin replied, laughing, "when I heard that, though, I thought, good, at a moment like this in history, I'd rather that he be spending his time reading the next fiscal year federal budget. He better really dig into that, and start reining it in.''

Does she think, the host asked Palin on The Mark Levin Show -- one of the few media interviews that Palin was conducting at the start of her book tour -- if she had gone to an Ivy League school, rather than starting in Idaho and Alaska, and hung out in New York or San Francisco, she might be the "darling of the left.''

"I tell my dad that, "I say, Dad, if you would have just given me a backpack and a passport when I was 18 years old after graduating from high school and let me travel Europe...' she said. "You know what the rest of us did, we worked our butts off to get through school.''

As much as the Left tries to dismiss her, Levin suggested, they hang on her every word.

"I do wonder why they do... 'Dismiss it, man, move on,''' Palin said. "What color toenail polish is she wearing today?...That stuff cracks me up.''

How about that Newsweek cover photo of her in tights from her Runner's World shoot?

"Maybe that's what our society needs, is more of that revelation of that mainstream media and what their agenda is, let it be revealed,'' Palin told Levin, "and I have to be the person used as a tool, fine, let them do it.''

If she had to describe her philosophy, her "common-sense conservatism,'' what is that?

"I believe that history teaches us lessons, and we're idiots if we don't learn from history,'' Palin said, suggesting there is a lot to be learned from Ronald Reagan's handling of the economy and national security matters. "A common-sense conservative looks at history, finds out how did we screw up in history, how did we implement solutions and we go from there.''

by Mark Silva

The White House is pushing back on the alleged "fiction'' of jobs created or saved under the $787-billion federal timulus bill - particularly what it views as the fiction surrounding reports that Recovery.gov, the official online accounting of where all the money is going, listed all sorts of money going into congressional districts that don't exist.

At the same time, the White House is citing an odd statistic in noting that the government doesn't always get its numbers quite right the first time around.

Look at the numbers of jobs lost last year, the White House notes today: With payroll employment for 2008, the original take on the average monthly decline was 157,000. The revised average monthly decline was 230,000 -- "46 percent lower than original,'' notes a spokeswoman for the Recovery Act, reporting on the White House blog today.

"From the beginning, even before the data was collected,'' the administration's Liz Ozborn writes of the Recovery Act accounting, "administration officials said repeatedly that they did not expect the initial reports to be perfect, but certainly expected them to provide an unprecedented and largely accurate look at the Recovery Act at work - and they do.''

That should lend a lot of confidence in the numbers.

The administration blogs on the "FICTION: The reports recipients of Recovery Act funds filed are riddled with errors.''

The "FACT,'' it reports, is that "more than 130,000 reports were collected from recipients who were required to fill out 99 different data fields - that's over 12 million pieces of information collected directly from those putting the funds to work.

" Much has been made of incorrectly coded Congressional Districts, but that issue - which the Recovery Board has already fixed - affected about 1 percent of reports. And other potential over or under-counts of jobs you may have seen highlighted in the media amount to less than 5 percent of all reports.''

More from the White House on fact versus fiction:

by Mark Silva

The House's health care bill, we were reminded, weighed in at over 20 pounds. The Senate's bill, we're told, is bigger than War and Peace.

Both of them also offer health care for millions of Americans uninsured.

And Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has a prescription for what the public should do if the Congress happens to pass all of this into law:

"Rebel.''

That was the word from Hatch this morning on cable news' FOX & Friends, as the Senate's Democratic leadership attempts to muster the votes by the end of this week to advance Senate Majority Harry Reid's health-care bill to a debate sometime after Thanksgiving.

"Thanks to the Senate's hard work,'' President Barack Obama said in a statement issued by the White House as he concludes his trek across Asia, "we're closer than ever to enacting solutions to these (health-care) problems. I look forward to working with the Senate and House to get a finished bill to my desk as soon as possible."

Reid's bill weighed in at about $850 billion over the coming 10 years, with the potential for cutting the deficit by more than $100 over that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office's look at the legislation. The $1.2-trillion bill which passed the House by a narrow vote of 220-215 is more costly, but also offers health insurance coverage to a somewhat greater percentage of uncovered Americans.

"I was particularly pleased to see that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the bill will reduce the deficit by $127 billion over the next 10 years and as much as $650 billion in the decade following, saving hundreds of billions while extending coverage to 31 million more Americans,'' Obama said.

"From Day One, our goal has been to enact legislation that offers stability and security to those who have insurance and affordable coverage to those who don't, and that lowers costs for families, businesses and governments across the country. ''

Hatch has another take on it:

by Mark Silva and updated with FOX apology

FOX has done it again, and this time, once again, FOX says its misplay of the wrong crowd video was another regrettable mistake.

Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin's book tour and the crowd she is drawing at the start of it - no small turnout, with some 1,500 people lining up early this morning for a chance to get into this evening's premier book-signing for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids.

"Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand new book,'' FOX's Jarrett told his viewers. "Take a look at -- these are some of the pictures just coming into us... The lines earlier had formed this morning.''

But it turns out that Happening Now had pulled some video of something that happened last year: Displaying video today from Palin's campaign for the vice presidency, on the ticket with the GOP's Sen. John McCain - which also drew considerable crowds, as shown today in video of a smiling Palin before an adoring campaign crowd.

"This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video,'' Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news at FOX, sad this evening. "There will be an on-air explanation during Happening Now on Thursday."

The unwelcome mishap follows soon on the heels of another FOX Pas - when the network's Sean Hannity ran video of a hugely attended TEA Party protest rally in Washington in September as Hannity was talking about a less-attended Nov. 4 rally outside the Capitol.

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart called out Hannity on that video, and Hannity apologized, on air, for what he called an "inadvertent'' error. Hannity has a book-tour interview of Palin on his show tonight, and we're betting Stewart's Daily Show crew will be watching.

So, as you might suspect, the No. 1-rated cable news network is taking today's mixing of videos quite seriously;

How seriously?

The Swamp hears tonight that it's highly like that serious disciplinary action will be taken for those responsible behind the scenes in the control room. News executives there consider this to have been a sloppy and unnecessary error.

New Thursday note: FOX made good on its promise to acknowledge the mistake and apologized for the mixup today: "We didn't mean to mislead anybody. It was a mistake, and for that we apologize.'' See it here:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, with 20 nations in his passport this year, stepped on to the Great Wall of China this week.

"It gives you a perspective on a lot of day to day things that don't amount to much...It's majestic,'' the president said. "It reminds you of the sweep of history. And that our time here on earth is not that long. So we better make the best of it.''

The president has a lot on his mind these days.

The way Republican Sarah Palin tells it, all the president has to do is listen to his general about deployment of additional forces in Afghanistan, and that will take care of that decision -- sort of like Harry Truman, had he only listened to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Obama isn't too happy about the leaks that have come out from the many decision-making meetings that he has held about the deployment.

"I think I'm angrier than (Defense Secretary) Bob Gates about it," Obama told CBS News' Chip Reid, in one of the network news interviews that he conducted in China. "We have deliberations in the situation room for a reason; we're making life and death decisions that affect how our troops are able to operate in a theater of war. For people to be releasing info in the course of deliberations is not appropriate."

"A firing offense?" Reid inquired.

"Absolutely," Obama replied.

As for his own physical health, he suggested, he's holding up fine.

"My weight doesn't fluctuate too much,'' the president said. " It goes in a five-pound bandwidth. It has for the last 30 years. Um, skipping meals, that's usually just a scheduling issue, but I'm eating fine and I'm sleeping fine.

"My hair is getting grey, and it is the butt of a lot of jokes from my wife as well as my friends,'' he said. " You just don't have a comparable set of circumstances - with two wars, a financial crisis as bad as anything since 1933, a host of regional issues that have to be dealt with, a pandemic.

"You have a convergence of factors that have made this a difficult year not so much for me, but for the American people,'' he said. "And so, absolutely that weighs on me, because whenever I visit Walter Reed or other military hospitals, I see the sacrifice young people are making. That is a heavy weight. But it's an extraordinary privilege, as well, and I wouldn't trade my job for anything."

Watch CBS News Videos Online

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin, author of Going Rogue, says the Army psychiatrist, a Muslim, accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, should have been "profiled'' before the shootings.

" I certainly do,'' Palin says in an interview that will air on FOX News' Hannity this evening, "and I think that there were massive warning flags that were missed all over the place, and I think that it was quite unfortunate that, to me, it was a fear of being politically incorrect to not -- I am going to use the word -- profile this guy, profile in the sense of finding out what his radical beliefs were.''

Palin, who is promoting her new memoir with a national book tour beginning in Grand Rapids this evening, tells FOX's Sean Hannity that her views about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, held in the shooting spree that shocked Fort Hood, the Army and a nation are likely to get liberal "heads.. spinning.''

"Now, because I used the word profile, I am going to get clobbered tomorrow morning,'' Palin says in the interview, her first with a cable TV news network, the leading one in this case. "The liberals, their heads are just going to be spinning. They're going to say she is radical, she is extreme.

""But I say profiling in the context of doing whatever we can to save innocent American lives, I'm all for it, then."

(Pictured above, a man waiting in line for the signing of Sarah Palin's new book at a bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Photo by Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)

by Michael Muskal and Mark Silva

Sen. Robert C. Byrd's tenure as the longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history was marked today with praise but also questions about the senator's health.

"I look forward to serving you for the next 56 years and 320 days," the ninth-term Democratic senator from West Virginia said in a statement marking the occasion.

It was unknown if Byrd would be able to attend today's Senate session. The senator has been in and out of hospitals over the past several months.

Byrd, who arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1953 as a freshman member of the House, has spoken fondly of a time long past "when men ran for the Senate to be a senator. Not to become president, they ran to be a senator. And they loved the Senate.''

Byrd also has offered this advice to newcomers: "Do your work, do your work well, whatever committee you're assigned to, do your work with all your might and in time you will become on to be listened to.''

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the floor this morning to praise Byrd's career.

"Friday is his 92nd birthday. And next week, Byrd writes in his weekly column, should be about Thanksgiving," Reid said. "What does he give thanks for this year? The privilege, he writes, of representing 'our great people in the United States Senate.''

Since June 12, 2006, Byrd has been the longest-serving senator. Later that year, he was elected to an unprecedented ninth term. Byrd has cast more than 18,000 votes and "despite fragile health that has kept him from the Senate floor during much of this year, has a nearly 98 percent attendance record over the course of his career," Reid noted.

Byrd's career has spanned 20,774 days. On Tuesday, Byrd tied the record set by Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.), who served in the House, then the Senate, from 1912 to 1969.

See some of Byrd's words above, and below the fold, courtesy of C-SPAN:

(Photo of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) accompanied by longtime staffer Martha Anne McIntosh as he arrived on Capitol Hill on Aug. 6 by Susan Walsh / AP)

by Michael Muskal

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder today defended the Obama administration's decision to try professed terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court and denied the move would give Mohammed a propaganda forum.

"At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is in federal court," Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning.

The decision to try some of the accused terrorists in civilian court rather than before military tribunals has been criticized by Republicans who argue that it gives terrorists a worldwide stage for their views. The argument is especially acute in the case of Mohammed, who has said he was the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington in which almost 3,000 Americans were killed.

Mohammed and four others being held at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay will be tried in federal court in Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Center's twin towers once stood.

Holder told senators that a civilian court was the proper place for the trial because the government had already successfully prosecuted more than 300 terrorists. Terrorists would have no more of a platform than they would have had in military proceedings.

"I have every confidence that the nation and the world will see him for the coward that he is," Holder said in televised remarks to the committee. "I'm not scared of what Khalid Sheik Mohammed has to say at trial -- and no one else needs to be either."

"We need not cower in the face of this enemy," Holder said. "Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, who made closing of the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within one year a priority on Day One of his presidency, allows that January's deadline for closure of the controversial facility will come and go.

"We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year,'' Obama said in an interview with FOX News Channel conducted in China. "I'm not going to set an exact date, because a lot of this is also going to depend upon cooperation from Congress..

"I'm not disappointed,'' Obama said. "I knew this was going to be hard, it's hard not only because of the politics, people I think understandably are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keeping terrorists out.

"So, I understood that that had to be processed, but it's also just technically hard,'' the president told FOX News' Major Garrett, in an interview with a news network with which the Obama White House has been at odds lately - a talk which FOX plans to air on Special Report with Brett Baier this evening. "I just think as usual in Washington things move slower than I anticipated."

The president, sitting for a round of American television network interviews after a tour of Asia that carried him to China, also bore some evidence of the economic concerns that his Chinese hosts were voicing during talks with President Hu Jintao and others in Beijing:

Speaking of continuing economic troubles at home, the president said: "I think it is important, though, to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession...''

"One of the trickiest things we're doing right now, is to on the one hand make sure the recovery is supported and not withdraw a lot of money either with tax increases or big spending ...at the same time, making sure that we're setting up a pathway long-term for deficit reduction,'' the president said. "It's about as hard of a play as there is..."

He said this, too, about a U.S. unemployment rate that has reached 10.2 percent, the highest in 25 years: "Nobody's been more disappointed than I have to see how high the unemployment rate has gotten. And, I spend every waking hour, when I'm talking to my economic team, about how we are going to put people back to work."

by Mark Silva

As people line up around the block in Grand Rapids for the debut of Sarah Palin's national book tour, the popular author will probably have to count one reader out:

President Barack Obama.

"Obviously, Sarah Palin has attracted a lot of attention,'' Obama said of the Republican former governor of Alaska and 2008 GOP nominee for vice president viewed by some as a strong candidate for president in 2012 -- though not among 70 percent of Americans surveyed, according to a couple of recent news polls.

"She is going to do very well with this book,'' the Democratic president said in an interview with CNN's Ed Henry conducted in China and aired today. "She obviously has a big constituency in the Republican Party, there are a lot of people excited about her.''

Suggesting that he, himself, has not even given any thought to 2012 yet, the president said, "I do think it says a lot about our political process that 10 months after (the last election) we're already talking about it.'' (The timing of network interviews this week didn't afford Obama an opportunity to personally comment, however, on Palin's suggestion that he has everything "backassward'' on the economy.)

But, citing a load of policy briefing books that he has been reading lately, the presdent said he "probably won't'' be reading Palin's memoir, Going Rogue.

"I probably will not'' read the book, the president said in an interview with FOX News that the leading cable news network has been seeking for some time.

In the interviews with American broadcasters covering his trip through Asia, FOX's Major Garrett asked Obama about Palin's book, in a talk that FOX News Channel will air on Special Report with Brett Baier this evening.

"But I wish her well, you know,'' Obama said of Palin. "It looks like she's going to do very well without my readership."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, "very close'' to a decision about deploying troops in Afghanistan - a strategy that must provide for an "endgame'' as well as a way forward - maintains that he is "absolutely confident'' about getting a health-care bill, calls the planned trial of 9/11 plotters in New York criminal court perfectly suitable and says he hasn't begun to even think about running in 2012 yet.

But he acknowledges the "political turbulence'' and the toll that "taking on things that are unpopular'' could take on his own prospects for reelection.

"if I feel like I've made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it, and my, you know, poll numbers are in the tank because we've gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically I'm in a tough spot, I'll feel all right about myself,'' he said. "I'd feel a lot worse, if at a time of such urgency for the American people I was spending a lot of time thinking about how I could position myself to ensure reelection.

"Because if I were doing that right now, I wouldn't have taken on health care, I wouldn't be taking on things that are unpopular,'' the president said. "I wouldn't be closing Guantanamo. There are a whole series of choices that I'm making that I know are going to create some political turbulence. But I think they're the right thing to do, and history will bear out my theories or not.''

The president said all this in an interview with CNN conducted in China as part of a round robin of interviews with cable news networks - CNN and FOX News alike - and the broadcast networks.

"We are very close to a decision,'' Obama said of his prolonged deliberation over deploying additional troops to Afghanistan. " I will announce that decision certainly in the next several weeks... ''

The president is weighing several considerations:

"We do have a vital interest in making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack us and that they can't use Afghanistan as a safe haven,'' he said. " We have a vital interest in making sure that Afghanistan is sufficiently stable that they can't infect the entire region with violent extremism...

"I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we're doing, how we're going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost, what kind of burden does this places on our young men and women in uniform, '' the president said, "and most importantly, what's the end game on this thing, which is something that, unless you impose that kind of discipline, could lead to a multi-year occupation.''

After more than eight years of war in Afghanistan, Obama was asked if he wants to see American troops come home from Afghanistan before the end of his presidency. "My preference would be not to hand off anything to the next president,'' he said. " One of the things I'd like is the next president to be able to come in and say, 'I've got a clean slate...'

The president maintained that Att'y Gen. Eric Holder had made the call about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and several accomplices held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in criminal court in New York, but allowed that he will be held accountable for it.

"I said to the attorney general, 'Make a decision based on the law,''' said Obama, noting that military commissions have been improved and are available for trial. "But I also have great confidence in our Article III courts, the courts that have tried hundreds of terrorist suspects who are imprisoned right now in the United States... This notion that somehow we have to be fearful that these terrorists possess some special powers that prevent us from presenting evidence against them, locking them up, and exact swift justice, I think that has been a fundamental mistake.''

But if something goes wrong, he allowed, he will be the one responsible for the decision.

"I always have to take responsibility,'' Obama said. "That's my job.''

by Mark Silva

A lot of questions have been posed in the health-care debate, with a lot of nuance: Americans have been asked if they approve of the president's handling of the issue, or congressional handling of the issue, if they think reform will make things better, make things worse, more costly or less costly.

But, as the Senate attempts to take a health-care bill to the floor as a test of the ability to began debate later this week, here's a simple question:

"Now thinking specifically about the health insurance plans available to most Americans, would you favor or oppose creating a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies?''

Fifty-six percent said yes to the "public option'' in the Nov. 13-15 survey conducted by CNN and Opinion Research Corp. That's the same number that CNN found at the end of August, as the public option was becoming the most controversial aspsect of the legislation.

Now that the House has narrowly (220-215) approved a health-care bill with a public option, and Senate leaders are advancing one with an option for a public option that states could opt-out from if they wanted, two-thirds of those surveyed say they oppose allowing states to prevent people from taking part in a public option if the government has one.

The survey of 1,014 adults, including 928 registered voters, carries a possible margin or error of plus or mnus 3 percentage points.

The Gallup Poll recently found softer support for a public option: 50 percent.

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin, embarking on a natonal book tour with her Going Rogue memoirs, has one word for the way that President Barack Obama is handling the economy:

"Backassward.''

That's how the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee put it during a series of talks that Palin had with ABC News' Barbara Walters, in a segment that aired this evening on World News.

""I would start cutting taxes and allowing our small businesses to keep more of what they are earning, more of what they are producing, more of what they own and earn so that they could start reinvesting in their businesses and expand and hire more people," Palin told Walters. "Not punishing them by forcing health care reform down their throats; by forcing an energy policy down their throats that ultimately will tax them more and cost them more to stay in business. Those are backassward ways of trying to fix the economy."

"You do have a way with words," Walters noted.

"I call it like I see it," she said.

Palin also embraced the word that former Vice President Dick Cheneyhad for what Obama is doing with the decision about troop deployments in Afghanistan:

"Dithering.''

"To listen to (Gen. Stanley) McChrystal, to listen to the appointee that President Obama asked for the advice from," Palin explained, "McChrystal gave the president the advice and said, 'We need essentially a surge strategy in Afghanistan, so that we can win in Afghanistan.'

"And that means more resources, more troops there,''' she said. "It frustrates me and frightens me -- and many Americans -- that President Obama is dithering around with the decision in Afghanistan." (The candidate at the top of the GOP's ticket in 2008, Sen. John McCain, has said he is "past angry'' about the delay of an Afghanistan strategy.)

But Palin hasn't followed the charted course of the past Bush-Cheney administration and its national security advisers very closely, or for that matter that of the Obama administration, when it comes to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.