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Volume 1 Issue 214       Today’s News and Views    Sunday, July 30, 2006

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Goff has written extensively on these matters in the past. His published articles can be found at the online publication From the Wilderness.

His research included a detailed review of more than 2,500 pages of official briefings and documents from three investigations, in addition to extensive interviews with Tillman family members and some of the soldiers in Tillman’s unit.

The office of Defense Department public relations official Lawrence Di Rita should have purchased high-quality shredders for all commanders.  The documents pertaining to the first three of six investigations contain generous and often gratuitous redactions.  They were given to the Tillman family, and through them to CNN, to ESPN—oh yes, and to me.  They show that it was the impending redeployment of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, Pat Tillman’s unit, in which the real story of his death was general knowledge, that compelled the Department of Defense to come clean, sort of.

“When you die,” the Reverend Kauzlarich explained to ESPN’s Fish, “I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right?  Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to?  Nothing. You are worm dirt.”

A theological term perhaps.

I don’t doubt for a minute that Kauzlarich’s version of spirituality is a kind of quid pro quo—a simple exchange of belief for immortality would strike the hardest of bargainers as a pretty good deal.  It even trumps the dissonance of the Warrior Jesus, the Prince of Peace mounted on a Humvee, perhaps manning the .50-cal, in Mazar-i-Sharif or Fallujah.

If you can sustain that contradiction, it is not particularly remarkable to believe you are a Lamb of God at the same time you deploy religious belief as a disingenuous dodge in defense of your career.

“So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more,” continued Kauzlarich, “that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks…. You know what? I don’t think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don’t know. Maybe they want to see somebody’s head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can’t bring their son back.”

So we get to it at last.  Kauzlarich imagines himself as John the Baptist, and Mary Tillman as Salome.  Poor, poor man.  Wretched, wretched woman.

I imagine a fish decal on Kauzlarich’s car, one that has a double significance:  Jesus, of course, cloning fish for the starving masses, but also a red herring.

Kauzlarich is in a state of dread—not the existential variety, since he has already cut the deal to survive death.  His dread is more immediate and secular.

A Ranger captain was assigned to investigate the death of Pat Tillman—Richard Scott, then commander of Headquarters Company, 2/75 Rangers.  Scott carried out his task with integrity, and the Article 15-6 investigation was completed in two weeks.  That investigation determined two things:  (1) The fellow Rangers who shot Tillman (and an Afghan that the military has never credited with a human being’s name) violated their own rules of engagement and were possibly criminally negligent and (2) that the order that led to splitting the platoon—one vigorously and rightly opposed by the platoon leader on the ground—was responsible for setting up the communications breakdown that resulted in the incident. 

It is not legal in the military to dispose of investigations or to compel or allow witnesses to change statements, and then make the original statements disappear, but that is precisely what happened in the case of Pat Tillman.  When Kauzlarich took over the investigation from Scott, Kauzlarich’s role in the alleged coverup disappeared and criminal charge recommendations were transformed into wrist-slapping nonjudicial punishments.

Even before the first investigation was complete—nay, even before Tillman’s unit returned from the field to conduct an “after-action review” to determine what happened—everyone in Tillman’s chain of command, including Kauzlarich [http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/062306_tillman_files4.shtml], appears to have conspired to draft a recommendation for a Silver Star award as part of the intentional development of a fictional account to cover up the fratricide.

This was in April-May 2004. And for those who don’t remember, these months were a catastrophic cascade of setbacks, bad news and rank scandal, including the dual rebellion in Iraq and the first public release of the Abu Ghraib photos.  The death by fratricide of a famous young man (who was resisting the Department of Defense efforts to turn him into a jingo icon) ran headlong into the DoD public affairs narrative of precision and professionalism (in an elite unit).  That was very bad news.

But with every stick, there is a carrot.

If this story could be covered up, for just a while, it had spin capacity.  Pat could be turned into a martyr-jingo icon.  An account could be constructed that would map directly onto the television-stunned social imagination of the American public.  A tale worthy of the arrested development of a nation that believes in the fantasies of masculine adolescence.

And that is precisely what they did, Kauzlarich included.  They drafted a Silver Star and a docudrama lie about an intense encounter with a determined enemy in which the obedient patriot sets an example worthy of a recruiting poster.  A Tom Clancy joint.  The real Pat Tillman was not only of no use, he was a net negative.  Real people get in the way.

They never counted on his brother Kevin discovering that there was an initial investigation that vanished.  They never counted on a mother and father who were strong enough to demand the truth about what had happened, and determined enough to rescue the real person that was Pat Tillman from the spin machine into which the Pentagon tried to feed his body.

Pat himself, after seeing the Iraq war firsthand and declaring it to be “so fucking illegal,” quipped to his fellow soldiers that the military seemed to be so inept that it couldn’t even construct a credible lie.  How prescient was that?

Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”

Mary Tillman, Pat’s mother, showed me a page from Pat’s journal when he was 16 years old.  It was Pat’s reflection on why he had decided, once and for all, that he didn’t need organized religion.  The entry was motivated by Pat’s grief at the death of an old family cat.  Pat wasn’t comfortable with the idea that one could love another creature that was being excluded from the bargain in the afterlife.  He and his brothers grew up between a river and the mountains, where they roamed countless miles and delighted in the ceaseless interplay of geography, climate, flora and fauna.  In his journal entry, Pat speculated about this singular universality, and made up his mind that one didn’t need some anti-material monarchy buzzing with angels to accommodate himself to mortality.

Pat never felt separate enough from the world to despise the worms. And so Kauzlarich’s expression of fear and loathing for the world would have amused Pat.

Pat’s ashes are adrift from where they were scattered along the Pacific Ocean, mixing back into the elements with which he was so at home; while Ralph Kauzlarich and the Pentagon fret about a five-foot-two-inch mother who refuses to make them an offering of her fear.  Surely Pat Tillman is laughing.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.

When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

July 30, 2006

Audit Finds U.S. Hid Cost of Iraq Projects

By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 — The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.

The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.

The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred questions about the audit to the State Department in Washington, where a spokesman, Justin Higgins, said Saturday, “We have not yet had a chance to fully review this report, but certainly will consider it carefully, as we do all the findings of the inspector general.”

Bechtel has said that because of the deteriorating security in Basra, the hospital project could not be completed as envisioned. But Mr. Higgins said: “Despite the challenges, we are committed to completing this project so that sick children in Basra can receive the medical help they need. The necessary funding is now in place to ensure that will happen.”

In March 2005, A.I.D. asked the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad for permission to downsize some projects to ease widespread financing problems. In its request, it said that it had to “absorb greatly increased construction costs” at the Basra hospital and that it would make a modest shift of priorities and reduce “contractor overhead” on the project.

The embassy office approved the request. But the audit found that the agency interpreted the document as permission to change reporting of costs across its program.

Referring to the embassy office’s approval, the inspector general wrote, “The memorandum was not intended to give U.S.A.I.D. blanket permission to change the reporting of all indirect costs.”

The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in his report.

The rest was reclassified as overhead, or “indirect costs.” According to a contracting officer at the agency who was cited in the report, the agency “did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization.”

“We find the entire agreement unclear,” the inspector general wrote of the A.I.D. request approved by the embassy. “The document states that hospital project cost increases would be offset by reducing contractor overhead allocated to the project, but project reports for the period show no effort to reduce overhead.”

The report said it suspected that other unreported costs on the hospital could drive the tab even higher. In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.

One result is that the project’s overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.

The figures were even adjusted in the opposite direction when that helped the agency balance its books, the inspector general found. On an electricity project at the Baghdad South power station, direct construction costs were reported by the agency as $164.3 million and indirect or overhead costs as $1.4 million.

That is just 0.8 percent overhead in a country where security costs are often staggering. A contracting officer told the inspector general that the agency adjusted the figures “to stay within the authorization for each project.”

The overall effect, the report said, was a “serious misstatement of hospital project costs.” The true cost could rise as high as $169.5 million, even after accounting for at least $30 million pledged for medical equipment by a charitable organization.

The inspector general also found that the agency had not reported known schedule delays to Congress. On March 26, 2006, Bechtel informed the agency that the hospital project was 273 days behind, the inspector general wrote. But in its April report to Congress on the status of all projects, “U.S.A.I.D. reported no problems with the project schedule.”

In a letter responding to the inspector general’s findings, Joseph A. Saloom, the newly appointed director of the reconstruction office at the United States Embassy, said he would take steps to improve the reporting of the costs of reconstruction projects in Iraq. Mr. Saloom took little exception to the main findings.

In the letter, Mr. Saloom said his office had been given new powers by the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, to request clear financing information on American reconstruction projects. Mr. Saloom wrote that he agreed with the inspector general’s conclusion that this shift would help “preclude surprises such as occurred on the Basra hospital project.”

“The U.S. Mission agrees that accurate monitoring of projects requires allocating indirect costs in a systematic way that reflects accurately the true indirect costs attributable to specific activities and projects, such as a Basra children’s hospital,” Mr. Saloom wrote.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The White House’s top political advisers are advancing a strategy built around national security, arguing that Iraq is a central front in the battle against global terrorism and that opposition to the war is tantamount to “cutting and running” in a broader struggle to keep America safe.

After three years of conflict, Democrats argue that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq should not be equated with a stronger, safer America. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said recently, “Nearly everywhere you look — from the Middle East to Asia — America’s enemies have been emboldened by the administration’s mismanagement of Iraq.”

The voters, at times, are even more impassioned. Representative Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois and chairman of the International Relations Committee, said that voters, pro or con, were treating the war the way they treated the mention of Richard M. Nixon in the 1974 post-Watergate midterm campaign. “Nobody is tepid on this issue,” said Mr. Hyde, who is planning to retire.

Many experts and members of both parties say they worry about the long-term consequences of such bitter partisan polarization and its effect on the longstanding tradition — although one often honored in the breach — that foreign policy is built on bipartisan trust and consensus.

“The old idea that politics stops at the water’s edge is no longer with us, and I think we’ve lost something as a result,” said John C. Danforth, a former senator and an ambassador to the United Nations under President Bush.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said, “There used to be some unwritten rules when it came to foreign policy.”

These divisions do not run across foreign policy. The latest poll shows no comparable partisan gap, for example, in attitudes toward the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. On Capitol Hill, even as lawmakers position themselves furiously over Iraq, they produce big bipartisan majorities on issues like this week’s nuclear deal with India or last week’s resolution expressing support for Israel.

But compared with past conflicts — from Vietnam to the war in the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan — the war in Iraq evoked strong partisan passions from the start.

“I’m a child of the 60’s and the Vietnam War,” Judy Smitko, a 63-year-old retired college professor and Democrat in San Diego, said in a follow-up interview to the New York Times/CBS poll. “It’s their country. It’s their own decision. Unfortunately, we’re in it, but I believe we should be out of it in 18 months.”

Bernard Thompson, a 72-year-old retiree from Corsicana, Tex., said Mr. Bush was “coming to grips with this worldwide threat, and we’ve got to stamp it out if we are going to survive.”

Mr. Thompson, a Republican, added: “The point is, we’re at war. Just think of what would have happened if the country had turned on Roosevelt.”

An analysis by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the difference in the way Democrats and Republicans viewed the Vietnam War — specifically, whether sending American troops was a mistake — never exceeded 18 percentage points between 1966 and 1973. In the most recent Times/CBS poll on Iraq, the partisan gap on a similar question was 50 percentage points.

The poll was based on telephone interviews conducted July 21 through July 25 with 1,127 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The overall shift in public opinion on the war largely depends on how independents fall — and lately, they have been agreeing more with the Democrats, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

Christopher F. Gelpi, a political scientist at Duke, said the only partisan divide that came close to the division over Iraq occurred during President Ronald Reagan’s military action in Grenada, but it was much smaller.

Experts cited several reasons for the extent of this partisan divide: Mr. Bush is a polarizing president in an intensely partisan age, they say. Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, said, “The divisions on the war exacerbate the divisions on Bush, and the divisions on Bush exacerbate the divisions on the war.”

Democrats are generally more skeptical about the use of force, especially without broad international support, and the course of the war has seemed to justify their doubts.

Republicans have been fiercely loyal to Mr. Bush for his handling of the fight against terrorism and see Democratic critiques as counterproductive to that effort.

Partisan passions have also been heightened, some analysts said, by the use of national security issues in the past two campaigns.

Democrats recall the 2002 campaign against Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia, as a turning point. Mr. Cleland, a triple amputee who was awarded a Silver Star in Vietnam, was defeated after an advertising campaign that accused him of being soft on national defense, at one point flashing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Democrats say the Republicans repeatedly broke the old rules, treating national security as a wedge issue to make Democrats look weak and unacceptable, especially in 2004. “George Bush decided to make foreign policy partisan in a way that Ronald Reagan or the first George Bush never did,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, “The divisions over Iraq and national security are the house that Karl Rove and George Bush built.”

But Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said the war and national security were entirely appropriate issues for election campaigns.

“I don’t think we’re politicizing the war,” Mr. Mehlman said. “I think the fact is that there are legitimate and important differences, and it is the job of a campaign to clarify between individual candidates on what is the central question our nation faces, which is, How do you win this global war on terror?”

Mr. Mehlman said presidents from both parties had used war as a campaign rallying point throughout history. But, he said, national security has been especially important to the Republican Party since the Reagan days, as Democrats in the post-Vietnam era have become increasingly antiwar.

He said it was Democratic leaders like Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had broken the old rules, embracing defeatism, “which I think is not only bad for American troops, but I think for their party.”

Three months before the midterm elections, the exchanges are already rough. In Ohio, Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican, recently ran an advertisement showing the World Trade Center towers and accusing his Democratic challenger, Representative Sherrod Brown, of “weakening America’s security” by a series of votes on issues like financing for intelligence programs.

Ohio Democrats responded with an advertisement that said Mr. DeWine “failed us on the intelligence committee before 9/11” and on “weapons of mass destruction.”

In independent interviews, two senior Republican strategists said that the war on terror — with Iraq as its central front — had been the single most effective motivator for base voters in internal party polls this year. Even so, some strategists said the continued violence in Iraq was a drag on many of their candidates, especially in moderate districts.

Among Republican voters in the latest Times/CBS poll, only 49 percent said they believed that the United States was winning the war, and 41 percent said neither side was winning.

Analysts in both parties say the intensity of Democratic feeling against the war will be a powerful motivator in this fall’s elections. The sentiment is perhaps most apparent in the Connecticut primary challenge to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a strong supporter of the war.

A variety of experts in both parties said they worried about the aftermath of intense partisanship.

“This era in general feels excessively partisan, and national security has been put right into the mix of intense partisan debate,” said Thomas E. Donilon, a lawyer and a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. “And it’s a mistake in terms of the president developing support for his position on these tough issues.”

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who until June 2003 served as director of policy planning for the State Department, said all nuance got lost in a campaign debate.

“You end up with very stark choices: quote, stay the course, versus, quote, cut and run,” Mr. Haass said. “And in reality, a lot of policy needs to be made between them.”

Many experts, though, said they were not sure what would change the current political climate. “It’s hard to repair the breach,” said John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton.

Megan Thee and Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York for this article.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

The effort, conducted two weeks ago, was sponsored by three policy research groups with very different political views: the Brookings Institution, home to many centrist Democrats; the Heritage Foundation, a conservative stronghold that has staunchly supported President Bush’s tax cuts and pushed for much deeper cuts in government spending; and the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group that advocates fiscal discipline but is essentially neutral on whether it should come from higher taxes or lower spending.

Participants in the session were given a whirlwind tour of the nation’s fiscal woes and then prodded to find out what solutions they could — and could not — agree on. The discussions here, along with two other sessions in Kansas City and San Diego, were run by Viewpoint Learning, a firm founded by the pollster Daniel Yankelovich.

The question for the researchers was this: do American voters, in their diversity and their focus on self-interest, share any consensus about making hard choices, or even on the need to make hard choices?

The researchers are still analyzing the results, to be published later this summer. But the session in Philadelphia left some strong impressions on a reporter permitted to observe it. Among them:

• The participants didn’t hate taxes nearly as much as many Republicans think.

• They seemed to treasure Social Security and Medicare in their current forms, but were more open to change than many Democrats think.

• None of the participants pushed for less defense spending, even if the war in Iraq were to wind down.

• Nobody could agree on a single government program that ought to be cut or eliminated altogether.

The good news was that people here appeared less polarized and more open to sharing burdens than do their elected leaders in Washington. The bad news was that the Philadelphia group thought the best solutions were to tax other people (smokers, drinkers, S.U.V. buyers, the rich) or to somehow “spend smarter.”

In that sense, participants were much like their elected representatives. The difference was that people were willing to contemplate higher taxes or other measures considered taboo in one party or the other.

Virtually no one needed to be persuaded that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path. Everyone accepted that federal spending has ballooned under President Bush, but that taxes have lagged far behind. The federal deficit is likely to be “only” about $300 billion this year, but deficits over the next 10 years could total more than $2 trillion if today’s policies remain unchanged.

The gravest fiscal problem begins at the end of this decade, when the nation’s 76 million baby boomers start to retire and claim old-age benefits. By 2050, according to the Congressional Budget Office, outlays for Medicare and Social Security alone would be higher than the government’s total spending today.

Participants were given four strategies for tackling the problem. The first was do nothing, but wait and hope that economic growth eliminated the need for big changes.

The second approach put a priority on “keeping our promises to the elderly” while raising taxes and cutting spending in other areas.

The third was to “increase personal responsibility and choice,” shifting Medicare and Social Security from government financing to individual investment-type accounts.

The last strategy was to “invest in the future,” putting more money into education and economic development, but raising taxes and trimming old-age programs.

Not surprisingly, many people appeared overwhelmed at first. But nobody needed to be persuaded about the magnitude of the problem, and no one endorsed “wait and hope,” the de facto strategy in Washington.

More surprising, virtually all the participants agreed on the need for higher taxes. Many supported a repeal of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001.

That contrasted sharply with the adamant opposition to tax increases among Republican leaders, especially President Bush. But the openness to at least talking about higher taxes appeared unanimous among those in the Philadelphia group, including those who described themselves as supporters of Mr. Bush.

“I was surprised that so many people were in favor of higher taxes, but I think it’s a good thing,” said Anthony Condo, a construction contractor in his 50’s and a strong Bush supporter. “If taxes went up to lower the deficit, and I knew they were being used for that, I would be in favor of it.”

This isn’t to say that tax increases amount to a winning election issue. “Focus groups and polls create a kind of laboratory with conditions that don’t always exist in the real world,” said Geoffrey D. Garin, president of Peter D. Hart Research, a polling company that does work for many Democratic candidates (and was not involved in the Philadelphia exercise).

“When you have a linear conversation with people, where they concentrate their attention on the idea of trade-offs, they very frequently end up at a place like this.” said Mr. Garin. “The problem is that, in the real world, these sorts of linear conversations don’t exist.”

WHEN the subject shifted to reducing government spending, the group seemed less successful. Few if any people thought military spending was too high — even if the United States withdrew from Iraq. Nor was there agreement on other programs to cut. Most wanted more money for education, and many wanted more money for prescription drugs. Budget cuts, such as they were, involved “smarter” spending and a crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse.

At times during the day, it was possible to sympathize with lawmakers who throw up their arms and shift the debate to flag-burning.

Still, people seemed willing to accept change. Despite intense support for Social Security, for example, many said that workers should be encouraged to postpone retirement. And despite support for Medicare, there was approval for reducing “heroic” high-technology measures that might keep very old and very ill people alive for a few weeks or months.

So if there was a message, it was not that people wanted to dodge tough choices. It was that they wanted good ideas from their leaders.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Bills Soar As Many Hit Gap in Drug Plan
Medicare Provision Jolts Some Seniors

By Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 30, 2006; C01

The calls are starting to come in from shocked or angry seniors. They have just learned that their Medicare drug plans are maxing out on early coverage and that they must now spend $2,850 from their own pockets before coverage will resume.

"I can't pay for my medications," one man told Howard Houghton of the Fairfax Area Agency on Aging the other day. "What do I do?"

Over the next five months, several million Americans with high medicine costs could find themselves in a similar bind. The gap in insurance, popularly called the doughnut hole, is an unusual provision in most of the private plans offered in Medicare's new Part D prescription drug program. Advocates for the elderly say it is misunderstood and problematic.

"There's nothing sweet about the doughnut hole," said Deene Beebe, spokeswoman for the New York-based Medicare Rights Center.

The program was designed to give all participants a certain level of insurance and to protect elderly and disabled recipients with chronic or catastrophic illnesses from huge prescription expenses. To afford those two goals, Part D's designers built in an annual period during which individuals have to pay for medicines themselves.

Under a standard plan this first year, Medicare handles 75 percent of drug costs after a deductible until the bill reaches $2,250. It does not kick in again until those costs total $5,100. After that, prescriptions are almost completely paid for. The very poor can get special subsidies.

Officials consider the formulation sufficient for the vast majority of recipients and a tremendous boon to those with the largest bills.

"That's a peace of mind . . . they never had before," said Mark McClellan, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

As of mid-June, federal officials said, 22.5 million people were enrolled in the program, about half of those eligible. The agency's estimates of how many will hit the $2,250 threshold are below projections from the Congressional Budget Office and others, partly because of lower-than-expected monthly premiums and greater use of generic drugs.

Even recipients who fall into the gap will benefit overall, McClellan emphasized. "We've made a lot of progress this year," he said.

Advocacy groups and some independent health analysts have warned of serious health consequences for older and disabled Americans living on low or moderate fixed incomes. Their resources, though minimal, often are too much to qualify for extra help. They face difficult choices, advocates fear: buy medicines or food and other necessities?

"It's a tough thing," said Houghton, who works with seniors as Fairfax County's coordinator of the Virginia Insurance Counseling and Assistance Program. The distressed retiree who appealed to him is 66 years old and takes five generic drugs and three "very expensive" brand-name pills.

"He doesn't have a whole lot of recourse," Houghton said.

According to a report by the Campaign for America's Future, a Washington-based advocacy organization, seniors enrolled in the program at the start of the year will, on average, reach the doughnut hole Sept. 22. As the calls to agencies on aging and senior centers attest, many already have.

Retired teacher Elise Cain walked into her Silver Spring pharmacy last week for a pill she takes for diabetes, one of her dozen daily medicines. The 77-year-old woman had paid $20 in June. Her charge now is $175.24.

"I nearly passed out," Cain said.

Although the Medicare handbook clearly describes the coverage break, critics say most Medicare recipients, bombarded with advertising from private prescription plans, focused on deductibles and premiums and the drugs included.

"There was a lot of emphasis on signing up seniors. It was a crusade almost," said Stuart Guterman, a Medicare expert with the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund. He doubts that many companies highlighted the doughnut hole in their marketing push. "That's not a selling point," he said.

Columbia resident Mary Ann Anderson, 81, was caught by surprise even though she had carefully reviewed the plans. She knew she had to choose wisely given the long list of medications she is taking after having double bypass surgery in December.

"It was a huge success," she said of the operation. "But not having the drugs could kill me."

This month, Anderson went to the store to pick up three refills. With her coverage, the bill had been about $125 a month. Suddenly, it had more than doubled.

"You hit the limit," the pharmacist told her.

"What do you mean?" she asked, bewildered.

She quickly learned. She also learned that the $14,952 she nets from Social Security annually made her ineligible for many assistance programs, including those offered by pharmaceutical companies. She spent five days on the phone trying to find alternatives, taking detailed notes of each conversation. She contacted elected officials, federal and state, and Howard County's Office on Aging. She asked her cardiologist for samples.

Anderson is managing for the moment, thanks in part to two drug vouchers her doctor supplied and a discount card she obtained through the county. Yet she worries. Unless she can switch to a plan without a gap -- and afford its higher premiums -- she'll face the same math all over again Jan. 1.

"I'm just one of many," she said.

Exactly how many remains a contentious question. Before the program's start, the Congressional Budget Office and the Kaiser Family Foundation both projected that about 7 million recipients would be affected this year.

Then last month, a report for the national Health Leadership Council, a coalition of health care executives, pegged the number at 3.4 million. This month the Campaign for America's Future report put the estimate back at 7 million.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for change. One proposal would have Medicare, not the drug plans, negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies; supporters say the savings could help eliminate the gap. Another measure, introduced by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and three colleagues, would waive the premium for any month when a senior lacks coverage.

Tave Kaufman, 74, of Bethesda calculates that he's better off regardless. Although he and his wife quickly spent their way past the first threshold, their total cost should be less by year's end than in 2005. "It better be," he said, "or else we took the wrong plan."

But his equanimity is being tested. With a brother, he's paying for the prescriptions of his 88-year-old aunt. Her priciest medication runs $450 a month.

Kaufman can only laugh. "You're looking at a trio of doughnut-holers," he said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

The strain shows. At campaign events, Lieberman at times appears subdued and weary. He projects little of the cheerful enthusiasm that marked his long-shot presidential bid two years ago. "It's difficult personally," Lieberman said last week of the defections by party veterans such as Stolberg. "I am competing in the most difficult part of the Connecticut electorate for me."

In an editorial published today, the New York Times endorsed Lamont over Lieberman, arguing that the senator had offered the nation a "warped version of bipartisanship" by supporting Bush on national security.

Lieberman is accustomed to the rough and tumble of politics, and can be combative in his own defense, as he showed during a recent debate. But he said he has been jarred by the intensity of Democratic anger toward Bush -- and, by extension, toward him. Liberal bloggers have called Lieberman a "liar" and a "weasel."

"It's not just opposition to Bush," he said. "The hatred is so deep."

That Democratic ire "raises larger questions about our politics," Lieberman added. He thinks it ultimately undermines the effectiveness of government. But he makes no apology for his position on the war, having resolved long ago that he would not "be part of a partisan response."

Other Democrats, including Stolberg, considered challenging Lieberman this year, but Lamont had a crucial advantage. The great-grandson of a JP Morgan chairman, who founded a successful cable-television business, he has already spent $1.5 million of his own money and had raised an additional $1.3 million through June 30.

"I felt all along I would have a challenge," Lieberman quipped. "But I was hoping God would send me a poor one." The senator, however, has raised $7 .2 million for his campaign.

In Washington, Lieberman carved a niche in foreign policy and gained a national reputation as a collegial, moderate Democrat with a strong moral streak. Back home, though, his Democratic base narrowed. Traditional left-leaning voters were turned off by Lieberman's support for school vouchers, his criticism of affirmative action and his hawkish foreign policy views. They also resented his conciliatory style in the highly partisan, elbows-out environment of Capitol Hill in recent years.

As the Iraq war unfolded and controversies flared over intelligence failures and the commitment of U.S. forces, Democrats such as Stolberg longed for their senator to take a more combative approach with the White House. Bush's embrace of Lieberman the night of the president's 2005 State of the Union address -- a moment that has come to be called "the Kiss" -- is one of the most vivid images of the Connecticut campaign. In a speech last December, Lieberman warned Democrats that "in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

"You can want to be liked by some people, but there are a few you have to write off," Stolberg said. "Joe wants to be loved by the devil, too."

Voters express a similar anguish. While Lieberman was working the crowd at a Norwalk Italian festival, he was greeted by Mike Vano Jr., an 80-year-old Navy World War II veteran. After shaking the senator's hand, Vano conceded that he could not decide which Democrat will get his vote. "I like the man. I like what he's done," Vano said of Lieberman. "But I don't like that war."

At a campaign stop last Monday at Sweet Rexie's, a candy store in South Norwalk, Conn., Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal California Democrat, vouched for Lieberman's Democratic bona fides before a group of local businesswomen. Boxer's visit was part of an effort by the Lieberman camp to convince Connecticut Democrats that he is still one of them.

"This is what I know," Boxer said. "You've got a good Democrat here." At a rally later that day in Waterbury, former president Bill Clinton assured 2,000 Lieberman supporters: "He is a good Democrat, he is a good man, and he'll do you proud."

A July 20 Quinnipiac University survey showed likely Democratic primary voters favoring Lamont 51 percent to 47 percent over Lieberman, a lead that is statistically insignificant because it falls within the margin of error. Lieberman trails among voters making over $30,000 per year, those with college degrees, and all age groups except senior citizens. Lieberman had held substantial leads in previous polls.

Some political observers think the seeds of Lieberman's problems with Connecticut voters were planted in 2000, when Al Gore picked him as his vice presidential running mate and as a precaution Lieberman refused to give up his bid for a third Senate term. "It's called covering your bases, rather than being a loyal party guy," said John M. Orman, a Fairfield University politics professor who briefly challenged Lieberman before Lamont entered the picture.

While laying the foundation for his own presidential bid in 2004, Lieberman criticized Gore for mishandling their 2000 campaign by sounding a populist tone instead of appealing more to centrists. He showed interest in the Republicans' plan for overhauling Social Security, he voted for a Republican energy bill that Democrats decried, he supported federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, and he helped clear the path for a vote on Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court confirmation --