Op-Ed Columnist - The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency

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By FRANK RICH

WEDNESDAY’S health care rally was one of President Obama’s finest hours. It was so fine it couldn’t be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House show.

Obama’s urgent script didn’t need such cheesy theatrics. At last he took ownership of what he called “my proposal,” stating concisely three concrete ways the bill would improve America’s broken health care system. At last he pushed for a majority-rule, up-or-down vote in Congress. At last he conceded that bipartisan agreement between two parties with “honest and substantial differences” on fundamental principles wasn’t happening. At last he mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss — insurance companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed 13 times.

There was only one problem. This finest hour arrived hastily and tardily. At 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, who was watching? Of those who did watch or caught up later, how many bought the president’s vow to finish the job “in the next few weeks”? We’ve heard this too many times before. Last May Obama said he would have a bill by late July. In July he said he wanted it “done by the fall.” The White House’s new date for final House action — specified as March 18 by Robert Gibbs, the press secretary — is already in jeopardy.

“They are waiting for us to act,” Obama said on Wednesday of the American people. “They are waiting for us to lead.” Actually, they have given up waiting. Some 80 percent of the country believes that “nothing can be accomplished” in Washington, according to an Ipsos/McClatchy poll conducted a week ago. The percentage is just as high among Democrats, many of whom admire the president but have a sinking sense of disillusionment about his ability to exercise power.

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Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts. And it won’t even be the opposition’s fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Obama does eke out his victory. Republicans claim that if he does so by “ramming through” the bill with the Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They’d also have to contend with this country’s congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We’ve already forgotten about Afghanistan — until the next bloodbath.

The 2010 election will instead be fought about the economy, as most elections are, especially in a recession whose fallout remains severe. But that battle may be even tougher for this president and his party — and not just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we’ve witnessed during Obama’s yearlong health care march — typified by the missed deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt shifts in political tone and strategy — won’t go away once the bill does. This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects it.

Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures as an attempt to impose “socialism” on a conservative nation. The truth is that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is a closet commie.

The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down.

But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful — both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.

Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a “pragmatic agenda.” But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.

That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo “nonideological” enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.

He cannot wait much longer. The rise in credit-card rates, as well as the drop in consumer confidence, home sales and bank lending, all foretell more suffering ahead for those who don’t work on Wall Street. But on these issues the president, too timid to confront the financial industry backers of his own campaign (or their tribunes in his own administration) and too fearful of sounding like a vulgar partisan populist, has taken to repeating his health care performance.

And so leadership on financial reform, as with health care, has been delegated to bipartisan Congressional negotiators poised to neuter it. The protracted debate that now seems imminent — over whether a consumer protection agency will be in the Fed or outside it — is again about the arcana of process and bureaucratic machinery, not substance. Since Obama offers no overarching narrative of what financial reform might really mean to Americans in their daily lives, Americans understandably assume the reforms will be too compromised or marginal to alter a system that leaves their incomes stagnant (at best) while bailed-out bankers return to partying like it’s 2007. Even an unimpeachable capitalist titan like Warren Buffett, venting in his annual letter to investors last month, sounds more fired up about unregulated derivatives and more outraged about unpunished finance-industry executives than the president does.

This time Obama doesn’t have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2.

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The Change Agenda At a Crossroads - washingtonpost.com

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From Health Care to Wars to Public Anxiety, Obama's Strength as a Leader Is Tested

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 6, 2009

As President Obama's senior advisers gathered at Blair House at the end of July for a two-day review of their first six months in office, what was meant to be a breath-catching moment of reflection was colored by a sense of unease.

To a sleep-deprived White House staff, the achievements since taking office that chilly morning of Jan. 20 seemed self-evident. The agenda of necessity they had carried out to stabilize the economy was rapidly making room for Obama's agenda of choice: changing the way Americans receive health care, generate and consume energy, and learn in public school classrooms.

But opinion polls showed support for the president and his policies dipping sharply, and the disheartening numbers had shaken the confidence of some of Obama's staff. Vice President Biden addressed the anxiousness when the Cabinet and senior staff met in the State Dining Room in the White House residence the next morning.

"Did you really think this was going to be easy?" Biden said, according to one participant.

The slide has only quickened. Emerging from an angry August recess, Obama is weakened politically and faces growing concerns, particularly from within his own party, over his strength as a leader. Dozens of interviews this summer in six states -- from Maine to California -- have revealed a growing angst and disappointment over the administration's present course.

Democratic officials and foot soldiers, who have experienced the volatile public mood firsthand, are asking Obama to take a more assertive approach this fall. His senior advisers say he will, beginning with his Wednesday address to Congress on health care.

His challenge, however, is more fundamental. Obama built his successful candidacy and presidency around a leadership style that seeks consensus. But he is entering a period when consensus may not be possible on the issues most important to his administration and party. Whatever approach he takes is likely to upset some of his most ardent supporters, many of whom are unwilling to compromise at a time when Democrats control the White House and Congress.

"Until last week, he was still trying to play ball with the Republicans who said, 'We're going to bring you down,' " said Karen Davis, 42, a musician from Jersey City who raised funds for Obama last year. "Now I'm thinking, 'This isn't what I voted for.' "

Obama has brought change over his first seven months in office, often through direct government intervention, to areas as different as the conflict in Iraq and the American auto industry.

The economy is improving and bailed-out banks are paying back the money with interest. A smooth Supreme Court selection has brought the first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, to the highest bench. America's standing in the world is improving, according to many polls, after Obama's widely broadcast address to the Muslim world, prohibition of torture in interrogation and decision to close the military brig at Guantanamo Bay.

But Obama's spending plans that will require $9 trillion in new borrowing over the next decade have alarmed conservatives in his own party, and he could not head off an investigation by his own Justice Department into the Bush administration's interrogation policies that he had made clear he did not want. Unemployment is still rising. His decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, deploying thousands of additional U.S. troops, has not come with a clear plan for how to leave.

Even though polls show fallen approval ratings, Obama remains more personally popular than his policies. His senior advisers say his leadership strength derives from the ability to remain calm in the maelstrom of 24-hour news cycles, a mark of his once-long-shot 2008 campaign. The anti-government anger that has risen from a thousand town hall meetings over the recess is now testing Obama's celebrated communication skills and a political style one confidante described as "unsentimental."

"I know there is great value associated in this town with the straight right jab and the occasional knee to the groin," said David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser. "He'll throw the jab when he sees it, when he feels it's necessary. But he's not likely to throw the knee."

Economy Clouds View

The ferment beyond the Beltway and the challenge it poses to Obama's agenda this fall is apparent off the Orange Blossom Trail, a wide commercial strip that runs out of Orlando, past the check-cashing stores, self-storage centers and adult emporiums.

The Hunter's Creek development is a mix of 8,700 homes and condominiums, a middle-class sanctuary with neighborhoods named Falcon Pointe and Osprey Links. Like much of Central Florida, it has burst open along with the housing bubble. Foreclosure filings are pending against 1,000 properties there.

On a recent evening, Rep. Alan Grayson, a freshman Democrat, arrived for a housing forum, which like many of his recent public events involved a police presence. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Grayson offered grim if unsurprising figures in a region where even Disney has laid off hundreds of workers this year.

"We all know that what we need is a healthy economy," Grayson told them. "And it's in times like these that we discover what kind of people we are."

In his summer travels, Obama has argued that the stimulus program's $787 billion mix of spending and tax cuts, the bank bailouts, and the decision to prop up General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy have nudged the economy toward recovery.

But the view from the Hunter's Creek Community Center, where 150 of Grayson's constituents had assembled to hear how the government intended to help them keep their homes, was shaded by fear over the president's ventures into the private sector and other planned reforms.

"A large portion of our problem right now is the result of our own fault," John Kulifay, a stout, balding retired engineer, said when called on to speak. "The other problem is the government itself. Please keep your fingers out of this. Let us fix it."

Applause erupted, along with the cry, "Stop the redistribution!"

The anxiety stretches from New England to the Pacific Ocean, judging by recent visits, and is rooted in the measures Obama has implemented to shore up the economy.

A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly, said that "there were so many things we had to do, and those are the things that feed into the skepticism that government is taking over everything or can't get it right."

"These were things we had no interest in doing," the official said. "That's the irony."

Political Capital

Activist presidents always have spent political capital pursuing their goals, and Obama has proved the same. As he told volunteers at a health-care rally last month, "The easiest thing to do as a politician is to do nothing."

Before Obama's inauguration, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, set out the administration's goals for the year.

Major reform targets, particularly in the health care and energy sectors, would not be staged one after the other, as in past administrations, but pursued simultaneously at a time when the private sector had been battered by the financial crisis.

Emanuel's logic was a warrior's -- that is, the side with the initiative succeeds. Since then, the administration has pushed through a dozen pieces of legislation with little obvious public resistance, including measures to expand health insurance for children, ensure pay equity, regulate tobacco and protect consumers from credit card companies.

But the strategy will likely cost Obama an energy reform bill this year, as the health-care debate drags on past the provisional deadlines the administration had set.

"From a timing point of view, we just don't know if it's possible," another senior administration official said on condition of anonymity in order to describe an internal assessment.

The breadth of Obama's reform plans, coming after the expensive and interventionist economic rescue measures, is also riling conservatives in places like Lebanon, Pa.

"I don't believe this is just about health care," Katy Abram, a stay-at-home mom, told Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) at a recent town hall forum there. "This is about the systematic dismantling of this country."

As the audience cheered, Abrams, who is 35, continued, "I've never been interested in politics. You have awakened the sleeping giant."

Smaller than it was a decade ago, the Republican Party has shed many moderates, leaving few who are willing to work even with a Democratic president who has promised less partisan governing.

"At the root of his difficulties is a misperception on his part of the root cause of the problem," said Obama critic Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University professor and presidential scholar. "He sees the problem as Washington. Fine. But the basic cause is the evolution of the Republican Party."

Like Lyndon B. Johnson, Obama is pursuing a broad reform agenda with large Democratic majorities in Congress.

But Wilentz said it is harder for Obama to work across party lines without the collection of moderate Republican senators present in Johnson's time. The need for him to do so has been made more urgent by the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and the filibuster-proof majority he represented.

"You can have an out-of-touch Republican Party, but in Washington that does great damage to reform efforts," Wilentz said. "He has done what he can to put the country on a new track, and in doing so he can't help but disappoint some of his supporters. But it's not a fan club."

Extreme Street Theater

At a late August town hall forum in Spring Valley, Calif., Robert Billburg, a 49-year-old Air Force veteran and Red Cross worker, watched a scene familiar to YouTube fans this summer.

Police conducted body searches at the gymnasium door. Signs depicted Obama as the Joker; others called him a Nazi. Liberal demonstrators dressed as cartoon-version fat cats in tuxedos and evening gowns held up signs reading, "Save health care, by a Congressman." The far edges of America's political spectrum were acting out street theater.

"I think the best description of him is a centrist technocrat," Billburg said of Obama, whom he supported. "So those on the extremes are going to be very disappointed."

Increasingly, they are.

During the campaign, Obama pledged to run an administration less concerned by partisanship than by ensuring effective government.

But from his first weeks in office, as his administration worked to secure a stimulus bill the president believed was essential to preventing a broader economic collapse, winning Republican support has been hard. Even the pursuit of it is now viewed by his Democratic base as a sign of weakness.

Only three Republican senators voted for the stimulus measure, written in large part by Congressional leaders but pushed through in the final hours by the White House. One of them -- Specter -- is now a Democrat. Not a single House Republican voted for it.

At the time, several senior administration officials said the amount of Republican support for a White House initiative would no longer be a measure of its success.

Yet Obama has allowed weeks of bipartisan Senate negotiations to take place over health-care legislation, and he has signaled a willingness to abandon a government-run insurance option to secure bipartisan support.

Many of Obama's senior advisers were schooled in Washington politics at least in part on Capitol Hill, including Emanuel, a former House member and pragmatist like the president who thinks allowing Congress to take the lead on legislation is generally the best way to ensure its passage.

But to Democrats like Grayson, who is defending Obama's agenda before sometimes unruly audiences, the president should be more forceful in the face of mounting opposition.

At his recent appearance at the Tiger Bay Club, Grayson told the lunchtime audience of business leaders that "there is a fight in Congress right now, not between Republican and Democrats, but between those who want to help and those who say, 'Thank God we're not helping.' "

Later, in an interview, Grayson said his advice for the president based on his experiences this recess is "to not only combat the lies, but to combat the liars."

"He must recognize that he has reached out his hand to the Republican leadership and they have spat on it," he said.

Holding Onto 'No Drama'

In addressing volunteers from Organizing for America last month, Obama warned those who had been central to the field operation of his grass-roots campaign that "everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up" in August and September.

It was meant as a warning not to believe the Beltway analysis that Obama, a skilled communicator and player of the long game, was losing control of his message and his broader agenda.

Governing requires the ability to appeal to Congress and the electorate simultaneously, and Obama is attempting to do that with the patience and unflappability that were the hallmarks of his "no drama" campaign.

To Obama and his senior staff, that means ignoring the "cable chatter," the president's catch-all term for media punditry and Hill partisanship, and the Washington ethic of winning in real time.

But a traditionally fractious Democratic Party is also finding that it is easier to remain united against an unpopular Republican administration, as it did during the Bush years, than it is to govern. And Obama stands at its head.

"There is something that has grown into the Democratic DNA over the last 30 years that makes our first reaction fear," said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director. "And we can't keep our fear to ourselves."

Beyond the Beltway, many Democrats say they would be less afraid if Obama appeared less fearful himself, including on issues such as race and the legacy of torture that he has eloquently addressed in the past. In office, Obama has tended to view those subjects largely as distractions from his reform ambitions.

Rickey R. Hendon, a Democratic state senator in Illinois who served with Obama in the legislature there, said the president has always been "conciliatory, a consensus seeker" and that "hasn't changed in Washington, much to his detriment, I believe."

Obama's tentative leadership on race, as the nation's first African American president, has disappointed Hendon, who is also African American.

Even during the controversy over the arrest of the African American Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., which prompted Obama's "beer summit" to smooth hurt feelings, Hendon said the president "did his best to dodge it, to duck and dive."

"He probably does it just to avoid anything that could be racially charged," he said. "I disagree with it, but that's been his mode of operation. Why change now?"

Axelrod said the White House has been receiving advice, much of it unsolicited, to push back harder against the opposition, particularly as the health-care debate heads into the fall legislative session. He said the president intends to do so, but on his own terms.

"He's not going to get punked or pushed around," Axelrod said. "On the other hand, I don't think he's going to fill his day with gratuitous partisan back-and-forth, because it isn't productive and it's not healthy."

Polling director Jon Cohen and staff writers Kari Lydersen, Alec MacGillis, Keith Richburg, Philip Rucker and Karl Vick contributed to this report.

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State of the Nation: Brooks vs Lind - Nation

Franklin D. Roosevelt via last.fm

by Eyal Press

According to David Brooks' latest column, Barack Obama's approval ratings are falling because his administration "has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress." Hmm. On the basis of… what exactly? Appointing extreme liberals such as Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner to bail out the banks and Wall Street? Signaling that inclusion of a "public option" in a healthcare overhaul – the fervent hope of the liberal leadership in Congress – is not essential?

"This is a country that has just lived through an economic trauma caused by excessive spending and debt," argues Brooks, which is why he thinks the "animating issue" among disgruntled citizens is "fiscal restraint." Over at Salon, Michael Lind offers a different view, pointing to some other animating issues, like resentment at the "Wall Street elites who wrecked the economy" while working-class people lost their jobs and houses. Where Brooks counsels fiscal restraint, Lind advises Obama to find his inner Franklin Roosevelt. "We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob," declared FDR in 1936. "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred."

I'm with Lind. For the past three decades, few Democrats have dared to voice such populist sentiments, ceding the ground to Republicans, who have rallied ‘the people' against every special interest imaginable save for the corporations and wealthy elites who have persistently benefited from their policies. Frustrated Democratic strategists have then wondered why the public's anger is misdirected while refusing to look in the mirror and ponder whether perhaps the reason rests in their own party's silence. Passing serious health care reform presents Obama with the perfect opportunity to reverse the equation. So far, he hasn't taken it. The familiar pattern is playing out.

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A new political generation rises in East Timor - Reuters

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By Sunanda Creagh

DILI, Aug 30 (Reuters) - As a student activist in Jakarta, Avelino Coelho da Silva sought refuge in the Austrian embassy to avoid capture by Indonesian troops. Now as East Timor's Secretary of State for Energy Policy, he installs solar power in villages.

Coelho, 46, is likely to be among the next generation of leaders in the tiny, oil and gas-rich nation which voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia exactly a decade ago.

Both Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, 63, who was imprisoned by Indonesia, and President Jose Ramos-Horta, 59, who campaigned abroad to keep East Timor's struggle in the public eye, are independence heroes.

But a new generation of political leaders, most of whom were children or students during Indonesia's rule, is getting ready to take over.

A former Portuguese colony, East Timor was invaded in 1975 by Indonesia. An estimated 180,000 died during the occupation, and the U.N. estimates about 1,000 East Timorese died in the mayhem that surrounded the 1999 vote for independence.

Since then, Dili has struggled to tackle security, social and economic woes including high unemployment, splits in the army, and poor infrastructure, healthcare and education.

"If you look at other members of cabinet, I tell you, 80 to 85 percent are new generation. People no more than 35-45 years old, who grew up in the era of occupation. This is the new generation running the country. They are the hope of this country," said Ramos-Horta.

Damien Kingsbury, an East Timor analyst from Australia's Deakin University, said there are already several people in East Timor ready to take over the reins from Gusmao and Ramos-Horta.

"It's essentially the student generation, members of the student resistance organisations and expat Timorese who went back from Australia and Indonesia," Kingsbury said.

The next elections are due in 2012.

The challenges the new leaders face remain daunting. Many roads are just dirt and gravel, making communication with remote villages tough.

Almost 30 percent of the adult population is illiterate: the young men who hang around on Dili street corners are evidence of the 40 percent jobless rate in a country where average household monthly income is just $27. In parts of Dili, roadside stalls sell cast-off clothes to people who can't afford to buy them new.

Coelho's Rural Electrification Master Plan has brought electricity to 17 isolated villages in just over a year by installing solar power systems, funded by the government but owned, installed and maintained by community cooperatives.

"Now they have electricity for five to six hours a day. Before, they spent $US1 a day to buy kerosene but now they can save $US30 a month and use it for other things," he said.

Max Lane, a political analyst who covers Indonesia and East Timor, said the electrification project had helped build Coelho's reputation.

"There will be other candidates around when the big guys leave politics but Coelho will definitely be in the race."


NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

Ramos-Horta, who survived an assassination attempt in February 2008, said he sees Fernando Lasama de Araujo, the 46-year-old speaker of parliament, as a future leader.

Araujo, who got almost 20 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential elections, was acting president for several months after Ramos-Horta was shot by disgruntled former soldiers. He was also involved in negotiations with the militants, who eventually laid down their arms.

Araujo, from the Democratic Party, says the government cannot just rely on its $5.1 billion Petroleum Fund, where money from oil and gas deals is collected, to fund development.

"We need to get the money from somewhere to accelerate development. I support foreign loans to achieve this," he said.

"After 10 years of independence, we should have achieved more than we have. Water is a very important one and roads, and schools. Until we build a port we cannot attract investors and tourism."

Finance Minister Emilia Pires, 48, who grew up and studied law in Australia, is another leader carving out a name for herself as she tries to increase spending on education, health and infrastructure. Pires is an independent, like some other cabinet members, and is close to Gusmao.

The economy grew 12.8 percent last year and she expects it to expand 8 percent both this year and next.

(For an interview, click on [ID:nJAK518967] )

Her predecessor, Fernanda Borges, an Australian-educated former credit risk analyst who helped set up the Central Payments Office, the forerunner of the Banking and Payments Authority, or central bank, is also considered a future leader.

Borges, 40, quit as finance minister in 2002 after accusing the government of corruption, and formed her own party, the National Unity Party.

East Timor ranked 145th out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index -- on a par with Kazakhstan and below Indonesia.

"I understand my limitations as a member of a small party. I know I don't have the resistance hero image behind me. But with three seats in parliament we can be a voice to say this is wrong and when the government is doing the right thing, we can say this is the right thing too," she told Reuters in an interview.

"We are the new kids on the block but people trust us. (Reporting by Sunanda Creagh in Dili; Editing by Sara Webb and Sanjeev Miglani)

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Fatah Election Brings In Younger Leaders

By ISABEL KERSHNER

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian nationalist party, elected a mostly new leadership committee, ushering in a younger generation and ousting some prominent veterans, according to preliminary results released here on Tuesday.

The new leaders are considered more pragmatic than their predecessors and grew up locally, in contrast to the exile-dominated leadership they are replacing. But many are familiar names who have already played active roles in Palestinian society and the peace process, and their election to the committee is not expected to bring about significant changes in Fatah policies.

Nevertheless, party leaders said they hoped the democratic process would lift Fatah’s popularity, strengthen the party in its dealings with Israel and increase its leverage in reconciliation talks with its main rival, the Islamic group Hamas.

Fourteen of the 18 people elected to the Fatah Central Committee have never served on it before. Among them are the veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat and two former Palestinian Authority security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub and Muhammad Dahlan.

Mr. Rajoub said there had been a “coup” in the party hierarchy as a result of an “honest competition.”

Marwan Barghouti, a popular leader of Fatah’s younger guard, also won a seat, but the post is likely to be largely symbolic for now, because he is currently serving five life terms in an Israeli prison. Mr. Barghouti, 50, was convicted in the deaths of five people during the second intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising that started in 2000.

This election was the first for the Central Committee, Fatah’s main decision-making body, since 1989. It rounded off a weeklong party conference in Bethlehem attended by roughly 2,300 delegates, the party’s first in 20 years and the first ever to be held on Palestinian soil.

By the end, many of the participants seemed buoyant. They said that Fatah, led by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, had emerged from the conference energized and more unified than it had been in years.

The party at the vanguard of peace negotiations with Israel, Fatah has been tarred by corruption, cronyism and infighting. That and a lack of party discipline led to its loss to Hamas in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. The following year, Hamas took over Gaza by force, routing Fatah there.

Many Palestinians also lost faith in the peace talks with Israel, which are now stalled.

Now Fatah must prepare for new Palestinian presidential and parliamentary elections that are provisionally scheduled for early next year.

“Fatah is the strongest movement in Palestinian society,” said Ziad Abu Ein, a member and Barghouti supporter from the Ramallah area. “It will succeed in everything — in peace, in resisting the occupation and in any election.”

One of the old guard who lost his seat in the Central Committee election was Ahmed Qurei, a longtime partner and rival of Mr. Abbas.

Nabil Shaath, another of the older leaders, retained his place on the committee. He noted that the younger members were “not that young,” with many of them now in their 50s.

“It was their first chance to be elected, but they are not novices,” he said.

Khaled Abu Aker contributed reporting.