Though Republicans still love to portray him as an urban elite, President Obama managed to more or less split the rural vote with John McCain during last year's election. Now, the White House is mounting a summer-long effort to help tailor the administration's agenda to small-town America.

Obama on Tuesday announced a rural tour that will see Cabinet secretaries fan out across the country to discuss issues including broadband deployment, rural health, economic development and agriculture. The tour begins on Wednesday, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack visit Wattsburg, Pa., to discuss telecommunications issues.

"Rural America is vast and diverse, and different communities face different challenges and opportunities," Obama said in a statement. "That's why we're going out to hear directly from the people of rural America about their needs and concerns and what my administration can do to support them."

There were no "Mission Accomplished" banners or other congratulatory trappings in the East Room of the White House Tuesday, when President Obama marked the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns in a decidedly understated fashion.

At a ceremony recognizing innovative nonprofit programs across the country, Obama paused to recognize the transfer of control to Iraq's government and security forces and reaffirm a goal of removing all U.S. combat forces from that country by the end of 2011.

"Iraq's leaders must now make some hard choices necessary to resolve key political questions, to advance opportunity, and to provide security for their towns and their cities. In this effort, America will be a strong partner to the Iraqi people on behalf of their security and prosperity," Obama said, before recognizing the sacrifices of American troops.

If President Obama hopes to make good on his promise to retool the U.S. health system, he'll almost certainly have to talk Congress into changing the tax treatment for employer-sponsored medical coverage.

Top administration officials acknowledge that an overhaul as sweeping as Obama envisions will require policymakers to look for new sources of money to pay for the changes -- and that the most straightforward way of making the numbers work is by confronting a provision in the federal tax code that reduced tax collections an estimated $246 billion in 2007. Senior adviser David Axelrod reiterated the message Sunday on ABC's "This Week," saying health care was too important to sink on purely mathematical questions.

The tax exclusion exempts health insurance premiums paid on workers' behalf from federal income and payroll taxes. It dates to World War II, when employers subject to wage and price controls decided to plow excess profits into health benefits in order to attract and keep workers.

The question now is how would Congress reel in the tax exclusion?

House Democrats have their talking point about the cost of the climate change bill, and they’ve been hammering it all day. The average family would pay about “the cost of a postage stamp per day,” as House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said on Fox News this morning.

But House Republicans have spent the day repeating a different quote from President Obama: that “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” under his proposal for a cap and trade system for limiting carbon emissions. “President Obama has said himself that, under this cap-and-trade plan, electricity rates will skyrocket,” Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., said at a press conference. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., repeated the charge on the House floor.

Oops! That wasn’t a very smart thing for Obama to say about the House climate change bill, was it? There’s only one catch: Obama wasn’t talking about the House bill, because it didn’t exist yet. The quote is from a year-and-a-half old interview Obama gave to the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board in January 2008, and it was about the more general cap-and-trade proposal he put out during the campaign.

The White House energy team was working overtime Friday afternoon to line up enough House votes to deliver one of President Obama's biggest legislative priorities: a comprehensive energy bill (HR 2454) that would regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama, climate czar Carol M. Browner, Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu were among the officials working over undecided Democrats on the hill. One message was a no vote would draw into question Democrats' ability to lead. Officials also were knocking down criticism from Greenpeace USA and other some quarters of the political left that the bill was insubstantial and put politics before science.

Obama put in one more public plug for the measure during a midday news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying it represented "enormous progress from where we have been."

The Obama administration is pursuing so many legislative initiatives at once that even seasoned policy wonks can find it difficult to keep track of everything.

Over in the west wing, top aides and advisers manage the task by breaking the year down into four quarters, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel explained to reporters at a press breakfast on Thursday.

Kind of like a football game. Or a longish opera.

The first quarter was focused on winning enactment of the $787 billion economic stimulus package (PL 111-5), reauthorizing and expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP (PL 111-3) and rolling out the president's fiscal 2010 budget plan. Emanuel said he's particularly pleased that the SCHIP expansion allowed legal immigrant children who have been in the United States for less than five years to enroll in the program, fulfilling a priority of Hispanic groups and immigrant advocates.

President Obama may or may not be serious about considering a rewrite of the medical malpractice laws as part of the health care overhaul. But today’s session of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee showed exactly how far the idea is getting in a Democratic Congress: nowhere.

When Obama spoke to the American Medical Association last week, he suggested that doctors’ fear of malpractice lawsuits should be part of the health care discussions. He didn’t go as far as the AMA wanted — he wouldn’t endorse caps on malpractice awards — but he at least put the issue on the table, saying it will be hard for doctors to make needed changes to the health care system if they’re “constantly looking over their shoulders for fear of lawsuits.”

So this afternoon, Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire — otherwise known as “Almost Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg” — tried to amend the HELP Committee bill to cap damages awards for obstetrician-gynecologists. He failed. But at least it was an entertaining failure — because it showed what happens when you try to do something like that with doctors and lawyers sitting on the same committee.

President Obama has gone out of his way to defer to Congress on some his biggest legislative priorities in the areas of health care, energy, education and immigration. And his detached position on the political upheaval in Iran prompted skeptics on Capitol Hill to wonder if the president was leading or allowing events to dictate a response.

Time, then, for the commander-in-chief to bring out the stick hidden under his desk and silence those questioning his resolve.

On Wednesday, Obama issued the first veto threat of his presidency, stating he would refuse to sign the House's version of the fiscal 2010 defense authorization bill (HR 2647) if it includes either of two provisions: $369 million in advanced fiscal 2011 procurement funds for the F-22 aircraft or $603 million for development and procurement of the alternative engine program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday showed off the early fruits of his efforts to assist higher education: a simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, or FAFSA, that he said would make it much easier for students to seek federally backed loans and other assistance.

But the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and sometimes pickup basketball partner of President Obama's told a White House press briefing that other, potentially bigger changes are in the works, including new financial incentives for colleges that keep tuition affordable.

The Obama administration wants to lean on colleges to control costs while it proposes more financial assistance for poor students. For good reason.

Was it our imagination, or was President Obama showing flashes of anger on Tuesday while explaining his new, tougher tone on the political upheaval in Iran?

Obama opened his fourth solo White House news conference with his strongest condemnation yet of the Tehran regime, declaring, "No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice."

By calling out authorities for threats, beatings and imprisonments, and invoking the widely viewed scene of a young woman bleeding to death from an apparent gunshot wound, Obama departed from his detached, measured approach to the Iranian crisis -- one predicated on respecting Iranian sovereignty and not making the U.S. a convenient scapegoat for Iranian authorities.

The White House is trying out a new argument to ease concerns over those sky-high estimates of the cost of overhauling the health care system. The federal government wouldn’t really be spending more money on health care, the argument goes — just shifting money that’s already in the system and spending it more efficiently.

It’s a dangerous argument for the White House to make, though, because it’s too easily shot down.

On ABC’s Good Morning America this morning, Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, used the argument to dismiss the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates that various versions of the health care bill could cost anywhere from $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion.

“I think people thinking that this is brand-new money that’s being printed,” she said. “There’s already $2 trillion worth of health care that’s being spent already. This is redirecting that money so that it’s more efficiently and effectively used and so that people are getting better quality health care.”

As if health care, energy, the economy and two wars weren't enough, President Obama is set to wade into the potentially explosive politics of immigration.

Obama told the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Friday that he's committed to passing an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws this year and honoring a campaign pledge that resonated mightily among Hispanic voters.

"The American people believe in immigration, but they also believe that we can't tolerate a situation where people come to the United States in violation of the law, nor can we tolerate employers who exploit undocumented workers in order to drive down wages," Obama said. "That's why we're taking steps to strengthen border security, and we must build on those efforts. We must also clarify the status of millions who are here illegally, many who have put down roots."

One of the big concerns liberals have about the health care overhaul effort is that President Obama and congressional Democrats will make bipartisanship a goal in itself, compromising the bill into mush to pick up a handful of Republican votes.

Now, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the acting chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, is making it clear that he sees bipartisanship as less important than getting a health care bill he considers effective.

“I certainly would love to have bipartisan support in the committee for the final product. But my goal here is to write a good bill. My goal is not bipartisanship,” Dodd told reporters this afternoon. “That can help you get to a good bill, but it’s not an end in itself.”

President Obama may have a friendly Congress controlled by his own party, but his firing of the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service raised enough suspicions that the White House is trying to head off an investigation by Congress.

This morning, Rep. Edolphus Towns of New York, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked White House counsel Gregory Craig for a briefing about the president’s reasons for firing Gerald Walpin from the inspector general job. Obama notified Congress last week that he had dismissed Walpin, citing “loss of confidence” in his performance. But that explanation was so vague that even Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, one of Obama’s closest Democratic allies, responded in a statement that “‘Loss of confidence’ is not a sufficient reason.”

Now, however, the White House seems to be getting some traction after issuing a lengthier, and more colorful, explanation last night.

Trying to mend fraying relations with the gay and lesbian community, President Obama late Wednesday afternoon will sign a presidential memorandum that extends benefits such as long-term care and sick leave to same-sex partners of federal workers. However, the memorandum does not confer a long-sought goal of gay rights groups: full health coverage to those partners.

Obama's administration has been under increasing pressure to make good on the president's campaign pledges to repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (PL 104-199), which discourages same-sex marriages, as well as the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. But the stakes were raised on June 11, when the Justice Department filed a brief to dismiss a lawsuit by a married same-sex couple in California that sought to invalidate the Clinton-era law. The Justice Department said the law "reflects a cautiously limited response to society's still-evolving understanding of the institution of marriage."

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Wednesday defended the filing, which at one point compares same-sex unions to incestuous relations. The president is responsible for upholding federal laws, even those he disagrees with, Gibbs explained. He added Obama hopes to work with Congress this year to repeal the law.

Congress may have its hands full overhauling the health care system over the next several weeks, but President Obama is about to set the stage for another priority: overhauling job training programs and the community college system.

In a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council this morning, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Obama will propose a new initiative “in the next couple of weeks” that will call for “the rewriting of all legislation related to job training and vocational ed in the country” — with a special emphasis on giving more funding and other support to the community college system.

Obama has already said he wants all Americans to have at least one year of post-high-school education. But Emanuel’s comments — which drew heavily on his own work with community colleges when he was in the House — suggested that Obama will try to elevate the importance of community colleges so they’re not constantly overshadowed in the political dialogue by four-year colleges and universities.

Experts are giving mixed reviews to the Obama administration's sweeping proposal for regulating the financial system, saying it smacks of a political compromise over how much authority to give the Federal Reserve.

The proposal, which will be unveiled Wednesday afternoon and already has been outlined in an administration white paper, portends a major overhaul of the Fed's responsibilities, by giving the central bank authority to oversee "systemically risky" financial institutions whose collapse would threaten the broader economy. These banks and financial houses will be subject to tougher federal oversight and tougher capital requirements, and the Fed would have the power to dissolve them in the event of their failure.

However, the administration plan would limit the Fed's emergency-lending authority, by forcing it to first seek approval from the Treasury Department. And a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, will assume some of the Fed's traditional responsibilities overseeing products like mortgages and credit cards.

Much of the proposal has to be approved by Congress, which, no doubt, will alter key provisions.

President Obama has regularly paid homage to ailing Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., for showing leadership trying to revamp the U.S. health care system. But now that the Congressional Budget Office has put a $1 trillion price tag on a preliminary draft of a Kennedy health bill and concluded it would reduce the ranks of uninsured Americans by about one-third, or 16 million, administration officials are trying to put just a bit of space between the White House and the liberal icon.

Team Obama is acutely sensitive to concerns that it is creating an expensive government-supervised health system -- a charge that congressional Republicans are lobbing with glee.

Obama had barely finished addressing the American Medical Association on the need for an overhaul plan Monday when GOP senators and members pounced on the CBO forecast, charging that "the Democratic plan" Kennedy crafted would force millions of working Americans to lose the care they get now, by creating a public insurance option that would compete with private health plans.

Normally, there’s not a lot of daylight between President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada — at least, not much that gets exposed to public view. Today, though, Reid released a public letter to Obama that seems designed with one purpose in mind: to look more pro-Israel than Obama did in his speech in Cairo earlier this month.

There’s something weird about the whole idea of Reid sending a public letter to Obama in the first place. As the Senate majority leader, and especially as a former mentor who helped raise Obama’s profile in the Senate, Reid can pick up the phone and call Obama anytime he wants. So it’s fair to conclude that any public letter has some broader message Reid is trying to convey to the political world — especially as he gets ready to run for re-election next year.

In this case, Reid’s letter is designed to put the spotlight back on the Palestinians’ responsibilities in pursuing Middle East peace, and on the importance of stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Obama made some Jewish groups nervous in his Cairo speech with his comments about Israel’s need to stop building settlements and Iran’s right to pursue peaceful nuclear power.

The announced re-election of hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is prompting calls in Congress and hawkish quarters of the foreign policy community for President Obama to get tough with the Tehran regime.

Strange, then, that reports out of the Middle East suggest Obama is getting ready to replace his special envoy to Iran, Dennis Ross, a former Middle East envoy in the Clinton administration, whom the Iranian regime has reportedly refused to recognize because of his Jewish background and pro-Israel leanings.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported Monday that Ross could be ousted within days and reassigned to a position dealing with regional issues in the Middle East.

By asking lawmakers to drop a provision of the war spending bill that would have banned the release of photos showing U.S. troops abusing detainees, President Obama has given new hints about how he’s willing to use his executive authority.

He’ll use it to help rescue a stalled bill — since the photos provision was threatening to sink the war funding legislation — but he’s not claiming that Congress has no business telling him what to do.

In his letter to congressional appropriators yesterday, Obama pointed out that he is already fighting the release of the photos in the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, and noted that the Justice Department is about to take the appeal to the Supreme Court. But the top priority in Congress must be to pass the supplemental appropriations bill to give the troops the funding they need, Obama wrote, and the photos provision “would unnecessarily complicate the essential objective of supporting the troops, and would accomplish no substantive purpose.”

President George W. Bush may be forever linked with faith-based initiatives due to his aggressive efforts to allow religious organizations to provide government-funded services. But it's President Obama who could yet turn out to be the chief executive who winds up most expanding the possibilities of government partnering with faith-based groups.

Joshua DuBois, a special assistant to the president and executive director of the rechristened White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, outlined the current administration's more expansive view of collaborations during an apperance Thursday at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Instead of "leveling the playing field" for federal contacting to faith-based groups -- which became a presidential obsession for much of Bush's eight years in office -- Obama is trying to involve religious groups in more extensive policy discussions.

This may be one of those legislative dances that lead to nothing, but there are more signs that Senate Democrats are at least thinking about alternatives to the government-run health care plan many had wanted to compete with private insurance.

And, at least for now, President Obama isn’t absolutely ruling out an alternative, either.

This afternoon, Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, who has been one of the most vocal supporters of the so-called public option, said Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana has asked him to talk with Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota about his alternative: set up publicly owned co-ops to offer health insurance, rather than a Medicare-like government plan.

It took a few months, but anti-abortion forces are set to force a showdown over the Obama administration's family planning policies.

The National Right to Life Committee and like-minded groups are pressing House members to reject a State Department reauthorization bill (HR 2410) due to be debated today, because it would create an Office for Global Women's Issues charged with promoting "women's empowerment internationally."

The groups contend this is a back-door way for American diplomats to micromanage reproductive rights abroad, particularly the right to abortion. Abortion foes have been deeply suspicious of the administration's motives ever since President Obama on his second day in office invalidated a prohibition on sending U.S. funds to groups that perform or promote abortion overseas.

President Obama continues to enjoy strong public approval ratings in virtually every category, except when it comes to spending and the deficit.

And though White House strategists swear they don't fixate on day-to-day blips in public opinion, they surely are concerned that the administration's budget proposals are projected to swell the deficit above $1.8 trillion this fiscal year -- a record in dollar terms and also the biggest deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product since the end of World War II.

So it was hardly coincidence that Obama on Tuesday took a high-profile vow of fiscal responsibility by calling for a return to statutory "pay-as-you-go" treatment for legislation. The deficit-control rules were first written into law in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (PL 101-508), but Republicans who controlled Congress for most of the current decade allowed them to lapse at the end of fiscal 2002, preferring to require offsets for new entitlement spending but not for tax cuts.

The Obama administration usually shows disdain for chronological milestones and what top officials derisively refer to as "Hallmark holidays." But with concern mounting that stimulus dollars aren't flowing fast enough to make a difference in economically stressed communities, the White House on Monday issued a new spending plan to guide the second hundred days of the implementation the economic recovery package (PL 111-5) that Congress passed in February.

The so-called "Roadmap to Recovery" spotlights ten major initiatives the administration says will save or create 600,000 jobs. The projects, enumerated on the White House web site recovery.gov range from creating 125,000 summer jobs for youths to breaking ground on 2,300 construction projects at military facilities around the country. Other steps include expanding service at more than 1,100 community health centers and accelerating maintenance repairs at 98 airports and on more than 1,500 highway projects.

"Our measure of progress is the progress the American people see in their own lives," said President Obama, who was presented the list by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a Cabinet meeting . "And until that progress is steady and solid; we're going to keep moving forward. We will not grow complacent or rest."

Guess the liberal House Democrats couldn’t let the centrists go unchallenged. A day after the Blue Dog Coalition declared they can only support a government-run health care plan if it has lots of limits, the Congressional Progressive Caucus said they won’t support it if it has any of those limits.

It’s not a surprise that the progressives would respond that way, but the statement is yet more proof that President Obama and House Democratic leaders will have a difficult balance to strike to get health care overhaul legislation through the House. Even though the House is considered the “easier” of the two chambers — it’s more easily controlled than the Senate, and there are no filibusters — the debate proves the White House can’t take the House for granted.

Friday's news that the economy shed another 345,000 jobs in May triggered one of those "good news, bad news" moments at the White House and sent critics and supporters of the economic stimulus package (PL 111-5) into heavy spin mode one more time.

The job losses were lower than had been feared, which almost qualifies as a cause for celebration for an administration increasingly intent on demonstrating that its $787 billion pump-priming of the economy is working.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who's minding the store while President Obama travels in Europe, met with Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer and his chief economist, Jared Bernstein, then tried to sustain the administration's careful management of public expectations in remarks to reporters.

If President Obama is going to push hard for the health care bill to include a government-run plan to compete with private insurance — a goal he campaigned on and repeated yesterday — he’s not just going to have to convince Republicans. He’s also going to have to convince the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Democrats who could cause him trouble in the House.

This morning, the Blue Dogs released a set of conditions they say the so-called public option should meet, all of which are designed to make it as un-Medicare-like as possible. It’s clear that the group isn’t convinced there should be a public option in the first place, so the statement suggests that the White House and the chairs of congressional committees will have to decide how far they can really go to win Blue Dog votes.

If there is a public option, the Blue Dogs want to make sure it doesn’t use Medicare reimbursement rates as a guide for its own payment rates. They also want to make sure hospitals and doctors aren’t banned from participating if they don’t take Medicare — a condition that would remove a major source of leverage if the Obama administration wants to crack down on providers who won’t treat Medicare patients.

For the most part, President Obama has taken a hands-off approach to the health care overhaul effort, outlining general principles and letting Congress write the bill. Today, though, he made a few specific requests in writing, including one that seems more important to him than most: He wants a “hardship waiver” from a proposed requirement that all Americans buy health insurance.

In a letter to Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, Obama declared that “if we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must make health care affordable. If we do end up with a system where people are responsible for their own insurance, we need to provide a hardship waiver to exempt Americans who cannot afford it.”

That statement shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who remembers the Democratic presidential candidate debates last year, in which Obama steadfastly refused to require coverage of individuals — except children — and argued that most uninsured Americans lack coverage not because they don’t want it, but because they can’t afford it.

There’s a pretty big gap in calls for congressional oversight of President Obama’s decision to invest another $30 billion in General Motors, and it’s pretty much along the lines you’d expect. Democratic leaders aren’t bothered enough to ask a lot of questions about the investment plan. Republicans are bothered enough that they’re about to demand that Congress vote on it.

Republican Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska says he has filed an amendment to the tobacco legislation currently on the Senate floor that would require both chambers to either approve or reject Obama’s move, which gives the federal government a 60 percent share of the equity in the struggling auto company. He’s hoping the amendment could come up on the Senate floor on Thursday.

“It’s remarkable what we’re seeing: General Motors has been nationalized, we own a 60 percent share, and not a single vote was cast on that plan,” Johanns told reporters at a press conference this afternoon. “I don’t see how you could argue against congressional oversight in a matter of this significance.”

When Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus laughs, you know President Obama and Congress don’t have their health care plan locked down yet.

This afternoon, Obama met at the White House with Baucus and the other Senate Democrats from the chamber’s two health care panels: Finance and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee. After the meeting, all pledged full speed ahead on health care, and Baucus said the goal was to have a bill on Obama’s desk by October.

But when asked if the president and Senate Democrats had talked about how to pay for it — perhaps the most difficult part of all — the Montana Democrat’s laugh told pretty much everything we need to know.

“There was some discussion of that,” he said. “It’s all on the table, and we’ll figure that out.”

Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman was the kind of Republican who genuinely made Democrats nervous — a moderate governor who might have been one of the Republicans’ strongest candidates to retake the White House in 2012. So a couple of weeks ago, President Obama found a clever solution. He sent Huntsman to China.

Today, Obama again reached across the aisle for a key administration appointment — nominating Rep. John M. McHugh of New York, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, to become the new secretary of the Army. Once again, Obama will get credit for stocking his administration with more Republicans. And once again, there’s a political side benefit — a chance for the Democrats to win his seat in upstate New York.

The last time Congress tried to overhaul the health care system, most Americans didn’t see any personal stake in it, other than possibly the rationed care the critics warned them about.

Today, White House officials gave another example of how they’re going to help lawmakers make a better case this time. They released a report predicting that most Americans’ income will go up if the federal government can get health care costs under control.

The report, “The Economic Case for Health Care Reform,” by the Council of Economic Advisers, predicts that the annual income for a typical family of four would be $2,600 higher in 2020 than it would have been without an overhaul — and nearly $10,000 higher in 2030. That’s because the increases in efficiency and lower deficits would help the economy grow faster than it would have otherwise, according to the report.

There’s still no real evidence that Judge Sonia Sotomayor needs to campaign that hard to get confirmed to the Supreme Court. But she’s going to try anyway, starting tomorrow, with meetings with 10 — count ‘em, 10 — senators in one day.

She has heard they filibuster sometimes, right?

According to the White House, Sotomayor will meet tomorrow with the top four Senate leaders from both parties: Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, and Minority Leader Jon Kyl of Arizona. Also on the itinerary are Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican (for now)(for now) on the Judiciary Committee.

It’s a little early to call anyone the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, but Mitt Romney would be on most party insiders’ shortlists. So when he accuses President Obama of short-changing the defense budget, as he did in a speech at the Heritage Foundation this morning, you know we’re getting a reasonably good preview of one of the criticisms Obama will face in his re-election campaign.

And, more likely than not, it’s one of the criticisms he’ll also hear from congressional Republicans between now and then.

Romney claims that Obama’s plans call for reducing the defense budget from nearly 4 percent of GDP now to 3 percent by the end of the next decade, a claim Heritage analysts have also made based on Obama’s long-term budget proposals. That’s not enough, Romney says, to do everything that will need to be done to maintain U.S. military strength over that time: modernize the nuclear arsenal, be prepared to fight land wars and counterinsurgencies, replace aging military equipment, help counterinsurgency efforts in other countries, and be ready to defend against communications disruptions.