Organizing for America volunteers have been working to sell the health care reform effort to the public through phone-banking and canvassing. In this video, NationalJournal.com's Theresa Poulson follows one canvasser as he goes door-to-door to promote the administration's plan for overhaul. On the front lines of the message war, the OFA volunteer comes up against some of the same problems that are plaguing the Obama administration.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has snagged Margaret Spellings to be a senior adviser to chamber President Thomas Donohue. Spellings, who was Education secretary during the Bush II administration, will also continue running her own consulting firm. She expects to work with governors and mayors on a variety of issues affecting states and cities.

Spellings, 51, a Houston native, worked on a Texas education reform commission and for the Texas Association of School Boards. She enlisted as political director to George W. Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign and served as senior adviser in the Governor's Mansion.

She enjoys working on education partly because "it implicates kids and a high degree of revenue and taxes, which everybody is an expert on ... it's a highly populist issue." Spellings was the first Bush administration official to appear on Jon Stewart's Daily Show and took center stage on The Colbert Report. "College students are one of the primary audiences for those shows, so you've got to go where your customer is," she says.

Spellings is now starting golf lessons, and she'll soon take her second daughter (a high school junior) to look at colleges. "You have to be heavily into reverse psychology," in dealing with that, she jokes.

Because of the stimulus package, Education successor Arne Duncan will have a lot of money to work with, but the abundance of dough also presents challenges, Spellings says. "They'll have to be very careful about how they implement that funding."
                                                                                           --Gregg Sangillo

By PETER H. STONE

When Texas financier R. Allen Stanford came to Washington in February 2006 to be feted at a celebratory dinner by a group called the Inter-American Economic Council, a few of his friends were in the crowd. They included lobbyists and such members of Congress as then-Reps. Bob Ney and Michael Oxley, both Ohio Republicans.

At the affair, Stanford received a special leadership award from the council, a business-backed group whose activities included underwriting trips for lawmakers to such countries as Antigua, where the Texan ran the Stanford International Bank.

The award was a way for the council to thank Stanford for his largess the prior year. In 2005, 85 percent of the council's budget of $472,000 came from Stanford and his companies, Barry Featherman, the group's president, told National Journal.

Further, Stanford had provided some of his own private planes to the council, enabling about two dozen congressional Republicans, Democrats and staffers to fly to Antigua on educational and pleasure trips.

But until last month, when the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Stanford's bank with misleading investors in an ongoing $8 billion fraud involving certificates of deposit, the Texan had spent years wooing lawmakers and other influential politicos around the world to help expand his businesses, fend off government regulators and seek tax breaks.

Continue reading Financier Was Well Connected In D.C., Internationally

Arthur Brooks, the economist who recently took over as president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, made waves two years ago with a data-heavy book concluding that political conservatives tend to be more generous contributors to charity than their liberal counterparts. The main reason: Conservatives are more likely to be religious and religious folk tend to give more--even to non-religious causes.

So, in light of recent events, I asked him whether liberals were less likely to pay their taxes than conservatives. Brooks diplomatically declined the opportunity for a cheap shot. "There's no evidence for that," he said. There was, he allowed, some evidence that "religious people are more likely to be honest with their taxes than non-religious people, but that's not a political thing." Brooks also said there are some data suggesting that hard-core ideologues at either end of the spectrum "behave less ethically" than those of less extreme views. "I'd love to know the answer," he mused, then quickly reconsidered. "No, actually I'm glad I don't."

For more on the latest internal workings at AEI, check out my upcoming feature in the February 14 issue of National Journal.

                                                                                                      --Julie Kosterlitz