Anti-obesity plan is 4 years in

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON Wal-Mart is putting special labels on some store-brand products to help shoppers quickly spot healthier items.

Millions of schoolchildren are helping themselves to vegetables from salad bars in their lunchrooms, while kids' meals at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants automatically come with a side of fruit or vegetables and a glass of low-fat milk.

The changes from the food industry are in response to the campaign against childhood obesity Michelle Obama began waging three years ago. More changes are in store.

About one-third of U.S. children are overweight or obese, which puts them at increased risk for any number of life-threatening illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

While there is evidence of modest declines in childhood obesity rates in some parts of the country, the changes are largely because of steps taken before the first lady launched "Let's Move" in February 2010.

With the program entering its fourth year, Obama embarked Wednesday on a two-day promotional tour with stops in Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri. She has been talking up the program on daytime and late-night TV shows, on the radio and in public service announcements with Big Bird. She also plans discussions next week on Google and Twitter.

"We're starting to see some shifts in the trend lines and the data where we're starting to show some improvement," the first lady told SiriusXM host B. Smith in an interview broadcast Tuesday. "We've been spending a lot of time educating and re-educating families and kids on how to eat, what to eat, how much exercise to get and how to do it in a way that doesn't completely disrupt someone's life."

Conservatives accused Obama of going too far and dictating what people should -- and shouldn't -- eat after she played a major behind-the-scenes role in the passage in 2010 of a child nutrition law that required schools to make foods healthier. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in 2008, once brought cookies to a school and called the first lady's efforts a "nanny state run amok."

Other leaders in the effort, such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have felt the backlash, too. Last fall, Bloomberg helped enact the nation's first rule barring restaurants, cafeterias and concession stands from selling soda and other high-calorie drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces.

Despite the criticism, broad public support exists for some of the changes the first lady and the mayor are advocating, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

More than eight in 10 of those surveyed, 84 percent, support requiring more physical activity in schools, and 83 percent favor government providing people with nutritional guidelines about diet and exercise. Seventy percent favor having restaurants put calorie counts on menus, and 75 percent consider being overweight and obesity a serious problem, according to the Nov. 21-Dec. 14 survey by telephone of 1,011 adults.

Food industry representatives say Obama has influenced their own efforts.

Mary Sophos of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's largest food companies, including General Mills and Kellogg's, said an industry effort to label food packages with nutritional content gained momentum after Obama attended one of their meetings in 2010.

"She's not trying to point fingers," Sophos said. "She's trying to get people to focus on solutions."

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The Next Four Years

The Simpson-Bowles commission sketched out a vision of what a Grand Bargain might look like. Obama and John Boehner tried to craft some semi-Grand Bargains. There was a lot of talk at think tanks of what the best combination of tax reform and entitlement reform might be.

The “fiscal-cliff” fiasco has persuaded many smart people that a Grand Bargain is not going to happen any time soon. A political class that botched the fiscal cliff so badly are not going to be capable of a gigantic deal on complex issues. It’s like going into a day care center and asking a bunch of infants to perform “Swan Lake.”

Polarization is too deep. Special interests are too strong. The negotiators are too rusty. Republicans are not going to give up their vision of a low-tax America. Democrats are not willing to change the current entitlement programs.

So as the president enters his second term, there has to be a new controlling narrative, a new strategy for how to spend the next four years.

As you know, I am an earnest, good-government type, so the strategy I’d prefer might be called Learning to Crawl. It would be based on the notion that you have to learn to crawl before you can run. So over the next four years, legislators should work on a series of realistic, incremental laws that would rebuild the habits of compromise, competence and trust.

We could do some education reform, expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers, encourage responsible drilling for natural gas, maybe establish an infrastructure bank. Political leaders would erode partisan orthodoxies and get back into the habit of passing laws together. Then, down the road, their successors could do the big things.

I may be earnest, but I’m not an idiot. I know there is little chance that today’s partisan players are going to adopt this kind of incremental goo-goo approach. It’s more likely that today’s majority party is going to adopt a different strategy, which you might call Kill the Wounded. It’s more likely that today’s Democrats are going to tell themselves something like this:

“We live at a unique moment. Our opponents, the Republicans, are divided, confused and bleeding. This is not the time to allow them to rebuild their reputation with a series of modest accomplishments. This is the time to kick them when they are down, to win back the House and end the current version of the Republican Party.

“First, we change the narrative. The president ran in 2008 against Washington dysfunction, casting blame on both parties. Over the years, he has migrated to a different narrative: The Republicans are crazy. Washington could be working fine, but the Republicans are crazy.

“At every public appearance, the president should double-down on that theme. The Democratic base already believes it. The media is sympathetic. Independents could be persuaded.

“Then, wedge issues. The president should propose no new measures that might unite Republicans, the way health care did in the first term. Instead, he should raise a series of wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class.

“He’s already started with a perfectly designed gun control package, inviting a long battle with the N.R.A. over background checks and magazine clips. That will divide the gun lobby from suburbanites. Then he can re-introduce Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform. That will divide the anti-immigration groups from the business groups (conventional wisdom underestimates how hard it is going to be for Republicans to back comprehensive reforms).

“Then he could invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling — make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy. Along the way, he could highlight women’s issues, social mobility issues (student loans, community college funding) and pick fights on compassion issues, (hurricane relief) — promoting any small, popular spending programs that Republicans will oppose.

“Twice a month, Democrats should force Republicans to cast an awful vote: either offend mainstream supporters or risk a primary challenge from the right.”

Just as Senator Mitch McConnell made defeating President Obama his main political objective, Democrats seem likely to make winning back the House their primary political objective. Experts are divided on how plausible this is, but the G.O.P. is unpopular and the opportunity is there.

This isn’t the Washington I want to cover, but it’s the most likely one. How will Republicans respond to this onslaught? I have no idea.

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George Will complains ‘the Republican Party has been in recent years too southern’ (Daily Caller)

Conservative commentator George Will argued Sunday that the GOP has become “too southern” and that this could have negative electoral ramifications for the party.

“There’s also the problem that the Republican Party has been in recent years too southern,” Will said on ABC’s “This Week,” raising questions as to whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry is the right presidential candidate for the party to nominate. “In the last five presidential cycles, they’ve got 79 percent of their electoral votes from the South. It’s too much. The Republican strategy for years has been carry the 11 states of the Confederacy and Oklahoma and Kentucky, carry the eight states of Mountain West — Arizona and New Mexico to the Canadian border, then spend a sum equal to the gross national product of the Brazil to carry Ohio and then you get to be president. That won’t work anymore partly because Barack Obama did extend the battlefield. And that’s another question about Gov. Perry.” (RELATED: George Will: Obama ultimately blames ‘James Madison for giving us separation of powers’)

Will also criticized Perry for attacking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during the last GOP primary debate “so incompetently.”

“Yes, it’s painful,” Will said of Perry’s debate performance last week. “Donna [Brazile] said it’s still early. It could be late in the sense that we know the field that we’re going to pick from. And long before the Iowa caucuses we may be down to one effectively. Tim Pawlenty got into trouble when he had a chance to attack Romney and he didn’t. Perry is in trouble because he attacked Romney and he did it so incompetently.”

Watch:

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