It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security they have kind of got that principle backwards.

Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying unprecedented profits and access with this Administration. Yet the Republicans' prescription drug plan for seniors has been a colossal failure and over 43 million Americans wake up every morning without health insurance.

As efforts to fix this failure at the Veterans Administration continue I also intend to persist in demanding answers and action on the establishment of a new clinic to serve the veterans in North Central Washington.

Within the U.S. the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here I fear the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo.

The Bush Administration's failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world.

While I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high number of jobs created in April the fact is that job creation during this recovery period has significantly lagged both historical experience in recovery and the projections of the Bush Administration.

This Bush administration has a growing credibility gap maybe even a credibility chasm on environmental policy. The President has lost the trust of the American people when it comes to the environment.

The Obama administration now has regulations that tells them that they can no longer promote marriage to these young girls. They can no longer promote marriage as a way of avoiding poverty and bad choices that they make in their life. They can no longer even teach abstinence education. They have to be neutral with respect to how people behave.

The Bush-Cheney administration had betrayed some basic American values. So there was hunger for change.

The reality of split government puts a premium on creativity within the administration. President Obama needs to put the right people in charge of the agencies and then have them push the bounds of administrative power to change policy through those agencies. President Obama has a pretty good track record of this.