Obama

President Obama is planning to speak in the “near future” on U.S. policy in the Mideast, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.

“It’s a speech to a broader audience than just the Arab world,” Carney said at his televised briefing. He didn’t specify when or where the president will speak, but said it will be in “the relatively near future.”

Obama is scheduled to begin a five-day European trip May 23.

The speech will come as the United States faces a slew of issues in the Middle East, including pro-democracy uprisings in several countries, a stalled Mideast peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, and the ongoing issue of nuclear proliferation and Iran.

The speech also will come within weeks of the U.S. raid in Pakistan during which terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was killed. The raid has raised questions from some about the future of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, which the West invaded seeking to end the Taliban state that was sheltering terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The raid has also raised questions about what Pakistan leaders knew about Bin Laden and whether the founder of Al Qaeda was being protected by elements of the Pakistani intelligence community.

Obama is scheduled to meet next week with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, a strong U.S. ally, and with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been invited to address Congress. Efforts to bring peace between Netanyahu’s government and the Palestinians have bogged down despite early U.S. efforts. Complicating that issue is the apparent reconciliation between Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian National Authority, and Hamas, which controls Gaza, the other part of the Palestinian entity. Israel and the United States view Hamas as a terrorist group.

In 2009, Obama visited Cairo in what was billed as an overture to the Islamic world, still smarting from the Bush years and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama mainly spoke of the positive power of Islam as a world force.

Since then, much of the Arab world has been shattered by ongoing pro-democracy revolutions and, in some cases, civil wars and extensive state repression.

In some countries, notably Syria and Libya, where the United States has had long-term questions about the rulers, the United States strongly condemned the use of force against citizens and took even more severe actions. The Obama administration helped engineer a United Nations resolution that has imposed a no-fly zone on Libya, which is being enforced by NATO. The Obama administration has also spoken out forcefully against Syria’s violence against its citizens.

Though it has condemned state violence, the Obama administration has been less forceful with some nations with friendlier governments, such as Yemen and Bahrain, and it was slow to condemn Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who was eventually deposed by the military after extensive demonstrations.

Michael.muskal@latimes.com

Twitter.com/LATimesmuskal

Reporting from Washington — President Obama reassured India’s prime minister Tuesday that the partnership between their two countries would be “one of the defining relationships of the 21st century.”

Appearing with Manmohan Singh at the White House after two hours of talks, Obama said the United States and India have agreed to broaden cooperation in a variety of areas, including the economy, agriculture, technology, trade and counter-terrorism.

“The United States and India are natural allies,” the president said at a news conference.

Indian officials have worried recently that the Obama administration might be less committed than its predecessors to strengthening the U.S.-Indian relationship. Indians are anxious that their relationship is taking a back seat to growing U.S. ties with China and Pakistan. Obama returned last week from a trip to Asia that included a three-day stop in China.

But the administration made a special effort to dispel those perceptions: Singh is the first foreign leader invited to the Obama White House for a state visit, which included a state dinner Tuesday night.

The president emphasized that the U.S. is not looking solely to China for leadership in Asia.

“The United States welcomes and encourages India’s leadership role in helping to shape the rise of a stable, peaceful and prosperous Asia,” Obama said. He also accepted an invitation from Singh to visit India next year.

Ashley J. Tellis, who was a senior South Asia aide in George W. Bush’s administration, said Obama’s statements held valuable symbolism.

But the “real tests are yet to come,” said Tellis, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

It remains to be seen whether the United States will devote the time needed to build a strategic relationship, and whether the two countries can work out their differences on such issues as climate change and nuclear nonproliferation, he said.

The Obama administration would like India to take aggressive steps to reduce carbon emissions, while India contends that the developed world should bear a larger share of that responsibility.

India, which has nuclear programs, has also been reluctant to impose tough economic sanctions on Iran, with which it has strong economic ties.

The United States and many other Western powers allege that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but Iran says its nuclear development program is for civilian energy purposes.

Obama and Singh may have been closer on concerns about Taliban militants in Afghanistan, a subject that the prime minister raised repeatedly this week at a series of public meetings in Washington, and which the two leaders discussed at the White House.

Michael Hammer, a White House spokesman, said Singh and Obama “agreed that stabilizing Afghanistan and preventing a return of the Taliban to power are critically important.”

Hammer said that in their discussion of Iran, the two leaders “resolved to work together to make sure that all countries live up to their international obligations in the nuclear context.”

Teresita Schaffer, a former U.S. ambassador now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Indians don’t want the U.S. to fail in Afghanistan because they believe it would mean “a much bigger footprint for militant Islam.”

More broadly, she said, “they’ve bet their international role on ties to a United States strong enough to deliver the goods.”

paul.richter@latimes.com

cparsons@latimes.com

Do newspaper endorsements for president still matter? Certainly not as much as they once did, but that doesn’t stop most newspapers (including this one) from exercising their 1st Amendment right to spout off about their choice of candidate, and it doesn’t stop the presidential campaigns from breathlessly reporting each and every endorsement as if it were handed down by the Oracle of Delphi.

So who’s winning the endorsement race?

That all depends on how you look at it.

According to Editor & Publisher, the longtime bible of the newspaper business, the tally as of Saturday was 112 for Republican Mitt Romney and 84 for President Obama. That list didn’t include papers from Sunday, when many delivered their endorsements, but it suggested a shift from 2008, when E&P;’s final tally showed daily newspapers — which historically have skewed Republican — endorsing Obama over Republican John McCain by a better than 3-2 margin, 296 to 180

The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara has also been tracking endorsements, but it limits its list to the 100 largest newspapers. On average, they tend to have more liberal editorial pages, presumably reflecting their locations in Democratic-leaning big cities. As of Sunday, the project showed 33 endorsements for Obama and 27 for Romney. (Although most newspapers have issued their endorsements by now, a significant number are apparently waiting for the final week of the campaign.)

The tally reflects some notable gains for the GOP, however. According to the American Presidency Project, nine of the 100 top newspapers have switched sides from Obama to Romney since 2008, whereas only one went the other direction.

Among those abandoning the president was his Arlington Heights, Il., Daily Herald in his home state, which cast its lot — albeit a bit hesitantly– with Romney on Sunday.

“We believe that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are good and decent men who care about the country,” the newspaper wrote. “We believe each possesses extraordinary skills and talent. But, philosophically, it is clear that one trusts government too much; the other appears to trust it too little.” The editorial went on to criticize “the tone of Obama’s relentless insinuations that wealthy Americans refuse to pay their fair share. That tone is divisive and damaging for the nation and for our economy. It creates villains and victims, and unfairly so.” That, it said, was, “ultimately, the point where we must break with him.”

The San Antonio Express-News was the only one of the big papers to go the other way. It had endorsed McCain in 2008. This year, it said that while Obama has “had his failings,” such as a failure to pursue immigration reform and to tackle the debt crisis, “These shortcomings … don’t justify a change in leadership, particularly when many of Mitt Romney’s proposals — such as an across-the-board 20 percent cut in taxes and the elimination of unspecified itemized deductions — invite skepticism.”

Concluded the Express-News: “No candidate has all the right policies — that includes Barack Obama. But having weathered the challenges of the last four years, we believe he is in a better position to guide the nation over the next four years — and has earned from voters the privilege to do so.”

It is probably in the nature of newspaper editorials to stop short of adulation and unbridled enthusiasm. That certainly is the case with virtually all the endorsements of Obama and Romney, very few of which are wholehearted.

The Chicago Tribune (owned by the Tribune Co., which also owns The Times) endorsed Obama, but its editorial page editors said, “On questions of economics and limited government, the Chicago Tribune has forged principles that put us closer to the challenger in this race, Republican Mitt Romney. We write with those principles clearly in our minds. Romney advocates less spending, less borrowing — overall, a less costly and less intrusive role for government in the lives of the governed.” So why not just endorse Romney? The Trib concluded that he had been “astonishingly willing to bend his views to the politics of the moment: on abortion, on immigration, on gun laws and, most famously, on healthcare.”

And several newspapers that did endorse Romney expressed the hope that, if elected, he would turn out to be the moderate Romney, not the “severe” conservative he presented himself to be in the Republican primaries.

“Let us stipulate,” said the Houston Chronicle, the largest newspaper to switch from Obama in 2008 to Romney this year. “The Mitt Romney we are endorsing is the Massachusetts moderate who worked successfully alongside an 88 percent Democratic majority in the state Legislature to produce what the Obama administration says became its model for national healthcare reform.”

Not everyone was so equivocal. The New York Post, never known for mincing words, did not choose this occasion to begin.

“Four frustratingly long years ago, a war-weary and economically battered America took a flier on a savior,” the Post wrote.

Next paragraph, in full: “It didn’t work out.”

Some newspapers that endorsed candidates in 2008 decided not to pick anyone this year. The Oregonian, in Portland, supported Obama four years ago, during a campaign in which he held one of his largest rallies in that city. The paper sounded a bit miffed this year when it said it wasn’t endorsing anyone this time around because the candidates hadn’t campaigned in Oregon. “The access and close observation that inform our endorsements for state and local offices and Congress do not apply in a national race; our CNN-level view of the presidential race is similar to everyone else’s,” the paper said.

The New York Times was the largest of the nation’s newspapers to endorse a candidate. It concluded Saturday that Obama “has formed sensible budget policies that are not dedicated to protecting the powerful, and has worked to save the social safety net to protect the powerless.” Romney, it said, “has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas.”

The two largest newspapers in the country, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, do not usually issue formal endorsements, although the Journal has made no secret of its strong preference for Romney.

The Los Angels Times, for what it’s worth, endorsed Obama and followed up with an explanation from Editorial Page Editor Nick Goldberg of why the newspaper endorses anyone at all, given its mandate to be nonpartisan and unbiased in its news articles. The article contained one reminder of the historically less-than-awesome power wielded by newspaper endorsements: The Times’ first endorsement, in 1884, was for Republican James G. Blaine.

Remember him?

mitchell.landsberg@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATlands