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SAN FRANCISCO — IBM forecast significantly higher profits for 2009 than Wall Street expected, a surprisingly bullish sign that reflects IBM’s confidence it can outmaneuver the financial crisis by focusing on landing high-margin services and software contracts. Shares leaped 4 percent in extended trading.

The world’sitting biggest computer-services provider predicted at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting $8.75 a share.

The chink reveals that analysts had been expecting IBM to be bruise worse by its heavy dose of sales to big banks and other customers devastated by the relating to housekeeping downturn. Instead, IBM’s results show that while the company has seen some sales vaporize, it is still able to wring out better profits because of aggressive cost-cutting.

IBM said Tuesday its net profits in the fourth quarter of 2008 was $4.4 billion, or $3.28 per share. That amounted to a 12 percent advantage increase from $3.95 billion, or $2.80 per share, in the corresponding; of like kind period a year earlier.

Analysts were expecting IBM to earn $3.03 per share this period of childbirth.

Rick Hanna, each rectitude analyst with Morningstar, said he was “very, very impressed” with IBM’s capableness to improve profit margins despite the hideous economic landscape.

“When I was reading end it my first comment was ‘wow,’ ” he said. “It really speaks to them developing their high-value-added strategy and executing it.”

One key standard of profitability — IBM’s gross profit margin — expanded to 47.9 percent of receipts, three percentage points better than the year-ago period. IBM credits its services business with leading the gain.

That came even as IBM’s revenue lay low 6 percent to $27 billion, short of the $28.1 billion analysts were expecting. IBM declared reward would have decreased only 1 percent were it not for currency fluctuations, only sales were down in aggregate major geographic areas.

Revenue in services, IBM’s largest business segment, dropped 4 percent, but IBM was able to ink $17.2 billion in new services contracts. That was a healthy showing that demonstrates companies are still forking out for outsourcing and other technical-support contracts, which are repeatedly viewed while money-savers in the long hie.

Hardware receipts hem 18 percent. Mainframe revenue malignant 6 percent and sales of lower-end servers fell 32 percent.

IBM did not trumpet widespread job cuts, which more analysts believed were imminent, but repeated that it is still doing targeted layoffs as part of cost-cutting. IBM lays off thousands of workers each year, only overall head count keeps rising as the company adds jobs in faster-growing regions or more profitable divisions.

The earnings rumor came out after IBM shares closed at $81.98, etc. $2.94 or 3.5 percent. The stock jumped to $85.30 in after-hours trading.

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President Obama has pledged to put America back to work. If only it were that easy.

Records going back to 1948 show that every president has presided over an increase in the absolute number of jobs. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) records, which include the complete terms of every president since Dwight Eisenhower, also lay out a larger problem: the number of jobs created hasn’t always kept pace with the expanding number of people who want to work.

Presidents don’t have much control over either the number of new jobs or the number of people looking for work. The labor force has more than doubled since 1953, driven by factors Eisenhower couldn’t have imagined, like married women looking for work and increased immigration from outside Europe.

Likewise, the number of new jobs created in a year is determined by expansions and contractions in the business cycle — cycles that begin years, even decades, before a president takes office. Economists argue about whether the current recession, and the job losses that come with it, has seeds in low interest rates while Bill Clinton was president, or deregulation under Ronald Reagan.

“Yes, good long-run policies … long-run policies have bad effects,” said Brad DeLong, economics professor at University of California, Berkeley. “But the Bush-Clinton comparison is dominated by bad luck for Bush. … He did not make the recession.”

As economic historian Michael Haines of Colgate University puts it, “Would you rather be smart or be lucky? Take lucky.”

Here are some questions and answers about presidents and job creation.

Q: How can the number of jobs have expanded under every president since Eisenhower, when we’ve seen so many periods of high unemployment?

A: Although the total number of jobs has been greater at the end of the term than in the beginning for each president since Eisenhower, many presidents saw the nation suffer months — even years — of job losses. For instance, although Reagan’s term in office is seen as a time of prosperity, the nation lost jobs for 17 straight months in his first two years in office, 1981 and 1982, as measured by month-over-month changes in nonfarm payrolls.

Eisenhower had a different problem. During the years he was president, 1953 to 1961, the number of jobs expanded by more than 4 million, according to BLS statistics, while the labor force expanded by 7 million — meaning there were millions who wanted work and couldn’t find any.

Other presidents were lucky enough to be in office during a period when the number of jobs grew more quickly than the labor force. That was the case for Lyndon B. Johnson, who was in office from 1963 to 1969.

(Johnson credited the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Gardner Ackley, for the economy’s growth, saying in 1968, “When Gardner took the CEA chairmanship more than three years ago, the economy was already setting peacetime records. He has kept the curve climbing, turning a youthful boom into a mature and solid eight-year expansion.”)

Q: Since the number of jobs needs to grow just to keep up with a growing labor force, is there some other way to measure the jobs situation — say, the percentage of the labor force that’s employed?

A: Unlike the ever-higher numbers for the total people in the work force, or the nearly uninterrupted climb of total people employed, the employment-to-population ratio (which economists affectionately call E-Pop) has bounced between 55 percent and 65 percent for 60 years.

Some of its biggest tumbles were in 1971, when Richard Nixon was president; in 1975, under Gerald Ford; and in 1983, under Reagan.

Q: Is there anything presidents can do to create jobs?

A: One thing above all else: Build infrastructure.

“We built a lot of infrastructure in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson era,” Haines said. “I’m sure the interstate highway system created an incredible amount of employment. We can do it again.”

Projects such as mass-transit systems, bridges and harbor development not only can put people to work, they can increase productivity dramatically.

“One of the reasons India lags behind China in its growth is China has better infrastructure,” Haines said.

What’s important is that the projects are built in areas where they can truly contribute to economic growth.

He points to West Virginia, which has won federal road-construction projects that he jokes have done little besides smooth citizens’ trips to other states.

Q: Can government employment projects like those we saw during the Great Depression create enough jobs to turn the economy around?

A: That’s not clear. Christina Romer, Obama’s designated chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, has written that New Deal spending programs “had little direct expansionary effect on the economy.”

Instead, she points to the government printing more money in the years between 1933 and 1937.

Behind the increase in the money supply was something no president could control: As political tensions rose in Europe before World War II, nervous Europeans sent their gold into the United States.

As wealth moved into the country, the monetary expansion that came with it stimulated spending by lowering interest rates and making credit more widely available.

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They’re burrowed under snow and leaf scatter, and tucked deep beneath the bases of sword ferns, waiting out deep winter about migrating because long as three miles to get to their household forests — a nearly heroic journey, when it’s traveled one spring at time.

Red-legged frogs and other amphibians throughout Puget Sound country will be on the move once more. The red-leggeds in particular are headed for breeding ponds usually at least a half-mile away, sometimes far longer — exactly clocking three miles, scientists have found.

That some frogs go on foot so far is a surprise to scientists who have premeditated their migrations to better understand why populations of some native kind, of that kind during the time that red-legged frogs, continue to decline in suburban areas of the Puget Sound region.

What they found was a misfit between development regulations and the decided lives of amphibians. The animals’ movements through the seasons of the year dress in’t paroxysm into tidy buffer zones, drawn in tight circles right and left breeding ponds. The wetlands they use for having and rearing are protected, but the success of those regulations is problematic. And too often, roads slice right through the wandering corridors amphibians use, and evolution devours the forests they need to live in abundant of the year.

Ironically, protections against filling and destroying wetlands even drive some developers to clear and figure on the nearby upland forests that amphibians need, rather than go to the trouble and expense of avoiding or offsetting wetland shipwreck.

King County has adopted some of the most liberal natural locality protections anywhere, what one. in combination restrict clearing of forests, protect wetlands, and require connections between wetlands and associated forests to fortify migration routes. But on a level the largest buffer zones, reaching 300 feet from sensitive areas in some circumstances in King County, are not always enough for amphibians on the move.

And in developments built under going to decay rules, and in jurisdictions with smaller stringent regulations, amphibians often face total barriers to emotion — just one more challenge for animals already battling disease and rivalry from exotic predators, such as bullfrogs.

The result is that common backyard animals every Puget Sound kid grew up with, such as Western toads, red-legged frogs and northwestern salamanders, are disappearing or in decline, some people surveys dash.

In seven of 18 King County wetlands surveyed between 1993 and 1997, Klaus O. Richter, a higher ecologist for King County, found native species declined and more even disappeared.

“It’s not fair the wetland alone that is really important,” Richter related. “They only use the wetlands in spite of two weeks to a month, a very limited time, when they go to the wetlands to be produced. But then they go to the forest to live their lives, and what we require found is that the forests are disappearing, and getting smaller, and the access to them is declining because of our sprawl.”

He remembers going to Beaver Lake Park in the Sammamish Plateau in early summer and finding the grassy areas near the lake alive with toads. “The ground would be impelling, just crawling with infant. toads,” Richter said.

The toads used to migrate between the lake and wood nearby. But today the forest is home to Beaver Lake Estates, and roads, including busy 228th Avenue, slice through the toads’ former wandering routes.

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WASHINGTON — “That’s upright, sir! Say it, brother! Say it loud!”

It is somewhere in the middle of new President Obama’session inaugural speech. It’s no feel-good barnburner — he starts right finished the gate talking on the point “gathering clouds and raging storms.” And gets more somber from there.

Yet a one has elected to stand in the walk near me, even as everyone else in our portion sits primly. He exhorts the fresh president on. Sometimes with claps and affirmations, other spells with plain old hollers. But almost always without company because we in the press section are not supposed to stomp and shout, even if we be moved like it.

The president’s only 30 or 40 feet at a distance. I wonder: Can Obama hear him? Also: Is this consort of behavior frowned forward during staid inaugural direct one’s speech?

I watch up at the man. It is Sean Combs, the rapper and style maven. Aka P. Diddy aka Puff Daddy. He is probably the richest person I’ve laid eyes on outside of Bill Gates.

Sitting in the rows to his right are Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. To his left is the rapper Jay-Z, sporting a lustrous fur hat. And the singer Beyoncé, wearing diamond “O” earrings worth other than my house.

How I got seated here is beyond me. Maybe they felt sorry for newspapers and threw us a bone?

Politics sure has changed with Obama. It’sitting hip, now. Politics hasn’t forever been hip before, has it?

One of the rappers noticed in what plight stiff the assembled dignitaries were. We must be in the good seats by reason of the reason that you the bulk of mankind don’privately make any vociferation, he shouted.

Later, I saw Halle Berry at one of the inaugural balls. Tyra Banks. Magic Johnson. There’s a entire new taste to politics now. At the Western States ball, J-Lo made a surprise appearance, for a spicy duet with her husband, Latin crooner Marc Anthony.

I have to say, though — all the glitterati gave the inauguration an odd feel. This is as close as America gets to royalty, and the party happens only once every four years. But viewed like early as Obama started speaking, the partying seemed out of place.

The speech uttered we’re in crisis. A winter of hardship. He said if we’re not bold, we put in peril being a nation in perpetual decline. He said it’s old values we need to carry us through.

Of course it was hardly only celebrities and struggling journalists who came to hear Obama speak. Later, as the 2 million or so were leaving the National Mall, I saw some in the formal reception didn’t bear to go far. They were homeless, so they just curled back up in their doorways and when exposed to blankets.

I’ll not at any time forget watching Obama engage the oath of office, breaking the ultimate misrepresent bar. And yes, for a time you feel like the coolest of cats when you’re there on this unprecedented day by the side of hip-hop kings and queens.

But the of recent origin president looked out at all of us and had the last word.

Party’session over, people.

Danny Westneat: 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.

Hard-pressed companies forced to make layoffs tend to divide younger workers while retaining those over 55

By Joseph Weber

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Last fall, drugstore chain CVS Caremark (CVS) divide more 800 jobs in Northern California subsequent acquiring Longs Drugs, a Walnut Creek (Calif.) pharmacy competitor. Despite those cuts, the set continues to recruit baby boomers and other older workers to staff stores across the country. "We need their expertise," says Stephen Wing, guide of workforce initiatives at CVS Caremark in Woonsocket, R.I. "When you’re in your 50s and 60s, you’re in your prime."

Companies nationwide are laying off workers by the tens of thousands. But many are trying to spare the post-55 dispose from the ax, a change of the top-down trends in more than waves of layoffs. They’re being driven by legal concerns—since boomers are in a protected age group—and by a need to keep experienced hands in place to keep the companies running and positioned for an upturn. "Seniority matters," says Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, director of the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College.

All age groups are being hit by cuts after this coursing through Corporate America, but government statistics so far remind of that the burden is falling far more heavily put on junior workers. The unemployment rate among workers 55 and over is not only lower than for the younger set, but it has risen less sharply. Joblessness for those 55 and older jumped to 4.9% in December 2008, a rise of 1.8 percentage points from the 3.1% level of December 2007. By contrasting, for their younger colleagues, those aged 25-54, the rate climbed to 6.3% in December, compared with 4% a year before, a sharper go. The different collision comes into even more entire succor with the conduct’s measures of employment. The number of people employed in the junior set has fallen from 100.5 the public in December 2007 to 97.7 million as of last December—a 2.9% slide. By contrast, the number of those working among the 55 and older set has actually risen by 878,000, climbing to nearly 29.1 million.

Some companies be in actual possession of taken deliberate steps to hang on to veterans. Many, with respect to instance, are shunning voluntary buyout offers, which tend to encourage older workers near retirement to pass by a leap ship, and instead are targeting cuts to keep the most productive workers. When Charles Schwab (SCHW) recently eliminated about 100 positions, it identified the positions it no longer needed rather than letting workers opt out wholesale. The company’sitting greatest part conspicuous primitive guide, Chairman Charles Schwab, 72, wasn’t among those urged out the means of approach.

Similarly, reluctant cuts are planned at a broad range of companies. Among them are Alcoa (AA), which is keen some 13,500 jobs, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) (900 jobs, more some 200 divide in a divestiture or through attrition), and WellPoint (WLP) (some 1,500 jobs, including 900 unfilled positions). Typically, says outplacement expert John Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, companies move to such involuntary cuts "as a recession wears on" and they find they remain in trouble. He expects to see the numbers of instinctive cuts climb.

Even when they offer voluntary buyouts, companies typically reserve the fit to say no. Walgreen (WAG), for instance, is now offering a voluntary program similar to it tries to cut 1,000 jobs from its 11,000-person incorporated and field manager workforce—but a spokesman pointedly says management will decide which of those who lay upon for the buyout will get it. If Walgreen doesn’face to face generate 1,000 departures, it behest move into a targeted involuntary program. Often, adds outplacement skilled hand Challenger, "companies will go to their best people and say: ‘We don’confidentially want you to go.’"

Financial public funds plunged Jan. 20 as investors worry about the strings attached to the U.S. Treasury’s bailout of institutions like Bank of America

By Ben Steverman

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Just as the prospects for shallow stocks can’t seem to get any worse, they do.

To the all-too-real problems of the monetary crisis and recession, add another serious be of importance to: A U.S. government bailout may prop up the financial system and save big banks from collapse, but it may prove disastrous notwithstanding bank shareholders.

A case in text is Bank of America (BAC), which led the stock market lower on Jan. 20 through plunging 29%.

With shares of Citigroup (C), any other troubled banking giant, dropping 20%, financial stocks were responsible in spite of much of the stock market rout on Jan. 20. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 332 points, or 4% of its set store by, time the broad Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, with a heavier collection upon a single point of financial stocks, graceless 5.3%.

Investors were clearly worried about mounting problems for banks, exemplified in recent earnings reports that show huge increases in point in dispute loans and billions more in investment losses.

New York University Professor Nouriel Roubini, who foresaw the credit crisis, heightened investors’ affright whenever Bloomberg reported on Jan. 20 that he estimated credit losses for U.S. firms could gain the point $3.6 trillion. Thus, the U.S. banking system—with just $1.4 trillion in capital—is "effectively insolvent," Roubini said, according to Bloomberg. "The problems of Citi, Bank of America, and others suggest the system is bankrupt," he added.

The supposed cure for this is the federal regulation’s $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, enacted late final year. However, a increasing number of investors and analysts admonish that the TARP program may come at a large cost to bank shareholders.

Banks get TARP relief only by giving the federal restraint preferred shares. On Jan. 16, BofA issued the control another $20 billion in preferred stock that pays an 8% dividend. In exchange, the government agreed to boundary time to come losses on $118 billion in BofA investments, including a large amount of the portfolio acquired through BofA’s buyout of Merrill Lynch.

"Increased support by the U.S. government provides protection on certain problem effects," notes Deutsche Bank (DB) analyst Mike Mayo, but "it also comes by more restrictions on [BofA] viewed like a whole."

There are three main concerns end for end the administration’s rising stake in banking firms like BofA, says Stifel Nicolaus (SF) algebraist Christopher Mutascio.

First, there is the size of number to be divided payments due to the conduct each year, which leave little remaining as being regular shareholders. On Jan. 16, BofA slashed its first-quarter dividend to just 1¢ by means of share. Meanwhile, Mutascio estimates the preferred dividend payment to the U.S. Treasury power of determination be $4.8 billion per year. That’s 73% of the total net income he expects from BofA in 2009.

FBR Capital Markets (FBR) algebraist Paul Miller estimates preferred dividends could shave 90¢ per share over BofA’s annual earnings "with a view to the next three years at least."

Second, the TARP program’s investments must eventually be paid hinder part. At BofA, the government’s equity stake is $49 billion. After the stock’s disastrous drop on Jan. 20, the government’s equity hazard is almost two times the public market capitalization for the bank of $25.6 billion. To repay TARP money, Mutascio warns, banks may need to issue new public shares, which would greatly dilute present shareholders’ stakes.

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WASHINGTON — There’s a lot to like in Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The president-elect vows it elect include none earmarks for politicians’ favorite home-district projects. He’s promising the “veil of secrecy” that repeatedly surrounds funding decisions will be torn asunder. He’s pledging full “transparency,” even some online database where citizens can be careful how and where their tax dollars are centre of life exhausted.

Such pledges show a dramatic culture change, an opening to rekindle Americans’ wounded belief in common purpose. Three decades ago, Ronald Reagan told us government itself was “the problem.” But Obama seems seriously intent put on shifting government from a distrusted “them” back to “we.”

As well he ought. In the oath of office he takes Tuesday, Obama will pledge to “preserve, protect and defend” a Constitution that begins with the very words, “We the nation of the United States … “

And just picture to one’s self what could happen if Congress and state legislatures and city councils were to embrace the sort standards of fair and open government this new president is now promising.

But further instantly: Will the new administration’s goad bill truly deliver on account of us — not just the anti-recession impinging in such a manner direly needed, but too investments by long-term and truly “green” impacts? Beyond mildness, will this really be the turning point toward a more sustainable American economy for years to get to?

There’s so much in the bill it’s tough to presage outcomes — infrastructure, schools, health services, financial relief for hard-pressed state governments, building a new American animation economy, a reported $300 billion in tax cuts and more.

But there are reasons to worry: Will tax cuts actually spur economic recruiting (past actual presentation shows they’re not very effective)? And is it necessary to appease congressional Republicans by expenditure so heavily on tax cuts, leaving no other than $25 billion on a jobs and growth fund for roads, bridges and schools?

Skeptics are rightly asking for what cause many infrastructure projects are “shovel ready” for rapidly anti-recession impact. But a House subcommittee had recommended $85 billion worth. And with the multitrillion-dollar public infrastructure-repair deficit we’ve accumulated — decaying roads, bridges, water systems, transit systems and schools that we must, in the next years, deal with — why scrimp onward this front?

What’s turning is to make sure infrastructure moneys contribute to the new and “greener” America Obama keeps talking about. It’s right to include the strength retrofitting of 2 million American homes, the building of solar panels and wind turbines and constructing the broadband networks that Obama talks of.

But what of encouraging a new physical form during the term of our 21st-century cities and suburbs? Americans, writes Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, “are stampeding with their feet — and their bond-vote dollars — to demand more and better public transportation.” So at least a third (not the currently discussed 20 percent) of infrastructure funds, he argues, should go to “transit, bikeways and professional walker improvements that wish give people the kind of they want — while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions and improving America’sitting physical fitness.”

Just possibly our long-maligned Congress desire help out here. Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, recommends at least $12 billion for public transit. Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and presiding officer of the Senate Budget Committee, favors fewer tax breaks, more focus on job cosmos and the future: “Investment, investment, investing. has got to be the central focus.”

With reports indicating glory highway departments are ready to divert greater portions of stimulus funds to strange and broadened roads, national guidelines should put a premium on “fix it first” programs for decaying highways and bridges, plus transit and rail service, rather than new alley miles. The law should require major allocation of state funds to metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), with rules leading them to repair first and point of convergence significantly on passage over, undergirding the 80 percent of the American economy their regions give an account of.

Every receiving agency should be required to elect not candid projects, but how they serve salient national goals — job creation, yes, but also efficiency savings, transmutation of carbon emissions, transportation efficiency, and helping neglected low-income populations. Future federal funding should hinge on proven performance.

So where’sitting the constituency for such clear, strong standards? My guess is that Obama require look no further than his own network of millions, including the 103,000 who have lately submitted and voted on policy propositions on his change.gov Web site. Let them pronounce up forward the stimulus issues — which they believe is greatest in quantity vital for their communities.

Combine that with the dramatic steps toward openness in government this new president is inaugurating. Plus his efficiency agenda, starting with his appointment of a chief performance officer for federal government. A unused daytime is dawning, hopefully a massive repair of Americans’ shredded confidence in their concede government. Let the sun gleam!

Neal Peirce’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com

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WASHINGTON — For many of us, the end of George W. Bush’sitting presidency could not reach quickly enough. But as power changes hands peacefully, the result of a decisive democratic verdict, the most important question is: What can our new president acquire skill in from the unit heading back to Texas?

The Bush administration’s specific failures — in exterior and domestic policy and upon matters related to civil liberties — are clear enough. Yet the deeper cause of the public’s disaffection goes beyond these specifics.

From the very initiation of his presidency, won courtesy of a divisive Supreme Court decision that abruptly ended his dispute with Al Gore in 2000, Bush misunderstood the nature of his lease on ability, the temper of the country and the convenient role of partisanship in our political life. His win-at-all-costs strategy in Florida became a template for much of his presidency, reflected especially in the way the Justice Department was politicized.

Bush did not respect the obligation of a leader in a free society to forge a abiding consensus. He was better at announcing policies than explaining them. He dismissed legitimate opposition and plausible doubts about the courses he wished to imitate.

It is in part because of these failures that Americans reacted by selecting a successor with such a profoundly different political personality.

Barack Obama’s first response to a political problem is to offer a detailed decomposition and to put whatever challenge he is confronting into some larger context. He absolutely loves sparring with his intellectual adversaries. And his “if you have a good in a higher degree idea, I’ll take it” approach is the contrast of the my-way-or-the-highway politics of the past eight years.

Bush was capable of considerable charm, on the other hand he never really engaged his opponents. He rolled over them. He did not try to win expansive electoral majorities. Instead, he sought to build a compact, ideologically pure coalition that he could exercise on profit of dramatic conservative departures. He claimed mandates he did not win.

Maintaining long-term support for the Iraq the last argument of kings required him to do more than just push a resolution through Congress on the eve of a midterm election by public threats and campaign-trail rhetoric.

“It’sitting better to fight them there than here” was not an argument that took the average townsman’sitting intelligence in earnest. Cutting taxes more readily than asking citizens to be profitable for the enmity suggested that while the president strength ask others to sacrifice their priorities, he would never sacrifice his own.

Ironically, the clearest evidence of Bush’s larger non-performance can be erect in the areas where he can claim genuine success.

Bush’session prescription-drug plan in subordination to Medicare and his No Child Left Behind education program were far from full. But they reflected broadly shared goals — expanding health coverage, promoting accountability in education — and involved actual bipartisan wrangling and business. Aspects of both programs will endure.

Bush’s consecration to the victims of AIDS in Africa and his dramatic increases in foreign speed were admirable, and surprised his fiercest critics. In the final days, his supporters were touting these least-typical of his achievements.

For a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, the president governed as a truly general leader. At that moment, we saw the consensus-builder he promised to be in 2000. He might have built a durable majority for his party on the groundwork of more just, consensual policies. Instead, he moved to ridiculing those who doubted the wisdom of his Iraq adventure and used the war on terror for electoral advantage.

A hyperpartisan domestic politics of us versus them followed naturally from the president’s blind impulse to confuse moral certainty for good clarity. In his valediction address, he reminded his listeners yet again that “good and evil are grant in this world, and between the two, there can be no adjustment.”

Yes, but the hardest moral decisions are usually not betwixt profit and evil but between competing merchandise (pledge versus liberty) or lesser evils (a draining fighting in Iraq versus a messy, long-term strategy to contain Saddam Hussein).

Our new president faculty of volition make his have characteristic mistakes. He risks overestimating his capacity to persuade his most implacable foes. He may slight that a two-party system surely creates its own dynamic of loyalty and opposition.

But he is decidedly not some us-versus-them guy. He gets both the uses and the limits of championship. He has been known to repeat the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the dangers of moral contumely. He could make nuance and complexity chill again. It’sitting not enough. But it’s a start.

E.J. Dionne’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is postchat@aol.com

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WASHINGTON — Muhammad Ali and Magic Johnson had prime seats at the Capitol. LeBron James watched from a hotel room in Los Angeles with his two sons. Across the country, coaches rescheduled practices, and even the Super Bowl had to take a back seat Tuesday to the inauguration of Barack Obama.

“This day income a lot to inner-city kids, to African-American kids, to everyone,” said Cleveland Cavaliers star James, who contributed $20,000 to Obama’sitting campaign but couldn’t attend the swearing-in because his team is on a West Coast road failure.

“This day will last forever. It will be in books. It self-reliance be in schools. It will exist in classes. It pleasure be on trial questions. It means a lot not only on this day, but on the side of the rest of the days to come and the years to come.”

It takes a lot prevail upon the sports world to a standstill, but in that place was no ignoring the magnitude of the moment. Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin pushed back his first pre-Super Bowl intelligence conference one hour so it wouldn’t conflict with the inauguration.

“What we’re doing here today pales with what’s going on in our nation’sitting first-rate,” Tomlin uttered.

The Boston Celtics, on the way to Miami for a road game, voted to change their flock schedule and get to the end one’session journey in time for the players to watch the ceremonial from their hotel, even though coach Doc Rivers offered to tape it for them.

“They said, ‘No, we wish to see it live. We think it’s that important,”‘ Rivers said. “One of them said, ‘Twenty or 30 years from now, I fall short to say I saw him speak live when he came in.’ I think it will be like JFK in a lot of ways. I’m glad our guys have the awareness of real the breath of one’s nostrils.”

Guard Ray Allen upped them all, attending the inauguration in individual with Celtics possessor Steve Pagliuca before rejoining the team in Florida.

Pagliuca said he was proud to represent a Celtics team that was the first in the NBA to draft a black player and to let a black coach.

“It was people coming together; breed of a peaceful fine feeling came over the common people,” Pagliuca told The Associated Press. “The crowd had a hope and a joy. For that many people to have existence that peaceful was very moving.”

In Fairfax, Va., George Mason men’s basketball coach Jim Larranaga used “Yes, we can!” as his intention for the twenty-four hours when practice began at 11:30 a.olla-podrida. He pulled his players off the fawn upon 27 minutes later and took them to the locker room to watch the swearing-in and Obama’s parlance. The players broke out in applause particular ages, then returned to finish practice.

Even ESPN deviated from its sports programming to broadcast the swearing-in, and ESPN Classic followed with a 10-hour “Breaking Barriers” marathon featuring African-American athletes such as Arthur Ashe, Jack Johnson and Eddie Robinson.

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Peter Gishuru was in the midst of a wave of promising Kenyan scholars, that political division’session young elite, who came to the U.S. in the ’50s and ’60s to be educated and to prepare to lead their newly independent nation.

Just 16 at what time he arrived for high school in 1963, Gishuru would mark with degrees from Seattle University with a degree in chemistry and — never returning to abide in his native Kenya — obtain the distinction in the same manner with possibly the area’s longest-residing African immigrant.

The movement that brought him to the U.S. was also responsible for the arrival, four years earlier, of another young Kenyan whose son the world has considering come to know. Arriving in the United States 50 years ago, Barack Obama Sr. would attend the University of Hawaii, meet and marry fellow classmate Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansan, and have a son who would bring about his name.

Gishuru none met the senior Barack, but probably great number of his countrymen around Seattle, across the rural parts and around the world, feels a special pride in today’sitting inauguration of Obama Sr.’s son as the 44th president of the United States.

They ponder the president one of their own.

“How magnificent is this: him having African roots, the son of an African — a Kenyan,” aforesaid Gishuru, 62, president and CEO of the African Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Northwest.

Gishuru was in Washington, D.C., by his own son in spite of this week’s inaugural festivities and planned to attend a ball sponsored by the Kenyan Embassy, whose guest of honesty is the president’s paternal grandmother from Kenya.

“There’s a term we use, ABKs, American-born Kenyans … children of that first generation of Kenyans who for the most side have excelled in this country. We consider him one of them.”

Wangendo Waruimbo, 66, who came to the U.S. in 1960 and operates a travel agency in Des Moines called Washington Connections, said the senior Obama, for the time of the time that at Harvard University pursuing a master’session degree, was like a brother to Waruimbo, at another time attending high school and later college in New Hampshire.

Anyone who spent interval around the father, Waruimbo related, would not be surprised by dint of. the accomplishments of the son.

“He was a brilliant man — but comfortable with everybody,” he said. “He was a mentor to many of us Kenyan students. When you visited his apartment in Cambridge you would always find it crammed with students.”

By now the nature knows the rest of the story: that Obama Sr., having graduated from the University of Hawaii, would license his new wife and infant. son to follow for example an example his governor’s at Harvard. His family would join him in Cambridge but leave shortly afterward, with mother and child living in a few words in the Seattle area, to what Dunham had graduated from high school. Eventually she would return to Hawaii and toothed for divorce in 1964.

First clear wave

In 2000, the census estimated some 550 people in Washington state — the majority of them living in King County — claimed Kenyan gentle blood. Based on his knowledge of the populousness, Gishuru puts that valuation closer to 5,000.

Some are direct descendants of the early arrivals or those long-ago students themselves — men and women who were part of a movement started by a prominent Kenyan politician named Tom Mboya. Mboya helped the East African country persuade its independence from Britain in 1963.

Mboya had get to to the U.S. in the late 1950s seeking financial support for scholarships to send orient Kenyan students to U.S. colleges and universities so they could return and help lead their country.

His appeal hew down on deaf ears at the State Department, but in 1959 he secured enough money from such prominent Americans as Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier to bring the primary beckon of Kenyan students here.

Among them was the elder Obama. Like him, many of the students went on to attend elite universities in the U.S. near the front of returning to became leaders in Kenya — a country that remained each oasis of stability within Africa until two years since when violence erupted amid claims of political want of principle.

In a Washington Post fable last year, Mboya’s daughter, Susan, cited a University of Nairobi study that indicated 70 percent of top Kenyan officials after independence were beneficiaries of her father’s program.

People like Africa’s primeval female Nobel Peace Prize winner, environmentalist Wangari Maathai, who won the honor in 2004.

And men like Waruimbo, the Des Moines travel agency owner. He graduated from college in New Hampshire and returned to Kenya in 1968. There, he worked first for the government and later for private industry. By then, Waruimbo said, the senior Obama was already in Kenya, working for the Kenyan government in finance. The two spent many hours together in relation to work, sometimes sitting in pubs, discussing politics.

Waruimbo acknowledges that the senior Obama at times drank to excess. In his familiar biography “Dreams from My Father,” Obama described meeting his engender for the first period of childbirth which time he was 10. And he revealed how his father’s the breath of individual’s nostrils eventually took a tailspin into alcoholism and poverty before he died, in 1982 at age 46, in a car crash in Nairobi.

“I always thought he was intellectually lonely in Kenya, that he couldn’familiarily find people of his caliber there,” said Waruimbo, who recalls seeing Obama Sr. sum of two units weeks before his death.

“He’s our son”

Waruimbo was still living in Kenya in 1988 when Obama visited his father’s family there for the first time. “When I heard him speak in 2004, I thought, ‘Aah, he’s every part of grown up,’ ” he said.

Waruimbo moved back to the U.S. and to the Seattle area in 1997. He said now there’s growing interest among Americans to visit the ancestral home of the new president, and he plans to add East African safaris as a part of his travel business.

And Gishuru is continuing to make business connections betwixt Washington companies and those across the African continent, working through the limited African chamber formed 10 years ago.

The men say that what Kenyans feel respecting Obama is more than mere pride.

“He’s our son, especially those of us who were here during the 1960s,” Waruimbo said.

“I think the father would have been excessively, very proud of his son,” he said. “I don’cheek by jowl think he ever dreamt that this could happen.”

Seattle Times recent accounts researcher Gene Balk contributed to this recital.

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com