White House

The White House has not confirmed the letter.

President Barack Obama wrote a secret letter to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month, laying out a shared interest in fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, according to a media report based on anonymous sources.

Obama used the letter to try to win support for the U.S.-led strikes against the Sunni Islamist group and to push for a deal over Iran’s nuclear program ahead of a Nov. 24 deadline, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, has been critical of U.S.-led strikes, claiming the West is using ISIS as an excuse to intervene in the Middle East, and has been highly skeptical of the nuclear talks being conducted under the purview of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

At a White House news conference on Thursday, spokesperson Josh Earnest said he could not confirm the letter.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Seventy uniformed officers to specifically care for doctors and nurses

Uniformed American officers are due to open and staff a field clinic for Ebola patients outside the Liberian capital of Monrovia this coming weekend, marking the United States’ latest bid to help bring the regional outbreak under control.

President Barack Obama had previously said none of the roughly 4,000 American troops deployed to Liberia would care for patients suffering from Ebola. But, USA Today reports, 70 uniformed government personnel from the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, of the Department of Health and Human Services, will be the first to do so and specifically treat health care workers who contract the deadly virus.

“They have to feel secure that there will be a high level of care provided if they do fall ill of Ebola,” Rear Adm. Scott Giberson, acting U.S. deputy surgeon general, said in the report, adding that the volunteers were among some 1,700 members who had expressed a willingness to be deployed.

The World Health Organization said Wednesday that at least 310 health care workers have died in the West Africa outbreak that has killed more than 4,800 people this year. That same day, Obama announced he would ask Congress for $6.2 million to fight Ebola.

[USA Today]

The President will speak about the midterm election results, which saw Republicans gain control of the Senate and maintain control of the House of Representatives, at a press conference set to begin at 2:50pm ET. Watch live here

For the second time, the President struggles with Election Night well wishes to Republicans. But Vice President Joe Biden got through.

President Barack Obama called to congratulate Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell on winning the job of Senate leader between 12:30 and 1 a.m. Wednesday morning. The only problem: By then, McConnell and his wife, former Secretary Elaine Chao, had already left for home and some much needed sleep after a grueling campaign, McConnell aides say.

MORE: See all the election results

The President left a message.

Vice President Joe Biden, by contrast, called about an hour earlier, and was able to get through to his longtime Senate colleague. McConnell aides say they expect he’ll connect with the President later Wednesday and that he’s looking forward to having lunch at the White House on Friday.

This isn’t the first time the Obama White House has struggled to connect with an Election Night phone call, as I reported exclusively in 2011.

On the night that Republicans won control of the House in 2010, the White House Press Office came to a startling realization: They had no contact information for Speaker-to-be John Boehner. In President Obama’s first two years in office, he’d reached out to House Republicans so little that they had no reason to get to know—or even get phone numbers or e-mails for—Boehner’s staff. Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse was asked to call his fishing buddy, Nick Schaper, who was Boehner’s new media director at the time. Schaper gave the appropriate names and numbers to Woodhouse, who then relayed them to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Update from Zeke Miller:

From a White House Official:

Last night the President phoned dozens of House, Senate, Gubernatorial candidates of both parties, and members the House and Senate leadership. The list of those lawmakers he connected with are below, and he is continuing additional calls throughout the day.

Senator Harry Reid

Senator Dick Durbin

Senator Michael Bennet

AR Governor-elect Asa Hutchinson

SD Senator-elect Mike Rounds

WV Senator-elect Shelly Moore Capito

MI Senator-elect Gary Peters

Senator Lindsey Graham

Senator Jim Inhofe

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Leader Nancy Pelosi

Governor-elect Tom Wolf, PA

Senator-elect James Lankford, OK

Senator-elect Tom Cotton, AR

Governor John Kasich

Senator Susan Collins

Senator Ed Markey

Senator Jeff Sessions

Senator Cory Booker

Senator Tim Scott

Senator Al Franken

Senator Mark Pryor

Congressman-elect Seth Moulton

Governor Robert Bentley

Governor Bill Haslam

Read next: Obama Says He Wants to ‘Get Stuff Done’

Don't bother looking to past leaders for solutions to today's problems

This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.

While on a speaking tour for a new book on Lincoln recently, appearing in bookstores and museums and libraries from Washington DC to Mill Valley, California, one question has been repeatedly asked of me in venue after venue: What would Lincoln do? Of course, it isn’t phrased precisely that way, but the content is the same: If Abraham Lincoln were president today, do you think he would be striking ISIS? Would he endorse universal health care? What would be his policy towards immigration, privacy, campaign finance, global warming, gay marriage? Would he detain enemies at Guantanamo? How would he respond to the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, to the outbreak of the Ebola virus? I usually beg off these pleas. Lincoln, after all, had a hard enough task determining policy for his own time, much less generating a blueprint for problems 150 years hence and, anyway, I am uncomfortable with such responsibility being thrust upon me, as if writing a single book about Lincoln makes me capable of channeling his thoughts. Still, there is something poignant in the repeated asking: Americans so desperately want someone to lead them, to make sense of the confusing world they inhabit, to impose sturdy values upon the confusing array of options before us. Who better than Abraham Lincoln?

The fact that we so revere him today would have amused many in Lincoln’s own day even – perhaps especially – Lincoln himself. He had been elected in 1860 with the lowest voting percentage (39.8) of any president in American history and it would be many years before he would be etched into the nation’s consciousness as the savior of the Union and the Great Emancipator, our most respected president. Americans were judging him in the moment and many of them – in the North as well as the South – judged him unfavorably. He had disappointed his Republican colleagues and enraged his Democratic opponents. He had been elected on a pledge to not disturb slavery where it already existed; yet two years later, he issued an Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the rebellious states and changing the mission of the war in what was for many, even in the North, an unacceptable direction. Challenging constitutional sensitivities, he had instituted the nation’s first national income tax, suspended habeas corpus, and used the arm of the law to pursue critics in the press. At a time when the constitutionality of conscription was still undetermined, he had instituted the first military draft, which included, remarkably, a provision allowing the draftee to pay someone to take his place. That act alone contributed to the worst civil violence in American history, the bloody 1863 New York City draft riot. Indeed, in Lincoln’s time, looking back in an attempt to capture their historical heroes’ vision, people were asking, “What would Jefferson do?” “What would Washington, Adams, and Madison do?” And among those searching for the aura of the Founders was Lincoln himself, who regularly cited them in an attempt to seize some historical cover historical, for he certainly did not yet generate any aura of his own.

That’s the frustrating thing about legends. We rarely recognize them in their own time because we cannot understand our times well enough to know what decisions history will celebrate and what decisions history will decry. We are, so to speak, too close to the painting to make out the contours of the image. Think of it. If history had ceased in 1938, Neville Chamberlain — rolled umbrella confidently tucked under his arm, chin raised in a display of self-satisfaction, as he doffed his bowler to the adoring crowds – would have been a hero for achieving “peace in our time.” If time had stopped in 2003, with George W. Bush standing proudly in his flight suit atop the USS Abraham Lincoln (an appropriate detail, at least for this discussion) declaring “Mission Accomplished” on the war in Iraq, we would never have had to reconcile it with the scene going on now, as American F-22s rain bombs down on ISIS-controlled Syria and western Iraq. For that matter, if we roll back the clock only to December, 2011 with the departure of the last American soldier from Baghdad and the end of the U.S-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, we would still be hailing President Obama for reversing the American tide toward foreign adventure that characterized his predecessor’s presidency, instead of nervously watching the Iraqi army that we funded, trained, and armed, fold under its first challenge, a sign that our earlier confidence that the Iraq war had been won, that the Iraq insurgency had been put down, and that political stability had emerged, was a mere fantasy.

The temptation to turn longingly to history’s heroes – whether recent or long-celebrated – arises from the evident truth that so many of our contemporary problems have their antecedents in, or at the very least correlations with, the problems of the past. Indeed, many of the decisions that Lincoln reached have powerful resonance with the issues of our own time. The clash with the Southern rebels produced plenty of terrorists and Lincoln treated them harshly, denying them due process; Lincoln injected the question of equality of peoples of difference into the American idea, though in his time it was race, not sexuality; Lincoln preferred negotiated ends to problems though war was thrust upon him even before he entered the office and after a period of hesitation and indecision Lincoln fought a hard war, a very hard war, convinced that rebellions need not simply be quelled but stamped out lest they rekindle. But those were responses keyed to his time. They do not necessarily tell us how to respond to ours. Even more important, we still cannot say with certainty that Lincoln chose the right path for his own day. Sure, the nation was saved and slavery was ended, but at what price? To paraphrase Faulkner, history is never history; it is always ripe for consideration and reconsideration.

Perhaps the prime thing we can learn from Lincoln is not what he did but how he did it, his deliberate method for decision-making which was characterized by the honest weighing of all sides to an issue, including the challenging of long held principles and assumptions before settling upon one inevitably imperfect plan. In a charming display of this approach, Lincoln once invited his friend Leonard Swett to the White House to listen to him read aloud the letters he had received containing all manner of arguments for and against emancipation. (Lincoln loved to read aloud for “when I read aloud I hear what is read and I see it” and thereby “catch the idea by two senses.”) The president then responded, also aloud, to each argument, both for and against, while Swett remained silent, his reactions never even sought by Lincoln nor provided. Lincoln knew what the choices were. He just wanted to project them into the air in the room so that they had substance for by doing that, maybe, just maybe, he would find a new clarity. Roughly a month after this scene, Lincoln issued the imperfect yet courageous Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

What would Lincoln do? Until they invent a computer program that allows us to construct his personality and then face him off against income inequality, Net Neutrality, and every other issue inconceivable in his time we can only absurdly speculate. But the real answer to that question is that it is not worth the pursuit. Our troubles are our troubles and they are ours to solve.

Todd Brewster has served as Don E. Ackerman Director of Oral History at the United States Military Academy, West Point, and is a longtime journalist who has worked as an editor for Time and Life and as senior producer for ABC News.

There's not just a red and blue America, there are red and blue districts, states and even years

Every two years, the call goes out from hill and dale: “This is the most important election of our lifetimes,” politicians trumpet to the crowds. Democracy, after all, prefers a fight with stakes, especially in America.

Then came the 2014 election, when no one even lifted a horn. There were stakes, and certainly fights, just never a feeling that it mattered all that much. In a nation mired in discontent—less than one in four still said they were satisfied with the direction—the people no longer found choosing the lesser letdown satisfying. A week away, one poll showed just 29% of voters held a positive view of the GOP; only 36% could say the same about Democrats. Enthusiasm for voting, as measured by Gallup, dropped to 2002 levels.

Now we come to the final hours of this miserable season. It’s likely, though not certain, that when you wake up Wednesday, Republicans will control the Senate for the first time since 2006, give or take a recount in the West or a runoff in the South. But don’t expect that result to tell you much about the direction of the country. The generic ballot is dead even, with Americans preferring Democratic and Republican Congressional control in equal measure, a shift from 2010, when Republicans enjoyed a clear advantage.

Other indicators contradict as well. Republicans lost no governors in 2010, but find themselves playing defense in four states. Republicans in Maine, Kansas, Wisconsin and Florida could all go down, consumed by local missteps and general malaise. Democrats have made a close Senate race in deep red Georgia, and an independent has spooked a Republican stalwart in Kansas.

Take it all instead as a grim starting point for the next phase of American political history. When the polls are finally settled and the new suits take their place, the dream of the last decade, which began with Barack Obama’s 2004 keynote at the Democratic National Convention, will end. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s the United States of America,” Obama said. The nation sent him to the White House to make it so. Then the divisions won.

They define us now more than ever, both in geography and time, and there is no leader in American political life with a credible plan for getting us out of the rut. Republicans dominate not just in red states and red districts, but in red years, the midterm cycles where only about 90 million show up at the polls. Democrats have the blue states and districts, and presidential years, when 130 million people, including all of Obama’s “Cousin Pookies,” cast their ballots.

Each side is assured a piece of the pie, and neither has incentive to move from its positions. “When you step in the voting booth, you’re making a choice not just about party, not just about candidates,” President Obama told his crowd Sunday, at an event in Philadelphia. “You’re making a choice about two very different visions of America.”

What he didn’t say was the fact that has tortured his second term: neither vision will become a reality anytime soon. Asked months ago by NBC’s Chuck Todd for the rationale behind the Senate staying Democratic in 2014, the best the President could muster was “it makes a big difference if we’ve got at least one branch in Congress that is presenting these ideas, making arguments.”

Message control, in other words, has replaced governing. Anyone with a television knows it has consumed campaigns, as well. Instead of leaders looking to debate ideas, or even to express ideas, candidates appeared trained like parrots to repeat the same vapid lines over and over again. With no way of dealing with the economic anxiety that dominates, they fanned fears around Ebola, immigration and women’s reproductive rights. The only campaign ad anyone will remember 10 years from now was a former Iowa farmer, Joni Ernst, saying she knew how to castrate hogs.

The irony of this new cynicism runs deep. The Republican Senate strategy was to endlessly repeat in races across the country that Democrats “voted with the President 90% of the time.” The line worked on two levels. It motivated the GOP base by evoking Obama. And it served as a character attack for the rest of country, who actually want to see their government function again. American voters want candidates who can think for themselves.

If the line sounded familiar, it’s because Democrats used it on Republicans in 2006, when they retook Congress, and Obama used it again in 2008. “It’s not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush 95% of the time, as he did in the Senate last year,” Obama said.

Chances are, the line will work again in 2016, in 2018 and in 2020. Another $4 billion, or $5 billion, or $6 billion will be spent spreading the message in each of those years. Voters will choose again to buck the status quo, and will soon find themselves once again right where they started, facing down the most important election of their lifetimes.

Fears are also raised that the Kremlin is again sending men and equipment into rebel areas

The Obama Administration has condemned Russia-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine for holding unauthorized elections and warned that the polls violated the fragile cease-fire deal signed by Kiev and Moscow during a meeting in Minsk, Belarus, last September.

Organizers of the elections in Donetsk and Luhansk say that insurgent leaders from both cities scored landslide wins — providing a bold challenge to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s embattled administration.

“The United States condemns the illegitimate, so-called elections held on Sunday by Russia-backed separatists in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk,” said Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokesperson, on Monday.

Meehan also voiced concerns that the Kremlin had begun sending Russian troops and equipment back across the border into rebel-held Ukrainian territory.

“Moscow’s continued failure to fulfill its obligations under the Minsk agreements calls into question its commitment to supporting a peaceful resolution to the conflict in parts of eastern Ukraine,” said Meehan.

On Monday, Russian authorities applauded the vote and commended the election’s high turnout.

“We respect the will of the inhabitants of the southeast,” said Russia’s Foreign Ministry in a statement. “The elected representatives have obtained a mandate to solve practical problems to restore normal life in the regions.”

In Kiev, the Ukrainian President called the polls a “gross violation” of the Minsk agreement and, during an address to the nation, said the elections would push Kiev to “re-examine” its cease-fire deal with the rebels, according to Agence France-Presse.

Poroshenko is set to sit down with his security team on Tuesday during an emergency meeting in the Ukrainian capital to discuss the implications of the separatist elections.