Collins and Herbert

Ms. Collins is concerned.  She’s addressing a problem:  “TV In Peril.  Is Nothing Sacred?”  She has marching orders for us:  Shape up people. It’s post-inauguration now. It’s all about the issues. And one issue at hand is every American’s God-given right to television reception.  Mr. Herbert writes about “A Crazy Dream,” and says a documentary about the women’s peace movement in Liberia spotlights the achievement of ordinary people who courageously intervene in their own fate.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

On Feb. 17, the nation’s TV broadcasters are scheduled to go all-digital, and Americans with unconverted analog televisions will get their reception cut off. Perhaps you are one of them. Perhaps you are in such a pathetic state of denial that you are not actually sure if you’re an analog person or not. Perhaps you think an analog is a rare burrowing creature found mainly in Australia.

All I can say is, shape up people. We are post-inauguration now. It’s all about the issues. You can’t palm yourself off as an informed citizen just because you know how many electoral votes Montana has.

In 2005, Congress voted to end analog broadcasting. The impetus was to raise money for the Bush tax cuts by selling off the emptied space. (Bad) But it also freed up lots of room for better Internet reception and public safety communication. (Good)

Other countries are doing the same thing. The Netherlands and Finland have already gone all-digital. In fact, the most unnerving thing about our Feb. 17 deadline is that the United States would be clocking in third. What are the odds that the Bush administration could pull off a complicated public initiative more efficiently than anybody but the Dutch and the Finns?

Everybody agrees that consumers shouldn’t suffer from the transition. So people who get analog reception — mainly those who use a rooftop antenna or indoor rabbit ears — are supposed to get converter boxes that allow them to get digital signals. In places like Britain, the government figures out which households are affected and then sends somebody to install the needed equipment.

Needless to say, the Republican-controlled Congress did not consider anything that socialistic in 2005. No, our plan was so deeply privatized that one DTV converter box retailer hired Joe the Plumber as a spokesman.

People who needed a converter box were supposed to request a $40 coupon, which could be used toward the purchase. The coupon was then sent to them by third-class mail — an interesting choice which sometimes meant the coupons, which expire in three months, did not arrive for four to eight weeks. The lucky recipient could then go to an electronics store, find the right kind of box, take it home and install it. (Just for fun, imagine the oldest member of your family doing this.)

Meanwhile, a public awareness campaign was under way. The Federal Communications Commission decided to spend $350,000 sponsoring a race car named “The Digital TV Transition.” Government officials no doubt imagined the golden moment when a Nascar announcer cried: “It’s the Digital TV Transition — over the finish line in record time.”

In the first race, the car hit a wall. In the second, it crashed and burned. Fans got to hear commentary along the line of: “Well, it looks like the Digital TV Transition is going to have to be towed off the track.”

Still, thanks to public service announcements on TV, an estimated 90 percent of TV owners now know something is up. Unfortunately, the announcements created a deep unease among people who were not affected by the transition at all, like cable or satellite subscribers.

Attention must be paid! The TV is in danger! Some folks thought they needed to buy a new set. Others may have been digging shelters in their backyards. Quite a few applied for those coupons even though they didn’t need them, creating a shortage.

Did I mention that once the government ran out of coupons, no new ones could be issued until the old ones expired? Or that people who didn’t manage to cash their coupons in before the expiration date couldn’t ask for a replacement?

At this point there are an estimated 6.5 million families still relying on unconverted televisions, and a waiting list for coupons. The Obama administration has asked for more time to straighten things out, and the Senate voted unanimously to postpone the deadline for four months. This shows that legislators of good will (Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas) can work in a bipartisan manner when the issue at hand is every American’s God-given right to television reception.

Then the bill moved to the House, where quick action required permission of a two-thirds majority. For once, the Republicans got a chance to make their presence felt, and they instantly sprang into action and refused to allow anybody to do anything. This shows you why Nancy Pelosi always seems a little irritable.

How could the Republicans not be worried about this? A disproportionate number of the endangered TV viewers are senior citizens. Bill O’Reilly’s entire audience is in danger!

The House is going to take another crack at the delay proposal soon. If they act, Obama officials will have another four months to resolve all the problems. As if they didn’t have enough to do.

This transition has been as well managed as a rural goat fucking contest…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

In the documentary film “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a woman whose family had endured the agony of civil war in Liberia talks about a dream she had in 2003 in which someone urged her to organize the women of her church to pray for peace.

“It was a crazy dream,” she said.

Prayer seemed like a flimsy counterweight to the forces of Charles Taylor, the tyrannical president at the time, and the brutally predatory rebels who were trying to oust him from power. The violence was excruciating. People were dying by the tens of thousands. Rape had become commonplace. Children were starving. Scenes from the film showed even small children whose limbs had been amputated.

The movie, for me, was about much more than the tragic, and then ultimately uplifting events in Liberia. It was about the power of ordinary people to intervene in their own fate.

The first thing that struck me about the film, which is playing in select theaters around the country now, was the way it captured the almost unimaginable horror that war imposes on noncombatants: the looks of terror on the faces of people fleeing gunfire in the streets; children crouching and flinching, almost paralyzed with fear by the sound of nearby explosions; homes engulfed in flames.

It’s the kind of environment that breeds feelings of helplessness. But Leymah Gbowee, the woman who had the crazy dream, would have none of that, and she should be a lesson to all of us.

The filmmakers Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker show us how Ms. Gbowee not only rallied the women at her Lutheran church to pray for peace, but organized them into a full-blown, all-women peace initiative that spread to other Christian churches — and then to women of the Muslim faith.

They wanted the madness stopped. They wanted an end to the maiming and the killing, especially the destruction of a generation of children. They wanted to eradicate the plague of rape. They wanted all the things that noncombatants crave whenever the warrior crowd — in the U.S., the Middle East, Asia, wherever — decides it’s time once again to break out the bombs and guns and let the mindless killing begin.

When the Liberian Christians reached out to “their Muslim sisters,” there was some fear on both sides that such an alliance could result in a dilution of faith. But the chaos and the killing had reached such extremes that the religious concerns were set aside in the interest of raising a powerful collective voice.

The women prayed, yes, but they also moved outside of the churches and the mosques to demonstrate, to protest, to enlist all who would listen in the cause of peace. Working with hardly any resources, save their extraordinary will and intense desire to end the conflict, the women’s initial efforts evolved into a movement, the Liberian Mass Action for Peace.

Their headquarters was an open-air fish market in the capital, Monrovia. Thousands of women responded to the call, broadcast over a Catholic radio station, to demonstrate at the market for peace. The women showed up day after day, praying, waving signs, singing, dancing, chanting and agitating for peace.

They called on the two sides in the conflict to begin peace talks and their calls coincided with international efforts to have the two sides sit down and begin to negotiate.

Nothing could stop the rallies at the market, not the fierce heat of the sun, nor drenching rainstorms, nor the publicly expressed anger of Mr. Taylor, who was embarrassed by the protests. Public support for the women grew and eventually Mr. Taylor, and soon afterward the rebel leaders, felt obliged to meet with them and hear their grievances.

The moral authority of this movement that seemed to have arisen from nowhere had become one of the significant factors pushing the warring sides to the peace table. Peace talks were eventually held in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and when it looked as if they were about to break down, Ms. Gbowee and nearly 200 of her followers staged a sit-in at the site of the talks, demanding that the two sides stay put until an agreement was reached.

A tentative peace was established, and Mr. Taylor went into exile in Nigeria. The women continued their activism. Three years ago, on Jan. 16, 2006, in an absolutely thrilling triumph for the mothers and wives and sisters and aunts and grandmothers who had worked so courageously for peace, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in as the president of Liberia — the first woman ever elected president of a country in Africa.

Liberia is hardly the world’s most stable society. But “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” reminds us of the incredible power available to the most ordinary of people if they are willing to act with courage and unwavering commitment.

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo’s wringing his hands over the stimulus package in “Cleaner and Faster.”  He whines that the Democrats have created a stimulus package that is a sprawling, undisciplined smorgasbord. By trying to do everything all it once, the bill does nothing well.  STFU, Bobo, until your team comes up with some idea other than cutting taxes and piddling their pants over condoms.  Moron.  Mr. Krugman thought that, 10 days into the new administration, it would be a good time to slap Obama around a bit about “Health Care Now.”  His question:  Why has the Obama administration been silent about one of the key promises during the campaign — the promise of guaranteed health care for all Americans?  Here’s Bobo:

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”

Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.

Now Barack Obama is president, and Summers has become a top economic adviser. Yet the stimulus approach that has emerged on Capitol Hill abandoned the Summers parameters.

In a fateful decision, Democratic leaders merged the temporary stimulus measure with their permanent domestic agenda — including big increases for Pell Grants, alternative energy subsidies and health and entitlement spending. The resulting package is part temporary and part permanent, part timely and part untimely, part targeted and part untargeted.

It’s easy to see why Democrats decided to do this. They could rush through permanent policies they believe in. Plus, they could pay for them with borrowed money. By putting a little of everything in the stimulus package, they avoid the pay-as-you-go rules that might otherwise apply to recurring costs.

But they’ve created a sprawling, undisciplined smorgasbord, which has spun off a series of unintended consequences. First, by trying to do everything all it once, the bill does nothing well. The money spent on long-term domestic programs means there may not be enough to jolt the economy now (about $290 billion in spending is pushed off into 2011 and later). The money spent on stimulus, meanwhile, means there’s not enough to truly reform domestic programs like health technology, schools and infrastructure. The measure mostly pumps more money into old arrangements.

Second, by pumping so much money through government programs, the bill unleashes a tidal wave on state governments. A governor with a few-hundred-billion-dollar shortfall will suddenly have to administer an additional $4 billion or $5 billion. That money will be corrosive both when washing in, and when it disappears in a few years time.

Third, the muddle assures ideological confrontation. A stimulus package was always going to be controversial, because economists differ widely about whether or how a stimulus can work. But this bill also permanently alters the role of the federal government, thus guaranteeing a polarizing brawl at the very start of the Obama presidency.

Fourth, Summers’s warnings about deficits have been put aside. There is no fiscal exit strategy. Instead, permanent spending commitments are entailed with no permanent funding stream to pay for them.

Fifth, new government expenditures on complex matters are being designed on a hasty, reckless timetable. As readers may know, the policy I am most passionate about is pre-K education. Yet I fervently hope that the Head Start expansion is dropped from this bill. A slapdash and shambolic expansion could discredit the whole idea.

Wise heads are now trying to restore structure and safeguards to the enterprise. In testimony this week, Alice Rivlin, Bill Clinton’s former budget director, raised the possibility of separating the temporary from the permanent measures and focusing independently on each. “A long-term investment program should not be put together hastily and lumped in with the anti-recession package,” Rivlin testified. “The elements of the investment program must be carefully planned and will not create many jobs right away.”

The best course is to return to the original Summers parameters — temporary, targeted and timely — thus making the stimulus cleaner and faster.

Strip out the permanent government programs. Many of them are worthy, but we can have that debate another day. Make the short-term stimulus bigger. Many liberal economists have been complaining it is too small, so replace the permanent programs with something like a big payroll tax cut, which would help the working class.

Add in a fiscal exit strategy so the whole thing is budget neutral over the medium term. Finally, coordinate the stimulus package with plans to shore up the housing and financial markets. Until those come to life, no amount of stimulus will do any good.

This recession is scary and complicated. It’s insane to try to tackle it and dozens of other complicated problems, all in one piece of legislation. Leadership involves prioritizing. Those who try to do everything at once will end up with a sprawling, lobbyist-driven mess that does nothing well.

Just imagine if the tables were turned…  Bobo would be screaming and howling about how the horrible Democrats were trying to destroy the country by not voting for the stimulus.  Eat shit, Bobo.  Here’s Krugman:

The whole world is in recession. But the United States is the only wealthy country in which the economic catastrophe will also be a health care catastrophe — in which millions of people will lose their health insurance along with their jobs, and therefore lose access to essential care.

Which raises a question: Why has the Obama administration been silent, at least so far, about one of President Obama’s key promises during last year’s campaign — the promise of guaranteed health care for all Americans?

Let’s talk about the magnitude of the looming health care disaster.

Just about all economic forecasts, including those of the Obama administration’s own economists, say that we’re in for a prolonged period of very high unemployment. And high unemployment means a sharp rise in the number of Americans without health insurance.

After the economy slumped at the beginning of this decade, five million people joined the ranks of the uninsured — and that was with the unemployment rate peaking at only 6.3 percent. This time the Obama administration says that even with its stimulus plan, unemployment will reach 8 percent, and that it will stay above 6 percent until 2012. Many independent forecasts are even more pessimistic.

Why, then, aren’t we hearing more about ensuring health care access?

Now, it’s possible that those of us who care about this issue are reading too much into the administration’s silence. But let me address three arguments that I suspect Mr. Obama is hearing against moving on health care, and explain why they’re wrong.

First, some people are arguing that a major expansion of health care access would just be too expensive right now, given the vast sums we’re about to spend trying to rescue the economy.

But research sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund shows that achieving universal coverage with a plan similar to Mr. Obama’s campaign proposals would add “only” about $104 billion to federal spending in 2010 — not a small sum, of course, but not large compared with, say, the tax cuts in the Obama stimulus plan.

It’s true that the cost of universal health care will be a continuing expense, reaching far into the future. But that has always been true, and Mr. Obama has always claimed that his health care plan was affordable. The temporary expenses of his stimulus plan shouldn’t change that calculation.

Second, some people in Mr. Obama’s circle may be arguing that health care reform isn’t a priority right now, in the face of economic crisis.

But helping families purchase health insurance as part of a universal coverage plan would be at least as effective a way of boosting the economy as the tax breaks that make up roughly a third of the stimulus plan — and it would have the added benefit of directly helping families get through the crisis, ending one of the major sources of Americans’ current anxiety.

Finally — and this is, I suspect, the real reason for the administration’s health care silence — there’s the political argument that this is a bad time to be pushing fundamental health care reform, because the nation’s attention is focused on the economic crisis. But if history is any guide, this argument is precisely wrong.

Don’t take my word for it. Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, has declared that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed. F.D.R. was able to enact Social Security in part because the Great Depression highlighted the need for a stronger social safety net. And the current crisis presents a real opportunity to fix the gaping holes that remain in that safety net, especially with regard to health care.

And Mr. Obama really, really doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Bill Clinton, whose health care push failed politically partly because he moved too slowly: by the time his administration was ready to submit legislation, the economy was recovering from recession and the sense of urgency was fading.

One more thing. There’s a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer.

I agree with administration officials who argue that these financial bailouts are necessary (though I have problems with the specifics). But I also agree with Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who argues that — as a matter of political necessity as well as social justice — aid to bankers has to be linked to a strengthening of the social safety net, so that Americans can see that the government is ready to help everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

The bottom line, then, is that this is no time to let campaign promises of guaranteed health care be quietly forgotten. It is, instead, a time to put the push for universal care front and center. Health care now!

Collins, Cohen and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “Lilly’s Big Day,” says it’s a good day for the feisty working women, like Lilly Ledbetter, who went to court to demand their rights, and the frequently underpaid lawyers who championed them.  Mr. Cohen, in “After the War on Terror,” says in his first White House televised interview, with the Al Arabiya news network, President Obama buried the lead: The war on terror is over.  Mr. Kristof, in “Putting Torture Behind Us,” says rather than lose forever the chance to grow from our missteps, here’s a proposal for confronting Guantánamo without distracting from the work on the economic crisis.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

President Obama is scheduled to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law today. (This is, technically, his second bill-signing, not the first. But you cannot possibly expect us to make a fuss about legislation fixing the salary of the secretary of the interior.)

“I’m so excited I can hardly stand it,” Ledbetter said recently after the bill passed the Senate.

Obama told her story over and over when he campaigned for president: How Ledbetter, now 70, spent years working as a plant supervisor at a tire factory in Alabama. How, when she neared retirement, someone slipped her a pay schedule that showed her male colleagues were making much more money than she was. A jury found her employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, to be really, really guilty of pay discrimination. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision led by the Bush appointees, threw out Ledbetter’s case, ruling that she should have filed her suit within 180 days of the first time Goodyear paid her less than her peers.

(Let us pause briefly to contemplate the chances of figuring out your co-workers’ salaries within the first six months on the job.)

Until the Supreme Court stepped in, courts generally presumed that the 180-day time limit began the last time an employee got a discriminatory pay check, not the first. In an attempt at bipartisan comity, the Senate decided to simply restore the status quo, rejecting House efforts to make the law tougher. Even then, only five Republican senators voted for it — four women and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who is currently the most threatened of the deeply endangered species known as moderate Republicans.

Ledbetter, who was widowed in December, won’t get any restitution of her lost wages; her case can’t be retried. She’s now part of a long line of working women who went to court and changed a little bit of the world in fights that often brought them minimal personal benefit.

Another was Eulalie Cooper, a flight attendant who sued Delta Air Lines in the mid-’60s when she was fired for being married. Not only did a Louisiana judge uphold the airline industry’s bizarre rules requiring stewardesses to be young and single, Cooper was denied unemployment benefits on the grounds that by getting married she left her job “voluntarily.”

But she began a pattern of litigation that eventually ended the industry’s insistence that women needed to look like sex objects in order to properly care for passengers on airplanes. Next time you talk about US Airways Flight 1549’s spectacular landing on the Hudson River, remember that the three flight attendants who kept calm in the ditched plane were all women in their 50s and give a nod to people like Eulalie Cooper.

Patricia Lorance, an Illinois factory worker, went to court after her union and employer secretly agreed to new seniority rules that discriminated against the women who had been promoted in the post-Civil Rights Act era of the 1970s. Like Ledbetter, she lost her court fight because of a ridiculous ruling about timing, which had to be fixed by Congress.

Working at a series of lower-paying jobs after the factory closed, and then disabled by physical ailments, Lorance lost track of her case long before it finally wound its way through the Supreme Court. “But to this day, I am rather proud of myself because I was not a dumb person. I believe in just standing up and fighting for your own rights,” she said in a phone interview.

Ledbetter’s real soul sister is Lorena Weeks of Wadley, Ga. Weeks, now 80, had worked two jobs to support her orphaned siblings, then struggled with her husband to set enough money aside to assure their children would be able to go to college. A longtime telephone employee, she applied for a higher-paying job overseeing equipment at the central office. Both her union and the management said the job was unsuitable for a woman because it involved pushing 30-pound equipment on a dolly, even though Weeks regularly toted around a 34-pound typewriter at her clerical job.

Weeks v. Southern Bell helped smash employers’ old dodge of keeping women out of higher-paying positions by claiming that they required qualifications only men could fulfill. But it was a long, painful fight during which Weeks was terrified that she might lose her job entirely. “I felt like I was so alone, and yet I knew I was doing what God wanted me to do. Going back to the fact my momma had died working so hard. And I knew women worked and needed a place in the world,” she said.

It’s a good day for the feisty working women who went to court to demand their rights and the frequently underpaid lawyers who championed them. They’re strangers to one another; most of them made their stands and then returned to their ordinary lives. But they’re a special sorority all the same. And Lilly Ledbetter got to go to the inauguration and dance with the new president.

“Tell her congratulations,” said Lorena Weeks.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Tehran:

In his first White House televised interview, with the Al Arabiya news network based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, President Obama buried the lead: The war on terror is over.

Yes, the with-us-or-against-us global struggle — the so-called Long War — in which a freedom-loving West confronts the undifferentiated forces of darkness comprising everything from Al Qaeda to elements of the Palestinian national struggle under the banner of “Islamofascism” has been terminated.

What’s left is what matters: defeating terrorist organizations. That’s not a war. It’s a strategic challenge.

The new president’s abandonment of post-9/11 Bush doctrine is a critical breakthrough. It resolves nothing but opens the way for a rapprochement with a Muslim world long cast into the “against-us” camp. Nothing good in Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan or Iran could happen with that Manichean chasm.

Obama said, “The language we use matters.” It does. He said he would be “very clear in distinguishing between organizations like Al Qaeda — that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it — and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop. We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful.”

Bush liked to distinguish between terrorists and the moderate, freedom-loving Muslims of his imagination. Obama makes a much more important distinction here: between those bent on the violent destruction of America and those who merely dislike, differ from or have been disappointed by America.

These days the great majority of the world’s Muslims fall into the latter category. Obama is right to take his case to them through the Arabic-language Al Arabiya network.

His tone represented a startling departure. He was subtle, respectful, self-critical and balanced where the Bush administration had been blunt, offensive, bombastic and one-sided in its embrace of an Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.

Speaking as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, began an eight-day visit to the region, Obama described the mission as one of listening “because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

Obama went further. Citing Muslim members of his own family and his experience of life in a Muslim country (Indonesia), he repositioned the national interest and his own role.

He defined his task as convincing Muslims that “Americans are not your enemy” and persuading Americans that respect for a Muslim world is essential. His objective, he said, was to promote not only American interests but those of ordinary people — read Muslims — suffering from “poverty and a lack of opportunity.”

That’s a significant ideological leap for an American leader, from the post-cold-war doctrine of supremacy to a new doctrine of inclusiveness dictated by globalization — from “the decider” to something close to “mediator-in-chief.” I applaud this shift because it is based in realism; a changed world is susceptible to American persuasion, not to American diktat.

Still, words do not alter the fact that the post-Gaza challenge facing Obama is immense. Here in Iran, where anti-American rhetoric is too significant a pillar of the 30-year-old Islamic Revolution to be lightly sacrificed, the response to the president’s interview was cool. It came as the government, citing the Israeli assault on Gaza, approved a bill to investigate and prosecute alleged war crimes anywhere in the world.

President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad said change under Obama was good but would only be credible if America apologized to Iran for its role in the 1953 coup, among other things. The hard-line daily Kayhan said: “Obama follows Bush’s footsteps.”

In fact, Obama said he would pursue dialogue with Iran and praised the greatness of Persian civilization even as he deplored Iranian threats against Israel, its nuclear program and “support of terrorist organizations in the past.”

Any U.S.-Iranian dialogue will have to be rooted in a word Obama favors: respect. The United States has underestimated Iranian pride and the fierce attachment to its independence of a nation that has known its share of Western meddling.

Carrots and sticks will lead nowhere. Nor will an exclusive focus on the nuclear issue that fails to examine the whole range of American and Iranian interests, some shared, some hotly contested.

What is certain, with Iran as with the rest of the Middle East, is that there will be setbacks. Terrorists will attack. Obama will be denounced. But as Mitchell knows from his experience of bringing peace to Northern Ireland, the critical thing is perseverance.

Tony Blair, now also a Middle East envoy and Mitchell’s partner in Belfast, once put it to me this way: “The only reason we got the breakthrough in Northern Ireland was we did in the end focus on it with such intensity over such a period that every little thing that went wrong — and everything that could go wrong did at some point — was all the time being managed and rectified.” He described the approach as: “Any time we can’t solve it, we have to manage it, until we can start to solve it again.”

Bush had the ideological framework wrong. Obama has righted it by ending the war on terror. Now comes the hard Middle Eastern slog of solve-manage-solve. It will need the president’s unswerving focus.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

President Obama is resisting calls for an investigation into torture and other abuses during the Bush years, so the chance to learn from our mistakes is slipping away.

Mr. Obama understandably wants to focus on economic recovery rather than a dissection of the past. Why fritter political capital on an inquest that would antagonize Republicans and imperil our economy and his agenda?

But as George Santayana, the eminent Harvard philosopher wrote: “Those who forget history are destined to repeat it.” Rather than lose forever the chance to grow from our missteps, here’s a two-step proposal for confronting the past without distracting from the work on the economic crisis.

The first step is to appoint a high-level commission — perhaps a McCain-Scowcroft Commission? — to investigate torture, secret detention and wiretapping during the Bush years, as well as to look ahead and offer recommendations for balancing national security and individual rights in the future.

This wouldn’t be a bipartisan commission, with Democrats and Republicans offsetting each other in seething distrust. Rather, it would be nonpartisan, dominated by military and security experts.

It could be co-chaired by Brent Scowcroft and John McCain, with its conclusions written by Philip Zelikow, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice who wrote the best-selling report of the 9/11 commission.

If the three most prominent members were all Republicans, no one on the right could denounce it as a witch hunt — and its criticisms would have far more credibility. The commission could be rounded out by former generals, top intelligence officials and outside experts without a strong partisan cast: people like Richard Haass, Anthony Zinni, Joseph Nye, James Dobbins and William Cohen.

Democrats might begrudge the heavy Republican presence on such a commission, but surely any panel is better than where we’re headed: which is no investigation at all. And the truth is that many generals are privately aghast at torture because it undermines their own “hearts and minds” counterinsurgency efforts, and because it adds to the risk that our own troops will face the same in enemy hands. My bet, based on my conversations with military and intelligence experts, is that such a commission would issue a stinging repudiation of torture that no one could lightly dismiss.

As a nation, we’ve repeatedly trampled on individual rights during moments of national fear — the Palmer raids after World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the McCarthy hearings at the dawn of the cold war. We may well do so again after the next major terror attack, particularly if it turns out to have been planned by people who were released from Guantánamo.

We’ll be better off if we come to some consensus on these issues. The Kerner commission on race and the 9/11 commission are both examples of how we as a nation used such panels to gain a better understanding of our shortcomings. Such a commission would also help heal the divisions with the rest of the world and help renew America’s reputation.

The second step has to do in particular with transforming Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Mr. Obama’s pledge to close the prison there within a year is a big help, but even so the word “Guantánamo” will live as a recruiting tool for Muslim terror groups.

So let’s do more than just close the prison. The best move would be to hand Guantánamo back to the Cubans.

Why spend tens of millions each year for a naval base that has very little military utility? We can project power in the region from Florida, and the main effect of the base has been to bolster Cuba’s Communist regime by creating a nationalist backlash and a scapegoat for the Castros’ repression and incompetence.

Granted, returning the base to Cuba may not be politically realistic. So here’s a fallback alternative: turn the base into a research center for tropical diseases.

This was proposed in a medical journal, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a year ago, and it makes more sense now than ever.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, there are still more than half-a-million cases annually of dengue fever (which causes excruciating pain and sometimes death), nearly 50,000 new cases of leprosy and more than 700,000 cases of elephantiasis (which causes grotesque deformities). In addition, 50 million Latin Americans have hookworms inside them, often causing anemia and making it more difficult for children to concentrate in school.

Peter Hotez, the president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute at George Washington University and the editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, says that an international center on Guantánamo could become a symbol of United States cooperation in the region.

Imagine if people around the world came to think of Guantánamo as a place where America led a battle against hookworms and leprosy. That would help us fight terrorism far more effectively than the prison at Guantánamo ever did.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo writes about “Wall Street’s Socialist Jet Setters,” and says the former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours.  The Moustache of Wisdom gives us “Abdullah II: The 5-State Solution.”  He asks what might King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia propose if asked to update his plan for peace in the Middle East?  He then tells us, doing a little fiction piece like MoDo.  Here’s MoDo:

As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.

Couldn’t he throw down his BlackBerry tablet and smash it in anger over the feckless financiers, the gods of gold and their idols — in this case not a gilt calf but an $87,000 area rug, a cache of diamond Tiffany and Cartier watches and a French-made luxury corporate jet?

Now that we’re nationalizing, couldn’t we fire any obtuse bankers and auto executives who cling to perks and bonuses even as the economy is following John Thain down his antique commode?

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)

The “Citiboobs” — as The New York Post, which broke the news, calls them — watched as the car chieftains got in trouble for flying their private jets to Washington to ask for bailouts, and the A.I.G. moguls got dragged before Congress for spending their bailout on California spa treatments. But the boobs still didn’t get the message.

The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours. Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.

Prodded by an appalled Senator Carl Levin, Tim Geithner — even as he was being confirmed as Treasury secretary — directed Treasury officials to call the Citiboobs and tell them the new jet would not fly.

“They woke up pretty quickly,” says a Treasury official, adding that they protested for a bit. “Six months ago, they would have kept the plane and flown it to Washington.”

Senator Levin said that the financiers will not be able to change their warped mentality, but will have to be reined in by Geithner’s new leashes. “I have no confidence that they intend or desire to change,” Levin told me. “These bankers got away with murder, and it’s obscene that close to nothing is being asked of financial institutions. I get incensed at the thought that a bank that’s getting billions of dollars in taxpayer money is out there buying fancy new airplanes.”

New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, always gratifying on the issue of clawing back money from the greedy creeps on Wall Street, on Tuesday subpoenaed Thain, the former Merrill Lynch chief executive, over $4 billion in bonuses he handed out as the failing firm was bought by Bank of America.

In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, Thain used the specious, contemptible reasoning that other executives use to rationalize why they’re keeping their bonuses as profits are plunging.

“If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise” and they’ll go elsewhere, he said.

Hello? They destroyed the franchise. Let’s call their bluff. Let’s see what a great job market it is for the geniuses of capitalism who lost $15 billion in three months and helped usher in socialism.

Bartiromo also asked Thain to explain, when jobs and salaries were being cut at his firm, how he could justify spending $1 million to renovate his office. As The Daily Beast and CNBC reported, big-ticket items included curtains for $28,000, a pair of chairs for $87,000, fabric for a “Roman Shade” for $11,000, Regency chairs for $24,000, six wall sconces for $2,700, a $13,000 chandelier in the private dining room and six dining chairs for $37,000, a “custom coffee table” for $16,000, an antique commode “on legs” for $35,000, and a $1,400 “parchment waste can.”

Does that mean you can only throw used parchment in it or is it made of parchment? It’s psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.

Thain should never rise above the level of stocking the money in A.T.M.’s again. Just think: This guy could well have been Treasury secretary if John McCain had won.

Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O’Neal?

“Well — his office was very different — than — the — the general décor of — Merrill’s offices,” Thain replied. “It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in.”

Did it have a desk and a phone?

How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) — and not as perps?

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

That sounds like a plan to me…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

In February 2002, I traveled to Saudi Arabia and interviewed the then crown prince, now king, Abdullah, at his Riyadh horse farm. I asked him why the next Arab summit wouldn’t just propose to Israel full peace and normalization of relations, by all 22 Arab states, for full withdrawal from all occupied lands and creation of a Palestinian state. Abdullah said that I had read his mind (“Have you broken into my desk?” he asked me) and that he was about to propose just that, which he later did, giving birth to the “Abdullah peace plan.”

Unfortunately, neither the Bush team nor Israel ever built upon the Abdullah plan. And the Saudi leader always stopped short of presenting his ideas directly to the Israeli people. Since then, everything has deteriorated.

So, I’ve wondered lately what King Abdullah would propose if asked to update his plan. I’ve even probed whether he’d like to do another interview, but he is apparently reticent. Not one to be deterred, I’ve decided to do the next best thing: read his mind again. Here is my guess at the memo King Abdullah has in his drawer for President Obama. I’d call it: “Abdullah II: The Five-State Solution for Arab-Israeli peace.”

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on your inauguration and for quickly dispatching your new envoy, George Mitchell, a good man, to the Middle East. I wish Mitchell could resume where he left off eight years ago, but the death of Arafat, the decline of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war in Lebanon, the 2009 Hamas-Israel war in Gaza, the continued expansion of colonial Israeli settlements and the deepening involvement of Iran with Hamas and Hezbollah have all created a new reality.

Specifically, the Palestinian Authority is in no position today to assume control of the West Bank, Hamas is incapable of managing Gaza and the introduction of rockets provided by Iran to Hamas has created a situation whereby Israel won’t turn over the West Bank to any Palestinians now because it fears Hamas would use it to launch rockets on Israel’s international airport. But if we do nothing, Zionist settlers would devour the rest of the West Bank and holy Jerusalem. What can be done?

I am proposing what I would call a five-state solution:

1. Israel agrees in principle to withdraw from every inch of the West Bank and Arab districts of East Jerusalem, as it has from Gaza. Any territories Israel might retain in the West Bank for its settlers would have to be swapped — inch for inch — with land from Israel proper.

2. The Palestinians — Hamas and Fatah — agree to form a national unity government. This government then agrees to accept a limited number of Egyptian troops and police to help Palestinians secure Gaza and monitor its borders, as well as Jordanian troops and police to do the same in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority would agree to five-year “security assistance programs” with Egypt in Gaza and with Jordan in the West Bank.

With Egypt and Jordan helping to maintain order, Palestinians could focus on building their own credible security and political institutions to support their full independence at the end of five years.

3. Israel would engage in a phased withdrawal over these five years from all of its settlements in the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem — except those agreed to be granted to Israel as part of land swaps — at the same pace that the Palestinians meet the security and governance metrics agreed to in advance by all the parties. The U.S. would be the sole arbiter of whether the metrics have been met by both sides.

4. Saudi Arabia would pay all the costs of the Egyptian and Jordanian trustees, plus a $1 billion a year service fee to each country — as well as all the budgetary needs of the Palestinian Authority. The entire plan would be based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and blessed by the U.N. Security Council.

The virtues of this five-state solution — Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia — are numerous: Egypt and Jordan, the Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, would act as transition guarantors that any Israeli withdrawal would not leave a security vacuum in the West Bank, Gaza or Arab Jerusalem that could threaten Israel. Israel would have time for a phased withdrawal of its settlements, and Palestinians would have the chance to do nation-building in an orderly manner. This would be an Arab solution that would put a stop to Iran’s attempts to Persianize the Palestinian issue.

President Obama, too much has been broken to go straight back to the two-state solution. It would be like trying to build a house with bricks but no cement. There’s no trust and no framework to build it. Israelis and Palestinians need the kind of cement that only Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan can provide. It would give Israelis security and Palestinians a clear pathway to an independent state.

I hope you will give careful consideration to the five-state solution.

Peace be upon you,

Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz

Bobo and Herbert

Bobo thinks he can instruct us on “What Life Asks of Us.”  He says there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book by the political scientist Hugh Heclo. In this way of living, we are defined by what life asks of us.  Um, Bobo, sometimes books are neglected because they suck.  Just sayin’…  Mr. Herbert, in “The Same Old Song,” says Republican policies have brought the country to a deplorable state. But the party is still at it, attacking President Obama’s stimulus plan and calling for ever more tax cuts.  Well, whine, cut taxes and piddle their pants at the thought of terrorists is all they know how to do.  Here’s Bobo:

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect … . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game … did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

With Kristol gone maybe the Times will look around and see what other dead wood is littering up the place.  One can hope…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Because your confreres (see above) are still worried if the people they’re supposed to be covering like sprinkles on their doughnuts, and they’re terrified they’ll not be invited to the next cocktail wienie bash…

Kristol, Cohen and Krugman

Bloody Billy Kristol, of PNAC infamy, has now turned his attention to the future of liberalism.  In “Will Obama Save Liberalism?” he says liberalism’s fate rests on our new president’s shoulders. If Mr. Obama governs successfully, we’re in a new political era. If not, the country will be open to new conservative alternatives.  Finally the Times seems to have seen the error of its ways, and has printed these welcome words:  “This is William Kristol’s last column.”  I don’t care if it’s Monday — it’s a great day!  Mr. Cohen is “Remembering Germany.”  He says America’s once strong alliance with Germany has soured. The new administration should rekindle this relationship, which is essential to turning the global economy around.  I’d say the odds are good that President Obama won’t get all creepy-touchy-feely with Chancellor Merkel, so that’s a step in the right direction already.  Mr. Krugman writes about “Bad Faith Economics.”  He says cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a stimulus plan through as fraudulent arguments that seem superficially plausible.  Here’s the last column we’ll have to suffer through from that human abscess Kristol:

All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.

Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

They also have some regrets. They’ll have time to ponder those as liberals now take their chance to govern.

Lest conservatives be too proud, it’s worth recalling that conservatism’s rise was decisively enabled by liberalism’s weakness. That weakness was manifested by liberalism’s limp reaction to the challenge from the New Left in the 1960s, became more broadly evident during the 1970s, and culminated in the fecklessness of the Carter administration at the end of that decade.

In 1978, the Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield diagnosed the malady: “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism. … Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”

Over the next three decades, it was modern conservatism, led at the crucial moment by Ronald Reagan, that assumed the task of defending liberty with strength and confidence. Can a revived liberalism, faced with a new set of challenges, now pick up that mantle?

The answer lies in the hands of one man: the 44th president. If Reagan’s policies had failed, or if he hadn’t been politically successful, the conservative ascendancy would have been nipped in the bud. So with President Obama today. Liberalism’s fate rests to an astonishing degree on his shoulders. If he governs successfully, we’re in a new political era. If not, the country will be open to new conservative alternatives.

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

Obama appealed to the authority of “our forebears,” “our founding documents,” even — political correctness alert! — “our founding fathers.” He emphasized that “we will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.” He spoke almost not at all about rights (he had one mention of “the rights of man,” paired with “the rule of law” in the context of a discussion of the Constitution). He called for “a new era of responsibility.”

And he appealed to “the father of our nation,” who, before leading his army across the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, allegedly “ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’”

For some reason, Obama didn’t identify the author of “these timeless words” — the only words quoted in the entire speech. He’s Thomas Paine, and the passage comes from the first in his series of Revolutionary War tracts, “The Crisis.” Obama chose to cloak his quotation from the sometimes intemperate Paine in the authority of the respectable George Washington.

Sixty-seven years ago, a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, at the close of a long radio address on the difficult course of the struggle we had just entered upon, another liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also told the story of Washington ordering that “The Crisis” be read aloud, and also quoted Paine. But he turned to the more famous — and more stirring — passage with which Paine begins his essay:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

That exhortation was appropriate for World War II. Today, the dangers are less stark, and the conflicts less hard. Still, there will be trying times during Obama’s presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out, jackass.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

When my thoughts turn to wreckage, and there’s a lot of it about these days, I tend to think of Germany’s “Stunde null,” or zero hour, the moment in 1945 when a once powerful nation faced its utter moral and material bankruptcy, the rubble of its collective suicide.

No doubt that’s because I lived in Berlin in the 1990s, at the time when the capital returned there from Bonn and a reunited Germany felt confident enough to face the ghosts of its darkest hours. Berlin was still raw, its past present at every turn, and so the miracle of Germany’s post-war recovery was palpable.

A country in disgrace had fast-forwarded from ruin to peace and prosperity.

That miracle, of course, was in large measure a German-American achievement, from Marshall Plan reconstruction, through West Germany’s insertion into NATO, culminating with the astute U.S. diplomacy that allowed the country’s unification within the Western alliance.

It’s easy to forget these days that solving “the German question” took much of the 20th century. It’s also easy to forget that the U.S. embassy in Bonn was once America’s largest in the world, comparable, with its thousands of staff, to the Baghdad embassy today.

What a difference a couple of decades make. The U.S. alliance with Germany has soured. Donald Rumsfeld’s comparison of the country to Libya was a low point illustrating how differences over Iraq poisoned a relationship already complicated by the disappearance of its strategic imperative.

Things have looked up a bit since then, but not a lot. The Germans still feel a little like jilted lovers. Many Americans have a vague notion of an ungrateful nation that’s gone soft and smug. It’s safe to say President Obama, his campaign speech in Berlin notwithstanding, does not have Germany high on his “to do” list.

That’s a pity. Germany is important to the United States right now. It’s time to rekindle a dormant relationship. While America is not at “Stunde null,” it’s at a moment of disarray when it has to rethink the nature and exercise of its power. Germany knows all about reinvention. It can help in four important areas: Europe, the economy, Iran and Afghanistan.

A strong Europe is essential to America’s recovery. The United States is too stretched — militarily and economically — to do without the cohesion of its closest allies.

There are three major European powers: Britain, France and Germany. Britain is going through a meltdown so severe that the joke there is that the country’s the next Iceland. That aside, its European credentials are always a little suspect.

In France, the notion of the European Union as a “counterweight” to American power still lurks, although President Nicolas Sarkozy has done much to dispose of such Gallic intellectual baggage.

Only in Germany is a powerful commitment to the strength and effectiveness of the European Union matched by an equally powerful conviction that the trans-Atlantic relationship remains critical.

Through Germany, Obama should press the urgent need for the 27-nation E.U. to complete reforms that will give it a president and foreign minister with terms long enough to count. Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the world’s largest exporter, must also be a pivot of post-crash reforms.

The recession is severe in Germany, but the country still has a savings ratio of 11 percent (it’s negative in the United States), a strong manufacturing sector and, after spending a staggering $1.8 trillion to integrate the Communist East, it has managed to get its budget close to balance.

Hence its much-criticized hesitation to join the socialist bandwagon (the Chinese are now referring to the U.S. economy as “socialism with American characteristics”) and pump billions into salvage operations. But Germany has now come through with a $110 billion stimulus package.

It is an essential American ally in turning the global economy around; expanding the G-8 to reflect today’s realities by including at least Brazil, Mexico, India, China, South Africa and Indonesia; and pushing through global financial reforms to be discussed in London in April that should include minimum capital ratios for banks and measures to ensure risk and responsibility get enduringly reacquainted with each other.

In Iran, Germany has broad experience of negotiation in recent years, along with Britain and France. That experience has led to some important German convictions: that American leadership under Obama is essential; that no deal will work without a regional security arrangement that only the United States can underwrite and that must (at least tacitly) acknowledge the Israeli bomb; and that new avenues have to be found to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because only he counts.

With 3,500 troops in Afghanistan, set to rise to 4,500 this year, Germany has the third-largest troop presence there. It has been a strong advocate of some measures — including treating Pakistan and Afghanistan as a single theater and concentrating on corruption-eliminating government reform — now finding favor in Washington. Another reason to think Berlin.

A good start would be naming a vigorous, German-speaking ambassador to Berlin. The post is vacant. It shouldn’t be for long.

And now here’s Mr. Krugman:

As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.

Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”

But the obvious cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don’t know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending. Meanwhile, it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan. But rather than accept that implication, conservatives take refuge in a nonsensical argument against public spending in general.

Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration’s chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.

It’s true that the normal response to recessions is interest-rate cuts from the Fed, not government spending. And that might be the best option right now, if it were available. But it isn’t, because we’re in a situation not seen since the 1930s: the interest rates the Fed controls are already effectively at zero.

That’s why we’re talking about large-scale fiscal stimulus: it’s what’s left in the policy arsenal now that the Fed has shot its bolt. Anyone who cites old arguments against fiscal stimulus without mentioning that either doesn’t know much about the subject — and therefore has no business weighing in on the debate — or is being deliberately obtuse.

These are only some of the fundamentally fraudulent antistimulus arguments out there. Basically, conservatives are throwing any objection they can think of against the Obama plan, hoping that something will stick.

But here’s the thing: Most Americans aren’t listening. The most encouraging thing I’ve heard lately is Mr. Obama’s reported response to Republican objections to a spending-oriented economic plan: “I won.” Indeed he did — and he should disregard the huffing and puffing of those who lost.

Hear, hear!

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo asks “Which Governor is Wackier?”  She loves the hurly-burly way the Illinois governor rammed through his choice for the Senate, compared with the namby-pamby way the New York governor strangled his best choice for the Senate.  Um, MoDo dear, I always thought taking the trouble to go and vote would be one of the prerequisites for being a Senator…  Mr. Friedman says “This Is Not a Test,” and that if you believe in the necessity of a Palestinian state or you love Israel, you’d better start paying attention. We’re getting perilously close to closing the window on a two-state solution.  Mr. Kristof tells us about “Bill Gates’s Next Big Thing.”  He offers a peek into a letter Bill Gates will publish on Monday. He’s not only going to do more for health and development in the poorest nations and education in America, he is calling for your help, too.  Mr. Rich says it’s “No Time for Poetry,” and that here’s a reason that Barack Obama’s inaugural speech was austere, not pretty. He wasn’t just rebuking the Bush administration, but unmistakably widened his indictment.  Here’s MoDo:

I love Blago.

I love his beady little eyes. I love his Serbian shock of hair. I love his flaring nostrils. I love the way he jogs through the snow under indictment, like a stork in spandex trying to gallop. I love the way he compares himself in quick order to Pearl Harbor, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a dead cowboy.

I love the hurly-burly way the Illinois governor rammed through his choice for the Senate, compared with the namby-pamby way the New York governor strangled his best choice for the Senate.

So now we have an N.R.A. handmaiden in Bobby Kennedy’s old seat? Kirsten Gillibrand, a k a Tracy Flick, accepting the honor with her Republican pal Al D’Amato beside her on stage? Gross.

After quoting Kipling and Tennyson in previous shameless press conferences, Blago moved on to an old cowboy movie analogy on Friday to explain why he should be allowed to call Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett and Jesse Jackson Jr. as witnesses at the impeachment trial he’s refusing to attend.

“There was an old saying in the Old West,” he said. “There was a cowboy who was charged with stealing a horse in town. And some of the other cowboys, especially the guy whose horse was stolen, were very unhappy with that guy. And one of the cowboys said, ‘Let’s hang him.’ Then the other cowboys said: ‘Hold on. Before we hang him, let’s first give him a fair trial. Then we’ll hang him.’ Under these rules, I’m not even getting a fair trial. They’re just hanging me.”

Raising his own high bar for chutzpah, he complained to The Associated Press about his arrest, “Dec. 9 to my family, to us, to me, is what Pearl Harbor Day was to the United States.”

Even though he is accused of pressuring The Chicago Tribune — fire members of the editorial board who had criticized him or lose his help in selling the prime asset Wrigley Field — Blago called on The Tribune to write editorials defending his rights.

Mayor Richard Daley pronounced Blago “cuckoo.” Governor Paterson is simply a goofball.

Paterson could have acted a month ago, or even a week ago. There was no reason not to, certainly not his claim that he had to wait for Hillary, ad nauseam, to exit to State. Colorado’s governor named Michael Bennet senator two and a half weeks before Ken Salazar resigned his seat for the Interior Department.

Then the Democrats would have had another Kennedy in the Senate representing New York — Bobby’s niece and a smart, policy-oriented, civic-minded woman to whom the president feels deeply indebted in an era when every state has its hand out.

Instead they have Gillibrand, who voted against the Wall Street — as in New York — bailout bill. And who introduced a bill to balance the federal budget annually, which suggests she would oppose the $825 billion in deficit spending that President Obama proposes to rescue the country, not least New York.

Paterson’s five weeks of dithering let the jealous vindictiveness of the Clintons and friends — still fuming over Caroline’s endorsement of Obama and Teddy’s blocking Hillary from a leading health care role in the Senate — poison the air. With his usual sense of entitlement and aggrievement, Bill Clinton of Arkansas did not want Caroline Kennedy of New York to have the seat that Hillary Clinton of Illinois held.

Paterson wasn’t thinking of New York, only of how an upstate ally who was a woman would bolster his own chances for re-election. We can only hope that an avenging Andrew Cuomo takes him out in a primary.

The 42-year-old Gillibrand, who has been in the House for only two years, is known as opportunistic and sharp- elbowed. Tracy Flick is her nickname among colleagues in the New York delegation, many of whom were M.I.A. at her Albany announcement.

Fellow Democrats were warning Harry Reid on Friday that he was going to have his hands full with the new senator because she’s “a pain.”

Chuck Schumer embraced Gillibrand because at long last he can be the best-known senator from New York, something that would have been impossible with Kennedy.

The governor who began his accidental tenure, thanks to Client 9, by confessing his infidelities and drug use had so little class that he trashed Kennedy while letting her hang out to dry, then let aides trash her even after she dropped out.

Kennedy friends said that, as Caroline was pulling out for family reasons, the governor made a crude attempt to control the spin — a childish “You can’t quit, I’m firing you” power play.

Carolyn McCarthy, who ran for Congress on an antigun platform after her husband was killed and her son wounded by a gunman on the Long Island Rail Road in 1993, said she may challenge the “N.R.A. poster child” in 2010.

She had the best line Friday, wondering about the chuckle-headed governor: “Who’s in control up there?”

Here’s Mr. Friedman:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “Guy walks into a bar …” No, not that one — this one: “This is the most critical year ever for Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy. It is five minutes to midnight. If we don’t get diplomacy back on track soon, it will be the end of the two-state solution.”

I’ve heard that line almost every year for the last 20, and I’ve never bought it. Well, today, I’m buying it.

We’re getting perilously close to closing the window on a two-state solution, because the two chief window-closers — Hamas in Gaza and the fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank — have been in the driver’s seats. Hamas is busy making a two-state solution inconceivable, while the settlers have steadily worked to make it impossible.

If Hamas continues to obtain and use longer- and longer-range rockets, there is no way any Israeli government can or will tolerate independent Palestinian control of the West Bank, because a rocket from there can easily close the Tel Aviv airport and shut down Israel’s economy.

And if the Jewish settlers continue with their “natural growth” to devour the West Bank, it will also be effectively off the table. No Israeli government has mustered the will to take down even the “illegal,” unauthorized settlements, despite promises to the U.S. to do so, so it’s getting hard to see how the “legal” settlements will ever be removed. What is needed from Israel’s Feb. 10 elections is a centrist, national unity government that can resist the blackmail of the settlers, and the rightist parties that protect them, to still implement a two-state solution.

Because without a stable two-state solution, what you will have is an Israel hiding behind a high wall, defending itself from a Hamas-run failed state in Gaza, a Hezbollah-run failed state in south Lebanon and a Fatah-run failed state in Ramallah. Have a nice day.

So if you believe in the necessity of a Palestinian state or you love Israel, you’d better start paying attention. This is not a test. We’re at a hinge of history.

What makes it so challenging for the new Obama team is that Mideast diplomacy has been transformed as a result of the regional disintegration since Oslo — in three key ways.

First, in the old days, Henry Kissinger could fly to three capitals, meet three kings, presidents or prime ministers and strike a deal that could hold. No more. Today a peacemaker has to be both a nation-builder and a negotiator.

The Palestinians are so fragmented politically and geographically that half of U.S. diplomacy is going to be about how to make peace between Palestinians, and build their institutions, so there is a coherent, legitimate decision-making body there — before we can make peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Second, Hamas now has a veto over any Palestinian peace deal. It’s true that Hamas just provoked a reckless war that has devastated the people of Gaza. But Hamas is not going away. It is well armed and, despite its suicidal behavior of late, deeply rooted.

The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank will not make any compromise deal with Israel as long as it fears that Hamas, from outside the tent, would denounce it as traitorous. Therefore, Job 2 for the U.S., Israel and the Arab states is to find a way to bring Hamas into a Palestinian national unity government.

As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen says, “It is not enough for Israel that the world recognize that Hamas criminally mismanaged its responsibility to its people. Israel’s longer-term interest is to be sure that it has a Palestinian partner for negotiations, which will have sufficient legitimacy among its own people to be able to sign agreements and fulfill them. Without Hamas as part of a Palestinian decision, any Israeli-Palestinian peace will be meaningless.”

But bringing Hamas into a Palestinian unity government, without undermining the West Bank moderates now leading the Palestinian Authority, will be tricky. We’ll need Saudi Arabia and Egypt to buy, cajole and pressure Hamas into keeping the cease-fire, supporting peace talks and to give up rockets — while Iran and Syria will be tugging Hamas the other way.

And that leads to the third new factor — Iran as a key player in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy. The Clinton team tried to woo Syria while isolating Iran. President Bush tried to isolate both Iran and Syria. The Obama team, as Martin Indyk argues in “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” “needs to try both to bring in Syria, which would weaken Hamas and Hezbollah, while also engaging Iran.”

So, just to recap: It’s five to midnight and before the clock strikes 12 all we need to do is rebuild Fatah, merge it with Hamas, elect an Israeli government that can freeze settlements, court Syria and engage Iran — while preventing it from going nuclear — just so we can get the parties to start talking. Whoever lines up all the pieces of this diplomatic Rubik’s Cube deserves two Nobel Prizes.

None of this mess is Bush/Condi’s fault, right?  And no doubt if Obama doesn’t succeed in doing all of that by Tuesday he’ll be an abject failure, right?  And the whole mess will be his fault, right?  Feh.  Here’s Mr. Kristof, writing from Seattle:

Here’s a paradox: In these brutal economic times, one of the leading advocates for the world’s poorest people is one of the richest.

Bill Gates will publish his first “annual letter” on Monday outlining his work on his twin passions — health and development in the poorest nations and education in America — and calling for the United States to do more even during this economic crisis. I came here to Seattle for an advance peek at the letter and to ask how he is adjusting to his transition from tycoon to philanthropist.

Mr. Gates ended his full-time presence at Microsoft last July and since then has thrown himself into work at his foundation. He is now trying to do to malaria, AIDS, polio and lethal childhood diarrhea what he did to Netscape, and he just may succeed.

He does seem to be going through withdrawal, for software engineering was his passion. “I miss that,” he said, but added that he is becoming equally maniacal (that’s his word) about poverty and education.

Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda, are already having an effect on the developing world that is simply transformative. Just one of their investments, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, has saved more than three million lives since 2000.

That’s a down payment.

In 1960, almost 20 million children died annually before age 5, Mr. Gates notes. There are more children today, yet the death toll has been halved to under 10 million annually. Now his goal is to see it halved again, saving an additional five million children’s lives annually.

“We’re on the verge of some big advances,” Mr. Gates said. In particular, a promising malaria vaccine will enter its final phase of human trials this year, with others behind it. Mr. Gates said he is “absolutely confident” that a successful malaria vaccine will be achieved, probably within a half dozen years, and an AIDS vaccine 10 or more years from now.

Look, I’m a cynical journalist, and I don’t want to sound too infatuated. I think the Gates Foundation has missed the chance to leverage the revolution in social entrepreneurship, hasn’t been as effective in advocacy as it has been in research, and has missed an opportunity to ignite a broad social movement behind its issues.

But if Mr. Gates manages to accomplish as much in the world of vaccines, health and food production as he thinks he can, then the consequences will be staggering. Squared. In that case, the first few paragraphs of Mr. Gates’s obituary will be all about overcoming diseases and poverty, barely mentioning his earlier career in the software industry.

Mr. Gates said he got the idea for an annual letter from Warren Buffett, who writes such a letter ruminating about investments and the business world. (You can sign up to get Mr. Gates’s letter, or read it beginning Monday, at www.gatesfoundation.org.)

In the letter, Mr. Gates goes out of his way to acknowledge setbacks. For example, the Gates Foundation made a major push for smaller high schools in the United States, often helping to pay for the creation of small schools within larger buildings.

“Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way,” he acknowledges. Small schools succeeded when the principal was able to change teachers, curriculum and culture, but smaller size by itself proved disappointing. “In most cases,” he says, “we fell short.”

Mr. Gates comes across as a strong education reformer, focusing on supporting charter schools and improving teacher quality. He suggested that when he has nailed down the evidence more firmly, he will wade into the education debates.

“It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one,” Mr. Gates writes in his letter. “Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.”

Mr. Gates told me he was optimistic that President Obama would make progress on these issues, notwithstanding the economic crisis, and he noted that the downturn had only added to the need for foreign assistance and education spending. “The poorer you are, the worse the impact is,” he said.

I asked Mr. Gates what advice he had for ordinary readers who might want to engage in micro-philanthropy.

“The key thing is to pick a cause, whether its crops or diseases or great high schools,” he said. “Pick one and get some more in-depth knowledge.” If possible, travel to see the problems firsthand, then pick an organization to support with donations or volunteer time.

So try it. The only difference between you and Mr. Gates is scale.

Here’s Mr. Rich:

President Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett’s. He did not recreate J.F.K.’s inaugural, or Lincoln’s second, or F.D.R.’s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Such was the judgment of many Washington drama critics. But there’s a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn’t just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don’t-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture. We did so while a supposedly cost-free, off-the-books war, usually out of sight and out of mind, helped break the bank along with our nation’s spirit and reputation.

We can’t keep blaming 43 for everything, especially now that we don’t have him to kick around anymore. On Tuesday the new president pointedly widened his indictment beyond the sins of his predecessor. He spoke of those at the economic pinnacle who embraced greed and irresponsibility as well as the rest of us who collaborated in our “collective failure to make hard choices.” He branded as sub-American those who “prefer leisure over work or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.” And he wasn’t just asking Paris Hilton “to set aside childish things.” As Linda Hirshman astutely pointed out on The New Republic’s Web site, even Obama’s opening salutation — “My fellow citizens,” not “fellow Americans” — invoked the civic responsibilities we’ve misplaced en masse.

These themes are not new for Obama. They were there back on Feb. 10, 2007, when, on another frigid day, he announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill. Citing “our mounting debts” and “hard choices,” he talked of how “each of us, in our own lives, will have to accept responsibility” and “some measure of sacrifice.” His campaign, he said then, “has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship.” But the press, convinced that Obama was a sideshow to the inevitable Clinton-Giuliani presidential standoff, didn’t parse his words all that carefully, and neither did a public still maxing out on its gluttonous holiday from economic history. However inadvertently, Time magazine had captured the self-indulgent tenor of the times when, weeks earlier, it slapped some reflective Mylar on its cover and declared that the 2006 Person of the Year was “You.”

It was in keeping with the unhinged spirit of the boom that three days after Obama’s Springfield declaration, a Wall Street baron, Steven Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, a private equity and hedge fund, celebrated his 60th birthday with some 350 guests in the vast Seventh Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s East Side. To appreciate the degree of ostentation and taste, you need only know that Rod Stewart was the headliner, at an estimated cost of $1 million.

That same week the National Association of Realtors told less well-heeled Americans not to fret about its report that median home prices had fallen in 73 metro areas during the final quarter of 2006. “The bottom appears to have already occurred,” said one of the N.A.R. economists. Another predicted: “When we get the figures for this spring, I expect to see a discernible improvement in both sales and prices.”

We have discerned what happened to those sales and prices ever since. As for the Blackstone Group, it went public four months after its leader’s 60th birthday revels. Its shares have since lost 85 percent of their value, and Schwarzman’s bash has become a well-worn symbol of our deflated Gilded Age.

Yet the values of the bubble remain entrenched even as Obama takes office. In the upper echelons, we can find fresh examples of greed and irresponsibility daily even without dipping into the growing pool of those money “managers” who spirited victims to Bernie Madoff.

Last week’s object lesson was John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch. He was lionized as a rare Wall Street savior as recently as September, when he helped seal the deal that sped his teetering firm into the safe embrace of Bank of America on the same weekend Lehman Brothers died. Since then we’ve learned that even as he was laying off Merrill employees by the thousands, he was lobbying (unsuccessfully) for a personal bonus as high as $30 million and spending $1.22 million of company cash on refurbishing his office, an instantly notorious $1,405 trashcan included.

Thain resigned on Thursday. Only then did we learn that he doled out billions in secret, last-minute bonuses to his staff last month, just before Bank of America took over and just before the government ponied up a second bailout to cover Merrill’s unexpected $15 billion fourth-quarter loss. So far American taxpayers have spent $45 billion on this mess, and that’s only our down payment.

In less lofty precincts of the American economic spectrum, the numbers may be different but the ethos has often been similar. As Wall Street titans grabbed bonuses based on illusory, short-term paper profits, so regular Americans took on all kinds of debt wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. The nearly $1 trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next big crash.

This debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility washed over our culture not just through the Marie Antoinette antics of a Schwarzman and a Thain but in mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment. Cable networks like Bravo, A&E, TLC and HGTV produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called Subprime Pornography. Some of the series — “Flip This House,” “Flip That House,” “Sell This House,” “My House Is Worth What?” — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness.

The austerity of Obama’s Inaugural Address seemed a tonal corrective to the glitz and the glut. The speech was, as my friend Jack Viertel, a theater producer, put it, “stoic, stern, crafted in slabs of granite, a slimmed-down sinewy thing entirely evolved away from the kind of Pre-Raphaelite style of his earlier oration.” Some of the same critics who once accused Obama of sounding too much like a wimpy purveyor of Kumbaya now faulted him for not rebooting those golden oldies of the campaign trail as he took his oath. But he is no longer campaigning, and the moment for stadium cheers has passed.

If we’ve learned anything since the election, it is this: We have not remotely seen the bottom of this economy, and no one has a silver bullet to arrest the plunge, the hyped brains in the new White House included. Most economists failed to anticipate the disaster, after all, and our tax-challenged incoming Treasury Secretary may prove as evanescent as past saviors du jour. As we applauded Thain in September, we were also desperately trying to convince ourselves that Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs would turn the tide, and that Hank Paulson, as Newsweek wrote in a cover story titled “King Henry,” would be the “right man at the right time.”

Obama couldn’t give us F.D.R.’s first inaugural address because we are not yet where America was in 1933 — in its fourth year of downturn after the crash of ’29, with an unemployment rate of 25 percent. But no one knows for sure that we cannot end up there.

On Tuesday, our new president did offer one subtle whiff of the Great Depression. His injunction that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off” was a paraphrase of the great songwriter Dorothy Fields, who wrote that lyric for “Swing Time” (1936), arguably the best of the escapist musicals Hollywood churned out to lift the nation’s spirits in hard times. But Obama yoked that light-hearted evocation of Astaire and Rogers to a call for sacrifice that was deliberately somber, not radiantly Kennedyesque.

That call included the obligatory salutes to those who serve by parenting, firefighting or helping strangers when natural disaster strikes. But he also cited one less generic example: “workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job.” There will be — there must be — far larger sacrifices in that vein yet to come. No one truly listening to the Inaugural Address could doubt that this former community organizer intends to demand plenty from us as we face down what he calls “raging storms.”

Last weekend, Bob Woodward wrote an article for The Washington Post listing all the lessons the new president can learn from his predecessor’s many blunders. But what have we learned from our huge mistakes during the Bush years? While it’s become a Beltway cliché that America’s new young president has yet to be tested, it is past time for us to realize that our own test is also about to begin.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins, in “The New Hillary,” asks why, in a state chock full of distinguished residents, was it so hard to scrounge up a senatorial replacement for Hillary Clinton?  Mr. Blow gives us “No More Excuses?”  He says Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency does not mean that all black children will automatically have an easier — or equal — route to success.  Mr. Herbert says it’s “More Than Charisma.”  He’s seen charismatic politicians come and go like sunrises and sunsets over the years. There was something more that was making people go ga-ga over Barack Obama. Something deeper.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Just before she was confirmed as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton bid adieu to her New York constituents and her eight-year career as a U.S. senator. “I’ve had a lot of fun,” she said in a farewell speech. “Eight state fairs, 45 parades, 62 counties, more than 4,600 events across the state.”

A short list, yet the answer to many questions. Like why, in a state chock-full of distinguished residents, it was so hard to scrounge up Hillary’s replacement.

Caroline Kennedy, who seemed to have pretty much locked up the seat, told Gov. David Paterson this week that she wanted out, citing mysterious personal reasons. New York Democrats were a little resentful, particularly since for most of them there were few reasons — up to and including having been deceased for several weeks — that are grave enough to warrant passing up a free Senate seat.

Respectful of the longstanding state tradition that there is no situation so bad that it can’t be made worse, Paterson’s office followed up by sliming Kennedy.

Even before the messy denouement, there were worrisome signs that Kennedy was just not the kind of person who would have fun doing 4,600 events across the state. A well-adjusted U.S. senator needs to combine a sincere interest in public policy with a joyful acceptance of the need to demean oneself while begging for votes and donations. But Caroline only seemed really enthusiastic about the first bit.

The state’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, on the other hand, believes that doing something silly is a way to reassure voters that he doesn’t think he’s better than they are. One of his fondest memories is competing in a sausage-eating contest in Cheektowaga. His staff has a rule requiring aides to intervene if it looks as if their man is about to sing, dance or put on a strange hat.

Clinton had a zest for the endless campaign, too, although the fact that she was keeping count of the number of appearances suggests that even she perceived a very deep downside to the job.

On Friday in Albany, Governor Paterson introduced Kirsten Gillibrand, a 42-year-old second-term member of Congress, as the new junior senator from New York. One look and you could see that this was a woman who would like nothing more than to march in 45 parades. She thanked everybody on the planet and introduced her 8-month-old son who was, she explained happily, “a good eater and a good sleeper.” Little Henry, we have since learned, was born shortly after Gillibrand spent 13 hours in the House of Representatives, voting on the farm bill and sitting through an endless hearing of the Armed Services Committee, where she successfully offered an amendment before moving on to the delivery room.

Despite Gillibrand’s giddy good cheer, there was a sense of uneasiness in the air at the press conference. And it had nothing to do with the fact that while the new senator was being unveiled, the New York State Senate’s recently retired majority leader was being indicted for political corruption. Really, Albany takes stuff like that in stride.

Gillibrand is conservative by New York Democratic standards, and there were rumblings of revolt in the party’s extremely large liberal wing. “A very bad choice,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy of Long Island, a gun control advocate who was incensed by Gillibrand’s perfect N.R.A. voting record.

The way a legislator votes is sort of, um, significant. Gillibrand’s current House district is conservative, but the state isn’t — particularly the Democratic part.

However, it seems as if the new senator’s politics are evolving at a rate previously seen only in science-fiction movies. She’s developed a hitherto unnoticed belief in gay marriage. At her press conference, she expressed an interest in working on one of McCarthy’s gun control bills. She has an appointment to meet in Harlem with Al Sharpton.

It feels as if it’s time for the Senate to finish swearing-in new faces and move on to … bills. Let’s take what we’ve got and wait and see.

While the governor of Illinois is having his impeachment trial, his selection for the Senate, Roland Burris, is now happily ensconced in Fred Thompson’s old office. You will remember that in the presidential race, Thompson entered in a blaze of glory but wound up looking extremely silly. Perhaps Burris, who entered Washington on a wave of hilarity, will turn out to be a statesman.

Stranger things have happened. After all, we live in a world in which the president of France was hospitalized this week after an attack by his “clinically depressed” Maltese.

We’re in for the long haul. If you’re a New Yorker with a parade or sausage-eating contest coming up, be sure to invite Senator Gillibrand. Meanwhile, hope for the best. And watch out for small, bipolar dogs.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

For the presidential inauguration, blacks descended on Washington in droves with a fanatical, Zacchaeus-like need to catch a glimpse of this M.L.K. 2.0. “Ooo-bama!” For them, he was it — a game changer, soul restorer, dream fulfiller. Everything. Ooo-K.

Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the majority whip, tapped into the fervor Monday night at the BET Honors awards in Washington when he proclaimed, “Every child has lost every excuse.”

What? That’s where I have to put my foot down. That’s going a bridge too far.

I’m a big proponent of personal responsibility, but children too often don’t have a choice. They are either prisoners of their parentage or privileged by it. Some of their excuses are hollow. But other excuses are legitimate, and they didn’t magically disappear when Obama put his left hand on the Lincoln Bible.

Representative Clyburn and those like him would do well to cool this rhetoric lest the enormous and ingrained obstacles facing black children get swept under the rug as Obama is swept into power. For instance:

• According to Child Trends, a Washington research group, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Also, black children are the most likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods. And, black teenagers, both male and female, were more likely to report having been raped.

• According to reports last year from the National Center for Children in Poverty, 60 percent of black children live in low-income families and a third live in poor families, a higher percentage than any other race.

• A 2006 report from National Center for Juvenile Justice said that black children are twice as likely as white and Hispanic children to be the victims of “maltreatment.” The report defines maltreatment as anything ranging from neglect to physical and sexual abuse.

Most of these kids will rise above their circumstances, but too many will succumb to them. Can we really blame them?

Malcolm Gladwell probably said it best in a November interview with New York magazine about his new book, “Outliers”: “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world decides what you can and can’t be.”

So black people have to keep their feet on the ground even as their heads are in the clouds. If we want to give these children a fighting chance, we must change the worlds they inhabit. That change requires both better policies and better parenting — a change in our houses as well as the White House.

President Obama is a potent symbol, but he’s no panacea.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert, writing from Boston:

On a rainy October night in 2006, I took a cab to the John F. Kennedy library here to conduct a very public interview. As we pulled up, the driver asked, “Who’s on the program?”

“Barack Obama,” I said.

“Oh,” he replied, “our next president.”

I mentioned this to then-Senator Obama during the program and he got a good laugh out of it. He hadn’t yet announced that he was running. The capacity crowd in the auditorium was clear about what it wanted. It cheered every mention of a possible run. Obama-mania was already well under way, and it would only grow.

I was back at the library this week to interview Gwen Ifill about her new book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” and I wondered aloud about this continuing love affair with all things Obama — the feverish excitement, the widespread joy and pride, and the remarkable surge of hope in an otherwise downbeat, if not depressing, period.

Where was all this coming from? What was it about?

Yes, as everyone agrees, Mr. Obama is handsome, fit, smart, and a great speaker. As Ms. Ifill noted in her book, “Voters are attracted to youth, vitality and change.”

And Americans tend to get giddy over winners, especially underdogs who take the measure of a foe thought to be impregnable — in this case, the mighty forces carefully assembled over several years by the Clintons.

And it’s not just the president himself who looks good. Even the shameless purveyors of fantasy at central casting would blush at the thought of crafting a family as picture perfect as the Obamas. So, yes, there is an awful lot to like about the Obama phenomenon.

But I’ve seen charismatic politicians and pretty families come and go like sunrises and sunsets over the years. There was something more that was making people go ga-ga over Obama. Something deeper.

We’ve been watching that something this week, and it’s called leadership. Mr. Obama has been feeding the almost desperate hunger in this country for mature leadership, for someone who is not reckless and clownish, shortsighted and self-absorbed.

However you feel about his policies, and there are people grumbling on the right and on the left, Mr. Obama has signaled loudly and clearly that the era of irresponsible behavior in public office is over.

No more crazy wars. No more torture, and no more throwing people in prison without even the semblance of due process. No more napping while critical problems like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, global warming, and economic inequality in the United States grow steadily worse.

“We remain a young nation,” Mr. Obama said in his Inaugural Address, “but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

On Wednesday, his first full day in office, the president took steps to make the federal government more transparent, signaling immediately that the country would move away from the toxic levels of secrecy that marked the Bush years.

“Transparency and rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” he said. It was a commitment to responsible behavior, and a challenge to the public to hold the Obama administration accountable. It reminded me of the wonderful line written into a federal appeals court ruling in 2002 by Judge Damon Keith:

“Democracies die behind closed doors.”

This has been the Obama way, to set a responsible example and then to call on others to follow his mature lead. In Iowa, after his victory in the Democratic caucuses a year ago, he promised to be “a president who will be honest about the choices and challenges we face, who will listen to you and learn from you, even when we disagree, who won’t just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know.”

In a cynical age, the inclination is to dismiss this stuff as so much political rhetoric. But Mr. Obama carries himself in a way that suggests he means what he says, which gives him great credibility when he urges Americans to work hard and make sacrifices, not just for themselves and their families but for the common good — and when he tells black audiences that young men need to hitch up their trousers and behave themselves, and that families need to turn off the TV so the kids can do their homework.

Or when he says of the many serious challenges facing the nation, as he did in his Inaugural Address: “They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America: They will be met.”

The bond is growing between the nation and its new young leader. Let’s hope it’s a mature romance that weathers the long haul.

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo is wringing his hands over “The First Test,” and he says that President Obama must prove that he meant what he said about bringing change to Washington by not signing whatever bills the Old Bulls put on his desk.  He’s nattering about the stimulus package.  Mr. Krugman, in “Stuck in the Middle,” says everyone hoped that President Obama’s Inaugural Address would offer some reassurance. But at least on matters economic, the speech was too conventional.  As I said the other day, it’s started.  Let’s all get together an attack Obama for things he hasn’t done.  Go, team!  Here’s Bobo:

There is a strong case to be made for a short, sharp stimulus package to restrain the collapse of the American economy. This would involve big, simple programs with immediate impact — a temporary cut in the payroll tax, big aid to the states, expanded unemployment insurance and food stamps.

There’s also a very strong case to be made for long-term government reform. America could fundamentally rethink its infrastructure policies — create a new model adapted to new modes of community-building. It could fundamentally rethink human capital policies — create a lifelong menu of learning options, from pre-K programs to service opportunities for the elderly.

But the stimulus bill emerging in the House of Representatives does neither of these things. The bill marked up Wednesday in the Appropriations Committee is a muddled mixture of short-term stimulus haste and long-term spending commitments. It is an unholy marriage that manages to combine the worst of each approach — rushed short-term planning with expensive long-term fiscal impact.

The bill has three essential failings. First, it lacks any strategic vision. This $825 billion bill has to be passed within weeks. There’s no time for fundamental rethinking or new approaches. Instead, there’s a sloppy profusion of 152 different appropriations — off-the-shelf ideas that mostly create costlier versions of the status quo.

The committee staff took the kernel of President Obama’s vision — infrastructure programs to create jobs — and surrounded it with an undisciplined sprawl of health, education, entitlement and other spending. There’s money for nurse training, Medicare, Head Start, boatyard support, home weatherization and so on. Eleven of the programs in the bill account for the vast majority of the actual job creation. The rest may be worthy or not, but they have little to do with stimulus. The total package is so diffuse, it costs $223,000 to create a single job.

Second, the bill has relatively modest short-term impact. Many parts don’t even pretend to be stimulus measures, like funding for basic research, or special ed programs. But even the parts of the bill that aim to stimulate will have modest near-term impact. A study by the Congressional Budget Office found that less than half of the money for infrastructure and discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010.

According to The Washington Post, of the $30 billion devoted to highway spending, only $4 billion will be spent in the next two years. Less than $3 billion of the $18.5 billion for renewable energy and less than half the financing for school construction will be spent by 2011.

The Appropriations Committee chairman, David Obey, fulminated against the C.B.O. Wednesday, and the uselessness of economists in general, but he had no answer to these findings.

Third, the spending measures in this bill have no sunset. In the middle of the Appropriations markup, the ranking member, Jerry Lewis from California, asked his chairman the crucial question: What happens when the economy recovers? Does this new spending disappear?

Chairman Obey refused to answer, but he didn’t have to. The entire argument for these measures over the previous hours had been that they were good in themselves. The commitments in this bill will constitute the new budget base line. They will contribute to the coming $2 trillion deficits. Worse, these new structures, and the lobbyists they attract, will create more impediments to the innovation that Obama may seek in the years ahead.

On Tuesday, President Obama was inaugurated and vowed a new era. On Wednesday, the House Appropriations Committee met and showed the old era was very much alive. Democratic subcommittee chairmen sat like potted plants because all power was wielded by Chairman Obey. Republicans were in the dark because of an information embargo placed on the majority staff.

President Obama is clearly going to have to show the hard way that he meant what he said about bringing change. He didn’t run for president just to sign whatever bills the Old Bulls put on his desk.

He’s going to have to prove the hard way that he meant what he said about being pragmatic and evidence-based. That means he won’t sweep a C.B.O. study under the rug simply because the findings are inconvenient.

He’s going to have to show that his plans have credibility, that a stimulus bill is really a stimulus bill, and not a Christmas tree for every special interest desire.

If he can do that, we’ll look back on this stimulus as a timely, temporary and targeted success. If not, we’ll just remember it as the sprawling mess that kicked up dozens of scandal headlines about $200 million programs to lay grass around the Jefferson Memorial.

The glow of the inauguration lingers, but the precedent-setting tests are already at hand.

Here’s Mr. Krugman:

Like anyone who pays attention to business and financial news, I am in a state of high economic anxiety. Like everyone of good will, I hoped that President Obama’s Inaugural Address would offer some reassurance, that it would suggest that the new administration has this thing covered.

But it was not to be. I ended Tuesday less confident about the direction of economic policy than I was in the morning.

Just to be clear, there wasn’t anything glaringly wrong with the address — although for those still hoping that Mr. Obama will lead the way to universal health care, it was disappointing that he spoke only of health care’s excessive cost, never once mentioning the plight of the uninsured and underinsured.

Also, one wishes that the speechwriters had come up with something more inspiring than a call for an “era of responsibility” — which, not to put too fine a point on it, was the same thing former President George W. Bush called for eight years ago.

But my real problem with the speech, on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests.

That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.

Thus, in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no idea what he meant. This is, first and foremost, a crisis brought on by a runaway financial industry. And if we failed to rein in that industry, it wasn’t because Americans “collectively” refused to make hard choices; the American public had no idea what was going on, and the people who did know what was going on mostly thought deregulation was a great idea.

Or consider this statement from Mr. Obama: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

The first part of this passage was almost surely intended as a paraphrase of words that John Maynard Keynes wrote as the world was plunging into the Great Depression — and it was a great relief, after decades of knee-jerk denunciations of government, to hear a new president giving a shout-out to Keynes. “The resources of nature and men’s devices,” Keynes wrote, “are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life. … But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

But something was lost in translation. Mr. Obama and Keynes both assert that we’re failing to make use of our economic capacity. But Keynes’s insight — that we’re in a “muddle” that needs to be fixed — somehow was replaced with standard we’re-all-at-fault, let’s-get-tough-on-ourselves boilerplate.

Remember, Herbert Hoover didn’t have a problem making unpleasant decisions: he had the courage and toughness to slash spending and raise taxes in the face of the Great Depression. Unfortunately, that just made things worse.

Still, a speech is just a speech. The members of Mr. Obama’s economic team certainly understand the extraordinary nature of the mess we’re in. So the tone of Tuesday’s address may signify nothing about the Obama administration’s future policy.

On the other hand, Mr. Obama is, as his predecessor put it, the decider. And he’s going to have to make some big decisions very soon. In particular, he’s going to have to decide how bold to be in his moves to sustain the financial system, where the outlook has deteriorated so drastically that a surprising number of economists, not all of them especially liberal, now argue that resolving the crisis will require the temporary nationalization of some major banks.

So is Mr. Obama ready for that? Or were the platitudes in his Inaugural Address a sign that he’ll wait for the conventional wisdom to catch up with events? If so, his administration will find itself dangerously behind the curve.

And that’s not a place that we want the new team to be. The economic crisis grows worse, and harder to resolve, with each passing week. If we don’t get drastic action soon, we may find ourselves stuck in the muddle for a very long time.

I don’t usually get cross with Prof. Krugman, but this time I am.  What did he expect from an Inaugural Address?  A major policy statement?  Get a freaking grip…

Collins, Cohen and Kristof

Ah, it may be beginning already.  Ms. Collins, in “Woodstock Without the Mud,” says the inauguration left the whole country glued together emotionally, one big American ball of hope. But there were signs in the Capitol that the new era was off to a slow start.  It turns out that not all Democrats are perfect, so the new administration is probably doomed…  Mr. Cohen welcomes “The Age of Responsibility.”  He notes responsibility, restraint, humility, peace: this is not the habitual vocabulary of America’s heroic narrative. But it constitutes a new lexicon of American power.  Mr. Kristof, in “The Remaking of America,” says President Obama is making an excellent start, and the globe is eager for American leadership. In the meantime, there are two immediate tests by which he will be judged: Guantánamo and the Middle East.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Having been lucky enough to attend two of the most memorable events in modern American history, I am able to report that Inauguration Day in Washington was very much like a cold-weather Woodstock.

At both, there was a wonderful feeling of community. Along, of course, with the sense that at any moment, you could be trampled to death by thousands of very friendly people who were being moved around like the world’s most mellow herd of cattle.

The big difference was in the national reaction. The only people who felt unified during Woodstock were those who were there — everybody else was horrified or jealous. But the inauguration left the whole country glued together emotionally, one big American ball of hope.

President Obama has made it clear that each of us has a role to perform, sacrifices to make in the great task of rebuilding the country. But his inaugural speech did not actually make those new duties look all that daunting. He mentioned firefighters running into burning buildings and parents nurturing their children, both of which have been going on for some time. He expressed hope that if a levee broke, we would help the refugees, and I have a feeling that in the event of another such crisis we will not disappoint.

On Wednesday in the Capitol, our elected officials seemed to be making at least a modest effort to respond to Obama’s call to give up “the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.” The Senate confirmed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state 94 to 2, with Obama’s newest BFF, John McCain, urging his colleagues to work together while other Republicans hopped up to sing Clinton’s praises. “A very ethical person and a wise person,” chimed in Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Can you remember back when Hillary was first elected to the Senate eight years ago, and the Republican majority leader made the wistful suggestion that she might be hit by lightning before she was sworn in? Do you remember that just last year she was supposed to be the most divisive figure in American politics? Now, the Republicans can find only two people cranky enough to vote against putting her fourth in line of succession to the presidency.

Meanwhile, over in the Finance Committee, most of the senators seemed reluctant to poke too hard at Obama’s Treasury secretary nominee, Timothy Geithner, even though Geithner has a record of not having paid all his taxes. The Republicans left most of the real complaining to people like Jim Bunning of Kentucky. Given the fact that Bunning claimed his last opponent looked “like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons,” we were not expecting him to be an early harbinger of the new era.

“Tim has made some mistakes, which he has freely admitted and corrected,” said Charles Schumer of New York. This is what Geithner’s supporters always say. It’s their defenses that make him sound really indefensible.

Despite the aid of a spiffy TurboTax program, Geithner neglected to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes for the years he was employed by the International Monetary Fund. When the Internal Revenue Service audited his 2003 and 2004 returns and told him to hand over the money, it apparently did not occur to him that he had been working at the same job and paying taxes the same way in 2001 and 2002. It took a cabinet nomination to jog his memory.

Nevertheless, most of the senators seem to feel that Geithner is, in the words of Charles Grassley, the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, “not only the best choice,” but the only choice.

The idea that there’s only one man who can save the day in a time of great economic crisis is worrisome, given the number of indispensable financial giants who’ve turned out to be deeply dispensable on second look. (Let us pause to remember a presidential campaign past, in which McCain said that if Alan Greenspan, then the Federal Reserve chairman, were to die, he should be propped up and kept on the job anyway.)

Perhaps there’s no time to start digging up a new Treasury secretary at this point. But we are starting the new era with the bar set surprisingly low.

In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to leave Charles Rangel in charge of the tax-setting Ways and Means Committee during an ethics investigation of his incredibly sloppy personal finances. In defense, she points out that the House leadership does have standards, and that she kicked former Representative William Jefferson off Ways and Means after investigators found $90,000 in marked bills hidden inside his freezer. In the Senate, Schumer argues that Geithner’s errors “pale before the myriad mistakes made by the operators of financial institutions.”

Maybe we should have higher standards for our Treasury secretary than being better organized than Lehman Brothers. Really, we’re ready for a new era that looks a little … newer.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

President Obama made a responsible speech for “a new era of responsibility” that is set to include a “responsible” withdrawal from Iraq. Standing at the west front of the Capitol, he was not at his most uplifting, nor his most inspiring, as he called in sober tones for a new “spirit of service” that will renew America and, through it, the world.

I sat 30 feet away and felt stirred but not transported. Perhaps that was the point. There’s too much work to do for high rhetorical flourish.

The day was bright but freezing. The trombones of the Marine Band glinted in the unforgiving light. The sun proceeded in its slow arc to noon, yet it seemed to grow colder, as if nature itself were stilled.

A shivering crowd of more than one million stretched back across the National Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial. But the Great Liberator, freer of slaves in a terrible war, was passed over in silence. So, too, was the throng.

The symbols, like the national catharsis, could speak for themselves, just as the 21-gun salute to an African-American president contained its own eloquence. This was a spare inaugural speech, devoid of allusion to setting, almost disembodied.

Still, there were powerful phrases and signals that together amounted to an attempt to re-imagine a nation in crisis.

The word “peace” appeared four times, as in “America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.” His predecessor did not like the word “peace,” which somehow smacked to him of weakness. He rarely used it.

But engaged in two wars, its Treasury bare, the United States has a pressing strategic interest in furthering peace where it can. Hence Obama’s little phrase to the Muslim world that should echo in Tehran: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

The United States was defined anew as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.” A kind of Christian assumption has inhabited American politics these past eight years — from the ex-president’s born-again hot line to God, through his unfortunate talk of a “crusade,” to his fundamentalist positions on issues like stem-cell research. Obama’s allusion to atheists returned religion to its proper station, as a personal choice rather than political credo.

As for speaking of Muslims before America’s more numerous Jews, this seemed an appropriate political gesture after the many slights since 9/11 toward America’s Muslim community.

Another little phrase — “We will restore science to its rightful place” — also appeared aimed at halting the religious invasion of public life and circumscribing the anti-Darwinian lunacy of the extreme Christian right.

As the Dow plunged another 400 points, or more than 4 percent, Obama spoke in far more guarded terms about the free market than is typical from an American leader. “Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill,” he said, calling for a “watchful eye” over the marketplace.

This is an admission of facts: a huge state intervention has occurred and an $825 billion stimulus package of tax cuts and public works projects is coming. But it was also a signal that a far less ideological United States will emerge under Obama, one that will speak less of a global mission to spread liberty, democracy and free markets. Call it the new American humility.

Obama vowed to defeat those who “seek to advance their aims by inducing terror.” Note how terror has shifted here from an amorphous jihadist ideology — “the war on terror” — to an emotion (what you feel when a suicide bomber detonates himself). We are not going to hear the phrase “global war on terror,” or its awful GWOT acronym, too often, if at all, from the Obama administration.

There is no point flattering America’s adversaries by inflating their vile methods into an ideology and then declaring an unwinnable war against it.

America is returning to its Constitution: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” With that little sentence, Obama bade farewell to renditions, torture, the trampling of habeas corpus, Guantánamo and other stains on the nation’s conscience. This work will not be complete until Guantánamo is closed and those wrongly imprisoned, some for more than five years, are compensated.

The personal convictions of a constitutional lawyer are allied to strategy here: America’s ideals remain among the most powerful tools in its diplomatic arsenal. As Obama said, “Our power alone cannot protect us; nor does it entitle us to do as we please.” Rather, “our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”

Responsibility, restraint, humility, peace: this is not the habitual vocabulary of America’s heroic narrative. It constitutes a new lexicon of American power. Are Americans ready to die for responsibility?

Perhaps not, but they may well seek dialogue in its name. “The world has changed — and we must change with it,” Obama said. Even change has changed now: no longer a clarion call, it is a responsibility.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

At the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency in January 2001, the Web site The Onion declared: “Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over.”

That was supposed to be satire, but in retrospect it proved a shrewd analysis. One measure of the bleak trajectory of the last eight years is that today The Onion looks equally astute when it says of the latest transition: “Black man given nation’s worst job.”

That man is making an excellent start, and news Web sites all over the world capture the globe’s eagerness — even desperation — for American leadership.

“Let the remaking of America begin today,” declared The Guardian, in Britain. The Independent called Inauguration Day “a day for hope.”

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of “a truly great hour for America” that offered “a multitude of opportunities.” The Times of India welcomed “a new beginning.” In Northern Ireland, The Belfast Telegraph asked: “Can Obama save us all?”

A BBC poll in 17 nations found that on average 67 percent believed that President Obama would improve America’s relations with the rest of the world; just 5 percent thought the opposite (or maybe feared that if they seemed critical of George W. Bush, they would be waterboarded).

Two themes were particularly reassuring in Mr. Obama’s Inaugural Address. One was his inclusiveness, his effort to tug people into his big tent, a huge contrast from Mr. Bush’s years of governing from an ideological pup tent.

President Obama’s inclusiveness started with his celebration of America as a patchwork of “Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.” If you know of any other sitting president who has dared to embrace atheists (Thomas Jefferson did, but not while in office), post the information on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground).

Mr. Obama was also the first president to use the word “Muslim” in an Inaugural Address. In an oblique olive branch that I took to be directed toward Iran and Syria, he said: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

The second reassuring theme has to do with “hard power” and “soft power,” in the terminology of Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor. In the Bush-Cheney years, America sought to rely overwhelmingly on military “hard power,” and the result was setbacks around the world, from Iran’s accelerated nuclear program to North Korea’s processing of plutonium for a half-dozen nuclear weapons (compared with zero during the Clinton presidency).

As my colleague David Sanger documents in his superb new book, “The Inheritance”: “We pursued a path that has left us less admired by our allies, less feared by our enemies, and less capable of convincing the rest of the world that our economic and political model is worthy of emulation.”

Mr. Obama’s first attempt at soft power is the nifty new White House Web site, complete with a White House blog. In his Inaugural Address, Mr. Obama focused on soft power alongside hard power: “Our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.”

Tempering qualities? Dick Cheney never wanted to temper anything, including his temper.

This mix of soft and hard power is what Professor Nye calls “smart power” — an update of Teddy Roosevelt’s notion of speaking softly and carrying a big stick — and it seems to be an emerging theme of the new administration. Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasized it in her confirmation hearings.

Professor Nye said that Mr. Obama’s inaugural was a perfect example of smart power. “That’s not going to make our adversaries roll over, but it’ll help in terms of mainstream Muslims and it’ll help in terms of allies,” Mr. Nye said. “And it’ll give a very different tone to foreign policy.”

Now the world will be watching to see if Mr. Obama’s policy matches his rhetoric. The economy will be paramount, of course, but it will take months or years to judge results there.

In the meantime, there are two immediate litmus tests by which the world will begin to judge Mr. Obama at once. The first will be his handling of Guantánamo and torture — the architects of those Bush policies did more damage to America than anyone confined in Guantánamo — and it was reassuring that Mr. Obama promptly suspended action by military tribunals.

A second test is Middle East policy. The Bush policy of (mostly) disengagement and obliviousness to Palestinian suffering has made it harder to achieve a peace that is the best hope for Israelis and Palestinians alike. Mr. Obama’s calls Wednesday to Middle Eastern leaders were helpful, and he should immediately make clear that he wants Israel to halt the settlements and ease repressive restrictions on the West Bank.

These steps would reassure the world that its hopes for a new day in Washington just may be justified.