Bobo and Krugman

Somebody sent Bobo a pre-release copy of a book on the Fed, so now he’s gonna ‘splain it to us.  In “Wise Muddling Through” he says  that the Federal Reserve is not the most democratic institution, but under Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner and others it seems to have done a good enough job.  “A good enough job” apparently means didn’t completely frack up EVERYTHING that they touched.  Prof. Krugman, in “Health Care Realities,” says many Americans don’t understand that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be radical: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.  Here’s Bobo:

Everybody wants to be a striding titan. Almost all alpha-leaders want to be the brilliant visionary in a time of crisis—the one who sees the situation clearly, makes the bold plans and delivers the faithful to the other side.

It almost never works out that way. The historian Henry Adams concluded that “in all great emergencies … everyone was more or less wrong.” Abraham Lincoln didn’t feel like a heroic leader: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” In real crises, the successful leaders are usually the ones who cope best with ignorance and error.

David Wessel’s about-to-be-released book, “In Fed We Trust,” gives a revealing blow-by-blow account of the recent financial crisis and illustrates this point.

It is a tale replete with error. In theory, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner were as well prepared as anyone for this sort of event. Bernanke had spent his life studying the Great Depression; Paulson had led the world’s most prestigious investment bank; Geithner had been involved in financial rescues in Asia and beyond.

Moreover, all of them were expecting some kind of crisis. They knew there had been a dangerous surge of debt.

And yet as the panic unfolded in 2007 and 2008, they continually underestimated its scope and implications. In July 2007, Bernanke estimated global losses from the subprime mortgages and other loans of $50 billion to $100 billion. The losses turned out to be in the neighborhood of $4 trillion. In October of 2007, Bernanke said the banking system was healthy and doubted that the housing woes would destabilize it. He was wrong.

Their decision not to bail out Lehman Brothers was based on a complete misreading of the economic psychology. Paulson was sick of doing bailouts. He seems to have had some sort of intuitive moral sense that it was time for some bank to pay for its mistakes. Bernanke and Geithner went along, and none of them anticipated the meltdown that followed.

But this is not a story of failure. It’s a story of effective muddling through. Bernanke & Co. never really got control of events. But they did avert disaster and committed only a few big blunders. In the real world, that counts as a job well done.

Bernanke’s first achievement was social, not intellectual. Wessel describes one long meeting and one tough decision after another. Rarely have so few endured so many conference calls for the sake of so many. And yet through all the talk, the fear and the rotten choices, Bernanke seems to have cultivated a feeling of comradeship and harmony within the group. He kept the conversation going.

Something unexpected would happen. At one point A.I.G. claimed that it needed a $4 billion cash infusion. Within days it drew in $38 billion instead. Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others would just keep talking it through. They developed a feel for the crisis, and for the sort of traditions they would have to smash to address it.

Second, Bernanke avoided the grand gesture. Occasionally, Paulson would make a bold policy pronouncement. The idea was to lay down some sort of principle so the markets would understand the new rules and feel more secure. But then events would change and he’d have to reverse course. He’d end up producing more uncertainty, not less.

Bernanke and Geithner favored a process of constant and gradual adjustment. They were navigating in a violent sea, shifting their weight this way and that to stay upright another day. They tried to solve one problem at a time and worry about the unintended consequences later. Their method didn’t produce a set of clear principles. Their lack of a grand plan or an exit strategy worried some. But their method matched the chaos of the situation.

Finally, there was the size of the response team. It wasn’t too big. There weren’t giant agencies going at each other. The White House and the Congress were barely involved. But it wasn’t too small — just a lone genius and a few loyalists. Instead, the same little platoon of about a dozen people shows up again and again in Wessel’s account—a manageable community of decision makers with no single person dominating the proceedings.

This recession is happening at a time when many wonder if the political system is capable of addressing the nation’s problems. The presidency has become a gargantuan enterprise in which media-star leaders are surrounded by a permanent campaign apparatus. The Congress is both riven by ideology and dominated by parochial concerns.

The Federal Reserve is not the most democratic institution, but under Bernanke et al, it seems to have done a good enough job. Self-effacement did not lead to timidity. Good people were mobilized and were able to talk frankly about the many things they did not understand.

My brain is all ouchy now.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

It’s a funny story — but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It’s not just that many Americans don’t understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don’t understand the way American health care works right now. They don’t understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in health care wouldn’t be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

The key thing you need to know about health care is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don’t know when or whether you’ll need treatment — but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor’s visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient’s acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend.

And in their efforts to avoid “medical losses,” the industry term for paying medical bills, insurers spend much of the money taken in through premiums not on medical treatment, but on “underwriting” — screening out people likely to make insurance claims. In the individual insurance market, where people buy insurance directly rather than getting it through their employers, so much money goes into underwriting and other expenses that only around 70 cents of each premium dollar actually goes to care.

Still, most Americans do have health insurance, and are reasonably satisfied with it. How is that possible, when insurance markets work so badly? The answer is government intervention.

Most obviously, the government directly provides insurance via Medicare and other programs. Before Medicare was established, more than 40 percent of elderly Americans lacked any kind of health insurance. Today, Medicare — which is, by the way, one of those “single payer” systems conservatives love to demonize — covers everyone 65 and older. And surveys show that Medicare recipients are much more satisfied with their coverage than Americans with private insurance.

Still, most Americans under 65 do have some form of private insurance. The vast majority, however, don’t buy it directly: they get it through their employers. There’s a big tax advantage to doing it that way, since employer contributions to health care aren’t considered taxable income. But to get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.

And it’s thanks to these rules that employment-based insurance more or less works, at least in the sense that horror stories are a lot less common than they are in the individual insurance market.

So here’s the bottom line: if you currently have decent health insurance, thank the government. It’s true that if you’re young and healthy, with nothing in your medical history that could possibly have raised red flags with corporate accountants, you might have been able to get insurance without government intervention. But time and chance happen to us all, and the only reason you have a reasonable prospect of still having insurance coverage when you need it is the large role the government already plays.

Which brings us to the current debate over reform.

Right-wing opponents of reform would have you believe that President Obama is a wild-eyed socialist, attacking the free market. But unregulated markets don’t work for health care — never have, never will. To the extent we have a working health care system at all right now it’s only because the government covers the elderly, while a combination of regulation and tax subsidies makes it possible for many, but not all, nonelderly Americans to get decent private coverage.

Now Mr. Obama basically proposes using additional regulation and subsidies to make decent insurance available to all of us. That’s not radical; it’s as American as, well, Medicare.

Kristof, Solo.

Gail Collins is on vacation.  Mr. Kristof is in Karachi, Pakistan and addresses the “Crisis in the Operating Room.”  He says one of the most lethal forms of sex discrimination is the systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth.  Here he is:

Afterward, they comforted each other with the blasphemy: “It was God’s will.”

It was the first pregnancy for Shazia Allahdita, 19. I was in the operating room at a public hospital here in Karachi as surgeons performed a Caesarean section on her to try to save her life.

As she lay unconscious under the anesthesia, doctors plucked a baby boy from her uterus and then labored to revive the child. “He has a heartbeat, but he’s not crying,” Dr. Aijaz Ahmed explained tersely as he gave the boy oxygen. “He’s not responding. I think he’s getting weaker.”

These dramas play out constantly in poor countries. One woman dies a minute from complications of pregnancy or childbirth somewhere in the world, and 20 times as many suffer childbirth injuries.

There’s no mystery about how to save these lives. Some impoverished countries, such as Sri Lanka, have succeeded stunningly well at saving mothers simply because they have tried. But foreign aid donors like the United States have never shown much interest in maternal mortality, and impoverished women are typically the most voiceless, neglected people in their own countries — so they die at astonishing rates. Here in Pakistan, 1 woman in 74 will die at some point in her life from complications during pregnancy.

Shazia’s suffering is typically unnecessary. It all would have worked out fine if she had gone to a hospital to deliver her baby. She wanted to. Her husband and relatives all agreed, when I interviewed them later, that she had had her heart set on delivering at the public hospital here. It’s also free, so long as supplies haven’t run out (other times, family members have to rush out to buy supplies).

But Shazia’s female in-laws thought that a hospital birth was a silly extravagance, and a young Pakistani woman is at the mercy of her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. (In Pakistan, men are little involved in such decisions about childbirth.) It didn’t help that the in-laws resented Shazia because she and her husband, Allahdita, had breached tradition by marrying out of love rather than by family arrangement.

When Shazia went into labor, the family summoned a traditional birth attendant to help with the delivery. Hours passed. Nothing happened. Shazia asked to go to the hospital, but it was far away and would require what for them would be an expensive taxi fare of 300 Pakistani rupees, equivalent to about $3.75.

“If she went to the hospital, then every time the family visited it would be a long way to go and very inconvenient,” explained an aunt, Qamarunnisa. “It was so much easier to go to the local health post. It seemed easier.”

So the family eventually took her to a local clinic, where Shazia struggled to deliver for another 24 hours of labor. The family discussed taking her to the hospital, but the obstacle was the 300 rupee taxi fare. “If it hadn’t been for the money, she would have come here,” said Qamarunnisa.

But nobody wanted to pay. Shazia’s in-laws truly are poor, but it’s hard to imagine that they would have balked if it had been a man in the family who was in danger — or if they had known that Shazia was carrying a baby boy.

“If they had known it was a son, they would have come up with 500 rupees,” said Dr. Sarah Feroze, as her colleagues struggled to save Shazia and her baby.

Finally, some 30 hours after Shazia’s water had broken, an aunt paid for the taxi to the hospital. The doctors immediately saw that Shazia’s baby could not fit through her pelvis and rushed her into the operating theater for the C-section.

Shazia lived. The baby died.

I visited Shazia the next day. She was in a crowded, stifling ward. The power had gone out. Her bedding was soiled. She was crying.

Outside, her husband, Allahdita, was grieving but philosophical. “It is God’s will,” he said, shrugging. “There is nothing we can do.”

That’s incorrect. If men had uteruses, “paternity wards” would get resources, ambulances would transport pregnant men to hospitals free of charge, deliveries would be free, and the Group of 8 industrialized nations would make paternal mortality a top priority. One of the most lethal forms of sex discrimination is this systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth — so long as those who die are impoverished, voiceless women.

Thankfully, there is the dawn of a global movement against maternal mortality. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, are trying to work with the United States and other countries to hold a landmark global health session at the U.N. focusing, in part, on maternal health. If that comes to pass, on Sept. 23, it will be a milestone. My dream is that Barack and Michelle Obama will leap forward and adopt this cause — and transform the prospects for so many young women like Shazia.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo’s going for the prize for Longest Title of a Column today.  In “Sarah Grabs the Grievance Grab Bag From Hilary” she says Sarah Palin has now morphed into what the Republicans always caricatured Hillary Clinton as: preachy, screechy and angry.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “59 Is the New 30,” says when Tiger Woods wins by 15 strokes, we are in awe. But when Tom Watson, a man our own age and size, whips the world’s best, who are half his age, we identify.  Here’s MoDo:

The woman who was prematurely counted in is out. And the woman who was prematurely counted out is in.

Goodbye, Sarah. Hello, Hillary.

In their vivid twin performances Sunday — Hillary on “Meet the Press” in Washington and Sarah at her farewell picnic in Fairbanks — two of the most celebrated and polarizing women in American political history offered a fascinating contrast.

Hillary, who so often in the past came across as aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing, was confident and comfortable in her role as top diplomat, discussing the world with mastery and shrugging off suggestions that she has been disappeared by her former rival, the president.

Sarah, who was once a blazingly confident media darling, came across as aggrieved, paranoid and press-loathing in her new role as bizarre babe-at-large, a Nixon with hair extensions ranting about “American apologetics,” which sounds like a cross between apologists and Dianetics.

Sarah once criticized Hillary for being a whiny presidential contender, arguing that women who want “to progress this country” should not complain about being under a “sharper microscope,” but instead should just work harder to prove themselves capable. Now Sarah is a whiny presidential contender, complaining about the sharper microscope that women wanting to progress this country are under and rejecting advice to work harder to prove herself capable.

The Alaskan who shot to stardom a year ago as the tough embodiment of Diana the Huntress has now stepped down as governor and morphed into what the Republicans always caricatured Hillary as — preachy, screechy and angry.

And Hillary, who is at long last in a job that she earned on her own merits, has lost that irritating question mark she used to carry around above her head like a thunder cloud: What is Hillary owed because of what she gave up, and went through, for Bill?

During the campaign, Hillary got in trouble for pretending to be more than she was, for bragging about dodging bullets in Bosnia and making peace in Northern Ireland. Just so, Sarah got in trouble for pretending to be knowledgeable about foreign affairs just because she lived across the Bering Strait from Russia.

But now Hillary does not have to tell stretchers. She’s fully qualified for her job and doesn’t sound defensive. Now Sarah has taken up Hillary’s old habit of keeping grudges and playing the victim and blaming the press for her own mistakes in judgment and gaffes.

If Sarah’s problem on the trail was that she knew too little, Hillary’s was that she knew too much. Before her misty turn in New Hampshire, Hillary’s wonkiness got in the way of her ability to make people comfortable.

Sarah, lacking Hillary’s cerebral side, has decided to wing it, Quayle-style, and go only for the visceral. That’s why she now sounds like a demagogue, embodying grievances and playing to people’s worst impulses.

Hillary’s radiant robustness, on the other hand, even with a sore elbow, makes the dictators in Iran and North Korea we’re so worried about seem like frail, little creatures.

Obama advisers say privately that the president truly respects the woman he ran against, and that they have a good relationship, so good it has even surprised Hillary. Certainly, she doesn’t have to worry that this president’s gaze is going to drift over her shoulder to some pretty thing behind her. In this White House, Barack Obama is the pretty thing who is taken with Hillary’s serious, smartest-girl-at-Wellesley aura. In a funny way, he’s the man of her dreams.

His support of her has allowed her to keep her paranoia in check — even with Richard Holbrooke and Joe Biden biting off parts of her portfolio.

Just to make sure it stays that way, Obama advisers told Hillary that she could not bring on board Sidney Blumenthal, her former aide de camp nicknamed G.K., “Grassy Knoll,” for his tendency to stoke her grievances.

In her cuckoo speech in Fairbanks, Sarah warned Alaskans to “be wary of accepting government largess. It doesn’t come free.” Funny coming from a woman who charged the Alaskan taxpayers every time she worked from Wasilla.

She also went after that old conservative villain Hollywood, saying, “They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets” for “their anti-Second Amendment causes.”

Sarah seems happily oblivious that she benefited from Hollywood casting techniques. Just as movie directors have beautiful young actresses playing nuclear physicists and Harvard professors, knowing the fusion of sex appeal and a heavyweight profession will excite, the novelty of a beautiful former beauty queen and TV reporter cast in a powerful role that has featured dour, gray old men like Dick Cheney was thrilling. At first.

As McCain pal and Republican strategist Mike Murphy so sagely observed recently: “If Sarah Palin looked like Golda Meir, would we even be talking about her today?”

Sarah should follow her own advice to Hillary and work harder to be capable. Until then, she’s all cage, no bird.

And now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Last April I took a break to caddy for the former U.S. Open champion Andy North when he teamed up with Tom Watson to defend their title in the two-man Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf tournament in Savannah, Ga. So it was with more than a casual spectator’s interest that I watched in awe on Armed Forces television from Afghanistan as Watson made his amazing run at winning the British Open at age 59. Watson likes to talk about foreign affairs more than golf. So to let him know just how many people wanted him to win, I e-mailed him before the final round: “Even the Taliban are rooting for you.”

Indeed, I have been struck at how many golfers and non-golfers got caught up in Watson’s historic performance — tying for the lead after four rounds at Turnberry, but losing in a playoff to the 36-year-old Stewart Cink. I was not alone in being devastated that Watson was not able to par the last hole and clinch the win. Like millions of others, I shouted at the TV as his ball ran across the 18th green — heading for trouble — “STOP! STOP! STOP!” as if I personally had something at stake. Why was that?

Many reasons. For starters, Watson’s run was freaky unusual — a 59-year-old man who had played his opening two rounds in this tournament with a 16-year-old Italian amateur — was able to best the greatest golfers in the world at least a decade after anyone would have dreamt it possible. Watching this happen actually widened our sense of what any of us is capable of. That is, when Kobe Bryant scores 70 points, we are in awe. When Tiger Woods wins by 15 strokes, we are in awe. But when a man our own age and size whips the world’s best — who are half his age — we identify.

Of course, Watson has unique golfing skills, but if you are a baby boomer you could not help but look at him and say something you would never say about Tiger or Kobe: “He’s my age; he’s my build; he’s my height; and he even had his hip replaced like me. If he can do that, maybe I can do something like that, too.”

Neil Oxman, Watson’s caddy, who is a top Democratic political consultant in his real life, told me: “After Thursday’s round with Tom, when we left the scoring tent I said to him, ‘You know, this is a thing.’ He understood what I meant. On Sunday morning, the two of us were in the corner of the locker room without another human being around, sitting in these two easy chairs facing each other behind a partition. We were chatting about stuff, and I said to him, ‘For a lot of people, what you’re doing is life-affirming.’ I took it from a story about when Betty Comden and Adolph Green — the writers of “Singin’ in the Rain” — showed Leonard Bernstein the famous scene of Gene Kelly. Bernstein said to them, ‘That scene is an affirmation of life.’ What Tom did last week was an affirmation of life.”

Also, as Watson himself appreciates, the way he lost the tournament underscored why golf is the sport most like life. He hit two perfect shots on the 18th hole in the final round, and the second one bounced just a little too hard and ran through the green, leaving him a difficult chip back, which he was unable to get up and down. Had his ball stopped a foot shorter, he would have had an easy two-putt and a win.

That’s the point. Baseball, basketball and football are played on flat surfaces designed to give true bounces. Golf is played on an uneven terrain designed to surprise. Good and bad bounces are built into the essence of the game. And the reason golf is so much like life is that the game — like life — is all about how you react to those good and bad bounces. Do you blame your caddy? Do you cheat? Do you throw your clubs? Or do you accept it all with dignity and grace and move on, as Watson always has. Hence the saying: Play one round of golf with someone and you will learn everything you need to know about his character.

Golf is all about individual character. The ball is fixed. No one throws it to you. You initiate the swing, and you alone have to live with the results. There are no teammates to blame or commiserate with. Also, pro golfers, unlike baseball, football or basketball players, have no fixed salaries. They eat what they kill. If they score well, they make money. If they don’t, they don’t make money. I wonder what the average N.B.A. player’s free-throw shooting percentage would be if he had to make free throws to get paid the way golfers have to make three-foot putts?

This wonderful but cruel game never stops testing or teaching you. “The only comment I can make,” Watson told me after, “is one that the immortal Bobby Jones related: ‘One learns from defeat, not from victory.’ I may never have the chance again to beat the kids, but I took one thing from the last hole: hitting both the tee shot and the approach shots exactly the way I meant to wasn’t good enough. … I had to finish.”

So Tom Watson got a brutal lesson in golf that he’ll never forget, but he gave us all an incredible lesson in possibilities — one we’ll never forget.

Bobo. Just Bobo.

Bob Herbert is off today, alas.  Bobo  has been reading blogs.  Bobo has been pondering great questions.  Bobo has produced “The Power of Posterity,” in which he opines that without a next generation, there would be no grand designs or high ambitions. Even words like justice would lose meaning because everything would get reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.  Bobo should not read any blog that coos approvingly about Megan McArdle.  Here he is:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its intelligent contributors. Last week, one of those contributors asked a question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?

If you take an individualistic view of the world, not much would happen immediately. There are millions of people today who do not reproduce, and they lead happy, fulfilling and productive lives.

Even after the event, material conditions would be exactly the same. People would still have an incentive to go to work, pay off their bills and educate the children who were already with us. For 20 years, there would still be workers flowing into the labor force. Immigrants from the other side of the earth could eventually surge into the areas losing population. If anything, the mass-sterilization might reduce the environmental strain on the planet. People might focus on living for the moment, valuing the here and now.

But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.

If, say, the Western Hemisphere were sterilized, there would soon be a cataclysmic spiritual crisis. Both Judaism and Christianity are promise-centered faiths. They are based on narratives that lead from Genesis through progressive revelation to a glorious culmination.

Believers’ lives have significance because they and their kind are part of this glorious unfolding. Their faith is suffused with expectation and hope. If they were to learn that they were simply a dead end, they would feel that God had forsaken them, that life was without meaning and purpose.

The secular world would be shattered, too. Anything worth doing is the work of generations — ending racism, promoting freedom or building a nation. America’s founders, for example, felt the eyes of their descendants upon them. Alexander Hamilton felt that he was helping to create a great empire. Noah Webster composed his dictionary anticipating that America would someday have 300 million inhabitants, even though at the time it only had 6 million.

These people undertook their grand projects because they were building for their descendants. They were motivated — as ambitious leaders, writers and artists are — by their hunger for immortal fame.

Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.

If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.

There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled.

Some people might try to perpetuate their society by recruiting people from the fertile half of the earth. But that wouldn’t work. Immigration is the painful process of leaving behind one culture and way of living so that your children and children’s children can enjoy a different future. No one would be willing to undertake that traumatic process in order to move from a society that was reproducing to a society that was fading. There wouldn’t be the generations required to assimilate immigrants. A sterile culture could not thrive and, thus, could not inspire assimilation.

Instead there would be brutal division between those with the power to possess the future and those without. If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit that shares the same destiny.

Within weeks, in other words, everything would break down and society would be unrecognizable. The scenario is unrelievedly grim. An individual who does not have children still contributes fully to the future of society. But when a society doesn’t reproduce there is nothing left to contribute to.

But, of course, that’s the beauty of this odd question. There are no sterilizing sunspots. Instead, we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.

Bobo makes my brain go all ouchy.

Douthat, Cohen and Krugman

Pasty little Ross, in “The War We’d Like to Forget,” says America’s most important interest remains a stable, unified Iraq, even if it takes longer than any domestic faction wants.  Mr. Cohen, in “A Nation Hard to Short,” says the miracle of New York gives reason to believe in America.  Prof. Krugman, in “An Incoherent Truth,” says on health care, the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense. The conservative Democrats can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project.  Here’s Asshat:

It was the kind of symbolic moment that George W. Bush must have yearned for during the Iraq war’s darkest days. Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of a sovereign (sort of), stable (up to a point) and democratic (within limits) Republic of Iraq came to Arlington National Cemetery Thursday, and laid a wreath in honor of the 4,328 American soldiers who have died fighting in his country.

Few Americans noticed, though, and even fewer cared. It would take more than a photo-op at the Tomb of the Unknowns to make the nation rethink the Iraq war. Having spent the better part of the Bush era arguing foreign policy with a fury not seen since Vietnam, Americans have settled on a remarkably durable consensus: It was a mistake. We’re winning. Let’s leave.

Each of these beliefs is contestable. But almost nobody — right, left or center — seems to have much interest in debating them. Most conservatives still believe that the invasion of Iraq was just and justified. But it’s clear from several years of polling that they aren’t about to persuade the public. So you’re much more likely to hear them emphasizing the successes of the surge than relitigating the W.M.D. debate.

Plenty of war-skeptics are unconvinced that Iraq’s recent stabilization will deliver a happy outcome in the long run. But the surge smoothed the way for withdrawal, which is what the war’s critics have wanted all along — so why rock the boat?

For the Obama administration, there’s nothing to be gained from reopening old wounds. They’re just happy to have inherited a timeline for pulling out our troops, instead of having to negotiate their own.

In many respects, this ideological truce is welcome. The fortunes of war have made every American faction look foolish at some point, and modesty is becoming to all sides. Anti-war liberals (and, much less influentially, anti-war conservatives) got the most important question right. But the anti-war side often seemed far too willing to leave Iraq to the furies, and far too reckless about the strategic consequences of beating a retreat.

Pro-war Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton talked a good game about seeing the conflict through, but they got both of the crucial decisions wrong – backing the invasion in 2003 and then, fingers in the wind, voting against the surge in 2006. (Naturally, they were rewarded with the reins of Barack Obama’s foreign policy.)

It was left to the much-hated neoconservatives to push and push, even when it seemed politically impossible, for the change of strategy that ultimately stabilized Iraq. But of course the neoconservatives were picking up the pieces from a debacle that their own overconfidence made possible in the first place.

These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.

Except that the Iraq war isn’t finished yet. There are still 130,000 American troops in the country. As Maliki acknowledged during his visit to Washington, there will probably be thousands of soldiers there after 2011, when the current Status of Forces Agreement states that our troops must be withdrawn.

Nobody’s sure exactly what this residual force will be doing. But that’s because nobody — nobody — knows how Iraq will look once American combat troops are gone. As soon as we do, the current consensus will likely come apart. It holds, for now, because everybody has an interest in the idea of a swift withdrawal. War supporters want the chance to claim victory. War opponents want the chance to claim vindication. Obama wants the problem off his desk.

But America’s most important interest remains a stable, unified Republic of Iraq, even if takes longer than any domestic faction wants. Afghanistan may be “the good war” to most Americans, but Iraq’s size, location, history and resources mean that it’s still by far the more important one.

Yes, the 9/11 plot got its start in a chaotic, conflict-ridden Afghanistan. But a Middle East-wide war could get its start in a chaotic, conflict-ridden Iraq. Indeed, before the surge, it almost did. This reality will keep us heavily involved, one way or another, long after our “withdrawal” is complete.

And if the hard choices start again, it will require that the American people pay attention, once more, to a war they’d just as soon forget.

God, I’d love to slap the snot out of him…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

The other morning, I caught Warren Buffett on MSNBC. The Sage of Omaha was in sprightly form, perhaps buoyed by the market’s summer surge. He was asked where the market was headed in the next few months and he said he had no idea but he knew one thing: “It’s hard to short America in the long term.”

All the debt, personal and national, notwithstanding, I have to second that. As it happened, I’d been up very early that morning to talk to CNN’s excellent John Roberts about Iran. Waiting for the show, I looked east across Central Park to the rising sun just knotting its tie over the serried high rises of midtown and the Upper East Side.

It was a magnificent sight, the city resplendent. New York has recovered, if not its stride, at least its balance.

Ten months ago, when Lehman Brothers went poof in the night, and its spooky chief executive Richard Fuld hustled off to sell his Florida mansion to his wife for $100, the city was shell-shocked. It was intact, but emptied and drained, its density gone, as if a neutron bomb had struck.

The sidewalks seemed too wide for scattered people. You could hail a cab in the rain at 6 p.m. on Fifth Avenue with ease. Waiters stared out from empty restaurants as if trapped suddenly in some Hopper painting. Jobs vanished faster than you could say leverage.

The damage from Fuld’s follies — and that of other 31st-floor types giddied by their ephemeral mastery of the universe — has not stopped giving. Credit appraisal is stuck on stupid. If you couldn’t fend off a loan in the days of mortgage madness, now you can scarcely get one with a perfect credit score.

An executive on the board of a large regional bank told me the other day that 95 percent of time is now spent on compliance, which does not leave a lot for doing business. That’s the world of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the opposite of the former PRAT (Please Reserve a Table) world of bankers.

Unemployment is still rising, and could hit 10 percent in the fall. Real estate has scarcely stabilized its free fall. Corporate profits, returning, seem based more on inventive cost-cutting than new revenue flows.

If moribund is 1 and feverish is 10 on the New York restaurant-and-taxi gauge, the city is hovering at about 4.

But it’s come back. It’s righted itself in short order. That has something to do with smart governance but more to do with the gritty culture of the city, its work ethic, its inspiring sense of its own grandeur, its shared knowledge of the personal struggle that goes into a day. A Fuld, who never took the subway, never sat in Bryant Park with a sandwich, knew nothing of what makes the city tick.

My dawn moment with the skyline is a moment every New Yorker knows, when the demanding city suddenly gives back, yields beauty from its pounding restlessness, grants some miracle of iron and light, and in so doing summons the energy and civility that has helped set things right.

Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who died last week, used to talk about that New York skyline, about the way he would dream of it during his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland (the inspiration for his hugely successful “Angela’s Ashes”), and about his fights with his brother Malachy over who should own the right to have such dreams.

He was talking about the summoning power of America, a land hardwired to the future; and, in his way, about the deeper reason why Buffett is right to say, “It’s hard to short America in the long term.” That reason is the enduring belief of millions in America as a transforming power.

The close to my day had a certain symmetry. I found myself in Queens that night, looking at the now glittering towers of midtown from the far side of the East River. Their orange glow was gone but not their beauty. I thought that New York was always surprising.

Some Iranian-Americans had invited me to a wonderful dinner complete with crispy rice (our “vegetarian crackling” as one woman once put it to me in Tehran) and unctuous beef simmered in bitter herbs. Their families had all fled Iran at different times — before the Revolution, in 1979, or in the tumultuous years afterward. Various odysseys had eventually brought them to New York.

Where they had begun again, giving their part to the city’s compact and reserving part of themselves for the memories from which America is only partial deliverance.

The talk of the revolution made me think of Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman whose death had immediately preceded McCourt’s. From day 50 of the 1979 U.S. hostage-taking in Tehran, Cronkite always told Americans what day the crisis was in, right up to the 444th day.

Perhaps Buffett has succeeded Cronkite as “the most trusted man in America.” My day of connections was over, a full day in an America that’s hard to short in the long term.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman.  I believe I will send his column to my useless Congresscritter, one of the bluest of blue dogs…

Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.

But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)

Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.

By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.

On the other side, individuals would also be prevented from gaming the system: Americans would be required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, rather than signing up only when they need care. And all but the smallest businesses would be required either to provide their employees with insurance, or to pay fees that help cover the cost of subsidies — subsidies that would make insurance affordable for lower-income American families.

Finally, there would be a public option: a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers, which would help hold down costs.

The subsidy portion of health reform would cost around a trillion dollars over the next decade. In all the plans currently on the table, this expense would be offset with a combination of cost savings elsewhere and additional taxes, so that there would be no overall effect on the federal deficit.

So what are the objections of the Blue Dogs?

Well, they talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it’s tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year’s big Bush tax cut — a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit?

But it’s actually much worse than that — because even as they complain about the plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.

There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.

But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid — and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.

So what do the Blue Dogs want?

Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.

One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.

But I guess I’m not quite that cynical. After all, today’s Blue Dogs are politicians who didn’t go the Tauzin route — they didn’t switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.

Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.

Is that what the Blue Dogs really want to see happen? We’ll soon find out.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo says “Bite Your Tongue,” and that race, class and testosterone will always be a combustible brew. Our first African-American president will try to make the peace with a professor and a cop.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “The Losers Hang On,” says to the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds.  Mr. Kristof, in “Not a Victim, But a Hero,” writes about Pakistani girl musters the courage to publicly fight her rapists, despite threats to her family.  Mr. Rich, in “And That’s Not the Way It Is,” says what matters about Walter Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walt and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust.  Here’s MoDo:

Being obnoxious isn’t a crime.

As we reflect on the arc of civil rights dramas from Jim Crow to Jim Crowley, my friend John Timoney, the police chief of Miami, observes: “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech. It can get tough out there, but I tell my officers, ‘Don’t make matters worse by throwing handcuffs on someone. Bite your tongue and just leave.’ ”

As the daughter of a police detective, I always prefer to side with the police. But this time, I’m struggling.

No matter how odd or confrontational Henry Louis Gates Jr. was that afternoon, he should not have been arrested once Sergeant Crowley ascertained that the Harvard professor was in his own home.

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted. His soothing assessment that two good people got snared in a bad moment seems on target.

It escalated into a clash of egos — the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar, the town vs. the gown, the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Crowley told a Boston sports station that Gates “seemed very peculiar — even more so now that I know how educated he is.”

Gates told his daughter Elizabeth in The Daily Beast: “He should have gotten out of there and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, good luck. Loved your PBS series — check with you later!’ ”

Gates told me Crowley was so “gruff” and unsolicitous “the hair on my neck stood up.” Crowley says Gates acted “put off” and “agitated.” But the strong guy with the gun has more control than the weak guy with the cane. An officer who teaches racial sensitivity should not have latched on to a technicality about neighbors — who seemed to be outnumbered by cops — getting “alarmed” by Gates’s “outburst.”

From Shakespeare to Hitchcock, mistaken identity makes for a powerful narrative.

A police officer who’s proud of his reputation for getting along with black officers, and for teaching cadets to avoid racial profiling, feels maligned to be cast as a racist white Boston cop.

A famous professor who studies identity and summers in Martha’s Vineyard feels maligned to be cast as a black burglar with backpack and crowbar.

Race, class and testosterone will always be a combustible brew. Our first African-American president will try to make the peace with Gates (who supported Hillary) and Crowley (whose father voted for Obama).

I tracked down Gates by phone at J.F.K. on Friday after he had talked to the president and agreed to go to the White House for a symbolic beer with the man he labeled “a rogue policeman.” Gates, coughing from a cold he picked up in China, said he wondered if perhaps “fate and history chose me for this event.” He was pleased with the thousands of empathetic e-mail notes he’s getting, material for a PBS documentary on racial profiling.

He says he’s ready for “marriage counseling” from the “Solomon” in the Oval, who wrote in his memoir that the police pulled him over “for no apparent reason.” “If Sgt. Crowley and the president and I meet, it’s clearly not going to be like Judge Joe Brown, OK? ‘You tell your side, you tell your side.’ We have to agree to disagree. But I would be surprised if somebody didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry you were arrested.’ ”

How can they ever reconcile their accounts? Crowley says he asked Gates to come outside and the professor replied, “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Gates wryly suggests Crowley got the line from watching “Good Times” as a child.

“Does it sound logical that I would talk about the mother of a big white guy with a gun?” he asked. “I’m 5-7 and 150 pounds. I don’t walk on ice, much less (expletive) with some cop in my kitchen. I don’t want another hip replacement.”

I asked how he felt when he learned that Crowley was the one who gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Reggie Lewis, the black Celtics basketball star, in a vain attempt to save his life after a heart attack in 1993. He replied: “I don’t stereotype. I never saw him as the head of the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe he was just having a bad day.”

And Gates says that if anyone thinks he’s a fiery black militant, they’ve got the wrong guy, considering he married a white woman, has mixed-race daughters and has white blood himself.

Mike Barnicle warns that the next time Gates needs 911, he should call the Harvard faculty lounge instead. But Gates ripostes, “I have a feeling the Cambridge police will be especially attentive to my needs.” He said that, as he was packing for China, he got a call from the Cambridge police soliciting a donation and told them to try back in two weeks.

“I haven’t quite decided,” he said between coughs, “if I’m up to that right now.”

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Jalozai Camp, Pakistan:

After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.

Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while.

Because, while the radicals have failed miserably, our allies — the pro-Americans, the Muslim modernists, the Arab moderates — have not really filled the void with reform and good government of their own. They are winning by default. More on that later.

For now, though, it is obvious that everywhere they have won or seized power, the Islamists — in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon or Gaza — have overplayed their hands, dragged their societies into useless wars or engaged in nihilistic violence that today is producing a broad backlash from mainstream Muslims.

Think of this: In the late-1970s, two leaders made historic trips — President Anwar Sadat flew from Egypt to Israel and Ayatollah Khomeini flew from Paris to Tehran. For the last 30 years, politics in the Middle East and the Muslim world has, in many ways, been a struggle between their competing visions.

Sadat argued that the future should bury the past and that Arabs and Muslims should build their future based on peace with Israel, integration with the West and embracing modernity. Khomeini argued that the past should bury the future and that Persians and Muslims should build their future on hostility to Israel, isolation from the West and subordinating modernity to a puritanical Islam.

In 2009, the struggle between those two trends tipped toward the Sadatists. The fact that Iran’s ruling theocrats had to steal their election to stay in power and forcibly suppress dissent by millions of Iranians — according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iran has surpassed China as the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 41 now behind bars — is the most visible sign of this. The Taliban’s burning down of secular schools that compete with its mosques, and its peddling of heroin to raise cash, are also not exactly signs of intellectual triumph.

The same day that President Obama spoke to the Muslim world from Cairo University, Osama bin Laden released a long statement on Islamic Web sites and on Al Jazeera. As the Egyptian Middle East expert Mamoun Fandy noted: “Obama beat Osama hands down. Ask anyone about the content of Obama’s speech and they will tell you. Ask them what Osama said and most people will say, ‘Did he give a speech?’ ”

In Iraq’s elections last January, nationalist and moderate Muslim parties defeated the sectarian, radical religious parties, while in Lebanon, a pro-Western coalition defeated one led by Hezbollah.

Here in Pakistan, the backlash against the Taliban has been building among the rising middle class. It started in March when a mobile-phone video of a teenage girl being held down and beaten outside her home by a Taliban commander in Pakistan’s Swat Valley spread virally across this country. In May, the Pakistani Army began an offensive against Taliban militants who had taken control of key towns in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and appeared to be moving toward the capital, Islamabad.

I followed Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he visited a vast, choking-hot and dust-covered refugee tent camp in Jalozai, where some 116,000 refugees have fled the NWFP, as the Pakistani Army moved into their hometowns to smash the Taliban in a popular operation.

“People are totally against them, but the Taliban don’t care,” a Pakistani teacher, Abdul Jalil, 41, told me while taking a break from teaching the Urdu alphabet to young boys in a sweltering tent. “They are very cruel. They chopped people’s heads off.”

To the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds. In Afghanistan, the Taliban play on Pashtun nationalist grievances, and in Iraq, the Sunni jihadists draw energy from killing Shiites.

The only way to really dry up their support, though, is for the Arab and Muslim modernists to actually implement better ideas by producing less corrupt and more consensual governance, with better schools, more economic opportunities and a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity. That is where “our” allies in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have so consistently failed. Until that happens, the Islamist radicals will be bankrupt, but not out of business.

Here’s Mr. Kristof, writing from Meerwala, Pakistan:

After being kidnapped at the age of 16 by a group of thugs and enduring a year of rapes and beatings, Assiya Rafiq was delivered to the police and thought her problems were over.

Then, she said, four police officers took turns raping her.

The next step for Assiya was obvious: She should commit suicide. That’s the customary escape in rural Pakistan for a raped woman, as the only way to cleanse the disgrace to her entire family.

Instead, Assiya summoned the unimaginable courage to go public and fight back. She is seeking to prosecute both her kidnappers and the police, despite threats against her and her younger sisters. This is a kid who left me awed and biting my lip; this isn’t a tale of victimization but of valor, empowerment and uncommon heroism.

“I decided to prosecute because I don’t want the same thing to happen to anybody else,” she said firmly.

Assiya’s case offers a window into the quotidian corruption and injustice endured by impoverished Pakistanis — leading some to turn to militant Islam.

“When I treat a rape victim, I always advise her not to go to the police,” said Dr. Shershah Syed, the president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan. “Because if she does, the police might just rape her again.”

Yet Assiya is also a sign that change is coming. She says she was inspired by Mukhtar Mai, a young woman from this remote village of Meerwala who was gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council. Mukhtar prosecuted her attackers and used the compensation money to start a school.

Mukhtar is my hero. Many Times readers who followed her story in past columns of mine have sent her donations through a fund at Mercy Corps, at www.mercycorps.org, and Mukhtar has used the money to open schools, a legal aid program, an ambulance service, a women’s shelter, a telephone hotline — and to help Assiya fight her legal case.

The United States has stood aloof from the ubiquitous injustices in Pakistan, and that’s one reason for cynicism about America here. I’m hoping the Obama administration will make clear that Americans stand shoulder to shoulder with heroines like Mukhtar and Assiya, and with an emerging civil society struggling for law and social justice.

Assiya’s saga began a year ago when a woman who was a family friend sold her to two criminals who had family ties to prominent politicians. Assiya said the two men spent the next year beating and raping her.

The men were implicated in a gold robbery, so they negotiated a deal with the police in the town of Kabirwala, near Khanewal: They handed over Assiya, along with a $625 bribe, in exchange for the police pinning the robbery on the girl.

By Assiya’s account, which I found completely credible, four police officers, including a police chief, took turns beating and raping her — sometimes while she was tied up — over the next two weeks. A female constable obligingly stepped out whenever the men wanted access to Assiya.

Assiya’s family members heard that she was in the police station, and a court granted their petition for her release and sent a bailiff to get her out. The police hid Assiya, she said, and briefly locked up her 10-year-old brother to bully the family into backing off.

The bailiff accepted bribes from both the family and the police, but in the end he freed the girl. Assiya, driven by fury that overcame her shame, told her full story to the magistrate, who ordered a medical exam and an investigation. The medical report confirms that Assiya’s hymen had been broken and that she had abrasions all over her body.

The morning I met Assiya, she said she had just received the latest in a series of threats from the police: Unless she withdraws her charges, they will arrest, rape or kill her — and her two beloved younger sisters.

The family is in hiding. It has lost its livelihood and accumulated $2,500 in debts. Assiya’s two sisters and three brothers have had to drop out of school, and they will find it harder to marry because Assiya is considered “dishonored.” Most of her relatives tell Assiya that she must give in. But she tosses her head and insists that she will prosecute her attackers to spare other girls what she endured.

(For readers who want to help, more information is available on my blog at: www.nytimes.com/ontheground.)

Assiya’s mother, Iqbal Mai, told me that in her despair, she at first had prayed that God should never give daughters to poor families. “But then I changed my mind,” she added, with a hint of pride challenging her fears. “God should give poor people daughters like Assiya who will fight.”

Amen.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

Who exactly was the competition in the race to be the most trusted man in America? Lyndon Johnson? Richard Nixon?

Not to take anything away from Walter Cronkite, but he beat out Henry Kissinger by only four percentage points when a 1974 Roper poll asked Americans whom they most respected. The successive blows of Vietnam and Watergate during the Cronkite ’60s and ’70s shattered the nation’s faith in most of its institutions, public and private, and toppled many of the men who led them. Such was the dearth of trustworthy figures who survived that an unindicted official in a disgraced White House could make the cut.

In death, “the most trusted man in America” has been embalmed in that most comforting of American sweeteners — nostalgia — to the point where his finest, and most discomforting, achievements are being sanitized or forgotten. We’ve heard much sentimental rumination on the bygone heyday of the “mainstream media,” on the cultural fractionalization inflicted by the Internet, and on the lack of any man who could replicate the undisputed moral authority of Uncle Walter. (Women still need not apply, apparently.) But the reason to celebrate Cronkite has little to do with any of this and least of all to do with his avuncular television persona.

What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.

That’s why the past week’s debate about whether there could ever again be a father-figure anchor with Cronkite’s everyman looks and sonorous delivery is an escapist parlor game. What matters is content, not style. The real question is this: How many of those with similarly exalted perches in the news media today — and those perches, however diminished, still do exist in the multichannel digital age — will speak truth to power when the country is on the line? This journalistic responsibility cannot be outsourced to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart.

Moving as it may be to repeatedly watch Cronkite’s famous on-camera reactions to J.F.K.’s death and the astronauts’ moon landing, those replays aren’t the story. It’s a given that an anchor might mist up during a national tragedy and cheer a national triumph. The real test is how a journalist responds when people in high places are doing low deeds out of camera view and getting away with it. Vietnam and Watergate, not Kennedy and Neil Armstrong, are what made Cronkite Cronkite.

In the case of Vietnam, the anchor began as a reliable mouthpiece for the optimistic scenarios purveyed by the Johnson administration. It was the contradictions and chaos Cronkite saw in a visit to Vietnam after the Tet offensive that tardily changed his mind in 1968. Even now, right-wing bloggers who still think we could have “won” in Vietnam and are busy trashing Cronkite miss the point of what he said in his on-air editorial. He did not presume to judge the confusing outcome of Tet itself; he viewed the war as a whole (accurately) as a stalemate.

What really outraged him was more elementary than any prognostication. He saw that the American government was lying to its own people. “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,” he said.

Cronkite was braver during Watergate. The Washington Post, still largely regarded as a local paper, had been on a lonely limb pursuing the scandal in the months after the break-in of June 1972. Its young reporters Woodward and Bernstein were nobodies. The leading national paper, The Times, was lagging behind and underplaying the story. The networks, the biggest news source for Americans, barely mentioned Watergate. The narrative was too complex and didn’t yield the kind of visuals that scream Good Television.

What Cronkite did on Oct. 27, 1972, was remarkable. Though CBS News had little fresh reporting of its own, it repackaged The Post’s to make it compelling TV. The Post’s logo and headlines often served as the visuals. The piece clocked in at an unprecedented 14 minutes — two-thirds of a news program running 22 minutes without commercials — and was broadcast just days before the election. As Katharine Graham, then the paper’s publisher, wrote in “Personal History,” her 1997 memoir, “CBS had taken The Post national,” giving its Watergate reporting the credibility and mass circulation that would ultimately allow it to affect the course of history.

That night the Nixon hatchet man Chuck Colson yelled at Cronkite’s boss, the CBS titan William Paley, and succeeded in getting the network’s management to delay, shorten and neuter Cronkite’s second Watergate installment. But Black Rock, CBS’s corporate headquarters, could not undo the anchor’s actions any more than the White House. The Nixon administration’s dark criminality would gradually be dragged into the sunlight.

To appreciate how special Cronkite’s achievements were, consider our recent past. As the Bush administration hyped Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D. and nonexistent link to 9/11, The Times and The Post too often enabled the fictions. But at least some reporters at these papers and others elsewhere were on to the hoax — even if their findings were buried in the back pages. At the networks, Cronkite’s heirs were not even practicing journalism. They invited administration propagandists to trumpet their tales of imminent mushroom clouds with impunity.

Not much changed after the invasion. When Ted Koppel, then of ABC News, dared to merely recite the names of the American dead on “Nightline” a year into the war, the assault from Bush-Cheney allies, including in the broadcasting industry, was so fierce that Koppel’s peers retreated from the fray. In the months when it might have made a difference, no network television anchor of Cronkite’s prominence challenged the administration’s silver linings in Iraq as he had L.B.J.’s in Vietnam.

If anything, the spirit of another recently departed lion of the establishment — Robert Strange McNamara, born five months before Cronkite in 1916 — may live on more potently at the nexus of American power and journalism than that of the CBS anchorman.

When McNamara died this month, many recalled his status as Exhibit A of what David Halberstam labeled “the best and the brightest,” the brilliant and arrogant Kennedy-Johnson team that blundered into a quagmire. Far less was said about how McNamara, at his height, wielded that image to spin a dazzled Washington press establishment on his misplaced optimism about the war. The Washington Post’s obituary, pointedly or not, included a photo of a smiling McNamara enjoying cocktails with a powerful syndicated Post columnist (and Vietnam apologist), Joseph Alsop. The obituary also noted that McNamara served on The Post’s board — a sinecure he was awarded after he had helped send some 50,000 Americans to pointless deaths.

What Halberstam labeled the “nice genteel chumminess” between potentates like McNamara and the Beltway press establishment, though occasionally frayed by scandals like Watergate, remains intact. Just a few days before McNamara died, Politico uncovered a particularly graphic example involving The Post: an invitation to lobbyists to shell out $25,000 to $250,000 to sponsor off-the-record, nonconfrontational “salons” where they could mix with what a promotional flier called “the right people” and “alter the debate.” The “right people” being pimped were White House officials, members of Congress and The Post’s own journalists. The salons were to be held in the home of the paper’s current publisher, Katharine Graham’s granddaughter.

The Post’s ombudsman called the salons “an ethical lapse of monumental proportions,” and they were canceled. But the lofty cover charge notwithstanding, one wonders if they would have differed in substance from that long-ago cocktail party attended by McNamara and Alsop.

As no one has to remind anyone at The Times, The Post is hardly the only news organization to suffer a monumental lapse in recent years. The bigger problem is the persistence of that clubby culture Halberstam described, no matter which party is in power. The hagiography that greeted McNamara’s arrival in Washington was also showered initially on some of the best and the brightest in the Bush and Obama administrations. Some journalists even fawn over the worst and the stupidest. As e-mail released by Mark Sanford’s office revealed, David Gregory of NBC News tried to get an interview with the sleazy governor by reassuring him that “‘Meet the Press’ allows you to frame the conversation how you really want to.”

Watching many of the empty Cronkite tributes in his own medium over the past week, you had to wonder if his industry was sticking to mawkish clichés just to avoid unflattering comparisons. If he was the most trusted man in America, it wasn’t because he was a nice guy with an authoritative voice and a lived-in face. It wasn’t because he “loved a good story” or that he removed his glasses when a president died. It was because at a time of epic corruption in the most powerful precincts in Washington, Cronkite was not at the salons and not in the tank.

Collins and Blow

Mr. Herbert is off today.  Ms. Collins says “Things Can Always Be Worse,” and that no matter what dreadful embarrassment your state is facing, you can always console yourself by remembering that you do not live in New Jersey.  Mr. Blow, in “Welcome to the ‘Club’,” says for many black men, a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Once again, it’s time to look for a silver lining.

The health care bill is a mess in Congress. But at least the Senate voted to stop constructing the stupid F-22 fighter — and they did it before the plane contract’s 30th anniversary!

California is about to whack the heck out of funding for its school system. But on the plus side, the Legislature rescued the money that localities needed to continue identifying dead bodies in their morgues. We hate it when they balance the budget on the back of the corpses.

In New York (Most Dysfunctional State in the Union! Thanks, National Journal!), Albany is being run mainly by thugs and people who were appointed to fill sudden vacancies. But I’m happy to report that we do have a lieutenant governor for the moment, thanks to an emergency swearing-in ceremony at a steakhouse in Brooklyn, two minutes ahead of Republicans waving court orders.

The governor of Nevada is being sued by a cocktail waitress, who claims he assaulted her outside a nightclub, and his wife, who wants a divorce. But at least he is doing better than the state’s lieutenant governor, who is facing felony charges for misusing funds when he was the state treasurer. And not all that much worse than Nevada’s U.S. senator, who had that affair with the campaign bookkeeper who was married to his chief of staff.

No matter what dreadful embarrassment your state is facing, you can always console yourself by remembering that you do not live in New Jersey. On Thursday, a vast corruption sweep there netted three mayors, two state assemblymen, five rabbis and a guy who had allegedly been running an organ-trafficking business that has left swathes of the population of Moldova walking around with only one kidney.

If you do live in New Jersey, console yourself by remembering that the organ-trafficking business was actually run by a guy in Brooklyn.

Among the indicted mayors was Peter Cammarano III, Hoboken’s 32-year-old “thoughtful fighter” whose reform agenda had raised hopes in a city so beleaguered that it had been under control of a state monitor.

“Though we campaigned with fists raised, I now extend my hand,” Cammarano said after taking the oath of office. This was three weeks ago. At the time, no one understood it was a double-entendre.

I hate it when reform mayors get indicted. Although it does make me feel better about the fact that in New York, the reform governor was not actually indicted but only forced to resign because of a hugely humiliating sex scandal.

The New Jersey story is particularly dispiriting because it appears that the original federal investigation was not aimed at government corruption at all, but a money-laundering scheme centered in a town appropriately named Deal. This case involved Israel, Switzerland and an Apple Jacks cereal box stuffed with $97,000 — all of which was very regrettable, but not the sort of thing likely to give nightmares to lovers of democracy around the globe.

However, it turned out that once the informant began driving around with a trunk filled with laundered money, government officials popped up like so many beagles sniffing an unsupervised hot dog. And these public servants were depressingly inexpensive. Five-thousand dollars appeared to be the going rate for pretty much everything in the political favor department. Although there was a reform assemblyman who allegedly got $15,000. And, of course, the kidney would set you back a bundle.

According to the indictments, one employee of the Hudson County Board of Elections did complain that he was being shortchanged when he was paid $2,500. And although his name is now linked to a scandal that is roiling New Jersey with shame, he is probably comforted in the knowledge that he was absolutely right.

Hard to come up with any consolation for the people of Hoboken, who turned on the TV Thursday night and saw their brand-new mayor being hauled off in handcuffs. While Cammarano was campaigning to “build a better, stronger, more-affordable Hoboken” he was also allegedly sitting down at a diner with a federal informant, who promised to give him two $5,000 payments in return for help with various development projects.

And, oh, bitter pill — the prosecutors say he lightheartedly told the informant that he was so popular that he could win the election even if he was “uh, indicted.”

The voters can tell themselves that at least they tried. Cammarano’s official biography boasts that he championed ethics and open government and sponsored a law requiring “that all wood products purchased for municipal projects are certified as non-rain forest in origin.” Whoever told us to beware of politicians bearing rain forest resolutions?

And it could have been worse. At least Hoboken’s indicted mayor isn’t the cut-rate $2,500 kind. And at last report, everybody was still hanging on to their kidneys.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

This week, the fog of racial profiling hung heavy over Harvard Square.

The arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the eminent Harvard scholar, at his own home thrust the police’s treatment of minorities, particularly black men, back into the spotlight.

Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last July asked: “Have you ever felt you were stopped by the police just because of your race or ethnic background?” Sixty-six percent of black men said yes. Only 9 percent of white men said the same.

These views are not without merit. A series of racial-profiling studies across the country have found that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped and searched than whites.

In fact, last year the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York law firm specializing in human rights, released a damning study of the racial-profiling practices of the New York Police Department. It found that more than 80 percent of those stopped and frisked were black or Hispanic. The report also said that when stopped, 45 percent of blacks and Hispanics were frisked, compared with 29 percent of whites, even though white suspects were 70 percent more likely than black suspects to have a weapon.

It’s such a sensitive issue for black men that even the Black Man in Chief dove into the fray on Wednesday, reiterating that the issue of racial profiling “still haunts us.” So passionate was his empathy that it caused him to err. His comment that the police behaved “stupidly” was not very smart. On Friday, he acknowledged as much.

Mr. Gates may be able to take some solace in the fact that his rite of passage came later in his life — a life that he told me on Thursday has been insulated “by a cocoon of racial tolerance, enlightenment and reason.” Still, as one commenter on my Facebook page put it: “Tell Doc, welcome to the ‘club.’ ”

My own induction into the “club” came when I was an 18-year-old college freshman. I was in a car with my friend Andre. We were young black men in a mostly white section of the mostly white town in Louisiana, about three miles from the college town where we lived.

As we drove, a police car began to trail us. Before we reached the city limits, its lights came on.

We stopped, and a white police officer approached. Andre got his license and motioned to me to get the registration from the glove box. When I opened it, a switch blade comb fell out. It was like the one the Fonz had on “Happy Days.” They were popular prizes at local fairs and carnivals at the time.

The officer drew his gun. I froze. Then, realizing that it was just a comb, I told him so and pushed the button to make the comb pop up. I thought it was kind of funny. I was the only one. The officer grew irritated. He commanded me to “drop the weapon” and told Andre to exit the car.

Andre insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason. It wasn’t true. Then he said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. Then he walked to his car and drove away.

He had raised the specter of executing us. He wanted to impress upon us his power and our worth, or lack thereof. We were shocked, afraid, humiliated and furious. We were the good guys — dean’s list students with academic scholarships. I was the freshman class president. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us.

As a child, I had been taught, in subtle ways, to be leery of the police. It wasn’t that they were all bad, but you never wanted to have to find out which ones were. As my mother would say, they were to be “fed with a long-handled spoon.” This was the first day that I fully understood what that meant.

We drove back to our college town and stopped at the house of Andre’s father. Andre asked him what we should do. Happy that we were alive, he just told us to drop it. I have spent 20 years trying to drop it.

Even so, I committed myself to breaking this cycle when I had my own kids. That became impossible the day after Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. A white police officer stopped me when I was in the car with my children. He said that I was using my cellphone while driving. In fact, I had answered a call at a stoplight. When the light turned green, I put the phone away. I thought this was a case that could be debated, so I debated it. That didn’t sit well with the officer. He went back to his car to write up a ticket. When he returned, he had two tickets. The second one, he told me, was for not wearing a seat belt, that he believed I had only put it on as I was being pulled over. That was not true. My kids were flabbergasted. They knew the officer was wrong, so they began to protest. I quieted them. When the officer drove off, I had a frank talk with them.

I told them that although most officers are brave and honorable men and women doing their best to protect and serve, there were, unfortunately, some bad seeds. Although I could not be sure that race had had any bearing on what the officer had done, I felt the need to tell my boys that as black men, we may sometimes take more of the brunt of those bad officers’ actions. As I spoke, my heart sank. Despite my best efforts to prevent it, the cycle of suspicion and mutual mistrust was tumbling forward into yet another generation. My children were one step closer to joining the “club.”

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo just doesn’t learn.  Both he and Prof. Krugman are addressing the health care crisis this morning.  Guess who comes off like a fool?  Bobo takes a metaphor and beats it into a pulp in “Kill the Rhinos!” in which he says the elimination of the biggest, hairiest, most entrenched problem in the country, the rising costs of health care, can not be done without overhauling the system.  Prof. Krugman, in “Costs and Compassion,” says controlling health care costs and expanding health care access aren’t opposing alternatives — either both have to be done or neither.  Here’s that fool Bobo:

Forget the wonkery. Let’s get primeval. Rising health care costs are a stampede of big ugly rhinos. They are trampling your crops, stomping on your children’s play areas and spoiling your hunting grounds.

President Obama wasn’t exaggerating when he said this cost onslaught is unsustainable. The rhinos have been roaming unchecked for a generation. We’ve thrown research projects, legislative and corporate reforms at them, all in an effort to tamp down health care inflation. But the rhinos keep coming. They are ubiquitous, powerful, protean and inexorable.

They feed on fuel sources deep in our system: expensive technological progress, the self-interest of the millions of people who make their living off the system, the public’s desire to get the best care for nothing, the fee-for-service payment system and so on.

The rhinos are closing off your future. As the White House folks say, health care premiums have doubled over the last decade. The government is saddled with $36 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

So your only question should be: Where do you find a tool or weapon big enough to stop the rhino stampedes? You know the problem is big, and you figure the response had better be gigantic.

Then you look on Capitol Hill and you see a bunch of popguns. The politicians describe these big ugly problems, but when it comes time to talk about their remedies they tell you: Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to change. In other words, we’re going to eliminate the biggest, hairiest, most entrenched problem in the country without fundamentally changing the system and without asking for sacrifice from anybody.

Good luck.

Then you talk to the health care experts promoting the bills and they are very honest: We don’t know exactly how to slow health care inflation. But we think we have some good ideas. We’re going to put some innovations, information clearinghouses and pilot projects in this legislation, and over the next 10 years we will see what works to really bring down costs. We’re going to go on a voyage of discovery to learn about rhino eradication.

And, indeed, some of the ideas do sound good: more information technology, comparative effectiveness research, conducting experiments to bundle hospital payments so they are based on outcomes. Some of the providers that do things right, like the Mayo Clinic, really are getting results.

But some of these ideas have been watered down in the legislation. And you’re not a complete idiot. You know there is a big difference between finding islands of excellence and creating a national system based on them.

Besides, you’ve got a bunch of big, evil rhinos stomping around! You want more than some promising ideas to pinpoint waste, fraud and abuse. You want some big heavy hammers to clock those suckers in the head.

Now that the first wave of legislation is bogging down, you want to take the seeds of cost control and you want to do more. You want to eliminate or cap the tax exemption on employee health benefits. This is a big way to crush one of the core drivers of health care inflation. You’re willing to give MedPAC-style technocrats a chance to take control of Medicare spending away from Congressional spendthrifts.

You want to loosen federal regulations so that states have more room to experiment — not tighten them, as the current legislation does, so that states have less. You want reforms throughout the system that will cut down on first-dollar reimbursement in exchange for catastrophic protection. You want to tie Medicare subsidies to income. You want to look at anything that will move us away from a fee-for-service model, the core perversion in the system.

You want to change incentives at both ends. The legislators who drew up the first bills want to change the provider’s incentives. But big cost savings can also come if consumers have choices and incentives to hunt for cheaper coverage. The Wyden-Bennett bill gives people a chance to choose the best option, instead of imprisoning people in existing coverage, as the current legislation does. The Medicare Part D reform has produced impressive reductions by allowing consumers to pocket prescription drug savings. Other proposals would give people tax credits and allow them to go to any trusted community group — like AARP or a union or a religious group — that wanted to compete to offer coverage.

Not everything is compatible with everything else. But the point is that you have rhinos at the door! You’ll try anything that works. You want a political class that no longer perpetuates the myth that people can get everything for nothing. You know that it was political pandering that got us into this mess in the first place.

Obama is right. Things will be bad if we don’t tackle the problem this year. Things will be worse if we add to the costs without beating the rhinos.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman, who actually seems to have thought about the problem:

The talking heads on cable TV panned President Obama’s Wednesday press conference. You see, he didn’t offer a lot of folksy anecdotes.

Shame on them. The health care system is in crisis. The fate of America’s middle class hangs in the balance. And there on our TVs was a president with an impressive command of the issues, who truly understands the stakes.

Mr. Obama was especially good when he talked about controlling medical costs. And there’s a crucial lesson there — namely, that when it comes to reforming health care, compassion and cost-effectiveness go hand in hand.

To see what I mean, compare what Mr. Obama has said and done about health care with the statements and actions of his predecessor.

President Bush, you may remember, was notably unconcerned with the plight of the uninsured. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he once remarked. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush claimed to be against excessive government expenditure. So what did he do to rein in the cost of Medicare, the biggest single item driving federal spending?

Nothing. In fact, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act drove costs up both by preventing bargaining over drug prices and by locking in subsidies to insurance companies.

Now President Obama is trying to provide every American with access to health insurance — and he’s also doing more to control health care costs than any previous president.

I don’t know how many people understand the significance of Mr. Obama’s proposal to give MedPAC, the expert advisory board to Medicare, real power. But it’s a major step toward reducing the useless spending — the proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs.

And both the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have also been emphasizing the importance of “comparative effectiveness research” — seeing which medical procedures actually work.

So the Obama administration’s commitment to health care for all goes along with an unprecedented willingness to get serious about spending health care dollars wisely. And that’s part of a broader pattern.

Many health care experts believe that one main reason we spend far more on health than any other advanced nation, without better health outcomes, is the fee-for-service system in which hospitals and doctors are paid for procedures, not results. As the president said Wednesday, this creates an incentive for health providers to do more tests, more operations, and so on, whether or not these procedures actually help patients.

So where in America is there serious consideration of moving away from fee-for-service to a more comprehensive, integrated approach to health care? The answer is: Massachusetts — which introduced a health-care plan three years ago that was, in some respects, a dress rehearsal for national health reform, and is now looking for ways to help control costs.

Why does meaningful action on medical costs go along with compassion? One answer is that compassion means not closing your eyes to the human consequences of rising costs. When health insurance premiums doubled during the Bush years, our health care system “controlled costs” by dropping coverage for many workers — but as far as the Bush administration was concerned, that wasn’t a problem. If you believe in universal coverage, on the other hand, it is a problem, and demands a solution.

Beyond that, I’d suggest that would-be health reformers won’t have the moral authority to confront our system’s inefficiency unless they’re also prepared to end its cruelty. If President Bush had tried to rein in Medicare spending, he would have been accused, with considerable justice, of cutting benefits so that he could give the wealthy even more tax cuts. President Obama, by contrast, can link Medicare reform with the goal of protecting less fortunate Americans and making the middle class more secure.

As a practical, political matter, then, controlling health care costs and expanding health care access aren’t opposing alternatives — you have to do both, or neither.

At one point in his remarks Mr. Obama talked about a red pill and a blue pill. I suspect, though I’m not sure, that he was alluding to the scene in the movie “The Matrix” in which one pill brings ignorance and the other knowledge.

Well, in the case of health care, one pill means continuing on our current path — a path along which health care premiums will continue to soar, the number of uninsured Americans will skyrocket and Medicare costs will break the federal budget. The other pill means reforming our system, guaranteeing health care for all Americans at the same time we make medicine more cost-effective.

Which pill would you choose?

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “The Health Care Sausage,” says President Obama took a step closer to health care reform after pulling out all the stops to give wavering senators the spine to take a stand against financing the F-22 fighter jet, a $1.75 billion piece of pork.  Mr. Kristof, writing from Karachi, Pakistan, gives us “Terror Creeps Into the Heartland,” in which he says militants seem to be putting all of Pakistan in play, and that’s one reason the country should be President Obama’s top foreign policy challenge.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Watching Barack Obama trying to push members of Congress toward some kind of agreement on a health care bill gives you a new appreciation for why Hillary Clinton decided to just write the whole thing herself and dump it on them.

Every inch has been torture. The president spent an hour the other day with seven fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who weren’t happy with their leadership’s legislation. Then he turned them over to the entire White House health care team, which sat down with the Dogs and negotiated a plan to create an independent commission to set Medicare rates.

This cost-containment commission now appears to be a centerpiece of the administration’s health care goals. I am a positive person, so I like to believe that this was not sheer desperation but rather the slow rolling out of an incredibly subtle plan to trick Congress into thinking it’s calling the shots.

Meanwhile in the Senate, everyone is waiting on Max Baucus of Montana. Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus, whose vast authority stems from the fact that he speaks for both the Senate Finance Committee and a state that contains three-tenths of one percent of the country’s population.

Baucus wants a bill that has bipartisan appeal. The Republicans who are eager to work with him on this include the Finance Committee’s minority leader and every single senator from Maine. The rest appear closer to Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who recently urged his fellow party members to dig in their heels and create a Waterloo for the president. “It would break him,” DeMint added appealingly.

DeMint is an increasingly influential voice in the Republican Party, and he is now regarded as a potential Republican presidential nominee in 2012. This is partly because of his new book, “Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide Into Socialism,” and partly because almost all the other potential Republican presidential nominees have been sidetracked by lively sex scandals. At present, DeMint does not seem to have a sex scandal, although if he ever comes up with one, I promise to remind you that in his last campaign he said that openly gay people and unwed pregnant women should not be allowed to teach in public schools.

But we digress. The point here is that neither rain nor snow nor Jim DeMint will deter Obama from delivering on health care. Not even if he has to meet with every member of Congress one by one, give an interview to every television reporter in the Northern Hemisphere and hold a press conference every single day for the rest of the year.

Earlier this week, the White House’s hopes for success were lifted when the Senate voted 58 to 40 to stop financing the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet. Not only did this create a savings of $1.75 billion, it demonstrated, the administration felt, that Congress really could step up to the plate.

This was a huge, huge victory. Everybody pulled out all the stops to give wavering senators the spine to take a stand. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a big we-are-at-the-crossroads speech in Chicago, telling the nation that if the F-22 stayed in the budget, all hope of sane procurement practices was lost forever.

The president threatened to veto the entire $664 billion defense appropriations bill if there were F-22s in it. Vice President Joe Biden was on the phone talking and talking and talking. Rahm Emanuel was threatening to bite people on the leg — it was terrible, seeing those swing votes limping down the halls with the White House chief of staff gnawing at their ankles.

And they won! Who says the Senate can’t make the hard choices?

Of course, the F-22 had been totally outmoded since the collapse of the Soviet empire. We’ve been through two wars without ever finding any use for it. We’ve already got 187 of them sitting around, available should the Soviet Union reconstitute itself tomorrow and send its pilots into our airspace for a stealthy dogfight.

The last two presidents, the last two joint chiefs of staff, and apparently every secretary of defense going back to John C. Calhoun have decried the F-22 as a stupendous waste of money. And, of course, the Pentagon has already come up with another fighter plane, the F-35 Lightning, that it vows to spend a quadrillion dollars on instead, even though its nickname is not nearly so cool as the Raptor’s.

Still. Today a 30-year-old piece of $1.75 billion pork. Tomorrow the world.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Blue Dog rebels in the House called the big cost-containment victory a “small breakthrough” and noted that he and his six fellow Dogs had nine more big problems they wanted to discuss with the White House.

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

It was the home of a Muslim religious teacher, but he was stockpiling more than copies of the Koran. His house blew up this month in a thunderous explosion that leveled much of his village and could be heard six miles away. Police reported that he was storing explosives, rockets, grenades and suicide vests.

But perhaps what was most dispiriting was that this arsenal, apparently intended for terror attacks, was not in the tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have long conducted operations. Rather this was in the southern part of Punjab, the Pakistani heartland.

The explosion was a reminder of what some call the “creeping Talibanization,” even of parts of Pakistan far from the formal fighting. Militants seem to be putting the entire country in play, and that’s one reason Pakistan should be President Obama’s top foreign policy challenge.

Think of it this way: It would be terrible if Afghanistan or Iraq collapsed, but it would be unthinkably catastrophic if Pakistan — with perhaps 80 to 100 nuclear weapons — were to fall into chaos.

Even here in Karachi, the pragmatic commercial hub of the country, extremists have taken over some neighborhoods. A Pakistani police document marked “top secret,” given to me by a Pakistani concerned by the spreading tentacles of jihadis, states that Taliban agents sometimes set up armed checkpoints in one such neighborhood here.

These militants “generate funds through criminal activities like kidnapping for ransom, bank robbery, street robbery and other heinous crimes,” the report says.

The mayor of Karachi, Syed Mustafa Kamal, confirms that Pashtun tribesmen have barred outsiders from entering some neighborhoods.

“I’m the mayor, and I have three vehicles with police traveling with me. And even I cannot enter these areas or they will blow me up,” Mr. Kamal said, adding, “Pakistan is in very critical condition.”

Lala Hassan of the Aurat Foundation, which works on social issues, said: “There’s no doubt militancy is increasing day by day, not only in Karachi but all over Pakistan.”

On this trip, I also traveled in South Punjab and found it far more troubled than in my previous trips to the area. Some music shops and girls’ schools have been threatened by fundamentalists, local residents said. In the city of Bahawalpur, home to a notorious militant, my interpreter asked me not even to step out of the vehicle.

The Daily Times of Pakistan described the situation as “terror’s free run in South Punjab.”

But the militants may have overreached. Their brutality, including the flogging of a teenage girl before a large crowd, has shocked and alienated many Pakistanis. It is just possible that the tide is turning as a result.

A poll of Pakistanis released this month by WorldPublicOpinion.org found that one-third believed that the Taliban intended to gain control of all of Pakistan, but 75 percent thought that would be a bad result. Two years ago, only 34 percent of Pakistanis believed that Islamic militants constituted a “critical threat.” Now, 81 percent do.

Unfortunately, the United States has acted in ways that have often empowered the militants. We have lavished more than $11 billion on Pakistan since 9/11, mostly supporting the Pakistani Army. Yet that sum has bought Pakistan no security and us no good will.

In that same poll, 59 percent of Pakistanis said that they share many of Al Qaeda’s attitudes toward the United States, and almost half of those said that they support Al Qaeda attacks on Americans.

One reason is that America hasn’t stood up for its own values in Pakistan. Instead of supporting democracy, we cold-shouldered the lawyers’ movement, which was the best hope for democracy and civil society.

If we want to stabilize Pakistan, we should take two steps. First is to cut tariffs on manufactured imports from Pakistan. That would boost the country’s economy, raise employment and create good will. Cutting tariffs is perhaps the most effective step we could take to stabilize this country and fight extremism.

Second, we should redirect our aid from subsidies to the Pakistani military to support for a major education initiative. A bill in the Senate backed by the Democrat John Kerry and the Republican Richard Lugar would support Pakistani schools, among other nonmilitary projects, and would be an excellent step forward.

In rural Pakistan, you regularly see madrassas established by Islamic fundamentalists, typically offering free tuition, free meals and even scholarships to study abroad for the best students. It’s clear that the militant fundamentalists believe in the transformative power of education — and they have invested in schools, while we have invested in the Pakistani Army. Why can’t we show the same faith in education as hard-line Muslim fundamentalists?

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo looked up from her contemplation of her navel and saw “Whirling Dervish Drivers.”  She says Americans are so addicted to techno-surfing that they’ve gotten hubristic about how many machines they can juggle simultaneously.  The Moustache of Wisdom is visiting Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan and tells us about “The Class Too Dumb to Quit.”  He says let’s hope the officers who were too stubborn to give up and figured out an anti-insurgency strategy in Iraq can rebuild Afghanistan.  Here’s MoDo:

One night several years ago, my mom slipped and broke a bone in her neck. I stayed late at the hospital with her. Driving home on a mostly deserted road, I checked my cellphone messages.

I didn’t notice either the red light coming up or the car stopped at the light. I banged into the back of it, and even though the damage was minor, it was a scary moment.

I admitted that I was upset and distracted, took the blame and swore to myself I’d never use a cellphone in a car again. But, of course, I did. D.C. police will pull you over if they see you using a cellphone that you’re holding up to your ear, but not if you’re hands-free.

Ominously, research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — suppressed for years and released on Tuesday after petitions were filed by advocacy groups — shows that there are “negligible differences” in accident risk whether you’re holding the phone or not. Hands-free devices may even enhance the danger by lulling you into complacency.

It is the conversation that pulls focus. My greatest fear is that I’m going to be in a taxi when the driver gets a call from his wife to tell him that she’s run off with his sexy cousin.

In a March New Yorker profile, Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of “Michael Clayton” and “Duplicity,” told the nightmare tale of being in a New York taxi when the cell-chatting driver ran a red light and hit another car.

“So they’re lifting the other guy out of the car, and I’m thinking, I’m lucky,” he said, adding: “Then I see them come at my cab with those things, the Jaws of Life.” He’d fractured his rib and hip.

Studies show that drivers who talk on cellphones are four times more likely to be in a crash and drive just as erratically as people with an 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level.

In one study cited by the highway safety agency, “drivers found it easier to drive drunk than to drive while using a phone, even when it was hands-free.”

The agency buried its head in the sand, keeping the research to itself for years and ignoring the fact that soon nearly all Americans would own cellphones and that the phones are always getting smarter and more demanding, putting a multimedia empire at your fingertips while you’re piloting a potentially lethal piece of artillery.

Americans are so addicted to techno-surfing that they’ve gotten hubristic about how many machines they can juggle simultaneously. One reporter I know recently filed a story from his laptop while driving on the Pacific Coast Highway.

As John Ratey, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who specializes in the science of attention, told The Times’s Matt Richtel for his chilling series, “Driven to Distraction,” using digital devices gives you “a dopamine squirt.”

That explains the Pavlovian impulse of people who are out with friends or dates to ignore them and check their BlackBerrys and cellphones, even if 99 out of 100 messages are uninteresting. They’re truffle-hunting for that scintillating one.

Americans woke up one day to find that they were don’t-miss-a-moment addicts who feel compelled to respond to all messages immediately.

The tech industry is our drug dealer, feeding the intense social and economic pressure to stay constantly in touch with employers, colleagues, friends and family.

It also explains why Christopher Hill, a 21-year-old from Oklahoma who killed a woman last September when he ran a red light while on his cellphone and rammed into her S.U.V., tried to keep dialing and driving with a headset his mother gave him two months after the accident.

He “found his mind wandering into his phone call so much that ‘I nearly missed a light,’ ” he told Richtel. Now he says he rarely uses the phone.

Hollywood offered a cautionary story with the depressing “Seven Pounds,” which begins with Will Smith spoiling his perfect life when he BlackBerrys while driving in his fancy car with his gorgeous new fiancée. He crashes into another car, killing six strangers and his girlfriend. The movie ends with a poisonous jellyfish in an icy bathtub. Don’t ask.

Left, literally, to our own devices, we spiral out of control. States should outlaw drivers from talking on phones — except in an emergency — and using digital devices that cause you to drift and swerve; or at least mandate a $10,000 fine for getting in an accident while phoning or Twittering.

Auto companies are busy creating new crack hits for our self-destructive cravings. Ford is developing a system that would let drivers use phones and music players and surf the Internet with voice commands and audible responses.

Sounds like a computerized death machine. But, as our dealers know, we’ll never disconnect.

While I agree with her that nattering on a cell phone makes you just as dangerous a driver as 14 martinis, I wonder what got her panties all in a bunch about this all of a sudden…  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I’m here in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. This is the most dangerous part of the country. It’s where mafia and mullah meet. This is where the Taliban harvest the poppies that get turned into heroin that funds their insurgency. That’s why when President Obama announced the more than doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, this is where the Marines landed to take the fight to the Taliban. It is 115 degrees in the sun, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is addressing soldiers in a makeshift theater.

“Let me see a show of hands,” says Admiral Mullen, “how many of you are on your first deployment?” A couple dozen hands go up. “Second deployment?” More hands go up. “Third deployment?” Still lots of hands are raised. “Fourth deployment?” A good dozen hands go up. “Fifth deployment?” Still hands go up. “Sixth deployment?” One hand goes up. Admiral Mullen asks the soldier to step forward to shake his hand.

This scene is a reason for worry, for optimism and for questioning everything we are doing in Afghanistan. It is worrying because between the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are grinding down our military. I don’t know how these people and their families put up with it. Never have so many asked so much of so few.

The reason for optimism? All those deployments have left us with a deep cadre of officers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running both wars — from generals to captains. They know every mistake that has been made, been told every lie, saw their own soldiers killed by stupidity, figured out solutions and built relationships with insurgents, sheikhs and imams on the ground that have given the best of them a granular understanding of the “real” Middle East that would rival any Middle East studies professor.

I’ve long argued that there should be a test for any officer who wants to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan — just one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer “yes,” you can go to Germany, South Korea or Japan, but not to Iraq or Afghanistan. Well, this war has produced a class of officers who are very out-of-the-box thinkers. They learned everything the hard way — not in classes at Annapolis or West Point, but on the streets of Fallujah and Kandahar.

I call them: “The Class Too Dumb to Quit.” I say that with affection and respect. When all seemed lost in Iraq, they were just too stubborn to quit and figured out a new anti-insurgency strategy. It has not produced irreversible success yet — and may never. But it has kept the hope of a decent outcome alive. The same people are now trying to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Their biggest strategic insight? “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore,” one of their officers told me.

Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers running these wars understood that R.B.’s (“relationships built”) actually matter more than K.I.A.’s. One relationship built with an Iraqi or Afghan mayor or imam or insurgent was worth so much more than one K.I.A. Relationships bring intelligence; they bring cooperation. One good relationship can save the lives of dozens of soldiers and civilians. One reason torture and Abu Ghraib got out of control was because our soldiers had built so few relationships that they tried to beat information out of people instead. But relationship-building is painstaking.

And that leads to my unease. America has just adopted Afghanistan as our new baby. The troop surge that President Obama ordered here early in his tenure has taken this mission from a limited intervention, with limited results, to a full nation-building project that will take a long time to succeed — if ever. We came here to destroy Al Qaeda, and now we’re in a long war with the Taliban. Is that really a good use of American power?

At least The Class Too Dumb to Quit is in charge, and they have a strategy: Clear areas of the Taliban, hold them in partnership with the Afghan Army, rebuild these areas by building relationships with district governors and local assemblies to help them upgrade their ability to deliver services to the Afghan people — particularly courts, schools and police — so they will support the Afghan government.

The bad news? This is State-Building 101, and our partners, the current Afghan police and government, are so corrupt that more than a few Afghans prefer the Taliban. With infinite time, money, soldiers and aid workers, we can probably reverse that. But we have none of these. I feel a gap building between our ends and our means and our time constraints. My heart says: Mission critical — help those Afghans who want decent government. My head says: Mission impossible.

Does Mr. Obama understand how much he’s bet his presidency on making Afghanistan a stable country? Too late now. So, here’s hoping that The Class Too Dumb to Quit can take all that it learned in Iraq and help rebuild The Country That’s Been Too Broken to Work.