The Pasty Little Putz, Cohen and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz, in “A Different Kind of Liberal,” gurgles that it’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted Kennedy shared some of his sister Eunice’s qualms about the practice.  Mr. Cohen, writing from Cherence, France, gives us “Advantage France” in which he says time bows at the altar of gastronomy in France. In the U.S., time is the altar.  Prof. Krugman is “Missing Richard Nixon.”  He says in the Nixon era, leaders in both political parties were capable of speaking rationally, and decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now.  Here’s the Pasty Little Putz:

Only 13 days separated the passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics, from the death of her brother Ted last week. But amid the wall-to-wall coverage and the stream of retrospectives for the senior senator from Massachusetts, it was easy to forget that he wasn’t the only famous Kennedy sibling to enter eternity this month.

Liberalism’s most important legislator probably merited a more extended send-off than his sister. But there’s a sense in which his life’s work and Eunice’s deserve to be remembered together — for what their legacies had in common, and for what ultimately separated them.

What the siblings shared — in addition to the grace, rare among Kennedys, of a ripe old age and a peaceful death — was a passionate liberalism and an abiding Roman Catholic faith. These two commitments were intertwined: Ted Kennedy’s tireless efforts on issues like health care, education and immigration were explicitly rooted in Catholic social teaching, and so was his sister’s lifelong labor on behalf of the physically and mentally impaired.

What separated them was abortion.

Along with her husband, Sargent Shriver, Eunice belonged to America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals. Like her church, she saw a continuity, rather than a contradiction, between championing the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed and protecting unborn human life.

Her brother took a different path. Not at first: In 1971, in a letter to a voter that abortion opponents would have many opportunities to quote, he declared that “wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” But like many other Catholic liberals, from Joseph Biden to Dennis Kucinich, he moved leftward with his party, becoming a down-the-line supporter of abortion rights, with a voting record that brooked no compromise on the issue.

For abortion opponents, cruel ironies abounded in this sibling disagreement. Because of Eunice Shriver’s work with the developmentally disabled, a group of Americans who had once been marginalized and hidden away — or lobotomized, like her sister Rosemary — was ushered closer to full participation in ordinary human life. But because of laws that her brother unstintingly supported, that same group was ushered out again: the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.

In 1992, Eunice participated in the last significant effort to push the Democratic Party away from abortion on demand, petitioning her party’s convention to consider “a new understanding” of the issue, “one that does not pit mother against child,” but instead seeks “policies that responsibly protect and advance the interest of mothers and their children, both before and after birth.” That same summer, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court upheld a near-absolute right to terminate a pregnancy — a decision made possible by her brother’s demagogic assault on Robert Bork five years earlier, which helped doom Bork’s nomination to the court.

At times, Ted Kennedy’s fervor on abortion felt like an extended apology to his party’s feminists for the way the men of his dynasty behaved in private. Eunice, by contrast, had nothing to apologize for. She knew what patriarchy meant: she was born into a household out of “Mad Men,” where the father paraded his mistress around his family, the sons were groomed for high office, and the daughters were expected to marry well, rear children and suffer silently. And she transcended that stifling milieu, doing more than most men to change the world, and earning the right to disagree with her fellow liberals about what true feminism required.

It’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted shared even some of his sister’s qualms about the practice. One could imagine a world in which America’s leading liberal Catholic had found a way to make liberalism less absolutist on the issue, and a world where a man who became famous for reaching across the aisle had reached across, even occasionally, in search of compromise on the country’s most divisive issue.

That was not to be. And it’s entirely fitting, given his record, that Kennedy’s immediate legacy is a draft of health-care legislation that pursues an eminently Catholic goal — expanding access to medical care — through a system that seems likely, in its present design, to subsidize abortion.

But his sister would have written it a different way.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Arrival is usually defined as reaching a destination, but of course it’s more than that, it’s the moment when you have shed enough of where you came from to be present at the place you’ve reached. This offloading of layers takes time, like peeling an onion.

My French arrival this year was time-consuming. Iran, which is another story, had me. But the moment came, and when it came, it was not the dawn swooping of starlings, the softness of the dusk light through the sycamores, or the chiming of a village bell that delivered me to “la douce France,” but the sight of glistening guts.

The guts in question were being coaxed by a hand — ungloved — from the belly of a four-pound sea bass — unfarmed — at the market in the Norman town of Vernon, which has one stand devoted solely to watercress. The fish, iridescent, its gills bright scarlet, was fresh from the waters off Dieppe.

My friend Marcel Bossy, who had made the pre-dawn drive from the coast with his glossy load, had his hand deep in the fish. He was laughing about something as the guts slithered onto a scale-coated chopping board.

My 11-year-old daughter, Adele, covered her eyes, but I was riveted. Marcel’s wife, Sandrine, also laughing — something ribald between them — was gutting firm mackerel with swift incisions and finger movements, when one dropped to the ground. She scooped the fish up and resumed work on it, putting me in mind of Julia Child’s famous statement about a miss-flipped potato pancake: “You can always pick it up.”

Since Child, in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and in her groundbreaking 1960’s television show “The French Chef,” brought Gallic secrets to riveted Americans, the shameless gutting and picking-up of real food in ungloved hands has given way to the hurried-hermetic-hygienic U.S. fever of plastic gloves, processed foods and precooked meals.

Those fish guts delivered me to France because, although this country has its share of fast-food outlets, it has preserved a relationship to food distinguished from the American in three essential respects: fear, time and “terroir.”

If Americans want their fish pre-filleted, their chicken breasts excised from surrounding bone and conveniently packed, their offal kept from view and the table, and any hand that touches a slice of ham or lox sealed inside a glove, it is because fear of the innards that will not speak their name, the guts that reek of life, and the germs we all carry has become rampant.

By contrast, the French don’t believe what they’re eating is genuine unless they’ve seen gritty proof of provenance. They like the alchemy of the peasant hand that does the pâté grip.

American anxiety is related to the American perception of time, which is always short in a land that prizes efficiency above all. Precooked meals — food divorced from its origins, food without guts — is faster to prepare and therefore attractive.

I bought a couple of the female ducklings the French call “canettes” the other day. It took 15 minutes for the cutting-off of head, feet and wing-tips; for the innards to be removed; for the placing in the cleansed insides of the liver, kidneys and neck; for singeing over a gas burner; and for discussion as to whether I wanted the plump ducks trussed for rotisserie cooking (I did not).

Most stores in New York don’t bother selling ducklings — they’re inefficient birds in that the meat-to-size ratio is low — and if they did such protracted preparation would be unthinkable. Time bows at the altar of gastronomy in France. In the United States time is the altar.

The third fundamental difference relates to “terroir,” the untranslatable combination of soil, hearth and tradition that links most French people to a particular place. France sees American mobility with a sacred immobility; attachments trump restlessness.

These are attachments of the gut, which brings us back to why the French take such pleasure in those hands at work cleansing a sea bass or a duckling, and why a stand selling watercress (with the unique taste of a particular patch of soil) is viable.

The French Paradox, so-called, is really the French self-evidence. Change your relationship to fear, time and place, and you change your metabolism. This has less to do with the specific foods eaten, or the specific wine drunk (although of course they count) than it has to do with how food is approached.

According to the 2009 C.I.A. World Factbook, the estimated average life expectancy in France is 80.98 (84.33 for women and 77.79 for men), against 78.11 for the United States (80.69 for women and 75.65 for men.) France ranks 9th in the world; America ranks 50th. There’s something to be said for ungloved hands picking mackerel from the ground.

The American healthcare debate is skewed. It should be devoting more time to changing U.S. culinary and eating habits in ways that cut the need for expensive care by reducing rampant obesity, to which anxiety, haste and disconnectedness contribute. France has much to teach, guts and all.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.

But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.

Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.

Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it’s now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon’s proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.

And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.

I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.

A lonely Sunday for Kristof

Dowd, Friedman and Rich are all off today.  Mr. Kristof, in “Until Medical Bills Do Us Part,” has a question:  How do those who fear death panels feel about a health care system that breaks apart families?  Here he is:

Critics fret that health care reform would undermine American family values, not least by convening somber death panels to wheel away Grandma as if she were Old Yeller.

But peel away the emotions and fearmongering, and in fact it is the existing system that unnecessarily takes lives and breaks apart families.

My friend M. — you’ll understand in a moment why she’s terrified of my using her name — had to make a searing decision a year ago. She was married to a sweet, gentle man whom she loved, but who had become increasingly absent-minded. Finally, he was diagnosed with early-onset dementia.

The disease is degenerative, and he will become steadily less able to care for himself. At some point, as his medical needs multiply, he will probably need to be institutionalized.

The hospital arranged a conference call with a social worker, who outlined how the dementia and its financial toll on the family would progress, and then added, out of the blue: “Maybe you should divorce.”

“I was blown away,” M. told me. But, she said, the hospital staff members explained that they had seen it all before, many times. If M.’s husband required long-term care, the costs would be catastrophic even for a middle-class family with savings.

Eventually, after the expenses whittled away their combined assets, her husband could go on Medicaid — but by then their children’s nest egg would be gone, along with her 401(k) plan. She would face a bleak retirement with neither her husband nor her savings.

A complicating factor was that this was a second marriage. M.’s first husband had died, leaving an inheritance that he had intended for their children. She and her second husband had a prenuptial agreement, but that would not protect her assets from his medical expenses.

The hospital told M. not to waste time in dissolving the marriage. For five years after any divorce, her assets could be seized — precisely because the government knows that people sometimes divorce husbands or wives to escape their medical bills.

“How could I divorce him? I loved him,” she told me.

“I explored a lot of options with an attorney here in town,” she added. “The attorney said, ‘I don’t see any other options for you.’ It took about a year for me to do the divorce, it was so hard.”

So M. divorced the man she loves. I asked him what he thought of this. He can still speak, albeit not always coherently, and he paused a long, long time. All he could manage was: “It’s hard to say.”

Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.

A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.

M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.

“It’s just crazy,” she said. “It twists people like pretzels.”

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins, in “The Updating Game,” says it’s depressing to realize that hercomputer is more bent on self-improvement than she is.  Mr. Blow, in “Imbalance of Trust,” says many people probably don’t trust Washington on health care reform because, right now at least, they just don’t trust Washington.  Mr. Herbert says “Look to the Rainbow,” and that the most significant aspect of the Kennedys, more important than their politics or legislative accomplishments, was their ability to inspire.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

There was a time when people in search of a full and meaningful life were advised to start off each morning by telling themselves: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Now, we get up and hear: “Updates are ready for your computer.”

It’s depressing to realize that my computer is more bent on self-improvement than I am. At home, my laptop is so ready to update that it can barely be constrained. The other day, I found three different pleas floating around on the screen.

The “Dell Support Center Automatic Upgrade” was the most tempting since it sounded as if the computer wanted to give me a really good seat on a plane.

“Effective now,” the announcement continued, “these valuable messages are part of the new Dell Support Center. Dell needs to upgrade Dell Support without impeding system performance so that messages continue to be received.”

In other words, I need an upgrade so that I will better be able to receive more upgrade requests in the future. This is extremely important to my laptop, which is only offering me the response options of: More Details, Start Upgrade or Remind Me Later.

There was a time when I would have responded, but nothing good ever seemed to come of that. The updated computers were never any better at doing the things I wanted to do than the old ones. And there’s always the possibility that I could trigger an inadvertent disaster.

I have been permanently traumatized by an experience with my BlackBerry, which started sending me signals that it was unhappy about something. I kept clicking around, looking for a positive response, trying to show it that I was a partner, eager to keep up my end of the relationship. The upshot was that the BlackBerry began refusing to do anything whatsoever except call up the telephone number of former Senator Trent Lott.

My most benevolent theory about the updating requests is that my computers are just bored. The one I take on the road is always whining about the unused icons on my desktop, like a hyper-tidy roommate who follows you around saying, “Gee, I notice you haven’t made your bed. Do you want any help with that? I know it must be really hard to remember every day, but if you want me to remind you or anything. …”

My home computer has begun to flash a Windows Genuine Advantage Notification, urging me to press a button so it can reduce software piracy and “help confirm that the copy of Windows installed on this PC is genuine and properly licensed.” This does not sound as if it’s all about me. In fact, the computer has no interest whatsoever in me, my BlackBerry crisis or my inability to make the iPod stop playing “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys all the time. It just wants a world where all its icons are tidily arranged, software is licensed, upgrade messages flow untrammeled and it feels better every day, in every way.

My darkest suspicion is that my computers are preparing to join their comrades in overthrowing humanity so machines can rule the earth. I have seen quite a few movies on this theme, and really, the signs are everywhere. The other day, Jim Dwyer reported in The Times about a man in Brooklyn whose oven broiler turns on every time the cellphone rings. Experts think this is caused by electromagnetic interference. However, I believe the oven is ticked off because its owners, in typical New York fashion, use it for storage rather than for actual cooking. And it is in cahoots with the cellphone, which probably is resentful because it is not allowed to spend its time doing the things cellphones really enjoy, like talking to Trent Lott.

The way you respond when your computer asks for an upgrade is a good test of how you relate to technology in general. My nephew Hugh and his friends seem as excited as the computers over the whole concept. “Actually, everyone would be fine with an annual update,” he said, “but that would make people feel like they were out of the loop. Unclean.”

I had a good deal of trouble getting hold of Hugh since he doesn’t respond to old-fashioned e-mail. “By the way,” he said delicately when we were finished talking, “if you tell people other than me that you’re writing a column on technology but don’t know how to text, they might sense, um, a — disconnect.”

Edward Tenner, a visiting scholar at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information and author of “Why Things Bite Back,” told me he actually used to be in the if-it’s-not-broke-don’t-update camp, until his computer suffered a total meltdown. The tech who fixed it told him that he should have been installing the virus-detecting updates all along. “Don’t try to second-guess Microsoft,” he warned, in tones the professor has now taken to heart.

Truly, words to live by. Every day in every way.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

Liberals are flummoxed by the fact that obviously false and widely discredited claims about health care reform have not only taken root, but appear to be growing in acceptance.

According to a poll of 600 adults ages 18 and older, which was conducted Aug. 13 to 18 by Indiana University’s Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research and released last week, most Americans now believe that if health care reforms pass, health care services will be rationed and taxpayers will be required to pay for abortions. And although Republicans are the most likely to believe this, they aren’t the only ones. Nearly a third of Democrats and more than half of independents also believe it.

What gives?

Is it partly the utter gullibility of some people? Sure. Is it partly deep-seated resentment of the black man in the White House? No doubt. But it’s also about something more fundamental: fluctuations of basic trust in the federal government.

These fluctuations highlight a peculiar quirk of recent American politics — according to an analysis of The New York Times/CBS News polls from the past 33 years, Americans seem to trust the government substantially more after a Republican president is elected than they do after a Democratic one is elected — at least at the outset.

Since 1976, the polls have occasionally included the following question: “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right — just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?”

The first poll taken in which this question was asked after Ronald Reagan assumed office found that 51 percent trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. For George H.W. Bush, it was 44 percent, and for George W. Bush it was 55 percent. Now compare that with the Democrats. In Jimmy Carter’s first poll, it was 35 percent. In Bill Clinton’s, it was 24 percent, and for Barack Obama’s, it was only 20 percent. (It should be noted that the first poll conducted during George W. Bush’s presidency came on the heels of 9/11.)

Surprisingly, Democrats’ trust in government was the same or higher after a Republican was elected than it was after a Democrat was elected. That in spite of the fact that all three Democratic presidents came into office at the same time that their party had won control of both chambers of Congress.

(It seems curious that the same party that believes in big government doesn’t trust that government to do the right thing when Democratic leaders control it. But Democrats are a curious lot.)

That said, it stands to reason that many people probably don’t trust Washington on health care reform because, right now at least, they just don’t trust Washington.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

When Jack Kennedy learned on a May morning in 1948 that his sister Kathleen, known as Kick, had been killed in a plane crash in Europe, he had been listening to recordings from the Broadway musical “Finian’s Rainbow.”

Jack, not yet 31, had already lost his older brother Joseph Jr., a Navy pilot whose plane exploded while on a bombing mission in World War II. It’s not easy to imagine the kind of resilience required to make your way through tragedies that, in the case of the Kennedys, often reached Shakespearean proportions. That resilience was one of the many things to admire about Jack and his siblings, fortunate in so many ways and damned in so many others.

It’s easy to miss the point about the Kennedys. The drama is always right there in your face to distract you. (Even now, with Ted barely gone, the struggle is under way over how his successor in the Senate is to be chosen, and whether Ted’s death will be a spur to — or the death knell for — health care reform.)

The most significant aspect of the Kennedys, more important than their reliably liberal politics or Ted’s long list of legislative accomplishments, was their ability to inspire. They offered the blessed gift of hope to millions, year after year and decade after decade. The key to understanding both the influence and the importance of the Kennedys was to pay close attention to what they said and what they tried to accomplish, and not let the depths of meaning in their words and aspirations become obscured by individual failings or shortcomings, the Kennedy Sturm und Drang.

So there was President Kennedy in 1963, in a landmark commencement address at American University in Washington at the height of the cold war, making an impassioned case on behalf of “the most important topic on earth: peace.” Calling for a halt to the arms race with the Soviet Union, Kennedy told the graduates that it was important for Americans to examine their attitudes toward peace.

“Too many of us think it is impossible,” he said. “Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man.”

The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”

Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”

Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.

“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”

Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.

“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”

That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.

Ted’s burial today is a perfect opportunity to remember the best that the family has given us.

Bobo and Krugman

Bobo, in “The Great Gradualist,” says Ted Kennedy’s ability to forge compromises and champion incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today.  Prof. Krugman, in “Till Debt Does Its Part,” says the budget projections showing a deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade are worrying, but the real concern is how the nation’s politicians deal with the debt.  Here’s Bobo:

In the days since Ted Kennedy’s death, the news programs have shown and re-shown the unforgettable ending of his 1980 Democratic convention speech — the passage from Tennyson and the beautiful final lines: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

But if you go back earlier into the heart of that speech, you see how bold Kennedy’s agenda really was. His central argument was for a policy of full employment. Government should provide a job for every able-bodied American. His next big goal was what he called “reindustrialization.” The computer revolution was just getting under way, but Kennedy called on government to restore the industrial might of America’s cities.

The third big goal was national health insurance. “Let us insist on real control over what doctors and hospitals can charge,” Kennedy cried.

There were other proposals. He vowed to use “the full power of government to master increasing prices.” Kennedy was proposing to fundamentally transform America’s political economy. He knew he had lost the nomination by this time, and his liberalism was unbound.

The speech was radical, and he could have gone back to the Senate, content to luxuriate in his own boldness. He could have excoriated his opponents for their villainy and given speeches about dreams that would never come true.

But Kennedy became something else. He became a compromiser. He became an incrementalist.

Those words have negative connotations. But they shouldn’t. Kennedy never abandoned his ambitious ideals, but his ability to forge compromises and champion gradual, incremental change created the legacy everybody is celebrating today: community health centers, the National Cancer Institute, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Meals on Wheels program, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and the No Child Left Behind Act. The latter law, by the way, has narrowed the black-white achievement gap more than any other recent piece of legislation.

Kennedy’s life yields several important lessons. One is about the nature of political leadership. We have been taught since, well, since the days of Camelot to admire a particular sort of politician: the epic, charismatic Mount Rushmore candidate who sits atop his charger leading transformational change.

But the founders of this country designed the Constitution to frustrate that kind of leader. The Constitution diffuses power, requires compromise and encourages incrementalism. The founders created a government that was cautious so that society might be dynamic.

Ted Kennedy was raised to prize one set of leadership skills and matured to find that he possessed another. He possessed the skills of the legislator, and if you ask 99 senators who was the best craftsman among them, they all will say Kennedy. He knew how to cut deals. He understood coalitions and other people’s motives and needs.

I once ran into John McCain after a negotiating session with Kennedy on an immigration bill they had co-sponsored. McCain was exhausted by the arduous and patient way his friend negotiated. In my last interview with Kennedy, I asked about big ideas, and his answers were nothing special. Then I asked about a minor provision in an ancient piece of legislation, and his command of the provision and how it got there was jaw-droppingly impressive.

There is a craft to governance, which depends less on academic intelligence than on a contextual awareness of how to bring people together. Kennedy possessed that awareness.

A second lesson involves the nature of change in America.

We in this country have a distinct sort of society. We Americans work longer hours than any other people on earth. We switch jobs much more frequently than Western Europeans or the Japanese. We have high marriage rates and high divorce rates. We move more, volunteer more and murder each other more.

Out of this dynamic but sometimes merciless culture, a distinct style of American capitalism has emerged. The American economy is flexible and productive. America’s G.D.P. per capita is nearly 50 percent higher than France’s. But the American system is also unforgiving. It produces its share of insecurity and misery.

This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own. American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it. They do not welcome proposals that centralize power and substantially reduce individual choice. They resist proposals that put security above mobility and individual responsibility.

In 1980, Kennedy proposed an agenda that jarred with the traditions of American governance. In the decades since, a constrained Kennedy and a string of Republican co-sponsors produced reforms in keeping with it. The benefits are there for all to see.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that’s a terrifying number, requiring drastic action — in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform.

The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it’s not catastrophic.

The only real reason for concern is political. The United States can deal with its debts if politicians of both parties are, in the end, willing to show at least a bit of maturity. Need I say more?

Let’s start with the effects of this year’s deficit.

There are two main reasons for the surge in red ink. First, the recession has led both to a sharp drop in tax receipts and to increased spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs. Second, there have been large outlays on financial rescues. These are counted as part of the deficit, although the government is acquiring assets in the process and will eventually get at least part of its money back.

What this tells us is that right now it’s good to run a deficit. Consider what would have happened if the U.S. government and its counterparts around the world had tried to balance their budgets as they did in the early 1930s. It’s a scary thought. If governments had raised taxes or slashed spending in the face of the slump, if they had refused to rescue distressed financial institutions, we could all too easily have seen a full replay of the Great Depression.

As I said, deficits saved the world.

In fact, we would be better off if governments were willing to run even larger deficits over the next year or two. The official White House forecast shows a nation stuck in purgatory for a prolonged period, with high unemployment persisting for years. If that’s at all correct — and I fear that it will be — we should be doing more, not less, to support the economy.

But what about all that debt we’re incurring? That’s a bad thing, but it’s important to have some perspective. Economists normally assess the sustainability of debt by looking at the ratio of debt to G.D.P. And while $9 trillion is a huge sum, we also have a huge economy, which means that things aren’t as scary as you might think.

Here’s one way to look at it: We’re looking at a rise in the debt/G.D.P. ratio of about 40 percentage points. The real interest on that additional debt (you want to subtract off inflation) will probably be around 1 percent of G.D.P., or 5 percent of federal revenue. That doesn’t sound like an overwhelming burden.

Now, this assumes that the U.S. government’s credit will remain good so that it’s able to borrow at relatively low interest rates. So far, that’s still true. Despite the prospect of big deficits, the government is able to borrow money long term at an interest rate of less than 3.5 percent, which is low by historical standards. People making bets with real money don’t seem to be worried about U.S. solvency.

The numbers tell you why. According to the White House projections, by 2019, net federal debt will be around 70 percent of G.D.P. That’s not good, but it’s within a range that has historically proved manageable for advanced countries, even those with relatively weak governments. In the early 1990s, Belgium — which is deeply divided along linguistic lines — had a net debt of 118 percent of G.D.P., while Italy — which is, well, Italy — had a net debt of 114 percent of G.D.P. Neither faced a financial crisis.

So is there anything to worry about? Yes, but the dangers are political, not economic.

As I’ve said, those 10-year projections aren’t as bad as you may have heard. Over the really long term, however, the U.S. government will have big problems unless it makes some major changes. In particular, it has to rein in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending.

That shouldn’t be hard in the context of overall health care reform. After all, America spends far more on health care than other advanced countries, without better results, so we should be able to make our system more cost-efficient.

But that won’t happen, of course, if even the most modest attempts to improve the system are successfully demagogued — by conservatives! — as efforts to “pull the plug on grandma.”

So don’t fret about this year’s deficit; we actually need to run up federal debt right now and need to keep doing it until the economy is on a solid path to recovery. And the extra debt should be manageable. If we face a potential problem, it’s not because the economy can’t handle the extra debt. Instead, it’s the politics, stupid.

Kristof, solo.

Gail Collins is off.  Mr. Kristof, in “Health Care Fit For Animals,” tells us why a health insurance executive decided to speak out against an industry that he was once paid to defend.  Here he is:

Opponents suggest that a “government takeover” of health care will be a milestone on the road to “socialized medicine,” and when he hears those terms, Wendell Potter cringes. He’s embarrassed that opponents are using a playbook that he helped devise.

“Over the years I helped craft this messaging and deliver it,” he noted.

Mr. Potter was an executive in the health insurance industry for nearly 20 years before his conscience got the better of him. He served as head of corporate communications for Humana and then for Cigna.

He flew in corporate jets to industry meetings to plan how to block health reform, he says. He rode in limousines to confabs to concoct messaging to scare the public about reform. But in his heart, he began to have doubts as the business model for insurance evolved in recent years from spreading risk to dumping the risky.

Then in 2007 Mr. Potter attended a premiere of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s excoriating film about the American health care system. Mr. Potter was taking notes so that he could prepare a propaganda counterblast — but he found himself agreeing with a great deal of the film.

A month later, Mr. Potter was back home in Tennessee, visiting his parents, and dropped in on a three-day charity program at a county fairgrounds to provide medical care for patients who could not afford doctors. Long lines of people were waiting in the rain, and patients were being examined and treated in public in stalls intended for livestock.

“It was a life-changing event to witness that,” he remembered. Increasingly, he found himself despising himself for helping block health reforms. “It sounds hokey, but I would look in the mirror and think, how did I get into this?”

Mr. Potter loved his office, his executive salary, his bonus, his stock options. “How can I walk away from a job that pays me so well?” he wondered. But at the age of 56, he announced his retirement and left Cigna last year.

This year, he went public with his concerns, testifying before a Senate committee investigating the insurance industry.

“I knew that once I did that my life would be different,” he said. “I wouldn’t be getting any more calls from recruiters for the health industry. It was the scariest thing I have done in my life. But it was the right thing to do.”

Mr. Potter says he liked his colleagues and bosses in the insurance industry, and respected them. They are not evil. But he adds that they are removed from the consequences of their decisions, as he was, and are obsessed with sustaining the company’s stock price — which means paying fewer medical bills.

One way to do that is to deny requests for expensive procedures. A second is “rescission” — seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums and finally gets cancer or some other expensive disease. A Congressional investigation into rescission found that three insurers, including Blue Cross of California, used this technique to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the companies $300 million in claims.

As The Los Angeles Times has reported, insurers encourage this approach through performance evaluations. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect evaluation score after dropping thousands of policyholders who faced nearly $10 million in medical expenses.

Mr. Potter notes that a third tactic is for insurers to raise premiums for a small business astronomically after an employee is found to have an illness that will be very expensive to treat. That forces the business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere.

All this is monstrous, and it negates the entire point of insurance, which is to spread risk.

The insurers are open to one kind of reform — universal coverage through mandates and subsidies, so as to give them more customers and more profits. But they don’t want the reforms that will most help patients, such as a public insurance option, enforced competition and tighter regulation.

Mr. Potter argues that much tougher regulation is essential. He also believes that a robust public option is an essential part of any health reform, to compete with for-profit insurers and keep them honest.

As a nation, we’re at a turning point. Universal health coverage has been proposed for nearly a century in the United States. It was in an early draft of Social Security.

Yet each time, it has been defeated in part by fear-mongering industry lobbyists. That may happen this time as well — unless the Obama administration and Congress defeat these manipulative special interests. What’s un-American isn’t a greater government role in health care but an existing system in which Americans without insurance get health care, if at all, in livestock pens.

Solo MoDo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today.  MoDo has her panties in a bunch about the interwebs toobz.  In “Stung by the Perfect Sting” she says the Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where everyone was free to have their say. Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide.  Here she is:

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Sooner or later, this sort of suit will end up before the Supreme Court.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

Cohen called and forgave Port, but did not get an apology. She had her lawyer, Steve Wagner, drop her defamation suit. But now Port says she’ll file a $15 million suit against Google for giving her up.

Port contends that if Cohen hadn’t sued, hardly anyone would have seen the blog. (If a skank falls in the forest and no one hears it … ?)

But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-cooler gossip. “It’s there for the whole world to see,” she told me. “What happened to integrity? Why go out of your way solely to upset somebody else? Why can’t we all just be nice?”

She said she may become an activist, and has been e-mailing with Tina Meier, mother of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after getting cyberbullied by the mother of a classmate who pretended to be a teen suitor named “Josh.”

“If that woman had started a MySpace page as herself, that little girl would still be in her mother’s arms,” Cohen said.

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Just Herbert

Bobo is still on vacation.  My sense of dread that he’s working on hatching something big increases.  Mr. Herbert, in “The Ultimate Burden,” says if the war in Afghanistan is fundamental to our defense, as President Obama stated, then we shouldn’t be leaving the entire monumental task to a tiny portion of the population.  Here he is:

If you want to get a little bit of a sense of what the wars are like in Afghanistan and Iraq — a small, distant sense of the on-the-ground horror — pick up a book of color photos called, “2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die.” It’s chilling.

Most Americans have conveniently put these two absurd, obscene conflicts out of their minds. There’s an economy to worry about and snappy little messages to tweet. Nobody wants to think about young people getting their faces or their limbs blown off. Or the parents, loaded with antidepressants, giving their children and spouses a final hug before heading off in a haze of anxiety to their third or fourth tour in the war zones.

The book is the work of the photographer Peter van Agtmael, who has spent a great deal of time following American combat troops in both countries. One of the photos in the book shows an Army captain standing exhausted and seemingly forlorn on the blood-slicked floor of a combat support hospital in Baghdad. Mr. van Agtmael was sensitive to the heavy psychological load borne by the medical personnel, writing in the caption:

“Their humor was dark and their expressions often flat and distant when they treated patients. The worst casualties were given nicknames. One soldier melted by the fire caused by an I.E.D. blast was called ‘goo man.’ But certain casualties would hit home, especially injured children. Some staff resorted to painkillers and other drugs.”

The war in Afghanistan made sense once but it doesn’t any longer. The war in Iraq never did. And yet, with most of the country tuned out entirely, we’re still suiting up the soldiers and the Marines, putting them on planes and sending them off with a high stakes (life or death) roll of the dice.

“2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die.”

Or maybe it’s the third tour, or fourth, or fifth. The book’s title came from graffiti scrawled on a wall at an Air Force base in Kuwait that was one of the transit points for troops heading to Iraq. America’s young fighting men and women have to make these multiple tours because the overwhelming majority of the American people want no part of the nation’s wars. They don’t want to serve, they don’t want to make any sacrifices here on the home front — they don’t even want to pay the taxes that would be needed to raise the money to pay for the wars. We just add the trillions to deficits that stretch as far as the eye can see.

To the extent that we think about the wars at all, it’s just long enough to point our fingers at the volunteers and say: “Oh yeah, great. You go. And if you come back maimed or dead we’ll salute you as a hero.”

And what are we sending them off to? There’s a photo of Nick Sprovtsoff, a sergeant from Flint, Mich., lying awake in his bunk at a patrol outpost in Afghanistan. He looks like a tough guy in the picture, but he also looks worried. The caption says:

“On his third tour, he was there to advise a local platoon of the Afghan army. The Afghan soldiers rarely wanted to patrol, preferring to watch DVDs and smoke hash. Their favorite movie was ‘Titanic.’ ”

(A Page 1 headline in Sunday’s New York Times read, “Marines Fight With Little Aid From Afghans.”)

A clear idea of the pathetic unwillingness of the American people to share in the sacrifices of these wars can be gleaned from a comment that President Obama made in his address last week to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “We are a country of more than 300 million Americans,” he said. “Less than 1 percent wears the uniform.”

The president was not chiding those who are not serving, he was only intending to praise those who are. But the idea that so few are willing to serve at a time when the nation is fighting two long wars is a profound indictment on the society.

If we had a draft — or merely the threat of a draft — we would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan. But we don’t have a draft so it’s safe for most of the nation to be mindless about waging war. Other people’s children are going to the slaughter.

Instead of winding down our involvement in Afghanistan, we’re ratcheting it up. President Obama told the V.F.W. that fighting the war there is absolutely essential. “This is fundamental to the defense of our people,” he said.

Well, if this war, now approaching its ninth year, is so fundamental, we should all be pitching in. We shouldn’t be leaving the entire monumental burden to a tiny portion of the population, sending them into combat again, and again, and again, and again …

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz says “Don’t Blame Obama,” and that in reality, the health care wrestling match is less a test of President Obama’s political genius than it is a test of the Democratic Party’s ability to govern and deliver on its most significant promises.  Prof. Krugman, in “All the President’s Zombies,” says Reaganomics has failed to deliver what it promised, yet people still believe that government intervention is bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is good.  Here’s the PLP:

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama’s most loyal constituencies were the national press corps and the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Those on the left loved him because they thought he was one of them. They tolerated all the happy talk about bipartisanship because they were sure that deep in his community-organizing heart Obama shared their premises, their passions and their goals.

The media loved him because he was a great story and a great campaigner. The press favors dreamy liberals, but it worships success, and Obama was the best of both worlds — a soaring rhetorician with a ruthlessly competent political machine.

But now both groups are turning on him. As the health care debate enters its decisive weeks, the left doubts President Obama’s commitment, and the press doubts his competence.

For MSNBC-watching, Huffington Post-devouring liberals, the administration’s fancy footwork on a public health care plan (maybe it’s out, maybe it’s in, but either way it’s negotiable) is just the latest example of the president’s unseemly unwillingness to steamroll the opposition. He has been too solicitous to Republicans, too hands-off with Democrats, too detached and technocratic — even as a once-in-a-generation opportunity is passing liberalism by.

Where the left sees betrayal, the press sees ham-fistedness. The White House’s messages have been mixed — fiscal hawkery one day, moralism the next. The administration has allowed distractions like the Skip Gates affair to crowd out his agenda. It has overlearned the lessons of the Clinton-care debacle and given Congress too much leeway. It has underlearned the lessons of the Bush-era Social Security debacle and gone to war before there’s an actual piece of legislation on the table.

Some of this is true — but some of it is overstated. And at its worst, it’s an example of the bipartisan derangement that Gene Healy of the Cato Institute has dubbed “the cult of the presidency.”

To the disciples of this cult, the president is the government. “He is a soul nourisher,” Healy writes, “a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns and spiritual malaise.” Anything that happens on his watch happens because of him. And just as important, anything that doesn’t happen can be pinned entirely on his mistakes.

President Obama has been turning these quasi-messianic expectations to his advantage since he first entered national politics. But that doesn’t make them any less unrealistic.

To listen to the chatter about where his administration has gone wrong, you would think that the rest of the Democratic Party had no agency — that Democratic office-holders are slaves to poll numbers that only the White House can control, and that the way a Max Baucus, a Ben Nelson or a Blanche Lincoln votes is entirely determined by whether the president of the United States twists the right arms and hits the right rhetorical notes.

In reality, the health care wrestling match is less a test of Mr. Obama’s political genius than it is a test of the Democratic Party’s ability to govern. This is not the Reagan era, when power in Washington was divided, and every important vote required the president to leverage his popularity to build trans-party coalitions. Fox News and Sarah Palin have soapboxes, but they don’t have veto power. Mr. Obama could be a cipher, a nonentity, a Millard Fillmore or a Franklin Pierce, and his party would still have the power to pass sweeping legislation without a single Republican vote.

What’s more, health care reform is the Democratic Party’s signature issue. Its wonks have thought longer and harder about it than any other topic. Its politicians are vastly better at talking about the subject than Republicans: if an election is fought over health care, bet on the Democrat every time. And for all the complexity involved, it’s arguably easier to tackle than other liberal priorities. It’s more popular than cap and trade, it’s less likely to split the party than immigration and it’s more amenable to technocratic interventions than income inequality.

If the Congressional Democrats can’t get a health care package through, it won’t prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress’s liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of delivering on its most significant promises.

You have to assume that on some level Congress understands this — which is why you also have to assume that some kind of legislation will eventually pass.

If it doesn’t, President Obama will have been defeated. But it’s the party, not the president, that will have failed.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.

First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.

To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.

Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.

And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.

There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.

Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.

The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.

But it’s much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation — this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.

So why won’t these zombie ideas die?

Part of the answer is that there’s a lot of money behind them. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.” In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.

But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn’t used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That’s ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America’s thinking as well as its tax code.

How will this all work out? I don’t know. But it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.

•

In my column last Monday, I made a joke about the Swiss that fell flat with some readers. Also, the Swiss don’t wear lederhosen.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

Since there’s nothing important happening in the country MoDo decided to waste our time with “The Last Empress” in which she says the real question about Anna Wintour is not whether she’s warm — she has her furs for that — but whether she can stay relevant in a more down-market age.  I know I lose sleep wondering about Anna Wintour…  Feh.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Connecting Nature’s Dots,” says policy solutions for climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity need to be as integrated as nature itself.  Well, in that case I guess we’re doomed if we have to rely on the Washington crowd.  Mr. Kristof gives us “Food for the Soul,” and says the central problem with modern industrial agriculture is not just that it produces unhealthy food. More fundamentally, it has no soul.  Mr. Rich, in “The Guns of August,” says that the simmering undertone of violence in our politics seems to be getting darker.  Here’s MoDo’s blithering waste of words:

The Devil does wear Prada.

I ended up sitting a stiletto’s throw away from Anna Wintour at the Monkey Bar, after the Museum of Modern Art screening of the new documentary about her. Nuclear Wintour looked summery in a floaty print Prada dress so au courant it hasn’t yet hit the stores.

Just like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Wintour can be seen in the new film clutching a Starbucks cup in her office and the back of her chauffeur-driven car. It seems to be her only sustenance, so I was curious to get the skinny on what the Skinny One eats.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” I told a startled waiter, who assumed I was kidding and pointed me to the part of the menu he thought suited me better: Chasen’s chili and Mrs. Carter’s butter tart.

“Anna eats steak and burgers, protein, and drinks a little wine,” said the Vogue editor André Leon Talley, mesmerizingly mountainous in a navy Armani with a white saber-toothed tiger tooth necklace and Manolo framboise velvet Woodstock sandals.

The documentary by R. J. Cutler chronicles Anna and her courtiers compiling the September 2007 issue of Vogue. Setting a record at 840 pages, 727 of them ads, and weighing as much as a preemie — 4 pounds, 9 ounces — that issue is now detritus of the Golden Age of excessive spending.

So the question invariably arises: Behind those bangs and dark glasses, is Anna human? Or did she tie Hermès scarves together and make a daring escape from District 9 in a getaway car driven by Oscar de la Renta?

On CBS’s “Early Show” on Thursday, Talley said it was a misconception that “she’s an ice floe or an iceberg and that she has no human flesh or bones.” Tom Florio, the publisher of Vogue, concedes in the documentary that “she’s not warm and friendly.”

At the screening Wednesday, towering with gorgeous girls in bondage gladiator heels and threaded with famous designers, one designer not favored by Anna muttered that she was a sartorial Star Chamber who smothered creativity.

David Letterman will probe Monday night to find out if Wintour is as frigid as we think. But there’s no need for her to drop the Cruella de Vil guise. Moviegoers want to see a brittle Anna belittle, Simon Cowell-style. We enjoy the editrix as dominatrix.

She’s a sacred monster, an embodiment of the highest standard of style, and we don’t expect our monsters to be nice.

“She’s the Sun King and you don’t want the Sun King to act like the mayor,” says Gioia Diliberto, a fashion writer for The Huffington Post.

Just like Miranda Priestly, who dismissed her assistant with a cold “That’s all,” Anna frostily murmurs “That’s it? There’s nothing else?” as she surveys photos and clothes and prods a staffer: “It’s Vogue, O.K.? Please, let’s lift it.”

She dresses down one editor for “sameness,” deems a Sienna Miller cover photo too toothy, and tells designers they should “edit” and be more exciting. Looking at a picture of a slender Jennifer Garner, Anna says ominously, “She looks pregnant.”

Her lovely daughter makes light of the gravity at Vogue, saying, “Some of the people act like fashion is life.” Indeed, the Vogue priestesses choosing glamour spreads in “The September Issue” seem just as intense as the soldiers in Iraq defusing bombs in “The Hurt Locker.”

There is friction in the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards relationship between the 59-year-old Anna and her closest collaborator, the 68-year-old flame-haired creative director and former model Grace Coddington, who is the only one willing to tweak “the Pope,” as Anna is dubbed by a staffer. Coddington tells French Vogue, “We have a real mutual respect for each other, even though sometimes I feel like killing her.”

The Vogue team and moviemakers didn’t know they were dancing on the deck of the Titanic. This September, ad pages in Vogue plummeted 36 percent and a Wall Street Journal story trumpeted “Thick Fashion Magazines Are So Last Year.”

The real question about Anna is not whether she’s warm — she has her furs for that — but whether she can stay relevant in a more down-market age and stay happy if she can’t continue to throw away $50,000 photo shoots that are not up to her exacting standards. In the new issue, there’s a small bow to democratization. A piece called “What Price Fashion?” allows that “overpriced fashion no longer makes sense” and features an Oscar de la Renta dress for under $2,000 and a Proenza Schouler executive touting the “very best skinny stretch-twill pant you’ve ever seen” for $550.

Anna herself continues to resist egalitarian impulses. As Keith Kelly wrote in The New York Post, Condé Nast may be slashing costs, but Anna is not scaling back at the upcoming fall fashion shows in Europe. She’s keeping her suite at the Paris Ritz, her chauffeured Mercedes sedans and her entourage of 10 that costs a quarter of a mill.

That’s all.

It’s really past time that the New York Times took her keyboard away.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom, writing from Jao Flats, Botswana:

Who knew that deep in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where there are no paved roads, phones or TVs, you could find the morning paper waiting for you every day outside your tent, with the latest news, weather and sports? Who knew?

True, this is no ordinary journal. The newspaper here on the Jao Flats of the northwest Okavango flood plain is published on the roads — literally. The wetlands are bisected by hippo trails and narrow roads made from pure white Kalahari Desert sand. And every morning, when you set out to investigate the wilderness, it is not uncommon for a guide to lean out of his jeep, study the animal and insect tracks, and pronounce that he’s “reading the morning news.”

We were lucky to be accompanied by Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — and it was fascinating to watch him read Mother Nature’s hieroglyphics.

This day’s “news,” Ives explained, studying a stretch of road, was that some lions had run very quickly through here, which he could tell by the abnormal depth of, and distance between, their paw prints. They were in stride. The “weather” was windy coming out of the east, he added, pointing to which side of the paw prints had been lightly dusted away. Flood waters remained high this morning, because the nearby hyena tracks were followed by little indentations — splashes of water that had come off their paws. Today’s “sports”? Well, over here — the hyenas were dragging a “kill,” probably a small antelope or steinbok, which is very obvious from the smooth foot-wide path in the sand that ran some 50 yards into the bushes. Every mile you can read a different paper.

It is mentally exhausting hanging with Ives, who was raised on the edge of the Okavango Delta. He points out the connections, and all the free services nature provides, every two seconds: Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. Yes, thank God for termites. All of the raised islands of green in the delta were started by them. The termites keep their mounds warm. This attracts animals whose dung brings seeds and fertilizer that sprout trees, making bigger islands. Ives will be talking to you about zebras and suddenly a bird will zip by — “greater blue-eyed starling,” he’ll blurt out in midsentence, and then go back to zebras.

“If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work, then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space,” said Ives. Humans were actually wired to do this a long time ago.

Unfortunately, he added, “the speed at which humans have improved technology since the Industrial Revolution has attracted so many people to towns and cities and provided them with ‘processed’ natural resources” that our innate ability to make all these connections “may be disappearing as fast as biodiversity.”

Which leads to the point of this column. We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.

They all need to go on safari together.

“We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.”

But we also need to double food production to feed a growing population. “So we’ll need to do that without clearing more forests and draining more wetlands, which means farmers will need new technologies and practices to grow more food on the same land they use today — with less water,” he added. “Healthy forests, wetlands and grasslands not only preserve biodiversity and store carbon, they also help buffer the impacts of climate change. So our success in tackling climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity loss will depend on finding integrated solutions from the land.”

In short — and as any reader of the Okavango daily papers will tell you — we need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself. Today, they are not.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof, who is writing from where he grew up, in Yamhill, Oregon:

On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all.

More fundamentally, it has no soul.

The family farm traditionally was the most soulful place imaginable, and that was the case with our own farm on the edge of the Willamette Valley. I can’t say we were efficient: for a time we thought about calling ourselves “Wandering Livestock Ranch,” after our Angus cattle escaped in one direction and our Duroc hogs in another.

When coyotes threatened our sheep operation, we spent $300 on a Kuvasz, a breed of guard dog that is said to excel in protecting sheep. Alas, our fancy-pants new sheep dog began her duties by dining on lamb.

It’s always said that if a dog kills one lamb, it will never stop, and so the local rule was that if your dog killed one sheep you had to shoot it. Instead we engaged in a successful cover-up. It worked, for the dog never touched a lamb again and for the rest of her long life fended off coyotes heroically.

That kind of diverse, chaotic family farm is now disappearing, replaced by insipid food assembly lines.

The result is food that also lacks soul — but may contain pathogens. In the last two months, there have been two major recalls of ground beef because of possible contamination with drug-resistant salmonella. When factory farms routinely fill animals with antibiotics, the result is superbugs that resist antibiotics.

Michael Pollan, the food writer, notes that monocultures in the field result in monocultures in our diets. Two-thirds of our calories, he says, now come from just four crops: rice, soy, wheat and corn. Fast-food culture and obesity are linked, he argues, to the transformation from family farms to industrial farming.

In fairness, industrial farming is extraordinarily efficient, and smaller diverse family farms would mean more expensive food. So is this all inevitable? Is my nostalgia like the blacksmith’s grief over Henry Ford’s assembly lines superseding a more primitive technology? Perhaps, but I’m reassured by one of my old high school buddies here in Yamhill, Bob Bansen. He runs a family dairy of 225 Jersey cows so efficiently that it can still compete with giant factory dairies of 20,000 cows.

Bob names all his cows, and can tell them apart in an instant. He can tell you each cow’s quirks and parentage. They are family friends as well as economic assets.

“With these big dairies, a cow means nothing to them,” Bob said. “When I lose a cow, it bothers me. I kick myself.” That might seem like sentimentality, but it’s also good business and preserves his assets.

American agriculture policy and subsidies have favored industrialization and consolidation, but there are signs that the Obama administration Agriculture Department under Secretary Tom Vilsack is becoming more friendly to small producers. I hope that’s right.

One of my childhood memories is of placing a chicken egg in a goose nest when I was about 10 (my young scientist phase). That mother goose was thrilled when her eggs hatched, and maternal love is such that she never seemed to notice that one of her babies was a neckless midget.

As for the chick, she never doubted her goosiness. At night, our chickens would roost high up in the barn, while the geese would sleep on the floor, with their heads tucked under their wings. This chick slept with the goslings, and she tried mightily to stretch her neck under her wing. No doubt she had a permanent crick in her neck.

Then the fateful day came when the mother goose took her brood to the water for the first time. She jumped in, and the goslings leaped in after her. The chick stood on the bank, aghast.

For the next few days, mother and daughter tried to reason it out, each deeply upset by the other’s intransigence. After several days of barnyard trauma, the chick underwent an identity crisis, nature triumphed over nurture, and she redefined herself as a hen.

She moved across the barn to hang out with the chickens. At first she still slept goose-like, and visited her “mother” and fellow goslings each day, but within two months she no longer even acknowledged her stepmother and stepsiblings and behaved just like other chickens.

Recollections like that make me wistful for a healthy rural America composed of diverse family farms, which also offer decent and varied lives for the animals themselves (at least when farm boys aren’t conducting “scientific” experiments). In contrast, a modern industrialized operation is a different world: more than 100,000 hens in cages, their beaks removed, without a rooster, without geese or other animals, spewing out pollution and ending up as so-called food — a calorie factory, without any soul.

And last but not least here’s Mr. Rich:

“It is time to water the tree of liberty” said the sign carried by a gun-toting protester milling outside President Obama’s town-hall meeting in New Hampshire two weeks ago. The Thomas Jefferson quote that inspired this message, of course, said nothing about water: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” That’s the beauty of a gun — you don’t have to spell out the “blood.”

The protester was a nut. America has never had a shortage of them. But what’s Tom Coburn’s excuse? Coburn is a Republican senator from Oklahoma, where 168 people were murdered by right-wing psychopaths who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Their leader, Timothy McVeigh, had the Jefferson quote on his T-shirt when he committed this act of mass murder. Yet last Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” if he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.

“Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.”

Coburn is nothing if not consistent. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was part of a House contingent that helped delay and soften an antiterrorism bill. This cohort even tried to strip out a provision blocking domestic fund-raising by foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Why? The far right, in league with the National Rifle Association, was angry at the federal government for aggressively policing America’s self-appointed militias. In a 1996 floor speech, Coburn conceded that “terrorism obviously poses a serious threat,” but then went on to explain that the nation had worse threats to worry about: “There is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own government.” As his remarks on “Meet the Press” last week demonstrated, the subsequent intervention of 9/11 has not changed his worldview.

I have been writing about the simmering undertone of violence in our politics since October, when Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate of a major political party, said nothing to condemn Obama haters shrieking “Treason!,” “Terrorist!” and “Off with his head!” at her rallies. As vacation beckons, I’d like to drop the subject, but the atmosphere keeps getting darker.

Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate. On Monday — the day after he gave a pass to those threatening violence — a dozen provocateurs with guns, at least two of them bearing assault weapons, showed up for Obama’s V.F.W. speech in Phoenix. Within hours, another member of Congress — Phil Gingrey of Georgia — was telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that as long as brandishing guns is legal, he, too, saw no reason to discourage Americans from showing up armed at public meetings.

In April the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, originally commissioned by the Bush administration, on the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. It was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since then, a neo-Nazi who subscribed to the anti-Obama “birther” movement has murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, and an anti-abortion zealot has gunned down a doctor in a church in Wichita, Kan.

This month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report. A federal law enforcement agent told the center that he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.

This uptick in the radical right predates the health care debate that is supposedly inspiring all the gun waving. Nor can this movement be attributed to a stepped-up attack by Democrats on this crowd’s holy Second Amendment. Since taking office, Obama has disappointed gun-control advocates by relegating his campaign pledge to reinstate the ban on assault weapons to the down-low.

No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell’s analysis appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. J.F.K., no more a leftist than Obama, was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the tribune of a new liberal order. Bell could have also written his diagnosis in 1992, between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the dispossessed.

While Bell’s essay remains relevant in 2009, he could not have imagined in 1962 that major politicians, from a vice-presidential candidate down, would either enable or endorse a radical and armed fringe. Nor could he have imagined that so many conservative intellectuals would remain silent. William F. Buckley did make an effort to distance National Review from the John Birch Society. The only major conservative writer to repeatedly and forthrightly take on the radical right this year is David Frum. He ended a recent column for The Week, titled “The Reckless Right Courts Violence,” with a plea that the president “be met and bested on the field of reason,” not with guns.

Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.

This week the journalist Ronald Kessler’s new behind-the-scenes account of presidential security, “In the President’s Secret Service,” rose to No. 3 on The Times nonfiction best-seller list. No wonder there’s a lot of interest in the subject. We have no reason to believe that these hugely dedicated agents will fail us this time, even as threats against Obama, according to Kessler, are up 400 percent from those against his White House predecessor.

But as we learned in Oklahoma City 14 years ago — or at the well-protected Holocaust museum just over two months ago — this kind of irrational radicalism has a myriad of targets. And it is impervious to reason. Much as Coburn fought an antiterrorism bill after the carnage of Oklahoma City, so three men from Bagdad, Ariz., drove 2,500 miles in 1964 to testify against a bill tightening federal controls on firearms after the Kennedy assassination. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his own famous Kennedy-era essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” these Arizona gun enthusiasts were convinced that the American government was being taken over by a “subversive power.” Sound familiar?

Even now the radicals are taking a nonviolent toll on the Obama presidency. Obama complains, not without reason, that the news media, led by cable television, exaggerate the ruckus at health care events. But why does he exaggerate the legitimacy and clout of opposition members of Congress who, whether through silence or outright endorsement, are surrendering to the nuts? Even Charles Grassley, the supposedly adult Iowa Republican who is the Senate point man for his party on health care, has now capitulated to the armed fringe by publicly parroting their “pull the plug on grandma” fear-mongering.

For all the talk of Obama’s declining poll numbers this summer, he towers over his opponents. In last week’s Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 21 percent approve of how Republicans in Congress are handling health care reform (as opposed to the president’s 41 percent). Should Obama fail to deliver serious reform because his administration treats the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as deferentially as it has the banks, that would be shameful. Should he fail because he in any way catered to a decimated opposition party that has sunk and shrunk to its craziest common denominator, that would be ludicrous.

The G.O.P., whose ranks have now dwindled largely to whites in Dixie and the less-populated West, is not even a paper tiger — it’s a paper muskrat. James Carville is correct when he says that if Republicans actually carried out their filibuster threats on health care, it would be a political bonanza for the Democrats.

In last year’s campaign debates, Obama liked to cite his unlikely Senate friendship with Tom Coburn, of all people, as proof that he could work with his adversaries. If the president insists that enemies like this are his friends — and that the nuts they represent can be placated by reason — he will waste his opportunity to effect real change and have no one to blame but himself.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

In “The Obamas Leave Town” Ms. Collins suggests that even on vacation with Michelle and the girls, President Obama is probably getting no end of helpful suggestions on what to do about health care.  Mr. Blow gives us “Masters and Slaves of Deception,” and says that President Obama should have treated health care reform the same way he treated the stimulus package — by personally helping to shape it and push it through from the start.  Bob Herbert, in “Voices of Anxiety,” says President Obama may be sanguine, but the same cannot be said of the general public, including some of his most ardent supporters.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

The Obama family is off for a week of summer vacation. This is something Barack owes Michelle and the girls, although I am sure he would personally have preferred to stay in Washington listening to people tell him what to do about health care.

The president is getting no end of helpful suggestions. Right now there is probably a caddy on Martha’s Vineyard wondering if he will be picked to carry Barack’s clubs, and if so, whether there will be time to put in a plug for the public option.

The Republicans say if Obama wants a bill that can pass, he should pay more attention to their ideas. Particularly the one about how he has to make the whole thing cheaper without getting the government in the business of reducing health care costs.

Democrats want him to stop betraying the party’s progressive base by being all kumbaya and bipartisan just because he won the election by being all kumbaya and bipartisan.

I am personally thinking that he should grab a copy of Tom Ridge’s memoir to read on vacation, come back and change the terror alert level to orange.

This summer we have found fissures in the social contract we never knew existed before. Until August, I had no idea that we were split over the question of whether it was a good plan to bring an assault rifle to a site where people had gathered to greet the president of the United States.

But the biggest stunner was the high regard in which the town meeting protesters seemed to hold members of Congress.

One thing I thought all Americans agreed about was that Congress is incapable of getting anything done. But the angry people at those meetings seemed to believe that their elected representatives are strong, sneaky, indifferent to public opinion, and intent on eviscerating popular and much-needed programs in order to create a national health care plan that will make everybody miserable.

This was a shocking new concept, a kind of Bizarro Congress that is exactly the opposite of the one we see stumbling through its paces on TV. That CSPAN Congress would quake in terror if asked to pass a bill against littering, fearing constituents might strain their backs by bending down to pick things up. It took the members 30 years to ax a fighter jet program even the Pentagon hates. Who knew they had the gumption to create death panels?

Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, told one town hall meeting that people “have every right to fear” that health care reform could lead to a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.” Grassley has been in the Senate for 28 years, and chaired the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Yet he seems never to have noticed that if forced to choose between slaughtering a pen full of cute puppies and irritating the senior voters, every single elected official in Washington would grab a hatchet and dive for the dogs.

Grassley is a member of the six-person Senate negotiating panel that is making everybody wait around while it allegedly works on a bipartisan health care plan. On Friday, the group leader, Max Baucus of Montana, reported the good news that the senators had a “productive” phone conversation in which the members “discussed our progress.”

This is the sort of encouraging report that is going to have Obama hitting the lobsters over the head with his putter.

Grassley and Mike Enzi of Wyoming, another Republican negotiator, have been busy upping the ante on what counts as truly bipartisan. The magic number for Enzi and Grassley now seems to be 80 votes in the Senate. This would mean getting at least half the Senate Republicans on board.

Try to imagine what that would entail. The current Republican caucus contains exactly two members (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine) who might be called moderate. After that you move into people like Grassley, who is part of the smallish Calm Conservative camp. Then you come to the larger Friendly Reactionaries contingent of which Enzi is a member and which has not indicated actual support for anything about health care reform except bipartisan negotiations. To get to 80 you would have to venture even further to the right, into the Clan of the Cave Bear.

It is not clear whether the 80-vote theory was part of the progress that the bipartisan negotiating panel discussed during that extremely productive call. Maybe they were trading stories about how they spent their summer vacations.

You may recall that the six states represented by the negotiators contain a whopping 2.77 percent of the American population. Perhaps they just wanted to stay on the phone because they’re lonely.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

President Obama made a huge mistake in pursuing health care reform. He tried to be hands-off when he needed to be knee-deep. The White House overcompensated for the Clinton-era defeat of health care reform by offering too little guidance and support to its own party’s lawmakers, who are now struggling to craft a coherent message out of a confusing bill. Adding to the challenge: this must be done in a bipartisan way.

But true bipartisanship, not withstanding candidate Obama’s grandiose visions of a post-partisan world, is becoming an increasingly quaint notion.

In this Washington, no outreached hand goes unmangled. Seeing an opening, conservatives have rushed in.

They have started Operation Master and Slaves of Deception — cooking up scary, outlandish claims about the plan and feeding them to a desperate base, eager to believe the worst about the man they loathe the most, President Obama.

Conservatives are now on fertile ground. Still enraged by the ignominy of having been trounced, they are most likely feeling marginalized, ignored and afraid. For them, it has been less about clarifying health care reform and more about a clarion call to resistance.

And the deceptions have worked. According to an NBC News poll released this week, 76 percent of Republicans believe that the health care plan will lead to a government takeover of the health care system; 70 percent believe it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly; and 61 percent believe it will allow the use of taxpayer dollars for abortions.

Conservative lawmakers should be delirious. Not only is this stoking the passions of their dwindling base, it is opening the spigot of money from the health care industry and conservative groups.

According to a report on Wednesday by OpenSecrets.org’s Center for Responsive Politics, health services and H.M.O.’s increased their campaign donations by 37 percent from the first to the second quarter this year. Republican and conservative advocacy groups increased their contributions by a whopping 237 percent over the same time period. For comparison, donations by Democratic and liberal advocacy groups declined.

Realizing that the plan was running into trouble with a wrangling right, the president began kowtowing to the crazies himself. When the president of the United States has to reassure us that he is not going to kill our grandmothers, you know there’s a problem.

The president should have treated health care reform the same way he treated the stimulus package — by personally helping to shape it and push it through from the start.

On Feb. 11, a Gallup poll found that 59 percent of Americans over all supported the economic stimulus package, but only 28 percent of Republicans supported it. This is not so different from the way Americans feel about health care. According to a CNN/Opinion Research poll released this month, 50 percent of Americans said that they favored “Barack Obama’s plan to reform health care,” compared with just 19 percent of Republicans.

The Democrats forged ahead with the stimulus package. The House passed it without a single Republican vote, and the Senate passed it with the help of three moderate Republicans.

Six months later, what is the result? According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday, half of Americans now expect the recession to be over within 12 months and “almost twice as many say the program has made things better as say it has made things worse (43 percent to 23 percent).”

Nothing succeeds like success. Now that the stimulus plan appears to be working, no one even remembers the acrimony about its passage.

Finally the Democrats are making rumblings that they may try to go it alone on health care reform as well. It’s about time.

The conservatives are not negotiating in good faith anyway. Chuck “snake in the” Grassley, ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of three Republicans supposedly working on the bipartisan health bill, is even propagating the nonsense, telling supporters that they have “every right to fear … a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

There is nothing that the Democrats can do to placate this cabal. This is how the Republicans see it: for them to win, the plan must fail.

Concessions simply weaken the bill, with little reward. For instance, a Rasmussen Reports poll last week found that 78 percent of conservatives opposed the reform plan. This week, they were asked if they would support the plan if the controversial public option was removed, and 73 percent said that they would still oppose it. By contrast, liberal support for the plan sans public option dropped by a third.

The conservatives are never going to play ball. As the Senate Republican whip, Jon Kyl of Arizona, put it, “there is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill,” even if it doesn’t increase the deficit.

Most important, this two-year window may be the only time Democrats can push through reform without Republican support. As Nate Silver pointed out on his blog last week, “Without major intervening events like 9/11, the party that wins the White House almost always loses seats at the midterm elections — since World War II, an average of 17 seats in the House after the White House changes parties.” There is no reason to believe that this won’t be the case next year.

A poll released by Rasmussen Reports this week found that on a generic Congressional ballot, Republican candidates hold a 5 percent advantage over Democratic ones.

The time is now. Just do it.

Amen.  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

Barack Obama is a guy who is easy to underestimate. Six years ago hardly anyone outside of Illinois had ever heard of him. Now he’s America’s first Zen-master president.

On Thursday, he made a jocular reference to the tendency of pundits and others to declare periodically that he’s off his game and headed for disaster. He noted that in August 2008, with his poll numbers wavering and the Republicans energized by the addition of Sarah Palin to the national ticket, a lot of people were convinced that, as he put it, “Obama’s lost his mojo.”

“You remember all that?” he asked, smiling. “There is something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.”

Wee-weed up? I don’t know what that means, but the president seemed pretty relaxed when he said it. This was the same day that he went on a radio program and did his Joe Namath routine, guaranteeing that health care reform would get done.

The president may be sanguine, but the same cannot be said of the general public, including some of Mr. Obama’s most ardent supporters. The American people are worried sick over the economy, which may be sprouting green shoots from Ben Bernanke’s lofty perspective but not from the humble standpoint of the many millions who are unemployed, or those who are still working but barely able to pay their bills and hold onto their homes.

This is the reality that underlies the anxiety over the president’s ragged effort to achieve health care reform. Forget the certifiables who are scrawling Hitler mustaches on pictures of the president. Many sane and intelligent people who voted for Mr. Obama and sincerely want him to succeed have legitimate concerns about the timing of this health reform initiative and the way it is unfolding.

The president has not made it clear to the general public why health care reform is his top domestic priority when the biggest issue on the minds of most Americans is the economy. Men and women who once felt themselves to be securely rooted in the middle or upper middle classes are now struggling with pay cuts, job losses and home foreclosures — and they don’t feel, despite the rhetoric about the recession winding down, that their prospects are good.

People worried about holding on to their standard of living need to be assured, unambiguously, that an expensive new government program is in their — and the country’s — best interest. They need to know exactly how the program will work, and they need to be confident that it’s affordable.

Mr. Obama, who has a command of the English language like few others, has been remarkably opaque about his intentions regarding health care. He left it up to Congress to draft a plan and he has not gotten behind any specific legislation. He has seemed to waffle on the public option and has not been at all clear about how the reform that is coming will rein in runaway costs. At times it has seemed as though any old “reform” would be all right with him.

It’s still early, but people are starting to lose faith in the president. I hear almost daily from men and women who voted enthusiastically for Mr. Obama but are feeling disappointed. They feel that the banks made out like bandits in the bailouts, and that the health care initiative could become a boondoggle. Their biggest worry is that Mr. Obama is soft, that he is unwilling or incapable of fighting hard enough to counter the forces responsible for the sorry state the country is in.

More and more the president is being seen by his own supporters as someone who would like to please everybody, who is naïve about the prospects for bipartisanship, who believes that his strongest supporters will stay with him because they have nowhere else to go, and who will retreat whenever the Republicans and the corporate crowd come after him.

People want more from Mr. Obama. They want him to be their champion. But they don’t feel that he is speaking to them in a language that they understand. He is seen as more comfortable speaking the Wall Street lingo. People don’t feel that the voices of anxiety are being heard.

Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe the economy really is turning around. Maybe Mr. Obama is working on a bipartisan deal that will take us a few small steps down the road to real health care reform.

It’s possible that we’ve been without mature leadership for so long that it’s difficult to recognize it when we see it. Mr. Obama has proved the naysayers wrong time and again. But if it turns out that this time he’s wrong, hold onto your hats. Because right now there is no Plan B.