Dowd and Friedman

MoDo writes “On Safire,” and says William Safire was anything but a nattering nabob of negativity. He had none of the vile and vitriol of today’s howling pack of conservative pundits.  (He’s spinning like a lathe in his grave now, MoDo, because you used “vile” as a noun, which it ain’t.)  The Moustache of Wisdom asks “Where Did ‘We’ Go?”  He says there is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” can only manage, let alone fix, our huge problems if there is a collective “we” at work.  Here’s MoDo:

During the Clinton impeachment circus, I walked by William Safire’s lair.

He had an imposing office in “murderers’ row,” as he dubbed the hall where we worked, full of English antiques, Oriental rugs and a couple of old ties he kept for those rare moments when he needed one.

He was sitting in an armchair reading that bodice-ripping best seller, The Starr Report.

“There’s a word here I don’t know,” said The Times’s wordsmith. “What is a thong?”

I flushed and stammered that it was a scanty panty with a string for the back. His hazel eyes glinted with curiosity.

Trying to elucidate, I blurted: “Maybe you’re thinking of thong sandals, where thong is an adjective. With Monica, it’s used as a noun.”

He smiled. “It’s like a G-string,” he said. “That brings back memories of some clubs I went to as a young man in Union City, N.J.”

Bill Safire was anything but a nattering nabob of negativity. He had none of the vile and vitriol of today’s howling pack of conservative pundits: Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Malkin.

Even though we disagreed on the Iraq war, he chastised me only once about it, for writing that Cheney & Co. had shoehorned all their “meshugas” about Saddam’s W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links into Colin Powell’s U.N. speech. “Mishegoss,” he wrote in his language column, would have been a better spelling of the word.

One of my proudest moments was when I proved to him that “jade” could be a noun referring to a woman, citing Edith Wharton’s “The Gods Arrive.”

He walked with a Walter Matthau shamble, and he always dressed down in tweeds, earth tones and Hush Puppies. But there was a natural elegance about the guy.

Married to the gorgeous English rose Helene, he was a man who loved women; his novels, even the one about the founding fathers, were full of zesty sex scenes.

He told me the story of how when Barbara Walters worked for him at the famous New York P.R. company of Tex McCrary, back in the “Mad Men” era, he wanted to loosen up Barbara, who was very serious. So one Christmas he gave her a sheer black shorty nightgown with matching panties.

“Today I would have had to take him to Human Resources,” she recalled dryly. “But then, I loved it.”

When he learned that my mom shared his love of weird head meats, he would buy tongue sandwiches from Loeb’s Deli to send home to her.

He had a rough time with his transition from the Nixon White House to The Times. He told me that many of the liberal reporters stiffed him for the first couple of years until he dove into a pool to save a drowning child at an office party.

When I became his “colleague in columny,” as he called me, we shared a bathroom, and I teased him for being the one who kept hair spray there.

He always had interesting advice.

“Put a phone in your office that doesn’t go through the switchboard,” he told me.

If White House officials wouldn’t call you back, leave them a single-word message about what you wanted to talk about: “Malfeasance.”

I saw him having lunch once in the ’80s with Bert Lance, the former Carter official. I asked him afterward why he was hanging out with the Georgian he had eviscerated; his columns on Lance’s irregular banking practices had won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and lost Lance his job. “Only hit people when they’re up,” he told me.

The only time I ever saw a shred of doubt was after the famous dust-up when he wrote that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was “a congenital liar.”

A congenital pot-stirrer, he acted delighted with Bill Clinton’s subsequent threat to punch him in the nose. But, as a famous expert on etymology, he must have known he had used the wrong word. Congenital usually connotes a condition existing at birth. Was that really what he intended?

Shortly after that happened I went into his office to talk to him. He wasn’t there, but I noticed a piece of paper on a table on which he’d written two words: “chronic” and “habitual.” A rare case of Safire second thoughts.

He would have appreciated the fact that his obits ran on Yom Kippur. He had a famous dinner every year at his home in Chevy Chase, Md., to break the fast that gathered many of the city’s most influential players.

Curious, I pestered him for years for an invite. He patiently explained it was just for Jews or people who were, or had been, married to Jews.

After years of pleading, including many protestations that I had had Jewish boyfriends and that I would one day find a Jewish husband, he broke down and let me come.

He was a mensch. And that’s no mishegoss.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish settler as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Brooks and Herbert

Bobo, in “The Next Culture War,” says the United States needs a revival of economic self-restraint to restore its financial values and make it a producer economy again, not a consumer economy.  Bobo, honey, it’s hard to be a “producer economy” when most of the production jobs have been sent off shore.  Just sayin’…  Mr. Herbert, in “Peering at the Future,” says the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recognizes what some Americans do not: the importance of education as the pathway to personal and societal success.  Here’s Bobo:

Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.

“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.

Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.

That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.

Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.

During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.

Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.

These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

A whoop went up in the classroom and the teenagers became giddy when they realized that the man and woman being escorted to the front of the room were Bill and Melinda Gates.

“Ohmigod!” shrieked one girl, her eyes and mouth wide with astonishment.

“Are you the real Bill Gates?” asked another.

The Gateses were in the Algebra 1 class at West Charlotte High School (a venerable, mostly black institution that over the decades has reached academic highs and touched ignominious lows) to learn, not teach. They have been traveling the country trying to see for themselves what really works and what has gone haywire in public education in the United States.

Visiting classrooms is like peering into the nation’s future. Right now the view is somewhat frightening. American kids drop out of high school at an average of one every 26 seconds. Only about a third of those who graduate are prepared to move on to a four-year college. And in the savage economic downturn that has gripped the U.S. for the better part of the past two years, retrenchment in public schools and colleges is widespread.

For a country that once led the world in educating its citizens, we are now moving decidedly in the wrong direction. As Mr. Gates points out: “Our performance at every level — primary and secondary school achievement, high school graduation, college entry, college completion — is dropping against the rest of the world.”

This has consequences. As Melinda Gates notes: “America’s long history of upward mobility is in danger.”

The Gateses are co-chairs of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization. They are investing billions of dollars and much of their considerable energy in an effort to spark not just change but a transformation in the way American youngsters are educated.

It’s an overwhelming challenge, and not all of their early efforts have borne fruit. Educating children in the U.S. means engaging issues like poverty and homelessness, racial and ethnic transformations and entrenched, outdated ways of doing things. But the Gateses seem determined to master this issue and do what they can to help reverse the current dismal trends.

As they met over two days with students, teachers, administrators and community college executives in Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, the intensity of their focus and concentration was striking.

“You can read about all of this stuff,” Bill Gates told me, “but it’s important to come out and see it, to spend time talking with the people involved, and to visit the bad schools as well as the good schools if you really want to understand and make a difference.”

The issues can be maddeningly complex. There are school districts in which much of the population is aging and predominantly white and the taxpayers are less than enthusiastic about supporting a school population that is largely poor and black or Hispanic. There are schools trying desperately to raise their test scores, an important measure of accountability, while at the same time trying to keep poor and struggling youngsters from dropping out — the very youngsters who are often a drag on overall test scores.

But the many challenges will have to be met and overcome if the U.S. is to maintain a successful society. The American work force is becoming increasingly black and Hispanic, and a two-year or four-year college credential has become a prerequisite to a middle-class standard of living. With that in mind, it’s not difficult to see how disastrous it is to have nearly 50 percent of minority kids dropping out of school before they even get a high school diploma.

“It is so important,” said Melinda Gates, “to get all of the children educated.”

The Gateses are committed, but they need so many more to follow their lead.

I’m not sure how or why so many Americans over the past few decades took their eyes off the critical importance of education as the pathway to personal and societal success. In their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz pointed out that educational attainment in the U.S. “was exceptionally rapid and continuous for the first three-quarters of the 20th century.” And then, foolishly, we applied the brakes and advancement “slowed considerably for young adults beginning in the 1970s and for the overall labor force by the early 1980s.”

If you don’t think we’re paying a price for this, just look around.

A student in the Algebra 1 class at West Charlotte High summed up the matter cogently when she said to the Gateses, in a voice that was not the least amused: “People seem to think it’s cool to be stupid. But it’s not.”

The Pasty Little Putz, Cohen and Krugman

Oh, cripes.  If I didn’t already loathe Lieberman having The Pasty Little Putz bring him up would be reason enough.  In “A War President?” the PLP says Senator Joe Lieberman is just one of many people waiting to find out if President Obama truly believes that the war he inherited in Afghanistan is a war of necessity.  I don’t trust myself to say anything about Lieberman or why anyone would give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about what he thinks…  Mr. Cohen, in “The U.S.–Iranian Triangle,” says Iran’s nuclear program is about the restoration of pride, and any sanctions are predisposed to failure. Instead, the U.S. must open talks on a broad array of issues between the two countries.  Prof. Krugman discusses the “Cassandras of Climate,” and says as climate scientists have begun reaching consensus that Earth’s outlook is getting worse at greater speed, the need for government action is thrown into sharper relief.  Here’s that babbling putz:

All spring and summer, it looked as though Joe Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut, would play the same role in the debate over President Obama’s Afghanistan policy that he played in the struggle over Iraq: as a champion of the surge-style counterinsurgency that Obama endorsed in March and as a defender of a wartime White House against the Democratic Party’s leftward flank.

But that was before Afghanistan’s fraud-riddled elections, before Obama’s new top commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, came back with a dire report and a request for further reinforcements and before a spooked White House entered full-scale reassessment mode.

Now, while Obama weighs his options, Lieberman is waiting to find out if he’s going to be the president’s ally on Afghanistan or one of his sharpest critics.

In a conversation last week, the Connecticut senator was careful to avoid taking the president to task for pausing before he escalates. After seven years of war, Lieberman noted, we’ve only now “begun the first serious national debate about Afghanistan: whether we should be there and what we should be doing there. In that regard, it’s entirely appropriate that the president is deliberating.”

But he was simultaneously careful to imply that Obama’s ultimate decision should be a foregone conclusion — not least because the president’s past statements allow for no alternative.

Throughout our discussion, Lieberman repeatedly cited Obama’s own arguments (“as the president said the other day. …”) to buttress the case for sending more troops to Afghanistan. And he suggested, more than once, that the president’s choice essentially amounts to deciding whether to abandon a strategy to which Obama has already committed himself.

I heard a similar theme, in public and private, from many counterinsurgency advocates last week. Having recently described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” they asked, can the president really turn down a request for more troops from a general he himself appointed to support a campaign that he personally endorsed?

The answer is very likely no. However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected “good war.”

But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous.

That’s because the counterinsurgency strategy he’s contemplating is the worst possible option — except for all the others. It looks attractive only because the alternatives involve abandoning southern Afghanistan to the Taliban’s tender mercies, playing Whac-a-Mole with Al Qaeda from afar with hopelessly inadequate intelligence and pushing the nuclear-armed Pakistani military back into a marriage of necessity with a resurgent Taliban next door.

Even allowing for these perils, the case for escalation remains a near-run thing. In the words of Stephen Biddle, who advised McChrystal on the review, increasing our military involvement in Afghanistan is “a close call on the merits,” whose “outcome is uncertain” and which is “likely to increase losses and violence in the short term in exchange for a chance at stability in the longer term.”

This kind of war may well be worth fighting. But it can only be prosecuted by a president who believes in it wholeheartedly.

It will have to be sold to an American public battered by recession and weary of seven years of conflict.

It will require rallying a Democratic Party whose support for sending more troops to Afghanistan — the better to outhawk the Republicans — has vanished with the Bush presidency.

And it will need to be conducted with a constant eye not only on Iran, but on the fragile situation in Iraq, which has fallen out of the headlines but remains, even now, our most important military theater.

In other words, fighting to win in Afghanistan will require that Obama become as much of a war president as his predecessor. And that’s a role for which he has shown little appetite to date.

Maybe this will change. “My hope,” Lieberman told me, is that once Obama finishes his “very public process of deliberation, he will have brought the public along with him” — and placed the war effort on a firmer footing in the process.

But the president can only bring the country with him if he really believes in the war that he’s inherited. For now, that remains an open question.

And if Obama takes us deeper into a conflict for which he doesn’t really have the stomach, then the outcome will almost certainly be tragic — for him, for us, and for Afghanistan.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

France and Germany fought three wars in 70 years before the bright idea dawned of enfolding their problem into something larger: the European Union. The United States and Iran have not gone to war but have a relationship of psychotic mistrust. The answer can only be the same: Broaden the context.

The revelation that Iran has built a second uranium enrichment plant in secrecy did not change the nuclear equation if that’s measured by the country’s ability to produce a bomb. No uranium has entered the facility. Iran’s eventual capacity to produce weapons-grade fissile material, let alone deliver it, is unaffected.

What has changed is the psychology of the Iranian nuclear program. Mistrust, already deep, is now fathomless.

With an enrichment facility at Natanz able to accommodate 54,000 centrifuges (just over 8,000 are installed), and its single nuclear power plant still in stop-go mode, there do not appear to be 54,000 reasons for Iran to burrow into a mountain near the holy city of Qum to install 3,000 more.

Tehran wants a military nuclear option even if it’s nervous — and hesitant — about the reality.

The Qum-nuclear twinning reveals the Iranian mindset: The enrichment program has attained sacred status as a symbol of Iranian independence — comparable to oil’s nationalization in the 1950s.

(Iran will argue its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency only required it to give notification of the new facility 180 days before introducing nuclear material. Western nations will contest that. The technicalities are debatable — and irrelevant. This is about trust betrayed by Tehran.)

The effect of Natanz-Qum was to make new sanctions more likely sooner. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France spoke of imposing them in December, absent an “in-depth change.” President Obama — who likes to leave hawkishness to Europeans — avoided the “s” word but did his best resolute thing.

More significant than the words, however, were the no-shows. Iran would have sat bolt upright had Obama been flanked by the leaders of Germany, Russia and China. Those three countries are principal sources of Iran’s trade.

Chancellor Angela Merkel could not find time (although she “associated” herself with Obama.) Russia expressed “serious concern.” China mumbled about “dialogue.” This was less a line in the sand than a faint squiggle.

I’ve said this before: Sanctions won’t work. Ray Takeyh, who worked on Iran with Dennis Ross at the State Department before losing his job last month and returning to the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that “sanctions are the feel-good option.”

Yes, it feels good to do something, but it doesn’t necessarily help. In this case, sanctions won’t for four reasons.

One: Iran is inured to sanctions after years of living with them and has in Dubai a sure-fire conduit for goods at a manageable surtax. Two: Russia and China will never pay more than lip-service to sanctions. Three: You don’t bring down a quasi-holy symbol — nuclear power — by cutting off gasoline sales. Four: sanctions feed the persecution complex on which the Iranian regime thrives.

A senior German Foreign Ministry official last week told an American Council on Germany delegation: “The efficiency of sanctions is not really discussed because if you do, you are left with only two options — a military strike or living with a nuclear Iran — and nobody wants to go there. So the answer is: Let’s impose further sanctions! It’s a dishonest debate.”

Dishonesty is a staple of Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has dissembled. Israel, which introduced nuclear ambiguity in the region, has — repetitively — predicted an Iranian bomb is just a few years away since the early 1990s. It still is some years off in the view of U.S. intelligence.

The choice is indeed between a military strike and living with a nuclear Iran. But what is a “nuclear Iran?” Is it an Iran that’s nuclear-armed — a very dangerous development — or an Iran with an I.A.E.A,-monitored enrichment facility?

I believe monitored enrichment on Iranian soil in the name of what Obama called Iran’s “right to peaceful nuclear power” remains a possible basis for an agreement that blocks weaponization. Zero enrichment is by now a non-starter.

For fruitless sanctions to be avoided, the mantra of William Burns, the U.S. under secretary for political affairs who will attend multilateral talks with Iran starting Thursday, must be: “Widen the canvas.”

The Iranian regime is weak. Its disarray was again evident last week; it actually feels threatened by George Soros. Significant factions now view an American breakthrough as needed. They have a favorable view of Burns.

Burns must seek to open a parallel bilateral U.S.-Iran negotiation covering at least these areas: Afghanistan and Iraq (where interests often converge); Hezbollah and Hamas (where they do not); human rights; blocked Iranian assets; diplomatic relations; regional security arrangements; drugs; the fight against Al Qaeda; visas and travel.

Isolated, nuclear negotiations will fail. Integrated, they may not. Iran’s sense of humiliation is rooted in its America complex; its nuclear program is above all about the restoration of pride. Settle the complex to contain the program. Triangulate. Think broad. Think E.U., not Versailles.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.

What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon dioxide locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.

The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.

And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then.

For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America” — yes, “imminent” — and reports “a broad consensus among climate models” that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-type conditions, “will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.”

So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They’ll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.

Now, at this point I have to make the obligatory disclaimer that no individual weather event can be attributed to global warming. The point, however, is that climate change will make events like that Australian dust storm much more common.

In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not?

Part of the answer is that it’s hard to keep peoples’ attention focused. Weather fluctuates — New Yorkers may recall the heat wave that pushed the thermometer above 90 in April — and even at a global level, this is enough to cause substantial year-to-year wobbles in average temperature. As a result, any year with record heat is normally followed by a number of cooler years: According to Britain’s Met Office, 1998 was the hottest year so far, although NASA — which arguably has better data — says it was 2005. And it’s all too easy to reach the false conclusion that the danger is past.

But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.

Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.

So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the back burner, at best, as a policy issue. I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.

And as I pointed out in my last column, we can afford to do this. Even as climate modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the threat is worse than we realized, economic modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the costs of emission control are lower than many feared.

So the time for action is now. O.K., strictly speaking it’s long past. But better late than never.

Dowd, Friedman and Rich

Mr. Kristof is off today.  MoDo, in “The Devil Wears Crocs,” says the painful periods for W. and Bill Clinton, falling low after starting with such grand hopes, are recounted in two new books.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “The New Sputnik,” says China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. Unfortunately, we’re still not racing.  Mr. Rich gives us “Obama at the Precipice,” in which he says President Obama, like the young President John F. Kennedy in 1961, is wrestling with sending more troops to an unpopular war during his first months in office.  Here’s MoDo:

At the end of many Shakespearean dramas, self-destructive leaders are usually strewn dead on stage.

With modern presidencies, we have to watch the poignant tableau of such leaders realizing that they have squandered their chance for greatness even as they suffer the indignity of rejection by those who once sought their blessing.

These painful periods for W. and Bill Clinton, falling low after starting with such grand hopes, are recounted in two new books.

The pen-and-tell by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, “Speech-less,” is being denounced by some former Bushies and Republican commentators as a “Devil Wears Prada” betrayal. (Except, in this case, the Devil wears Crocs. Preparing to make a prime-time address explaining why the 2008 economic bailout wasn’t socialism — “We got to make this understandable for the average cat,” the president tells his speechwriters — W. pads around the White House in Crocs, an image that’s hard to get out of your head.)

“The guy is a worm,” Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer about Latimer, adding: “He needs to read his Dante. He probably hasn’t read ‘The Inferno.’ The lowest circles of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal, and at the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies.”

Despite all the devilish critiques, the book is not that hard on W., except to state the obvious: that he was a Decider who made bold but bad decisions. And it’s positively dewy-eyed about two of the worst decisions, Dick Cheney and Rummy. (Latimer wrote speeches for Rummy at the Pentagon and is now helping the former defense chief with his memoir.)

My favorite part is when the White House political office suggests that W. go to Monticello and make a speech pointing out that his legacy matched Thomas Jefferson’s. “Jefferson had founded the University of Virginia,” Latimer writes, describing the aides’ reasoning. “Well, they said, Bush had gotten the No Child Left Behind Act passed. Jefferson had authored the Declaration of Independence. Well, Bush had launched the Freedom Agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jefferson had authored the Virginia statute for religious freedom. Well, that was just like the president’s faith-based initiative.” Latimer balked, noting that “if Bush actually went to Monticello to proclaim himself the Thomas Jefferson of our day, there’d be grounds to question his sanity.”

His book ends with the downbeat time when Bush supports McCain simply because “a McCain defeat would be a repudiation of the Bush administration.” Both Republicans were uncomfortable. McCain was distancing himself from the unpopular Republican president and W. “was clearly not impressed with the McCain operation.”

One day, W. was told that a joint appearance in Phoenix with McCain, designed to show the two men could stand to be on the same stage together, was going to be closed to the press.

“If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” W. snapped. “I’ve got better things to do.”

Then the president was informed that the event was going to be closed because McCain was having trouble drawing a crowd. Latimer writes that an incredulous Bush mordantly asked: “He can’t get five hundred people to show up for an event in his hometown?”

Happy he wasn’t the only political wallflower, W. drove home the point: “I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford. This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

Like W., Bill Clinton had an awkward final act supporting Gore, even though Gore was distancing himself from Clinton, and Bubba was chafing at the misguided Gore campaign. Like W. with McCain, he felt a Gore defeat would be bad for his legacy.

In his new book, “The Clinton Tapes,” Taylor Branch describes an explosive meeting between Clinton and Gore after the election characterized by Clinton as “surreal.” Gore said people around him blamed Clinton’s scandalous shadow for the defeat. And Clinton, who told Branch that W. was “an empty suit, meaner than his dad,” shot back that if Gore had used him more in the last 10 days in places where he was still popular, he could have swung the election. He chastised Gore for not running on bigger themes and for dropping the issue he was most passionate about: the environment.

Gore asked Clinton for an explanation of Monica Lewinsky; he wanted an apology. Clinton blew up. Focusing on his mistakes, he told his V.P., demeaned voters and ignored the public’s business.

Branch summed up Clinton’s bottom line to Gore: “By God, Hillary had a helluva lot more reason to resent Clinton than Gore did, and yet she ran unabashedly on the Clinton-Gore record” for the Senate and won handily. Gore, Clinton said, was in “Neverland.”

The wrong turns Clinton and W. took made it harder for Gore and McCain to get elected. But in the final analyses, Clinton and W., both clever pols, were right: Gore and McCain tripped themselves up with awful campaigns.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.

Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity because too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.

What do we know about necessity? It is the mother of invention. And when China decides it has to go green out of necessity, watch out. You will not just be buying your toys from China. You will buy your next electric car, solar panels, batteries and energy-efficiency software from China.

I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet.

Well, folks. Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean-tech. The view of China in the U.S. Congress — that China is going to try to leapfrog us by out-polluting us — is out of date. It’s going to try to out-green us. Right now, China is focused on low-cost manufacturing of solar, wind and batteries and building the world’s biggest market for these products. It still badly lags U.S. innovation. But research will follow the market. America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.

“If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they’ll win,” says David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy. “If we both invest in 21st-century technologies, challenging each other, we all win.”

Unfortunately, we’re still not racing. It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star. Instead of a strategic response, too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we’re always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hat’s off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its “obstructionist tactics.” All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.’s why they still belong to the chamber.

China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.

“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”

I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.

“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”

Of course, China will continue to grow with cheap, dirty coal, to arrest over-eager environmentalists and to strip African forests for wood and minerals. Have no doubt about that. But have no doubt either that, without declaring it, China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our peril.

Now here’s Mr. Rich:

The most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration.

Holbrooke’s verdict on “Lessons in Disaster” was not only correct but more prescient than even he could have imagined. This book’s intimate account of White House decision-making is almost literally being replayed in Washington (with Holbrooke himself as a principal actor) as the new president sets a course for the war in Afghanistan. The time for all Americans to catch up with this extraordinary cautionary tale is now.

Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don’t know whether Afghanistan would be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam’s apocalyptic climax. What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office.

The remarkable parallels to 2009 became clear last week, when the Obama administration’s internal conflicts about Afghanistan spilled onto the front page. On Monday The Washington Post published Bob Woodward’s account of a confidential assessment by the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, warning that there could be “mission failure” if more troops aren’t added in the next 12 months. In Wednesday’s Times White House officials implicitly pushed back against the leak of McChrystal’s report by saying that the president is “exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan.”

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

Within Kennedy’s administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs’ repeated call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara) and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s special military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball’s dissenting role.

Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”

Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A. helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn’t have a coup in his toolbox.

Goldstein points out there are other indisputable then-and-now analogies as well. Much as Vietnam could not be secured over the centuries by China, France, Japan or the United States, so Afghanistan has been a notorious graveyard for the ambitions of Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviets. “Some states in world politics are simply not susceptible to intervention by the great powers,” Goldstein told me. He also notes that the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Vietnam share the same geographical advantage. As the porous border of neighboring North Vietnam provided sanctuary and facilitated support to our enemy then, so Pakistan serves our enemy today.

Most worrisome, in Goldstein’s view, is the notion that a recycling of America’s failed “clear and hold” strategy in Vietnam could work in Afghanistan. How can American forces protect the population, let alone help build a functioning nation, in a tribal narco-state consisting of some 40,000 mostly rural villages over an area larger than California and New York combined?

Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan’s Qaeda camps from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens?

Already hawks are arguing that any deviation from McChrystal’s combat-troop requests is tantamount to surrender and “immediate withdrawal.” But that all-in or all-out argument, a fixture of the Iraq debate, is just as false a choice here. Obama is not contemplating either surrender to terrorists or withdrawal from Afghanistan. One prime alternative is the counterterrorism plan championed by Biden. As The Times reported, it would scale back American forces in Afghanistan to “focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan.”

Obama’s decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he’ll be extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his country or his own party behind him. He’ll have to explain why more American lives should be yoked to the Karzai “government.” He’ll have to be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what his predecessor never did: How much — and what — are you willing to sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?

If Obama instead decides to embrace some variation on the Biden option, he’ll have a different challenge. He’ll face even more violent attacks than he did this summer. When George Will wrote a recent column titled “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan,” he was accused of “urging retreat and accepting defeat” (by William Kristol) and of “waving the bloody shirt” (by Fred Kagan, an official adviser to McChrystal who, incredibly enough, freelances as a blogger at National Review). The editorial page at Will’s home paper, The Washington Post, declared that deviating from McChrystal’s demand for more troops “would both dishonor and endanger this country.” If a conservative columnist can provoke neocon invective this hysterical, just imagine what will be hurled at Obama.

But the author of “Lessons in Disaster” does not believe that a change in course in Afghanistan would be a disaster for Obama’s young presidency. “His greatest qualities as president,” Goldstein says, “are his quality of mind and his quality of judgment — his dispassionate ability to analyze a situation. If he was able to do that here, he might more than survive a short-term hit from the military and right-wing pundits. He would establish his credibility as a president who will override his advisers when a strategy doesn’t make sense.”

Either way, it’s up to the president to decide what he thinks is right for the country’s security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarily pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of his own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but of confidence and strength. It is, perhaps, Obama’s most significant down payment yet on being, in the most patriotic sense, Kennedyesque.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Ms. Collins says “Score One for the Diplomats,” and that while the United Nations can be feckless and frustrating, it’s not any more so than, say, the United States Senate.  Mr. Blow, in “Obama’s Tortoise Tactics,” says through the seething summer of discontent, President Obama maintained a Pollyannaish disposition. Some thought it worrisome or weak. But maybe not so fast.  Mr. Herbert, in “Fed Up With War,” says the difference between the public’s take on Afghanistan and that of the nation’s top leadership is both stunning and ominous. A clash is coming.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

We are gathered here today to praise the United Nations, not to make fun of it.

Although it’s sort of hard to resist when you’ve got Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi working on a plan to dismember Switzerland. This thought is not central to my argument about the U.N., but we live in troubling times and it might be very soothing to stop worrying about Iran for a while and listen to world leaders argue about the Swiss Menace.

The president of Switzerland, Hans-Rudolf Merz, paid a conciliation call on Qaddafi, who is camping out at the Libyan Embassy in New York City this week after literally being unable to find a patch of ground on which to pitch his tent. Merz has been trying to get Libya to spring two Swiss businessmen, who have been stuck in Tripoli since 2008, when Qaddafi decided that Switzerland is a “world mafia and not a state.” He also withdrew Libya’s assets from Swiss banks, recalled his diplomats and closed the Nestlé office in Tripoli.

This would be immediately after the Geneva police arrested Qaddafi’s son Hannibal and his wife for beating two servants with a coat hanger and belt while they were staying in one of the city’s luxury hotels. The servants later withdrew their complaint after receiving what The Associated Press said was “compensation from an undisclosed source.”

Unappeased, Qaddafi submitted a U.N. proposal to abolish Switzerland altogether and divide the territory among its next-door neighbors.

Hannibal has an interesting résumé, which includes being picked up in Paris for drunken driving at 90 miles per hour on the wrong side of the Champs Élysées. On another occasion, he was taken into custody by French police after he allegedly pulled a gun on officers who came to his hotel room to investigate reports that he was beating his girlfriend. After he was released, he was quickly arrested again in another hotel for breaking up the furniture. Perhaps he has a problem with rented rooms.

But we digress. About the United Nations: For eight years, the Bush White House regarded the U.N. mainly as an annoyance, a mole in the garden of the new American world order. Now we are in the age of the Obama, and trying to once again play well with others.

Qaddafi’s weird performance before the General Assembly on opening day was a bit of a blow to the American plan to deal with the U.N. seriously, although the 96-minute speech may have suffered from the fact that his translator collapsed somewhere into the second hour. But things improved a lot when Obama got the Security Council to pass a resolution on nuclear proliferation, just before he and the leaders of Britain and France dramatically blew the whistle on Iran for hiding a second uranium-enrichment plant from U.N. nuclear inspectors.

The resolution encourages member nations to consider whether the folks who buy their nuclear technology are allowing the U.N. to keep track of what they’re doing with it. It also encourages nations to get their nuclear materials secure within four years.

There has never been so much encouragement this side of elementary school tee-ball leagues. Basically, the Security Council resolved that it would be really keen if members refrained from selling nuclear bomb kits to just anybody who happened to show up at the door.

There are two ways to look at this. One is that it just goes to show that the U.N. can’t really step up to the plate. “Fluff and stuff,” grumbled John Bolton, the U.N.-hating U.N. ambassador during the Bush administration.

The other is to feel that while the United Nations can be feckless and frustrating, it’s not any more so than, say, the United States Senate, which has been busy this week trying to make sure that health reform does not involve anything that might really work.

Legislative bodies are maddening, even when they’re made up of people from the same country. In fact, if the United Nations was the New York State Senate, instead of passing a semi-toothless resolution, the Security Council members would have started locking the doors on each other and arguing about whether France could be counted as part of a quorum if its delegate just walked across the room to get a cup of coffee.

If it was the Connecticut House of Representatives, China and Russia would have been too busy playing solitaire on their computers to pay attention. The State Legislature in Hartford was recently embarrassed by pictures of two lawmakers playing card games on their state-issued laptops during a late-night budget debate. However, if the U.N. had handed out similar equipment to the General Assembly, there might have been a lot more people hanging around through that Qaddafi speech.

Anyhow, I’m thinking — good work, Security Council. At least it wasn’t a study commission.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

Has President Obama outsmarted us all?

This was conservatives’ seething summer of discontent and unhinged hysteria: town halls, tea parties and tirades. They captured headlines and gained momentum. Misinformation ran amuck. President Obama’s approval ratings tumbled. Through it all, Obama maintained a Pollyannaish, laissez-faire disposition. Some found this worrisome. Others, like me, even thought it weak. But maybe not so fast.

According to Gallup poll results released on Wednesday, the president’s approval rating has stopped falling and has leveled out in the low-50 percents, about the same as Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s at this point in their presidencies (both two-termers, lest we forget).

The United Nations General Assembly and the G-20 summit have catapulted Obama back onto the world stage where leaders treat him like the best jock in the high school cafeteria. Even his adversaries praise him. His leadership in these forums to tighten the screws on Iran for its nuclear programs project a presidential certitude and sense of steel and authority that was sorely needed and sorely missed.

Furthermore, after Dick Cheney’s thrashing and whining about the Obama administration making us less safe, a rash of recent terror arrests has sent the signal that the aggressive pursuit of terror suspects remains a top priority.

Then there is the interminable health care debate. It seems that the Republican babble may have backfired.

According to a poll released last week by the Pew Research Center, most Americans think that the health care debate has been “rude and disrespectful” and most of those who hold this view blame the opponents of the proposed legislation.

Obama told “60 Minutes” last week that if a health care bill passes, “I own it.” But, if it fails, the Republicans will own it.

According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published on Wednesday, a plurality of respondents said that if health care reform fails, the Republicans will be at fault. Those who disapproved of the way that Republicans are handling the health care debate outnumbered those who approved of their behavior by a margin of more than 3 to 1.

And, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Thursday, more people said Republican opposition to Obama’s health care proposals is politically motivated than those who said that Democratic support of them is politically motivated.

Maybe Obama was wise to hang back. While anger can simmer forever, overheated outrage is exhausting and ultimately counterproductive.

Anyone familiar with Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” surely remembers this lesson: slow and steady wins the race. I was beginning to think of Obama as the hare, but maybe he’s the tortoise.

And now here’s Mr. Herbert:

Most Americans, looking at a globe, would be hard pressed to find Afghanistan. Americans on the whole know very little about the land or its people — and care even less. They know we’re at war over there, wherever it is, but if you were to ask what a Pashtun is or mention the name Abdullah Abdullah you would most likely get a blank stare.

Americans’ minds are on other things, like trying to figure out why, if the Great Recession is over, as Ben Bernanke seems to believe, the employment landscape still looks like a toxic waste dump.

A New York Times/CBS News poll found that eight years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, there is a general feeling of disenchantment with our military involvement there and a desire to bring it to an end. About half of all Americans believe that the war has had no effect on the threat of terrorism, and a majority want the troops out of there in two years.

Americans are tired of the war. Some of the young people currently being outfitted for combat were just 10 or 11 years old when Al Qaeda struck the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. They are heading off to a conflict that most Americans are no longer interested in. The difference between the public’s take on this war and that of the nation’s top civilian and military leadership is both stunning and ominous.

A clash is coming. President Obama may be reconsidering his idea of substantially increasing the number of American troops, but no one at the higher echelons of government is suggesting that anything other than a long, hard, tragic and expensive campaign lies ahead — with no promise of ultimate victory, or even a serious definition of what would constitute victory.

The two broad options being explored and argued about at the White House, the Pentagon and elsewhere are an all-out counterinsurgency strategy, which includes an emphasis on protecting and wooing the Afghan population, and a more narrow focus on counterterrorism. This is a distinction that is not nearly as clear cut as it sounds. President Obama says our goal in Afghanistan is to defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies. That’s counterterrorism, and it’s a goal with which few Americans would argue.

But the administration also argues that it is impossible to defeat Al Qaeda and eventually bring American troops home if we don’t fight the Taliban on the ground and simultaneously work to establish an effective government in Afghanistan with an armed force capable of protecting its own population. That’s classic counterinsurgency and nation-building.

The president’s goals, however you characterize the strategies under consideration, may or may not be achievable. But they are definitely not achievable in a short period of time, without the loss of a great deal of lives, and without a tremendous continued expenditure of American dollars.

The public has not been prepared for a renewed big-time, long-haul effort in Afghanistan. And if American casualties increase substantially, support for the war will diminish that much more. There is very little tolerance in the U.S. for the reality of war, which is why the images in the media are so sanitized. The public’s concept of warfare, for the most part, is the product of Hollywood movies about the heroics of the so-called Greatest Generation, and video games.

This disconnect between what the public is expecting, or willing to accept, regarding the war in Afghanistan and what the White House and the Pentagon are in fact planning is vast. Americans want their politicians to concentrate on the economy here at home. After the long, sad experience in Iraq, and the worst economic shock since the Depression, they are not up for extended combat and endless nation-building in Afghanistan.

The armchair generals, in full popcorn mode, are enthusiastically debating the merits of this strategy or that, and speculating on the political implications for President Obama. It’s an exhilarating intellectual exercise. But the American public has other priorities in mind.

What we need to be assessing are the implications of forcing still more conflict on a public that is broke, dispirited and fed up with eight years of continuous warfare that have not yielded a victory parade or a sense that the nation is reasonably secure.

If the conflict in Afghanistan is as crucial to American national security as President Obama has said, then he needs to make that case to the public, clearly and compellingly. A presidential call to arms to meet a threat of that magnitude should surely overshadow the national debate on health care.

Otherwise, let’s explore creative alternatives to endless warfare and start bringing the weary troops home.

From Friday — Bobo and Krugman

Bobo, who’s never been closer to the military than waving a flag at a July 4 parade, apparently knows just what to do in Afghanistan.  In “The Afghan Imperative” he squeaks that fighting the Afghan war the easy way hasn’t worked. Only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success.  He must have visions…  Prof. Krugman, in “It’s Easy Being Green,” says saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.  Here’s Bobo:

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

There is simply no historical record to support these illusions. The historical evidence suggests that these middling strategies just create a situation in which you have enough forces to assume responsibility for a conflict, but not enough to prevail.

The record suggests what Gen. Stanley McChrystal clearly understands — that only the full counterinsurgency doctrine offers a chance of success. This is a doctrine, as General McChrystal wrote in his remarkable report, that puts population protection at the center of the Afghanistan mission, that acknowledges that insurgencies can only be defeated when local communities and military forces work together.

To put it concretely, this is a doctrine in which small groups of American men and women are outside the wire in dangerous places in remote valleys, providing security, gathering intelligence, helping to establish courts and building schools and roads.

These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building. And we might as well acknowledge that it’s not an easy call. The costs and rewards are tightly balanced. But in the end, President Obama was right: “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror. … You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither.

Afghanistan is central to this effort partly because it could again become a safe haven to terrorists, but mostly because of its effects on the stability of Pakistan. As Stephen Biddle noted in a recent essay in The American Interest, the Taliban is a transnational Pashtun movement active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is part of a complex insurgency trying to topple the Pakistani regime.

Pakistan has a fragile government with an estimated 50 or more nuclear weapons. A Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would endanger the Pakistani regime at best, create a regional crisis for certain and lead to a nuclear-armed Al Qaeda at worst.

A Taliban reconquest would also, it should be said, be a moral atrocity from which American self-respect would not soon recover.

Proponents of withdrawal often acknowledge the costs of defeat but argue that the cause is hopeless anyway. On this, let me note a certain pattern. When you interview people who know little about Afghanistan, they describe an anarchic place that is the graveyard of empires. When you interview people who live there or are experts, they think those stereotypes are rubbish. They usually take a hardened but guardedly optimistic view. Read Clare Lockhart’s Sept. 17 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get a sense of the way many knowledgeable people view the situation.

Amidst all the problems, the NATO coalition has a few things going for it. First, American forces have become quite good at counterinsurgency. They have a battle-tested strategy, experienced troops and a superb new leadership team. According to the political scientists Andrew J. Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli, since World War II, counterinsurgency efforts that put population protection at their core have succeeded nearly 70 percent of the time.

Second, the enemy is wildly hated. Only 6 percent of Afghans want a Taliban return, while NATO is viewed with surprising favor. This is not Vietnam or even Iraq.

Third, while many Afghan institutions are now dysfunctional, there is a base on which to build. The Afghan Army is a successful institution. Local villages have their own centuries-old civic institutions. The National Solidarity Program was able to build development councils in 23,000 villages precisely because the remnants of civil society still exist.

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. … This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

Tell the families of the people who have died in Afghanistan that they were doing it “the easy way,” why don’t you, Bobo?  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents?

If so, you’ll love the next big debate: the fight over climate change.

The House has already passed a fairly strong cap-and-trade climate bill, the Waxman-Markey act, which if it becomes law would eventually lead to sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But on climate change, as on health care, the sticking point will be the Senate. And the usual suspects are doing their best to prevent action.

Some of them still claim that there’s no such thing as global warming, or at least that the evidence isn’t yet conclusive. But that argument is wearing thin — as thin as the Arctic pack ice, which has now diminished to the point that shipping companies are opening up new routes through the formerly impassable seas north of Siberia.

Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. As the blog Climate Progress puts it, opponents of climate change legislation “keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.”

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.

By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real G.D.P. will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that G.D.P. per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.

So where do the apocalyptic warnings about the cost of climate-change policy come from?

Are the opponents of cap-and-trade relying on different studies that reach fundamentally different conclusions? No, not really. It’s true that last spring the Heritage Foundation put out a report claiming that Waxman-Markey would lead to huge job losses, but the study seems to have been so obviously absurd that I’ve hardly seen anyone cite it.

Instead, the campaign against saving the planet rests mainly on lies.

Thus, last week Glenn Beck — who seems to be challenging Rush Limbaugh for the role of de facto leader of the G.O.P. — informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Beck. Similar — and similarly false — claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts.

A year ago I would have been shocked by this behavior. But as we’ve already seen in the health care debate, the polarization of our political discourse has forced self-proclaimed “centrists” to choose sides — and many of them have apparently decided that partisan opposition to President Obama trumps any concerns about intellectual honesty.

So here’s the bottom line: The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green.

Collins and Cohen

Mr. Kristof is off today.  Ms. Collins, in “A Tom DeLay Makeover,” says Tom DeLay made a spectacle of himself on national television; Sarah Palin gave a closed-door speech in Hong Kong. For politicians, it seems as if there’s more than one way to rehab an image.  Mr. Cohen, in “The Miracle of Dullness,” says Germany has become reassuring to the point of dullness. Europe’s most powerful nation is electing its leader — and nobody really cares. Germans are not unhappy but uninspired.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Let’s talk about midcareer life changes. Or, what the heck, late-career life changes. We’re Americans. We don’t acknowledge deadlines.

Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, was ridiculed for doing the cha-cha on “Dancing With the Stars.” But you have to admit, DeLay’s decision to make a spectacle of himself on national television was a terrific game-changer.

His performance did create the kind of uncomfortable feeling you experienced when your crusty Uncle Fred got drunk at your graduation party and tried to sing “My Way.” But I bet not a single person watching DeLay slide across the floor on his rhinestone-encrusted knees with that manic grin on his face was thinking: “Gee, I wonder how that money-laundering indictment is working out for him?”

And look at Sarah Palin. Everybody thought that she was a desperately uninformed goofball whom the Republican Party might, nevertheless, someday nominate for president in an effort to cement its reputation as worst major American political organization since the Know-Nothings. Then this week she went off to Hong Kong and gave an 80-minute, closed-door speech to financial fund managers, for which she was paid an undisclosed but indisputably vast sum of money. The early reviews from people exiting the ballroom ranged from “well prepared” to “boring.”

Given that she started the day as a celebrity whose deepest recorded thought was how only dead fish go with the flow, this was quite a triumph. If Palin can arrange to make all her future speeches in Asia, with no reporters present and tons of money falling out of the ceiling at every stop, I think she has a real shot at rehabilitation.

For those in need of a life change without a six-figure speech in the offing, consider the advice given by the heroine of “The Good Wife,” the new TV series about the wife of a disgraced politician: Just keep trudging along. “It’s the superficial things that matter most right now,” said Alicia Florrick, the lead character, as she extolled the virtues of fixing your makeup and getting a good haircut.

This worked great for Alicia. Her hair looked great even while she was visiting her husband in the clink. And by the end of the first episode she had managed to restart the legal career she abandoned in her youth, win her first case, free a second-grade teacher unjustly charged with murder and reconnect with a hunky former law school classmate. Just by taking it one day at a time. And not all that many days, at that.

Sometimes, friends can show you the way. Barack Obama has been trying to put his pal David Paterson on a more fulfilling path than Paterson’s current one, which involves being governor of New York and dragging down the entire Democratic slate in the 2010 elections. So far, the White House’s efforts have not gotten a particularly warm reception.

But perhaps that was because until now, New York didn’t have a lieutenant governor. If Paterson had left Albany to be, say, chief of an exciting new think tank located in a really excellent office in Manhattan, control of the state would have fallen to … well, hard to say. Probably whichever state senator could do the best impression of a junior high school delinquent shaking down the third graders for their milk money.

But this week, the state’s highest court ruled that Paterson’s desperate attempt to swear in Richard Ravitch as lieutenant governor while Ravitch was dining at a steakhouse in Brooklyn was actually legal. Who’d have thought? Despite his peculiar initiation, Ravitch is an eminently respectable guy who has held almost every appointive office in the state except Grand Marshal of the Columbus Day Parade. If Paterson decides he needs a life makeover, it’s clear sailing.

Here is the exciting part. Then there would be an opening for another new lieutenant governor! And I think I would be a really excellent candidate.

I am totally up for an exciting new challenge, but preferably one that does not involve mouthing “Wild Thing” while attempting to ballroom dance. And it would have to be something that would not force me to quit my current job, which I really like. So lieutenant governor would be perfect. Nothing ever gets done in Albany, and I could just sit in my shiny leather chair and work on my laptop all day.

New York has lost an uncommon number of elected officials over the last few years. So they’re probably starting to run out of people to plug up the holes. And I have good qualities that set me apart from many other possible contenders. For instance, I am not currently under indictment. And I have been very active in New York politics, in the sense that I have voted in all the elections, including that one for public advocate the other week in which only about 10 people took part.

If this doesn’t work out, there’s still the haircut.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Frankfurt:

I bumped down in Frankfurt at 10:55 AM. A German landing, I thought — unsubtle and punctual.

The sky was clear, an un-German sky, and the colors that assailed me were pink (Deutsche Telekom), yellow (Lufthansa) and gray: cool colors at some remove from Caspar David Friedrich’s ecstatic dusks in forests of Gothic gloom.

Friedrich’s passionate romanticism is under control these days in a Germany that has become reassuring to the point of dullness. Europe’s most powerful nation is electing its leader Sunday — and nobody really cares.

“Welcome to the most boring German election ever,” former foreign minister Joschka Fischer told me by way of greeting.

That was enough to compel me to write about the miracle of German dullness. It is cause for hope, a commodity the commodity-rich Middle East does not trade in.

The drudgery is also cause for concern: more on that later.

Lest anyone forget, the world spent a goodly chunk of the last century agonizing over the German question, ruing the proximity of the Polish border to Berlin, digesting the crime. It’s just 20 years since this country was made whole and, with it, Europe. Now mighty Germany chooses its chancellor and, for all people seem to care, the election might be for the Würzburg city council.

It’s not true that everything changes so that everything can remain the same. The German demon got extirpated by American tutelage, European convergence and the rule of law.

Modern Germany, the Johnny-come-lately of European powers, settled down. The German frisson faded to a yawn.

Perhaps Bärbel Bohley, the former East German dissident, summed up the experience, and let-down, of unification best: “We wanted justice and we got the rule of law.”

Another protest leader, Joachim Gauck, ran her close: “We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia.”

Such is the way of adrenalin. It dissipates.

And along comes Angela Merkel, the adrenalin-free Ossi, who has been a chancellor of unmemorable steadiness, and who, barring an upset, will be re-elected at the head of her center-right Christian Democratic Union.

Merkel has been a leader in the image of a settled Germany. Everything about her screams drama over — Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto; chain-smoking Schmidt (“a politician with vision needs to see an ophthalmologist”) fighting the fight for medium-range U.S. missiles; Kohl clasping Mitterrand’s hand at Verdun and later inhaling unification with unabashed appetite. Every risk-averse fiber in Merkel’s body proclaims the social-market consensus has prevailed, even through financial crisis.

The extent of discord may be measured by the fact that Merkel’s chief opponent is also her foreign minister in the governing Grand Coalition: Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democrat leader. He’s a likeable technocrat who always seems to be wondering how he ever ended up as a politician.

None of the above should suggest there’s nothing at stake. There is: a little. If Merkel gets her favored option — a center-right coalition with the liberal Free Democrats — tax cuts, nuclear power and support for the Afghan mission (Germany has sent more than 4,000 troops) will get a boost. If not, well, more of the same is in order. My sense is most Germans feel market reforms of recent years have gone far enough.

Germans are hunkered down, not unhappy but uninspired. This has been a campaign of astonishing intellectual nullity. I spoke of hope and concern: The former springs from Germany’s absorption of its eastern third and passage into normality, the latter from the country’s numbness.

Nothing — not the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, not the faltering direction of the European Union (once a German obsession, now a sideshow), not financial Armageddon — seems able to stir Germans from contemplation of their navels. This is bad for Europe. The world wanted a boring Germany for a while, but not to this degree, and anyway that time has passed.

Perhaps the center-right option would be a better outcome if only because the Social Democrats need time in the wilderness to resolve their relationship with the Left party. The Grand Coalition is an idea-dampening soporific. Prescription for more than four years is ill-advised.

Germany is in political transition. If the East has been economically absorbed, its political legacy, in the form of the Left party, has proved inhibiting, even paralyzing.

History moves in broad sweeps murky to its hindsight-deprived actors. We can say this: The eruption into the heart of Europe of a German nation state upended the Continent from 1871 to 1945 and a full “normalization” of Germany has taken from 1945 to the present. The long arc has been painful but hopeful.

The demon of instability, German-prodded, moved to the Middle East, where another modern nation state, Israel, in turn upended the order of things. Perhaps after 74 years (1871-1945), we will see glimmerings of a new, more peaceful regional order there. Hope is almost as stubborn as facts.

Hope, at least, is what my German years bequeathed me. Unsubtle and punctual bumpings-down now comfort me, like the unique hermetic thud of a heavy German door closing, one made to last and to fit.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo, in “Where the Wild Thing Is,” says Tom DeLay on “Dancing With the Stars” is a reminder that in our lowbrow-loving culture, a scoundrel can do the redemption tango simply by being a good sport.  The Moustache of Wisdom addresses “Cracks in Iran’s Clique” and says signs that the Iranian regime is becoming vulnerable might mean the United States is in a better position to negotiate a deal at the next round of talks.  Here’s MoDo:

Tom DeLay was icing his foot and resting his booty.

On Monday, his debut as a dancing fool (or just a fool, depending on whom you talk to), he had started at 10 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m., and his pre-stress fracture was acting up.

“It swole up a little bit,” he said, on the phone from Los Angeles. “The doctor says to keep icing it.”

That meant a delay in learning the tango from Cheryl Burke, his partner on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” who blessedly had never heard of the guy once dubbed “The Meanest Man in Congress” when he was first assigned to her.

“Cheryl says the tango’s macho, arrogant and aggressive, and I said, ‘That’s me,’ ” he recalled.

The Hammer, who in rehearsal admitted to feeling like “a complete goose” — and not simply because he had his golf shirt tucked into his sweat pants — is clinging to his Texas machismo even as he follows Cheryl’s instruction to find his “feminine side.”

“I’m being more feminine and a little prissy,” he said, using a word that smacks of über-alpha “I am not gay even though I have on heels and sparkles and want a disco-ball trophy” overcompensation.

“My brain is telling my hips, ‘We don’t do that.’ It’s not like a speech or a press conference. This is exposing your soul.

“At the beginning, I told Cheryl, ‘No rhinestones, no frilly shirts and no pink.’ Well, it didn’t take Cheryl two seconds to put rhinestones on me. And she swears she’s going to put ruffles on me for the tango — probably pink.”

It might be a sign of the apocalypse — a frilly Tom DeLay shimmying away from an indictment and onto “Dancing.” It’s certainly a blazing reminder that in our lowbrow-loving, no-attention-span culture, most any scoundrel can do the redemption tango simply by being a good sport.

“I’m very excited for people to see the real Tom DeLay,” the former House majority leader said. The Hammer vigorously flipped his fanny and played air guitar to the tune of the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” a song that came out in the mid-60s when the teenager was starting at Baylor University in Waco.

“I used to gator to this song in my wild days before I was kicked out of Baylor,” he said. “I was so good they nicknamed me ‘Gator.’ ”

No gatoring on campus, though. The Southern Baptist college banned dancing for 151 years, relenting in 1996.

“Somebody gave the school a student union building that had the most beautiful dance floor you ever saw with the provision that if we ever had a dance, they’d tear it down,” he said. “We had our dances off campus in hotel rooms and parking lots.”

So DeLay, 62, cutting loose in his orthopedic shoes with the cha-cha and his Texas mugshot grin, was the Lipitor version of the finale of “Footloose.” The judges gave him tepid scores in Monday’s male dance-off, but a scandal-plagued former Dallas Cowboy and George Hamilton’s glossy son rated lower.

The man whose house was christened “Macho Manor” back in his party-boy, “Hot Tub Tom” days in the Texas Legislature compared looking for his feminine side to “knocking on a closed door.” But he gave it a shot during his cha-cha by winking and pointing at Bruno Tonioli, the effervescently effeminate judge.

“You’re crazier than Sarah Palin!” Bruno shouted when a winded DeLay was done swiveling in a leopard-skin-sequin-trimmed brown get-up.

“I think that’s a great compliment,” DeLay told me afterward.

Once the Hammer tried to outfox Democrats. Now he’s trying to outfox-trot Donny Osmond. Once he whipped Republicans relentlessly to keep their votes in line. Now he says he and his daughter have “a strategy to whip the vote” on “Dancing.”

“Nothing complicated,” he said. “Twitter. Facebook. My daughter taught me how to tweet.”

The former exterminator drove the loony Clinton impeachment, pushed the nutty Terri Schiavo legislation, gutted the House ethics committee, engaged in gerrymandering schemes, enhanced the pay-to-play political culture and made the Republican Party so sulfurously partisan, ethically suspect and God-centric that voters recoiled.

He dropped out of politics in 2006 after a campaign finance violation indictment and ties to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

I asked DeLay about Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a watchdog group that had a “Dancing” watching party at a bar here featuring Hammer-tinis — an occasion to reiterate that DeLay was corrupt and should go to jail.

“I wish I could have gone,” said a cheery DeLay, adding that he’s not worried that his foes will skew the voting. “You can’t vote against somebody. You can only vote for me or somebody else.”

Would he want to be on another reality show?

“No,” he said. “I’d probably end up killing somebody on ‘Big Brother.’ ”

I didn’t watch the show (there’s not enough money in the world to bribe me to do that) but from the clips I saw The Hammer looked a bit light in the loafers…  And I’ll never forgive him for never letting me hear “Wild Thing” without the vision of him waggling his butt.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

For the first time since Iran began enriching uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon, we have a glimmer of hope for a diplomatic solution to this problem — as long as we are not too diplomatic, as long as the Iranian regime is made to understand that biting economic sanctions are an absolute certainty and military force by Israel is a live possibility.

The reason we now have a slight chance — and I really emphasize slight — for a negotiated deal is because Iran’s nuclear program has always been a survival strategy for Tehran’s ruling clique: what Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment, calls “the small cartel of hard-line clerics and nouveau riche Revolutionary Guardsmen who run Iran today.”

After stealing June’s elections, this ruling cartel is now more unpopular and illegitimate than ever. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot hold a rally in Tehran without hearing “death to the dictator” chants more than “death to America.” As a result, his government can ill afford real biting sanctions that would make life in Iran not only politically miserable but even more economically miserable — and his dictatorial clique even more unpopular.

I wouldn’t exaggerate this because this regime has never minded inflicting pain on its people, but this time it may be more vulnerable. That is why we may be in a position to say to the Iranian regime that continuing to grow its stockpiles of low-enriched uranium outside international controls, and suffering real economic sanctions, could threaten its survival more than it would help.

On Oct. 1, William Burns, the American under secretary of state, will join diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China for talks with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator to see whether any deal is possible.

While real sanctions are necessary to exploit this moment, they are not sufficient. We also need to keep alive the prospect that Israel could do something crazy. I don’t favor Israeli military action against Iran and hope we’re telling Israel that privately. But I do believe that U.S. officials, particularly the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, need to stop saying that publicly. Gates is a smart power player. He knows better. If any U.S. official is asked for an opinion on whether Israel should be allowed to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, there is only one right answer: Refer them to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2005 comment that Israel “might well decide to act first” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, and say nothing else. Why should we reassure Iran?

I would hope by now that the murderous crackdown on Iran’s mass democracy movement by the country’s oil-funded ruling cartel would have removed the last scales from the eyes of those Iran watchers who think this is simply a poor, misunderstood regime that really wants to repair its relations with the West, and we just have to learn how to speak to it properly. This is a brutal, cynical, corrupt, anti-Semitic regime that exploits the Palestinian cause and deliberately maintains a hostile posture to the West to justify its grip on power. A regime that relates to its own people with such coercive force is not going to be sweet-talked out of its nuclear program. Negotiating with such a regime without the reality of sanctions and the possibility of force is like playing baseball without a bat.

The U.S. is being advised to explore a variety of sanctions, including encouraging capital flight from Iran, thereby creating a run on the Iranian currency. It is also considering a global ban on companies doing business with Iran’s oil industry, which would be a big blow to the regime, because its oil industry — which provides the vast majority of government revenues — needs modernizing and that requires foreign technological help and financing.

By improving relations with Russia, President Obama has done a good job of increasing his leverage with Iran. But as the negotiations begin, there is another dimension that we have to keep in mind: Obama officials want to be careful not to say that all they care about is a deal that neutralizes Iran’s nukes, and, if we get that, we have no problem with those in power in Tehran. That would be a rebuff of Iranian democrats. This will get tricky.

“The Obama administration must reconcile how to deal with a disgraced regime, which presents urgent national security challenges, while at the same time not betray a democratic movement whose success could have enormously positive implications for the U.S.,” said Sadjadpour.

“If we neglect to be vocal about human rights,” he added, “our message to the Iranian people is ‘We don’t care about you. We only care about nukes.’ Ultimately, it has to be Iranians themselves who change their history. We can’t want it more than they do. But it should be a U.S. foreign policy imperative not to do anything to deter the green movement’s success or alter its trajectory. We cannot forget that the underlying problem we have with Iran has more to do with the character of its regime than its nuclear ambitions.”

Bobo and Herbert

Ahhhh…  The hagiography begins.  Bobo has extruded a thing called “Three Cheers for Irving,” in which he gurgles that Irving Kristol thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age, but he was able to pick a side without losing his clarity.  Irving Kristol deserves to rot in hell for eternity simply because he spawned Bloody Billy Kristol.  Mr. Herbert, in “The Hard and Bitter Truth,” says President Obama will face hard realities if he continues the war in Afghanistan.  Here’s Bobo:

Irving Kristol was born into a fanatical century and thrust himself into every ideologically charged battle of his age. In the 1930s, as a young socialist, he fought the Stalinists. In the 1940s, as a soldier, he fought fascism. In the decades beyond, as a writer and intellectual, he engaged with McCarthyism, the cold war, the Great Society, the Woodstock generation, the culture wars of the 1970s, the Reagan revolution and so on.

The century was filled with hysterias, all of which he refused to join. There were fanaticisms, none of which he had any part in. Kristol, who died on Friday, seemed to enter life with an intellectual demeanor that he once characterized as “detached attachment.”

He would champion certain causes. He could arrive at surprising and radical conclusions. He was unabashedly neoconservative. But he also stood apart, and directed his skeptical gaze even on his own positions, and even on the things to which he was most loyal.

“There are no benefits without costs in human affairs,” he once wrote. And so there is no idea so true and no movement so pure that it doesn’t require scrutiny. There was no position in this fallen world without flaws.

So while others were marching to barricades, picking out bits of the truth that confirmed their own prejudices, editing contrary evidence and working themselves up a righteous lather, Kristol would adopt an attitude of smiling forbearance. He was able to pick a side without losing his clarity.

Kristol championed capitalism and wrote brilliantly about Adam Smith. But like Smith, he could only give two cheers for capitalism, because the system of creative destruction has victims as well as beneficiaries.

Kristol championed middle-class virtues like faith, family and responsibility, especially during the 1960s when they were so much under attack. But he acknowledged that bourgeois culture could be boring and spiritually unsatisfying.

Kristol championed democracy but understood its limitations. He emphasized that the American founders believed in a democratic system, but were appalled by the democratic faith: the idea that the majority view should be followed in all circumstances. They built a system that was half-democracy and half a republic, designed to acknowledge and also subdue popular will.

Kristol embraced the welfare state (one of his great achievements was to reconcile conservatism with the New Deal), but he was skeptical of most individual proposals. Improving society is so intractably hard that all efforts to do so should be subject to the most careful scrutiny.

His goal, he wrote, was “not to dismantle the welfare state in the name of free-market economics but rather to reshape it so as to attach it to the conservative predispositions of the people.” He believed that government programs that were not paternalistic, but merely provided social insurance, would “engender larger loyalties,” which is “precisely what the art of government, properly understood, is all about.”

Kristol was easily the most influential contemporary writer in my life, and while going over my worn collections, I’ve wondered where this attitude of detached attachment came from.

My first guess is ethnic. Kristol grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn and seems to have absorbed the elemental Jewish commandment: Don’t be a schmuck. Don’t fall for fantastical notions that have nothing to do with the way people really are.

My second guess is philosophical. Kristol wrote in a time when intellectuals saw themselves as heirs to the Enlightenment, by which they meant the French Enlightenment. They put their faith in a rational elite and a moral avant-garde that would champion justice, virtue and equality by leading social and political revolutions.

But Kristol was drawn to the other Enlightenment: the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, led by Lord Shaftesbury, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. This was a more prosaic Enlightenment, which was hostile to passionate politics. The leaders of the Scottish environment hoped that progress might come gradually and organically — if individuals were given the liberty to develop their own responsible habits and if they themselves built institutions to guide them on their way.

My third guess is moral. In “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky has his Antichrist flaunt a banner that, in modern form, reads: “First make people prosperous, and then ask of them virtue.”

Kristol argued that this was the great seduction of modern politics — to believe that problems that were essentially moral and civic could be solved by economic means. They can’t. Political problems, even many economic problems, are, at heart, ethical and cultural problems. And improving the attitudes and virtues of a nation is, at best, a slow, halting process.

Kristol pursued this task by being cheerful, patient and realistic — by being at once courageously committed and skeptically detached.

Here’s Mr. Herbert:

President Obama is in the uncomfortable position of staring reality in the face in Afghanistan. Reality is not blinking.

The president’s handpicked point man in the war zone, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wants more troops and a stepped-up commitment by the United States that would lock us into the conflict indefinitely, with nothing like an exit strategy in sight, or even a conception of what victory might look like.

Mr. Obama himself has banged the war drums loudly, having already increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and declaring just last month that the war is absolutely essential to American security, that it “is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

Among the many problems for the president on this front is the sobering fact that most ordinary Americans do not seem to agree. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 51 percent of respondents believed the war has not been worth its costs, and only 26 percent favored sending more troops.

That does not bode well for an expensive and debilitating conflict that is about to enter its 9th year and would go on for untold years to come if the president decides to double down on America’s military commitment.

Senator John McCain gave us a compelling insight into these matters in a foreword that he wrote about Vietnam for David Halberstam’s book, “The Best and the Brightest”:

“War is far too horrible a thing to drag out unnecessarily,” he said. “It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn’t support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay.

“No other national endeavor requires as much unshakable resolve as war. If the nation and the government lack that resolve, it is criminal to expect men in the field to carry it alone.”

The only thing that needs to be updated about Mr. McCain’s comments is that we now regularly send women as well as men off to war.

In the case of Afghanistan, we’re sending them off to fight and possibly die in support of a government that is incompetent and riddled with corruption and narcotics traffickers. We’re putting them in the field with Afghan forces that are ill trained, ill equipped and in all-too-many instances unwilling to fight with the courage and tenacity of the American forces. And we’re sending them off to engage in a mishmash of a mission that alternates incoherently between aggressively fighting insurgents and the admirable but unachievable task of nation-building in a society in which most Americans are clueless about the history, culture, politics and mores.

In a confidential assessment of the war prepared for President Obama, General McChrystal wrote: “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials and [the American-led NATO force’s] own errors have given Afghans little reason to support their government.”

A friend of mine who lives in South Carolina sent me an e-mail about a young serviceman in civilian clothes whom she and her husband noticed as he talked on a public telephone in the Atlanta airport last week. He was 19 or 20 years old and quite thin. His clothes and his shoes were worn, my friend said, but the thing she noticed most “was the sadness in his eyes and his sweet demeanor.”

The young man was speaking to his mom in a voice that was quite emotional. My friend recalled him saying, “We’re about to board for Oklahoma for the training before we move out. I didn’t want to bother Amber at work, so please tell her I called if you don’t think it will upset her too much. … I miss you all so much and love you, and I just don’t know how I’ll get through this.”

At the end of the call, the serviceman had tears in his eyes and my friend said she did, too. She wrote in the e-mail: “I stood up and wished him good luck, and he smiled the sweetest smile that has haunted me ever since.”

As President Obama tries to decide what to do about Afghanistan, reality is insisting that he take into account the worn-down condition of our military after so many years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the soaring budget deficits and sky-high unemployment numbers here at home in a country that is hurting badly and could use its own dose of nation-building.

Mr. Obama, in the face of these daunting realities, is said to be re-thinking his plans to ratchet up American involvement in Afghanistan. One can only hope.

The Pasty Little Putz, Cohen and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz, in “The Self-Correcting Presidency,” says George W. Bush made two disaster-averting interventions for which presidents usually get canonized — but in his case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch.  Mr. Cohen, who is in Lisbon, sends in “Of Polish Angst and NATO.”  He says President Obama’s move on missiles highlights fissures in NATO as it tries to redefine its role for the 21st century.  Prof. Krugman, in “Reform or Bust,” says putting limitations on how bankers are compensated is a populist idea, but it is also good politics and good economics.  Here’s the PLP:

Last week, the Census Bureau released a statistical report on the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. The numbers were brutal. On every indicator, Americans lost ground during the Bush era. The median income slumped. The poverty rate increased. The percentage of Americans without health insurance rose.

Adding insult to injury, the umpteenth insider look at Bush administration’s dysfunction was unveiled last week as well, courtesy of an obscure second-term speechwriter named Matt Latimer. (Next up: Bush’s White House chef tells all!) Latimer’s memoir, excerpted in GQ, offers grist for Bush-whackers of both parties. For liberals, there’s Dubya the incurious frat boy, flubbing policy details and cracking wise about Hillary Clinton’s posterior. For conservatives eager to prove that the most unpopular president in 50 years was never really one of them, there’s Bush the crypto-liberal, who dismisses the conservative movement and boasts that he personally “redefined the Republican Party.”

The census report is yet another nail in the coffin of Bush’s reputation; Latimer’s tell-all seems more like a thumbtack. Both are reminders that it’s hard to imagine his presidency being remembered as anything but a failure, by liberals and conservatives alike.

But if Bush is destined to go down as a failed president, come what may, he looks increasingly like an unusual sort of failure.

America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.

Both fixes remain controversial. But for the moment, both look like the sort of disaster-averting interventions for which presidents get canonized. It’s just that in Bush’s case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch.

This leaves him in an unusual position where the judgments of future generations are concerned. On foreign policy, Bush looks a lot like Lyndon Johnson — but only if Johnson, after years of unsuccessful escalation, had bequeathed Richard Nixon a new strategy that enabled U.S. troops to withdraw from Vietnam with their honor largely intact. On economic matters, he resembles Herbert Hoover — but only if Hoover, after presiding over the stock market crash of 1929, had engineered an economic response that nipped the Great Depression in the bud.

It’s true that Bush didn’t personally formulate the surge, or craft the bailout. But he was, well, the decider, and if he takes the blame — rightly — for what Donald Rumsfeld wrought, then he should get credit for Gen. David Petraeus’s successes in Iraq, and for blessing the sweeping decisions that Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke made in last September’s desperate weeks.

And if we give Bush credit on these fronts, it’s worth reassessing one of the major critiques of his presidency — that it was fatally insulated, by ideology and personality, from both the wisdom of the Washington elite and the desires of the broader public.

In reality, many of the Bush-era ventures that look worst in hindsight were either popular with the public at the time or blessed by the elite consensus. Voters liked the budget-busting tax cuts and entitlement expansions. The Iraq war’s cheering section included prominent Democrats and scores of liberal pundits. And save for a few prescient souls, everybody — right and left, on Wall Street and Main Street — was happy to board the real-estate express and ride it off an economic cliff.

Bush-era bipartisanship did produce some defensible legislation (No Child Left Behind, for instance). But more often, it produced travesties like the failed attempt at “comprehensive” immigration reform, lobbyist feeding frenzies like the 2005 energy bill, and boondoggles like the Department of Homeland Security.

By contrast, Bush’s best initiatives often lacked a constituency outside the White House: His AIDS-in-Africa program; his insistence, vindicated by subsequent scientific breakthroughs, on seeking alternatives to embryo-destroying research; his failed second-term proposals for Social Security and tax reform.

And perhaps his best decisions, on the surge and the bailout, were made from the bunker of a seemingly-ruined presidency — when his approval ratings had bottomed out, his credibility was exhausted and his allies had abandoned him.

This is not a blueprint that future presidents will want to follow. But the next time an Oval Office occupant sees his popularity dissolve and his ambitions turn to dust, he can take comfort from Bush’s example. It suggests that it’s possible to become a good president even — or especially — when you can no longer hope to be a great one.

Words fail me…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

“How could Obama choose such a day?”

That was the anguished outburst of a senior Polish officer attending a meeting of NATO chiefs of defense here when asked what he thought of the U.S. president’s cancellation last week of plans to place missile interceptors in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic.

The officer was referring to the fact that the announcement came on Sept. 17, the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland. A gesture to Russia on this date — a “brave” decision said Vladimir Putin — was the rough equivalent for the Poles of their announcing concessions to a U.S. foe on 9/11.

Poland is now one of the very few places in Europe that prefers former President Bush to Obama.

Now I’m sure Obama had no desire to insult Poland, even if the announcement also came as Russia conducted large-scale military maneuvers with Belarus, an exercise on its western flank that summons the darkest specters of post-Soviet Polish and Baltic-state angst. As U.S. timing goes, this was pitiful.

Strategy is another matter. The new U.S. plan to deploy proven SM-3 interceptor missiles, first at sea and later on land, makes better sense overall. It’s nimbler and saner on the Iranian threat. Why goad the Russian bear for little gain?

Even the Polish generals at the conclave of NATO’s military committee accepted some of the strategic arguments for the switch, but their reaction was governed by enduring Soviet trauma: Poles — like Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians — want the United States as visible on their soil as possible to deter Russian prowling.

That feeling is not just a Cold War hangover. The Russian incursion into Georgia last year caused central European shivers. Moscow succeeded in relegating the Georgian and Ukrainian bids for NATO membership to a place somewhere backward of the back burner.

Gosh, founding alliance members mused, imagine if Georgia had already been in NATO! Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty is clear: “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and will trigger the “use of armed force” in “collective self-defense.”

Were boys from Turin and Topeka really ready to die for Tbilisi?

For Poland, as for other newer NATO members who joined the West after falling on the totalitarian side of the post-World War II European carve-up, Article 5 is beyond sacred. It is the very foundation and essence of the alliance. Changing it is as unthinkable as disputing the existence of God at the Vatican.

That is not the case for the United States and its allies in “old” Europe, who, six decades on from NATO’s foundation, in a transformed world, are as conscious of the shortcomings of Article 5 as they are aware of its iconic status.

What of a cyberattack on a NATO member causing lethal damage? Or a biological attack? Or an act that directly threatens energy security? Should the notion of “collective self-defense,” with its old-fashioned basis in defense of territory against Antwerp-bound Soviet tanks, not be replaced by a more flexible formulation like “collective security?” And, in light of the Afghan mission and the global nature of threats, do the geographical limits of Article 5 make sense?

All these questions confront NATO as it embarks on an attempt to redefine its “Strategic Concept” for the 21st century. This is a necessary, indeed an overdue, exercise. The power shifts of globalization (some of them toward new anti-Western poles), the changed nature of modern conflict (unwinnable through force alone), new threats and the traumatic “out-of-area” Afghan experience all demand a radical rethink.

But as the splits between new and old NATO members here make clear — differences centered on Russia and alliance priorities — the exercise will not be easy. Afghanistan also has revealed fissures between states ready to put troops in harm’s way and others reluctant to do so.

A 12-member group, headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, is leading the review, but has made the initial mistake of not including a military figure, active or retired. Strategy is useless unless matched to capacity. Only a soldier can tell you about that.

I remain an Atlanticist convinced of NATO’s relevance. The millions clamoring to get into the Euro-American community from the un-free or less-free world pay tribute to the “normality” (Adam Michnik’s word) underwritten by the alliance. But NATO has failed to level with its citizens and the world about what it has become since 1989. The new Strategic Concept, due in 2010, must fix that.

Other recommendations: focus on values (freedom, stability, pluralism, the rule of law); stress partnerships; avoid the arrogant-sounding “global actor” in favor of “actor in a globalized world;” be succinct (the founding treaty was 23 sentences); and reinterpret Article 5 without rewording it (think amendments to the U.S. Constitution).

Oh, yes, and Mr. President, about those Poles, grant them visa-free travel to the United States! It’s past time, especially after this latest snub. Don’t forget, your home is in Chicago.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

In the grim period that followed Lehman’s failure, it seemed inconceivable that bankers would, just a few months later, be going right back to the practices that brought the world’s financial system to the edge of collapse. At the very least, one might have thought, they would show some restraint for fear of creating a public backlash.

But now that we’ve stepped back a few paces from the brink — thanks, let’s not forget, to immense, taxpayer-financed rescue packages — the financial sector is rapidly returning to business as usual. Even as the rest of the nation continues to suffer from rising unemployment and severe hardship, Wall Street paychecks are heading back to pre-crisis levels. And the industry is deploying its political clout to block even the most minimal reforms.

The good news is that senior officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve seem to be losing patience with the industry’s selfishness. The bad news is that it’s not clear whether President Obama himself is ready, even now, to take on the bankers.

Credit where credit is due: I was delighted when Lawrence Summers, the administration’s ranking economist, lashed out at the campaign the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in cooperation with financial-industry lobbyists, is running against the proposed creation of an agency to protect consumers against financial abuses, such as loans whose terms they don’t understand. The chamber’s ads, declared Mr. Summers, are “the financial-regulatory equivalent of the death-panel ads that are being run with respect to health care.”

Yet protecting consumers from financial abuse should be only the beginning of reform. If we really want to stop Wall Street from creating another bubble, followed by another bust, we need to change the industry’s incentives — which means, in particular, changing the way bankers are paid.

What’s wrong with financial-industry compensation? In a nutshell, bank executives are lavishly rewarded if they deliver big short-term profits — but aren’t correspondingly punished if they later suffer even bigger losses. This encourages excessive risk-taking: some of the men most responsible for the current crisis walked away immensely rich from the bonuses they earned in the good years, even though the high-risk strategies that led to those bonuses eventually decimated their companies, taking down a large part of the financial system in the process.

The Federal Reserve, now awakened from its Greenspan-era slumber, understands this problem — and proposes doing something about it. According to recent reports, the Fed’s board is considering imposing new rules on financial-firm compensation, requiring that banks “claw back” bonuses in the face of losses and link pay to long-term rather than short-term performance. The Fed argues that it has the authority to do this as part of its general mandate to oversee banks’ soundness.

But the industry — supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats — will fight bitterly against these changes. And while the administration will support some kind of compensation reform, it’s not clear whether it will fully support the Fed’s efforts.

I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.

All I can think is that this was another example of something we’ve seen before: Mr. Obama’s visceral reluctance to engage in anything that resembles populist rhetoric. And that’s something he needs to get over.

It’s not just that taking a populist stance on bankers’ pay is good politics — although it is: the administration has suffered more than it seems to realize from the perception that it’s giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money away to Wall Street, and it should welcome the chance to portray the G.O.P. as the party of obscene bonuses.

Equally important, in this case populism is good economics. Indeed, you can make the case that reforming bankers’ compensation is the single best thing we can do to prevent another financial crisis a few years down the road.

It’s time for the president to realize that sometimes populism, especially populism that makes bankers angry, is exactly what the economy needs.