The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

In “A Generation in the Balance” the Pasty Little Putz says the lack of confidence in government has turned many older voters rightward. Younger voters have not followed. But even they will want results eventually.  No shit, Sherlock?  Really?  Something tells me they’re smart enough to understand that the reason nothing gets done is The Party of No.  Prof. Krugman, in “The Jobs Imperative,” says Washington’s assumption that the economic recovery will trickle down to workers is wrong and unacceptable. It’s time for an emergency jobs program.  If I never hear the words “trickle down” again it will be too soon.  Here’s The Pasty Little Putz:

Do downturns create Democrats? The Great Depression certainly did: The generation that came of age in the 1930s has cleaved to the Democratic Party like no population before or since. And it makes intuitive sense that experiencing a recession at a formative age could inspire lifelong sympathy for the party of the welfare state and lifelong suspicion toward the party of free markets.

In a recent paper, “Growing Up In a Recession,” Paola Giuliano, an assistant professor of economics at U.C.L.A., and Antonio Spilimbergo, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, offer statistics to back this intuition up. Looking at over 40 years of survey data, the authors report that Americans who experienced “macroeconomic shocks” between the ages of 18 and 25 were more worried about poverty and inequality across their voting lives, and more skeptical about the wisdom of the market.

These findings track with the results of the 2008 election, when a cratering economy helped Barack Obama win an extraordinary landslide among young and first-time voters. And they provide grist for the liberal hope that the rising generation will prove as enduringly Democratic as that of their Depression-era grandparents, with George W. Bush playing Herbert Hoover to Obama’s F.D.R.

But the study shouldn’t make liberals too cocky. The authors find that growing up in a recession can encourage conservative instincts as well. Downturns make young voters distrustful of unfettered capitalism, yes. But they also make them less confident in the federal government.

This finding may explain why recent recessions have actually ended up pushing America rightward. The stagflation of the 1970s, for instance, and the hapless liberal response, helped usher in Ronald Reagan’s revolution. (The cohort that grew up with Reagan is the most staunchly Republican in modern history.) The slump of the early 1990s bolstered Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign — but it also gave a boost to the fiscally conservative populism of Ross Perot, and then to the Republican wave of 1994.

Recessions, it seems, only benefit liberals when an activist government is perceived to have answers to the crisis. When liberal interventions seem to be effective, a downturn can help midwife an enduring Democratic majority. But if they don’t seem to be working — or worse, if they seem to be working for insiders and favored constituencies, rather than for the common man — then suspicion of state power can trump disillusionment with free markets.

Among voters at large, that’s what seems to be happening at the moment. Nothing the government has done across the last 12 months has inspired much public confidence. Of the billions poured out in bailouts and stimulus, a substantial share has gone to privileged insiders and liberal interest groups — Wall Street bankers, auto unions, public-sector employees. Beltway Democrats have spent months laboring on an enormous health care bill that feels irrelevant, at best, to the continuing unemployment crisis. And Obama and his advisers overpromised on the stimulus package, whose economic boost, while real, remains imperceptible to a nation coping with a double-digit jobless rate.

Meanwhile, the regions hardest hit by the current downturn are places where liberals have dominated for generations, and where government is overextended already. (Of the 10 “States in Fiscal Peril” featured in a recent Pew report, nine went for Barack Obama in 2008.) Even if the residents of California or New Jersey or Illinois wanted further expansions of government, there isn’t any revenue to finance them.

So voters are turning rightward instead. In New Jersey, a recent Quinnipiac poll found that 61 percent of voters favored laying off state workers to reduce the current budget shortfall; only 23 percent favored raising taxes instead. Nationally, the percentage of Americans who say that government is doing “too much” hit a 10-year peak this fall. In 2007, 69 percent of the public said that government should guarantee universal health care; now that number is down to 47 percent.

The silver lining for liberals, though, is that this rightward turn hasn’t touched younger voters yet. With 18- to 29-year-olds, Democratic identification remains high, and Obama’s approval ratings are still up over 60 percent.

This suggests that a Depression-style realignment, in which today’s youthful “Obama Democrats” are still voting for hope and change (and grumbling about George W. Bush) in 2050 and beyond, remains within the Democratic Party’s grasp.

But even the young will need to see results eventually. And the more that Democrats flail in the present, the more likely it becomes that the Great Recession will be remembered as the time when liberalism let the future slip away.

How long, NYT, how long?  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

This is wrong and unacceptable.

Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean that full employment is just around the corner. Historically, financial crises have typically been followed not just by severe recessions but by anemic recoveries; it’s usually years before unemployment declines to anything like normal levels. And all indications are that the aftermath of the latest financial crisis is following the usual script. The Federal Reserve, for example, expects unemployment, currently 10.2 percent, to stay above 8 percent — a number that would have been considered disastrous not long ago — until sometime in 2012.

And the damage from sustained high unemployment will last much longer. The long-term unemployed can lose their skills, and even when the economy recovers they tend to have difficulty finding a job, because they’re regarded as poor risks by potential employers. Meanwhile, students who graduate into a poor labor market start their careers at a huge disadvantage — and pay a price in lower earnings for their whole working lives. Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.

So it’s time for an emergency jobs program.

How is a jobs program different from a second stimulus? It’s a matter of priorities. The 2009 Obama stimulus bill was focused on restoring economic growth. It was, in effect, based on the belief that if you build G.D.P., the jobs will come. That strategy might have worked if the stimulus had been big enough — but it wasn’t. And as a matter of political reality, it’s hard to see how the administration could pass a second stimulus big enough to make up for the original shortfall.

So our best hope now is for a somewhat cheaper program that generates more jobs for the buck. Such a program should shy away from measures, like general tax cuts, that at best lead only indirectly to job creation, with many possible disconnects along the way. Instead, it should consist of measures that more or less directly save or add jobs.

One such measure would be another round of aid to beleaguered state and local governments, which have seen their tax receipts plunge and which, unlike the federal government, can’t borrow to cover a temporary shortfall. More aid would help avoid both a drastic worsening of public services (especially education) and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile, the federal government could provide jobs by … providing jobs. It’s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, one that would offer relatively low-paying (but much better than nothing) public-service employment. There would be accusations that the government was creating make-work jobs, but the W.P.A. left many solid achievements in its wake. And the key point is that direct public employment can create a lot of jobs at relatively low cost. In a proposal to be released today, the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that spending $40 billion a year for three years on public-service employment would create a million jobs, which sounds about right.

Finally, we can offer businesses direct incentives for employment. It’s probably too late for a job-conserving program, like the highly successful subsidy Germany offered to employers who maintained their work forces. But employers could be encouraged to add workers as the economy expands. The Economic Policy Institute proposes a tax credit for employers who increase their payrolls, which is certainly worth trying.

All of this would cost money, probably several hundred billion dollars, and raise the budget deficit in the short run. But this has to be weighed against the high cost of inaction in the face of a social and economic emergency.

Later this week, President Obama will hold a “jobs summit.” Most of the people I talk to are cynical about the event, and expect the administration to offer no more than symbolic gestures. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, we can create more jobs — and yes, we should.

 

Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

Frank Rich is off this week.  MoDo has decided to remind us of how she used to write before she became a harpy.  In “The Wizards’ Wizard” she  says she’s seen some people who were fierce in the face of mortification and death. But none as fierce as Abe Pollin, Washington’s great sports impresario and philanthropist.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “America vs. the Narrative,” tells us why a cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11.  Mr. Kristof asks “Are We Going to Let John Die?” and says those members of Congress who are wavering on health reform are blind to the innumerable Americans who die annually as a consequence of not having insurance.  Here’s MoDo:

There is much to be learned from exits.

How people leave relationships. How people help their loved ones negotiate their final months and years. How we ourselves face the final curtain, as Frank Sinatra would say.

I’ve seen some people who were fierce in the face of mortification and death. But none as fierce as Abe Pollin.

In the last few years, Washington’s great sports impresario and philanthropist suffered from a rare brain disease that robbed him of everything but his burning love of life and sports and his burning desire to help sick children and the poor in Washington and around the world.

After giving everyone in his company, from part-time ushers to top executives, a Thanksgiving bonus; after making sure that the Wizards staff was going to get out early for the holiday; after sending his wife, Irene, a bouquet of yellow roses to thank her for their 64 years together, the 85-year-old Pollin died Tuesday at his home in Bethesda, Md.

Pinioned by his crippling neurological disease, he could no longer walk, read or write. He was confined to a wheelchair with a neck brace holding his head in place.

His mind was working, but his body was a cage around it. Just about the only pleasures left to Pollin, besides his loyal family, were Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Puccini’s “Turandot,” Frank Sinatra (Abe loved that you could hear every word Frank sang), sunshine, birds, root beer Popsicles and Wizards basketball games.

Anything the debilitated Wizards owner wanted to remember about team business, he had to hold in his head, since he could no longer jot down a note. Sometimes he stayed up all night just trying to hang on to what he wanted to remember the next day.

His son, Bob, who worked with me many years ago at The Washington Star on the clerks’ desk before becoming an economist and professor, said in his emotional eulogy at Washington Hebrew Congregation on Friday that he was amazed that his father “was never bitter.”

“He loved and appreciated simple pleasures,” Bob said dryly. “Like a basketball team. And yes, he had four houses. Not as many as John McCain.”

Bob noted: “My mother and he always celebrated Shabbat dinner on Friday night. And they always had lobster.”

As strongly as Abe Pollin felt about Judaism, Bob said, it was not the rituals that he considered important so much as “leading a moral life.”

Abe, the son of a Russian immigrant plumber, was famously frugal. But when he saw children in need, his generosity was boundless. After reading an article in The Washington Post in 1984 about 40,000 children dying daily from malnutrition in Africa, he called the story’s writer to see if it was a typo. Assured that it was accurate, Pollin called a top Unicef official and said: “I want to help. I will do anything.” And so he became an honorary chairman of the global charity.

He transformed a bleak swath of downtown Washington in 1997 when he opened what is now the Verizon Center, built with $200 million of his own money. Pollin — who originally entered the family construction business — created the Linda Pollin Memorial Housing Project in southeast Washington in honor of his daughter, who died at 16 of congenital heart disease. And he was about to break ground on an affordable-housing project here when he died. “We’ll do all the things the way you wanted it, Dad,” Bob promised.

President Obama, who attended a Wizards game in February at Pollin’s invitation, said in a statement on Wednesday: “Abe believed in Washington, D.C., when many others didn’t — putting his own fortune on the line to help revitalize the city he loved.”

I still remember when Abe decided that the original name of his team, the Bullets, was offensive and he was going to change it to something less violent, the Wonders, maybe, or the Wizards. Unlike the owners of the Redskins, he decided it was worth the marketing tumult.

Even though his team had won its only championship in 1978 as the Bullets, Abe felt, as Bob put it, “that a bullet killed Yitzhak Rabin and bullets killed young people in Washington every day.”

He famously fired Michael Jordan in 2003 because he thought Jordan was a bad manager, always out on the links, and a divisive force with the players.

I went to a game with Bob, Abe and Abe’s friend Tom Friedman a few months ago and was deeply moved by the courage of Mr. P., as he was known by his adoring Wizards staff. He could barely move a muscle, but he emanated joy.

“He was in such bad shape for so long, but he would somehow always muster the strength and courage to surge back,” Bob told me. “He was having just such a surge on Tuesday. I had just finished feeding him lunch — a full, happy meal — and we were planning to go to the Wizards’ game that evening. That is when he died suddenly.”

His heart stopped. But oh, what a heart it was.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

What should we make of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who apparently killed 13 innocent people at Fort Hood?

Here’s my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”

What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

Although most of the Muslims being killed today are being killed by jihadist suicide bombers in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Indonesia, you’d never know it from listening to their world. The dominant narrative there is that 9/11 was a kind of fraud: America’s unprovoked onslaught on Islam is the real story, and the Muslims are the real victims — of U.S. perfidy.

Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics. In the process, we did some stupid and bad things. But for every Abu Ghraib, our soldiers and diplomats perpetrated a million acts of kindness aimed at giving Arabs and Muslims a better chance to succeed with modernity and to elect their own leaders.

The Narrative was concocted by jihadists to obscure that.

It’s working. As a Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert, who asked to remain anonymous, said to me: “This narrative is now omnipresent in Arab and Muslim communities in the region and in migrant communities around the world. These communities are bombarded with this narrative in huge doses and on a daily basis. [It says] the West, and right now mostly the U.S. and Israel, is single-handedly and completely responsible for all the grievances of the Arab and the Muslim worlds. Ironically, the vast majority of the media outlets targeting these communities are Arab-government owned — mostly from the Gulf.”

This narrative suits Arab governments. It allows them to deflect onto America all of their people’s grievances over why their countries are falling behind. And it suits Al Qaeda, which doesn’t need much organization anymore — just push out The Narrative over the Web and satellite TV, let it heat up humiliated, frustrated or socially alienated Muslim males, and one or two will open fire on their own. See: Major Hasan.

“Liberal Arabs like me are as angry as a terrorist and as determined to change the status quo,” said my Jordanian friend. The only difference “is that while we choose education, knowledge and success to bring about change, a terrorist, having bought into the narrative, has a sense of powerlessness and helplessness, which are inculcated in us from childhood, that lead him to believe that there is only one way, and that is violence.”

What to do? Many Arab Muslims know that what ails their societies is more than the West, and that The Narrative is just an escape from looking honestly at themselves. But none of their leaders dare or care to open that discussion. In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”

And now here’s Mr. Kristof:

If Joe Lieberman or other senators came across John Brodniak writhing in pain on the sidewalk, they presumably would jump to help him and rush him to a hospital.

Unfortunately, an emergency room won’t help — indeed, the closest E.R. has told him not to come back, he says. So, for those members of Congress who are wavering on health reform, listen to John’s story.

John is a sawmill worker from Yamhill County, Ore., where I grew up. He was a foreman at a mill, he felt strong and healthy, and he had very basic insurance coverage through his job. On April 18, he was married, at age 23, and life was looking up.

Ten days after the wedding, he was walking in his backyard carrying a neighbor’s dog — and he suddenly blacked out. That led, after rounds of CAT scans, M.R.I.’s and other tests, to the discovery that the left parietal lobe of his brain has a cavernous hemangioma. That’s an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John’s case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain.

John began to have trouble walking and would sometimes collapse. He developed spasms and restless leg syndrome, he began to use a cane, and his mind suffered.

“He forgets stuff a lot, he bumps into things,” said his new wife, Esther Brodniak. “But he keeps things light. He jokes about it.”

Perhaps the worst is the pain — blinding, incapacitating headaches that have left him able to sleep only in short intervals. He vomits daily when the pain surges.

“The pain is constant,” John said. “It’s a 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, and then it hits the high peaks and makes me vomit.”

With John unable to work, he lost his job — and his insurance coverage. Esther had insurance for herself and for her two children (from a previous marriage) through her job building manufactured homes. But she couldn’t add John to her plan because of his pre-existing condition.

Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain. When he collapses or suffers particularly excruciating headaches, Esther rushes him to the emergency room of one hospital or another, but an E.R. can’t do much for him. One hospital has told them not to come back unless he gets insurance, they say.

Esther used up her family leave time to look after her new husband. “Then I went back to work, and he fell several times,” she said. “I told my boss that I had to quit. Taking care of John was more important than building someone else’s house.”

That meant that the couple had no income — and no insurance for anyone in the family, including the children. Neighbors have helped, and a community program has paid the rent so that they are not homeless. But bills are piling up, and John and Esther don’t know how they will cope.

The doctors warn that pressure from the growth could lead a major blood vessel nearby to burst, killing him. “They tell me I’m a time bomb,” John said. With a touch of bitterness, he adds, “It sort of feels as if they’re playing for time to see if it bursts, to save them from doing anything.”

I’m not a physician, and I certainly can’t speak to the medical issues here. But I have examined John’s medical records, and they appear to confirm his story.

John says the principal obstacle to treatment appears to be simply his lack of insurance. In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn’t been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low. Doctors tell him that his condition is operable — but that they can’t accept him without conventional insurance. He is increasingly frustrated as he watches his family crushed by the burden of his illness.

“The mill won’t let me go back to work until a doctor gives me a note saying I can go back,” he said. “I tried with several doctors. I said, ‘Just give me a note. … I’ve got to do something for my family. But they won’t.” John and Esther agreed to tell me their story in hopes that somehow it would lead to medical help.

John’s story is not so unusual. A Harvard study, to be published next month in the American Journal of Public Health, suggests that almost 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of not having insurance. John may become one of them.

If a senator strolled indifferently by as John retched in pain, we would think that person pitiless. But isn’t it just as monstrous for politicians to avert their eyes, make excuses and deny coverage to innumerable Americans just like John?

 

Herbert, all alone

Ms. Collins and Mr. Blow are off today, so Bob Herbert goes solo.  In “Stacking the Deck Against Kids” he says the American economy is broken, economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are deeply affected. We must work harder to give our children the society they deserve.  Here he is:

Every year at Thanksgiving, parts of the Upper West Side of Manhattan become like a paradise for children. There’s the exciting preparation of the balloons and floats for the Thanksgiving Day parade, and then, on Thursday morning, the parade itself.

The weather isn’t always kind. I’ve seen the kids out there in snow, in freezing rain, in winds that threaten to send the balloons and their handlers soaring to distant venues. It doesn’t seem to matter. The children come into the neighborhood in waves, holding the hands of adults or riding atop their shoulders, smiling, laughing, playing hide-and-seek among the police barricades. Finally, inevitably, they end up staring in absolute open-mouthed, wide-eyed awe as the mammoth, colorful helium-filled creations of their favorite characters begin making their majestic way down Central Park West.

We have an obligation and an opportunity at this special moment in history to do right by these youngsters, and all the rest of America’s kids. It’s a special moment because we’ve seen so clearly the many things that have gone haywire in the society, and while it may not be easy to articulate, we have a sense of what needs to be done.

The American economy is broken, ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government. While Wall Street is handing out billions in bonuses, American families are struggling with joblessness, home foreclosures and rampant debt. The economic woes are exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are taking a big hit — emotionally, psychologically and otherwise.

One effect of the Great Recession, according to a recent series in The Times, has been a big jump in the number of runaway children, many of them living in dangerous conditions on the street.

Family homelessness is also up, and poverty is increasing. More than a third of all black children in America are poor, and that tragic percentage is expanding. The outlook for America’s working classes is bleak. A few weeks ago a New York cab driver nearly broke down in tears as he told me he’d had to apply for food stamps to continue feeding his family.

A sense of urgency may be starting to emerge. With President Obama’s jobs summit approaching, representatives from labor and progressive organizations gathered in Washington to warn of the lasting damage being inflicted on the prospects of young Americans by the continuing employment crisis.

Millions of youngsters like those who were suffused with such delight at the Thanksgiving Day parade are being buffeted by an economy that is eroding their quality of life, curtailing their educational opportunities and undermining their prospects for economic success as adults. That more attention is not being paid to this growing disaster is criminal.

Groups represented at the meeting in Washington, which was sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, included the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the N.A.A.C.P., the National Council of La Raza and the Center for Community Change. Among other things, they urged the administration and Congress to provide substantial additional relief to economically distressed state and local governments, to invest in much more widespread infrastructure improvements, and to engage in some direct government creation of jobs.

All of that, in my view, would amount to just a first step. We remain stuck in an economic model that not only permits but encourages the continued existence of financial institutions that are too big to fail, which means that when one or more of them fail — as will surely happen at some point — we’ll again be rushing to “save the system” by bailing them out at taxpayers’ expense.

The system remains grotesquely unfair, with the deck stacked against working people, even as we’re desperate to have them sustain the economy with nonstop consumer purchases. Keep in mind that at the start of the recession the collective wealth of the richest 1 percent of Americans was greater than that of the bottom 90 percent combined. The economic and political clout of that bottom 90 percent has only weakened since then.

We still have a hideously dysfunctional public education system, one that has mastered the art of manufacturing dropouts and functional illiterates. We have not even begun to turn that around.

We still keep fighting tragic, futile, stupid wars, squandering lives and resources and creative energies that could be put to use right here at home, where the need for nation-building is beyond critical.

The U.S. should be a paradise for young people. We need big changes in this country, approaches that are constructive, creative and fundamentally new, if we’re going to give those smiling kids I saw on Thanksgiving Day the kind of society they deserve.

Well, at the very least we have to make sure that they’re well-fed enough to serve as cannon fodder in the next war of choice, right?

Bobo, Cohen and Krugman

Bobo is addressing “The Other Education.”  He says while our scholastic education is formal and supervised, our emotional education, the one we glean on our own from artists and musicians, is more important to our long-term happiness.  Mr. Cohen, in “Iranians in Exile,” says President Obama has been too weak on human rights abuses in Iran. He needs to express outrage.  Prof. Krugman, in “Taxing the Speculators,” says while a financial transactions tax would not completely prevent any future crisis, it could generate substantial revenue while providing a useful check on reckless short-term speculation.  Here’s Bobo:

Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.

But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.

We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.

This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.

The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.

From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.

Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning.

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.

What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on an epic and anthemic scale.

There are certain prominent neighborhoods on his map — one called defeat, another called exaltation, another called nostalgia. Certain emotional chords — stoicism, for one — are common, while others are absent. “There is no sarcasm in his writing,” Landau says, “and not a lot of irony.”

I find I can’t really describe what this landscape feels like, especially in newspaper prose. But I do believe his narrative tone, the mental map, has worked its way into my head, influencing the way I organize the buzzing confusion of reality, shaping the unconscious categories through which I perceive events. Just as being from New York or rural Georgia gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so spending time in Springsteen’s universe inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

Then there is the man himself. Like other parts of the emotional education, it is hard to bring the knowledge to consciousness, but I do think important lessons are communicated by that embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself. I do think a message is conveyed in the way he continually situates himself within a tradition — de-emphasizing his own individual contributions, stressing instead the R&B groups, the gospel and folk singers whose work comes out through him.

I’m not claiming my second education has been exemplary or advanced. I’m describing it because I have only become aware of it retrospectively, and society pays too much attention to the first education and not enough to the second.

In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.

Last week, my kids attended their first Springsteen concert in Baltimore. At one point, I looked over at my 15-year-old daughter. She had her hands clapped to her cheeks and a look of slack-jawed, joyous astonishment on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing — 10,000 people in a state of utter abandon, with Springsteen surrendering himself to them in the center of the arena.

It begins again.

And afterwards he took her for a special outing to the Applebee’s salad bar…   Here’s Mr. Cohen:

There is a Persian saying that goes, “Your coming is in your hands, but your leaving is in the hands of God.”

Shortly before I left Iran on June 24, there was a late-night knock at the door of my hotel room. Alright, I thought, this is it.

By then I was one of the few Western journalists left in Tehran after a savage post-election clampdown and I had been working for more than a week despite the revocation of my press pass.

As I moved, heart thumping, toward the door, I imagined being dragged blindfolded into the hell of Evin prison, built by the shah for the brutalizing of his political prisoners, used for the same purpose by the Islamic Republic.

“Laundry, sir. We forgot these.”

A hotel employee was holding a couple of shirts. I thanked him, tossed them on a sofa, and breathed out: Fear the worst but never bow to it.

I looked down at the lights of Tehran, cradled in its mountainous amphitheater. In 1936, the shah’s father had banned the veil in a furious Ataturk-like push for Westernization. In 1979, the Islamic Republic had re-imposed the hijab on all women. Now, in 2009, a reformist movement trying to chart a middle course — a non-theocratic but also non-secular path — had been bloodied before my eyes. Iran’s tragedy overwhelmed me.

A few days later, I did leave and found my parting in the hands not of God but of the Revolutionary Guards at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The stubble-faced ghouls duly toyed with me, leaving me humiliated, before letting me go.

The last people I saw were Nazila Fathi, long the wonderful New York Times local correspondent in Tehran, her husband Babak Pasha, and their children, Shayan, 5, and Tina, 3. Through 12 tumultuous post-electoral days Nazila was at my side as we were chased and tear-gassed. She never lost her composure.

By then her apartment — seen in paranoid regime eyes as a center for fomenting “velvet revolutions” and “soft overthrows” — was under constant surveillance. Evin, or worse, beckoned.

On July 1, a week after me, Nazila and her family left with a suitcase for a long-planned vacation in Canada. Five months later, they have been unable to return. They have followed millions of Iranians — an immense pool of lost talent — into exile. Dual Canadian and Iranian citizens, they have settled for now in Toronto.

That is why I came here. My debt to Nazila is immense.

She calls me — that bright, sing-song voice — and tells me there’s been a murder at the entrance to her Toronto apartment building. I start laughing. But it’s true. Canada has put on a little Iran show for us.

On Nazilia’s table are Iranian pistachios — a taste of the forbidden. She turns on the TV and there, on “60 Minutes,” is another Canadian-Iranian journalist, Maziar Bahari, who was seized in June and held in Evin prison for 118 days. We see images, filmed by Bahari, of the Basiji shooting into the crowd on June 15 and a slain man falling. Nazila and I were 100 yards from the scene.

I shudder. Bahari, a Newsweek correspondent, tells his story (as he does also in the current Newsweek) with a fine lucidity: the slapping, the lashing and death threats, the accusations that he was a velvet revolution “mastermind.”

When Bahari watches himself making a forced “confession” — that the media did give “moral support for the people who took part in those illegal gatherings” — his remorse is almost too much to bear. When you’re “broken under pressure,” he remarks, it’s hard to “gather your pieces.”

Nazila and I give each other a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God look. There are hundreds like Bahari. Iran since June 12 has veered into a paranoid bunker. President Barack Obama has been too weak on human rights abuses in Iran.

To say “the world continues to bear witness” to the “powerful calls for justice” of Iranians, as he did on Nov. 3, is not good enough. He needs to express the outrage of the United States of America.

Sure, Iran sees Evin as the mirror image of Guantánamo. But undoing that U.S. aberration was central to Obama’s message. Speaking out against the abuse of Iranian political prisoners must be equally so. Obama should continue to seek engagement — it’s the only way forward — while denouncing the outrages.

His bedside reading should be Haleh Esfandiari’s brilliant, shattering book “My Prison, My Home,” in which the Wilson Center scholar recounts her own 2007 Evin nightmare.

Hillary Clinton did mention Bahari. That, the Newsweek man says, is the “best thing that can happen to any prisoner, that you know someone cares about you.” Obama has not made it clear enough, name by name, that he cares.

“Fathi” — the name of his beloved, lost, longed-for grandfather — is the word little Shayan has scrawled on his bedroom walls.

Iran is betraying its aching children. There is a middle path, Shiite and democratic, of which Nazila and Babak and countless others could be part. Their country has been hijacked. The waste is immeasurable — and unnecessary.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Should we use taxes to deter financial speculation? Yes, say top British officials, who oversee the City of London, one of the world’s two great banking centers. Other European governments agree — and they’re right.

Unfortunately, United States officials — especially Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — are dead set against the proposal. Let’s hope they reconsider: a financial transactions tax is an idea whose time has come.

The dispute began back in August, when Adair Turner, Britain’s top financial regulator, called for a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage “socially useless” activities. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, picked up on his proposal, which he presented at the Group of 20 meeting of leading economies this month.

Why is this a good idea? The Turner-Brown proposal is a modern version of an idea originally floated in 1972 by the late James Tobin, the Nobel-winning Yale economist. Tobin argued that currency speculation — money moving internationally to bet on fluctuations in exchange rates — was having a disruptive effect on the world economy. To reduce these disruptions, he called for a small tax on every exchange of currencies.

Such a tax would be a trivial expense for people engaged in foreign trade or long-term investment; but it would be a major disincentive for people trying to make a fast buck (or euro, or yen) by outguessing the markets over the course of a few days or weeks. It would, as Tobin said, “throw some sand in the well-greased wheels” of speculation.

Tobin’s idea went nowhere at the time. Later, much to his dismay, it became a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-globalization left. But the Turner-Brown proposal, which would apply a “Tobin tax” to all financial transactions — not just those involving foreign currency — is very much in Tobin’s spirit. It would be a trivial expense for long-term investors, but it would deter much of the churning that now takes place in our hyperactive financial markets.

This would be a bad thing if financial hyperactivity were productive. But after the debacle of the past two years, there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.” And a transactions tax could generate substantial revenue, helping alleviate fears about government deficits. What’s not to like?

The main argument made by opponents of a financial transactions tax is that it would be unworkable, because traders would find ways to avoid it. Some also argue that it wouldn’t do anything to deter the socially damaging behavior that caused our current crisis. But neither claim stands up to scrutiny.

On the claim that financial transactions can’t be taxed: modern trading is a highly centralized affair. Take, for example, Tobin’s original proposal to tax foreign exchange trades. How can you do this, when currency traders are located all over the world? The answer is, while traders are all over the place, a majority of their transactions are settled — i.e., payment is made — at a single London-based institution. This centralization keeps the cost of transactions low, which is what makes the huge volume of wheeling and dealing possible. It also, however, makes these transactions relatively easy to identify and tax.

What about the claim that a financial transactions tax doesn’t address the real problem? It’s true that a transactions tax wouldn’t have stopped lenders from making bad loans, or gullible investors from buying toxic waste backed by those loans.

But bad investments aren’t the whole story of the crisis. What turned those bad investments into catastrophe was the financial system’s excessive reliance on short-term money.

As Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick of Yale have shown, by 2007 the United States banking system had become crucially dependent on “repo” transactions, in which financial institutions sell assets to investors while promising to buy them back after a short period — often a single day. Losses in subprime and other assets triggered a banking crisis because they undermined this system — there was a “run on repo.”

And a financial transactions tax, by discouraging reliance on ultra-short-run financing, would have made such a run much less likely. So contrary to what the skeptics say, such a tax would have helped prevent the current crisis — and could help us avoid a future replay.

Would a Tobin tax solve all our problems? Of course not. But it could be part of the process of shrinking our bloated financial sector. On this, as on other issues, the Obama administration needs to free its mind from Wall Street’s thrall.

 

Collins and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “A Tale of Two Turkeys,” says turkey-pardoning is supposed to be a long-running tradition, but it officially only goes back to George (the Good One) Bush.  Mr. Kristof, in “The Religious Wars,” says traditionally, religious wars were fought with swords and sieges; today, they often are fought with books.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

On Wednesday, President Obama pardoned his first Thanksgiving turkey.

There is something wrong with this concept.

Here is how our beloved national tradition works: One lucky turkey gets to live — and fly first class to Disneyland, where he is grand marshal in the Thanksgiving Day parade (I am not making this up). While another nameless bird gets slaughtered in his place.

It’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” except somehow I doubt that the doomed turkey volunteered for the job.

Who mourns the Backup Bird? What fickle finger of fate decided that he should literally get the ax, while the one who was supposed to go next lives happily ever after on the Big Thunder Ranch in Frontierland?

The president did not seem all that thrilled with his role. “There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this, where I pardon the turkey and send it to Disneyland,” he said.

His daughters, who were trotted out as the alleged champions of the turkey pardon, looked as if they’d be perfectly happy to retract. Malia, who noted that the bird reminded her of “a large chicken” seemed particularly unenthusiastic.

The National Turkey Federation named the bird Courage, perhaps in memory of Benjamin Franklin’s contention that the bald eagle was a bird of bad moral character while the turkey was “though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage.” If Franklin’s argument had prevailed and the turkey, rather than the bald eagle, had become the national symbol, would we still be eating them? Would the turkey farmers still be in business? What does eagle taste like, anyway?

These are the whims of fate that we celebrate on the day before Thanksgiving, when one random, somewhat sullen-looking bird gets pardoned while another goes to the presidential dinner table.

The turkey-pardoning is supposed to be a long-running national tradition, but it officially only goes back to George (the Good One) Bush and 1989. Since Thanksgiving is a holiday that’s particularly rich in long-running traditions, 20 years barely counts as an impulsive gesture.

If we want a political tradition, we can do better. Let’s all just gather around the family computer and watch that video of Sarah Palin discussing Thanksgiving in front of a bloody turkey abattoir.

There was actually no mention at the presidential pardon of what the Obamas themselves were going to be eating on Thanksgiving. While the turkey federation traditionally donates a live bird for the ceremony and dead ones for the White House dinner, the oven-ready birds seem to be the ones that the president and the girls were taking to a Washington charity. As to the menu at the White House, a spokesman said it would involve “traditional foods and family favorites,” but declined to give details.

We all know that Obama is extremely logical. He must understand that the only way for this pardoning ritual to make sense would be if he spared the backup turkey, and the backup’s backup, all the way down the line.

Then he could announce the creation of a new vegetarian Thanksgiving to commemorate the day the Pilgrims and the Indians got together over a steaming platter of parsnips.

But since this is keep-it-cool, middle-of-the-road Barack Obama, he would probably skip both the drama and the turkey and go meatless without telling anybody.

After all, if the word got out, who knows how many tea parties it would spark? Birthers would probably claim that no one actually born in the United States would consider celebrating Thanksgiving without a turkey. Glenn Beck would weep over the incipient loss of our freedom to consume really dry meat on a holiday. Rumors would arise that Michelle does not really love her national cuisine.

Whatever they’re eating, the Obamas will undoubtedly discuss the things they want to give thanks for this year. You wonder what the president would say. He can always mention his family. Not every man has daughters loyal enough to accompany him through a cheesy turkey-pardoning.

But when he tries counting his blessings, does the specter of President Karzai rise up through the mashed potatoes? Do the brussels sprouts all look like little versions of Joe Lieberman threatening a filibuster? If it turns out that there is a turkey, and someone inevitably remarks that it looks like the biggest ever, does Obama think they’re talking about the unemployment rate?

It’s not really fair. The president knows he could jump-start the economy, fix health care and do his ambitious energy policy — if only the last administration hadn’t cut taxes, started two wars and created a new, large Medicare entitlement without paying for any of it.

When he’s not making his way through Thanksgiving photo-ops, he’s adding up the numbers over and over in his mind, and sending mental daggers at the Republicans who are yelling at him about deficits that they created.

Although what else could he expect in a Washington that thinks you can pardon your turkey and eat it, too?

Here’s Mr. Kristof:

Just a few years ago, it seemed curious that an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn’t smite tormentors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They all published best-selling books excoriating religion and practically inviting lightning bolts.

Traditionally, religious wars were fought with swords and sieges; today, they often are fought with books. And in literary circles, these battles have usually been fought at the extremes.

Fundamentalists fired volleys of Left Behind novels, in which Jesus returns to Earth to battle the Anti-Christ (whose day job was secretary general of the United Nations). Meanwhile, devout atheists built mocking Web sites like www.whydoesGodhateamputees.com. That site notes that although believers periodically credit prayer with curing cancer, God never seems to regrow lost limbs. It demands an end to divine discrimination against amputees.

This year is different, with a crop of books that are less combative and more thoughtful. One of these is “The Evolution of God,” by Robert Wright, who explores how religions have changed — improved — over the millennia. He notes that God, as perceived by humans, has mellowed from the capricious warlord sometimes depicted in the Old Testament who periodically orders genocides.

(In 1 Samuel 15:3, the Lord orders a mass slaughter of the Amalekite tribe: “Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child.” These days, that would earn God an indictment before the International Criminal Court.)

Mr. Wright also argues that monotheism emerged only gradually among Israelites, and that the God familiar to us may have resulted from a merger of a creator god, El, and a warrior god, Yahweh. Mr. Wright also argues that monotheism wasn’t firmly established until after the Babylonian exile, and he says that Moses’s point was that other gods shouldn’t be worshiped, not that they didn’t exist. For example, he notes the troubling references to a “divine council” and “gods” — plural — in Psalm 82.

In another revelation not usually found in Sunday School classes, Mr. Wright cites Biblical evidence that God (both El and Yahweh) had a sex life, rather like the Greek gods, and notes archaeological discoveries indicating that Yahweh may have had a wife, Asherah.

As for Christianity, Mr. Wright argues that it was Saint Paul — more than Jesus, an apocalyptic prophet — who emphasized love and universalism and built Christian faith as it is known today. Saint Paul focused on these elements, he says, partly as a way to broaden the appeal of the church and convert Gentiles.

Mr. Wright detects an evolution toward an image of God as a more beneficient and universal deity, one whose moral compass favors compassion for humans of whatever race or tribe, one who is now firmly in the antigenocide camp. Mr. Wright’s focus is not on whether God exists, but he does suggest that changing perceptions of God reflect a moral direction to history — and that this in turn perhaps reflects some kind of spiritual force.

“To the extent that ‘god’ grows, that is evidence — maybe not massive evidence, but some evidence — of higher purpose,” Mr. Wright says.

Another best-seller this year, Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” likewise doesn’t posit a Grandpa-in-the-Sky; rather, she sees God in terms of an ineffable presence that can be neither proven nor disproven in any rational sense. To Ms. Armstrong, faith belongs to the realm of life’s mysteries, beyond the world of reason, and people on both sides of the “God gap” make the mistake of interpreting religious traditions too literally.

“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage,” Ms. Armstrong writes. Her book suggests that religion is not meant to regrow lost limbs, but that it may help some amputees come to terms with their losses.

Whatever one’s take on God, there’s no doubt that religion remains one of the most powerful forces in the world. Today, millions of people will be giving thanks to Him — or Her or It.

Another new book, “The Faith Instinct,” by my Times colleague Nicholas Wade, suggests a reason for the durability of faith: humans may be programmed for religious belief, because faith conferred evolutionary advantages in primitive times. That doesn’t go to the question of whether God exists, but it suggests that religion in some form may be with us for eons to come.

I’m hoping that the latest crop of books marks an armistice in the religious wars, a move away from both religious intolerance and irreligious intolerance. That would be a sign that perhaps we, along with God, are evolving toward a higher moral order.

 

Solo MoDo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today, so MoDo flies solo.  In “Thanks for the Memories” she says President Obama can often be more interested in wooing opponents than tending to those who put themselves on the line for him.  Hmmm…  Can’t say that I disagree with that.  Here she is:

At his Cabinet meeting Monday afternoon, President Obama took a moment to give thanks to his team.

Sipping a glass of water, the president offered special gratitude to the woman on his right.

“I advised this hard-working Cabinet to get a little bit of rest this week,” he said, looking at Hillary Clinton, “particularly the people who have been traveling around the globe day-in and day-out and don’t know what time zone they’re in.”

The secretary of state, with a china cup and saucer in front of her, smiled.

In the back of the room, back where they were parched, back where no water or coffee was served for the two-hour meeting, sat Greg Craig, the White House counsel who was a ghostly presence, given his death by a thousand leaks.

Only a year after he had helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig was himself eviscerated by the Obama inner circle.

I remember meeting Craig at a book party during the campaign. He upbraided me for writing critical things about Obama. I didn’t like being chastised, but I admired his loyalty.

It couldn’t have been easy for Craig, a special counsel in the Clinton White House who directed the response on impeachment, to break away from the Clintons and help the insurgent Obama shatter Hillary’s dream of shattering the Oval glass ceiling.

As Todd Purdum wrote of Craig in The Times in 1998, “At Yale, he surrendered his $75-a-month apartment in New Haven to Mr. Clinton and his girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, who were a class behind him, and he remains especially close to Mrs. Clinton, friends say.”

In a memo he sent to the press during the bitter 2008 Democratic primary, Craig made the case that Hillary had exaggerated her foreign policy experience and that she did not pass “the Commander-in-Chief test.”

It was brutally effective, taking apart her claims of involvement, country by country, and noting: “As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue — not at 3 AM or at any other time of day.”

I often wondered if Craig and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the other former Clinton official who helped undermine Hillary’s foreign policy record, would have done so if they had known that after turning on Hillary they would once more end up working beside her; if they had known that Obama can often be more interested in wooing opponents than tending to those who put themselves on the line for him.

There were complaints that Craig was out of the loop, but couldn’t Obama have walked the single West Wing staircase up to his counsel’s office and looped him in?

Craig was, after all, simply defending positions that Obama himself took during the campaign, from closing Gitmo to greater transparency.

The way the Craig matter was handled sent a chill through some Obama supporters, reminding them of the icy manner in which the Clintons cut loose Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier. But then, Obama is surrounded by many old Clinton hands (and a Clinton).

Writing in Politico, Elizabeth Drew called it “the shabbiest episode of his presidency,” saying that it had caused people who had helped Obama rise to question whether he would behave in as classy and non-Clintonian a fashion as they had hoped.

It recalled Obama’s failure to lift a finger to help Caroline Kennedy — after she had lifted him at a crucial moment — when the loopy Gov. David Paterson was dragging her through mud and refusing to announce a decision on the appointment for the New York Senate seat. Paterson was being lobbied by a vengeful Bill Clinton. Bill was still upset at Caroline for bestowing the Camelot mantle, which he had tried to claim during his campaigns, on Obama. Yet no one from the Obama camp tried to counteract Bill and straighten out Paterson.

Although a handful of donors were invited to the premiere state dinner Tuesday night — as well as erstwhile allies Craig and Hillary — many donors and passionate supporters are let down by Obama’s detachment, puzzled at his failure to make them feel invested when he’s certain to come back to tap their well soon enough.

It is especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election — and given that we all now know someone on the unemployment line. (A new poll shows Obama and Sarah Palin neck and neck among independents, but then it is a Fox survey.)

Bill Clinton may not have cared any more about contributors than Obama does, but he was such a talented politician that he made them feel as though they were in “a warm bath,” as one put it.

Obama is more like a cold shower.

 

Brooks, Cohen and Herbert

I was praying Bobo would be on vacation, but no joy there.  In “The Values Question” he gurgles that like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally about values, about whether we have a moral preference for vitality or security.  Fuck, Bobo, I have a “moral preference” for staying alive.  Asshole.  Mr. Cohen, in “Obama in His Labyrinth,” says President Obama’s ideas are good, but the warmth, cajoling and craft that make ideas more than that — especially in foreign policy — are lacking.  Mr. Herbert, who is writing from Detroit, sees “Signs of Hope.”  He says the U.S. has the intellectual resources and expertise to lead in the development of clean energy. It just needs the will to make it happen.  Here’s that schmuck Bobo:

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about health care reform. But, like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally a debate about values. It’s a debate about what kind of country we want America to be.

During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain — poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.

Over the years, Americans decided they wanted a little more safety and security. This is what happens as nations grow wealthier; they use money to buy civilization.

Occasionally, our ancestors found themselves in a sweet spot. They could pass legislation that brought security but without a cost to vitality. But adults know that this situation is rare. In the real world, there’s usually a trade-off. The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young. Welfare policies usually direct resources to the vulnerable and the elderly. Most social welfare legislation, even successful legislation, siphons money from the former to the latter.

Early in this health care reform process, many of us thought we were in that magical sweet spot. We could extend coverage to the uninsured but also improve the system overall to lower costs. That is, we thought it would be possible to reduce the suffering of the vulnerable while simultaneously squeezing money out of the wasteful system and freeing it up for more productive uses.

That’s what the management gurus call a win-win.

It hasn’t worked out that way. The bills before Congress would almost certainly ease the anxiety of the uninsured, those who watch with terror as their child or spouse grows ill, who face bankruptcy and ruin.

And the bills would probably do it without damaging the care the rest of us receive. In every place where reforms have been tried — from Massachusetts to Switzerland — people come to cherish their new benefits. The new plans become politically untouchable.

But, alas, there would be trade-offs. Instead of reducing costs, the bills in Congress would probably raise them. They would mean that more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system.

The authors of these bills have tried to foster efficiencies. The Senate bill would initiate several interesting experiments designed to make the system more effective — giving doctors incentives to collaborate, rewarding hospitals that provide quality care at lower cost. It’s possible that some of these experiments will bloom into potent systemic reforms.

But the general view among independent health care economists is that these changes will not fundamentally bend the cost curve. The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.

As Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, “In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it.”

Rather than pushing all of the new costs onto future generations, as past governments have done, the Democrats have admirably agreed to raise taxes. Over the next generation, the tax increases in the various bills could funnel trillions of dollars from the general economy into the medical system.

Moreover, the current estimates almost certainly understate the share of the nation’s wealth that will have to be shifted. In these bills, the present Congress pledges that future Congresses will impose painful measures to cut Medicare payments and impose efficiencies. Future Congresses rarely live up to these pledges. Somebody screams “Rationing!” and there is a bipartisan rush to kill even the most tepid cost-saving measure. After all, if the current Congress, with pride of authorship, couldn’t reduce costs, why should we expect that future Congresses will?

The bottom line is that we face a brutal choice.

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.

We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.

I’ve rarely seen such a crystal-clear example of FYIGM.  Bobo, give up your health insurance and go work for minimum wage at a job that won’t offer it to you and see how “secure” you feel.  Schmuck.  Here’s Mr. Cohen, who’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia:

Before coming up to Canada’s Atlantic provinces, where the nicest people in this nice country are said to live, I found myself seated next to Henry Kissinger at a New York dinner and asked him how he thought President Barack Obama was doing.

“He reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games,” Kissinger said. “But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one.”

I thought that wasn’t a bad image for Obama’s international gambits, and then here, at the first Halifax International Security Forum, I heard a similar observation from one participant: “We’ve had the set-up, but is there a middle game?” Or, put another way, can this probing, intelligent president close anything?

As an Obama admirer, I’m worried. He feels over-managed, over-scripted to me, to the point where he’s not showing the guts that prevailed at various difficult moments in the campaign. The ideas are good, but the warmth, cajoling and craft that make ideas more than that are lacking.

I find myself yearning for a presidential gaffe if only to reveal an instinctual human moment. Memo to Obama handlers: Give us a little more of the unvarnished. De-teleprompt the president for a few seconds!

The list of Obama’s international initiatives is of head-turning scope. There’s his “world without nuclear weapons,” announced in Prague last April, reiterated at the United Nations in September. It’s an idea with resonance, and may provide some moral suasion over countries contemplating pursuit of a bomb, but I can’t help recalling that the worlds of 1914 and 1939 were worlds without nukes. No thanks to that.

Unless proliferation, the most worrying global trend of the past 15 years is reversed, this dream is just a feel-good notion.

Then there’s the “reset button” with Russia, which always makes me think of those announcements on flights — “We’re trying to reset the video system” — and my heart sinks. One way to measure the importance of this attempt to warm a cool relationship is that Russia and the United States still control upward of 95 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal.

There are glimmerings with Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, but as Robert Gates, the U.S. defense secretary, observed here, Russia now offers “two perspectives on the rest of the world depending on which of its leaders you’re talking to.” The other perspective is called Vladimir Putin.

Obama needs Russian help on Iran, but I’m not holding my breath for forthright cooperation from Moscow on any eventual sanctions. As for the follow-up agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, intended to cut Russian and American arsenals by about half and supposed to be signed before the old pact expires on Dec. 5, it still needs work. I don’t believe Obama has yet shifted the basic confrontational optic of a resurgent Russia emerging from the humiliation of imperial collapse.

On Afghanistan, where an announcement is at last imminent on the troops the United States will commit to “the necessary war,” Obama has mixed messages with unhappy results. The clarity of March yielded to the cloudiness of fall and the long think has, in the words here of John McCain, “sounded an uncertain trumpet.” Peter MacKay, the Canadian defense minister, said the hesitation was “not helpful” because “everyone has hit the pause button until the U.S. decision.”

I worry now that Obama’s quest for perfect calibration will yield a less than resounding fudge where the tenacious message of a troop increase is undermined by talk of exit timing. That’s not how you break the will of an enemy.

In Europe, a more modest reset attempt has been compromised with political leaders (if not the public) by a perception of cool distance, underscored when Obama did not show at 20th-anniversary celebrations of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Feelings are particularly strong in Paris, where mutterings about Obama’s “Carterization” are heard. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who ushered France back to NATO’s integrated military command structure, and shattered political taboos dictating coolness toward America, has seen his hopes for a special relationship evaporate.

In Israel-Palestine, Obama underestimated the damage of the past decade and has been outmaneuvered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president’s groundbreaking outreach to Iran, which I applaud, has unsettled a regime that does not know how to respond. But here, as elsewhere, Obama has been unnecessarily weak on human rights issues in the face of an unconscionable crackdown. There’s a trace of churlish “ABB” — “Anything but Bush” — in Obama’s failure to speak out more for human rights and freedom. Once again, calibration has trumped gut to a damaging degree.

Ieva Kupce, a Latvian Defense Ministry official here, told me, “Watching Obama, I worry that democracy is going out of fashion. We in Latvia would not have made it without the United States.”

The great battle of the 21st century is going to be between free-market democracies and free-market authoritarian systems. America’s position in that struggle has to be clear if Obama’s simultaneous grandmaster openings are to produce victories.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

I came to Detroit and its environs, the seat of America’s glorious industrial past, to see if I could get a glimpse of the future. Is the economic, social and physical deterioration that has caused so much misery in the Motor City a sign of what’s in store for larger and larger segments of the United States?

Or are there new industries waiting in the wings — some of them right here in the Detroit metropolitan area — with new jobs and bright new prospects for whole new generations of American dreamers?

I found real reason to hope when a gentleman named Stan Ovshinsky took me on a tour of a remarkably quiet and pristine manufacturing plant in Auburn Hills, which is about 30 miles north of Detroit and is home to Chrysler’s headquarters. What is being produced in the plant is potentially revolutionary. A machine about the length of a football field runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, turning out mile after mile after mile of thin, flexible solar energy material, from which solar panels can be sliced and shaped.

You want new industry in the United States, with astonishing technological advances, new mass production techniques and jobs, jobs, jobs? Try energy.

Mr. Ovshinsky knows as much or more about the development and production of alternative energy as anyone on the planet. He developed the technology and designed the production method that made it possible to produce solar material “by the mile.” When he proposed the idea years ago, based on the science of amorphous materials, which he invented, he was ridiculed.

But the thin-film photovoltaic solar panel was just one of his revolutionary ideas. He invented the nickel metal hydride battery that is in virtually all hybrid vehicles on the road today. And when I pulled into the parking lot outside his office in Bloomfield Hills, he promptly installed me in the driver’s seat of a hydrogen hybrid prototype — a car in which the gasoline tank had been replaced with a safe solid-state hydrogen storage system invented by Mr. Ovshinsky.

Within minutes, I was driving along a highway in a car that produced zero pollution. No carbon footprint whatsoever. How’s that for a wave of the future?

The point is that these (and many more) brilliant, innovative technologies are here. They are real, tangible. They exist. What’s needed now is the will to develop policies that will vastly expand these advances and radically reduce their costs. The United States should be leading the world in the creation of whole new energy technologies and industries, instead of allowing the forces of the old carbon-based industries — coal, oil, gasoline-powered vehicles — to stand obstinately in the way of real progress.

“Now,” Mr. Ovshinsky told me, “is when we have to build the new industries of the future.” He has always been driven by the desire to use science and technology to solve the real-world problems of real people, and that has meant creating employment and stopping the pollution of the planet. He and his late wife, Iris, formed a company (to become known as Energy Conversion Devices) in Detroit in 1960 with the idea of using their considerable talents, as he put it, “to do good, to change the world.”

After nearly a half-century of revolutionary innovations with the company, Mr. Ovshinsky retired two years ago to focus his attention on the difficult and time-consuming effort to make solar energy economically competitive with coal and oil. “I know solar energy can’t live up to its possibilities unless it’s a hell of a lot cheaper,” he said.

He believes he has assembled a team that, with sustained, intense work under his direction — and if sufficient funding can be secured — will bring the price of solar power below that of coal and oil within a few years.

What’s weird is that this man, with such a stellar track record of innovation on products and processes crucial to the economic and environmental health of the U.S., gets such little attention and so little support from American policy makers. In addition to his work with batteries, photovoltaics and hydrogen fuel cells, his inventions have helped open the door to flat-screen televisions, new forms of computer memory and on and on.

So when Stan Ovshinsky tells us that we should be putting our chips on hybrid and electric vehicles, and that solar and hydrogen power can be the cornerstone of an industrial renaissance in the U.S. as well as a cleaner planet, we should be listening very, very closely.

As oil defined the 20th century, new forms of energy will define the 21st. The U.S. has the opportunity, the intellectual resources and the expertise to lead the world in the development of clean energy. What we’ve lacked so far has been the courage, the will, to make it happen.

 

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz, in “They Chose Celebrity,” says the Republican Party needs leaders who prefer the responsibilities of leadership to the pleasures of fame.  No shit?!  Who’d a thunk?  Prof. Krugman, in “The Phantom Menace,” says the scare stories from Wall Street seem to be intimidating Washington from doing more to rescue the economy.  Here’s The Pasty Little Putz:

Before the 2008 election, almost nobody outside Alaska and Arkansas had heard of Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee. But in a long and crowded campaign season, they were the only Republican politicians who inspired any genuine enthusiasm.

They had other things in common as well. Both came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and joined a soft-edged social conservatism to a strong populist streak. Both had been considered pragmatists, rather than ideologues, as governors of their home states. Both were untainted by the failures of the Bush-era Republican Party.

And both had the same Achilles’ heel: They seemed unready for high office, and owed their appeal more to personality than to substance.

This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity?

For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.

So far, they’ve chosen celebrity instead. Huckabee spent the last year hamming it up on a weekly talk show, and the last month hawking a book of inspirational Christmas stories. As for Palin — well, you probably know what she’s been up to lately.

Nobody should begrudge them their choices. Think tanks are a snooze; Senate races are a grind. Signing autographs for your adoring fans is more fun than rounding up budget votes in Juneau.

But they were the wrong moves if either wanted to become president someday. Huckabee’s gabfest is a weekly reaffirmation of the rap that he’s too lightweight for the Oval Office. Palin has sealed her identity as a culture-war lightning rod: she can inspire hysteria from liberals (ably catalogued in Matthew Continetti’s “Persecution of Sarah Palin”) and adulation from conservatives (visible at every stop along her book tour), but she’s unlikely to persuade anyone in the middle to trust her with the reins of government.

It’s possible to be a celebrity and a serious politician at the same time: Barack Obama’s career proves as much. But Obama’s celebrity status is frequently a political liability, and he’s (usually) wise enough to know it. That’s why he plays the wonk as often as he plays the global icon.

For now, no Republican leader projects a similar level of seriousness. Late in the Bush years, it was easy to dismiss conservatism as brain-dead. Among policy thinkers, that isn’t true anymore: the advent of Obama seems to have provided just the jolt that right-of-center wonks needed. But innovative proposals are useless without politicians willing to champion them.

When the Republican minority needed an alternative to the Obama administration’s sweeping stimulus proposal, for instance, a number of free-market economists were ready with an answer: a payroll tax cut. It was plausible, elegant and easy to explain — but there was no Republican leader with the wit to seize on it and sell it.

You could tell the same story about regulatory reform. A slew of conservative economists and think tankers, led by the University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, have been working on ways to protect free markets from a re-run of last fall’s “too big to fail” fiasco. But most Republican politicians would rather rail against bailouts that have already happened than talk about how to prevent them from happening again.

In the health care debate, too, conservative and libertarian policy thinkers have floated a number of plans to expand insurance coverage. Some are incremental and some are sweeping; some build on the existing system and some would essentially replace it. But any of them would be better than that threadbare plan House Republicans actually put forward, which would hardly expand coverage at all.

True, these ideas won’t sell millions of books, or excite the crowd on Huckabee’s talk show. But they’re what the Republican Party needs if it’s going to be more than just a brake on liberalism’s ambitions. And they’re what voters are going to be looking for, in 2012 and beyond, as proof that conservatives can be trusted once again.

This means that there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism. It probably won’t be Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. If Republicans are lucky, though, it will be somebody who shares their charisma — but who prefers the responsibilities of leadership to the pleasures of celebrity.

And of course, the putz and his ilk have no responsibility at all for promoting Palin et al…  Asshole.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

A funny thing happened on the way to a new New Deal. A year ago, the only thing we had to fear was fear itself; today, the reigning doctrine in Washington appears to be “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

What happened? To be sure, “centrists” in the Senate have hobbled efforts to rescue the economy. But the evidence suggests that in addition to facing political opposition, President Obama and his inner circle have been intimidated by scare stories from Wall Street.

Consider the contrast between what Mr. Obama’s advisers were saying on the eve of his inauguration, and what he himself is saying now.

In December 2008 Lawrence Summers, soon to become the administration’s highest-ranking economist, called for decisive action. “Many experts,” he warned, “believe that unemployment could reach 10 percent by the end of next year.” In the face of that prospect, he continued, “doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

Ten months later unemployment reached 10.2 percent, suggesting that despite his warning the administration hadn’t done enough to create jobs. You might have expected, then, a determination to do more.

But in a recent interview with Fox News, the president sounded diffident and nervous about his economic policy. He spoke vaguely about possible tax incentives for job creation. But “it is important though to recognize,” he went on, “that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

What? Huh?

Most economists I talk to believe that the big risk to recovery comes from the inadequacy of government efforts: the stimulus was too small, and it will fade out next year, while high unemployment is undermining both consumer and business confidence.

Now, it’s politically difficult for the Obama administration to enact a full-scale second stimulus. Still, he should be trying to push through as much aid to the economy as possible. And remember, Mr. Obama has the bully pulpit; it’s his job to persuade America to do what needs to be done.

Instead, however, Mr. Obama is lending his voice to those who say that we can’t create more jobs. And a report on Politico.com suggests that deficit reduction, not job creation, will be the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address. What happened?

It took me a while to puzzle this out. But the concerns Mr. Obama expressed become comprehensible if you suppose that he’s getting his views, directly or indirectly, from Wall Street.

Ever since the Great Recession began economic analysts at some (not all) major Wall Street firms have warned that efforts to fight the slump will produce even worse economic evils. In particular, they say, never mind the current ability of the U.S. government to borrow long term at remarkably low interest rates — any day now, budget deficits will lead to a collapse in investor confidence, and rates will soar.

And it’s this latter claim that Mr. Obama echoed in that Fox News interview. Is he right to be worried?

Well, spikes in long-term interest rates have happened in the past, most famously in 1994. But in 1994 the U.S. economy was adding 300,000 jobs a month, and the Fed was steadily raising short-term rates. It’s hard to see why anything similar should happen now, with the economy still bleeding jobs and the Fed showing no desire to raise rates anytime soon.

A better model, I’d argue, is Japan in the 1990s, which ran persistent large budget deficits, but also had a persistently depressed economy — and saw long-term interest rates fall almost steadily. There’s a good chance that officials are being terrorized by a phantom menace — a threat that exists only in their minds.

And shouldn’t we consider the source? As far as I can tell, the analysts now warning about soaring interest rates tend to be the same people who insisted, months after the Great Recession began, that the biggest threat facing the economy was inflation. And let’s not forget that Wall Street — which somehow failed to recognize the biggest housing bubble in history — has a less than stellar record at predicting market behavior.

Still, let’s grant that there is some risk that doing more about double-digit unemployment would undermine confidence in the bond markets. This risk must be set against the certainty of mass suffering if we don’t do more — and the possibility, as I said, of a collapse of confidence among ordinary workers and businesses.

And Mr. Summers was right the first time: in the face of the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, it’s much riskier to do too little than it is to do too much. It’s sad, and unfortunate, that the administration appears to have lost sight of that truth.

 

Dowd, Friedman and Rich

Nicholas Kristof has the day off today, so we have three.  MoDo seems to have succeeded, once again, in making a buffoon of herself by firing off a column and letting it run even after news events have blown up in her face.  I would have pulled “Visceral Has Its Value” after La Palin left her fans freezing in the rain at her book signing, but MoDo still maintains that Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Sarah Palin.  [snort]  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Advice From Grandma,” says a great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power.  Mr. Rich gives us “The Pit Bull in the China Shop,” and says Sarah Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama. Her 15 minutes is far from up.  Here’s MoDo:

It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin.

She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls.

The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax.

“And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain,” she told Bill O’Reilly.

Yet Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power.

As Judith Doctor, a 69-year-old spiritual therapist, told The Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz at Palin’s book signing in Grand Rapids, Mich., “She’s alive inside, and that radiates energy, and people who are not psychologically alive inside are fascinated by that.”

Barack Obama, who once had his own electric book tour testing the waters for a campaign, could learn a thing or three from Palin. On Friday, for the first time, his Gallup poll approval rating dropped below 50 percent, and he’s losing the independents who helped get him elected.

He’s a highly intelligent man with a highly functioning West Wing, and he’s likable, but he’s not connecting on the gut level that could help him succeed.

The animating spirit that electrified his political movement has sputtered out.

People need to understand what the president is thinking as he maneuvers the treacherous terrain of a lopsided economic recovery and two depleting wars.

Like Reagan, Obama is a detached loner with a strong, savvy wife. But unlike Reagan, he doesn’t have the acting skills to project concern about what’s happening to people.

Obama showed a flair for the theatrical during his campaign, and a talent for narrative in his memoir, but he has yet to translate those skills to governing.

As with the debates, he seems resistant to the idea that perception, as well as substance, matters. Obama so values pragmatism, and is so immersed in the thorny details of legislative compromises, that he may be undervaluing the connective bonds of simpler truths.

Americans who are hurting get angry when they learn that Timothy Geithner, as head of the New York Fed before becoming Treasury secretary, caved to the insistence of Goldman Sachs and other A.I.G. trading partners that they get 100 cents on the dollar when he could have struck a far better bargain for taxpayers.

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

It’s time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person.

Palin can be stupefyingly simplistic, but she seems dynamic. Obama is impressively complex but he seems static.

She nurtures her grass roots while he neglects his.

He struggles to transcend identity politics while she wallows in them. As he builds an emotional moat around himself, she exuberantly pushes whatever she has, warts and all — the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names.

Just like the disastrous and anti-intellectual W., this Visceral One never doubts herself. The Cerebral One welcomes doubt.

On Afghanistan, Palin says, W-like, that the president should simply give Gen. Stanley McChrystal a blank check. But Afghanistan is a wrenching decision, and we do need the closest exit ramp. So the president should get credit for standing back and studying the issue, and for not rubber-stamping the generals’ predictable urge to surge. But the way he has handled the perception part has allowed critics — including generals — to cast him as indecisive.

McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus should have been giving their best advice to Obama — and airing their view against scaling down in Afghanistan — in confidence. Instead, McChrystal pushed his opinion in a speech in London, and Petraeus has discussed his feelings in private sessions with reporters. This creates a “Seven Days in May” syndrome, where the two generals are, in effect, lobbying against the president and undercutting him as he’s trying to make a painfully complex, life-and-death decision.

This time, Obama should adopt Palin’s straight-from-the-gut approach, call the generals into the Oval and tell them, “Your pie-holes you will shut or rise higher you will not. Because, dang it, the president I am!”

How long, NYT, how long?  Put her out to pasture.  Please.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

President Obama’s visit to China this week inevitably invites comparisons between the world’s two leading powers. You know what they say: Britain owned the 19th century, America owned the 20th century, and, it’s all but certain that China will own the 21st century. Maybe, but I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China just yet.

Why not? It has to do with the fact that we are moving into a hyperintegrated world in which all aspects of production — raw materials, design, manufacturing, distribution, fulfillment, financing and branding — have become commodities that can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. But there are still two really important things that can’t be commoditized. Fortunately, America still has one of them: imagination.

What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive. The Apple iPod may be made in China, but it was dreamed up in America, and that’s where most of the profits go. America — with its open, free, no-limits, immigrant-friendly society — is still the world’s greatest dream machine.

Who would cede a century in which imagination will have such a high value to an authoritarian society that controls its Internet and jails political prisoners? Remember what Grandma used to say: Never cede a century to a country that censors Google.

But while our culture of imagination is still vibrant, the other critical factor that still differentiates countries today — and is not a commodity — is good governance, which can harness creativity. And that we may be losing. I am talking about the ability of a society’s leaders to think long term, address their problems with the optimal legislation and attract capable people into government. What I increasingly fear today is that America is only able to produce “suboptimal” responses to its biggest problems — education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment.

Why? Because at least six things have come together to fracture our public space and paralyze our ability to forge optimal solutions: 1) Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.

2) The gerrymandering of political districts means politicians of each party can now choose their own voters and never have to appeal to the center.

3) The cable TV culture encourages shouting and segregating people into their own political echo chambers.

4) A permanent presidential campaign leaves little time for governing.

5) The Internet, which, at its best, provides a check on elites and establishments and opens the way for new voices and, which, at its worst provides a home for every extreme view and spawns digital lynch mobs from across the political spectrum that attack anyone who departs from their specific orthodoxy.

6) A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.

These six factors are pushing our system, which was designed to have divided powers and to force compromises, into the realm of paralysis. To get anything big done now, we have to generate so many compromises — couched in 1,000-plus-page bills — with so many different interest groups that the solutions are totally suboptimal. We just get the sum of all interest groups.

The miniversion of this is California, which, as others have noted, is becoming America’s biggest “failed state.” Californians had hoped they could overcome their dysfunctional system by electing an outsider, a former movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would slay the system, like the Terminator. But he couldn’t.

Mr. Obama was elected for similar reasons. People had hoped that his unique story, personality and speaking skills could bring the country together, overcome paralysis and deliver nation-building at home. A lot of the disappointment settling in among Obama voters today is prompted by their dawning realization that maybe, like Arnold, he can’t.

China’s leaders, using authoritarian means, still can. They don’t have to always settle for suboptimal. So what do we do?

The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things. Otherwise, folks, we’re in trouble. A great power that can only produce suboptimal responses to its biggest challenges will, in time, fade from being a great power — no matter how much imagination it generates.

Grandma said that, too.

And now here’s Mr. Rich:

At last the American right and left have one issue they unequivocally agree on: You don’t actually have to read Sarah Palin’s book to have an opinion about it. Last Sunday Liz Cheney praised “Going Rogue” as “well-written” on Fox News even though, by her own account, she had sampled only “parts” of it. On Tuesday, Ana Marie Cox, a correspondent for Air America, belittled the book in The Washington Post while confessing that she couldn’t claim to have “completely” read it.

“Going Rogue” will hardly be the first best seller embraced by millions for talismanic rather than literary ends. And I am not recommending that others follow my example and slog through its 400-plus pages, especially since its supposed revelations have been picked through 24/7 for a week. But sometimes I wonder if anyone has read all of what Palin would call the “dang” thing. Some of the book’s most illuminating tics have been mentioned barely — if at all — by either its fans or foes. Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves.

The book’s biggest surprise is Palin’s wide-eyed infatuation with show-business celebrities. You get nearly as much face time with Tina Fey and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in “Going Rogue” as you do with John McCain. We learn how happy Palin was to receive calls from Bono and Warren Beatty “to share ideas and insights.” We wade through star-struck lists of campaign cameos by Robert Duvall, Jon Voight (who “blew us away”), Naomi Judd, Gary Sinise and Kelsey Grammer, among many others. Then there are the acknowledgments at the book’s end, where Palin reveals that her intimacy with media stars is such that she can air-kiss them on a first-name basis, from Greta to Laura to Rush.

Equally revealing is the one boldfaced name conspicuously left unmentioned in the book: Levi Johnston, the father of Palin’s grandchild. Though Palin and McCain milked him for photo ops at the Republican convention, he is persona non grata now that he’s taking off his campaign wardrobe. Is Johnston’s fledgling porn career the problem, or is it his public threats to strip bare Palin family secrets as well? “She knows what I got on her” is how he put it. In Palin’s interview with Oprah last week, it was questioning about Johnston, not Katie Couric, that made her nervous.

The book’s most frequently dropped names, predictably enough, are the Lord and Ronald Reagan (though not necessarily in that order). Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,” running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith and trust in God. But Palin did not write her letter to God; she wrote the letter from God, assuming His role and voice herself and signing it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” If I may say so — Oy!

Even by the standard of politicians, this is a woman with an outsized ego. Combine that with her performance skills and an insatiable hunger for the limelight, and you can see why she will not stay in Wasilla now that she’s seen 30 Rock. The question journalists repeatedly asked last week — What are Palin’s plans for 2012? — is a red herring. Palin has no obligation to answer it. She is the pit bull in the china shop of American politics, and she can do what she wants, on her own timeline, all the while raking in the big bucks she couldn’t as a sitting governor. No one, least of all her own political party, can control her.

The fact-checking siege of “Going Rogue” — by the media, Democrats and aggrieved McCain campaign operatives alike — is another fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has correctly observed, “She represents less a philosophical strain on the right than an affect and a demographic.”

That demographic is white and non-urban: Just look at the stops and the faces on her carefully calibrated book tour. The affect is emotional — the angry air of grievance that emerged first at her campaign rallies in 2008, with their shrieked threats to Obama, and that has since resurfaced in the Hitler-fixated “tea party” movement (which she endorses in her book). It’s a politics of victimization and sloganeering with no policy solutions required beyond the conservative mantra of No Taxes. Its standard-bearer can make stuff up with impunity: “Thanks, but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere”; Obama’s “palling around with terrorists”; health care “death panels.”

After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about — unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.

The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin” and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, center-right approach.”

What Continetti means is that Palin could still somehow fudge her history as McDonnell did; his campaign kept his career-long history as a political acolyte and financial beneficiary of Pat Robertson on the down-low. Even the far right has figured out that homophobia is a turnoff to swing voters, which is why Palin goes out of her way in “Going Rogue” to remind us she has her very own lesbian friend. (What’s left unsaid is that the book’s credited ghost writer, Lynn Vincent, labeled homosexuality as “deviance” in her own writings for World, the evangelical magazine.)

But no matter how much Palin tries to pass for “center-right,” she’s unlikely to fool that vast pool of voters left, right and center who have already written her off as unqualified for the White House. The G.O.P. establishment knows this, and is frightened. The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline; there’s no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory.

Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary.

Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

Now that is a scary thought…

Collins, Blow, Cohen and Herbert

Ms. Collins, in “Putting the Fond in Farewell,” says that by announcing that her show’s 25th season will be her last, Oprah Winfrey provided a useful tip in navigating life: Quit while you’re ahead.  Mr. Blow writes “In Defense of New York.”  He says questioning whether New York City can handle the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is an insult. New Yorkers live with the threat of terrorism every day.  Mr. Cohen, in “What Makes Cities Live,” says wholesale gentrification deadens. The fight for the genuine in the world’s great cities is also a fight for jobs, workers and creativity.  Mr. Herbert addresses “An American Catastrophe,” and says Detroit and its environs are suffering because of policies that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Few people have spent more time contemplating The Journey of Life than Oprah Winfrey, and on Friday she provided another useful tip in navigating it: Quit while you’re ahead.

At the current moment, this is not necessarily a thought for the masses. Unless something dramatic happens on the economic front, most of us are not going to be able to quit — period.

But the greatest decision a stellar public figure can make is to resist the temptation to keep doing the same thing forever. Even if the fans don’t want you to stop.

One day you’re the champion of the world, the people’s choice. Then, next thing you know, you’re losing a unanimous decision to Trevor Berbick. Or putting “Dictator for Life” on your business cards.

We are talking here about a timely and well-planned leave-taking — like George Washington, refusing a third term. Or the end of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

This is not to be confused with its evil twin sister, the Abrupt Rogue Departure. You cannot get yourself elected governor, serve for two and a half years, disappear for the better part of another and then announce you’re quitting because nobody likes a lame duck. Well, it turns out you can, but it is a really, really bad idea.

“I love this show. This show has been my life. And I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye,” Winfrey told her fans tearily. She’s not actually leaving until the end of season 25, nearly two years from now. Talk about long-term planning.

However, if she really wanted to drive home how much her viewers were going to be losing, she might have picked a more inspiring lead-in to her announcement than a 20-minute interview with Ray Romano. (Along with a promo for an upcoming interview with a woman whose husband was addicted to porn.)

It’s been quite a run for the Oprah brand. The über-guests, the good works. The Obama campaign. Her forays into books (we will really miss the book thing) and spirituality (not so much). She never coasted.

Her next step seems to involve a new cable TV channel. But since Winfrey has — I believe this is an exact figure — a trilliondy-billion dollars, she probably has more than one option.

Her audience, of course, doesn’t want her to move on. Americans are congenitally attached to too much of a good thing: “Law & Order.” Professional sports. Christmas. (The national calendar seems to be divided into two seasons: Baseball and Holiday Shopping.)

The idea that anything popular should stay around until we turn green at the sight of it is not, of course, confined to our culture. The British have Tony Blair and The Spice Girls Reunion Tour.

We do hate change. Even though we know that our demand for more of the same is a treacherous road that will eventually lead to Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct 2.”

Nowhere is the need for the graceful exit more apparent than in our politics. This week Senator Robert Byrd turned 92. He has been in office for more than 50 years. That’s an all-time record for Congress. In fact, it is probably a record for every deliberative body since Athens in the Age of Pericles.

To be fair, this was not entirely his idea. The Democratic Party begged Byrd to stay and hang onto a seat that will probably fall to the opposition when he leaves. But still, this is not a record that we want to encourage other people to aspire to break.

Nothing becomes a politician like a timely departure. If Rudy Giuliani had quit after 2001, we’d still think of him as America’s Mayor instead of the worst presidential candidate in the history of the world.

Imagine how much better Joe Lieberman would look if he had called it a day after the vice presidential run. Or Ross Perot if he had stopped in 1992.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn’t even begun his controversial third term and already he seems to have shrunk to a pocketsize.

And what a revered figure Ralph Nader would be if he had called it quits back in the 1990s. He’d be an icon — the pioneer of consumerism who had the corporation’s number from the get-go, instead of the guy who robbed Al Gore of the presidency and then just wouldn’t stop talking. He could have spent the last 15 years giving inspiring lectures to college students and now it would be time for the comeback tour. People would be flocking to hear him explain how the structure of the American economy failed its people in last year’s collapse.

By the way, you can have a comeback tour if you retire gracefully. Just not one every single year.

Here’s Mr. Blow:

Representative John Shadegg of Arizona really knows how to put on a show.

Earlier this month, he used a live baby as part of a quasi-ventriloquist act on the House floor. Creepy? Yes. Still, we let it slide.

But he doesn’t get two passes in a row. Monday, he took a swipe at Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City for saying that the city could handle the security for the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Shadegg sniped, “I saw the mayor of New York today said ‘We’re tough. We can do it.’ Well mayor, how are you going to feel when it’s your daughter that’s kidnapped, at school, by a terrorist?”

Say what you will about New Yorkers, but question our toughness, you will not.

Whether a civil or military trial would provide the best chances of securing a conviction while simultaneously signaling to the world a righting of America’s moral compass is a fair debate. But questioning whether New York City can handle the trial is an insult.

(By the way, what’s with this business of the mayor’s daughter being kidnapped? It sounds like the plot of a Jackie Chan movie.)

We New Yorkers live with the threat of terrorism every day — on our trains, in our high-rises, in our plazas. But we’ve learned to cope. Not by being afraid, but by being vigilant. Bringing Mohammed to Manhattan isn’t going to move the needle much.

A police spokesman told Reuters that “eight terrorism plots against the city have been scuttled since 2001, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and the retaining wall at ground zero.”

Yet the city didn’t blink. Schools still opened, trains still ran and the Naked Cowboy still serenaded gaggles of grown women who giggled like schoolgirls.

So Mr. Congressman, how many terror plots have been squashed in your district? Take your time. I’ll wait.

We love this city, and nothing and no one will make us afraid to be in it. We refuse to be cowed by cowards — not by those hiding in the Hindu Kush or by those hyperventilating in the halls of Congress.

And what galls us most is having watched for years as politicians like Shadegg used fear-mongering about 9/11 and the threat of attacks as a political tool.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani used it to sidestep the extreme racial divisiveness he fostered in the city. Former President George W. Bush used it as a Trojan horse to ravage our civil liberties. Dick Cheney is still using it to shield his transgressions.

Let us be clear: The fear tactics that work in the hinterlands don’t work here.

We rose from the ashes of the Twin Towers. We don’t need a puppeteering politician from Phoenix lecturing us about being tough in the face of terror.

Nice alliteration.  He left out “pusillanimous,” though.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

A couple of blocks and your life changes in this city. New York is worldly but fiercely local. Another borough is as remote as another country. Europe, just across the pond, can seem closer than across town.

Not so long ago, my office was moved a couple of blocks, a little west and a little south, from 43rd Street to Renzo Piano’s handsome light-filled building between 40th and 41st Streets. It proved to be a change of worlds.

The former headquarters was trapped in the neon tentacles of Times Square, a once seedy part of town re-imagined as the tourist-filled set for a movie called “New York,” a place where people from out of town loiter six-abreast gazing at the flashing lights while New Yorkers try to dodge the phalanxes of flesh.

The new premises, as I’ve gradually learned, placed us just within the garment district, an area where zoning laws have protected apparel manufacturing space and so held off the developers who would otherwise have turned clothes factories into condos and created yet another gentrified district bereft of seediness, tawdriness, community and that strange high-low alchemy essential to any great city’s mystery and charge.

I’ve come to love the dull, solid mid-rise brick buildings of the garment district, a universe away from the high-rise glass-and-neon of that other country two blocks away where Planet Hollywood and M&M’s World strut their stuff.

It’s wonderful to wander far from the movie theaters (or so it seems) past emporiums of buttons, palaces of thread, empires of zippers, long pink gowns, canary yellow chiffon skirts (on sale for $10), trimmings, lace, beads, ribbons, fake pearls, glittering belts, shoulder pads and ruffles — not to mention “Spandex World,” and “Leather Impact.” Stores have names like “Joyce Button and Trims.” They look like they’ve been there forever, or at least the American version of forever.

The pleasure, I think, comes from the sense of something still purposeful and authentic, woven by the years — a slither of town between 35th and 40th Streets where designers, manufacturers, small retailers, showroom owners and others interact and create, and where money, big money, has not swept all in its path.

The area still has pungency. It has not surrendered to the great anaesthetizing march of modernity. It has not chased its working class to faraway suburbs. It has not become a hollow movie-set version of an authentic place — a “garment district” cleansed to quaintness, shaped for the well-to-do, complete with guides relating the rich history of immigrants and their sewing machines.

Unlike Paris — where the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants and the hammering of artisans and the garlic-whiff of the morning Métro are long gone — New York preserves, in small enclaves, its shabby splendor. Its center, unlike London, has not become a near-exclusive preserve of the super-rich.

No — miracle of miracles — people here still buy and use sewing machines! A million square feet or so are devoted to garment manufacturing. The jobs have not all vanished to Bangladesh.

It’s funny how we crave the authentic, the unspoiled, the genuine — the un-globalized and un-homogenized and un-gentrified — only to destroy them. And then, as if in remorse, attempt to create unthreatening Disney versions of the authentic, the unspoiled and the genuine. It’s funny how the rich, tired of grilled tuna or Chilean sea bass, weary of New York generic (never simmered, always seared), want to eat like the poor, while the poor just want to be rich.

Speaking of food, the move has also brought deliverance from theme restaurants and chains to a garment-district diversity as wondrous as the ostrich feathers and sequined robes in store windows. Let’s face it: Dives are the last redoubt of genuine fare in New York.

I’ve found a Balkan cellar whose cevapcici (grilled lozenges of minced meat) take me back to Sarajevo days; a deli whose tongue sandwiches remind me of the tongue my mother prepared; a Chinese hole-in-the-wall with heartwarming oxtail on rice; and a Szechuan joint whose duck tongues on a bed of scallion, dressed in a scallion pesto, are a little miracle of many-layered succulence — the reddish-brown Szechuan pepper imparting a numbing-tingling heat, the duck tongues crunchy (about the consistency of frogs’ legs) and gelatinous and looking, in the pesto-green sauce, a little like asparagus tips. If you wish, you may follow that with a fish-head (carp) stew in spiced chili broth that’s hot enough to ease your eyes from their sockets.

Two blocks away they’re eating burgers and Bubba Gump shrimp and never dreaming of this other land just around the corner. You don’t have to travel far to change countries; and you can travel across the world and still find yourself in the globalized mall of bright lights, bland foods and brands.

I’m grateful for my New York journeys and for the zoning laws that make them possible. Wholesale gentrification deadens. There’s an untamed thread that binds button stores and stir-fried intestines with chili: They’re genuine. The fight for the genuine in the world’s great cities is also a fight for jobs, workers and creativity.

It’s sort of telling that Mr. Cohen didn’t seem to be aware of that “other world” a couple of blocks from his old office.  Canalized much, sir?  Here’s Mr. Herbert, writing from Detroit:

In many ways, it’s like a ghost town. It’s eerily quiet. Driving around in the middle of the afternoon, in a city that once was among the most productive on the planet, you see very little traffic, minimal commercial activity, hardly any pedestrians.

What you’ll see are endless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.

Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives. And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about what we’ve allowed to happen to this city and what is now happening to the middle class and the American economy as a whole.

I was in Detroit with Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in labor issues. He grew up in Detroit and his love for the city and its people are palpable, as is his grief for the horrors the city has endured.

The popular narrative of what happened to Detroit contains a great deal of truth but its focus is too narrow to account for the astonishing decline of this former industrial colossus. Yes, there were the riots of 1967, and white flight; and political leadership that was not just shortsighted but at times embarrassingly incompetent and corrupt. And, yes, the auto industry was a case study in self-destruction.

But as Mr. Shaiken points out, Detroit was still viable enough for the Republican Party to hold its convention here in 1980, when it nominated Ronald Reagan. And it was not the riots, but the devastating recession of the early ’80s that really knocked the city senseless. “That’s when the place really cracked,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that was about aggressive globalization and the lack of an industrial policy, not the riots.”

Detroit and its environs are suffering the agonies of the economic damned because of policies, crafted at the highest national and corporate levels, that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base. Those decisions have had a profound effect on the fortunes not just of Detroit, or even Michigan, but the entire U.S. economy.

“We’ve been living with the illusion that manufacturing — making things — is so 20th century,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families.”

The idea that the fallout from the wrongheaded economic concepts of the past 30 or 40 years could be contained, with the damage limited to the increasingly troubled urban areas while sparing prosperous suburbia, has now proved as phony as Bernie Madoff’s fortune. Americans, whether they live in big cities, suburban towns or rural areas, need jobs, and when those jobs are eliminated (for whatever reasons — technological advances, globalization) without being replaced, the national economy is guaranteed at some point to hit a wall.

Professor Shaiken and I drove past vast lots filled with rubble and garbage and weeds, past the old Michigan Central Terminal, which was once Detroit’s answer to New York’s Grand Central Terminal but which has long since been abandoned; past a onetime Cadillac manufacturing plant that is now an empty lot.

We stopped at an old Ford plant and stood in a stiff, cold wind, reading a plaque put up by the Michigan Historical Commission: “Here at his Highland Park plant, Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915 Ford built a million Model T’s. In 1925 over 9,000 were assembled in a single day. Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th century living.”

Professor Shaiken’s grandfather, Philip Chapman, took a job at the Highland Park plant in 1914, earning five dollars a day, and worked on production at Ford until his retirement in the mid-1950s.

We’re at a period no less significant to the U.S. than Mr. Chapman’s early years at Ford. We need a revitalized industrial policy, including the creation of whole new industries, if American families are to prosper in the coming decades. If there is any sense of urgency about this in the hearts and minds of our corporate and government leaders, I’ve missed it.